The Egg-Shaped Thing

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Then if you really made a noise you might succeed in getting an enquiry started. Which would take far too long. Yet without positive results from such an enquiry, your comments on that count don’t wash.”

  “Then there’s my wristwatch.”

  “You were alone.”

  “I wasn’t alone when those instruments in the aircraft blazed up bright green.”

  He did react this time. “Do you know…that’s about the only thing you’ve got? Yet two of your witnesses are dead, one seems to be embarking on a nervous breakdown (if you’re right about the co-pilot) and that just leaves the Captain, who isn’t here. Am I right? Brutally, am I right?”

  I countered: “Not quite. There was the report from the Pentagon which we read on the plane.”

  “Can I have it, please?”

  “It was on D.P.G. paper.”

  “You see? — And didn’t you also tell me that the department that prepared the document was in any case disbanded?”

  I exploded: “But don’t you realize — ?”

  “What I realize,” he said, with crucifying dispassion, “is that you have witnessed some highly unusual events. My opinion — for what it’s worth — is that your conclusions may be out of all proportion to the significance of those events.”

  I was aghast. “But you said yourself that you arrived at that graph from your own figures, and that the time — four thirty-one — corresponded to mine exactly, using a completely different source of information. I came here on the ticket that you had experienced over a long period a number of inexplicable surges and the facts bore me out. Moreover, from your graph you derived the conclusive proof that the next Pulse is due almost exactly forty-eight hours from now. Yet you sit there and glibly tell me all this amounts to nothing. Why? Is this something, then, completely beyond anybody’s grasp? Are you going to tell me — after all — that really I’m just imagining it?”

  There was a long silence. And when he spoke, just the same cool vein — no inflection.

  “Your people,” he resumed. “Let’s take your people, one by one. Davvitt…well, I know him by reputation. It’s true he’s unpopular and ruthless. I can quite believe he was vindictive enough to maul your company — though I think you must have maddened him somewhat…You can be pretty maddening, I have no doubt! But the only direct confrontation you’ve had with him lately was when you were trespassing on his roof. He had a perfect right to be annoyed — anyone would.

  “Then this man Miles Pollenner. The one — didn’t you say? — with sunglasses. What a crime! You make great play about an incident with an Easter egg which your girl-friend saw. Another crime! — and remarkably little to do with science! Okay, so he does bug your girlfriend’s handbag. That fits the Easter egg bit in a way, doesn’t it? Maybe both were sort of sex things. After all, he had been going about with her a good deal, might have been jealous. Nasty thing to do, but hardly proves the nebulous peculiarities you’re suggesting. But Dr Gray is the one who really interests me. I take it you are having an affair with this girl Nicola?”

  I felt bound to tell him in the circumstances. “Yes.”

  “So to put it bluntly, without all the trimmings, you hop into bed with her and assume from what she has to say that her father is knee-deep in some horrific goings-on to do with Time and Space and an egg-shaped thing. Is that right?”

  “No. Tesh’s transcript bears out Gray’s involvement in the BRUNDASH business right from the start.”

  “In America?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would there be anything on the files in England that would corroborate what Tesh Philbar was reporting from there?”

  “I think so. Tesh was working in collaboration with a ministry in England and…”

  “Which ministry?”

  “I don’t know. He couldn’t tell me. It was a security matter.”

  “All the same, this transcript still exists?”

  “It’s still at the flat in London.”

  “Not on D.P.G. paper, I trust?”

  “No.”

  “On whose authority was a duplicate car allowed to be run using an identical number plate? That should give us a clue as to which ministry Tesh was working for.”

  “That would be a Home Office matter, in any case. They would have had to authorize it for whatever ministry requested it.”

  “So that doesn’t help us?”

  “Not until we can trace whoever it was at the Home Office who agreed to give the authority.”

  “Today is Sunday. There’s no chance of doing that until office hours Monday morning. Is there?”

  “No.”

  Sanger sat back and glared at me hard. “I think you’re going to have to admit that you do not have a case sufficiently strong for me to accept the conclusions which you draw.” He started to get up. The interview was clearly over. “Nevertheless, Fulbright, I gave you top-secret information and if you misused it you could get me into very serious trouble. So don’t say I didn’t trust you. It’s merely that I think your deductions are hysterical — as I said earlier. I don’t know if you were going to ask for anything else, but I’m afraid…”

  — which was precisely when the phone rang.

  *

  When the two halves of an explosive situation come together finally the result can be nothing other than devastating.

  Tracing back each successive stage in the menacingly inevitable process of such mutual zeroing, a computer could probably have anticipated that no coincidence was required to bring about that phone call in my presence. For both that and my arrival at Windscale were instigated by the same force.

  The routes taken were devious but sure. Double-negatived by the very nature of things, the event could not have not happened. For, with an ugly precision, the analogy of atomic catastrophe had been played out to the full…you bring together two halves of the nuclear orange — each half being harmless in itself. Together they raise the volume of the orange above a certain minimum level; and thus compacted, and yet unable to co-exist, they annihilate the very structure of the total orange before it can ever exist as a whole.

  The proof was provided instantly, unarguably, and with bewildering finality.

  For the moment the phone rang the pointer of the neutron flux dial simply slammed hard over against the pin and stayed there.

  Sanger did not take time out to argue the toss of his own scepticism. He simply hit the red button marked emergency shut-down and counted-out seven seconds…the time needed for the control rods to drop with a crash into the X-holes to quash the threat of super-criticality…

  Red lights and alarm bells and the spectacle of baffled instruments doing their nut…

  Sanger: “Is it safe to pick up the phone?”

  “It makes no difference. The circuit was made when the call was placed.”

  He nodded, spoke with astonishing calm into the telephone. Sharp, crisp and collected: “Sanger here.”

  I heard the voice quite distinctly from my position nearby. “This is Dr Julian Gray.”

  Julian Gray — at last! Instantly I thought of the flash photograph, wondered if Nicola was with him, knew she must be, knew at a time like this he couldn’t be without her.

  Even amid all those clanging alarm bells and the klaxons in the distance and the red lights flashing on the emergency panel, the clear picture shot back into my mind…Gray looking almost feastingly across at Nicola, and her lack of consciousness of this, eyelids down as she played with the puppy at her feet.

  Sanger’s calm was short-lived. The fact that it was Gray really shook him. “Dr Gray! I must know where you’re speaking from! Please!”

  And the grimly determined reply: “Negative. No interference from you or anyone else.”

  Sanger tried: “Fulbright is here and we both want to help. Structure One is out of control. Isn’t it? Now, tell us how we can help.” Sanger covered the mouthpiece. To me, frantically: “Trace this call on the other line!”

  My hand was alr
eady on the instrument.

  Gray came back: “I will not tolerate amateur intervention! Tell him that!”

  On my own line I gave the situation* full-pelt, to the operator. The voice rapped back at me: “I must get police authority.”

  “That’ll be too late.”

  “Don’t tell me my job.”

  “Then get on with it!” And the line dead.

  Sanger held the receiver of his phone farther from his ear. I leaned over to get the undiluted impact.

  Striking was the way the voice at the far end seemed to reverberate, as if Gray were entombed in some enormous chasm. There were other voices in the background and I thought also that I heard the sound of rushing water.

  But Gray: “Do you realize that because of one man’s insolence the work of years is now threatened?”

  And Sanger playing for time: “I don’t see that. How?”

  A gasp of exasperation from the other end. “Who asked you to? I’m simply asking you to restrain this Mr Fulbright from interfering in a science that neither he nor you can conceivably hope to understand.” He added as if he couldn’t help himself: “And if he continues to pester my daughter he’ll know all about it!”

  At that point a red phone blinked a flashing light and Sanger ripped the receiver off the hook. Into this one he said: “I know! Wait!” A lightning glance over his panel. “The reactor is safe but sorry. It’ll be badly damaged, but that’s a detail…”

  Something more was said at the other end of the red phone. Sanger ignored it, laid the receiver down on the console-top, shushed the three men who now tore into the control room and directed them to the section of dials to do with coolant temperature and control of steam. They zipped across to deal with that just as all the main lights went out. Sanger flipped a switch somewhere and we were over to emergency lighting.

  Sanger again got on to Gray…

  But my phone came live and a voice said: “We’re talking to the police down below.”

  I said: “What does it take to get action? Get that call traced!”

  “We’re doing that now.”

  Sanger covered his phone again. To me: “Are they tracing it?” He had himself in check, now.

  “Yes…It takes time. Keep him on at all costs.”

  Sanger: “He’s getting wise to it!”

  I could see we were going to lose the line. I snatched the receiver from Sanger. “Gray! Put Nicola on!”

  Gray yapped something back but she must have been standing right beside him. There was some sort of a scuffle.

  Then her voice. “Darling! For God’s sake do what he says. It’s the only chance for yourself!”

  I said curtly: “If you care about your own survival…”

  Nicola, with calm slow emphasis: “James, I love you, darling, but you don’t understand.”

  “Oh? So suddenly? You didn’t think that before!”

  If only I could keep her talking. I was terrified because of the clear image I had not of her but of Jane, standing there in Moorbridge with her arms outstretched — a kind of welcoming. Could it be like this for Nicola?

  “Part of me did, James.”

  “Where are you?”

  But voices in argument in the background. I heard someone — Davvitt, I think — yell: “They’re tracing the call! Get off the line! Get off the — ”

  Blanked out. Silence. Click the hook and of course nothing.

  The group in the control room was joined by Sanger’s deputy. Sanger leapt to his feet at once, talked to the man rapidly, as my operator came up with what I dreaded to hear. “We lost them.”

  “Bully for you!” I retorted. “What do you use for phonelines? — red tape?” I smashed the receiver back on the hook, knowing this crack to be totally unfair, regretting it immediately, forgetting it two seconds later.

  Over on the coolant panel the men had got someone below-stairs on the intercom. I just heard the words: “Well, never mind that! Get the pressure down!” — then I got rapped on the shoulder by Sanger, who drew me out of the control room into the corridor.

  “That’s my minister on the red phone. Gordon Bennett, Minister of Power. He’s waiting for news. What do I tell him?”

  “Tell him we have to find out where these people are!”

  “Yes…but how?” He snapped his fingers three times in quick succession, his ideas ahead of his capability of expressing them. “You said…” — I thought he was going to choke on the words. Up to now he had maintained a brand of calm I couldn’t hope to match. Right now his stomach-bile threatened to compromise him.

  I said: “Take it easy.” And waited.

  He seemed to be counting ten. Then, quite controlled: “You said there are two cars with the same number…”

  “Good idea!” I gave him the number that would be on both plates, added that I thought they might find it difficult to locate the egg in time.

  “They’re just going to have to!” He darted a look toward the control-room doorway, at the question mark of a red telephone beyond it. “Then what?”

  “Only two courses open. Either we get an emergency shutdown on every reactor on Earth.”

  “I tell you we can’t do that! You’re not the only person who’s become suspicious of Gray and people. Word has got through to the Russians and they think it’s some sort of nuclear weapon.”

  I couldn’t help it: “Are they as hysterical as I am, then?”

  “The rumours doing the rounds are very different…” — with which he blandly dealt with his sarcasm of earlier on. “But if the Russians or anyone else connected a worldwide shutdown with this…”

  I asked: “Did Gray leak anything at any time?”

  “I don’t know about Gray. Davvitt makes no secret of an impending triumph of some kind, keeps gassing and dropping hints to colleagues. Enough anyway to draw attention to it in a way which has got a lot of people very panicked.”

  “Then we’ll have to adopt your plan. Isolate it. I don’t have to tell you how chancy that course of action will be. As I said, we’ve no idea of its range.”

  White in the face, he had no illusions and said so, adding: “I can’t keep the minister hanging on any longer. What will you do?”

  “Let’s discuss that when you’ve finished on the red phone.”

  He okayed this, then strode back into the control room.

  Ten minutes later things were calmer.

  Whatever it was they had needed to do about pressures below, the men were evidently satisfied that they could achieve no more in the control room. They went down to reactor level with Sanger’s deputy and I was left with Sanger alone.

  The emergency lights were still our sole illumination.

  In that stark glare we looked at the mess around us, then at each other. Sanger said: “And that’s just the beginning?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  We breathed out the ensuing silence.

  Till Sanger said: “Then do the sensible thing. Until those cars are traced it’s no good going anywhere or doing anything. My minister has to make the more impossible decisions. All you can do is wait. So get some sleep. You’ll be needed and you won’t have a chance if you don’t relax a while.”

  “Relax?”

  “I’m right, you know. Let me call the doc and get you a fast knockout. Something that’ll hit you for six but won’t leave too much hangover.” He wouldn’t listen to argument, already had his finger on the dial.

  While he waited, then talked briskly, I let a torrent of thoughts whip around my exhausted brain. Once again, the feeling that I was being crassly stupid.

  I couldn’t get Brighton off my mind, but could see no justification for going flat out on that tack when there was less than no evidence and when the South Coast could have been diametrically the wrong direction.

  But Sanger won. I slept.

  *

  “Why in God’s name wasn’t I woken sooner?”

  “Because the doctor said you were suffering from acute exhau
stion to a dangerous degree.”

  “What’s he mean dangerous?”

  “Perhaps he meant you wouldn’t be any use to man or beast in that condition.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon!”

  “I’m aware of that.” Sanger smiled imperturbably. “There’s some tea on the way up.”

  “What do you think you’re running here? — a hospital?”

  “One of the cars has been found,” he said coldly.

  I sat up and took notice on this. “Where?”

  “Not far from Penrith — only a few miles out of Moorbridge, in fact.”

  I shook my head violently, then regretted it. The pill had left my brain half numb, but the headache was a masterpiece. “It can’t be it,” I said. “They didn’t decoy the security team all the way to Kendal with an empty truck just to move five inches up the map.”

  “Have you anything better to go on?”

  “I don’t know — I’ve been asleep, you will recall.”

  Someone brought the tea in. I felt panicky and out of touch. But there was something wrong with this police hunt. I went on: “What else has happened?”

  “They found this man Guy Endleby and interviewed him.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Still at the K.L.K. unit at Moorbridge.”

  “Did they get anything?”

  “No.” Sanger looked at me deadpan. “They said he had a suspected fractured jaw.”

  “Did he, though!”

  “And they were inclined to your view…That he’d told all he knew during, er, your own interrogation.”

  “Is this area around Windscale in any danger at the moment?”

  “No. The shutdown was quite clean. We’ve kept it out of the press and all appears serene to the outside world.”

  “Does the minister agree with your suggestion? — That we try to get the Structure out to sea?”

  “Yes. Every possible method of getting it away has been thought out and the appropriate transportation placed on standby.”

  “And did you mention Brighton — specifically — as a possible hideout of Gray’s?”

  “Fulbright…there’s nowhere in Brighton he could possibly be. You can’t move an apparatus that size in a taxi and unobtrusively book it into a hotel.”