Gibraltar Road (8 page)

Shaw had gone very white. He said, “So that’s happened again, has it? Why can’t they switch off?”

Staunton snapped, “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the damn’ thing. All I know is the bare fact that they can’t put it right, and they can’t switch it off.” He added, “I’m more concerned about Ackroyd himself.”

That phrase—
London says you know the details already
— had shaken Shaw because of what Carberry had told him. He said, “Major, is the thing . . . overheating? Is that it?”

Staunton’s searching glance ran over his face. “I believe it is. I gather the report from the technicians said something like that. Why? What’s the matter?”

“Major,” said Shaw quietly, “I shouldn’t start worrying
just
because the high-ups are due. If they can’t switch off soon there’s going to be more than mere trouble.” Earnestly he leaned forward, feeling the sweat sticky on his face. “Don’t you realize the Rock’s likely to go sky-high? Right now we’re sitting on what could be the biggest atomic blast since Hiroshima.”

The night before Shaw arrived the seedy-looking little man with the timid eyes had been happier than he’d ever been in his life. Happier and more important-feeling.

The huge power-production unit, even its lead casing seeming to pulse with controlled energy, had been running quite satisfactorily in the close, stuffy power-house, the enormous cavern which the Admiralty had allocated to it below Gibraltar’s rock. It seemed almost to speak to him, to respond to his caresses as he put out a skinny arm and patted the metal fondly, revealing the dark sweat-stains under the armpits of his open-necked white shirt.
Dum-da, dum-da
, it went, in its slow, emphatic way . . .
dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da
. . . .

That machine—Autopowered Fuel Production Unit (AGL Six), Mark One, to give it the full designation, or AFPU ONE for short—was Mr Ackroyd’s whole life, almost of itself the culmination of years and years of grinding work and study which had really started when he was just a kid at the grammar school in the East Riding, taking a keen interest in the science lessons—even in those days, he thought, they’d taunted him with being half barmy. Well, in just under three days’ time he’d show them all, he’d just ruddy well show them. He’d been told that there was a possibility that even the Defence Minister was coming with the top brass.

Mr Ackroyd had started up AFPU ONE an hour or so ago because she took two full days to work up before she began to produce results—and when he’d run her through some days earlier for test she really hadn’t behaved very well, hadn’t been herself at all, and he’d had to send in a long, highly secret report about his brain-child’s irregularities. Of course, he’d worked on her since then, but still . . .

And now he’d started her, and watched her, and made some adjustments, and watched her again like a proud father —and he’d found her running beautifully. Mr Ackroyd peered round, squinting into powerful electric light. He looked suspicious, furtive almost. The senior technician on watch was reading the dials on the main remote-control panel set in the rock wall of the power-house and he wasn’t taking any notice of Mr Ackroyd. Quickly, deftly, the little man did what he always did when he left the machine running, and opened up the primary starting-panel in the side of AFPU ONE herself, the starting-panel which could also be remote-controlled from that main control-panel; he took a screwdriver from his pocket and, after undoing some screws, dismantling some of the mechanism, and fiddling with a few knobs, he removed a steel plate set fairly deeply inside. Inserting his fingers gently, he probed for perhaps half a minute, while his eyes roved the workshop; at the end of that time he brought out a small piece of metal shaped rather like a spanner—a very-thin, flat spanner with a hole at one end and at the other a semicircular convex head cut into very fine teeth. Then, whistling a little to himself, and drawing the back of his hand across his nose, he slipped the piece of metal into a pocket and replaced the steel plate, reassembled the remaining mechanism, and closed the panel. After that he patted the power unit again—alarmed, in a funny sort of way, at his own suspicious instincts. The truth was, as he admitted to himself, he’d always been like that; it wasn’t quite his own fault, for even as a kiddy he’d always found that every one— grown-ups and other children alike—had seemed to be in some vast conspiracy to mess up anything he’d set his heart on, to wreck his plans and ambitions and his poor, fragile hopes.
And no one was going to have the opportunity to do anything like that this time of all times.

AFPU ONE meant a tremendous lot to Gibraltar. For that matter it meant life or death to the whole Western defence programme. But it also meant everything to Mr Ackroyd himself. It was his vindication. It was
his
machine —all his. His technicians—all very decent lads, as he freely admitted—knew the routine maintenance and how to start and stop the machine and all that; but they hadn’t his intimacy with her, hadn’t worked on her from the word go, right from the first airy-fairy dream and the roughed-out drawings before even the blue-prints had been thought of as a likelihood; and if anything went wrong, Mr Ackroyd used to say to himself, with a certain guilty satisfaction, they’d be ‘proper stumped.’ And now that he’d taken that vital part out of the innards of the starting mechanism no one would be able to stop her when he wasn’t there and muck her about and perhaps spoil his big moment, when (he hoped) the Minister of Defence himself stood beside AFPU ONE and murmured words of praise and congratulation into his willing ear. So that was that. They’d be much too scared to mess about with the innards if they couldn’t stop her.

A little self-importantly Mr Ackroyd spoke to the technician who was still studying the various dial readings. He said, “Well, there we are, lad. She’s working fine now, she is. Keep your eye on ’er, though.”

“Okay, Mr Ackroyd.”

The physicist took a last look round. “I’ll be back in the morning as usual,” he said, “and if you want me before, ring me.” There was a phone to the Dockyard Exchange in the power-house. “Ring me at once if she doesn’t seem to be going right, eh, lad? She’ll have to be stopped if she over-’eats again, and we may ’ave to strip ’er down.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good night, then lad.”

Mr Ackroyd, enjoying as usual—even now—the sensation he always got when he was called ‘sir,’ picked up a towel and a bathing-costume, the sort that covered him completely, and walked out of the almost airless compartment which drummed with heat and AFPU ONE’s reverberating
dum-da
. The technician watched him go, a slight smile on his lips. He thought: Poor little beggar, he’s dead nuts about this machine, and he’s so full of brain he doesn’t know how to relax properly. . ..

Mr Ackroyd, handing in the film badge which he had pinned to his shirt, and which when developed would show up any radiation, turned to the right out of the side-passage into Dockyard Tunnel proper, walked down towards the Sandy Bay end, came out along the narrow-gauge railway track under the stars, took in draughts of cool, fresh air gratefully. Making to his left, he called good-night to the dockyard policeman on the gates and went out into the roadway strictly according to his unchanging nightly routine. After a day’s work in the close confines and stuffiness of the tunnel power-house, Mr Ackroyd looked forward immensely to his nice swim in the dark from Sandy Bay. A swim, and then a noggin in the Bristol or the Yacht Club, where he enjoyed the sensation of being regarded as a big-shot even if the nobs didn’t exactly make him feel one of themselves.

Walking down to the beach, Mr Ackroyd put his little bundle in the same spot as he always put it—in the lee of a nice big rock where any chance passer-by—not that there was likely to be many of these—couldn’t see his skinny frame entering the bathing-costume. He was about to start undressing when with terrifying suddenness a man appeared from the darkness behind the rock and pinioned his arms behind his back. Mr Ackroyd felt his heart thudding away. He was about to utter a frightened scream when a second man pressed a hand tightly over his mouth; while a third thrust a knife into his ribs just hard enough for the tip to penetrate the shirt and draw blood. Mr Ackroyd felt the warm trickle of his own gore down his skimpy chest and quivered for an instant.

Then he fainted.

The man with the knife withdrew his weapon, the hand came away from Mr Ackroyd’s mouth, and the little physicist was tightly gagged with a dirty strip of cloth. Then he was picked up and carried down towards the sea and pushed into a rowing-boat which had grounded on the sand. This boat took him and the three men out to a felucca which was lying off to seaward. All the men were transferred to the felucca, which, when the rowing-boat had been made fast astern, hoisted sail and made to the northward for the fishing quarter of La Linea, to the east of the town.

Shaw’s statement about the possibility of the Rock going up had, not surprisingly, shaken Staunton rigid. The Defence Security Officer stared at Shaw and demanded, “What in hell d’you mean by that?”

Shaw tried to explain, to put across what he’d been told by Carberry; and all the time he was talking he was conscious of the pain in his guts like a small, red-hot pill. For Debonnair was coming out to Gibraltar; admitted, Carberry had warned him of AFPU ONE’s defective performance, but it had never been imagined that they might not be able to switch off, so of course he hadn’t thought anything of it when he’d got that cable from the girl. Though presumably the danger was not immediate, he wanted to get away and send that message which would—might—stop her . . . but he forced himself to forget his private worries.

He said, “I’m told that a few days before he started up the fuel unit for this demonstration, Ackroyd ran it for test and found it wasn’t behaving quite as expected.”

“I gather that’s right. Hardly surprising, surely—the thing’s only a prototype, isn’t it, really?”

“Well, it’s not perfected yet, certainly. I suppose anything could have gone wrong, but what I gather from you has happened now—I mean this overheating business—is precisely what Ackroyd had in mind might happen after that last test. It was all in a report which he sent to the Admiralty. I dare say it would have been all right if the thing could be stopped—but you say it can’t.” Shaw hesitated, rubbed a hand across his long chin.

Staunton lit a cigarette, offered Shaw one which the agent took. Shaw’s fingers were shaking a little as he lit up; he went on, “To put it in a nutshell, Major, if this fault isn’t corrected AFPU ONE will get like . . . like a hen that’s egg-bound.” He frowned. “I’m no expert, and that’s the best way I can put it.” He broke off, biting his lip, then leaned forward and went on grimly, “I’m not a physicist any more than you, and I’m only repeating what I’ve been told— which is this; when that fuel unit starts producing under excess heat there’ll be a build-up in the ejection duct.” His eyes were bright now, staring into Staunton’s face. “When that jam-up reaches, let’s call it, x proportions, and when the machine gets to y temperature—and obviously no one knows quite when that stage’ll be reached—the algalesium product will react on what I call the H-bomb automatic power unit inside AFPU ONE—and then it goes up. Unless it can be switched off meantime, of course.”

There was a silence, and then Staunton said briefly, “My God.”

He got up, walked about the office. Shaw watched him. There was a cold feeling running along Shaw’s spine; he’d had experience of explosives—ordinary explosives like T.N.T.—and he could visualize only too well what that explosion in a confined place almost in the dead centre of the Rock would do to the structure, to the very foundations upon which Gibraltar stood—to Gibraltar’s very stuff of existence itself. Split it asunder, send those millions of tons of rock and earth and stone and fortifications and big fortress-guns flinging down on that little, clustering, overcrowded town, on the inhabitants . . . and after that, if there was anyone left to know about it, the atomic mushroom-cloud and the fall-out, the radiation spreading over the Straits, over the gap where Gibraltar once had been. The end of the dockyard, of the fortress, of Project Sinker, of all that the fortress-rock—for so long the key defence outpost of the Commonwealth—had ever meant to England; the end of everything.

From Staunton’s expression Shaw could see that the Defence Security Officer had that picture in his mind as well. Staunton asked, “Is there any estimate of—how long?”

“I was told that if the fuel unit overheated it would probably be safe for about a week—not more—after starting to produce the AGL Six. Of course, then it was never dreamed that it wouldn’t be possible to switch the thing off, so the time-limit wasn’t really important—and anyhow no one really knows, probably not even Ackroyd.” Shaw rubbed the side of his nose with a brown forefinger and frowned. “Look, I’ve seen photos of Ackroyd and I’ve also heard quite a lot about him from my department. But I’d like to know how he struck you. Can you give me a word-picture of the man?”

“Yes, I can.” Staunton went back to his desk, perched on a corner of it, nervily hunched. “He’s a funny little geezer in appearance, rather like the popular idea of a pre-War foreman plumber but without the authority and assurance. You know—bowler hat, droopy moustache, off-the-peg blue serge suit, very shiny—till it rotted off him with the sweat, since when he’s gone into open-necked shirts. Actually arrived out here from England wearing the bowler. Yorkshire accent, quite pronounced. He’s rather pathetic, really—never quite found his level in a garrison like this. He’s not assured enough to mix with the brass away from the job, and he’s too brainy for his own sort—regular egg-head, though you mightn’t think it to look at him, and awfully standoffish—shy, really. He can be bloody pig-headed and awkward, and yet he’s an awful little coward too—oddly enough, considering his job. Runs a mile at any sudden noise, and is like a child if he cuts his finger.” Staunton drew deeply on his cigarette, stubbed it out, and lit another. “And how do I know all this? Simple. People talk, and anyway it’s my job to sort these chaps out. One thing I don’t know—how the devil did the Admiralty allow it to happen that he’s the only one who understands this damned machine, Shaw?”