Abercrombie was a strangely secretive man even for a top atom scientist. He had peculiar, advanced theories of his own which he would communicate to no one. The Government research project was well provided with safety factors. In theory the Pile was safe... but theory and practice are poles apart. There is always room for human error. The only man who did not run was Abercrombie. Was he a hero or a megalomaniac? His body was never found, but inexplicable things happened after the accident. It was as if a presence or an essence lingered over the rebuilt Project Headquarters.
The accident at the Pile and the strange rumours surrounding Abercrombie's name were all but forgotten when the Aliens appeared. Terrible inhuman intelligences aided by powerful androids and monstrous robots threatened the Earth and Man's concept of civilised life. Then there was another strange phenomenon at the Pile and Abercrombie was no longer forgotten...
Release date:
September 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
A SUDDEN hush seemed to descend on the bar as Major Burke—known disrespectfully as The Ramrod—made an entrance. Burke had the kind of effusive but overbearing military personality which would not permit him to come into a room Burke made an entrance.
He looked around as though the man he sought at that moment might be there, and then, with an audible snort, the project security chief turned on his heel with military precision and stormed out. Just as Burke did not merely come into a room, neither did he merely go out of it. He made an exit with as much military theatricality as he would have made an entrance.
“Do you think he does it consciously?” asked Tubby Jordan.
Julian Rice blew froth from his beer and watched the bubbles sliding down the far side of his glass.
“Interesting example of surface tension,” he said.
“I don’t mean Burke,” expounded Julian Rice, with a rather cold and superior air.
“Oh,” said Tubby. He always felt a little hurt with Julian. Try as he would to be friendly, thought Jordan, Rice just wouldn’t have any. He was the kind of man to whom you could say “Good morning” and be rounded on as though you had uttered some deadly insult to his family honour.
Lance Gascoigne ordered another pint of twos, collected it from the bar and sat down at a formicatopped table. Lance Gascoigne drank his beer with evident enjoyment. He held the half-empty tankard up towards the neon strip which illuminated the ultra modern bar.
Softly, but with a clear audibility that was an unmistakably poetic delivery, Gascoigne began to speak:
“O gentle, amber-coloured gift of heaven,
Soft, smooth and potent to the dry, parched throat.
Would that the seas and rivers were fomenting,
That lakes and streams were filled with foaming beer
“You were born about three centuries too late,” grinned Tubby Jordan. “You’d have been a great success in the 17th century.”
Julian Rice snorted. “Poetry! Prostitution of the Arts!”
“What’s the matter with you, then?” demanded Gascoigne with an air of sham indignation.
“A man with your capabilities puling out poetry!” retorted Rice. “Nonsense! Complete nonsense!”
“You mean because I’m a scientist I shouldn’t have any room for poetry?” said Gascoigne, and took another thoughtful pull at his beer.
“I don’t think any real scientist ever wrote poetry,” commented Rice, and gave a rather superior sniff. “I certainly haven’t!”
“What made you think you were a real scientist then?” demanded Lance Gascoigne.
What had been banter suddenly sounded rather more serious.
Rice put his empty glass down on the bar and began to look decidedly unpleasant. He had a cold, hard, face thought Jordan. Julian’s features might have been chiselled from flint or granite. He was more like a machine than a man. He was more like a piece of rock than a living creation of warm flesh and blood.
“Sometimes,” said Julian Rice with appreciable bitterness, “I get so damnably sick and tired of this place that I wonder why I stay here.”
“Some of us,” remarked Gascoigne, addressing his beer mug, “wonder the same thing.”
Rice walked briskly across to Lance’s table. The two men were about the same height when Gascoigne stood up, but Rice seemed to be a little more heavily built.
“I’ve had about enough of you and your damn stupid nonsense!” snapped Julian viciously.
Gascoigne stood swaying rather dangerously on the tips of his toes. He looked deceptively casual.
“Oh, come on chaps, don’t let’s make a big thing of this,” interposed Tubby Jordan.
“He damn well started it,” exploded Rice. “I’m going to finish it! Sometimes, Gascoigne, it becomes necessary to descend to a pretty primitive level to deal with your kind of insolence!”
“Insolence?” said Gascoigne.
“You’ve got a nasty, rebellious streak in you,” went on Rice. “You’ve got a vicious temper, Gascoigne. But you’ll find you’re not the only man with a temper, I assure you!”
“You’re projecting your own faults,” returned Lance with cool, calm, self-control. “You’re the man who’s getting hot under the collar, Jordan. Nobody else is.”
“I get sick and tired of this damn place,” said Rice, “confined here with these lesser minds.” He was speaking through clenched teeth. “That damned old fool Abercrombie, wandering about here like a—” He ended in a sort of inarticulate splutter, as though at a loss for words.
At that moment the door opened and Paul Abercrombie entered. His face was the face of a mature man in his early fifties. The forehead was lined and wrinkled; what remained of the hair was very thin. It lay close to the high intelligent forehead. Abercrombie’s moustache was bristling, and his eyes were glaring beneath their heavy brows. He looked, if anything, angrier than Julian Rice.
“Did I hear you just mention my name, Rice?” barked Abercrombie. He had a remote and austere manner as a rule, but now he was decidedly imminent. The cold eyes of Julian Rice blazed with anger that was now very close to the dangerous verge beyond which there was no control.
“Eavesdropping again, Abercrombie?” snapped Rice.
“Now, look, gentlemen,” said Tubby Jordan, “our work is exacting, it’s very exacting. You chaps do more than I do. At least you all seem to—” he grinned. “Even my nerves get a bit strained at times, so with you doing that much more there’s every excuse for all of you to feel a bit edgy. But please, don’t any of you do anything silly, don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
There was a temporary lull. Julian Rice turned and stalked back to the bar. Abercrombie stood glaring at him in silence for a moment. The door opened again and a girl entered. She was the kind of girl at whom men automatically look twice. She was the kind of girl who would have attracted admiring glances in a street full of pretty girls. But Jean Abercrombie was one of the very few women on the project.
She came into the room like a ray of sunshine filtering through the dull window of a grimy cellar.
“Hello, Father. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Major Burke wants you.”
“Oh,” Abercrombie was as remote and austere as Jean was gay and talkative. Looking at her, Tubby Jordan wondered whether her gay, bright nature was only a kind of persona, whether it was a defence against this dour, withdrawn father of hers. As far as Tubby could judge there wasn’t very much here at Project headquarters that would appeal to a girl like Jean Abercrombie. But she never complained, never grumbled at the loss of the kind of social life which a girl of her age and apparent temperament had every right to expect. She took her father’s arm gently, and, his anger having fallen from him like an old glove, Paul Abercrombie allowed himself to be steered out of the bar in the project’s social wing and away in the direction of Major Burke’s office in the security block.
Jean’s intervention at that moment had prevented any really serious flare up from getting out of hand.
“She’s a lovely girl,” said Lance Gascoigne, turning to Tubby.
“She certainly is,” agreed Jordan. He winked at Gascoigne, “You’re a lucky man!”
“Oh, I’m not there yet, you know, there’s many a slip—as the old saying goes.”
Julian Rice laughed. A loud, contemptuous, sneering sort of laugh.
“Got a frog in your beer, have you?” asked Gascoigne.
“I’m laughing,” Rice informed him coldly.
“If you hadn’t told us we’d never have guessed,” returned Gascoigne, even more icily.
“This has just about got to the level of the Sixth Form,” said Tubby Jordan despairingly. “Can’t you chaps stow it!”
“Tubby,” said Lance, “You sound like the jolly fat boy out of one of these pre-war boarding school adventure stories. ‘I say, you chaps, can’t you chuck it!’” he mimicked Tubby’s voice. The plump scientist looked a bit crestfallen.
“Why don’t you do us all a favour and drop dead, Jordan,” said Rice.
Looking even more crestfallen, and without his usual smile, Tubby got to his feet and went and sat on the far side of the bar. His depression did not last more than a few seconds, however. In less than a minute he was chatting about the latest Test score to one of the technicians sitting on the far side of the bar, beside him. From time to time, however, he cast a concerned glance in the direction of the two men whose quarrelling voices could be heard plainly. Tubby had no responsibility for Lance or Julian. His was the concern of a friend. There was a very real sense in which Tubby’s broad mind regarded most of the human race as “friends”—or potential friends. He himself could get on with nearly anybody, and it cost him little or no effort. It always worried and puzzled him when two colleagues for whom he tried to have an equal, though different type of regard, failed to agree together. He was at a loss to explain such phenomena adequately, the very existence of it was a cause of perplexity and a chronic mild anxiety as far as Tubby was concerned.
In the security block Burke was sitting behind a square, crisp-cornered, metal desk. Abercrombie knocked, and opened the door with a practised and well-executed movement of the wrist. Burke looked at him a little uncertainly. Abercrombie was such an enigma, there was no knowing what went on behind the scientist’s mask-like face, thought Burke. All these damned scientists were the same, decided the security major. Each of them was wrapped up in one tightly specialised sphere of the work upon which the whole team were engaged. Their ideas about security, thought Burke angrily, were either childishly primitive or non-existent, and this work, here, was of the utmost importance. The security chief became aware that Paul Abercrombie was towering above the desk, glowering at him after the manner of an irate schoolmaster glaring at a recalcitrant pupil. It was the kind of glower that speaks of dire punis. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
