'How is she?'
'I've left a shopping list for you – just the chemist in Warminster, and the supermarket.'
'Mrs Jones, how is she?'
'Losing the will to go on fighting – but then you'd know that better than me.'
' Yes. '
He sat at the kitchen table. On the table was that day's newspaper, and the previous day's, neither unfolded. He cradled the mug in his hands. She told him when she would be back.
She said that she would see herself out.
When he had finished his tea, he slowly climbed the staircase.
She had just had the pains when Colt had last written, not been feeling herself.
Perhaps it had all been his fault. Country people who ran whippets and lurchers and labradors and terriers said that there was no such thing as a bad dog, only bad owners and bad breeders and bad trainers. As the recent months had passed, and as Louise had sickened, he felt the guilt more frequently. He knew many people in the village, almost everyone except the newly arrived and the ones who used the village as a dormitory and who worked in Bath or Chippenham or Swindon, but he knew very few that he could classify as friends. The problem of living in the big stone-built Manor House on the edge of the village, with the trees shielding it from the road, and the drive. He could think of no man, or woman, in the village that he could have gone to and talked with, and been reassured on the question of his guilt. As his wife, as his Louise, had slipped, there was no friend with whom he could share the sorrow he felt over his son. In his own time he had been a maverick, and for being a maverick his grateful sovereign had pinned on his chest the gallantry medal of the Military Cross. In the worst passages of his despair, Tuck could believe that the little bugger had learned to be a maverick from his father.
At the door of her bedroom, he paused. He loathed to be in the room now. It was the room they had shared for 30 years since they had moved in to claim his inheritance. He slept next door now, in his dressing room. He paused, so that he could shed the sorrow that had taken hold of him.
He was smiling when he went into the room.
'Good news, ma petite fleur, a letter from that young rascal of yours, a letter from Colt.'
The room was dim because the curtains were half drawn, but he saw the sparkle of her eyes. He walked to the bed, and he sat, and he took the gaunt hand in his own.
'I'll read you what the blighter has to say for himself… '
Erlich didn't know Englishmen. He had never had to work alongside them.
He thought this one must have escaped from the National Theatre down the road.
They were in a pub overlooking the Thames, a stone's throw from Century House, the Secret Intelligence Service offices.
There was no way that S.I.S. would allow Erlich into their tower block, Ruane had warned him in advance.
The stage Englishman wore a pink silk shirt and a lime polka-dot bow-tie. He was old and pompous. They were in the crowded saloon bar with the lunchtime white-shirt crowd, while the other bar was filled with the building trade. To Erlich, it was an idiotic place to meet. They were forced to sit so close that each wrinkle of the boredom on the man's face was apparent. The man seemed to think that everything said to him was excruciatingly tedious and barely worth his attention. Erlich drank Perrier, Ruane drank tomato juice. The Englishman drank two large gin and tonics, without ice, with lemon. Erlich gave him the name of Colt. He was told that it would be checked out.
Outside, watching the man stride away along the pavement, Ruane said, 'Just because they speak our language, don't imagine they do things the same way. Right, the Agency has an address, and a signpost at the right turning off the Beltway. These people don't exist, not here anyway. Very shy people…'
'Are all of them that exotic?'
'Colourful, I grant, but underneath that conspicuous plumage you will get to know, if you are as lucky as you are ambitious, a very down-to-earth bird. He organised, was control of, a mission into the Beqa'a Valley. He achieved with a marksman more than a Phantom wing of the Israeli Air Force could have, took out a real bad guy.'
Erlich said deliberately, 'Sorry I spoke.'
Major Tuck's letter to his son, by now encoded, was transmitted by teleprinter to the Defence Ministry in Baghdad. All matters concerning Colin Olivier Louis Tuck were dealt with in that small group of offices behind their own perimeter fence and guarded by their own troops. By the time that Colt's father had warmed a broth to take upstairs with the scrambled egg and toast that he would himself eat for his supper, the letter to his son would have been delivered to the Colonel's department.
Time, in Frederick Bissett's private world, the world of H 3, was referred to as a 'shake'. Time was 'quicker than a shake of a lamb's tail'. A shake was measured at 1/100,000, oooth of a second. The nuclear explosive process that would obliterate a city involved a reaction taking place in a few hundred shakes. Distance was counted in new language, because it was necessary to be able to refer to the diameter of a unit as small as that of the electron that orbits the neutron in the core of the atom. The diameter of the electron is a 'fermi', named in recognition of the Italian scientist who achieved that mathematical calculation. There are 300,000,000,000,000 fermis in twelve inches. Temperature was talked of in the context of some hundreds of millions of degrees Centigrade, necessary for the stripping away of the electron from the hydrogen atom, vital for the removal of the hydrostatic repulsive forces of the nuclei, leaving them free to collide. The greater the temperature, the greater the force of the collision, the more complete the reaction. Pressure was worked on the scale of 'megabars'. The pressure in the pit of a nuclear explosion was one megabar times one million, equal to 8 billion tons per square inch. Energy was the release of such power that 2.2 pounds weight of the material, plutonium, could in the event of complete fission produce violent strength in the muscle of physics that was equivalent to the detonation of 20,000 tons of conventional explosive.
For his work among those Times, Distances, Temperatures, Pressures and Energies, Senior Scientific Officer Bissett, Grade 8, was paid less than his neighbour the plumber and his neighbour the tinned-food salesman.
Reuben Boll was at his door.
The man's voice boomed in the small room, would be heard down the corridor in the outer office where Carol lorded it over her clerical assistants.
'Tell me, kindly tell me, when is your material going to be ready?'
Bissett did not reply.
Each month the pressure of the work was greater. He should draw a graph of the increasing pressure upon his work.
The Trident programme had seen the start of the pressure, because the submarine-launched system was the priority programme at the Establishment. Everything was sacrificed to Trident. Bissett's own project had been shunted backwards, removing from him colleagues, laboratory time, engineering space, facilities. The staff shortages were the further factor.
Fewer scientists, fewer technicians, fewer engineers. What sort of first-class science graduate would be recruited to A. W. E. when he could earn half as much again or double in the private sector?
There might not be money for Frederick Bissett's salary or funds enough to supply him with badly needed back-up, but by God, oh yes, there was money for the building programme. More than a billion for the A90 complex, and he had heard, and he believed it, that there was ?35 million of money just for the new fencing and perimeter security equipment… money for that, money no object for the bloody contractors.
'Frederick, I asked when is the material going to be ready?'
He felt so hopeless. 'Soon, Reuben.'
'What is 'soon', Frederick?'
'When it is ready… '
'I have a meeting in the morning, Frederick.'
'I am doing my best.'
The fact was that the facilities were not there. Computer time was not possible. Staff were not available. Every time he went across to A area, he was lucky to get half an hour of their time.
He would be heard out, and he would see the shaking heads, and he would be told that facilities and staff were tied down, knotted down, on Trident.
