prepared to squeeze in a visit from lowly Frederick Bissett of H3.
He drove across Second Avenue, and past the new colossus that was the A90 building. The building was a great show box of concrete. He had never been inside the box, nor had he seen the Decontamination Centre that was alongside, nor the Liquid Waste plant. At least they were working on the complex that day, at least the civilian contractors had been able to bribe their private work force to cross the picket lines. It was said that A90 and its ancillaries would end up costing the taxpayer? 1. 5 billion. He'd heard that stainless steel was going inside that box at such a rate as to absorb the country's entire annual output, and that the rip-offs were a scandal. It was being said that when A90 came on song there wouldn't be enough people to work it and there wouldn't be enough plutonium to make it work. Naturally, there was enough money for A90… money, money, money… not a squeak out of the bank manager that week.
He cut across First Avenue. Ahead of him was what those who worked there called the Citadel.
The Citadel was the A area.
The Citadel was where nuclear warheads were made. Inside the Citadel, in Bissett's opinion, there was little that was innovative, much that was wasteful – but then what else could be expected of engineers? The Citadel was a sprawl of buildings, erected in various bursts of haste and always in secrecy since the early Fifties. Everyone who worked oulside it said that the Citadel buildings creaked with age, improvisation, and therefore danger.
There was AI, in at the birth panGs of the British weapon, where the plutonium was heated in the furnaces so that it could be shaped into the melon-sized spheres for the inner workings of the warheads, and it was no secret amongst the Establishment staff that a dozen years earlier cancers had been rampant amongst the technicians. There was A45, the Materials Assembly unit, where the plutonium sphere was wrapped in a second concentric sphere of highly enriched uranium before the sealing of the lethal elements in 22-carat gold foil. Bissett had once met the gaunt technician from A45 who had apparently received through a faulty glove a particle of plutonium the size of a pinhead and whose body had been cremated six months later before there could be an inquest. There was A 1 2, Waste Management Group, where the plutonium and highly enriched uranium and beryllium and tritium were taken from weapons that had achieved their shelf life in the guts of submarines and the bunkers of Air Force camps, then reworked for newer and more potent devices. There were the open-air vats alongside A 1 2 where acid burned out the plutonium before the sludge could be reprocessed.
Bissett had only to see the wire of the Citadel's perimeter, to see the smoke from the Citadel's chimneys, to feel a loathing for the place. He was required to leave his car outside the perimeter fence.
In the walkway inside the high double fencing, an alsatian, an ugly and vicious-looking brute, dragged at its handler's leash. The dog, leaping at the wire, snarling its frustration, frightened him. The Ministry policeman, flak jacket unfastened over his chest, sub-machine gun hooked on a strap over his shoulder, checked his I/D card at the entrance to the razor-wire tunnel, consulted a list of the day's expected visitors, thumbed him through. The machine gun unnerved him, always had and always would.
At the second check, at the end of the wire tunnel, his name was searched for again, and he had to hand in his H area card in exchange for a temporary pass, and a phone call was made ahead.
He was kept waiting. He could never have worked in AIi or Ai/
I or A45 or A 1 2. Every time that he had been inside the Citadel he went home as soon as his day's work was finished and scrubbed his body from toe to scalp. He could never have taken his urine and faeces samples once a week to Health Physics. He could not have endured the clamouring siren bells that marked an alarm and that caused A area to be sealed down, passage in and out of the Citadel suspended until the malfunction was located. He was ushered forward after cooling his heels for four minutes.
He met three men inside A45. For half an hour he took tea and biscuits with them, and discussed the problems of weight reduction through additional use of gallium worked into plutonium. Weight was the key to a warhead. He could have sat down with only one of them and achieved the same guidance on weight and machining capability, but three of them came to the meeting, which he thought typical of engineers. A sniff of tea, a whiff of biscuits, and there would soon be a crowd. Because of the shortage of plutonium, because of the call on plutonium by the Trident programme, he was required to reduce the warhead weight for the cruise system. As he left, the engineers were on their third cup and discussing last week's retirement party.
But he had had some valuable help.
He went out through the 'airlock' system of the wire tunnel.
He was handed back his identity card. The dog was still there, still straining to break through at him.
It was always the same when he came out of there, he thought there was an itch at his back as if he had been touched. They actually wore, those engineers, four different samplers on their chests and pinned to their jackets or shirts.
He drove back to H area.
At least the post was not strike-bound. Carol, on her picket line, would be suffering in the knowledge that a whole delivery of post would escape her. A bundle of recycled internal envelopes for Boll, mostly journals and magazines for Basil, an O.H.M.S. for Wayne, a motley of envelopes for the technicians from H3's laboratory. He saw his own name on a plain white envelope.
Because Carol wasn't there, wasn't arching her head to see the contents of a letter, it was not necessary for him to take the envelope into his own office.
He read the neatly typed letter…
Dear Frederick,
Hoping this finds you well. As you will see, I am now the Professor of Physics here. In an effort to make life more interesting for our younger members of staff and our graduate element, I have been inviting past students back to lecture on any aspect of their current work.
Obviously much of what you do is restricted, but come and give us a talk on anything unrestricted that you think would be of interest.
You are something of a legend here still and would be assured of a fine welcome, a passably good dinner, and a bed at my humble abode – plus travel expenses.
Perhaps you could test the water at your end, and let me know when you could come. Thursday evenings are our best.
Yours,
Walter Smith
PS: What on earth do you do with yourself these days?
Surely they must be about to close the bomb shop down.
Sara could see the raindrops falling from the bare branches of the apple tree in the garden, and she could feel the freshness of the wind on her arms.
She stood at the drying frame with her box of pegs and her tub of washing.
It was a strange thing, really strange to her, that she could feel her underclothes against her body. It was the third day after she had dressed, gone out, without wearing her underclothes, into her car, driving on the main road through Tadley, driving all the way to Kingsclere, knocking at the front door of the home of a woman who was almost a stranger, going into a house that she hardly knew.
Her underclothes had been neatly folded in the bottom of her handbag. No sketcher nor painter nor artist wanted to see the elastic weals on a model's shoulders and chest and hips and thighs, every model left her underwear off for as many hours as possible before posing.
The eyes of the man in the doorway had been a reawakening for Sara. It was more years than she cared to remember since she had last seen a man stare at her in frank admiration. When had she last seen Frederick stare at her, worship her? Back beyond memory.
When she had been at art college, but that was just kids hunting for trophies, and they hadn't meant a toss to her. She had turned her back on the lot of them, and married Frederick Bissett, from a terraced house in Leeds, bright boy of the street. That was her statement to her parents, to her school, to her upbringing. She could not remember when poor old Frederick had last gazed in lust at her naked body, not like Debbie's husband had.
It had been better, a long time ago it had been better, when their loving had made Frank, and better up to the time of Adam's birth. Such excruciating pain and three weeks premature, and fast, but with the pain, and Frederick on his one and only trip to New Mexico.
Alone in her agony, she had vowed that the responsible bastard would go short… He'd gone short and the trouble was – she pegged his flannel pyjamas to the frame – that he didn't seem to care.
