Gibraltar Road by Philip McCutchan

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,