Gibraltar Road by Philip McCutchan Page B

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