The Fourth Bear полностью

“No. A-bombs give off large quantities of radioactive fallout. There is nothing at the site, nothing downwind and only a small amount on this sample. This could not have been a fission device.”

“What then?”

“A fusion reaction with the heavy isotope of hydrogen as the fuel would give a waste product of only helium and a small amount of localized radioactivity caused by an excess of neutrons. However, there are problems here, too.”

“Such as?”

“To start a fusion reaction, you need a huge amount of heat—two million degrees or more. To get that you need either a plasma chamber the size of a house consuming vast quantities of power, a ball of gas the size of the sun or—”

“An A-bomb?” suggested Mary.

“Precisely. A fission trigger to set off the fusion device—but that would also leave large quantities of detectable radioactive fallout.”

He waved the Geiger counter over the fused earth again, and it clicked in a desultory manner.

“This is just mildly radioactive, so it suggests that it might have been a fusion blast of a very small size. Since nuclear fusion exists only in the heart of stars, an A-bomb or a plasma chamber, I think this was something else entirely—a ground burst of a type we have yet to fully understand.”

There was a brief silence as Jack and Mary tried to figure out just what Parks was talking about. As far as Jack could make out, Cripps and his garden were destroyed by a destructive force that Parks couldn’t explain and that the government was keen on hiding—they had removed nearly eighty tons of topsoil before allowing anyone in.

“Do you know the significance of this shape?” asked Parks, indicating the rectangular block of fired earth. Jack and Mary said nothing, so he continued. “If this did come from here, it was cut when the glass was still hot. There was only a time window of twenty-six minutes before the area was cordoned off. The first officers on the scene saw no one but confused villagers. If that’s correct, then we have a witness to the event. Find him and you’ll answer a lot of questions.”

Jack thought for a moment. Up until ten minutes ago, he hadn’t entertained the possibility of McGuffin’s being still alive or heavily involved at Obscurity, but now he was reasonably convinced of both.

“If you think of anything else, I’d appreciate a call,” said Jack, giving Parks his card, “but keep all this under your hat. It seems Goldilocks found a link between the explosions and McGuffin, and she’s dead.”

“Better and better,” replied Parks cheerfully. “No conspiracy is worth a button unless someone is murdered over it—preferably with clandestine overtones and just enough ambiguous facts to be tantalizing, yet not so many that it’s possible to resolve the thing one way or the other.”

They all stood and stared in silence at the bare earth that had once been Stanley’s property.

“A mess, isn’t it?” murmured Parks. “If this is linked to McGuffin, it would explain QuangTech’s interest.”

“QuangTech?” asked Jack sharply.

Parks looked at them both slightly oddly. “Yes. They undertook the initial investigation here. I thought that was common knowledge.”

“Not to me. Does QuangTech usually do investigative work for the government?”

“I have no idea. All I know is that their trucks and personnel were swarming over here for the first week after the blast. They were the ones that took all the topsoil.”

Jack thanked Parks and walked back along the road past the scorched hedgerows to the car. The presence of QuangTech might have been nothing except a coincidence, but it had to be looked into. Within ten minutes they were on the road again, the Vicar’s increasingly aggressive offers of scones and tea notwithstanding.

They were both silent until Mary had driven them onto the main road back to Reading, when she said, “That’s odd.”

“You’re not kidding,” replied Jack, who had been making notes since the moment they left. “I wonder if Parks was talking any sense at all when he thought Obscurity was an explosion of a type unknown to science.”

“No, I mean it’s odd that your odometer is going backward.”

“I noticed that, too. This is how I see it: McGuffin is still alive and conducting secret tests of some sort. In Pasadena, Tunbridge Wells, the Nullarbor—and now here. He’s going to reveal everything to Goldilocks, but then… something happens—and she has to be silenced.”

“Where do the cucumbers come into it?” asked Mary.

“I’d forgotten about them,” replied Jack with a frown. “Perhaps they don’t. In any event I think we need to start getting some answers out of QuangTech. Perhaps we should even try to speak to… the Quangle-Wangle himself.”