Unobtainium 1: Kate on a Hot Tin Roof (4 page)

‘And he is not saying, I assume? No, but of course not. The man is using the life of his own daughter as a… a bargaining chip.’

‘I believe that we can only use the term “daughter” loosely. He may, indeed, have been the… paternal contributor to Kate’s creation, but I believe he did so simply to reduce the chance of discovery. One less person involved in the experiment.’ He spat out the last word, his fists clenching.

Antonia leaned forward, her hand coming to rest on his. ‘This is not your fault, Charles, and if there is anyone who can cure her of this malediction, I am quite sure that it is you.’

‘Thank you for your confidence, but
I
fear that it may be misplaced even if no one else does.’

Antonia narrowed her eyes and glared at him. ‘Charles Hunter Barstow-Hall, do not
dare
to sit here in the club your grandmother’s family built and tell me that you are not scientist enough to solve this problem. You are the foremost mind in science today. In this Great Britain if not the entire world! Kate could not have a better champion in this fight and I wish to hear no more of your negative assertions. You
can
do this. Do not make me resort to uncivilised language to emphasise my surety on this.’

‘Far be it from me to force a lady to use uncouth words.’ Charles picked up his glass and drained it. ‘I must return to my laboratory. If there is an answer to be found, I will find it there.’

Knightsbridge, 18
^th
April.

The nightmare was a familiar one, but no less terrifying for that. Charles crawled in darkness, looking for a way out. He had had similar dreams ever since, at the age of seven, he had been trapped by a small collapse in one of the Unobtainium mines. The sight of his grandfather’s lantern had been the most welcome thing Charles had ever seen, and the fear of darkness had stayed with him for twenty-five years.

But this time there was something different and the difference was holding him there in the dark as his sleeping mind fought to awaken
and
to determine what was wrong. He had just worked out that the floor was smooth, too smooth to be the floor of the tunnel, when the light appeared from above. Cold, pale blue light flooded into the chamber, a roughly square cell with a tin bucket in the corner. Charles knew that light all too well, recognised the colour even as he felt his skin begin to burn under the torrent of radiation. Felt his eyes melting…

He jerked awake, barely noticing the blanket, which Harroway must have put over his shoulders, falling behind him. He had fallen asleep at his desk trying to come up with some way of removing the contamination from Kate’s body, and he had dreamed of what it must have been like for her. She had lived much of her life in darkness. Perhaps she had seen daylight when taken up to be experimented on, but Cooper had arranged it so that he could expose her to the blue light of the reactor without her leaving her cell. A channel had been cut through the floor, covered by a lead plate. They had found it when they had moved the reactor. All to make it easier to irradiate the girl.

Why had he done that? His experiments appeared to use the cages with radiation directed through the light tubes. Yet he had made it a simple matter of moving a metal plate to fill Kate’s cell with the same energy. It seemed… uncontrolled. Unscientific. Cooper was insane, but he was an insane scientist. So why use such a haphazard method… Unless it served some other purpose.

Charles bolted to his feet and rushed to the door. ‘Harroway!’

A door at the end of the hall opened and the manservant, immaculately dressed even at whatever time it was, appeared through it. ‘Sir? Your tone suggests that you have found an answer to your conundrum.’

‘Not an answer, but possibly a palliative. Call the hospital and tell them to have Kate ready to travel. If they can provide an ambulance, so much the better. Then call Greenwich and tell them I need our heaviest suit ready for me when I get there. I’ll be collecting Kate and taking her there.’

Harroway actually raised an eyebrow. ‘You are taking the young woman to the largest Unobtainium reactor in the country, sir?’

‘Yes. I believe I know why her father was exposing her to the radiation. I believe that it may be the only thing which keeps her alive!’

Greenwich.

Kate’s condition had worsened, but she was still on her feet and quite capable of moving under her own power, and the sight of the huge, brick-built building which housed arguably the Unobtainium Company’s greatest achievement caused her eyes to widen.

‘Very big,’ she said as Charles led her from the ambulance to the main doors. ‘Very big house.’

‘No one lives in this house, my dear. We call them “buildings” when no one lives in them. Or factories, or warehouses, or… Well, you can learn all those words later. This one is where we keep a reactor, a machine like the one your father had, with the blue light. Do you trust me, Kate?’

She stopped and looked at him. ‘You want to show me the light.’

‘I believe that it stabilises… No, a simpler explanation. I believe that it stops you becoming sick.’

She nodded. ‘Sometimes when I was sick, father showed me the light and I felt better. Sometimes I not sick and it make me sick, but not… not like the same sick.’ She lifted the arm which had been burned but was now perfect skin. ‘Like this.’

‘Then we go in. I’ll take you into the room, but you will have to come out when you think you’ve had enough. I have no way of determining how much exposure you need.’

She frowned at him. ‘If you come too, you get hurt.’

‘I have a way of protecting myself. Don’t you worry.’

Charles’s method of protecting himself, a heavier version of the suits the hazard teams wore with a solid, armoured chest and helmet, and triple-layered cloth everywhere else, reduced Kate to a fit of giggles. ‘Sharles is funny,’ she proclaimed.

He smiled, even if she could probably barely see it through the thick, Unobtainium-doped glass of the small window in his helmet. ‘Yes, I probably look funny, but even with this on, I cannot stay with you for too long.’

Kate nodded, suddenly very serious. ‘Sharles not hurt himself for me. I am brave. I stay on self. Get better. Come out.’

‘Very good. This way.’

The reactor room was sealed behind six feet of brick, concrete, and lead, but there was one way to get through. The tunnel had three doors. The first, thick, iron, and locked until Charles opened it, led into an antechamber where he paused, hanging up a new shift the hospital had provided on a peg.

‘Kate, listen carefully,’ he said. Kate put on a studious expression which almost made him laugh. ‘When you come out, you need to remove your dress and place it into this receptacle here.’ He indicated a large, metal bucket with a lid across the tunnel from the peg. ‘It must be burned. This new dress is for when you go out through the door. Do you understand?’

She nodded emphatically. ‘When I come out, I put this dress in bucket and put on new one. Thank you for new dress.’

‘My pleasure. Let us continue.’

There was a second door, this one made of a thin layer of adamantium welded to a thicker iron base, and then the third door with a thicker adamantium layer let them into the reactor room.

It was not dark. The room was fifty feet across and the centre of it was a metal sphere ten feet in diameter. The size of the thing had meant that casting the case had not been an easy operation. They had known it would leak and so they had constructed the room around it to absorb that leakage. In a way it made things easier since the blue light of the reactor provided illumination. Surrounding the reactor itself were pipes, coiled copper pipes in large numbers, all of them there to absorb the heat of the reactor and convert water into steam which in turn was used to generate electricity. The heat in the reactor room was more oppressive, but less lethal, than the radiation.

As Charles opened the door, he heard the Geiger counter on his suit begin to click. Kate looked at him as though she might be about to start giggling again. ‘Now Sharles make funny noise.’

‘That is telling me that there is radiation in this room. The blue light.’

‘Yes.’ She could see that.

‘Stay near to the wall.’ He pulled the door closed and turned the locking wheel. ‘You see how this door is opened and closed? You turn this wheel–’

‘And the bars move, and it open.’

‘You are an observant girl. Good.’

‘Now you go. Sharles will
not
hurt for me.’

He looked at her through the hazy glass. ‘You will come out as soon as you feel better?’

‘Yes, Sharles.’

‘You remember you have to change clothes?’

‘Yes, Sharles.’

The urgent clicking of the radiation meter told him she was right to insist, but it was still with reluctance that he turned the wheel and left her to the mercy of the vast, metal beast behind him.

~~~

William Rotham watched as one of the greatest minds in the country paced back and forth across the access room of the power plant. There was every possibility that Charles was going to wear a groove in the concrete floor, not that Rotham planned to point this out. He liked his job. Chief engineer paid well and kept his wife in the style she enjoyed, and the work was generally more supervisory than practical. And it was in the dry.

‘It’s been over ninety minutes,’ Charles said.

‘Just coming up to one hundred, sir.’

‘That’s… if she’s stayed near the wall as I instructed, that would be… thirty roentgens of exposure.’ Rotham quietly marvelled at the fact that Charles could just work that out in his head. ‘It’s not certain death, but she should be badly burned, nauseous… I’m going to go back in and check on her.’

‘Sir, I think that it would be wise–’ He stopped as a red light appeared above the door. ‘The reactor room door has been opened, sir.’

Charles stopped pacing and looked up at the light. ‘All right, you know what’s required. We’ll need to isolate her if she’s giving off too much radiation, which I’d rather not do, but I think she’ll understand.’

Rotham picked up a Geiger counter, the head mounted on the end of a six-foot pole, and waited. A minute or so later Kate emerged from the tunnel, dressed in her new, white shift, and turned dutifully to close the door.

‘Kate,’ Charles said, ‘just wait there for a moment. This is Mister Rotham and he is going to check that you are not… He’s going to make sure you did not bring any of the light out with you.’

‘Radiation,’ Kate said seriously as Rotham extended the pole out towards her.

Charles smiled. ‘Indeed. I really must stop treating you like a child. You clearly have a good memory. Rotham?’

Rotham was frowning at his instrument. ‘Uh, she appears to be clean, sir.’ He scanned the probe up to Kate’s head and then down to her feet. Then he shook the box as though he was having trouble believing what he was seeing. ‘
Too
clean, if I may be so bold. The instrument is reading the background of this room, always a little higher than outside, but nothing from Miss Kate. It’s as though she had never been in the reactor room.’

Charles walked over to Rotham and took the device from him, peering at the set of gauges on the top. He turned it off, back on again, waited for it to warm up, and peered once again at the needles.

‘You continue to astound me, Kate,’ Charles said, handing the box back to Rotham. ‘By rights you should be burned and sick, if not dying, but you seem to be completely unaffected.’

‘Burns could show up later, sir,’ Rotham pointed out.

‘Indeed, but that does not explain this total lack of apparent contamination.’

‘Agreed, sir, but I’m an engineer, not a physicist. I’ll leave the explanations to you, if you don’t mind the presumption.’

Charles chuckled. ‘I do not, Mister Rotham. Thank you for your assistance. Come, Kate. We’ll get you back to the hospital and have you watched for a few hours. I will attempt to find a more permanent home for you now that we know what is required. I believe that there is only one place we can put you, and I am afraid that I will have to do some persuading to make it work.’

Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

‘There are no signs of ill effects from the exposure,’ Wilberforce said. ‘I consulted one of our experts in the field and he professed disbelief. I assured him that your estimations were correct, and he agreed that
you
of all people would know. He believes the young lady to be either lucky beyond all women, or blessed by God Himself.’

‘Perhaps God did look down upon Cooper’s work and decide that it could not be allowed to stand,’ Charles allowed. ‘Sadly, He did not have more hand in Kate’s nature than He does in any of us. I swear that her father will pay for his detestable acts, but that is for another day.’ He looked around at Franklin, who was attending the hospital because Charles had requested he be there to give his opinion on Charles’s plans. ‘Inspector, you said that you had some news?’

‘I do, sir, and it is as disquieting as the young lady’s miraculous health.’

Charles frowned. ‘Please, continue.’

‘We got a name from Cooper. Kate’s mother was named Helen Brighton and, on searching our files, we discovered the name. A known prostitute, I am sorry to say, even though she was barely eighteen. She was known to frequent the Strand and Catherine Street.’ Charles gave a wince; he knew the kind of girl who plied her trade there and they were among the lowest of their unfortunate breed. ‘She was reported missing by a “friend” and we later found a body which matched her description in the Old Deer Park out near Kew.’

‘And also quite near to Cooper’s residence.’

‘Indeed, sir. At the time, the doctor who performed the autopsy believed that she had been with child soon before her death and may have died giving birth, but he could not be sure.’

Charles gave a nod. ‘Cooper said Kate’s mother died giving birth, though I’d wager he did little to save her and planned to do away with her had she survived. I am not hearing anything disquieting, Inspector.’