Ball of Paper

I was in my lab² one afternoon. It must have been about half-past five, anyway, time to think about going home. There were a couple of observations I wanted to make before I went and it was a quarter of an hour before I could make the second check. During that quarter of an hour the wretched Johnson incident happened.

I decided to use the spare time filling up a form. This form was to do with Johnson's'promotion. Johnson had got to go up for an inter­view³ and he couldn't go till the form was completed. I'd given our Establishment Officer⁴ my word that I'd definitely do it before I went home this afternoon. I was Johnson's senior officer⁴ and whoever read that particular bit of paper was probably going to pay some attention to what I said on it. I hoped they would anyway.

Since Johnson came to me he'd done a good job as an Experimental Officer.⁴ I could put my hand on my heart and say that. But he was not everything he ought to be. He was inconsistent, inconsistent in a way I just somehow couldn't put up with.

I'm not consistent at all myself. I work in bursts and keep irregu­lar hours. But I can see the sense in that. I couldn't see the sense in the way Johnson went on. He wasn't consistent intellectually. He wasn't consistent in his attitude either. More than once I caught him going behind my back for something he wanted. In fact, he'd have done me one or two dirty tricks if I hadn't found out and stopped him. But that's the personal side of it. What really bothered me was the way he was erratic in his ideas.

To be fair to the man, I've got to admit that he'd had a lot of expe­rience. He had some good ideas as well. I'd even go so far as to say one or two of them were really good, far beyond what you could expect from an E.O.⁴ He'd also had quite a few bad ones, in fact bad is hardly the word for them. They were blunders. On top of all he had an ungov­ernable temper.

It was a very difficult decision to make. Moving Johnson up from E.O. to S.S.O.⁴ was risky. A man as erratic as Johnson is a risk any­where. In our kind of work he's a menace. But I had to admit that as the years went by he was getting more sensible. He was having his good ideas just as often and he was making blunders less frequently. I was coming round to thinking the risk might be worth taking. These were the lines I was thinking along, and I should have gone on thinking along them if Johnson hadn't come into the room that evening just at the crit­ical moment.

I suppose you must have guessed that Johnson thought the reason he hadn't succeeded in getting promoted already was because I'd given him a bad write-up,⁵ that I was responsible for the delay. Mind you, it was a difficult thing to do, to get the kind of appointment he was aiming at. Johnson had it fixed in his head that a poor write-up from me would not permit our people to promote him. As usual he was exaggerating. I'd first reported impartially on his actual work, and then given my personal opinion of the risk of making him an S.S.O. After that it was up to them.

On the last two occasions the Commission had come down on my side of the line. Now I'd come to the conclusion that the line didn't quite stand where it did. The man was definitely taking himself in hand, both in his ideas and in his personal behaviour. I thought the risk was definitely less than it had been, and I was prepared to say so. And that, I thought, might mean that this time Johnson would get what he wanted.

1 picked up my pen. Now I'd got down to it, the job was not as dis­agreeable as it might have been.

I was just reading the form over before I put my name to it when the door flew open. It was Johnson. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he knew what I was doing.

I shall now have to describe the lab. It was what's called a hot lab.⁶ This means there are radio-active substances about the place that can do you serious harm if you expose yourself to too much radiation from them. You've probably seen pictures of people working in hot labs, handling things by remote control, wearing protective clothing and all the rest of it. The labs are air-conditioned, they don't have any win­dows and they are constantly being swept and polished.

What caught your eye when you came into my lab was an object called a coffin⁷ in the middle of the floor. A coffin is a large brick-shaped block of solid lead with a cavity on the top. Lead is one of the best materials for stopping radiation. At the bottom of the cavity lay a ura­nium slug — that's where the radiation was coming from. The slug was fresh from the reactor.

What goes on in an atomic pile is this. Bars of uranium, called slugs, are pushed along channels through the reactor, and while they're there fission of the uranium takes place, so that when they come out at the other end they've been partly transformed into plutonium and fission products. What I have to draw your attention to is that the longer the slug has been in the pile, the more active it's likely to be when it comes out.

I can't describe the experiments I was doing because they are se­cret. The only two things you need to know I actually can tell you. First, the slugs I was experimenting with had been kept in the reactor a long time. Second, the coffin I was using was one I had designed myself, and it gave very little protection. I didn't like that, naturally. But I couldn't do the experiments on the slug that I wanted to do unless I had that design of coffin. So there it was. When we weren't doing any experiments we covered the cavity over with lead bricks. When the bricks were off you had to keep way.

So there we were, Johnson and I facing each other.

Johnson's eyes were bulging. His specs² were slipping off his nose.

"Oh, hello," I said. I put down my pen.

"Hello, Curtis."

He spoke in a menacing tone and what's more he dared to come and stand not far from my elbow. I was used to dealing with him in this mood. I said:

"You've just come in time, Johnson. The next observation is due at —" I don't remember now actually what time it was, but I told him then.

"O.K.," he said. "That leaves us eight minutes. I wanted to have a word with you about that, Curtis."

"About what?" I said.

"About that confidential report on me." There was no denying it.

"I'm not going to pretend it's not what you think it is, Johnson." I said. "It is."

He came still nearer. His eyes were now popping out of his head, not at me, but in an effort to read what I'd written.

"What I'd like to know," he said, "is whether you're going to wreck my chances again."

"Who said I wrecked your chances before?"

"Come off it,⁸ Curtis; you know you did. That's why I'm going to have it out with you now. I want to know where I stand."

"You seem to know more than I do."

"For once I don't."

I was pretty fed up⁹ with him.

"I'm going to tell you what I've written about you, and then you can judge for yourself. It'll be up to you then to decide whether I'm wrecking your chances or not. I've given a very fair account of what you've done so far. I've said I think there's a risk in putting you up to S.S.O. but"—I paused--"I'd be willing to take it."

"If that's what you've written, let me see it!"

I lost my temper with him. I don't lie. Nothing would make me lie. Not about that sort of thing, anyway.

"You're not going to see it."

"Then that proves my point!" He jumped towards me and seized the form.

"Give that back!" I jumped up.

To stop me getting it he crushed it into a ball between his hands.

"Give it back!" I pulled at his forearm and he pulled it away. The

ball flew out of his hands, through the air, across the floor till it came to the coffin.

"Come back!"

He was already picking the ball of paper up, opening it, READING IT WHERE HE WAS STANDING.

I'd got the telephone receiver off and was asking for Health Phys­ics¹⁰ before I knew what I was doing. I was telling Health Physics what he'd done. I looked at him and put the telephone down.

"They're going to be here for you in about three minutes!"

He said nothing and neither did I. When he did speak his eyes were fixed on my face.

"Do you think I've got it?"

I said: "I think you've had something." I don't know why, but I suddenly thought about his wife and kids.

I noticed him touching the film-holder on the lapel, as if he was making sure it was there. It was the sort of badge we all wear. It con­tains a piece of photographic film between two thin sheets of lead with windows in the front one. When the Health Physics people develop the film they can tell the amount of radiation that has fallen on it. I suppose the first thing they'd do when they took him away now was develop his film. He must have been thinking the same thing.

Johnson couldn't have had a fatal dose,¹¹ I was convinced of that:

If he'd had the sort of dose I thought he'd probably get away with it. Then another thought occurred to me — it was a hundred to one the medicals would say he wasn't to come near any more radiation for quite a time. And it was beyond my power to do anything either. He had put himself out of just the job he wanted and just the job he was most use­ful for.

 

NOTES

1. William Cooper (1910): a modern English writer, critic and expert on atomic energy. His main works are: "Scenes from Provincial Life" (1950); "Scenes of Married Life" (1961); "The Novel and Anti-novel" (1961).

2. lab (coll.): an abbreviated form of "laboratory". Note also:

specs: spectacles; doc: doctor; bike: bicycle.

3. interview: a meeting to test the suitability of a candidate for a post.

4. Experimental Officer, Senior Scientific Officer; Establishment Officer: terms loosely corresponding to the Russian: младший, стар­ший научный сотрудник; работник отдела кадров

5. write-up: (зд.) характеристика

6. a hot lab: лаборатория для исследования радиоактивных веществ

7. coffin: (зд.) контейнер, хранилище

8. Come off it! (coll.): Stop pretending!

9. fed up: (sl.). sick and tired (of)

10. Health Physics study the ill-effects of ionizing radiation on humans and their protection from them дозиметристы

11. the fatal dose for man is put down at 400 r. (r.=roentgen=-Rtgn.) Roentgen W.K. (1845—1923) German physicist, discoverer of X-rays.