Goodbye California - Alistair [91]
The quiet voice carried total conviction, but when a mind is confronted by the inconceivable it takes refuge in disbelief and non-acceptance.
‘You are quite, quite mad.’ For once Burnett was neither furious nor truculent but he carried as much conviction as Morro had done. ‘If we refuse to, as you say, co-operate? Torture? The threat to the women?’
‘Mrs Ryder will have told you that they are safe from me. You really can be tedious at times, Professor. No torture, except that of your own consciences, the thought that will haunt you as long as you may live – you could have saved countless lives but have chosen not to.’
Healey said: ‘What you are saying in effect is that while people might not believe you and take a chance that you are bluffing they would believe us and take no such chance.’
Morro smiled. ‘It wounds what passes for my amour propre but, yes, precisely.’
‘Let’s go and see just how mad he is.’
The lift was an extraordinary construction. Its floor measured about four feet by six but, in height, it must have been at least fourteen feet. The faces of the four physicists reflected their puzzlement. As the lift whined down Morro smiled again. ‘It is peculiar, I admit. You will understand the reason for its unique design in a very few moments.’
The lift stopped, the door opened and the eight men moved out into a large chamber about twenty feet square. The walls and roofs were as they had been when cut from the solid rock, the floor of smooth concrete. On one side were vertically stacked sheets of steel, whether hardened or stainless it was impossible to judge: on the other were unmistakable sheets of aluminium. For the rest, it was no more or less than a comprehensively-equipped machine shop, with lathes, machine presses, drills, guillotines, oxy-acetylene equipment and racks of gleaming tools. Morro waved a hand.
‘In an automobile plant, what you would call the “body shop”. Here we make the casings. I need say no more.’
Running along the length of the roof of the chamber was a heavy metal rail from which were suspended travelling chain blocks. This extended into the next compartment. Morro led the way in. There was a long table, again running the length of the chamber: a table fitted with circular metal clamps. On either side were racked storage compartments, wire-net fronted, both containing metal drums well separated at calculated intervals.
Morro didn’t even break stride. ‘Plutonium to the left, Uranium-235 to the right.’ He carried straight on to a smaller room. ‘The electrical shop, gentlemen. But that wouldn’t interest you.’ He kept on walking. ‘But this next room should fascinate you. Again in auto-manufacturing parlance, this is what you would call the “assembly shop”.’
Morro had made no mistake. The four physicists were, beyond question, fascinated as they had never been in their lives. But not in the details of the assembly shop. What caught and held fast their disbelieving and horrified attention was the rack bolted to the right-hand wall. More precisely, what the rack held. Clamped vertically, side by side, were ten twelve-feet-high cylinders, each four-and-a-half inches in diameter. They were painted in matt black with the exception of two red bands, each an inch thick, that circled the cylinders one third and two thirds the way up their height. At the further end of the row were two more sets of clamps which held nothing. Morro looked at each of the four physicists in turn. Each