I smiled. 'No.'
'So what can I do for you ?'
'Is there,' I asked him, 'a fire manual? I'd like to do some reading.'
He grinned. 'More joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth -’
'The manual,' I said.
'Sure.' He passed it over from a rack of heavy army-issue books on the wall behind his chair.
'Thanks.' I took the plastic-bound volume. 'Mind if I borrow it?'
'Not if it comes back.'
I returned to my hut, lay on the bed and began to try to find my way through about three pounds of assorted fire regulations. Finally I found what I wanted: a complete paper on the effect of fire on plastics. It laid heavy emphasis, as they always do, on the dangers of cigarettes, the need for ashtrays everywhere. Then it went on to describe the particular hazards. PVC, I learned, produced a wide variety of highly toxic gases during combustion, among them phosgene and benzene. But it wasn't PVC that really concerned me. The seat cover was PVC, but the foam inside wasn't. Then I found the bit about polyurethane foam, and read that. Having done so, I read it again. And I wonder, dear reader, as the Victorian novelists used to say, whether you quite realize what it is you're sitting on when you relax in your soft, squashy armchair?
Because polyurethane foam, when it burns, produces, if I may quote the manual 'extremely large volumes from small quantities' of a) carbon monoxide, and b) hydrogen cyanide.' Just to underline the point, carbon monoxide is lethal. All those people who commit suicide by running a hose pipe from the exhaust into the car are making use of carbon monoxide's handy properties. But compared with hydrocyanic gas, carbon monoxide is gentle. Hydrogen cyanide is the stuff they used in American gas chambers to execute murderers - literally the quickest of all gaseous killers. And polyurethane foam had been smouldering quietly about a foot from my nose!
'Careless fellow,' they'd have said at the inquest, if there had been an inquest. 'He left a cigarette burning.'
What I was suddenly burning to know was the name of said careless fellow. Because I was sure now that somebody had tried to kill me!
Chapter 12
The first shock of realization: the first crawling of the scalp, the first sharp chill around the heart, all wore off after a while. The fear-generated adrenalin coursed round and round and finally wore off too, and I was left with another conclusion : that my great discovery had got me precisely nowhere. To Barney and Westlake, all this would seem like a desperate, not to say crazy, rationalization of my own carelessness. Barney had already muttered, once in my hearing, and probably several times out of it, the word
'paranoid'. If I went to him now and said, 'Look, I've just realized somebody's trying to kill me,' he'd say,
'Prove it.' And I couldn't; my proof rested in the main on self-knowledge, on my own certainty about the way I handled cigarettes, about the way I'd wrestled with the trench door. But to Barney I'd still be the fool who left a cigarette burning. Furthermore, he'd know all the fire and safety regulations backwards that was the nature of the man. He'd know all about the poisonous gases generated in the combustion of plastics and be merely surprised that I didn't. No, Barney wouldn't take my theories at all seriously. But there was one thing he would take very seriously indeed, and that was anything he regarded as spreading alarm and despondency.
All I could do, for the moment at least, was to keep my knowledge to myself. And bloody well watch my back! And then I knew that that wouldn't be enough, because whoever was trying to kill me was also chipping away very effectively indeed at the whole fabric of Camp Hundred. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the medic was right, and that somebody was trying not only to kill me, but to render Hundred uninhabitable. So somehow I must try to find out who was doing it. Above all, why?
I lay back, trying, now that the decision was made, to evolve some method. But my mind must, by that time, have had enough. I drifted off into a confused, disturbed, jumpy kind of shallow doze from which I finally woke with a start of surprise for no reason at all. I'd fallen asleep with the light on and now, forlornly alert, I looked round the little, windowless room, halt expecting trouble. The room was empty. Reassured, I glanced at my watch. I'd promised to go back to duty with Kelleher at five and it was now almost half past. Once again I dressed quickly and hurried out. My nerves jangled an alarm when I went into the hospital hut and discovered that Kirton's office was empty; but in the ward the medic was dozing on one of the spare beds and Carson's corporal sat patiently reading a magazine.
'All well?’ I asked softly.
The corporal nodded towards the medic. 'He gave him another shot around one. All quiet since.'
'Fine,' I said. 'Sorry I'm late. Time you had a sleep.'
'Sure is.' He stretched and rose.
I said, 'Did Mr Kelleher waken?'
'Well, he kinda half-wakened.'
'And?'
'Didn't say much. Just was 1 positive he hadn't had a coronary.'
'He was rational, then?'
'Getting that way. Kinda dopey, you know?'
He left then, and I went to look at the patient. Kelleher seemed completely calm; he was breathing regularly, and so too was the medic. I wished I were as relaxed. I felt unwashed, un-rested and unhappy. A cup of coffee helped a little, but not much. I couldn't settle. As soon as I sat in a chair, it developed lumps and bumps and I developed corns and had to move. The conundrum kept rattling round my head and gave me no peace. Somewhere in this place was a man, or men, intent upon sabotage to the point where Camp Hundred folded up. Who? I thought round and round it, but there seemed to be no pointer anywhere. All right, why? There was an answer, of sorts, to that, but it was a pretty feeble answer. Hundred was cold and not too comfortable; it was a long way from the civilized pleasures; it must seem, perhaps, a bloody awful posting to a lot of the men. But would anybody seriously embark on a campaign of deliberate and expensive sabotage, and, worse, actually kill, just to shorten a posting? Which brought me back to madmen, and I smiled wryly at the thought that the nearest available madman was now sleeping peacefully a few feet away.
The train of thought moved over some points then, as I stood looking at Kelleher. Really, I knew very little about the man, except that from the beginning, and until the previous day's extraordinary seizure, he had struck me as very stable and reliable. It also seemed likely that there was no history of mental illness; had there been, no organization in a field as sensitive as nuclear engineering would have touched him with a very long pole. Come to think of it, I'd be prepared to bet that his company would have any man in Kelleher's line of country examined very closely indeed for chinks in his psychological armour. Lots of American companies, these days, give psychological tests to a salesman's wife before they'll take him on the payroll, let alone a man who's going to design and work on experimental atomic power furnaces. I lit a cigarette and rather self-consciously looked for an ashtray. Two hours or so drifted slowly by in which nothing happened except that the medic awoke to give Kelleher a little tidying-up. While it was going on, I stood by in case Kelleher woke and became violent again, but he slept peacefully while the canvas leg restraints were removed and he was washed. When the straitjacket was back in position and fastened to the bedposts again, such mild tension as there had been vanished. About eight o'clock Barney came along to inspect Kelleher again. He looked very tired, his eyes deep in the sockets and the skin dark below them. But his step was brisk, his manner cheerful, and he gave my shoulder an amiable thump. 'How's the patient?'