The Fourth Bear

21. Driven to Obscurity

“Welcome to Obscurity,” said the Vicar kindly, shaking their hands.

Jack and Mary had arrived at the village—after becoming hopelessly lost—two hours after leaving the NCD offices. The damage to Obscurity was readily apparent before they even reached the village. Fallen trees and hedges blackened by fires guided them the last half mile or so.

“As you can see, not many buildings were spared the damage of that night,” explained the Vicar, waving his arm in the direction of the vicarage. The windows had been boarded up, and blue plastic tarpaulins were draped across the roof. “I’m five hundred yards from Stanley’s house, and this is the result. Would you like some tea and a scone?”

“Maybe later.”

“They’re very good scones.”

“I’m sure they are. But this is a matter of some urgency.”

“Then I’ll show you around.”

They walked past the church, which had lost the top of its steeple and all its windows. The yew in the churchyard had burned where it stood, as had most of the surrounding trees, hedges and crops. This and the blackened texture of the stone walls and buildings gave the whole area a scorched, hell-on-earth look to it.

“Large graveyard,” observed Jack as he peered over the wall.

“You’d be surprised by the number of people who die in Obscurity,” observed the Vicar. “The gravediggers are rarely out of work.”

“What was Stanley Cripps like?” asked Mary.

“Quiet fellow. A brilliant man in his day, I understand—something big in the power industry. After his wife died, he immersed himself in vegetable growing in general and cucumbers in particular; he rarely showed anyone what he was doing, but I was once granted access to his cucumbertorium. This year’s effort was a remarkable sight.” He stretched his arms out wide in the manner of a hyperbolic fisherman. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He said it would take the world championships by storm.”

“They have cucumber world championships?”

“Indeed they do,” replied the Vicar. “He took his vegetables extremely seriously. After almost twenty years of work, it was a very great tragedy that Stanley didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits—or should I say vegetables? — of his labors.”

He laughed at his own joke for a moment, noticed that Jack and Mary hadn’t joined him and turned the laugh into a cough.

“Who knew him best? You?”

“I wish I could boast that, but no. As I understand it, he was closest to Mr. Hardy Fuchsia, his old colleague and only serious competitor in the cucumber extreme class. Despite Mr. Fuchsia’s preeminence in the field, I understood they spoke frequently. If you want to know more about Stanley, best call on Hardy.”

“They never found Mr. Cripps, did they?” asked Jack, who had read several accounts of the incident that morning, everything from the official government report to misinformation and half-truths in the self-appointed journal of the conspiracy world, Conspiracy Theorist.

“They found his dentures embedded in a tree a quarter mile away,” replied the Vicar. “It took a crowbar to get them out. But they don’t think he was wearing them at the time; his bedside lamp was also found close by.”

They walked past another house that had completely lost its roof and was abandoned, ready for demolition. The damage here was considerably worse, even though they had walked less than a hundred yards.

“The devastation increases exponentially the closer we get to the epicenter,” explained the Vicar, who had spent the days after the event talking to curious onlookers and had learned a few destruction-related buzzwords. “It was an unexploded Grand Slam wartime bomb, apparently. Look at the trees.”

They passed another house, this one almost flattened. The trees were indeed a good indication of the center of the blast—they had all been felled in straight lines radiating outward.

“Mr. Cripps’s last words were ‘Good heavens! It’s full of holes!’" said Mary. “Do you have any idea to what he was referring?

“Most puzzling,” confessed the Vicar. “He might have been referring to anything—the greenhouse, his cucumber, the plot—anything.”

“The plot?” echoed Mary.

“I mean the vegetable plot,” he said hurriedly. “A slip of the tongue. Vandals might have dug it up—holes, you know. Hmm.”

There were quite a few tourists wandering around, although there was precious little to look at, but this didn’t seem to bother them. Quasi-scientific-looking people dressed in lab coats were conducting experiments of an entirely spurious nature on anything they could find, and a local farmer was doing a brisk trade renting out a field for parking. On the verges and the village green, an eccentric and brightly colored collection of tents and yurts had been set up, offering refreshments and advice on spiritual matters. There seemed to be quite a few Druids kicking around, too.

They had reached the village’s one and only streetlamp next to its one and only telephone booth, or what was left of them. The cast-iron lamp standard had melted like a soft candle, and the phone booth had collapsed gently in on itself in the same manner.

“The glass from the phone-booth windows had melted and then cooled in midflow, like icicles,” explained the Vicar. “It was quite lovely—but most of it was taken by souvenir hunters. Neither of these will be replaced. We want to keep them as a memorial to Stanley.”

They walked on for a few moments into an increased density of aimless milling crowds.

“We’ve had thousands of people through here, but it all seems to be slackening off, praise the Lord.”

“This is ‘slackening off’?” asked Jack, looking at the crowds.

“You should have seen it last week,” said the Vicar with a smile. “There was a mile-wide no-go zone while the area was made safe. As soon as the cordon was lifted, it was like a plague of locusts. For a moment we thought we might have to change the village’s name to ‘Popularity.’"

The Vicar chuckled at his own joke.

“Well, this was Stanley’s property,” he said, waving his hand at a flat piece of hard-packed soil that had been roped off and contained nothing except a white-coated individual who was passing some sort of humming sensor over the ground. “That’s Dr. Parks. He’ll answer questions if you find him in a good mood. Do drop in for tea before you go, won’t you? My wife does a mean scone.”

He smiled, shook their hands, and was gone.

Jack and Mary stared at the expanse of well-trodden ground among a group of forty or so others doing exactly the same.

“It’s not the original soil,” said a man dressed in tinfoil overalls and holding a crystal.

“No?”

“No. The crater was fully excavated by government inspectors, who then filled in the hole with eighty tons of new topsoil.”

“That was charitable of them,” remarked Jack.

“Charitable be damned,” said their new friend. “All it did was hamper the investigations of the independent scientists who arrived as soon as they could.”

They learned from several other passersby who seemed to be in the know that the government’s interventions had given the conspiracy theorists a field day, and six books with equally bizarre and implausible explanations were being hurried to the bookshops, the most popular concept being some sort of modern battlefield-size nuclear device delivered accidentally by a fighter-bomber, although the lesser theories were still considered quite seriously: a meteor strike, an unprecedented ball-lightning explosion, the planned arrival of an asteroid made entirely of sapphire, an attack by French cucumber terrorists intent on sabotaging the opposition, the arrival of Lucifer to cleanse man’s wickedness or even—if you really stretched your imagination—an overlooked wartime Grand Slam bomb that had spontaneously detonated.

They walked over to Dr. Parks, who was absorbed in his work and didn’t hear them approach. When Jack spoke, he jumped and then glared at them testily. He was aged about thirty and looked tanned and fit, for an academic. It was soon apparent that he didn’t place government agencies, police included, in very high esteem.

“Dr. Parks?” asked Jack. “May we have a word?”

He looked them both up and down. “Police?”

“Well, yes,” replied Jack, a bit miffed that it should be so obvious. “I’m DCI Spratt. This is Sergeant Mary.”

The scientist chuckled to himself. “You’re a bit late. I got here as soon as the government would let me, and even then I was too late. Which theory do you guys adhere to?”

“We’re not so much interested in the phenomenon as in a journalist who was investigating it.”

“Which journalist? There must have been dozens.”

Jack showed him a photo of Goldilocks. He stared at it for a moment, then at Jack and Mary.

“Yes, I remember her. She was one of the first in once the government lifted the cordon on Wednesday morning. She sticks in my mind because she didn’t treat any of us out here on the outer fringes of science as loonies and geeks. Everyone else does.”

“Did you know she was talking to Cripps the day before the explosion?”

“If she was,” replied Parks, “there’s a lot of people who’d like to speak to her.”

“They’ll be disappointed. She died on Saturday morning.”

“Murdered by the government?” he asked excitedly, his conspiratorial leanings springing to the fore. “Now, that would be good.”

“From my experience of government departments,” said Jack,

“they couldn’t order the right size of staples, let alone succeed in anything as bizarrely complex as a murder and then subsequent cover-up.”

“Yes,” agreed Parks sulkily, “it’s where that particular mainstay of conspiracy theory falls down. I hate to admit it, but governmental deviousness is usually better explained by incompetence, vanity and the need to protect one’s job at all costs. Still, I liked her.”

“What else can you remember about her?”

“Not much,” said Parks after a moment’s thought, “except…”

“Except what?”

“Except she was the only one who asked me about… McGuffin.”

“Professor Angus McGuffin?”

Parks registered surprise that they knew about him. “You’ve heard of him? Not many people have, outside the pseudoscience elite. He’s been dead these past sixteen years, a great loss to the conspiracy industry. When Guff was around, there was always lots of wild conjecture to try and dress up as serious scientific study.”

“What sort of work did McGuffin indulge in?” asked Jack.

“We don’t know for sure,” replied Parks, putting away his equipment and walking back to his van. “That’s what made him such catnip for the conspiracy industry. What we do know is that he liked blowing things up—big bangs, fireballs, that sort of stuff. He lost two fingers to a batch of nitroglycerine when he was still in the sixth grade. He was eventually expelled for blowing up the gymnasium with a form of homemade plastic explosive. By the time he was twenty-two, he had moved from rapid chemical decomposition to the power within the atom. He shared a Nobel Prize for Physics when he was only twenty-eight. He was brilliant, outspoken, daring. Best of all, he died while claiming he was ‘on the brink of a quantum change in atomic theory.’ Mind you, I suppose they all claim that.”

“Do you think his death at all mysterious?”

“Sadly, no,” replied Parks. “Fittingly, he blew himself up.”

“I heard. And his work at QuangTech?”

“The official story is that he was transforming grass cuttings into crude oil, but it’s doubtful someone as savvy as the Quangle-Wangle would fall for that old con trick. His work was top secret, but even now he still holds the record for blowing up laboratories. Thirty-one in under twenty years, if you count his school experiments.”

“What about farther afield?” suggested Jack. “Such as the Nullarbor in ’92, Tunbridge Wells in ’94 or Pasadena in ’99?”

Parks stopped and stared at them both. “Hooey. Not even the staunchest theorist would connect those with Guff.”

“He was too underqualified?”

“He was too dead. Those happened after his accident. No one seriously doubts that he died, Inspector. If you’re after truth, I’m not sure the conspiracy fraternity is the place to find it.”

Jack looked around at the fresh topsoil and said, “Do you want to see a part of Mr. Cripps’s garden before it was taken away?”

Parks’s eyes nearly popped out on springs.

Jack took the package from his pocket and passed it across. Dr. Parks led them to the back of his van, donned a pair of latex gloves and delicately removed the small piece of fired glassy earth from the mailing envelope.

“This is good,” he said quietly, “really good. Do you have any provenance for it?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Excellent. Reliable provenance has always seriously damaged the conspiracy industry. Do you see how smooth and glassy one side is while the other side is fired into a hard terra-cotta?”

“Yes?”

“This is the remains of one of Mr. Cripps’s gravel paths. The sand has fused into glass, the soil beneath it into a ceramic. The principle of firing pottery is the same, only instead of several hours at a relatively low temperature, this was done in a fraction of a second—but at several hundreds of thousands of degrees. No wonder they didn’t want us to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because it proves it wasn’t a conventional explosion. The damage you see around you could easily have been done by an unexploded wartime bomb, but with this evidence of associated heat”—he waved the piece of fired earth at them—“it’s quite impossible. Conventional explosives just don’t match the heat generated by… nukes.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Jack, who was willing to go a few steps into the conspiracy world, but not the several hundred yards Parks was suddenly demanding. “You’re saying someone was using a nuclear weapon in Berkshire? Surely cucumber fanciers aren’t that serious over the opposition?”

“Extremism comes in all shapes and forms, Inspector. But you’re right to be skeptical. Let’s see what we can find out about this object of yours.”

He opened a small wooden box and took out a device that began giving off random clicks when he switched it on.

“This Geiger counter measures radioactivity,” he explained.

“The more clicks, the higher the levels—the odd clicking you can hear is just background radiation.”

He passed the instrument over the sample, and there were a few extra clicks, but nothing wildly dramatic.

“You see?” asked Parks.

“No.”

“The nuclear-blast theory seems sound until one looks for evidence of radioactivity—and there’s hardly any at all.”

“I’m no expert in nuclear weapons, Dr. Parks,” admitted Jack.

“Perhaps you can explain that in simpler terms.”

Parks took a deep breath. “Atom-splitting reactions are called fission devices: the A-bomb. Atom-fusing reactions are called fusion devices. A nuke small enough to do the limited damage you see here would have to be a fission device.”

“Why?” asked Mary.

“Simply stated, an A-bomb is the bringing to critical mass of a quantity of fissile material, say uranium 235. A lump of uranium 235 the size of a football would be critical; a lump the size of a golf ball would not.”

“I get it,” said Jack. “Just add two uncritical masses together and bang, right?”

“In essence. However, you can ignite even smaller lumps of fissile material by bringing them together very rapidly. In theory you could make an A-bomb to fit in a suitcase. A mini-nuke with limited destructive power.”

“And that was what hit Cripps?”

“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.”