The Insulators Read Free Page A

tubes would then be lowered one after another into one of the testing chambers, and submitted to a full charge of radioactivity which would melt the lead if the crystals did not insulate the paper-thin foil.
    Some crystals did give a kind of protection; a built-in timing device told how long it was before the leadfoil actually melted. One set of crystals had resisted the radioactivity for over an hour, but eventually the foil had melted. The crystals were cheap to manufacture and very light; once a batch could be used as insulators against radioactivity then significant progress would have been made in protecting people and instruments from the effects of radioactive contamination.
    There had been a great deal of experimental work in crystallography in this search for an insulator in industrial as well as State-controlled research, not only in Great Britain but throughout the world. There was no way of being sure which country or which industrial unit was nearest a breakthrough. The certain thing was that once a breakthrough was made, then the industrial as well as the military use of nuclear energy would be vastly cheaper and easier. If the first breakthrough was made by a commercial company or group then it would be able to quote ridiculously low prices for nuclear reactors and nuclear powering of all kinds of machines, from aeroplanes to submarines and trains to merchant ships.
    Janey, at the time intensely interested in the practical aspects of crystallography, had answered an advertisement for a research physicist with some knowledge of the subject. She had been told at the third interview, before being offered the job, that it would be done under conditions of the most stringent secrecy; that she herself would have to be screened with infinite care to make sure that she was not a spy for some other group engaged in the same research.
    “You will have to devote yourself exclusively to The Project,” she had been told by a man not unlike the small one in charge here, but bigger and more aggressive in his manner. “You will have to live in the restricted area of The Project, and will have no physical contact with the outside world during the year you are on The Project. But there are excellent facilities at the Company’s headquarters . . .”
    She had been shown a short film in colour, of the grounds in which the research buildings were set, and it was explained that a model industrial city had been planned here, and partly constructed, before a change of government had diverted the funds, and a group of research organisations, it was said, had taken over.
    They saw pictures of the sweeping lawns sloping down to a small river, where there were boats and jetties and places on the banks for fishing; there was a lido for swimming and sunbathing and deck or beach games, a big indoor swimming pool and gymnasium. There was a small cinema, a theatre with seats for five hundred people, an auditorium for orchestras. Everything for pleasure as well as cultural facilities was there; a library, bookshop, record shop – a small shopping centre for those who preferred to cook for themselves. Many of the married couples preferred this.
    “What you do in your personal life is no concern of ours,” Parsons had said, and with almost startling frankness he had added: “If you wish to sleep with one of your fellow workers, whether you prefer promiscuity to a settled sexual relationship will be entirely a matter for you to decide.”
    He had meant that: in fact events had proved that he had meant everything he had said.
    There were faithful married couples and also there were community groups which changed partners whenever the mood took them. There were groups of male homosexuals and, as she had discovered with surprisingly little sense of revulsion, there were lesbians in one of the little apartment communities. It was as if those who controlled The Project knew that the unnatural segregation from the outside world meant that some