Amid the deafening din of a huge munition works, Roger Sheringham could hardly hear the words. He grinned amiably and nodded, saving his larynx.
‘Come and see what this lot’s doin’,’ invited the foreman.
Roger looked round for his host, saw that he had not re-appeared, and followed his deputy towards a little group of half-naked men who were wiping the sweat off their foreheads with the air of something accomplished.
Some kind of a lull in the general din made conversation possible, and Roger learned that they had been forging the barrel of a six-inch gun. He said the appropriate things.
‘And I expect Hitler would give something for the sight of that, too,’ he added with a smile.
The burly man nearest to him wiped his forehead again. ‘Well, sir, even ’itler must know we’re making guns in England by this time.’
To Roger this seemed a very reasonable remark, but the little foreman appeared to find it highly humorous. ‘Ah, it isn’t the barrels,’ he shouted. ‘It’s what’s in ’em.’
‘Shells, you mean?’ hazarded Roger, relieved to find that the burly workman appeared just as bewildered as himself before the foreman’s wit.
‘Shells?’ replied that humorist. ‘No, wot I mean, it all depends if you know what you’re lookin’ at.’
‘’E’s looking at a gun-forging, same as you are,’ rejoined the burly workman, with an air of finality. ‘Come on, mates.’
Roger was not sorry to be rescued at that moment by his host.
Arthur Luscombe at school had been a large, heavy boy, with a passion for imparting unwanted information in a ponderous manner. Now, as the managing director and virtual owner of Luscombe and Sons, he seemed to Roger to have altered very little. Leading his guest with measured footsteps towards his private office, he appeared determined on sacrificing his valuable time to pouring into Roger’s reluctant ears just about everything anyone could want to know about steel, and a good deal more than most did.
‘Austenite-alloy steels … low elasticity … manganese steels … toughness … resistance to abrasions … high-tensile alloy steels … gun-tubes … resistance to shock … nickel … chromium … molybdenum … you’re not listening, Sheringham!’
‘I am,’ Roger protested, as they turned in the managing director’s office. ‘You were talking about steel, I mean,’ he added hastily, after a glance at the other’s face. ‘You were saying that some—er—alloys were harder than others, and … and some not so hard … I mean, greater elasticity … yes, and … I say, though, wouldn’t Hitler give something to see what I’ve just seen?’
The managing director’s response to this artless query surprised its maker. It was with a positive start and a look of something remarkably like suspicion that he snapped: ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
‘Well … er … nothing,’ Roger returned lamely. ‘As a matter of fact, it wasn’t even original. Your foreman said it, so I thought—’
‘Johnson had no right to say anything of the sort.’
‘But it doesn’t matter, does it?’ Roger asked, still more surprised. ‘I mean, munition works and so on … naturally Hitler …’
‘Yes, yes. Of course. Naturally. Still, Johnson … However, it’s of no importance. Now, I can just spare another ten minutes, Sheringham. Would you care to see our sidings? I have to go there myself in any case.’
‘I should like to, above all things,’ Roger said agreeably.
Five minutes later he was trying to look intelligently at long lines of railway trucks, but over which Mr Luscombe threw the complacent eye of proprietorship.
‘Most interesting,’ Roger said, doing his stuff. ‘And I suppose this is the—er—raw steel, or whatever you call it. Where does that come from?
‘Sorry, I can’t answer that sort of question, Sheringham,’ his host retorted, with (Roger thought) insufferable complacency. ‘Official secrets, you know—Yes, O’Connor, what is it?’
Seeing his employer’s attention distracted, the sidings foreman grinned sympathetically at Roger. ‘Not that there’s much official secret about it, sir,’ he said, behind his hand. ‘Anyone’s only got to look at the labels on the trucks.’
Roger looked.
‘Exactly. In fact, you get the stuff from Henbridge, wherever that may be—looks like a Government works.’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact we don’t. We’re getting our steel now from Allen and Backhouse, of Wolverhampton—this other label. That one’s cancelled: some consignment from Henbridge to Allen and Backhouse, nothing to do with us.’ The foreman saw Mr Luscombe returning, and hastily stepped back with an air of childlike innocence.
The rest of Roger’s visit to the premises of Luscombe and Sons was uneventful. Indeed, it might very easily have passed out of his mind altogether. It is true that on getting home he had the curiosity to look up Henbridge in the gazetteer, and learned that it was a small village in the more inaccessible part of Cumberland, remarkable only as the site of the only coccodium deposits in England; whereupon he looked up coccodium in the encyclopaedia and gathered that it was a rare metal, resembling vanadium, but possessing certain unique properties, found only at Henbridge, in Cumberland.
It was just one of those coincidences, which so often do happen, which brought the name of Henbridge up in a conversation a few days later at Roger’s club. It appeared that the man to whom he was talking lived there. Roger asked him about it.
‘Used to be a grand little place—if you like ’em remote,’ replied the other. ‘Pitched up among the Cumberland fells and nearly a dozen miles from the nearest railway station. But it’s all spoilt now. They’ve put up a huge great factory or something just outside, and the fells are covered with wooden huts. Just breaks my heart.’
‘It seems queer,’ Roger suggested, ‘to choose a site a dozen miles from the nearest railway for a factory?’
The man snorted. ‘But isn’t it typical? Besides, that wouldn’t worry them. They’ve brought the railway to Henbridge!’
‘It certainly seems off,’ Roger said mildly, and went away to look up trains.
‘And you were as bad as any of them,’ Roger was saying severely to a stricken Mr Luscombe a few hours later. ‘Your works foreman was like a child playing with fire; couldn’t help trying to be clever and drop hints that the stupid visitor wouldn’t understand. He showed me there was some kind of secret going on; a simple remark of an irritated workman showed that the hands weren’t in the secret, so it obviously wasn’t a new hush-hush weapon; and then you gave me the biggest clue yourself.’
‘I only told you a few elementary facts that you could have got out of any text-book,’ protested the deflated remains of the managing director.
‘It was the way you marshalled them. I know nothing of steel, but even I gathered that the hardest steels won’t stand up so well to shock, and the ones that stand up best to shock have other drawbacks. You showed me that this fact, above all others concerned with steel, was most important to you. Naturally enough, perhaps, as one occupied in making gun-tubes, but there it was; the ideal steel alloy for a gun-tube had yet to be found, all the known ones lacked full efficiency one way or the other.
‘Then your sidings foreman gave away that your suppliers have recently been changed, and I learnt that these suppliers are receiving consignments of what can only be coccodium. The inference is obvious. Experiments, using an alloy with coccodium to combine high resistance to both shock and friction have been successful, consignments of this coccodium steel are now reaching you, and are being tried out for six-inch naval guns. If Hitler had any