Little Deadly Things

by Harry Steinman

  Reinhart turned back to the bid committee and pressed on. “Now, I’m not the brains of our outfit. I just give our people a little nudge here and there to help keep things runnin’ smoothly. But we’ve got some darned smart folks in Texas. One or two of ’em even went to college in Boston, at Harvard, same as Dr. Rozen. They tell me that you can change one element into another, but only with highly radioactive elements. Give ’em a shake and they shed a few electrons. That turns ’em into some other mighty radioactive elements.”

  Eva looked up. Had the bid committe caught it? Had anyone? No! Her head shook imperceptibly in disbelief. Stupid cows, they were, every single one of them.

  Reinhart continued. “Carbon? Can it shed some electrons to become iron? Last I checked, carbon has six electrons and iron has 26. So, carbon doesn’t have enough atomic bits to shed. You would need atomic fusion to make it work, mashing your atoms together.” He mimed making a snowball, in case the idea was difficult to follow. “You find atomic fusion in thermonuclear weapons. I think we’re in the business of cleaning up after weapons, not makin’ new ones.”

  Now Eva grinned.

  “Well. Maybe Dr. Rozen wrote some new laws of physics. Maybe it’s different in Boston. But in Rockford, we go by the same God-given laws of nature that have run the universe for about four billion years. Give or take a few million.”

  He winked. Pure charm.

  “Mind you, I had our scientists look at changin’ atoms all around. After all, if NMech has something novel, it ought to be repeatable. NMech says it’s got the experts to do it but we don’t see anything published to show just how. Maybe they’re just keepin’ it a secret, or maybe they’re playin’ for time.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t sell CleanAct short in the area of fabrication. We bought the best in the business and we’re ready to start—and to finish ahead of schedule. That’s our corporate culture: better and faster.

  “Let me close by quotin’ a proverb from the Bible, ‘There is a time to every purpose’—I believe that our time is now and our purpose is to clean up that dreadful river.”

  Reinhart sat down to applause. He nodded to his rival as Eva mounted the lectern to address the committee. She showed neither embarrassment nor amusement by Reinhart’s barbs. She was not a compelling presenter. She tended to speak in a monotone and often employed a technical vocabulary that estranged her audience. Today she started in better form.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting NMech here today. I’m not here to tell you jokes. I don’t have Dr. Reinhart’s sense of humor. In fact, most people say I don’t have any sense of humor at all.”

  The committee smiled. A good sign.

  “Besides, the problem is too serious for quips. Let’s start by being accurate. Dr. Reinhart, your Bible quote is not from Proverbs, but Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verse 1. This is the smallest of Dr. Reinhart’s inaccuracies. Second, Harvard is in Cambridge, not Boston. Small points, you might say. But they reflect Dr. Reinhart’s consistent fuzzy thinking.”

  “His larger mistakes are astonishing in their stupidity. Nuclear fusion is the result of combining the nuclei of atoms, not by adding or shedding electrons. Atoms give up electrons in the normal course of forming molecules. For example, sodium sheds an electron when it binds with chlorine. Is the result dangerous? Radioactive? No. The result is table salt.”

  “I’m not sure why this committee would entrust the largest remediation project in history to a company run by a man who does not understand the fundamentals of chemistry. How can this man expect to manage cutting-edge nanotechnology? That’s like asking an illiterate to read an anatomy text in order to perform surgery. Reinhart’s fundamental ignorance should frighten you.

  “As far as their proposal, so what if CleanAct bought FeFree? FeFree is best at producing advertising, not ZVI. If they had a workable solution, they could have made a fortune licensing the process to remediation companies instead of selling themselves to Clean-Act. We estimate that the successful remediation of the Nuovo River will use approximately $11 billion of ZVI over the next decade, but CleanAct paid less than that to buy FeFree. Why would FeFree sell themselves so cheaply if their process were dependable?

  “But let’s assume for a moment that FeFree really can produce the ZVI needed. CleanAct’s approach relies on transporting ZVI to Rockford. The problem is safety. If there’s a leak in transport, or in the containment module, the helium escapes. Dr. Reinhart, the last time I checked, helium is lighter than air and iron is heavier. That means that if there’s a breach, your helium goes north and your ZVI goes south. If you’re lucky, it rusts. If not, then it explodes.”

  Eva saw confusion on the faces of the bid committee and explained. “If the ZVI leaks anywhere from production at FeFree, to transport, to loading into the containment module, you get a cloud of nanoparticles. If you suspend small particles in air, then you risk an explosion. Ask any farmer about the dangers of a grain dust explosion. Ask a baker about flour explosions. There were over a hundred of these disasters in the last century. Talk to the survivors of the Washburn explosion. A grain elevator there blew and the blast leveled two mills and most of the town. Never mind that CleanAct’s approach is unproven: it’s dangerous.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we will use simple, proven nanotechnology to fabricate and to safely handle more than enough ZVI. Creating new atoms is not fantasy. Reinhart ignores a half century of atomic manipulation. Go back fifty years. Scientists at one corporation took 35 xenon atoms and picked them up and set them down to spell the name of their company. Wrangling atoms is easier for a real scientist than wrangling cattle is for a real cowboy. By the way, Dr. Reinhart, those are some nice boots you’re wearing. You’ve driven a lot of steer in your time, have you?”

  Eva had the committee’s attention. “Cowboy Fritz here says that there’s nothing published? Perhaps Dr. Reinhart’s team should forget about chasing cows and catch up on their professional reading. Scientists started fabricating what are called superatoms in the early 2000s—and they published their work. Superatoms are made of several atoms linked together to act as another atom. If you vaporize carbon and condense the vapor, you can build an iron superatom. It isn’t easy, but if Dr. Reinhart were capable of understanding the science he wouldn’t stand here and make a folksy fool of himself.”

  Eva was lit by her own passion—and something more. Her face was pepper red and her upper lip was beaded with sweat. Her movements were jerky and her voice was too loud. The bid committee looked on in growing discomfort. No one nodded agreement. Perfunctory applause accompanied her to her seat.

  The committee chairperson rose and thanked the speakers and promised a careful deliberation and a decision once both proposals were reviewed. In truth, the outcome had been decided months ago when a cabal of CleanAct’s executives, all ex-military or Department of Defense veterans, sat down with the military command at the munitions plant and hammered out a deal. Yes, there would be competition. The law required it. And after the bid committee’s careful consideration of both bids, CleanAct would win the contract, fair and square. It had been decided.

  Dr. Reinhart stood and approached Eva with a smile and an outstretched hand. “Dr. Rozen, that was one interesting presentation. I must say, you’re a formidable competitor.”

  And you’re a dead man walking, Eva thought as she ignored the proffered hand and walked past him to join her ashen-faced colleagues. They saw what Eva could not see as she walked back to her seat: the smug grins on the faces of the CleanAct executives.

  NMech had lost the bid. In truth, they never had a chance. They had failed to consider the political factors that would guide the selection of a vendor, and moved as fatted calves into a den of hungry bureaucratic wolves.

  21

  ___________________________________________

  DISASTER

  BOSTON, MA AND ROCKFORD, VA

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2045

  One year later, Eva Rozen, Marta Cruz, Jim Ecco
and Dana Ecco gathered in an NMech conference room and watched scores of Rockford’s residents join the munitions plant officials and the CleanAct’s executives gather for the remediation plant opening. The launch of a dump site seldom generated much public excitement, but CleanAct’s public relations department had had a year to feed the public’s imagination. A video stream broadcast the event and fed the dreams of delegates of other toxic sites who watched in anticipation. Schoolteachers used the occasion to illustrate the principles of environmental responsibility and scientific achievement. Financiers calculated whether remediation would be the Next Big Thing. Even the viewers at NMech were mesmerized by the scope of the celebration.

  Jim commented on the morbid curiosity that drove him to watch the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Marta spoke of her interest in seeing the river cleaned. Eva offered no motive for watching her competitor’s success.

  Dana’s schooling brought him to the conference room. The remediation project provided lessons in chemistry, political science, history, biology, and social science. His gaze alternated between the vid projections, his own heads-up display and sidelong glances at Eva. At one point, he subvocalized a command to his datasleeve and sent a databurst to Eva’s sleeve. She looked over at the boy with a wistful gaze and mouthed, “Later.” Dana frowned and turned back to the news coverage of the plant’s opening.

  The winter morning was unusually warm in Rockford, and the sun shone as bright as the town’s hopes for a clean river and economic prosperity. Rings of chairs perched on a temporary stage. The front row was reserved for plant and town officials. Dr. Reinhart mingled with them. He shook hands, slapped backs, and doled out humble thanks and earnest congratulations in equal measure. The Rockford High School marching band entertained the assembled guests from just beyond the stage. Their costumes shimmered, first in blue, then gold—Rockford’s colors—and sunlight glinted off their instruments and the decorations on their costumes like the tips of a crackling fire.

  The officials and honored guests, the townspeople of Rockford, and viewers around the world all focused on the ZVI containment building, with its inverted funnel-shaped dome that came to be an icon for the project. CleanAct’s building had passed inspection after inspection. Experts considered earthquakes, lightning strikes, fires, terrorist attacks, and tsunamis, never mind that the munitions plant was nearly two hundred miles inland.

  Their conclusion? The building was safe. This pronouncement was all the more laudable because CleanAct was ready three weeks ahead of schedule, as Dr. Reinhart had boasted it would be. In an age of complex projects with near-zero tolerance for error, most manufacturers were hard-pressed to meet a deadline, let alone beat one. But Dr. Reinhart had made this a point of pride. He’d show those eggheads in Boston a thing or two. “Here in Texas,” he’d said repeatedly, “we don’t always have fifty-dollar words for workin’ hard. It may not be the easy way, but it’s the Texas way.”

  The final safety check had been three weeks earlier. Quality engineers flooded the containment chamber with pressurized helium. Had any of the helium escaped, it would have been detected and the project halted until the integrity of the chamber could be guaranteed. Once CleanAct demonstrated the safety of the chamber, all of the helium used for the test was evacuated through a vent high up on the building and rose safely into the atmosphere. Only enough to surround the ZVI remained.

  The moment came to bring the plant online. Wielding an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors, the plant manager cut a foot-wide blue-and-gold ribbon, and then Rockford’s mayor threw a ceremonial switch. The plant had actually been brought online hours earlier, again thanks to CleanAct’s deadline-beating push to complete the project. All that remained was for the containment building to release ZVI into a production vault where thousands of microscopic jets would spray fine mists of ZVI into a collection tank through which the Rockford Munitions Plant’s effluvia now passed.

  The process was completely automated. CleanAct’s proprietary process assembled the analysis of incoming waste, the moment-by-moment configuration of the ZVI spray heads, the analysis of the output, and the scooping up of the heavy, ZVI-bonded pollutants.

  There were backups to the process, and backups to the backups. A redundant operating system ensured that none of the operating instructions became corrupted. If quality control sensors noted any irregularity in the operating commands, the plant would switch to the backup operating system and the cleanup would carry on without a hiccup. It was foolproof, CleanAct said, and the plant officials dutifully agreed.

  Inside the containment chamber and unseen to the crowd, the backup operating system was monitoring the containment chamber, as expected. But it was not synchronized to the three-weeks-ahead-of-schedule timeline that CleanAct had as the centerpiece of its winning bid. The backup operating system believed that the containment chamber hull integrity test was to be conducted today. This set of instructions should have been deleted after the successful test three weeks earlier. Was it carelessness that allowed the code to remain? In its rush to beat the clock, did CleanAct miss a crucial step? Or was it an act of sabotage?

  Whatever the reason, the backup software overrode the primary instructions for the operations protocols. The redundant instructions ordered external sensors to test for escaped helium as it had been programmed to do. Noting no leaks, the backup operating system concluded that the pressure test was successful.

  The next step in the testing process was to purge inert helium. But the chamber now contained ZVI, not helium, and tons of the volatile particles poured out of the purge vent. The heavy iron cascaded down the rear of the round containment dome and into the oxygen-rich air that sustained the lives of the observers. The ZVI was little different from grain dust or flour in its explosive potential. In fact, given the size of the nanoclusters, it was more hazardous by several orders of magnitude.

  One spark, source unknown, triggered the blast that incinerated the officials and the guests on stage, rattled windows for eleven miles, and prompted seismologists to report an earthquake at the small Virginia town.

  The blast was magnificent, as explosions go. Had the guests been able to describe the last moment of their lives, they would first have noted a powerful shockwave and compared it to being tackled by a steroid-soaked team of football players. Their hands would have tried to clap at the sides of their heads when, a few milliseconds into the event, their eardrums flexed and ruptured. An overpowering flood of nausea would have swept them as their internal organs began to liquefy. Given the ability to continue their observations, they would have noted a strange fog appear and disappear as the air’s moisture precipitated and then vaporized in the emerging fireball.

  The observers’ reports would have terminated as the air flashed to over four thousand degrees. Then the firestorm incinerated the plant and any evidence of the cause of the conflagration.

  The blast was loud. A mid-twentieth century battleship’s 16-inch guns generated 215 decibels and the sound wave flattened nearby seas. The Saturn V rocket that carried its human payload to the moon generated a decibel reading of 220—five times louder than the battleship on the logarithmic decibel scale. The rocket’s sound was loud enough to melt concrete. The Rockford blast was estimated at 230 decibels—ten times louder than Saturn V.

  The fireball consumed most of the iron nanodots. There were no structures within the blast radius and once the shockwave passed, the event appeared over. Military personnel from the munitions plant were deployed and they fanned out, tending to the wounded and dazed survivors, pulling bodies from the containment building’s rubble.

  Those who had been watching the video feed were stunned. Schoolchildren wailed. Financiers winced, seeing an investment opportunity literally go up in smoke. Representatives of other toxic sites cradled their heads in their hands and wondered what they would do next.

  A different scene unfolded in the boardroom at NMech. The Cruz-Ecco family stared in horror. Eva Rozen was building models of iron atoms with
children’s construction toys. She’d create one, and then take it apart and build it again. Eva glanced at the video feed, blank since the explosion, and grunted, “I told them it was dangerous. Maybe they’ll listen to me now.”

  Marta stared at her, a puzzled look on her face. “You don’t seem very surprised by the explosion,” she said in a casual tone, almost nonchalant.

  “Nope. Bad science leads to bad results. I warned the bid committee, but they were already in Reinhart’s back pocket. Serves them right.” Now she was building carbon atoms. Her hands moved faster than a blackjack dealer at a high-stakes table.

  “Do you really mean that?” asked Marta. “The explosion serves them right? Being incinerated is justice?” Her tone stayed gentle, casual and interested.

  Eva grinned and ignored the question. She looked at the empty video feed and said, “Well, I guess we’re back in business. I don’t see any obstacles left. We’re a year or so behind where I thought we’d be, but that business is going to be ours.”

  Marta said, “Eva, I’m a little concerned. You’re not surprised. You talk like this tragedy serves some kind of higher purpose. Ever since you decided we should go into remediation, you’ve acted like winning this bid was a life-or-death matter for NMech. I have to ask, did you have anything to do with this disaster?” Her voice was restrained but her gaze was direct.

  “Don’t be an idiot. I told them it was a stupid idea. Are you suggesting that this explosion was anything but Reinhart’s folly?”

  Jim interrupted. “Wait. Something’s happening at Rockford. Look.”

  The video feed resumed as new vidbots came online. People staggered drunkenly, their skin turning cyanotic. Those who had been untouched by the fireball had counted their blessings too quickly. They had breathed a sigh of relief—and inhaled ZVI. Most of the particles had oxidized on contact with air and posed no health risk. Just enough ZVI, however, stayed reactive and entered the onlookers’ respiratory systems. The nanodots bonded with the oxygen in the bloodstreams of those rushing to the site of the blast. The iron rusted; the townspeople asphyxiated.