The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  The siren was approaching again when Jenkins came back, the little tense lines about his lips still there, but his whole bearing somehow steadier. He nodded. “I called Palmer, too, and he O.K.’d her coming inside on the phone without wondering how I’d contacted her. The switchboard girl has standing orders to route all calls from us through before anything else, it seems.”

  Doc nodded, his ear cocked toward the drone of the siren that drew up and finally ended on a sour wheeze. There was a feeling of relief from tension about him as he saw Jones appear and go toward the rear entrance; work, even under the pressure of an emergency, was always easier than sitting around waiting for it. He saw two stretchers come in, both bearing double loads, and noted that Beel was babbling at the attendant, the driver’s usually phlegmatic manner completely gone.

  “I’m quitting; I’m through tomorrow! No more watching ’em drag out stiffs for me – not that way. Dunno why I gotta go back, anyhow; it won’t do ’em any good to get in further, even if they can. From now on, I’m driving a truck, so help me I am!”

  Ferrel let him rave on, only vaguely aware that the man was close to hysteria. He had no time to give to Beel now as he saw the raw red flesh through the visor of one of the armor suits. “Cut off what clothes you can, Jones,” he directed. “At least get the shield suits off them. Tannic acid ready, nurse?”

  “Ready.” Meyers answered together with Jenkins, who was busily helping Jones strip off the heavily armored suits and helmets.

  Ferrel kicked on the supersonics again, letting them sterilize the metal suits – there was going to be no chance to be finicky about asepsis; the supersonics and ultraviolet tubes were supposed to take care of that, and they’d have to do it, to a large extent, little as he liked it. Jenkins finished his part, dived back for fresh gloves, with a mere cursory dipping of his hands into antiseptic and rinse. Dodd followed him, while Jones wheeled three of the cases into the middle of the surgery, ready for work; the other had died on the way in.

  It was going to be messy work, obviously. Where metal from the suits had touched, or come near touching, the flesh was burned – crisped, rather. And that was merely a minor part of it, as was the more than ample evidence of major radiation burns, which had probably not stopped at the surface, but penetrated through the flesh and bones into the vital interior organs. Much worse, the writhing and spasmodic muscular contractions indicated radioactive matter that had been forced into the flesh and was acting directly on the nerves controlling the motor impulses. Jenkins looked hastily at the twisting body of his case, and his face blanched to a yellowish white; it was the first real example of the full possibilities of an atomic accident he’d seen.

  “Curare,” he said finally, the word forced out, but level. Meyers handed him the hypodermic and he inserted it, his hand still steady – more than normally steady, in fact, with that absolute lack of movement that can come to a living organism only under the stress of emergency. Ferrel dropped his eyes back to his own case, both relieved and worried.

  From the spread of the muscular convulsions, there could be only one explanation – somehow, radioactives had not only worked their way through the air grills, but had been forced through the almost airtight joints and sputtered directly into the flesh of the men. Now they were sending out radiations into every nerve, throwing aside the normal orders from the brain and spinal column, setting up anarchic orders of their own that left the muscles to writhe and jerk, one against the other, without order or reason, or any of the normal restraints the body places upon itself. The closest parallel was that of a man undergoing metrozol shock for schizophrenia, or a severe case of strychnine poisoning. He injected curare carefully, metering out the dosage according to the best estimate he could make, but Jenkins had been acting under a pressure that finished the second injection as Doc looked up from his first. Still, in spite of the rapid spread of the drug, some of the twitching went on.

  “Curare,” Jenkins repeated, and Doc tensed mentally; he’d still been debating whether to risk extra dosage. But he made no counter-order, feeling slightly relieved this time at having the matter taken out of his hands; Jenkins went back to work, pushing up the injections to the absolute limit of safety, and slightly beyond. One of the cases had started a weird minor moan that hacked on and off as his lungs and vocal cords went in and out of synchronization, but it quieted under the drug, and in a matter of minutes the three lay still, breathing with the shallow flaccidity common to curare treatment. They were still moving slightly, but where before they were perfectly capable of breaking their own bones in uncontrolled efforts, now there was only motion similar to a man with a chill.

  “God bless the man who synthesized curare,” Jenkins muttered as he began cleaning away damaged flesh, Meyers assisting.

  Doc could repeat that; with the older, natural product, true standardization and exact dosage had been next to impossible. Too much, and its action on the body was fatal; the patient died from “exhaustion” of his chest muscles in a matter of minutes. Too little was practically useless. Now that the danger of self-injury and fatal exhaustion from wild exertion was over, he could attend to such relatively unimportant things as the agony still going on – curare had no particular effect on the sensory nerves. He injected neo-heroin and began cleaning the burned areas and treating them with the standard tannic-acid routine, first with a sulphonamide to eliminate possible infection, glancing up occasionally at Jenkins.

  He had no need to worry, though; the boy’s nerves were frozen into an unnatural calm that still pressed through with a speed Ferrel made no attempt to equal, knowing his work would suffer for it. At a gesture, Dodd handed him the little radiation detector, and he began hunting over the skin, inch by inch, for the almost miscroscopic bits of matter; there was no hope of finding all now, but the worst deposits could be found and removed; later, with more time, a final probing could be made.

  “Jenkins,” he asked, “how about I-713’s chemical action? Is it basically poisonous to the system?”

  “No. Perfectly safe except for radiation. Eight in the outer electron ring, chemically inert.”

  That, at least, was a relief. Radiations were bad enough in and of themselves, but when coupled with metallic poisoning, like the old radium or mercury poisoning, it was even worse. The small colloidally fine particles of I-713 in the flesh would set up their own danger signal, and could be scraped away in the worst cases; otherwise, they’d probably have to stay until the isotope exhausted itself. Mercifully, its half-life was short, which would decrease the long hospitalization and suffering of the men.

  Jenkins joined Ferrel on the last patient, replacing Dodd at handing instruments. Doc would have preferred the nurse, who was used to his little signals, but he said nothing, and was surprised to note the efficiency of the boy’s cooperation. “How about the breakdown products?” he asked.

  “I-713? Harmless enough, mostly, and what isn’t harmless isn’t concentrated enough to worry about. That is, if it’s still I-713. Otherwise—”

  Otherwise, Doc finished mentally, the boy meant there’d be no danger from poisoning, at least. Isotope R, with an uncertain degeneration period, turned into Mahler’s Isotope, with a complete breakdown in a billionth of a second. He had a fleeting vision of men, filled with a fine dispersion of that, suddenly erupting over their body with a violence that could never be described; Jenkins must have been thinking the same thing. For a few seconds, they stood there, looking at each other silently, but neither chose to speak of it. Ferrel reached for the probe, Jenkins shrugged, and they went on with their work and their thoughts.

  It was a picture impossible to imagine, which they might or might not see; if such an atomic blowup occurred, what would happen to the laboratory was problematical. No one knew the exact amount Maicewicz had worked on, except that it was the smallest amount he could make, so there could be no good estimate of the damage. The bodies on the operating tables, the little scraps of removed flesh containing the minute globu
les of radioactive, even the instruments that had come in contact with them, were bombs waiting to explode. Ferrel’s own fingers took on some of the steadiness that was frozen in Jenkins as he went about his work, forcing his mind onto the difficult labor at hand.

  It might have been minutes or hours later when the last dressing was in place and the three broken bones of the worst case were set. Meyers and Dodd, along with Jones, were taking care of the men, putting them into the little wards, and the two physicians were alone, carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, waiting without knowing exactly what they expected.

  Outside, a droning chug came to their ears, and the thump of something heavy moving over the runways. By common impulse they slipped to the side door and looked out, to see the rear end of one of the electric tanks moving away from them. Night had fallen some time before, but the gleaming lights from the big towers around the fence made the plant stand out in glaring detail. Except for the tank moving away, though, other buildings cut off their view.

  Then, from the direction of the main gate, a shrill whistle cut the air and there was the sound of men’s voices, though the words were indistinguishable. Sharp, crisp syllables followed, and Jenkins nodded slowly to himself. “Ten’ll get you a hundred,” he began, “that— Uh, no use betting. It is.”

  Around the corner a squad of men in state militia uniform marched briskly, bayoneted rifles on their arms. With efficient precision, they spread out under a sergeant’s direction, each taking a post before the door of one of the buildings, one approaching the place where Ferrel and Jenkins stood.

  “So that’s what Palmer was talking to the Governor about,” Ferrel muttered. “No use asking them questions, I suppose; they know less than we do. Come on inside where we can sit down and rest. Wonder what good the militia can do here – unless Palmer’s afraid someone inside’s going to crack and cause trouble.”

  Jenkins followed him back to the office and accepted a cigarette automatically as he flopped back into a chair. Doc was discovering just how good it felt to give his muscles and nerves a chance to relax, and realizing that they must have been far longer in the surgery than he had thought. “Care for a drink?”

  “Uh – is it safe, Doc? We’re apt to be back in there any minute.”

  Ferrel pulled a grin onto his face and nodded. “It won’t hurt you – we’re just enough on edge and tired for it to be burned up inside for fuel instead of reaching our nerves. Here.” It was a generous slug of rye he poured for each, enough to send an almost immediate warmth through them, and to relax their overtensed nerves. “Wonder why Beel hasn’t been back long ago?”

  “That tank we saw probably explains it; it got too tough for the men to work in just their suits, and they’ve had to start excavating through the converters with the tanks. Electric, wasn’t it, battery powered? . . . So there’s enough radiation loose out there to interfere with atomic-powered machines, then. That means whatever they’re doing is tough and slow work. Anyhow, it’s more important that they damp the action than get the men out, if they only realize it – Sue!”

  Ferrel looked up quickly to see the girl standing there, already dressed for surgery, and he was not too old for a little glow of appreciation to creep over him. No wonder Jenkins’ face lighted up. She was small, but her figure was shaped like that of a taller girl, not in the cute or pert lines usually associated with shorter women, and the serious competence of her expression hid none of the liveliness of her face. Obviously she was several years older than Jenkins, but as he stood up to greet her, her face softened and seemed somehow youthful beside the boy’s as she looked up.

  “You’re Dr. Ferrel?” she asked, turning to the older man. “I was a little late – there was some trouble at first about letting me in – so I went directly to prepare before bothering you. And just so you won’t be afraid to use me, my credentials are all here.”

  She put the little bundle on the table, and Ferrel ran through them briefly; it was better than he’d expected. Technically she wasn’t nurse at all, but a doctor of medicine, a so-called nursing doctor; there’d been the need for assistants midway between doctor and nurse for years, having the general training and abilities of both, but only in the last decade had the actual course been created, and the graduates were still limited to a few. He nodded and handed them back.

  “We can use you, Dr.—”

  “Brown – professional name, Dr. Ferrel. And I’m used to being called just Nurse Brown.”

  Jenkins cut in on the formalities. “Sue, is there any news outside about what’s going on here?”

  “Rumors, but they’re wild, and I didn’t have a chance to hear many. All I know is that they’re talking about evacuating the city and everything within fifty miles of here, but it isn’t official. And some people were saying the Governor was sending in troops to declare martial law over the whole section, but I didn’t see any except here.”

  Jenkins took her off, then, to show her the Infirmary and introduce her to Jones and the two other nurses, leaving Ferrel to wait for the sound of the siren again, and to try putting two and two together to get sixteen. He attempted to make sense out of the article in the Weekly Ray, but gave it up finally; atomic theory had advanced too far since the sketchy studies he’d made, and the symbols were largely without meaning to him. He’d have to rely on Jenkins, it seemed. In the meantime, what was holding up the litter? He should have heard the warning siren long before.

  It wasn’t the litter that came in next, though, but a group of five men, two carrying a third, and a fourth supporting the fifth. Jenkins took the carried man over, Brown helping him; it was similar to the former cases, but without the actual burns from contact with hot metal. Ferrel turned to the men.

  “Where’s Beel and the litter?” He was inspecting the supported man’s leg as he asked, and began work on it without moving the fellow to a table. Apparently a lump of radioactive matter the size of a small pea had been driven half an inch into the flesh below the thigh, and the broken bone was the result of the violent contractions of the man’s own muscles under the stimulus of the radiation. It wasn’t pretty. Now, however, the strength of the action had apparently burned out the nerves around, so the leg was comparatively limp and without feeling; the man lay watching, relaxed on the bench in a half-comatose condition, his eyes popping out and his lips twisted into a sick grimace, but he did not flinch as the wound was scraped out. Ferrel was working around a small leaden shield, his arms covered with heavily leaded gloves, and he dropped the scraps of flesh and isotope into a box of the same metal.

  “Beel – he’s out of this world, Doc,” one of the others answered when he could tear his eyes off the probing. “He got himself blotto, somehow, and wrecked the litter before he got back. Couldn’t take it, watching us grapple ’em out – and we hadda go after ’em without a drop of hooch!”

  Ferrel glanced at him quickly, noticing Jenkins’ head jerk around as he did so. “You were getting them out? You mean you didn’t come from in there?”

  “Heck, no, Doc. Do we look that bad? Them two got it when the stuff decided to spit on ’em clean through their armor. Me, I got me some nice burns, but I ain’t complaining – I got a look at a couple of stiffs, so I’m kicking about nothing!”

  Ferrel hadn’t noticed the three who had traveled under their own power, but he looked now, carefully. They were burned, and badly, by radiations, but the burns were still new enough not to give them too much trouble, and probably what they’d just been through had temporarily deadened their awareness of pain, just as a soldier on the battlefield may be wounded and not realize it until the action stops. Anyway, atomjacks were not noted for sissiness.

  “There’s almost a quart in the office there on the table,” he told them. “One good drink apiece – no more. Then go up front and I’ll send Nurse Brown in to fix up your burns as well as can be for now.” Brown could apply the unguents developed to heal radiation burns as well as he could, and some division of work that would relie
ve Jenkins and himself seemed necessary. “Any chance of finding any more living men in the converter housings?”

  “Maybe. Somebody said the thing let out a groan half a minute before it popped, so most of ’em had a chance to duck into the two safety chambers. Figure on going back there and pushing tanks ourselves unless you say no; about half an hour’s work left before we can crack the chambers, I guess, then we’ll know.”

  “Good. And there’s no sense in sending in every man with a burn, or we’ll be flooded here; they can wait and it looks as if we’ll have plenty of serious stuff to care for. Dr. Brown, I guess you’re elected to go out with the men – have one of them drive the spare litter Jones will show you. Salve down all the burn cases, put the worst ones off duty, and just send in the ones with the jerks. You’ll find my emergency kit in the office, there. Someones has to be out there to give first aid and sort them out – we haven’t room for the whole plant in here.”

  “Right, Dr. Ferrel.” She let Meyers replace her in assisting Jenkins, and was gone briefly to come out with his bag. “Come on, you men. I’ll hop the litter and dress down your burns on the way. You’re appointed driver, mister. Somebody should have reported that Beel person before, so the litter would be out there now.”

  The spokesman for the others upended the glass he’d filled, swallowed, gulped, and grinned down at her. “O.K., doctor, only out there you ain’t got time to think – you gotta do. Thanks for the shot, Doc, and I’ll tell Hoke you’re appointing her out there.”

  They filed out behind Brown as Jones went out to get the second litter, and Doc went ahead with the quick-setting plastic cast for the broken leg. Too bad there weren’t more of those nursing doctors; he’d have to see Palmer about it after this was over – if Palmer and he were still around. Wonder how the men in the safety chambers about which he’d completely forgotten, would make out? There were two in each converter housing, designed as an escape for the men in case of accident, and supposed to be proof against almost anything. If the men had reached them, maybe they were all right; he wouldn’t have taken a bet on it, though. With a slight shrug, he finished his work and went to help Jenkins.