by Dean Ing
Of course, two rems an hour weren't good for you. If you absorbed that much radiation steadily for a week, your body would get a total exposure of 336 rems during that time. Chances were one in three that you'd die in a month or so from such a dose.
The operative word there was "steadily": fallout particles radiate so much during the first day or so, they're only emitting ten percent as strongly seven hours after the blast; one percent as strongly after two days. After fifteen days that emission rate is only one tenth of one percent as much as it was during the first moments of that monstrous fireball.
That dwindling radiation rate was the rationale for staying put awhile—and for optimism. If radiation rose to deadly levels outside, we would experience only a small fraction of it in my basement. Sure, it was still dangerous. We might get sick; we might even contract cancer and die in a few years. In my book a few years beats hell out of a few days.
But Shar's hundred-rem-per-hour estimate had been wildly optimistic. As Ern chased me up to the attic, we had no idea that the particles slowly drifting down toward us from forty-thousand-foot altitude were from the very center of the Hamilton cloud, so ferociously lethal they should've glowed in the dark. They didn't, of course.
Stepping carefully to avoid fiberglass insulation, we still got it in our eyes and cussed it as we worked. Ern had a better understanding of structures than I did; he judged we could make a four-legged pyramid from the A-frame tubes. We used up ten minutes putting the A-frames in place with only my lamp to illuminate us, straddling the tube butts on joists and nailing stubs of two-by-four to keep the butt ends from skating away. Then I braced my legs, put my head and both forearms under the cracked roofbeam, and Ern helped me lift.
A pain like an electric shock banged alongside my spine. I'd half-expected it. Given plenty of time, Ern would've jacked the beam up by an old expedient: a sturdy vertical timber under the roof beam with overlapping hardwood wedges under the vertical piece. By driving the wedges toward each other with a hammer, a slender housewife could elevate that timber by the thickness of both wedges; several inches, in fact. Well, we didn't have the time. We did have a tall, heavy-boned idiot with an old back injury—me.
The joists groaned underfoot. Dust and splinters fell from the roof beam. With a great dry groan the center of the beam rose within an inch or so of horizontal. Ern, standing on different joists, panted, "Can you hold?"
"Do it," I grunted, and he rushed to lean the tops of the tubes into place, apexes nearly together under the roof beam.
"Let down easy," he said, holding the tops of the tubes in place. As I did, the tubes bit a half-inch up into the beam—a good thing, since they wanted to slip aside. Ern saw the problem, grabbed the hammer and nails, and drove nails into the beam so their protruding heads held the tube lips from moving. Then, "I still don't like it, but it'll do," he said, and I staggered back. "We should span the break with plywood and screws, Harve, but we don't have the time."
"What if we nailed chains across the bottom of the beam?"
He saw what I meant. If we stretched a chain across the bottom face of the beam, nailing through several links where the wood wasn't split, the beam couldn't sag again without snapping chain or very sturdy nails. "Smart," he agreed, and we did it in two minutes flat. Now he was happy. Ours was a stronger repair than a simple vertical post resting in the middle of a joist, since that lone joist might give way. I suggested that we clear out.
"Oh hell, we didn't block the attic vents," Ern said then as we collected our tools. The little screened vents weren't large, but a strong updraft under the eaves could sift dust into the attic. Ern saw me kneading the muscles near my kidney, told me to wait, and scrambled downstairs. He was back moments later with newspapers I had put in the bedrooms for atmosphere. The front pages were expensive fakes with historic headlines like FIRE RAVAGING SAN FRANCISCO—an appalling irony now—and LUSITANIA TORPEDOED. We thrust the paper, a dozen thicknesses at each vent, flat against the holes and nailed them in place. Then we abandoned the attic and taped the door edges.
Kate and Cammie were rechecking their tape job around upstairs window edges while Shar, with some help from Lance, wrestled mattresses downstairs to the basement. Ern and I shucked off our clothes in my old-fashioned second-floor bathroom and used perfectly clean water from the toilet tank to sponge-bathe, scrubbing off the itchy insulation as well as we could.
On our way downstairs for fresh clothes, Ern tried joking about the picture we made, two middle-aged naked guys scratching where it itched.
"I'll laugh tomorrow," I promised glumly.
Then while he retrieved a coverall he'd left at my place, Ern called to me. "Who's that outside?"
I paused with one foot in my size 46 jeans. "Beats me; we're all inside."
"Spot isn't," he rejoined.
"Why the hell isn't he," I stormed, and pounded out to the back porch while buttoning a long-sleeve shirt.
The back of my roof overhung the screen porch by three feet, but the faint breeze on my cheeks told me the place wouldn't be safe for long. We hadn't stretched film over the screen. Now I heard, from beyond my perimeter fence, a voice either female or falsetto. "Get down, Richard, there's a lion in there!"
This was followed by a male whoop and cries that faded into the distance. I called Spot and waited, peering into a rosy semi-darkness that obscured all but silhouettes of trees and skyline. The glow over the mass of mountain was red on rose. I wondered if fires would spread from Oakland to leap the fire lanes; to engulf us all before dawn. I wondered if I should've let those poor devils in. And I wondered if Spot was radioactive by now.
I finally got my dumb cheetah inside and made him understand that he was to stay in the tunnel. When I returned to my office and told Ern what I'd heard outside, I was too exhausted to ream anyone out for letting Spot roam loose. It was hard to believe that it was only eight o'clock.
Ern, who had to be more weary than I, sat with my battery lamp and sipped from a glass of my brandy as he trimmed rectangles of aluminum foil. "Another hour and I'll know if this one works," he said as I sat on the edge of my waterbed, twenty feet away in my unpartitioned sleeping area. Then he must've heard me grunt. "Hurt your back up there, didn't you?"
My old vertebra compression fracture was an enemy I had to live with. "Just a muscle spasm," I said, and eased myself onto the floor where I could lie flat on the carpet. Sometimes, by forcing myself to relax while lying full-length, I could feel the flutter-crunch of vertebrae unpopping in the small of my back. I closed my eyes. "We had room for those two out there, you know," I said softly.
"Two? It may have been twenty," he replied. "We made that decision a long time back."
"I know."
"When would we stop, Harve? How many could we take?"
I didn't answer. Ours was the classic crowded-lifeboat dilemma: how to decide when taking one more swimmer meant reducing the odds of the lucky occupants. My cop-out was accidental, but no less an avoidance. I fell asleep the instant those vertebrae unkinked.
I awoke to feel fingers massaging my scalp so I knew it was Cammie bending over me, speaking softly, urgently, ". . . to get up now. We can't carry you."
I peered into almost total darkness; came up on one elbow, flooded with the sudden awareness of where I was, and why. My forty-by-twenty-foot basement was lit by a single candle, its wick trimmed, that squatted on a low bookshelf in my lounging area. "I can walk," I protested, and saw Ern's bulk disappearing into my tunnel, dragging mattresses. "Whatthehell? Another bomb?"
"It's hot in here, Harve," called my sis, who was lugging a tub of water into the tunnel.
"I don't feel very—" I said, then realized what she meant. "Fallout?"
"Yes, and getting heavier," Cammie said. She hurried off to help carry things to the tunnel as I creaked upright.
My watch was still in the clothes I'd discarded. My digital clock didn't glow because the power was off, and if it hadn't been for that candle, that basement wo
uld've been dark as Satan's soul. I learned while blundering into people with books and boxes that I'd slept only three hours, but that little bit had done my back lots of good.
"Wish we could get that damn waterbed in here," Ern groused as I swung the tunnel door closed. He busied himself by passing armloads of books to Shar and Kate, who were restacking them on a bookshelf they'd scrounged from my office. Cammie was on her bike, pedaling to provide enough light for our needs. Lance was sitting on a mattress. And what the hell was I doing? Nothing useful. I didn't have to ask why they were making a barrier of books at the foot of the stairs in the root cellar; instead, I hurried back to the basement and lifted my entire small bookcase of Britannicas, hauling it through the tunnel to help create the book barrier.
If fallout was intense enough to warrant our moving into the tunnel, the radiation through the puny film-covered doors of my root cellar would be high at that end of the tunnel. Distance alone was some help. The right-angle turn into the tunnel helped, too. But thick, dense stacks of paper make an excellent barrier against ionizing radiation—and a shelf of books, Shar's texts claimed, was better than a steel-faced door. She had begun the book barrier directly in front of the root cellar steps and used scraps of lumber nailed across the wooden stairway framing to keep the rickety barrier from toppling.
I leaned against the bookcase to help Shar and watched as Ern rubbed an antique phonograph record against the fur rim of my old parka. The light in the tunnel was dim enough to reveal the blue crackles of static sparkling in the fur. "Ern, what the hell are you—oh," I subsided as he brought the record disc near a whiskery piece of wire that protruded from the top of the tin can in his other hand. He'd finished his fallout meter.
A small spark jumped to the wire. Ern snapped on my lamp, stared down at the tin can, which now had a clear plastic film cover through which the wire protruded. He moved the wire gently. He glanced at his wristwatch, gnawing his lip—and Ern chews that lip only in extremis.
He glared through the plastic cover into the tin can, holding it in the light as if daring it to do him wrong. After a minute he glanced up at me, and his smile was an act of bravery. "The manual tells you to charge the leaves of foil by rubbing a hunk of plexiglass with paper," he said, trying to sound unconcerned. "I remembered how old vinyl records sometimes took a hellacious static charge from wool or fur and stole one of your old LPs and—sure 'nough," he said and shrugged, squinting down into the can again, checking his watch.
I whispered it: "Don't kid me, Ern: how we doin'?"
His reading glasses gleamed as he muttered, "Lots better here." He pointed down into the tin can to show me. "Those little foil leaves are suspended by nylon monofilament. See the inked paper scale I pasted on the plastic top? You center the scale so its zero mark is exactly between the foil leaves, and then see how far out the bottom of each leaf is from zero." Anxiety infiltrated his low baritone. "No, don't lean so close; your eye must be one foot from the scale to give the right parallax—uh, anyway, after a little practice you can get it pretty close without a ruler."
Though I was older than Ern, my eyes haven't yet gone farsighted on me. I could see that the suspended leaves of foil stood slightly apart, defying gravity since their static charges made them repel each other. "I get a reading of two," I said.
He pulled the can back in a hurry, stared at it, glared at me. "Scare the living shit out of a feller," he grumbled. "Two millimeters for one leaf and nearly three on the other. That makes five, Harve. I started about four minutes ago with readings of seven and eight millimeters on the scale. Now"—he checked his watch and nodded—"I read it as two and three. So the bottom edges of the foil leaves have swung nearer by a total of ten millimeters in four minutes. Look at the paper chart on the side of the can."
I did, knowing Ern was not going to tell me how much radiation we were taking because he wanted me to do it myself. "Ten millimeters in four minutes: two rems. In four minutes?"
"Jesus, no! Two rems per hour; you read the dose rate in rems per hour, you nik-nik. Why didn't you build one of these years ago?"
"Because I'm an idiot," I concluded. "And you?"
"Built mine so long ago I forgot half the details. But Lance tore it up trying to get at the hunks of desiccant in the bottom of the can. He was only five. Thought it was candy." Ern tried to make it seem a clever ploy by a blameless child, but I knew his disappointment with Lance was marrow-deep even if he rarely showed it.
To realign the topic away from Lance I said, "Those little hunks of rocks in the bottom are desiccant? Where'd you get it?"
"Knocked a corner from a piece of wallboard under your stairwell," he confessed. "The crumbly stuff in wallboard is gypsum. Kate heated the little hunks inside a tin cup over a candle for a half-hour to make sure they were dry before I put 'em in. You can't afford moisture in this can, and dry gypsum is a desiccant—soaks up the water vapor from the air in the can. It's all in the manual."
I watched Shar and Kate finish their work, conscious of the close quarters and of the muffled echoes in the tunnel. Only Spot and Lance seemed capable of sleep. "Hey, a two-rem reading in here is pretty high, isn't it?"
Ern snorted. "Try it on your porch. For the first two hours I didn't notice the foil leaves relaxing. Then when I wasn't looking, they lost their charge in a hurry. When I charged 'em up again, they sagged by twelve millimeters in one minute flat, which is nearly ten rems an hour. Just to check, I took your lamp and wore your parka out to the porch with a handkerchief over my mouth, and tried to get a reading." His long single headshake was eloquent. "I could actually see the damn aluminum leaves wilting down, and the best spark I can make gives about a sixteen-millimeter reading to start with, and the static charge decayed to zilch, buddy—zero—in just a few seconds."
I stared at the chart pasted on his fallout meter. "That's completely off scale, Ern. Over fifty rems per hour on my porch! Any chance the meter is wrong?"
"Sure there's a chance. You feel like taking that chance?"
"Maybe some other time," I husked. "What do you think the dose rate would be for anyone out in the open?"
"If the protection factors we estimated are any guide, Harve," and now he was whispering, "they could be taking hundreds."
"And their chances after an hour or so—"
"No chance, buddy. Maybe a ghost of one if they got to shelter right after that. But they'd probably be the walking dead, and not walking for long."
I glanced at that steel-faced door, then down the tunnel as Shar moved toward us. "I'm wondering if we'd get a different reading right up against that door, or by the book barrier," I said.
"What could we do about it?"
"If there's a radiation gradient along the tunnel, we could stay in the safest part of it."
"I'm getting stupid with exhaustion," Ern admitted. "You're right." He started past Shar; kissed her forehead.
She was too preoccupied to respond. "All right, girls," she said, "now we must lie down and relax. There's only so much air in here, and the less we exercise, the less we foul the air." Kate had a snippish reply on her face but glanced at me, shrugged, and chose a mattress.
"Until we get our flashlights it's gonna be dark, mom," said Cammie, and slowed her pedaling to prove it.
"Your father has Harve's lamp," my sis replied, and saw Ern nod in confirmation. Moments later the only source of light was my lamp, which Ern conserved as much as possible. The women settled quietly among blankets they didn't really need, and I sat almost as quietly, avoiding exertion.
Ern took readings at the book barrier, then backtracked down the tunnel to the basement door. It took him quite a while because the longer he waited for a reading, the more accurate it was. When he finished at the basement door, I was nearly asleep on the mattress I shared with Kate, who was snoring gently, and no wonder.
He walked to us, roughly midway down the tunnel, and switched off the lamp as he sat next to Shar. "Looks like we did something right by sheerest intuition.
Hon? Harve? You awake?"
My sis and I acknowledged it.
Softly he asked, "You awake, Kate?" Silence, if you discounted the mezzo-soprano of her snores. "Cammie?" No answer. "Lance?" No answer. "Okay, team, it's midnight; time for a progress report."
In his travels down the tunnel, Ern had also made sure our food and water were not only present but out of the way. The root cellar was a jumble that we would have to straighten out, because we might be living in these cramped quarters for quite a while.
Near the steel-faced door, he said, the reading was roughly three rems per hour. At the book barrier it was over four. At the midpoint of the tunnel it was only two, maybe a shade less. Without any question, my half-assed root-cellar-door arrangement could have killed us all—might still be killing us, depending on how much dust might get through the sealing job Shar had done with such desperate speed. "The good news is, the radiation level must be dropping," he reminded us. "At least it should be. We'll know for sure in an hour or so." He stopped, listening. Rain drummed against the plastic that covered the root cellar doors, reminding me of a stampede of small animals. Those drops must've been as big as marbles. To my relief, it didn't last long.
"I wonder how fast we're using up the air in here," Shar muttered in the darkness. "Harve, how many cubic feet of air are in the tunnel?"
I made a rough calculation. Seven feet high, four and a half wide, sixty from end to end, plus the volume of the root cellar itself. "Maybe two thousand," I said.
"Not enough," she said with a catch in her voice. "Not even half enough. We're exhaling carbon dioxide into it, fouling what we have, and we need three or four hundred cubic feet an hour each. I'm trying not to panic, but if we fall asleep now, it's possible we'd never wake up."
I could hear their movements and imagined Ern trying, in his diffident way, to comfort my sis. Finally he said, "So we pump fresh air in here somehow."