The 13th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Lester Del Rey

  * * * *

  Jenkins straightened out a wrinkle in his white jacket fussily and looked up. “I’ve been getting the surgery ready for instant use, Dr. Ferrel. Do you think it’s safe to keep only Miss Dodd and one male attendant here—shouldn’t we have more than the bare legally sanctioned staff?”

  “Dodd’s a one-man staff,” Ferrel assured him. “Expecting accidents tonight?”

  “No, sir, not exactly. But do you know what they’re running off?”

  “No.” Ferrel hadn’t asked Palmer; he’d learned long before that he couldn’t keep up with the atomic engineering developments, and had stopped trying. “Some new type of atomic tank fuel for the army to use in its war games?”

  “Worse than that, sir. They’re making their first commercial run of Natomic I-713 in both No. 3 and 4 converters at once.”

  “So? Seems to me I did hear something about that. Had to do with killing off boll weevils, didn’t it?” Ferrel was vaguely familiar with the process of sowing radioactive dust in a circle outside the weevil area, to isolate the pest, then gradually moving inward from the border. Used with proper precautions, it had slowly killed off the weevil and driven it back into half the territory once occupied.

  Jenkins managed to look disappointed, surprised and slightly superior without a visible change of expression. “There was an article on it in the Natomic Weekly Ray of last issue, Dr. Ferrel. You probably know that the trouble with Natomic I-344, which they’ve been using, was its half life of over four months; that made the land sowed useless for planting the next year, so they had to move very slowly. I-713 has a half life of less than a week and reaches safe limits in about two months, so they’ll be able to isolate whole strips of hundreds of miles during the winter and still have the land usable by spring. Field tests have been highly successful, and we’ve just gotten a huge order from two states that want immediate delivery.”

  “After their legislatures waited six months debating whether to use it or not,” Ferrel hazarded out of long experience. “Hm-m-m, sounds good if they can sow enough earthworms after them to keep the ground in good condition. But what’s the worry?”

  Jenkins shook his head indignantly. “I’m not worried. I simply think we should take every possible precaution and be ready for any accident; after all, they’re working on something new, and a half life of a week is rather strong, don’t you think? Besides, I looked over some of the reaction charts in the article, and—What was that?”

  From somewhere to the left of the Infirmary, a muffled growl was being accompanied by ground tremors; then it gave place to a steady hissing, barely audible through the insulated walls of the building. Ferrel listened a moment and shrugged. “Nothing to worry about, Jenkins; you’ll hear it a dozen times a year. Ever since the Great War when he tried to commit hara-kiri over the treachery of his people, Hokusai’s been bugs about getting an atomic explosive bomb which will let us wipe out the rest of the world. Some day you’ll probably see the little guy brought in here minus his head, but so far he hasn’t found anything with short enough a half life that can be controlled until needed. What about the reaction charts on I-713?”

  “Nothing definite, I suppose.” Jenkins turned reluctantly away from the sound, still frowning. “I know it worked in small lots, but there’s something about one of the intermediate steps I distrust, sir. I thought I recognized…I tried to ask one of the engineers about it. He practically told me to shut up until I’d studied atomic engineering myself.”

  Seeing the boy’s face whiten over tensed jaw muscles, Ferrel held back his smile and nodded slowly. Something funny there; of course, Jenkins’ pride had been wounded, but hardly that much. Some day, he’d have to find out what was behind it; little things like that could ruin a man’s steadiness with the instruments, if he kept it to himself. Meantime, the subject was best dropped.

  The telephone girl’s heavily syllabized voice cut into his thoughts from the annunciator. “Dr. Ferrel. Dr. Ferrel wanted on the telephone. Dr. Ferrel, please!”

  Jenkins’ face blanched still further, and his eyes darted to his superior sharply. Doc grunted casually. “Probably Palmer’s bored and wants to tell me all about his grandson again. He thinks that child’s an all time genius because it says two words at eighteen months.”

  But inside the office, he stopped to wipe his hands free of perspiration before answering; there was something contagious about Jenkins’ suppressed fears. And Palmer’s face on the little television screen didn’t help any, though the director was wearing his usual set smile. Ferrel knew it wasn’t about the baby this time, and he was right.

  “‘Lo, Ferrel.” Palmer’s heartily confident voice was quite normal, but the use of the last name was a clear sign of some trouble. “There’s been a little accident in the plant, they tell me. They’re bringing a few men over to the Infirmary for treatment—probably not right away, though. Has Blake gone yet?”

  “He’s been gone fifteen minutes or more. Think it’s serious enough to call him back, or are Jenkins and myself enough?”

  “Jenkins? Oh, the new doctor.” Palmer hesitated, and his arms showed quite clearly the doodling operations of his hands, out of sight of the vision cell. “No, of course, no need to call Blake back, I suppose—not yet, anyhow. Just worry anyone who saw him coming in. Probably nothing serious.”

  “What is it—radiation burns, or straight accident?”

  “Oh—radiation mostly—maybe accident, too. Someone got a little careless—you know how it is. Nothing to worry about, though. You’ve been through it before when they opened a port too soon.”

  Doc knew enough about that—if that’s what it was. “Sure, we can handle that, Palmer. But I thought No. 1 was closing down at five thirty tonight. Anyhow, how come they haven’t installed the safety ports on it? You told me they had, six months ago.”

  “I didn’t say it was No. 1, or that it was a manual port. You know, new equipment for new products.” Palmer looked up at someone else, and his upper arms made a slight movement before he looked down at the vision cell again. “I can’t go into it now, Dr. Ferrel; accident’s throwing us off schedule, you see—details piling up on me. We can talk it over later, and you probably have to make arrangements now. Call me if you want anything.”

  * * * *

  The screen darkened and the phone clicked off abruptly, just as a muffled word started. The voice hadn’t been Palmer’s. Ferrel pulled his stomach in, wiped the sweat off his hands again, and went out into the surgery with careful casualness. Damn Palmer, why couldn’t the fool give enough information to make decent preparations possible? He was sure 3 and 4 alone were operating, and they were supposed to be foolproof. Just what had happened?

  Jenkins jerked up from a bench as he came out, face muscles tense and eyes filled with a nameless fear. Where he had been sitting, a copy of the Weekly Ray was lying open at a chart of symbols which meant nothing to Ferrel, except for the penciled line under one of the reactions. The boy picked it up and stuck it back on a table.

  “Routine accident,” Ferrel reported as naturally as he could, cursing himself for having to force his voice. Thank the Lord, the boy’s hands hadn’t trembled visibly when he was moving the paper; he’d still be useful if surgery were necessary. Palmer had said nothing of that, of course—he’d said nothing about entirely too much. “They’re bringing a few men over for radiation burns, according to Palmer. Everything ready?”

  Jenkins nodded tightly. “Quite ready, sir, as much as we can be for routine accidents at 3 and 4!…Isotope R… Sorry, Dr. Ferrel, I didn’t mean that. Should we call in Dr. Blake and the other nurses and attendants?”

  “Eh? Oh, probably we can’t reach Blake, and Palmer doesn’t think we need him. You might have Nurse Dodd locate Meyers—the others are out on dates by now if I know them, and the two nurses should be enough, with Jones; they’re better than a flock of the others, anyway.” Isoto
pe R? Ferrel remembered the name, but nothing else. Something an engineer had said once—but he couldn’t recall in what connection—or had Hokusai mentioned it? He watched Jenkins leave and turned on an impulse to his office where he could phone in reasonable privacy.

  “Get me Matsuura Hokusai.” He stood drumming on the table impatiently until the screen finally lighted and the little Japanese looked out of it. “Hoke, do you know what they were turning out over at 3 and 4?”

  The scientist nodded slowly, his wrinkled face as expressionless as his unaccented English. “Yess, they are make I-713 for the weevil. Why you assk?”

  “Nothing; just curious. I heard rumors about an Isotope R and wondered if there was any connection. Seems they had a little accident over there, and I want to be ready for whatever comes of it.”

  For a fraction of a second, the heavy lids on Hokusai’s eyes seemed lo lift, but his voice remained neutral, only slightly faster. “No connection. Dr. Ferrel, they are not make Issotope R, very much assure you. Besst you forget Issotope R. Very ssorry. Dr. Ferrel, I musst now ssee accident. Thank you for call. Good-by.” The screen was blank again, along with Ferrel’s mind.

  Jenkins was standing in the door, but had either heard nothing or seemed not to know about it. “Nurse Meyers is coming back,” he said “Shall I get ready for curare injections?”

  “Uh—might be a good idea.” Ferrel had no intention of being surprised again, no matter what the implication of the words. Curare, one of the greatest poisons, known to South American primitives for centuries and only recently synthesized by modern chemistry, was the final resort for use in cases of radiation injury that was utterly beyond control. While the Infirmary stocked it for such emergencies, in the four years of Doc’s practice it had been used only twice; neither experiment had been pleasant. Jenkins was either thoroughly frightened or overzealous—unless he knew something he had no business knowing.

  “Seems to take them long enough to get the men here—can’t be too serious, Jenkins, or they’d move faster.”

  “Maybe.” Jenkins went on with his preparations, dissolving dried plasma in distilled, de-aerated water, without looking up. “There’s the litter siren now. You’d better get washed up while I take care of the patients.”

  Doc listened to the sound that came in as a faint drone from outside, and grinned slightly. “Must be Beel driving; he’s the only man fool enough to run the siren when the runways are empty. Anyhow, if you’ll listen, it’s the out trip he’s making. Be at least five minutes before he gets back.” But he turned into the washroom, kicked on the hot water and began scrubbing vigorously with the strong soap.

  Damn Jenkins! Here he was preparing for surgery before he had any reason to suspect the need, and the boy was running things to suit himself, pretty much, as if armed with superior knowledge. Well, maybe he was. Either that, or he was simply half crazy with old wives’ fears of anything relating to atomic reactions, and that didn’t seem to fit the case. He rinsed off as Jenkins came in, kicked on the hot-air blast, and let his arms dry, then bumped against a rod that brought out rubber gloves on little holders. “Jenkins, what’s all this Isotope R business, anyway? I’ve heard about it somewhere—probably from Hokusai. But I can’t remember anything definite.”

  “Naturally—there isn’t anything definite. That’s the trouble.” The young doctor tackled the area under his fingernails before looking up; then he saw Ferrel was slipping into his surgeon’s whites that had come out on a hanger, and waited until the other was finished. “R’s one of the big maybe problems of atomics. Purely theoretical, and none’s been made yet—it’s either impossible or can’t be done in small control batches, safe for testing. That’s the trouble, as I said; nobody knows anything about it, except that—if it can exist—it’ll break down in a fairly short time into Mahler’s Isotope. You’ve heard of that?”

  Doc had—twice. The first had been when Mahler and half his laboratory had disappeared with accompanying noise; he’d been making a comparatively small amount of the new product designed to act as a starter for other reactions. Later, Maicewicz had tackled it on a smaller scale, and that time only two rooms and three men had gone up in dust particles. Five or six years later, atomic theory had been extended to the point where any study could find why the apparently safe product decided to become pure helium and energy in approximately one-billionth of a second.

  “How long a time?”

  “Half a dozen theories, and no real idea.” They’d come out of the washrooms, finished except for their masks. Jenkins ran his elbow into a switch that turned on the ultraviolets that were supposed to sterilize the entire surgery, then looked around questioningly. “What about the supersonics?”

  Ferrel kicked them on, shuddering as the bone-shaking harmonic indicated their activity. He couldn’t complain about the equipment, at least. Ever since the last accident, when the State Congress developed ideas, there’d been enough gadgets lying around to stock up several small hospitals. The supersonics were intended to penetrate through all solids in the room, sterilizing where the UV light couldn’t. A whistling note in the harmonics reminded him of something that had been tickling around in the back of his mind for minutes.

  “There was no emergency whistle, Jenkins. Hardly seems to me they’d neglect that if it were so important.”

  Jenkins grunted skeptically and eloquently. “I read in the papers a few days ago where Congress was thinking of moving all atomic plants—meaning National, of course—out into the Mojave Desert. Palmer wouldn’t like that…There’s the siren again.”

  * * * *

  Jones, the male attendant, had heard it, and was already running out the fresh stretcher for the litter into the back receiving room. Half a minute later, Beel came trundling in the detachable part of the litter. “Two,” he announced. “More coming up as soon as they can get to ’em, Doc.”

  There was blood spilled over the canvas, and a closer inspection indicated its source in a severed jugular vein, now held in place with a small safety pin that had fastened the two sides of the cut with a series of little pricks around which the blood had clotted enough to stop further loss.

  Doc kicked off the supersonics with relief and indicated the man’s throat. “Why wasn’t I called out instead of having him brought here?”

  “Hell, Doc, Palmer said bring ’em in and I brought ’em—I dunno. Guess some guy pinned up this fellow so they figured he could wait. Anything wrong?”

  Ferrel grimaced. “With a split jugular, nothing that stops the bleeding’s wrong, orthodox or not. How many more, and what’s wrong out there?”

  “Lord knows, Doc. I only drive ’em, I don’t ask questions. So long!” He pushed the new stretcher up on the carriage, went wheeling it out to the small two-wheeled tractor that completed the litter. Ferrel dropped his curiosity back to its proper place and turned to the jugular case, while Dodd adjusted her mask. Jones had their clothes off, swabbed them down hastily, and wheeled them out on operating tables into the center of the surgery.

  “Plasma!” A quick examination had shown Doc nothing else wrong with the jugular case, and he made the injection quickly. Apparently the man was only unconscious from shock induced by loss of blood, and the breathing and heart action resumed a more normal course as the liquid filled out the depleted blood vessels. He treated the wound with a sulphonamide derivative in routine procedure, cleaned and sterilized the edges gently, applied clamps carefully, removed the pin, and began stitching with the complicated little motor needle—one of the few gadgets for which he had any real appreciation. A few more drops of blood had spilled, but not seriously, and the wound was now permanently sealed. “Save the pin, Dodd. Goes in the collection. That’s all for this. How’s the other, Jenkins?”

  Jenkins pointed to the back of the man’s neck, indicating a tiny bluish object sticking out. “Fragment of steel, clear into the medulla oblongata. No blood loss, but he�
��s been dead since it touched him. Want me to remove it?”

  “No need—mortician can do it if they want… If these are a sample, I’d guess it as a plain industrial accident, instead of anything connected with radiation.”

  “You’ll get that, too, Doc.” It was the jugular case, apparently conscious and normal except for pallor. “We weren’t in the converter house. Hey, I’m all right!… I’ll be—”

  Ferrel smiled at the surprise on the fellow’s face. “Thought you were dead, eh? Sure, you’re all right, if you’ll take it easy. A torn jugular either kills you or else it’s nothing to worry about. Just pipe down and let the nurse put you to sleep, and you’ll never know you got it.”

  “Lord! Stuff came flying out of the air-intake like bullets out of a machine gun. Just a scratch, I thought; then Jake was bawling like a baby and yelling for a pin. Blood all over the place—then here I am, good as new.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dodd was already wheeling him off to a ward room, her grim face wrinkled into a half-quizzical expression over the mask. “Doctor said to pipe down, didn’t he? Well!”

  As soon as Dodd vanished, Jenkins sat down, running his hand over his cap; there were little beads of sweat showing where the goggles and mask didn’t entirely cover his face. “ ‘Stuff came flying out of the air-intake like bullets out of a machine gun,’ ” he repeated softly. “Dr. Ferrel, these two cases were outside the converter—just by-product accidents. Inside—”

  “Yeah.” Ferrel was picturing things himself, and it wasn’t pleasant. Outside, matter tossed through the air ducts; inside—He left it hanging, as Jenkins had. “I’m going to call Blake. We’ll probably need him.”

  II