Nerves

by Lester Del Rey

  It wasn’t the men who were being inspected who would give trouble, nor those who’d already passed, he realized. It was the group who would have to go on waiting, not knowing when their turn would come. He himself had nothing to fear, and yet it was beginning to get him….

  He headed for the front office, wondering whether anyone there had heard anything about the future schedule. The receptionist and secretary would be the logical ones to have buddies working in Administration, and even a hint would be helpful. He came through the door just as a small, wiry little man entered from outside, taking off his Homburg and fiddling with his tiny mustache as he approached the receptionist. Ferrel recognized him just as he looked up.

  “Hi, Ferrel,” the little man cried.

  “Busoni! What are you doing here?” But Doc could guess the answer to that.

  It was what he expected. “Serving as expert. I’m your inspector. I’ve been looking forward to a crack at you too, ever since I knew you were on the list. How’s bloodwashing?”

  “Beats general practice — or it did until you came in, bone-breaker.” Busoni had been in Ferrel’s class at medical school, specializing in work on fractures. He’d made something of a reputation from his work in rebreaking and correcting old, badly knit fractures. Then he’d built a second reputation from his work in finding ways to wash the radioactive ions out of the calcium of the bones without hurting the calcium deposits themselves. Doc had sent him a patient once after the usual routine with blood-exchange and treatment with the versene group of chemicals had failed.

  He held the door while the other walked in. Busoni moved about, taking in the equipment, studying the layout, and moving toward the nurses’ toilet. He made a thorough inspection there, nodded, and began marking his sheets. “You pass, Ferrel. Any man who can keep a ladies’ room clean has a good mark in my book.”

  He smiled as he said it, but Doc wasn’t sure but what he meant it. At that, the man had managed to cover the key points. Then he snapped his book shut and relaxed. “I got you off lightly, Roger. I told them I knew you, and they figured you’d spill more dirt to me than anyone else. I know better, but why disillusion them? But I’m afraid this plant is in for pretty rough treatment. The committee’s mostly pretty honest, but they’ve been filled with a lot of dirty rumors about Palmer. How about it — does he stink, or does he deserve a break?”

  “I’m still here,” Ferrel told him. “In fact, I’m here when I could have had the day off.”

  Busoni grinned. “I’ll take that answer. But I don’t think I can sell it to anyone else. He made a bad mistake in getting the reporters kicked out. Oh, I can guess why. But a couple of the men feel spiteful, and —”

  From outside came the rising wail of an electric siren, reaching a shrill scream that cut through the walls and pierced the ears. Emergency! And from the warbling that was beginning, it meant an emergency with hot stuff floating free!

  “Dr. Ferrell” the paging speaker shouted. “Phone!

  He snatched up the receiver. “Ferrel!”

  “Point Twenty!” Palmer snapped the words out, and then hung up. But it was information enough. “Point Twenty”– the pile that gave them their power– and of all the places for an accident Doc liked that least.

  He grabbed his emergency bag from the wall and headed for the rear. Dodd was with him, holding out his surgeon’s smock. He shook his head, but she clutched it grimly as she ran. In the back receiving room, Beel already had the little litter equipped with twin stretchers, and the motor turning over. He waited until Ferrel and Dodd had grabbed the handrails; then he gunned away, while the second driver was still waiting for Blake and his nurse. Doc ran his eye over the equipment that had been made ready, and nodded. Jones had proved his worth as a male attendant long before, and he was still doing the right thing instantly.

  Then for the first time he became aware of the fact that Busoni was riding the litter with him. “Hot stuff!” Doc shouted warningly over the wail of the litter siren. But he was glad to have another doctor at his side.

  Crowds were heading for the converter heedless of the risk, driven by the compulsion to witness disaster. Their presence would make rescue operations more difficult, but the guards were on duty, chasing them back. A vehicle that looked like a fireman’s hook-and-ladder engine gunned past at top speed. Its complicated superstructure was like a three-dimensional Jacob’s ladder, and a man in heavy shielding rode at each end to steer it.

  The emergency truck stopped at the side entrance of the huge building that housed the pile. At one time this pile had been the largest commercial atomic reactor in existence, and it still ranked high. It broke U-235 down, using part of the broken cores of atoms to turn the more common U-238 into plutonium, from which the pile derived most of its power. Unlike some of the early plants, the pile was not only a power source, but a breeder pile as well, and that made it useful for the production of tiny amounts of other normal radioactive elements.

  The heat generated in the process was piped out, first by liquid sodium, then by exchange to steam, and finally into the huge turbines that generated all the thousands of kilowatts needed to keep the plant going, maintain Kimberly, and even serve as an auxiliary power source for other sections.

  But now the red flag was up, which meant that all the damper rods would be in, cutting its power, and letting the men escape through the entrances.

  There was one entrance, however, that seemed to have given trouble. The complicated grapple was being backed in as the litter came to a stop. It had to go in, carrying shielding for the men as well as their own shields, and then to adapt to the angles of the passage. As in all the piles, the escape halls were built with a number of right-angle turns, on the theory that loose radiation travels in straight lines, and that little of it would bounce– while a man could move in zigzag fashion, reaching safer and safer territory.

  Abruptly, the grapple began moving out, as rapidly as the men riding the sections could guide it through the passage. Other guards in shields were clearing the area, and now one came up to Doc, holding out a huge, heavy suit. Doc grimaced, but began working his way into it. “What happened?”

  “I only got part of it,” the guard reported. “Seems they were pulling a thimble of hot stuff out for the Kimberly hospital. One of the men dropped the tongs. The stuff ran all over the floor, or something. One guy didn’t get out.”

  Doc saw that the others were in suits by now, and snapped the helmet shut. The grapple came free, holding a limp figure at the end of padded tongs. It swung around, putting the figure into a shielded and padded box.

  Busoni was beside Doc as he moved forward. Beel, now also in a suit, was backing the litter, and equipment was being pulled off before Doc could reach the casualty.

  “How long?” he asked.

  Mervin, the pile superintendent, had been checking, and now answered, his voice muffled through the diaphragm on his helmet. “Six minutes. The alarm wasn’t tripped at once, for some reason. Best I can find out is that he saw the thimble falling and caught it in his gloves. He threw it into the hot-pot, clamped the lid down, and then headed for the port that hadn’t been closed to the pile. He must have got at least half a minute’s dose.”

  Doc felt sick. Half a minute! It might have been better for him to have died in the chamber.

  They were working together now, Dodd, Busoni and Blake with him, fitting the unconscious body with all the things to begin exchanging his blood, pumping out the old and replacing it completely with freshened blood, according to the tattooed type on his wrist. Dodd had him stripped, and the shielded box was being fitted with sprays to wash him free of outside contamination, if any.

  Then Doc stopped, gazing at him more closely. The man was Clem Mervin, the super’s son! The face of Mervin was almost invisible behind his helmet, but now he nodded slowly at Doc’s sudden questioning glance. He’d known all along.

  “We’ll save him,” Doc promised. It was almost certainly true– as far as his li
fe was concerned. Men could be saved from tremendous doses now. But just staying alive was not everything; the boy would go through a year of hell, as a bare beginning, and would certainly be sterile. And his mind was likely to be irreparably harmed.

  There was no use lying about that to Mervin; the super knew that himself.

  A tiny tanklike car had gone into the passage, dragging hoses to wash out the chamber. Now it came out, and the red flag on the pile building began going down. Apparently the radiation was down to safe levels in the pile chamber, thanks to the sacrifice Clem Mervin had made. Getting the thimble of precious but deadly stuff into the disposal hamper and shutting the port that was open into the pile had kept the level from going too high.

  Mervin seemed to gather himself together. “Doc, do what you can, anyway! I’ve got to get back and salvage that potassium before somebody at the hospital dies for lack of it.”

  He moved off, collecting his crew. Doc signaled the waiting ambulance and men began to lift the heavy casketlike box containing the unconscious man while Ferrel and the others shucked off their armor. This was a case for the Kimberly hospital radiation ward. It was smaller than the Infirmary, but they were better equipped for the long, slow process of keeping the man alive.

  Doc started to climb into the truck, but Blake stopped him. “Go on back, Doc. I’ll take this hitch.”

  It was just as well. Doc stepped back, watching the vehicle roll off with a scream from its siren. He’d have to drop by the hospital from time to time, but there was nothing more he could do at the moment. Tissue that badly damaged could be repaired only by months of treatment.

  Busoni walked beside him silently as they headed back to the litter. But a group of half a dozen men stood in their way. One of them stepped forward.

  “Is this the way you usually handle cases, Doctor?” he asked savagely. “Give them a lick and promise and then turn them over to someone else?”

  The other men gasped, and moved toward the man. But Busoni was there first. “Shut up, damn you!” he said harshly, and his little figure was shoving the heavy-jowled man aside, pushing him back and out of Ferrel’s way. He climbed onto the litter with Doc, leaving the congressional committee staring after him. The others turned to the man who had spoken, but Doc had no interest in what they might say or do.

  “He’ll ache for my scalp for a while, but Morgan will calm him down, Roger,” Busoni said. He was grinning wryly now. “Tomorrow we’ll both have to apologize and shake hands. And the funny thing is, with them that probably will end it. I won’t get into trouble, so forget it. Just be thankful that most of our representatives aren’t like him. The committee will go along with me when I say you did a damned fine job. And they’ll probably make sure that young Mervin gets a medal.”

  Doc nodded wearily; it didn’t matter too much. He hadn’t been worried about any report that might be issued on his work in the affair. Technically it had been a routine accident, and the handling had been efficient and normal. He knew that, and he knew his staff would take it for granted. They simply hadn’t been able to work the miracle needed to give immediate assurance of life and health to a boy who’d proved his right to them. No present amount of medical knowledge could do that. But until such miracles could be made to order, the rewards of his job would always be too small for him.

  Then he shrugged it off, burying it with the other bitter cases that lay stored in the back of his mind. Some day they might pile up beyond what he could stand, and then he’d be old. But so far he could carry them. He shook Busoni’s hand when the litter came to a stop, making the usual meaningless remarks about getting together at the next medical convention. But they probably never would. The difference between a practicing and a lapsed physician was too great.

  He watched carefully to see that the equipment that had come too near young Mervin was put into the decontamination chamber. And finally he turned toward the administration building to report to Palmer. The manager would already have received the general report, but he’d want to know more of what chance the injured man might have and what could be done for him.

  And maybe he’d need someone he knew near him as he realized that the one accident that could spell the end of all chances to establish the plant’s safety had already occurred. It might be routine here, but to the men who had never seen any atomic accident before; it could be nothing but the final proof that everything related to atomics was dangerous and that the plants weren’t safe near civilization.

  Doc wondered how Emma would take the move– if the plant could be moved.

  Chapter 3

  Allan Palmer had learned long before that the place for a manager was in his office.

  It had been a long and expensive lesson, but he’d finally accepted the fact. From his desk he could do the one job that nobody else could do and which could only be done from there– he could manage! If he went out to perform deeds of derring-do, the men might love him for it, but they would also suffer, because who would get the work done?

  It was one of the secrets that had carried him up the ladder from construction engineer working under a seventh sub-assistant to head of his own atomic-pile construction company– and then to taking over when bad management had almost wrecked National. It was from his desk that he’d persuaded Link and Hokusai to try their new ideas on superheavy isotopes in full scale, and swung the incredible sums needed to build them the first converter. It was from here that he hoped some day to see Hokusai create the fuel that would take men to the moon and back.

  Now he listened to Ferrel’s account silently, fighting back the old desire to go charging out in a last-ditch effort to prove somehow the safety of the plant before the committee could leave. He saw the strain on Doc’s face, and long experience with the man had taught him enough to guess most of the reason– Ferrel’s concern for him– Doc hadn’t yet realized what personal stakes were involved for himself and all the rest.

  Palmer leaned back, looking out of the window toward Kimberly. If the crackpots won, it would be a ghost town in five years; there was no reason for a town there, without cheap power and without the atomic plant upon which local industry depended. What would Doc get for his house then? How could he send his boy on through college on what a general practitioner could earn in a dying city. And what would happen to Doc’s partially crippled wife in whatever wild location would be left within the restrictions of the law they proposed for the plants?

  Even Doc wouldn’t escape the tar-brush. Let the crackpots win, and every man who was associated with atomics would be a pariah. Doc wasn’t too old yet to go back to hospital work, but he couldn’t carry the stigma with him. And there were a thousand men or more like Doc out there. They called it his problem, but he was the only one among them who was safe, if he chose to give up and sell out for whatever pittance the equipment here might bring. His own private money was safe. He could go to Europe, retire…

  And let the damned fools who talked about moving atomic plants try to move a pile that had been running for twenty-five years, building up radioactivity within it every second of that time! Let the untended pile erode until the hell inside it broke out, and the people really had contamination on their hands!

  “Doc,” he said at last, “you’ve been with me at least twenty years. During that time have I ever lied to you?”

  He didn’t need the touch of a smile to know the answer to that. The need for absolute truth, no matter how much it hurt, was another of the lessons Palmer had learned long ago. Now he leaned back, forcing his face to a relaxation he couldn’t feel. “Okay, then. For God’s sake stop deciding I’m all washed up. When I’m licked I’ll tell you so! Maybe I’m in a corner now because of the accident, and maybe I couldn’t afford it. But I knew it was coming– in these conditions, it had to come; all we could hope was that nobody got hurt, or at least not too many. Maybe it’s going to cost more than we can afford, but not more than I’ll find a way to pay. They haven’t moved us yet, and while I’m alive they won’
t! That’s a promise. Now go home and get some rest, or at least get some rest here and stop thinking about my troubles.”

  He watched Doc go down the walk toward the Infirmary and nodded slowly to himself. If he’d told the first lie in more than twenty years, he’d done it in a good cause. Doc seemed a dozen years younger than the tired, beaten man who’d come up that walk. And maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe he could still scrape by, somehow. If not…

  He stood up and went over to the wall, studying the chart that listed the customers of National together with quantities.

  At the top of the list were the hospitals, not because they bought in quantity but because their needs would always have priority. Below that came the military branches, the utilities, the rocket experimenters who needed superheavy isotopes to line their jets, because nothing else could stand the temperatures– and below them every major endeavor of the world. In twenty-five years, superheavy isotopes had become an integral part of the whole fabric of civilization. And now they wanted to rip it out– as if any major industry could move away from all cities of more than ten thousand population. Within six months after the relocation there’d be a city three times that size nearby; there had to be, to hold the workers and the butchers and bakers and shoemakers the workers had to have! And that didn’t count the other industries needed to keep National itself running!

  His secretary’s soft voice spoke from the intercom. “Representative Morgan is here to see you, Mr. Palmer.”

  “Send him in, Thelma,” he told her. Morgan was the best man on the committee, the only one who could see the facts. Idly, though, Palmer was thinking only of the man’s white hair again, wondering whether he bleached it to get such a startling effect.

  But the rest of the man was almost as impressive. Buried in the files, Palmer had the almost forgotten fact that Morgan had spent several years on the stage under another name as a leading man before turning to law and politics. He was still a consummate actor when he chose, and his speeches were always an event. Now, though, he was acting as little as he could. He looked tired. And the hand he held out lacked some of its usual heartiness.