Nerves

by Lester Del Rey

  “Hi, Ferrel.” Palmer’s voice also had a false heartiness to it, and the use of the last name was a clear sign of some trouble. “There has been a little accident on one converter, 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 half an hour 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 pickup. “No, of course there’s no need to call Blake back, I suppose — not yet, anyway. It would only worry anyone who saw him returning. You can probably handle everything.”

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

  “Mostly radiation, I think — maybe some accident stuff, too. Someone got careless again. You know what that means; you’ve seen what happens when one of the highpressure lines breaks.”

  Doc had been through that, if that was what it was. “Sure, we can handle that, Palmer. But I thought you weren’t going to use Number One until it had been overhauled completely. And how come they haven’t installed the pressure reliefs? I thought all that was done six months ago.”

  “I didn’t say it was Number One or that a line broke. I was just comparing it to something familiar. We have to use new equipment for the new products.” Palmer looked up at someone else, confirming Doc’s idea, and his upper arms made a slight movement before he looked down at the pickup again. “I can’t go into it now, Doc; the accident’s throwing us off schedule already — 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 Three and Four alone were operating, and they were supposed to be fool-proof. Just what had happened?

  As he came out Jenkins jerked up from a bench, face muscles tense and eyes filled with a sure 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 was necessary. Palmer had said nothing about 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 Three and Four! 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 those two should be enough with Jones, they’re better than a flock of the other nurses, anyway.” Isotope 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 back 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 Three and Four?”

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

  “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 to lift, but his voice remained neutral, only slightly faster. “No connection, Dr. Ferrel; they are not make Issotope R, very much assure you. Best you forget Issotope R. Very sorry, Dr. Ferrel, I must now see accident. Thank you for call. Good-by.” The screen was blank again, along with Ferrel’s mind.

  Jenkins was standing at 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 great 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 were utterly beyond control. While the Infirmary stocked it for such emergencies, in the long years of Doc’s practice it had been used only twice; neither experience had been pleasant. Jenkins was either thoroughly frightened or overly zealous — 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-aïerated water. He added the ingredients for checking plutonic anemia and liver degeneration 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. As Jenkins came in, Doc rinsed off, 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 that Ferrel was slipping into his surgeon’s whites, which 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. His helper, 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 student 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 surgery, then looked around questioningly. “What about the supersonics?”

  Ferrel kicked them on, shuddering as a bone-shaking subharmonic hum indicated their activity. Technicians had supposedly debugged the supersonics twice, but the hum was still there. He couldn’t complain about the amount of equipment, though. Ever since the last major accident, when the state congress developed ideas, there’d been enough gadgets 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 reach. A whistling note from their generator reminded him of something that had been tickling around in the back of his mind for some minutes.

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

  Jenkins grunted skeptically and eloquently. “With everyone trying to get Congress to chase all the atom plants out into the middle of the Mojave desert, Palmer would be a fool to advertise the fact that there was another accident.”

  “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 vein, now held in place by 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 torn 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 and 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 first 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 man on the table, 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 an antibiotic 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 samples, I’d guess it as a plain industrial accident, instead of anything connected with radiation.”

  “You’ll get that, too, Doc.” It was the first man, 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. 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 toward 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, those 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. “I’m going to call Blake. We’ll probably need him.”

  Chapter 5

  Mal Jorgenson cursed as he moved about in the crushing weight of the big Tomlin suit. The bulk of its multitude of shields and the complicated nonsense of its built-in air system would have killed a lesser man in minutes, so they had to make him the guinea pig to test it. To make matters worse, it added to his stature, until even the ratholes he’d learned to navigate were too small for him. He cursed again, and swore at the pigmy race that had spawned him, with their puny minds even smaller than the silly things they called bodies.

  He wedged himself into the upper test pit of Number Three, trying to get his shoulders in far enough to hook on his gauge. There’d been no time to install a proper bank of test instruments; they could wait weeks to try his process– and then they expected him to do it all overnight!

  Finally, by resorting to pure mathematics, he found a location, and ran off a test. The results agreed with what he’d expected, of course. There might be some satisfaction in all this yet– if Palmer stuck around long enough to eat crow for the doubts that had been on his face. There were a few things Jorgenson had been saving to tell him!

  He caught his shoulder edging out, and swore hotly, not bothering to turn down the radio on his suit. Damn it, Palmer had no business insisting that everyone wear suits on this job. They only made the work more complicated, and showed the men that the manager didn’t trust him. It was standard operating procedure on an initial run, as the manager had said. But this was a special job, done on the worst possible short notice. Some concessions might have been made!

  He climbed down, his anger bearing him up. He had reason to be angry in a world where nothing fitted, where travel was an ordeal, and where even the clothes he wore had to be built to order at a price that sapped his income and left him with no hope for his future. And the women….

  He almost spat, before he remembered the visor in front of his face.

  Briggs was standing with a bunch of the men by the south converter safety chamber. The big hulk of the converter was built inside an even bigger housing, made of thick concrete, and the chambers had been designed along the outer housing wall for use in accidents. They were never meant as meeting halls, yet the fools were all huddled about the chambers, as if they had no faith in him.

  “Get those runts of yours out on the job, Briggs,” he ordered. “I don’t want to see them clumped up here again. Damn it, we’re running a new job. If I have to change the setting, or if those gauges start to go up, I want to see men where they can move. You’ve worked with me before. You know what I want.”

  “You want a knife in the guts some dark night,” Briggs said, his voice quiet and cold. “You run your blasted conversion and I’ll run the men. Palmer told me to keep them back when I could.”

  There was nothing Jorgenson could do about it. If he knocked the fool cold for his insolence, the whole pigmy group would be down on him f
or picking on a smaller man. He’d had trouble enough before– though never this much. If Palmer would back him up…But the manager wouldn’t. Even Kellar had been hell to work with and soft-headed about the men.

  He clumped away, heading through the slow-moving, massive door through the housing wall and toward Number Four. It was overdue for a check, as a result of the delay in handling the instruments where there was no room to turn. A good reader might have helped, but he’d never found one he could trust. He stood fuming while the motors in the second converter slowly pushed the entrance wide enough for him to pass through.

  Inside Number Four, Grissom was at least some improvement over Briggs. The foreman had kicked, but now he had his men spaced out where they belonged. They looked scared, but it was good for them. A little adrenalin in their blood streams might put some life into them.

  “Get that feeder dressed down,” he told Grissom. It had been badly hooked up, in spite of the bonus he’d offered that afternoon and had come partly loose so that it thumped with the changes in pressure going on inside the converter. But as long as the designers insisted on putting housings around the converters– to hold in the effects of accidents, they claimed– instead of leaving the machinery outside where it could be reached, sloppy work was to be expected.

  He climbed laboriously up to the testing pit and went through the whole operation again, figuring out a way to get his arms far enough in to read his gauge. He stared at it automatically and then his eyes focused on it sharply.

  The needle wasn’t steady.

  It was wobbling from side to side, dancing erratically. Its periodic dip and rise reminded him of something else. With a snap, his mind dug out the memory and examined it.

  The time was the same as that of the feeder that was loose.

  The pressures inside were varying, but he’d expected that. It still should have no effect on the other readings. And yet the fluctuation was obvious.