Nerves

by Lester Del Rey

  “And Heaven help us, Doc, if it’s up to me. I’ve always had a flair for atomic theory; I grew up on it. But he’s the production man who’s been working at it week in and week out, and it’s his process, to boot…. There they are now! All right for them to come back here?”

  But Hokusai and Palmer were waiting for no permission. At the moment Jorgenson was the nerve center of the plant, drawing them back, and they stalked over to stare down at him, then sat where they could be sure of missing no sign of returning consciousness. Palmer picked up the conversation where he’d dropped it, addressing his remarks to both Hokusai and Jenkins.

  “Damn that Link-Stevens postulate! Time after time it fails, until you figure there’s nothing to it; then this! It’s black magic, not science, and if I get out I’ll find some fool with more courage than sense to discover why. Hoke, are you positive it’s the theta chain? There isn’t one chance in ten thousand of that happening, you know. It’s unstable, hard to start, tends to revert to the simpler ones at the first chance.”

  Hokusai spread his hands, lifted one heavy eyelid at Jenkins questioningly, then nodded. The boy’s voice was dull, almost uninterested. “That’s what I thought it had to be, Palmer. None of the others throw off that much energy at this stage, the way you described conditions out there. Probably the last thing we tried to quench it set it up in that pattern and it’s in a concentration just right to keep it going. We figured ten hours was the best chance, so it had to pick the six-hour short chain.”

  “Yeah.” Palmer was pacing up and down nervously again, his eyes swinging toward Jorgenson from whatever direction he moved. “And in six hours maybe all the population around here can be evacuated, maybe not, but we’ll have to try it. Doc, I can’t even wait for Jorgenson now! I’ve got to get the Governor started at once!”

  “They’ve been known to practice lynch law, even in recent years,” Ferrel reminded him grimly. He’d seen the result of one such case of mob violence when he was practicing privately and he knew that people remain pretty much the same year after year; they’d move, but first they’d demand a sacrifice. “Better get the men out of here first, Palmer, and my advice is to get yourself a good long distance off; I heard some of the trouble at the gate, but that won’t be anything compared to what an evacuation order will do.”

  Palmer grunted. “Doc, you might not believe it, but I don’t give a continental about what happens to me or the plant right now.”

  “Or to the men? Put a mob in here hunting your blood and the men will be on your side, because they know it wasn’t your fault and they’ve seen you out there taking chances yourself. That mob won’t be too choosy about its targets, either, once it gets worked up, and you’ll have a nice vicious brawl all over the place. Besides, Jorgenson’s practically ready.”

  A few more minutes would make no difference in the evacuation, and Doc had no desire to think of his partially crippled wife going through the hell evacuation would be; she’d probably refuse to go until he returned. His eyes fell on the box Jenkins was playing with nervously, and he stalled for time. “I thought you said it was risky to break the stuff down into small particles, Jenkins. But that box contains the stuff in various sizes, including one big piece we scraped out, along with the contaminated instruments. Why hasn’t it exploded?”

  Jenkins’ hand jerked up from it as if burned and he backed away a step before checking himself. Then he was across the room toward the I-631 and back, pouring the white powder over everything in the box in a jerky frenzy. Hokusai’s eyes had snapped fully open and he was slopping water to fill up the remaining space and keep the I-631 in contact with everything else. Almost at once, in spite of the low relative energy release, it sent up a white cloud of steam faster than the air conditioner could clear the room; but that soon faded down and disappeared.

  Hokusai wiped his forehead slowly. “The suits — armor of the men?”

  “Sent ‘em back to the converter and had them dumped into the stuff to be safe long ago,” Jenkins answered. “But I forgot the box, like a fool. Ugh! Either blind chance saved us, or else the stuff spit out was all one kind, some reasonably long chain I don’t know nor care right —”

  “S’ot! Nnuh…Whmah nahh?”

  “Jorgenson!” They swung from the end of the room like one man, but Jenkins was the first to reach the table. Jorgenson’s eyes were open and rolling in a semi-orderly manner, his hands moving sluggishly. The boy hovered over his face, his own practically glowing with the intensity behind it. “Jorgenson, can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Uh.” The eyes ceased moving and centered on Jenkins. One hand came up to his throat, clutching it, and he tried unsuccessfully to lift himself with the other, but the aftereffects of what he’d been through seemed to have left him in a state of partial paralysis.

  Ferrel had hardly dared to hope that the man could be rational, and his relief was tinged with doubt. He pushed Palmer back and shook his head. “No, stay back. Let the boy handle it; he knows enough to avoid a shock to the man now, and you don’t. This can’t be rushed too much.”

  “I — uh…Young Jenkins? You gotta righ’. Been thinkin’ — wrong ‘bout ever’thing!” Somewhere in Jorgenson’s huge frame, an untapped reserve of energy and will sprang up, and he forced himself into a sitting position, his eyes on Jenkins, his hands still catching at the reluctant throat that refused to cooperate. His words were blurry and uncertain, but sheer determination overcame the obstacles and made the words understandable. “Y’r dad tol’ me —”

  “Dad’s dead, Jorgenson. Now — .”

  “‘Sright. ‘N I’m grown up. ‘Bout twelve years old, y’were…The plant —!”

  “Easy, Jorgenson.” Jenkins’ own voice managed to sound casual, though his hands under the table were white where they clenched together. “Listen, and don’t try to say anything until I finish. The plant’s still all right, but we’ve got to have your help. Here’s what happened.”

  Ferrel could make little sense of the cryptic sentences that followed, though he gathered that they were some form of engineering shorthand; apparently, from Hokusai’s approving nod, they summed up the situation briefly but fully, and Jorgenson sat rigidly still until it was finished, his eyes fastened on the boy.

  “Helluva mess! Gotta think. Yuh tried —” He made an attempt to lower himself back, and Jenkins assisted him, hanging feverishly on each awkward, uncertain change of expression on the man’s face. “Uh — da’ sroat! Yuh — uh — urrgh!”

  “Got it?”

  “Uh!” The tone was affirmative, unquestionably, but the clutching hands around his neck told their own story. The temporary burst of energy he’d forced was exhausted and he couldn’t get through with the answer. He lay there breathing heavily and struggling, then relaxed after a few more half-whispered words, none intelligently articulated.

  Palmer clutched at Ferrel’s sleeve. “Doc, isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “Try.” He metered out a minute quantity of drug doubtfully, felt Jorgenson’s pulse, and decided on half that amount. “Not much hope, though; that man’s been through hell and it wasn’t good for him to be forced around in the first place. Carry it too far and he’ll be delirious if he does talk. Anyway, I suspect it’s a partly his speech centers as well as the throat.”

  But Jorgenson began a slight rally almost instantly, trying again, then apparently drawing himself together for a final attempt. When they came, the words spilled out harshly in forced clearness, but without inflection.

  “First…variable…at…twelve…water…stop.” His eyes, centered on Jenkins, closed, and he relaxed again, this time no longer fighting off the inevitable unconsciousness.

  Hokusai, Palmer and Jenkins were staring back and forth at one another questioningly. The little Japanese shook his head negatively at first, frowned and repeated it, to be imitated almost exactly by the manager. “Delirious ravings!”

  “The great white hope, Jorgenson!” Jenkins’ shoulde
rs dropped and the blood drained from his face, leaving it ghastly with fatigue and despair. “Oh, damn it, Doc, stop staring at me! I can’t pull a miracle out of a hat!”

  Doc hadn’t realized that he was staring but he made no effort to change it. “Maybe not, but you happen to have the most active imagination here, when you stop abusing it to scare yourself. Well, you’re on the spot now and I’m still giving odds on you. Want to bet, Hoke?”

  It was an utterly stupid thing and Doc knew it; but somewhere during the long hours together he’d picked up a queer respect for the boy and a dependence on the nervousness that wasn’t fear but closer akin to the reaction of a rear-running thoroughbred on the home stretch. Hoke was too slow and methodical and Palmer had been too concerned with outside worries to give anywhere nearly full attention to the single most urgent phase of the problem; that left only Jenkins, hampered by his lack of self-confidence.

  Hoke gave no sign that he caught the meaning of Doc’s heavy wink, but he lifted his eyebrows faintly. “No, I think I am not bet. Dr. Jenkins, I am to be command!”

  Palmer looked briefly at the boy, whose face mirrored incredulous confusion, but he had neither Ferrel’s ignorance of atomic technique nor Hokusai’s fatalism. With a final glance at the unconscious Jorgenson, he started across the room toward the phone. “You men play if you like. I’m starting evacuation immediately!”

  “Wait!” Jenkins was shaking himself, physically as well as mentally. “Hold it, Palmer! Thanks, Doc. You knocked me out of the rut and bounced my memory back to something I picked up somewhere; I think it’s the answer! It has to work — nothing else can at this stage of the game!”

  “Give me the Governor, operator.” Palmer had heard but he went on with the phone call. “This is no time to play crazy hunches, until after we get the people out, kid. I’ll admit you’re a darned clever amateur, but you’re no atomicist!”

  “And if we get the men out it’s too late — there’ll be no one left in here to do the work!” Jenkins’ hand snapped out and jerked the receiver of the plug-in telephone from Palmer’s hand. “Cancel the call, operator; it won’t be necessary. Palmer, you’ve got to listen to me; you can’t clear the whole middle of the continent and you can’t depend on the explosion to limit itself to less ground. It’s a gamble, but you’re risking fifty million people against a mere hundred thousand. Give me a chance!”

  “I’ll give you exactly one minute to convince me, Jenkins, and it had better be good! Maybe the blow-up won’t hit beyond the fifty-mile limit!”

  “Maybe. And I can’t explain in a minute.” The boy scowled tensely. “Okay, you’ve been belly-aching about a man named Kellar being dead. If he were here would you take a chance on him? Or on a man who’d worked under him on everything he tried?”

  “Absolutely, but you’re not Kellar. And I happen to know he was a lone wolf; didn’t hire outside engineers after Jorgenson had a squabble with him and came here.” Palmer reached for the phone. “It won’t wash, Jenkins.”

  Jenkins’ hand clamped down on the instrument, jerking it out of reach. “I wasn’t outside help, Palmer. When Jorgenson was afraid to run one of the things off and quit, I was twelve; three years later things got too tight for Dad to handle alone but he decided he might as well keep it in the family, so he started me in. I’m Kellar’s stepson!”

  Pieces clicked together in Doc’s head then, and he kicked himself mentally for not having seen the obvious before. “That why Jorgenson knew you, then? I thought that was funny. It checks, Palmer.”

  For a split second the manager hesitated uncertainly. Then he shrugged and gave in. “Okay. I’m a fool to trust you, Jenkins, but it’s too late for anything else, I guess. I never forgot that I was gambling with the locality against half the continent. What do you want?”

  “Men — construction men, mostly, and a few volunteers for dirty work. I want all the blowers, exhaust equipment, tubing, booster blowers, and everything ripped from the other three converters and connected as close to Number Four as you can get. Put them up some way so they can be shoved in over the stuff by crane — I don’t care how; the shop men will know better than I do. You’ve got sort of a river running off behind the plant; get everyone within a few miles of it out of there and connect the blower outlets down to it. Where does it end, anyway — some kind of a swamp?”

  “About two miles farther down, yes; we didn’t bother keeping the drainage system going since the land meant nothing to us and the swamps made as good a dumping ground as anything else.” When the plant had first used the little river as an outlet for their waste products, there had been so much trouble that National had been forced to take over all adjacent land and quiet the owners’ fears of the atomic activity in cold cash. Since then it had gone to weeds and rabbits, mostly. “Everyone within a few miles is out, anyway, except a few fishers or tramps who don’t know we use it. I’ll have the militia sent in to scare them out.”

  “Good. Ideal, in fact, since the swamps will hold stuff longer in there where the current’s slow. Now, what about the super-thermite stuff you were producing last year? Any around?”

  “Not in the plant. But we’ve got tons of it at the ware-house, still waiting for the army’s requisition. That’s pretty hot stuff to handle, though. Know much about it?”

  “Enough to know it’s what I want.” Jenkins indicated the copy of the Weekly Ray still lying where he’d dropped it, and Doc remembered skimming through the nontechnical part of the description. The super-thermite was made up of two superheavy atoms, kept separate. By itself neither was particularly important or active but together they reacted with each other atomically to release a tremendous amount of raw heat and comparatively little unwanted radiation. “Goes up around twenty thousand centigrade, doesn’t it? How’s it stored?”

  “In ten-pound cans that have a fragile partition; it breaks with shock, starting the action. Hoke can explain it — it’s his baby.” Palmer reached for the phone. “Anything else? Then get out and get busy! The men will be ready for you when you get there! I’ll be out myself as soon as I can put through your orders.”

  Doc watched them go out, to be followed in short order by the manager, and was alone in the Infirmary with Jorgenson and his own thoughts. They weren’t pleasant; he was both too far outside the inner circle to know what was going on and too much mixed up in it not to know the dangers. Now he could have used some work….

  He grunted in disgust at himself and dug out the blood sample of the ringer. It was no great effort to prepare it and to set up the microscope. Then he was studying the cells. There wasn’t much question. The excess white count and large number of juvenile cells were typical. Everything indicated chronic myelogenous leukemia. If the woman didn’t receive treatment soon, she’d be dead in a year.

  That meant that Palmer had no worry there — and that Doc again had nothing to do. He wriggled down in the leather chair, making the mistake of trying to force sleep, while his mind chased out after every sound that came in from outside. There were the drones of crane and tank motors coming to life, the shouts of hurried orders and above all the jarring rhythm of pneumatic hammers on metal, each sound suggesting some possibility to him without adding to his knowledge. The Decameron was boring, the whiskey tasted raw and rancid, and solitaire wasn’t worth the trouble of cheating.

  Finally he gave up and turned out to the field hospital tent. Jorgenson would be better off out there under the care of the staff from Mayo’s, and perhaps he could make himself useful. As he passed through the rear entrance he heard the sound of a number of helicopters coming over with heavy loads and looked up as they began settling over the edge of the buildings. From somewhere a group of men came running forward and disappeared in the direction of the freighters. He wondered whether any of those men would be forced back into the stuff out there to return filled with radioactive; though it didn’t matter so much now that the isotope could be eliminated without surgery.

  Blake met him at the entranc
e of the field tent, obviously well satisfied with his duty of bossing and instructing the others. “Scram, Doc. You aren’t needed here, and you have to get some rest. Don’t want you added to the casualties. What’s the latest dope from the powwow front?”

  “Jorgenson didn’t come through, but the kid had an idea and they’re out there working on it.” Doc tried to sound more hopeful than he felt. “I was thinking you might as well bring Jorgenson in here; he’s still unconscious, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Where’s Brown? She’ll probably want to know what’s up, if she isn’t asleep.”

  “Asleep when the kid isn’t? Uh-unh. Mother complex, has to worry about him.” Blake grinned. “She got a look at him running out with Hoke tagging at his heels, and hiked out after him, so she probably knows everything now. Wish Anne’d chase me that way just once — Jenkins, the wonder boy! Well, it’s out of my line; I don’t intend to start worrying until they pass out the order. Okay, Doc, I’ll have Jorgenson out here in a couple of minutes, so you grab yourself a cot and get some shut-eye.”

  Doc grunted, looking curiously at the refinements and well-equipped interior of the field tent. “I’ve already prescribed that, Blake, but the patient can’t seem to take it. I think I’ll hunt up Brown, so give me a call over the public speaker if anything turns up.”

  He headed toward the center of action, knowing that he’d been wanting to do it all along but hadn’t been sure of not being a nuisance. Well if Brown could look on there was no reason why he couldn’t. He passed the machine shop, noting the excited flurry of activity going on, and went past Number Two, where other men were busily ripping out long sections of big piping and various other devices. There was a rope fence barring his way, well beyond Number Three, and he followed along the edge, looking for Palmer or Brown.