Percy showed them all how to read the dosimeter he insisted they each now wear at all times. He used his as the example. “See, it’s not even a measurable amount. But as I told Andrew, we don’t take any chances. From now on, until the radiation falls back to the background level I have recorded for here, we wear the dosimeters and track our accumulated dose, as well as taking readings with the survey meter regularly. We limit our outside trips to those absolutely necessary. And for the immediate future, only Sara, Mattie, and I will go outside, unless there is a major emergency.”
All the rest immediately protested that they should share the risk. Percy raised his hand to quiet them and explained. “We three are the oldest. We’ll be close to the end of our lives before a low dose of radiation will usually result in cancer or other problems. Like thirty or forty years from now. Even if it’s twenty, we’ll still be old. You all would just be in the prime of your life, even still in the childbearing years for some. There is no reason for you younger people possibly to suffer during the most productive part of your life, if it can be avoided.
“It’s not that you won’t get some exposure. It’s bound to happen. We won’t be in shelter forever. We will limit the exposure more, the younger you are. We’re talking long term planning here. We have to think of accumulated dosages over the next twenty, thirty, forty years. Even after it’s safe to go out… relatively speaking, each and every time you do, you will be getting a little radiation.
“We’ll decontaminate here. Things are set up to make it relatively easy. But the radiation will be decaying after the detonations stop and the dose rate peaks. By the seven ten rule, radiation should be one tenth what it is an hour after the peak dose rate, seven hours after that first hour, then one-tenth of that 49 hours later, then a tenth of that about two weeks later and so on. For each seven fold increase in time the dose rate, assuming no new radiation, the dose rate drops to a tenth of what it was.
“So, if we were to peak at… say… one thousand Röentgens it would be down to zero point one Röentgen in four months and down to zero point zero one Röentgen after about two and a half years.
“While the fallout is building, then the first two days are really dangerous. Then the next two weeks, still dangerous, but should be okay after that to go out for decontamination and necessities. After four months, it will be a matter of sleeping in shelter, but working in decontaminated areas should be okay for a regular daily schedule. In less than three years, there won’t be much to worry about, except the weather.”
“Nuclear winter?” Melissa asked.
“Possibly, more likely climate change for other reasons. We’ve been staring at the possibility since the North Sea started freshening up from melting ice. We might get colder, warmer, or stay the same. One thing is for sure, the weather will be unsettled for a long time. As much ash as we are getting, and the different varieties, makes me think that a lot of volcanoes let loose. A couple of big volcanoes can put more debris in the air than all the nukes that could be used.
“If the trend is warmer, we’re looking for lots of rain. If the trend is a lot cooler, then we should expect drier weather. Either way, the storms will be worse with really heavy rains and snow, even if it’s cooler and drier over all. If it’s warmer then we’ll just get lots and lots of rain and that’s if we’re really lucky… Geez!”
The dome shook yet again. Percy ran to the den and flipped on a TV, flipped another switch, then worked a remote control. “This camera is in a grounded steel housing out by the towers. I opened the cover. Look.”
There was an ugly glow in the distance to the west, illuminating the clouds and falling ash. “Probably thirty miles, possibly more,” Percy said. “No target there. It could be one that just missed or there’s something there that we never knew about but they did.” Percy didn’t specify who ‘they’ were.
“I just thought!” Jock exclaimed. “What about chemical or biological weapons?”
They all looked at Percy. “They both have very localized areas of destruction. If any were used… are being used, the effect will be right there. They are primarily tactical weapons. They can be used for denial of territory, too, on a strategic scale. We should be fine. The house HVAC system has appropriate filters. So do the animal barn fans. There is a danger of biological weapons spreading diseases from locally affected populations, but I doubt there’ll be much long distance travel for a long time.
“Most of the biologicals I know about are virulent and would kill off those exposed quickly. It wouldn’t be able to spread without fast transportation. And chemicals should dissipate pretty quickly. Nor are they mobile. They’ll stay where they are, except for some possible runoff problems.
“There is always the possibility. We will just have to watch for signs of them as we go about our business. I have suits and respirators for the decontamination. They’re good for NBC. We’ll be wearing them when we first go out anyway, so if there was something biological or chemical we’ll be protected until we can detect it.
“Since we’re on the subject, when we do start going out, without the protective suits, I want everyone in long sleeves and no shorts. Everyone wears a wide brim hat, or at least a cap. There’s going to be a lot of UV exposure, probably. Even when it’s cloudy. A person could pick up a burn without realizing it. Try to wear UV coated glasses, sunglasses or clear, whenever it’s daytime, to protect the eyes from the UV exposure.
“Now, I want to go check the animals after this tremor. They’ll probably be agitated and upset anyway about being cooped up.”
Everyone except Mattie went with Percy and helped calm the animals. The horses and dogs were the most agitated, but calmed down quickly with the human presence. The cattle and chickens didn’t seem to be affected. The pigs showed signs of having been, but were happily rooting around the dirt floor in their area of the barn.
The dirt areas in the barn had raised quite a few comments from people that learned about them. Percy never really explained why he had them. He just told people he was too cheap to buy concrete.
In actuality, it was for the animals’ health that he had put in pits in the barn floor and filled them with dirt. The surfaces were kept raked clean of wastes, which went into the compost piles or the methane generator, or both. Each animal had an individual stall, if needed, but were allowed, for the most part, to stay in designated areas in groups.
The barn was a series of connected domes, creating plenty of space for the animals, with a generous area for work and another for feed storage. There was even a well-equipped veterinary area so they could do much of the vet work themselves. Doc usually came to the barn to do what he needed to the animals. Only if one needed isolation did Percy take the animal over to Doc’s hospital. He could isolate three animals in the barn if he needed to, it was just labor intensive to take care of them. Doc had a couple of hired hands that did it for him.
The stalls were equipped with individual automatic feeders and waterers. The compounds were equipped with group feeders for each type of animal. Percy, as he did the crops, rotated the animals on the different areas yearly to minimize the chance for disease organisms building up. The occasional complete emptying and refilling of the pits also helped.
The studs were usually stalled when a female of the species came into estrus, when Percy wanted outside breeding. There were separate birthing areas for the horses, cattle, and pigs. The chickens had their yard and coop in the barn. There was a separate sitting coop for when he allowed a brood hen to hatch eggs.
Most of the cattle came to the edge of their pen to watch as Percy and Susie put the horses and dogs through their paces. The pigs pretty much just kept rooting around or sleeping. The humans seemed to enjoy the activity as much as the horses and dogs. They returned the dogs to their indoor kennel. Several went to the doors through which they normally went outside, but made no fuss when they were told they had to stay inside.
Percy showed them the rest of the tunnels and the utility rooms of t
he various barns before they went back to the house, staying in the tunnels. Mattie had a late lunch on the table when the others returned.
“Reading is up,” Mattie said when they all gathered in the dining room after having washed up. “A lot.”
Percy went to look at it before he sat down to eat. “Three hundred and climbing,” he said when the others looked at him. Percy wasn’t particularly religious, but he asked Sara to say grace before they ate.
She did, and included Percy in the thanks for giving them shelter from the storm. They all said heartfelt amen’s to the sentiment, knowing the storm Sara meant. As the meal neared its end, Percy said, “I’m going to hook up a shortwave receiver and see what I can get. I’ve tried the regular broadcast bands and there wasn’t anything. Satellite services seem to be out, too. Anyone want to listen in?”
When the others all gave resounding versions of ‘yes, of course they wanted to listen,’ Percy muttered, “Stupid question, I guess.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon listening. There was a great deal of static. There were also some conversations going on in the amateur radio bands, which brought sighs of relief from most of the others. Percy had expected it, but the others seemed to think they might be the only survivors, after the radiation levels began climbing.
They felt several more shocks, though they were very weak. There was much speculation of what was causing them. Nukes, volcanoes, or earthquakes. There was simply no way to tell. Percy checked the camera occasionally, always closing the protective cover after a quick look around. It would be several days before he went out and installed another camera on the antenna towers.
The next few days were spent the same way. Sleeping, eating, tending the animals, and listening to the shortwave. Things were more or less normal, except they couldn’t go outside and there was no live TV.
Percy had a vast library of books, music, and video. There were days when there was quite a bit of activity on the shortwave, others when there was little but static. Those days the library got a lot of use. Percy was convinced that the war was still raging in some places in the world. The radiation spiked three times, the last time at six hundred Röentgens/hr, then began a steady decline.
At the end of eight days after the last peak, the dose rate was under two Röentgens/hr. Percy would go out the next day and put up a camera. Mattie and Sara would begin the decontamination.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It took Percy less than a half an hour to mount the camera, return to the house, and decontaminate. He’d put a time limit of a half hour on all of them. He paced while he waited for Sara and Mattie to finish their half hour. They seem determined to stay the full length of time, though both had seen him go into the garage.
Percy managed to wait for them without calling them on the radio and telling them to come in. He was waiting by the door when they came through, each woman not starting to remove their respirators, rubber boots, or Tyvek suits until they were in the mudroom. Percy had a simple decontamination shower in the garage that drained to a dry sump in the yard. They’d hosed each other down thoroughly before going inside.
“Barely getting a tick now,” Sara said, handing Percy her dosimeter. He checked it, then Mattie’s. They picked up only a tiny dose, as had he. He made a point to log it on the chart he’d printed for each person. He’d enter the data in a computer later to keep a running track of accumulated dose over given time periods.
The Doctors Bluhm had been reading up on radiation sickness in the library and were now familiar with the symptoms. At the doses the three had been exposed to, there was no danger. The doctors, as well as Percy, intended to keep it that way.
“Just a tick,” Sara repeated. “Inside the berms of the house. Outside, of course, it’s still over one. Do you think we can do the animal barn tomorrow and maybe let the animals out, one at a time?”
“Not yet. They’re going to want to run free a bit. I want to use the sweeper on at least one of the pastures first. I’m debating whether or not to strip the top soil. I want to look at the crops, too, and decide what to do about them. I’ll do what I can in the greenhouses, too. The automatic systems are okay, I saw the watering system go on as I was coming back to the house. We should be able to recover quite a bit.”
“Whoa!” Jock said. “Even if all that needs to be done, you can’t do it all. Not in one day. It’s low enough that a couple of us can get just a little exposure the next couple of days. It should be below zero point six in less than a week, if my calculations are right. We’ll be able to do a lot then.”
Percy frowned.
“Come on, Boss. We spray the outsides of the greenhouses, and then I can go in and work the greenhouses for half an hour,” Susie said.
“Yeah. I know you and Mrs. McLain, and Mrs. Simpson will do most of it right away, but we can risk a little exposure,” Andy said. “Except Doctor Bluhm, of course, since she’s still pregnant.”
“And I will be for another eight months. I don’t want to go out much, but a few minutes of fresh air, in the decontaminated zone won’t hurt, will it?”
Jock looked reluctant, but his studies told him that the risk was minimal. They had to wear the respirators while they were stirring up dust, but a few minutes without one in the area that Sara and Mattie had cleared today should be okay. He said as much.
Melissa smiled. The others frowned. “Tomorrow,” Jock quickly added. “After the area is tested again.”
“Well, okay,” Melissa said. She touched her belly and said, “I don’t want anything happening to junior here, but I really need to get outside. I could stand it when I had to. Now it’s hard.”
“We all feel the same way,” Percy said. He hung up the suits and racked the boots, gloves, and respirators for their next use.
They had the entrances and work areas decontaminated by the end of the week, including the patios atop each of the buildings. It hadn’t occurred to Percy to do it sooner. As soon as they were hosed down, and the slopes of the dome, there wasn’t even a tick on the survey meter in the center of the patios, being as high as they were and with the mass of the earth covering the domes between the remaining fallout particles and those at the patio center. The radiation was very little higher even at the edges.
Percy decided, for the first pasture to be decontaminated, to till it very shallowly and scrape the tilled soil up. He dug a pit just outside the pasture and buried the dirt he scraped up. Percy had washed three large patches of grass near the barn. He’d used a fire hose run from the barn to wash any fallout from the patches to the surrounding grass. He left the washed patches when he tilled the rest of the pasture. When they turned the animals out the horses and cows went immediately to the three grassy areas. The hogs and chickens were happy with the large expanse of bare ground.
Percy debated about trying to reseed the pasture. The occasional rain they were getting was washing some of the high flying, very light fallout particles out of the sky, but the radiation levels were so low, and Percy knew it would continue for months, if not years, that he decided to go ahead and get the pasture reseeded. He waited until the next day and used a broadcast spreader on one of the Unimogs to get the seed distributed.
They were still limiting their exposures, keeping the time outdoors down, and wearing the exposure suits and respirators whenever they were doing decontamination work, which was at least a little every day it wasn’t raining. Percy decided the field crops were going to be a total loss, except as feed for the methane generator and the alcohol still. They would be cut down at ground level, raked into windrows, collected, and then fed to the stills.
After the alcohol content was extracted the material would go into the methane generator. The remains would be buried in a pit. Percy knew it would be useable as compost eventually, but decided to let it wait a couple of years in the pit. Then the compost would be used on fields set aside to grow crops not for human or animal consumption. Those fields would be used for fuel crops for the biodiesel oper
ation.
There was some loss in the greenhouses due to the lack of attention the first few days when radiation levels were too high to go into them from the earth-sheltered structure to which they were connected. Sixteen days after the radiation had peaked at six hundred Röentgens, Percy decided to make a run into town with the produce from the greenhouses. Susie loved the animals and could not help when Percy butchered a dozen chickens, a calf and two of the yearling pigs to take in, too.
He’d always sent the animals in to the butcher shop, but had everything needed to handle the job at the estate. Percy was a bit surprised when Jock offered to help. He wasn’t surprised when Andy did. Andy wanted to learn everything. With the meat and fresh milk on ice from the large ice machine in the product barn, they headed into town with six dozen eggs, the produce, milk, and meat.
Percy was both pleased and disappointed with what he found in town. He, Jock, Andy, Sara, and Susie went. Percy and Sara were in a Unimog with the products, the others were in the van, with Susie driving.
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