The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  We drink black coffee from old cups the size of small soup bowls. The coffee is chicoried and strong as Turkish.

  “Look,” I say at last. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  “What?”

  “Put Feliciana back up there.”

  “All right.”

  “Now here we are here. A mile or so from the old river.”

  “Right.”

  “Here’s the Grand Mer facility on Tunica Island.”

  “Right, and here’s the Ratliff intake here.”

  “Not a mile from Grand Mer.”

  “Right.”

  “Lucy, you’re telling me that the drinking water from here is contaminated by heavy-sodium ions.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And I’m telling you that this facility here at Grand Mer has a heavy-sodium reactor.”

  “I know.”

  “Then clearly there is a leak from this source here to this intake here.”

  “A leak or something.”

  “Or something. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  “What?”

  “If you can spare Vergil, he and I will go take a look.”

  “And I. I’ll fix you some breakfast and—”

  “Call in sick.”

  “Call in sick. Let’s go back to bed. I’ll wake you at nine.”

  I go back to bed dressed. I go back to ordinary sleep, as if I had dreamed the whole thing, panzers, nukes, bad water, Alice Pratt—but not Lucy.

  5. BREAKFAST IN THE OLD dining room is a meal of quail, grits, beaten biscuits, fried apple rings, and the same bowl-size cups of chicoried coffee. I don’t know whether Lucy or the uncle or Carrie Bon cooked it. The uncle is proud of the quail— they’re his, he’s got a freezerful—half a dozen hot little heart-shaped morsels per plate, six tender-spicy, gamy-gladdening mouthfuls.

  Lucy is half finished. She gives me a single quick look, head down, through her eyebrows. She and the uncle watch in silence while I eat. I am starved! Lucy smiles, smokes, and drinks her coffee. Satisfied, the uncle leaves.

  We move to the other end of the table, where Lucy spreads out a geodetic survey map, weights the corners with cups and cellars. She summons Vergil.

  When she stands, I see she’s wearing jeans too, worn and gray and soft as velvet. They fit her admirably. She sits at the head, Vergil and I flanking her; Vergil, arms folded on the table, eyes fixed on the map.

  “I think we got trouble,” says Lucy, plucking tobacco from her tongue. “I think there’s been a Grade Two incident at Grand Mer. Either a spill or a leak. Vergil knows the plumbing—maybe he can help us. What I can’t understand is how in the hell it could get into the Ratliffe intake upriver. In any case, it’s my business. When people get sick, etiology unknown, it becomes my business. What do you think?”

  Vergil and I look at each other, “One question, Lucy,” I say.

  “What?”

  “You know those queries you made of the data banks last night?” “Yes?”

  “Do they know they’ve been queried by you?”

  “Why?” She looks at me strangely.

  “Just curious.”

  “It’s routine epidemiology. I’m entitled. They wouldn’t red-flag it—as they might if the query were suspicious, some hacker fishing around. They know me. I did the same thing with the Jap encephalitis, though not on such a grand scale as last night.”

  “I see. Lucy, are you going to notify the feds, EPA or NRC?”

  “Of course. This is heavy-duty stuff—and you found it. We found it. We’ll both report it, okay? But before the stampede of bureaucrats, I’d like to have a look for myself. Want to come? I think you better come. You’re the guy that blew the whistle. I should think you’d be interested.”

  “I’m interested.” She’s forgotten it is my idea.

  “Vergil’s going to come. He knows the territory and the technology. He’s our resource person. Okay, Vergil?”

  “Sure,” says Vergil without looking up.

  “Okay, now look.” Lucy weights the map with more crystal goblets and salt cellars. “Here we are at Pantherburn. Here’s old Grand Mer, now a blind loop of the river, a lake. Up here is Angola, the state pen, a plantation with ten thousand inmates—which incidentally is supplied by the Ratliff number-one water district. Here’s Fedville—”

  “Is that in the water district?” I ask.

  “No, it’s not. They’ve got their own intake half a mile upriver.”

  “I see.”

  “You see what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Here’s Tunica Island, not really an island, as you see, but part of the great Tunica Swamp. Here’s the Grand Mer facility, reactor and cooling tower. Here’s Raccourci Chute, the New River, and here upriver, less than a mile from the facility, is the Ratliff intake. And next to it, over the levee, is the pumping station which supplies the area of the occurrence of your syndrome. Here, not three hundred yards upriver, is Ratliff number-two intake, which supplies all of Fedville. Now here’s the question. You already know, don’t you?” She cocks an eye at me.

  “Sure. The question is how what you call an incident can affect number-one intake, which is upriver, and not affect number two.”

  “Right,” she says, eyeing me. “Why do you say ‘what you call an incident’?”

  “That’s what you call it. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Let’s go look.” She pushes back her chair.

  “Do you just drive up to the gate and announce your business?”

  “I sure as hell do. Because it is my business. And I’ve got both federal and state passes. I can go to the facility or the water district number-one station or the Fedville station. I can go anywhere. You, Tom, are coming along because it is also your business. You discovered it. What we don’t know and mean to find out is whether it is a one-shot spill and we’ve seen the worst or whether it’s an ongoing contamination. Vergil is coming because he knows pipes. What we’ve got here, both in the facility and in the water district, is essentially nothing more than a system of pipes. And Vergil is majoring in pipes, aren’t you, Vergil?”

  Vergil smiles and nods.

  “What we got here is a pipe problem,” Lucy tells us. “A busted pipe. Got to be. Let’s go.”

  “Lucy,” I say, taking her arm, “before we go I’d like to check one more reading upstairs. Could Vergil meet us at the truck in, say, fifteen minutes?”

  “No problem.” Vergil nods and is gone.

  6. LUCY WAITS, SMILING, at her keyboard. “Who do you want to run?”

  “Ellen.”

  “Ellen.” One swift, hooded glance, but her voice doesn’t change. “Okay. How do we get a handle?”

  “Easy. She’s a volunteer nurse at Belle Ame Academy. So she takes the same physical all schoolteachers and staff take. Try State Public Health.”

  “Right. That’s—ah—Van Dorn’s outfit, isn’t it?” she asks carefully.

  “Yes.”

  “You got her SS number?”

  “Yes.” It’s with mine in my wallet. I read it out to her.

  She hits keys without comment.

  The screen nixes. She looks at me neutrally.

  “What name did you use?”

  “Ellen More.”

  “Try Ellen Oglethorpe. That’s her maiden name and tournament name.”

  A nod, no comment, not an eye flicker. She hits keys. “There she is.”

  NA-24—2.

  We look in silence. “That’s not much, Tom.”

  “No, not much. But too much. Let’s try Van Dorn. I don’t have his number.”

  “No problem,” she says, as neutrally as I. “I can get it from Fedville file.”

  She gets it, hits more keys. The screen answers laconically.

  NA-24—O.

  “How could that be?” I ask nobody in particular.

  Lucy waits, like a stenographer, watching the keyboard. After a while she looks up at me. “What’s the matter?”r />
  “Nothing. Let’s go,” I say. “Vergil will be waiting.”

  We pile into Lucy’s big pickup, Vergil standing aside so I’ll sit in the middle next to Lucy. The uncle is nowhere in sight. Maggie, the pointer, thinking she’s going hunting, jumps clear over the tailgate into the truck bed.

  “We’re not going to have any trouble,” Vergil tells us in a soft voice. “There’s only one fellow at the intake gate. I know him. He used to fish with my daddy. He’s from Baton Rouge.” The only sign that Vergil is black is the way he pronounces Baton Rouge, with a rough g, Roodge.

  He’s right. There is no trouble. We swing off the Angola road to a chain link gate, Lucy not even showing her pass to the uniformed guard in his booth, who probably recognizes her truck, out and over the Tunica flats between the high-rises of Fedville on the right and the barbed-wire chain link fence of the Grand Mer facility on the left. The gravel road slants up and over the levee. There across the still waters of old Grand Mer, now Lake Mary, and not half a mile away looms the great lopped-off cone of the cooling tower, looking for all the world like a child’s drawing of Mt. St. Helens after it blew its top. The thin flag of vapor flies from its crater. From the pumping station below a brace of great pipes strapped together like the blood vessels in the thigh humps directly up and over the levee, making an arch high enough for a truck to pass under. Across the upper blind end of Lake Mary is the old revetment, great mattresses of concrete, old, moldering, lichened, laid down years ago in a vain attempt to thwart the river’s capricious decision to jump the neck of the loop and take a shortcut south—to no avail. Ol’ Man River done made up his mind.

  Lake Mary, once the broad gulf of the river where sternwheelers made their stops at plantation landings, stretches peaceably beyond the willows. Directly in front of us the new river booms past down Raccourci Chute as if it had just discovered the shortcut, half a mile wide, foam-flecked in excitement, sparkling brown wavelets crisscrossing in angry sucks and boils. A powerful towboat pushing an acre of barges labors upstream. There is no easy water here.

  A short concrete L-shaped pier sticks out into the river. A privy-size guardhouse houses a guard not even uniformed and listening to his headset. He waves us past.

  “I don’t know what we’re looking for,” says Lucy.

  In fact, there is not much to see. The concrete ell encloses the intake, a grid of steel bars some twenty feet square. It is girded around by a protective strainer of steel fins like whale teeth in which is lodged river junk, driftwood, beer cans, chunks of Styrofoam, the whole mess coated in yellow froth.

  We stand looking down. “Well, that’s it,” says Lucy. “The grossly strained water goes down there, then up there in that pipe—how big is that pipe, Vergil?”

  “Seventy-two-inch diameter.”

  “—then over to the pumping station and purification plant. Actually, it’s good water when you drink it. We’re above the big chemical plants. For the life of me”—she nods to the tower —”I don’t see how a spill down there could get into the water here.”

  We gaze some more. There is nothing to see.

  But as we drift up the levee and back to the truck, Vergil calls us aside. We’re on top of the levee. He is standing casually, hands in pockets, looking down as usual. “You want to see something?” he asks nobody in particular.

  “Yes,” we say.

  “Look over there.” He nods toward the south without looking up.

  We look. There is nothing to see but the fence and, beyond, the batture which widens into the Tunica Swamp and is mostly grown up in willows.

  “What do you see?” I ask Vergil finally.

  “Look at the willows.”

  “I’m looking at the willows.”

  “Look at the color.”

  “The color of willows is green,” says Lucy.

  “That’s right. So what do you see. Look where I’m looking.” He looks.

  We look. “Do you mean that couple of sick willows?” I ask at last.

  “It’s a track,” says Vergil. “A faint yellowing which crosses the batture toward the tower.”

  “I see!” cries Lucy. “Damned if it isn’t! But what does—”

  “Let’s go,” I say. “We got company.”

  A small white pickup is moseying along the narrow roadway atop the levee.

  “That’s just the levee board patrol,” says Lucy. “Now what do you think that yellow means?”

  “Let’s go, Lucy,” I say, taking her arm.

  We walk slowly down the slanting gravel road. The white truck seems to pay us no attention, bumps across the access road, under the pipe arch, and goes its way.

  “Now would you mind telling me—” begins Lucy when we are in the truck.

  “Let’s wait till we get home,” I say. Vergil and I are looking straight ahead. “Drive the truck, Lucy.”

  “Okay okay.”

  7. FOR SOME REASON nobody says anything until we’re back at the dining-room table gazing down at the map.

  “Now what’s all this about, Vergil?” asks Lucy.

  “They have a line there.”

  “A line?”

  “A pipe.”

  “Where?”

  Vergil’s forefinger with its glossy nail and large half-moon rests on the green neck between the river and lake.

  “How do you know?”

  “I used to run leaks for Continental all the way from Golden Meadow to Tennessee. That’s how we spotted leaks by chopper.”

  “How?”

  “By yellowing. Grass and leaf yellowing over the pipeline. I got so I could spot the slightest off-green.”

  We look hard at the map as if we could see it.

  “I don’t understand,” says Lucy. “Couldn’t it be a gas pipeline supplying Grand Mer?”

  “No. It wouldn’t be there. This runs from Grand Mer to Ratliff number one.”

  Again we look at the map.

  “Well, if there’s a pipeline there,” says Lucy slowly, “wouldn’t there be a cleared right-of-way with signs and so forth?”

  Vergil smiles and shrugs. Ask me about pipes but don’t ask me why folks do what they do.

  Lucy looks at me. “Am I being stupid? Ya’ll seem to know something I don’t know. What does he mean?”

  “He means that there would be a right-of-way and signs only if they wanted you to know the pipeline was there.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Vergil is suggesting that there is a pipeline there and that it is hidden.”

  “I see. You mean that if there is contamination of the water supply, it is deliberate.”

  “That’s right.”

  She muses, eyes blinking and not leaving my face. “Why do I have the feeling that you are not only not surprised but that you know a lot more about this than you let on?”

  I don’t say anything.

  She looks back at Vergil. His face is blank.

  “What kind of contaminant are we talking about?” asks Lucy.

  I shrug and tap the pencil on the cone on Tunica Island. “This is an old heavy-sodium reactor, one of the first and, I believe, one of the few still around. Right, Vergil?”

  “Right,” says Vergil, taking the pencil and warming to it. The subject is pipes. “Dr. More is right about the heavy sodium, but it’s not the core, the reactor, it’s the coolant. Okay?” He corrects me gently. He begins to sketch. “Okay, this is an old LMFBR, liquid metal fast breeder reactor. You’ve got your core here, a mixture of oxides of plutonium and uranium, and around it you’ve got your blanket of uranium, U-238. Now here’s your primary coolant loop of liquid Na-24, used because of its heat-transfer properties—it’s liquid over a large range of temperatures. Here is your secondary nonradioactive sodium loop, which cooks the steam, which in turn drives the turbines. And here is your water loop, which cools your condenser and turbine.” With an odd little deprecatory gesture, Vergil both offers the drawing and shakes his head at it.

  We gaze at the loo
ps and the small tidy blacked-in core.

  “I still don’t get it,” says Lucy. “Are you telling me that stuff from here”—she taps the primary coolant loop—“gets over to here?” She taps the Ratliff intake an inch away.

  Vergil is silent. His eyes are black and blank.

  “How?” Lucy asks both of us.

  “By a pipe,” I say, watching Vergil. He nods.

  “But who—?” she begins.

  We are silent.

  “By a pipe, you say. But if that stuff was in a pipe in the willows here, it would be a liquid, wouldn’t it? So how—”

  We’re back in Vergil’s territory. “That’s right. It would have to be treated, converted to a water-soluble salt, probably a chloride—like this.” He picks up a crystal cellar from a corner of the map.

  “But somebody has to do this!” Lucy accuses him. Vergil cuts his eyes, passes her to me.

  “That’s right, Lucy. Somebody designed it and built it.”

  We think it over. Now Lucy has the import.

  “You mean to tell me,” says Lucy in a measured voice, tapping pencil on table with each word, “that somebody has deliberately diverted heavy sodium from here, through a pipe, through the Tunica Swamp here, to put it in the water supply at Ratliff number one here?”

  Vergil gazes at the map as if the answer were there.

  “That’s what we mean to tell you, Lucy.”

  “Does that mean it is something done officially, with NRC approval, perhaps by NRC, or could someone have done it surreptitiously?”

  Lucy looks at me. I look at Vergil. Vergil shrugs.

  Lucy puts her head down, raises a finger. “We’re talking about somebody official, right? Nobody could have slipped in there and done it.” We both shrug.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “A good question.”

  “Now wait,” says Lucy.

  We wait for her.

  “Assuming there is a pipe there, why is it leaking? Why the yellowing?”

  I look at Vergil—he shrugs. “It don’t take much of a leak— especially if somebody was doing the plumbing in secret without routine pipe checks.”

  Lucy is gazing at me. “We don’t know this,” she says at last. “We’re guessing.”