The Tommyknockers Page 11

  To Gard he didn't look like a man anymore. The shaggy head of a wolf poked out of the collar of his white shirt with the narrow red pinstripes. It looked around, pink tongue lolling, greenish-yellow eyes sparkling. Arberg squealed some sort of approval and stuffed more odd lots into his pink pig's snout. Patricia McCardle now had the smooth sleek head of a whippet. The college dean and his wife were weasels. And the wife of the man from the electric company had become a frightened rabbit, pink eyes rolling behind thick glasses.

  Oh, Gard, no, his mind moaned.

  He blinked again and they were just people.

  "And one thing these protesters never remember to mention at their protest rallies is just this," Ted the Power Man finished, looking around at them like a trial lawyer reaching the climax of his summation. "In thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, there has never been one single fatality as the result of nuclear power in the United States of America." He smiled modestly and tossed off the rest of his Scotch. "I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that," the man who looked like a college dean said. "And now I think my wife and I--"

  "Did you know that Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning?" Gardener asked conversationally. Heads turned. "Yeah. Leukemia induced by direct exposure to gamma rays. She was the first casualty along the death march with this guy's power plant at the end. She did a lot of research, and recorded it all."

  Gardener looked around the suddenly silent room.

  "Her notebooks are locked up in a vault," he said. "A vault in Paris. It's lead-lined. The notebooks are whole, but too radioactive to touch. As for who's died here, we don't really know. The AEC and the EPA keep a lid on it."

  Patricia McCardle was frowning at him. With the dean temporarily forgotten, Arberg went back to scrounging along the denuded buffet table.

  "On the fifth of October 1966," Gardener said, "there was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor in Michigan."

  "Nothing happened," Ted the Power Man said, and spread his hands to the assembled company as if to say, You see? QED.

  "No," Gardener said. "Nothing did. God may know why, but my guess is no one else does. The chain reaction stopped on its own. No one knows why. One of the engineers the contractors called in took a look, smiled, and said, 'You guys almost lost Detroit.' Then he fainted."

  "Oh, but Mr. Gardener! That was--"

  Gardener held up a hand. "When you examine the cancer-death stats for the areas surrounding every nuclear-power facility in the country, you find anomalies, deaths that are way out of line with the norm."

  "That is utterly untrue, and--"

  "Let me finish, please. I don't think the facts make any difference anymore, but let me finish anyway. Long before Chernobyl, the Russians had an accident at a reactor in a place called Kyshtym. But Khrushchev was Premier then, and the Soviets kept their lips a lot tighter. It looks like maybe they were storing used rods in a shallow ditch. Why not? As Madame Curie might have said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Our best guess is that the core-rods oxidized, only instead of creating ferrous oxide, or rust, the way steel rods do, these rods rusted pure plutonium. It was like building a campfire next to a tank filled with LP gas, but they didn't know that. They assumed it would be all right. They assumed." He could hear the rage filling his voice and was helpless to stop it. "They assumed, they played with the lives of living human beings as if they were ... well, so many dolls ... and guess what happened?"

  The room was silent. Patty's mouth was a frozen red slash. Her complexion was milky with rage.

  "It rained," Gardener said. "It rained hard. And that started a chain reaction that caused an explosion. It was like the eruption of a mud volcano. Thousands were evacuated. Every pregnant woman was given an abortion. There was no choice involved. The Russian equivalent of a turnpike in the Kyshtym area was closed for almost a year. Then, when word started to leak out that a very bad accident had happened on the edge of Siberia, the Russians opened the road again. But they put up some really hilarious signs. I've seen the photos. I don't read Russian, but I've asked four or five different people for a translation, and they all agree. It sounds like a bad ethnic joke. Imagine yourself driving along an American thruway--1-95 or 1-70, maybe--and coming up on a sign that says PLEASE CLOSE ALL WINDOWS, TURN OFF ALL VENTILATION ACCESSORIES, AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOUR CAR WILL GO FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MILES."

  "Bullshit!" Ted the Power Man said loudly.

  "Photographs available under the Freedom of Information Act," Gard said. "If this guy was only lying, maybe I could live with it. But he and the rest of the people like him are doing something worse. They're like salesmen telling the public that cigarettes not only don't cause lung cancer, they're full of vitamin C and keep you from having colds."

  "Are you implying--"

  "Thirty-two at Chernobyl we can verify. Hell, maybe it is only thirty-two. We've got photos taken by American doctors which suggest there must be well over two hundred already, but say thirty-two. It doesn't change what we've learned about high-rad exposure. The deaths don't all come at once. That's what's so deceiving. The deaths come in three waves. First, the people who get fried in the accident. Second, the leukemia victims, mostly kids. Third, the most lethal wave: cancer in adults forty and over. So much cancer you might as well go on and call it a plague. Skin cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, melanoma, and bone cancer are the most common. But you also got your intestinal cancer, your bladder cancer, your brain tumors, your--"

  "Stop, can't you please stop?" Ted's wife cried. Hysteria lent her voice a surprising power.

  "I would if I could, dear," he said gently. "I can't. In 1964 the AEC commissioned a study on a worst-case scenario if an American reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl blew. The results were so scary the AEC buried the report. It suggested--"

  "Shut up, Gardener," Patty said loudly. "You're drunk." He ignored her, fixing his eyes on the power-man's wife. "It suggested that such an accident in a relatively rural area of the USA--the one they picked was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three-Mile Island is, by the way--would kill 45,000 folks, rad seventy percent of the state, and do seventeen million dollars' worth of damage."

  "Holy fuck!" someone cried. "Are you shitting?"

  "Nope," Gardener said, never taking his eyes from the woman, who now seemed hypnotized with terror. "If you multiply by five, you get 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars' worth of damage." He refilled his glass nonchalantly in the silent grave of the room, tipped it at Arberg, and drank two mouthfuls of straight vodka. Uncontaminated vodka, one hoped. "So!" he finished.

  "We're talking almost a quarter of a million people dead by the time the third wave dissipates, around 2040." He winked at Ted the Power Man, whose lips had pulled back from his teeth. "Be hard to get that many people even on a 767, wouldn't it?"

  "Those figures came directly out of your butt," Ted the Power Man said angrily.

  "Ted--" the man's wife said nervously. She had gone dead pale except for tiny spots of red burning high up on her cheekbones.

  "You expect me to stand here and listen to that ... that party-line rhetoric?" he asked, approaching Gardener until they were almost chest to chest. "Do you?"

  "At Chernobyl they killed the kids," Gardener said. "Don't you understand that? The ones ten years old, the ones in utero. Most may still be alive, but they are dying right now while we stand here with our drinks in our hands. Some can't even read yet. Most will never kiss a girl in passion. Right now while we're standing here with our drinks in our hands.

  "They killed their children."

  He looked at Ted's wife, and now his voice began to shake and to rise slightly, as if in a plea.

  "We know from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, from our own tests at Trinity and on Bikini. They killed their own children, do you dig what I'm saying? There are nine-yearolds in Pripyat who are going to die shitting out their own intestines! They killed the children!"

  Ted's wife took a step back, eyes wide behind he
r glasses, mouth twitching.

  "We'll acknowledge that Mr. Gardener is a fine poet, I think," Ted the Power Man said, putting an arm around his wife and pulling her to his side again. It was like watching a cowboy rope a calf. "He's not very well-informed about nuclear power, however. We really have no idea what may or may not have happened at Kyshtym, and the Russian figures on the Chernobyl casualties are--"

  "Cut the shit," Gardener said. "You know what I'm talking about. Bay State Electric has got all this stuff in its files, along with the elevated cancer rates in the areas surrounding American nuclear-power facilities, the water contaminated by nuclear waste--the water in deep aquifers, the water people wash their clothes and their dishes and themselves in, the water they drink. You know. You and every other private, municipal, state, and federal power company in America."

  "Stop it, Gardener," McCardle warned, stepping forward. She flashed an overbrilliant smile around the group. "He's a little--"

  "Ted, did you know?" Ted's wife asked suddenly.

  "Sure, I've got some stats, but--"

  He broke off. His jaw snapped shut so hard you could almost hear it. It wasn't much . . . but it was enough. Suddenly they knew--all of them--that he had omitted a good deal of scripture from his sermon. Gardener felt a moment of sour, unexpected triumph.

  There was a moment of awkward silence and then, quite deliberately, Ted's wife stepped away from him. He flushed. To Gard he looked like a man who has just whanged his thumb with a hammer.

  "Oh, we have all kinds of reports," he said. "Most are nothing but a tissue of lies--Russian propaganda. People like this idiot are more than happy to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. For all we know, Chernobyl may have been no accident at all, but an effort to keep us from--"

  "Jesus, next you'll be telling us the earth is flat," Gardener said. "Did you see the photographs of the Army guys in radiation suits walking around a power plant half an hour's drive from Harrisburg? Do you know how they tried to plug one of the leaks there? They stuffed a basketball wrapped with friction-tape into a busted waste-pipe. It worked for a while, then the pressure spit it out and busted a hole right through the containment wall."

  "You spout some pretty goddam good propaganda." Ted grinned savagely. "The Russians love people like you! Do they pay you, or do you do it for free?"

  "Who sounds like an airport Moonie now?" Gardener asked, laughing a little. He took a step closer to Ted. "Nuclear reactors are better built than Jane Fonda, right?"

  "As far as I'm concerned, that's about the size of it, yes."

  "Please," the dean's wife said, distressed. "We may discuss, but let's not shout, please--after all, we're college people--"

  "Somebody better fucking shout about it!" Gardener shouted. She recoiled, blinking, and her husband stared at Gardener with eyes as bright as chips of ice. Stared as if he were marking Gard forever. Gard supposed he was.

  "Would you shout if your house was on fire and you were the only one in your family to wake up in the middle of the night and realize what was happening? Or just kinda tiptoe around and whisper, on account of you're a college person?"

  "I just believe this has gone far en--"

  Gardener dismissed her, turned to Mr. Bay State Electric, and winked at him confidentially. "Tell me, Ted, how close is your house located to this nifty new nuclear facility you guys are building?"

  "I don't have to stand here and--"

  "Not too close, uh? That's what I thought." He looked at Mrs. Ted. She shrank away from him, clutching at her husband's arm. Gard thought, What is it that she sees to make her shrink away from me like that? What, exactly?

  The voice of the booger-hooking, comic-book-reading deputy clanged back in dolorous answer: Shot your wife, uh? Good fucking deal.

  "Are you planning to have children?" he asked her gently. "If so, I would hope for your sake that you and your husband really are located a safe distance from the plant . . . they keep goofing, you know. Like at Three-Mile Island. Not long before they opened the sucker, someone discovered the plumbers had somehow hooked up a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. In fact, they found out about a week before the place went on line. You like it?"

  She was crying.

  She was crying, but he couldn't stop.

  "The guys investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was 'a generally inadvisable practice.' If your hubby here invites you to take the company tour, I'd do the same thing they tell you to do in Mexico: don't drink the water. And if your hubby invites you after you're pregnant--or after you even think you might be--tell him . . ." Gardener smiled, first at her, then at Ted. "Tell him you've got a headache," he said.

  "Shut up," Ted said. His wife had begun to moan.

  "That's right," Arberg said. "I really do think it's time for you to shut up, Mr. Gardener."

  Gard looked at them, then at the rest of the partygoers, who were staring at the tableau by the buffet, wide-eyed and silent, the young bartender among them.

  "Shut up!" Gardener yelled. Pain drove a gleaming spike into the left side of his head. "Yeah! Shut up and let the goddam house burn! You can bet these fucking slumlords will be around to collect the fire insurance later on, after the ashes cool and they rake out what's left of the bodies! Shut up! That's what all these guys want us to do! And if you don't shut up on your own, maybe you get shut up, like Karen Silkwood--"

  "Quit it, Gardener," Patricia McCardle hissed. There were no sibilants in the words she spoke, making a hiss an impossibility, but she hissed just the same.

  He bent toward Ted's wife, whose sallow cheeks were now wet with tears. "Also, you might check the IDS rates--infant--death syndrome, that is. They go up in plant areas. Birth defects, such as Down's syndrome--mongoloidism, in other words--and blindness, and--"

  "I want you to get out of my house," Arberg said.

  "You've got potato chips on your chin," Gardener said, and turned back to Mr. and Mr. Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from deeper and deeper inside him. It was like listening to a voice coming out of a well. Everything going critical. Red lines showing up all over the control panel.

  "Ted here can lie about how vastly overrated it all was, nothing but a little fire and a lot of headline fodder, and all of you can even believe him . . . but the fact is, what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released more radioactive waste into the atmosphere of this planet than all the A-bombs set off aboveground since Trinity.

  "Chernobyl's hot.

  "It's going to stay that way for a long time. How long? No one really knows, do they, Ted?"

  He tipped his glass toward Ted and then looked around at the partygoers, all of them now standing silent and watching him, many looking just as dismayed as Mrs. Ted.

  "And it'll happen again. Maybe in Washington State. They were storing core-rods in unlined ditches at the Hanford reactors just like they were at Kyshtym. California the next time there's a big quake? France? Poland? Or maybe right here in Massachusetts, if this fellow here has his way and the Iroquois plant goes on line in the spring. Just let one guy pull the wrong switch at the wrong time, and the next time the Red Sox open at Fenway will be around 2075."

  Patricia McCardle was as white as a wax candle . . . except for her eyes, which were spitting blue sparks that looked freshly dropped from an arc-welder. Arberg had gone the other route: he was as red and dark as the bricks of his fine-old-family Back Bay home. Mrs. Ted was looking from Gardener to her husband and back again as if they were a pair of dogs that might bite. Ted saw the look; felt her trying to back out of his encircling, imprisoning arm. Gardener supposed it was her reaction to what he had been saying which provoked the final escalation. Ted had doubtless been instructed about how to handle hysterics like Gardener; the company taught their Teds to do that as routinely as the airlines taught stewardesses how to demonstrate the emergency oxygen system of the jets
in which they flew.

  But it was late, Gardener's drunken but eloquent rebuttal had blown up like a pocket thunderstorm ... and now his wife was acting as though he might be the Butcher of Riga.

  "God, I get tired of you guys and your simpering! There you were tonight, reading your incoherent poems into a microphone that runs on electricity, having your braying voice amplified by speakers that run on electricity, using electric lights to see by . . . where do you Luddites think that power comes from? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus!"

  "It's late," McCardle said hurriedly, "and we all--"

  "Leukemia," Gardener said, speaking directly to Ted's wide-eyed wife with dreadful confidentiality. "The children. The children are always the ones to go first after a meltdown. One good thing; if we lose Iroquois, it'll keep the Jimmy Fund busy."

  "Ted?" she whimpered. "He's wrong, isn't he? I mean--" She was fumbling for a handkerchief or tissue in her purse and dropped it. There was the brittle sound of something breaking inside.

  "Stop it," Ted said to Gardener. "We'll talk about it if you want, but stop deliberately upsetting my wife."

  "I want her to be upset," Gardener said. He had embraced the darkness completely now. He belonged to it and it belonged to him and that was just fine. "There's so much she doesn't seem to know. Stuff she ought to know. Considering who she's married to, and all."

  He turned the beautiful, wild grin on her. She looked into it without flinching this time, mesmerized like a doe in a pair of oncoming headlights.

  "Used core-rods, now. Do you know where they go when they're no more good in the pile? Did he tell you that the Core Rod Fairy takes them? Not true. The power folks sort of squirrel them away. There are great big hot piles of core-rods here, there, and everywhere, sitting in nasty pools of shallow water. They're really hot, ma'am. And they're going to stay that way for a long time."

  "Gardener, I want you out," Arberg said again.

  Ignoring him, Gardener went on, speaking to Mrs. Ted and Mrs. Ted only: "They're already losing track of some of those piles of used rods, did you know that? Like little kids who play all day and go to bed tired and wake up the next day and can't remember where they left their toys. And then there's the stuff that just goes poof. The ultimate Mad Bomber stuff. Enough plutonium has already disappeared to blow up the eastern seaboard of the United States. But I've got to have a mike to read my incoherent poems into. God forbid I should have to raise my v--"