Badwater

23

I said, “We’re going to have to go back up the canyons.”

Walter had his nose in the Munsell color charts, ranking the hue of layer five. His tongue was anchored between his teeth. He was showered, shaved, dressed, and looking little worse for the wear.

I was showered and dressed.

Walter put up a hand: let me finish. Color is subjective. Most soils are adulterated with gray, so the question is: is layer five’s gray a departure from the neutral, or not?

I waited. It matters. Color is a signpost of source. I hoped he’d find a lead. I sure had nothing new. In the four hours since Soliano had shot the bat, we’d struggled to reassemble our map. While Walter set up our lab, I’d been choppered to the talc mine to take new samples. When I returned, we began anew the task of creating definable layers out of the odds and ends of fender soils. After two hard hours, the only new thing I had was a craving for ham-and-tomato sandwiches. I said, finally, “Anything?”

“Same thing I found yesterday.”

“It’s a start.”

“A restart. We’ve lost a full day.” Walter closed his chart and swiveled to face me. “As to the canyons, Hector’s offered an escort.”

We’d lost more than a day. We’d lost our freedom in the field. I curled my hands, where the cut palm stung. I focused on Walter’s hands, which rested on his thighs. Old hands, marked by the years and the sun and the rocks in the field. Blunt-fingered corded hands, still strong. Hap should draw those hands. There was a thin white scar on his right pointer, courtesy of his pocket knife. I had my own knife scar — right thumb, from peeling crystals of mica. And now of course I had a fresh palm wound, although I couldn’t blame that on normal wear and tear. I regarded our four hands. Not a Glock callus in sight. We were sitting ducks. I said, “Good idea.”

We worked another half-hour and then there came a knock at the door.

“Will you get that?” Walter said, nose in his soils. “It may be Pria.”

“Who’s Pria?”

“Our girl. She appears to spend her free time around here.”

I rose. “You know her name.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

There was another knock — pounding this time — and I thought, not only do we require babysitting, we’re becoming babysitters, and I reached the door and opened it before she could pound again. But it wasn’t Pria, it was Hap.

He said, “We got mail.”

We left the Inn by convoy.

Walter and I rode with Soliano and Hap and Ballinger in a green Jeep Soliano had appropriated from the Park Service. RERT vans tailed us.

We took highway 190 around the back of the Inn and up the stem of the fan into the mountains. The road followed a wide gravelly wash, which climbed gently between two parallel ranges. To our left continued the abrupt face of the Funerals. To our right began the Black Mountains, which ran southward between the saltpan and the Funerals. We were wedged between two mountain faces as different as Walter’s and — it came to me — Pria’s. The cavernous Funerals were folded in sunburnt browns and somber grays and the gentle Blacks were furred in pastel mudstones. We passed a beard of white issuing from the fault zone along the base of the Funerals. Travertine deposits, I hazarded. Old dry springs.

Indeed, we were traveling up a long drainage ditch. I saw how the waters that drained from the Funerals and Blacks would collect in the gravelly wash, which would channel those waters with their sediment load down to spill onto the fan. I saw how the fan was still being built.

I’d keep that flood channel in mind, what with these hurricane-spawned storms. I had checked the weather report and learned that the hurricane off Baja California, according to Monday’s forecast, would be throwing storms our way all week. I’d keep in mind the Park Service’s doppler radar scan, which provided a detailed flood risk index.

I peered at the sky. Broken clouds.

“Dolomite up there,” Walter said, peering at the Funerals.

I saw. Dolomite in fender layer four. How coy of Jardine if he’d stashed his radioactive booty in the Funerals.

Our destination, however, was in the Black Mountains. We turned off 190 onto the graded road that cut into Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. The jumbled badlands were naked of any shrub, their eroded contours shaded in mustard and cream and purple and pink. Black-mouthed burrows pockmarked the hills.

Walter checked his map against the GPS coordinates in Jardine’s email.

You are cordially invited, Jardine had written. And then he gave the time and place. And then he set the hook: A package awaits you inside the borax mine.

And we bit. We couldn’t pass up the chance to recover at least some of the stolen radwaste. Of course, we had to consider that it might be a trap, which was why we planned to proceed with all due care. Or, maybe, nothing awaited us in the mine, and this was a hoax — Jardine running us around the desert, deflecting us from our job of following the evidence.

The road climbed and curved and I stopped admiring the geology and started worrying about the mine we’d been invited to. The mudstone was now shot with snowy veins of borate ore. I knew my mining geology — anyone who worked with Walter had to know her mining geology. An ancient lake once filled this area, collecting alluvia from the surrounding mountains, some of whose rocks contained boron. And then the lake dried up and the borates were precipitated out, and then people came along to mine it, and then Roy Jardine came along to defile it.

We rounded the bend and Walter said, “Here.”

The convoy stopped. We piled out and flinched, hammered by the heat.

There was a small ridge above us and footprints led up the hillside. We paused to examine them. They were fresh, made after this morning’s thundershower. We’d seen their like before, at the crash site: dimple-soled rubber prints, bootie prints. Roy Jardine’s prints. Very smart, Roy. So you really were here. I shivered.

Scotty took the lead. In his board shorts and Hawaiian shirt he looked like the surfer dude he’d been. But he was RERT chief now with instruments strapped over each shoulder. We went single-file along the spine of the ridge, a beaten path in the crumbly soil. If I were making a movie starring the badlands of Mars, I’d film it here. Where clouds shadowed it, the soil looked bruised, but it nonetheless threw up waves of heat. I took small breaths, hoping to cool the air before it seared my lungs. Mars-breathing.

Ahead, the ridge dead-ended in the flank of a hill. Scotty metered the area then gave us the thumbs-up.

We followed the bootie prints to the adit that cored into the hillside. The adit was about six feet high and wide enough for a couple of fat mules. Nothing fancy, no timbers, no rails, just a gate barring entrance and a warning sign: DANGER: Loose rock. Decaying explosives. Bad air. Rattlesnakes.

To say nothing of whatever Jardine had left for us in there.

Hap read the sign. “Whew, no bats.”

Scotty turned to Soliano. “Hey, what about the bats?” Scotty had found and collected the bat on the saltpan and handed off both carcasses to a lab in Vegas that could do a radioanalysis necropsy, fast.

Soliano squinted, as if fighting a vision of sunlit teeth. “ARS.”

We digested that. Nobody voiced the thought that two bats, somewhere within their range, had encountered a lethal source of high-rad resins. Nobody said aloud, maybe somewhere is here.

Soliano had a Park Service key but he didn’t need it — the gate nudged open.

Walter said, “Look at those.”

Tire tracks, faint but unmistakable, inside the adit. I looked back along the ridge but if there had been tracks incised there, rain or wind had obliterated them. Still, whatever rolled into this tunnel must have come up that path. Narrow, but doable — fit for a Mars-roving telehandler.

No way to know when the telly was here but I figured I knew the why. To transport a cask. Any thought that our summons was a hoax wilted in the hot adit mouth.

“Okey-doke,” Scotty said, “let’s get to it.”

Soliano started. “But you are not yet suited.”

“Checking for gas, first, Hector. Carbon monoxide, dioxide. Collects in old mines near the floor. We walk around much and we’ll stir it up.”

I felt monumentally relieved that Scotty knew this. That he was prepared for whatever mother nature, along with Roy Jardine, had in store for us.

Scotty took his meters into the tunnel. After a full minute, he emerged. “Yup, we got gas.” He rubbed his face. “Shit, we gotta go in full bug suits. My people’ll die before they even get here, just hiking up that ridge dressed out. Think I’ll set up the zone right here. Christ, I wonder if snakebite goes through rubber.” He glanced at Soliano and dimpled, briefly. “All right, no worry, I got it.”

Hap lowered his sombrero. “I ain’t worrying. Course, I ain’t going in.”

Scotty stalked off along the ridge.

“Let us lend a hand,” Soliano said, to Hap and Ballinger. To me and Walter, he said, “You rest, in the eventuality your skills are needed.”

Walter and I sank against the hillside. I said, “He expects us to go in.”

“It’s not his call.”

“Right.”

“If we do decide to go in,” he said, “there’s no need for the both of us.”

I let that hang in the hot air between us.

We watched Scotty and his crew hauling equipment out of the vans. Soliano, Ballinger, and Hap began ferrying the stuff up the ridge. Hap took the lead, laden with silvery suits. He was whistling — heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. He appeared to be having fun. Just when I think I can predict him, I can’t.

I glanced at Walter. “I don’t mind snakes, per se.”

His eyes were closed. “Rattlesnakes, dear.”

I studied his flushed face. “Big ones, I’d think.”

“Mean, certainly.”

“Cranky, anyway.”

He said, “I go in.”

“Let’s wait and see what Scotty finds before we take on snakes.”

“You’re of child-bearing age,” he said. “I go in.”

He will never, ever, let the subject go. I said, “You’re at an age where your cells are not so resilient.”

“Thank you for the reminder.”

“Thank Hap.”

We all waited, stacked against the hillside, while Scotty paced and his three RERT colleagues rested. Scotty had sent in the smallest of his team, a wiry woman with a purple punk ‘do named Lucy who, it struck me, looked of child-bearing age.

The heat was a bath, submerging us. We could drown in this heat. I watched cloud shadows tongue along the ridge and strained to detect the drop of a degree Fahrenheit or two.

Fifteen minutes later Lucy emerged, looking like her next stop was Mars. Scotty metered her at the hot line then helped her skin off the heavy suit. She pushed back her hood and spat out the respirator and rasped out a word.

I thought she said fuck and didn’t blame her.

“Went right,” she rasped. “Nothing.”

Oh, fork. Shit.

Scotty raked his hair, spiking the wet strands. “Okay, I getta go.” A tall thin RERT guy named Tim grumbled to his feet to help Scotty dress out.

We waited, sucking our water bottles dry. I believed I saw bees buzzing a great sunflower but it was only heat waves flaming off an orange hill.

Twenty minutes later, by my watch — hours, by my fried brain — Scotty reappeared. When Scotty was stripped to his shorts, when he had downed half a bottle of water, he gave Soliano the thumbs-up.

Now we know, I thought. Okay, it’s better to know.

Soliano got to his feet. “In a cask, or loose?”

Scotty tried to speak, and then just mouthed it. Cask.

“Contents?”

“Hot.”

I licked my cracked lips. The real deal, this time.

“And so we account,” Soliano said, “for one of two missing casks.”

I wondered which one. The swap cask, which Jardine recovered from the talc mine? Or was this the rainy-day cask? Then again, what did it matter, which one? What mattered was what it held.

Scotty cleared his throat. “Another thing. Mud on the cask. Spattered.”

I sat up straight. “What’s it look like?”

“Mud.”

“Well did it look like it came from the surrounding soil?”

He lifted his palms.

Whether it was the swap cask or rainy-day cask, it could have been stored at Jardine’s depot before being brought here. I looked at Walter, and he nodded. We wanted that mud.

“Geologists.” Soliano toed the soil. “This could be Mr. Jardine’s depot?”

I doubted it. Couldn’t swear to it. If we hadn’t lost our soil map, if we weren’t playing catch-up, we could say something with some heft. I said, instead, “It’s not consistent with the soils we’ve analyzed so far.”

“Then this is what? A demonstration, that Mr. Jardine has the hot resins and can place them wherever he wishes?”

Scotty answered. “I’m convinced.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Could be something more, some kind of taunt. I mean, it’s sure the right place for it. Borax mine.”

“This means…?”

There came a strangled sound, from Ballinger. I thought he was going to be sick. Hap leaned in whispering, his sombrero eclipsing Ballinger’s glistening scalp. Then Hap got to his feet. “Milt just recalled a little incident that might tie in here.”

“Yes?” Soliano said.

Ballinger hunched, silent.

“Sorry Hector,” Hap said. “Milt doesn’t have a fully developed sense of irony.”

“I have,” Soliano said. “Explain to me this irony.”

Hap shrugged. “Like Scotty said, this place makes a point. Borax ore contains the element boron. And boron, Hector, is a crackerjack neutron absorber. They put it in the reactor control rods to slow the fission process — keep that chain reaction under control.”

“Yes?”

“So, Milt’s little incident began with the boron-recycle system at the nuke plant. Once upon a time plant’s getting decommissioned and sends the dump the resins they’d used to clean the system. Low curie-count, so casks get buried in the trench.”

Soliano frowned. “I thought resins were hot. Or hotter.”

“Depends what they pick up. Pick up hot clides, theys hot. Boron resins are low-rad.”

“Mild salsa,” I said.

He nodded. “Anyhoo, couple weeks later a guy’s digging a drainage ditch — and he’s a mite hungover — and he sideswipes a row of containers. Including the boron resin casks. But he doesn’t notice. Couple months later somebody sees the trench is slumping. Now, they have to regrade it.” Hap sighed. “Lady by the name of Sheila Cook gets nominated. Gets her backhoe stuck. Gets out to inspect, sees she’s tramping around in beads. Dang. She calls in the cavalry. And when they frisk the beads, surprise! TripleX hot.” He winked at me. “Been used to clean the spent-fuel pool. Turns out somebody at the nuke plant loaded them into the wrong cask and it shipped with the low-rad load.”

“Christ,” Scotty said, “nobody caught it before it got buried?”

“What you gotta understand, Scotty, is trucks were backed up half a mile waiting to unload. Busy time at the dump. So they frisked the resin truck and the overall dose rate was under the limit and they were under-staffed and all those high-rad trucks were waiting.” Hap smiled that curbed smile of his. “And that story came to be known in the dump oral history as Boron-gate.”

“Very witty,” Soliano said. “And Ms. Cook?”

Hap sighed again. “Starts woofin her cookies couple days after the incident. But she recovers, so the question becomes what’re the long-term effects? She gonna win the cancer lottery? By gum, she do. About seven years later she gets leukemia.” Hap whipped off his sombrero and held it over his heart. “Now, I didn’t see the lady get crapped up — this all happened afore I found my fortunate way to the dump — but it’s one of them legendary stories what get told to the new guy.” He glanced down at Ballinger. “That’s what Milt’s feeling a mite sick over right now.”

I fixed on Ballinger oozing sweat and thought, he’s doing the math.

Soliano said, “Mr. Ballinger, you were manager at the time of this incident?”

Ballinger nodded.

“You gave the order to hasten the disposal?”

Ballinger started to speak, and then just nodded.

“This was CTC policy?”

Now he spoke. “Policy is avoid delays and make a profit. Safety first, and all.”

“Did CTC bear liability for Ms. Cook’s contamination?”

“Paid workers comp till she recovered.”

“And later? The leukemia?”

“No proof that one-time incident caused it. Lotsa things cause cancer.”

“I will wish to contact Sheila Cook.”

Ballinger wiped his skull. “She’s dead.”

I recoiled, as though I hadn’t expected that.

“She died….when?”

“That would be, uh, two years ago.”

“And you learned of her death…how?”

“Grapevine.”

Soliano squatted in front of Ballinger. “And Mr. Jardine? When did he come to work for you?”

“That would be, um, three years ago. Same year she left. You know, when she got, uh, sick.”

“So their employment overlapped?”

“No, he came later in the year.”

“Then Mr. Jardine would not have encountered her?”

“Not at the dump.”

“Meaning what? He encountered her outside the work place?”

“Girlfriend, I’m thinking,” Hap said.

Ballinger looked at his shoes. “Sister.”

Soliano cursed softly in Spanish.

I cursed silently, in English.

“Mr. Ballinger.” Soliano gathered himself. “You did not recall a grievance he might hold against you, in regard to his sister?”

“Just found out she was. She’s listed as his emergency contact on the new hire form. Sheila Cook. Sister. Guess it was her married name.” Ballinger wiped his oiled face. “And I guess after she died, Roy never bothered to change his info. Point is, I didn’t know. I mean, who reads that stuff anyway — unless you need it?”

Soliano said, precise, “I read that stuff.”

“Okay, see, I looked it over before I gave it to you and it kinda broadsided me — her being his sister. So I, uh, deleted it.” Ballinger took on a tight unwilling look. “Didn’t see any point in the FBI digging up ancient history. I mean, what difference does it make now?”

Soliano said, icy, “Motive.”

“So he’s got a bone to pick.”

“Two bones, Mr. Ballinger. Let us not forget the prank that scarred his face. He might, perhaps, blame you for a…culture of lax management?”

“Well he never complained to me about it.”

Hap looked pained. “Uh, what if he’s sending a message now, Milt? You know — boron, control rods, chain reaction? And we’re at the wrong end of a chain reaction. Let’s see, nuke plant shuts down, got no more use for all the gear but you can’t sell the gear on eBay because the gear’s crapped up, so the gear gets shipped to the dump, but the paperwork’s effed up and the backhoe driver’s hung over and then poor Ms. Cook steps in and gets contaminated and wins the cancer lottery. Then brother Roy gets a feather up his and decides to put it to you, brother Roy’s got access to all those rads — and brother Roy’s gonna pull the rods and let that chain reaction go critical. Metaphorically speaking.”

“Christ,” Scotty said, “so that diagram he drew on the truck — skull and bones, guy running away? That’s you, Milt?”

I stared. My stick figure?

Ballinger said, “That’s a buncha crapola.”

“No Milt,” Walter snapped, “that’s revenge.”

My thoughts took off along the chain of events. Brother Roy takes a job at the radwaste dump where his sister got crapped up. Maybe he’s looking to gather evidence of mismanagement — a lawsuit. Then his sister dies. And the prank is just one more grievance. So he settles upon revenge. He plans the swap. He enlists Chickie and her talc, or he just steals it. He enlists the truck driver; maybe he sells the plan as extortion, offering a cut. The pothead buys it. They siphon off radwaste for who knows how long. Then something goes wrong. Maybe Ryan Beltzman finds out Jardine’s real motive and wants no part of it. And there’s the fight, the chase, the crash, the shooting. And that changes things…how? Where does the chain reaction go from there? Metaphorically speaking.

If the running figure is Milt, he’s not running alone any longer. We’re right there with him.

Soliano moved to me and Walter. He looked haggard, his face more bony than aristocratic. “This mud on the cask — this could be from his depot?”

I nodded.

“Go get it.”

“Which one of you?” Scotty asked, rummaging through the suits.

Walter started to speak but I clamped his arm. “I’m smaller, and stronger.”

Walter shook me off and headed for the suits.

I followed and said, low, “And I’m healthy.”

He shot me a look I would not like to see again.

I pulled him aside and said, brutal, “You’re flushed. Try wearing one of those bug suits. Get halfway into the tunnel and pass out. Somebody has to come in after you. Go ahead and push yourself real hard and see if you can bring on another stroke. Then you’ll be in the hospital and I’ll be here doing this job without you and that’s goddamned unfair.”

Walter looked at the others. They hadn’t heard, or pretended not to. He gave me a brusque nod.

Feeling like the biggest shit in the world, I went to Scotty. “It’ll be me.”

Scotty had offered to go back in himself and scrape some mud but I needed to see it, undisturbed, in situ. Read the pattern of deposition before ruining it to take a sample.

So now it became my show.

Scotty opened an ice chest, pulled out a plastic vest filled with something that looked like blue ice, and then wrapped it like a gift around my baked husk. I had a moment to enjoy that and then Scotty worked me into the rubberized suit out of hell. I asked, “How much does this bug suit weigh?”

He said, stern, “I call it a bug suit because I’ve worn it more times than I can count.” He packed me into the air tank and harness assembly. “You’re gonna call it a fully-encapsulated suit with self-contained breathing apparatus because I don’t want you to forget why you’re wearing it.”

Hardly likely.

“Weighs about sixty pounds.”

I would have said a hundred.

“I already metered for background radiation,” Scotty said. “We’re at eleven micro-Roentgens per hour. That’s what we’d expect around here, so no worry. You know, rads from rocks and…” He dimpled. “Well, rocks, that’s your department. Right-O?”

“Right-O.” There’s some uranium and thorium in most rocks and soils, but around here it’d be down to point oh-oh parts per million. No worry. About the rocks.

Scotty rummaged in his box of meters and brought out a Geiger counter. “This one’s for you. See the rate chart? Tells you rads based on clicks per second — alpha, beta, gamma. You get inside the tunnel, should sound about like this.” He snapped his fingers, paused, snapped again. “When you reach the fork, your reading’s gonna pick up a little.” He snapped a little faster. “When you see the cask, should sound about like this.” Faster. “Don’t get any closer than you need — Lucy’s making you a tool. And you wanna limit your time. Just grab your dirt and go, real fast. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Your Geiger sounds like a machine-gun, you make that Titanic face and get the hell out.”

I swallowed. “Got it.”

Lucy came over with the tool. It was the type of telescoping wand the woman at the dump had used to meter the cask at a respectable distance. Scotty had, I assumed, used it in the adit here, to similar purpose. Now it was my turn. Lucy had duct-taped a small scoop to the end of the wand. Very clever. She made a fist and after a moment I understood and balled my free hand and we bumped fists. Very cool.

Scotty moved back in. When I was fully encapsulated, he connected the breathing hose and opened the valve. “Gimme a big inhale.” He hung the Geiger around my neck, attached the headlamp, and tapped the hood. “We’ll stay in touch.”

There was nothing for it now but to get on with the show.

I moved, elephantine. Walter intercepted me and fastened the belt bag of tools around my bulky girth. I extended my fist. He pretended not to notice. He said, “Watch out for snakes.”

As I passed Hap, he outlined a cross over me.

I remembered. Go with low dose.

I entered the adit. Already sweating. Turtling along in my thousand-pound rubber shell. The floor was furred with decomposed borates. If I tripped and pitched face-down I doubted I’d be able to right myself. My headlamp lit the near view, the hacked throat of crumbly gold and milky white. Further on, the gullet was pitchy black.

I followed the tire tracks.

There was a sudden glitter at the edge of my vision and I thought bat eyes, but of course it was just my light sparkling off faceted ore.

“How you doin?” Scotty’s voice, jovial, came in my facepiece speaker.

“Fine,” I lied. Back ached, sweat leaked, cool vest chafed, mouth metallic, and I was already hallucinating bats.

The Geiger clicked leisurely. Snap…snap.

I returned my attention to the tracks. They grew spotty as the soil thinned and the floor showed its base rock.

Up ahead, the gullet split in two.

For a wild moment I couldn’t remember which fork Lucy had taken, which fork I need take, and I didn’t want to take the wrong fork and spend one extra second entombed in this suit in this place. The tire tracks were unreadable — Scotty and Lucy had made such a mess that it was simply hopeless. I was making a bigger mess with my own shuffling bug-suited feet.

I squeaked, “Left fork, right?”

“No, not right,” Scotty boomed in my ears, “go left.”

Something skittered in my beam. My heart lurched. A small naked form turned tail and disappeared into the left fork. Some kind of rat. So the air in that fork was rat-safe, anyway. Can rat teeth go through bug suits?

Bile came up into my mouth. I forced it down in dread of retching into my self-contained breathing apparatus.

And now my Geiger counter was growing chattier. I checked the rate chart. All was as Scotty said it should be.

Okay lady, just keep going.

I forced myself into the left fork, following the rat.

Following Roy Jardine. Had he worn a bug suit? Surely a veteran of the radwaste dump knew what to wear in here. I hoped, fervently, that he had ached and sweated and chafed. I felt no sympathy for him, none at all. I felt a sorrow for poor dead Sheila. And for the rest of us.

Up ahead, my headlamp beam caught on a roadblock of silver.

The cask seemed to fill the adit. It was the same make I’d seen at the crash site, and at the dump — that hefty tin can of a cask — and down here stuffed into the gullet of the mountain it looked monumental.

I heaved my weighted self to a stop. “I’m looking at it,” I told Scotty.

“Okey-doke. You got twenty minutes air left but you might wanna hurry it up.”

My Geiger chattered gaily. I checked the chart. All was as it should be.

I stood where I assumed Scotty had stood, at a telescoping-wand’s distance. I played my beam over the skin of the cask and saw what Scotty had seen: patches of dried mud, like the cask was molting. A dark gray mud. Not — just eyeballing it — the same species as the native soil around here. Not — a reasoned leap — acquired here. The mud was spattered across the lower reaches of the cask. I thought that over. Let’s say this cask was stored at the depot, until Jardine decided to bring it here. And in the process of loading it for transport maybe he spun the wheels of a telehandler or trailer in wet soil, and spattered the cask.

I wanted that mud.

I tucked Lucy’s tool under my arm and opened my belt bag, fishing for the specimen dish. I couldn’t tell a dish from a hand lens through this clown glove. Come on come on. You wanna limit your time. Just grab your dirt and go. Whatever I’d been fingering slipped away. I swallowed a curse. Scotty was listening. What if he told Walter I was stressed? And Walter’s already berating himself for letting me bully him into staying behind, and he’s got Soliano’s noblesse-oblige dogging him, and if there’s anything Walter hates more than letting himself down, it’s letting others down. He’s out there telling himself he feels just fine, and he’s never happy unless he can put his own eyes on the scene, and it’s not out of the question that he’ll bully Scotty into dressing him out and sending him in here to help.

I secured the specimen dish and set it on the ground.

I untelescoped Lucy’s tool and held the thing like a fishing pole, fishing for the spot just above the cask’s base collar where the largest mud patches clung.

The scoop banged against steel and it made a big sound.

And then there was a long moment when I didn’t understand, when I thought the sound came from my headset — Scotty banging his microphone into something — and then I thought I’d somehow dislodged a rat nest and it was rat turds spewing out. And then I focused on the yawning rip in the cask. Did I do that? With Lucy’s tool? And then I recoiled. The cask shat out beads, and beads geysered through the tunnel and spattered me and pooled at my feet and before I could backpedal out of their path, beads buried my booties.

I must have screamed.

Scotty yelped in my earphones.

I paid no heed to my ringing ears, to Scotty’s babble — I paid heed, rather, to my little Geiger counter that was clicking its fool head off.

I prepared to step out of the shower but Scotty stopped me. “Lemme get those hard-to-reach places.” He had a long-handled brush. “Lift the suit.”

I pulled it up so that the leg wrinkles smoothed out, like I was hiking up a pair of sagging pantyhose, and Scotty scrubbed. Water was pumped from a RERT van up the ridge, and the hose connected to a PVC-pipe frame, and a nozzle rained the water down on me, and it pooled at my feet in a bright yellow catch basin that looked like a blow-up wading pool. I concentrated fiercely on the ludicrousness of this scene, of a toy shower stall outside a mine adit in the desert, of me in my bug suit being scrubbed down by Scotty in his suit. Some kind of kinky scene for hazmat fetishists. I focused on the soapy water that sluiced off my suit into the catch basin, on the hose that pumped the contaminated water out of the shower and down the ridge to the waste tank in the van.

“Raise your arms.”

I complied, numb, so Scotty could get at the hard-to-reach alphas and betas, but it was what he couldn’t get at, what my bug suit couldn’t keep out, that kept me sweating.

I saw Walter, who had come to the edge of the decon corridor and was staring at me like I was from Mars. Soliano touched Walter’s elbow and said something I could not hear over the hiss of my tank.

“Damn you,” Walter said.

I heard that. But I didn’t blame Soliano for the exposure because I would have chosen to go in no matter what he said, and so would Walter, because there was the chance we could get a jump on locating the rest of the radwaste — although that chance had been blown to dust — and I knew Walter would not be blaming Soliano if Walter were the one standing here being deconned.

Scotty moved between me and them, blocking my line of sight. He shut off the water. He went over me hood to boots with the Geiger and this time, unlike his frisk before the shower, the counter relaxed. I relaxed too, a fraction. Scotty opened my hood and removed my facepiece. I sucked in sweet hot air. He disconnected the regulator and took the tank off my back. I felt so light I could float away.

He doffed his own breather. “Doing okay?”

I nodded and turned my face to the sky, to the low brutal sun, and for a moment the solar rays on my liberated skin felt simply like a beachy summer afternoon.

“Okey-doke,” he said, “we’re gonna peel you outta that suit.”

I said, “Do I have a problem?”

“About?”

“Gammas.”

He said, grim, “Puppies throw off some gammas.”

I shifted in my two-ton suit. “Any lead in this? Like the dentist’s bib?”

“Can’t wear a suit with enough lead to protect against gammas, and still move.”

“What’s my dosimeter say?”

“Says you picked up some gammas. And I’m real unhappy about that. Rules say a civilian shouldn’t be exposed to more’n a hundred millirems a year — above and beyond the background dose.”

“How safe’s the dose limit, Scotty?”

“Depends what you mean by safe.”

“The numbers they put in the equations. That correlate millirems to likely effects. Hap says it’s a guess.”

“Hap’s a clown.”

“So you trust the numbers?”

“Gotta have some guideline.” He shifted. “Anyway, we go by alara.”

“What’s alara?”

“A-L-A-R-A. As low as reasonably achievable. It means, let’s not take the dose limit as a goal. Let’s lowball the exposures. If we can.”

But we hadn’t.

“Hey Cassie, what you got…there is nothing to worry about.”

He didn’t say ‘no worry.’ I didn’t like ‘there is nothing to worry about.’ It was too formal for Scotty. It sounded like it came from some manual: there is nothing to worry about so long as exposure is kept below the dose limit. I glanced at the scowling RERT crew, preparing to start the cleanup of Jardine’s mess. “What about them? How’s ALARA let them go in there?”

“ALARA for us isn’t the same as ALARA for you.”

“Jesus Scotty, you’re made of the same stuff I am.”

He reddened. “Look, nobody on my watch goes over their set limit. I time them. Keep track. That’s why we have dosimeters. Somebody gets close to dosing out, I’m gonna limit their exposure. It’s real simple.” He looked down at my boots. “Time equals dose.”

It had taken me, I calculated, about five seconds to ID the resin beads as not rat turds, and run.

He squinted, although the sun was not in his face. His skin crackled around the eyes. He looked weathered — surfer dude soaked too long in the brine, in the sun, soaking up too many cosmic rays. Surfer dude in hazmat that doesn’t protect against gammas, that doesn’t protect against the revenge-soaked unpredictability of a man with access to the rads. He said, finally, “We follow the rules best we can.”

“I know you do.”

He absently touched the good-luck medallion at his neck, then saw me looking. “Hey, we’re not gonna have you sucking up any more dose.” He peeled off my gloves and dropped them in a plastic decon bag. “I mean, it’s cumulative.”

Scotty had taken my place in the shower, vigorously going after his own hard-to-reach places. I thought, it’s old news to Scotty. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. Get contaminated. Decon. Rub the medallion for luck, or grace, or habit. Go on his way.

Lucy had disappeared into the adit.

Walter had gone to fetch me a chilled soda from one of Scotty’s ice chests.

Hap joined me, clutching his EMT kit. “Probabilities, Buttercup.”

“Not now, Hap.”

“Don’t knock it. The radiation track is all about probability — whether or not it hits the cell. Odds are it didn’t. You’re not your grandma.”

I glared at him. How about just: chin up, Buttercup?

He knelt and opened his kit.

My scalp prickled, like I’d spent a day at the beach and come back with sand in my hair. I watched Hap — the top of his sombrero, his red-freckled hands rummaging in the kit. Probability, what means the cancer lottery. Probability, what means the genetics lottery. Step yourself right up and take a guess. Youse might win or youse might lose but no worry Buttercup. Nobody knows how to score anyway and you won’t find out how y’all did until somewhere down the road apiece.

Hap stood, opening a pill bottle. He held it out to me.

“What is it?”

“Good old ibuprofen. Ease up those sore muscles.” He passed me his water bottle. “Sorry I can’t offer a nuke-dodgem pill.”

I took the pill and washed it down.

“And next I prescribe a long hot shower.”

I glanced at the yellow stall.

“Back at the Inn.” He grinned. “A real shower where you get naked and use soap. Soothe them aches and pains.” He added, kindly, “You have had one piss-poor day.