Nerves

Chapter 7

Palmer’s intercom clicked softly. “Mayor Walker’s on the phone again,” Thelma’s tired voice announced.

Palmer cursed and swallowed the last of his tasteless sandwich in an unchewed lump. This was the third call from the Mayor since he’d gone back to Kimberly, and he was fed up with the troubles of the town. “Tell him to call back in ten minutes,” he answered. “Tell him anything you like. I won’t talk to him now.”

He should never have agreed to see Walker in the first place. The petition to abolish the bus service out here wasn’t that important. If the man hadn’t been in his office when the accident first happened a lot of things could have been handled differently. But the Mayor had got to one of the phones while Palmer had still been trying to find out what had happened, and the Governor had been on the wire before it could be stopped. Now, instead of his own troubles he had the worries of the town and state demanding his time.

He stared down at the tangle of walks below his window. There was nothing to see, since the converters lay on the other side of the building. There was only the sight of a figure in the militia uniform, pacing about under the raw lights clutching awkwardly at his rifle. Palmer knew there were others all over the place and still more outside the gates. There they might be of some use if the rabble element of the anti-atom crowd proved as edgy as Walker seemed to think, but in here they were only a nuisance.

He glanced at his watch, surprised to see the time. Peters should have reported the latest on the emergency work long before this. He reached for the intercom switch. “Thelma, call out there and find out what’s going on!”

“Yes, sir.” Her voice sounded worried, and he knew she’d been noticing the time too. “Briggs is on the line.”

He picked up the receiver, to see Briggs’s tired, ugly face filling the screen. The man nodded. “We’ve shut down, boss. All we have to do is dump her and test it.”

There had been no trouble with the batch at Number Three. It had proceeded exactly as Jorgenson’s schedule predicted and Palmer had decided to let it run, since there was no way of knowing what would happen if conversion stopped before completion.

“Good work, Briggs,” Palmer told him. “Think you can handle the rest of it?”

Briggs nodded and hung up. His test would be useless for the records, if anyone ever questioned it, since he wasn’t able to put a degree after his name. But it would have to do. He knew enough to be trusted. He’d come to National as a working student when the atomic plants were first permitted to give field degrees, but he’d apparently liked being a foreman well enough to stick to it, refusing to go on.

Palmer went out to the outer office, tired of the impersonal speaker. “What about that call?” he asked the girl.

“They don’t even answer!”

He almost welcomed the news. He was tired of marking time here, waiting for God knew what word, trying to piece things together from clumsy accounts. But there’d better be a good reason for the lack of reports or answer.

“All right,” he decided. “I’m going out. If anyone calls, handle it if you can; if not, send out a runner.”

He took the stairs, not waiting for the elevator. Outside, the guard stared at him suspiciously and started forward, then apparently recognized him and went on pacing uselessly. Palmer headed for the converters, listening to the confusion of human and mechanical sounds and trying to make sense of them. Then he was where he could see for himself.

The magma inside the converter had cracked through the small door to the power-control wing, and it was from there that the injured men had been dragged. Now the wing was a crumpled wreck of broken walls where the machines had battered their way in, and work there had stopped. Now they were attacking the main entrance, where the great slab of a door had been half-fused shut, while other men worked on the outside walls that separated them from the safety chambers.

But it was a sickening chaos that met his eyes instead of the orderly work he’d expected. Every available light glared down on a tangle of men and machines getting in each other’s way, moving about helplessly and generally only making things steadily worse. The main entrance should have been cracked fifteen minutes ago, to let in whatever equipment they could improvise to handle the stuff. But the two bulldozers working on it seemed to be making no progress at all.

He spotted a man he knew helping a red-haired woman he’d never seen, but who seemed to be running some kind of a crude field hospital. He shoved his way through until he could grab the man’s arm and pull him around. “Where’s Peters? Who’s running things here? And why in hell wasn’t I notified?”

“Stuff got Peters twenty minutes ago.” The man pointed to a figure being lifted on a stretcher onto the litter, the head swathed in bandages. “Hoke’s been taking over.”

Palmer groaned, though the mess fitted that explanation. Hokusai was one of the best theoretical physicists in the field, but he was a hopeless idiot as a director of others and he made things worse by considering himself almost the exact opposite.

The manager started off at a run, heading for Number Three. He saw that the red working lights were off, indicating that the dumping must be finished, and hit the entrance release, waiting for the thick portal to lift enough for him to slide under. Inside, Briggs and the men were grouped around the heavy box beside the test bench.

“I-713,” the foreman reported. “Checks out, and pretty pure, too.”

That, at least, was a relief. If they ever got out of this mess, National would need all the pull Morgan could swing, and maybe more. The committee of congressmen had announced hours ago that they were canceling their junket to return to Washington. Undoubtedly, the double accident had made atomic plants unpopular with them, but he suspected that telegrams demanding action had more to do with the change of plans.

There’d be enough I-713 to start Morgan’s vote-getting test going, as soon as any way could be found to ship it out, and that should strengthen the congressmen’s convictions.

But he simply nodded acknowledgment, without stopping to comment. “Peters is out, Hoke’s running the rescue,” he told Briggs. “Drop the rest of this and get out there!”

“My God!” Briggs’s face showed that he was guessing the mess. He tossed orders over his shoulder to a few of the men, collected the others and went out of the converter on the double. As a foreman, he could displace Hoke with no hard feeling, since he was only doing his job. Palmer would have had to argue longer than it took to get the other man.

By the time the manager was out, Briggs was on top of the improvised stand yelling into the P.A. outfit. Lanes began to be cleared and the bulldozers were coming out, while other men began chasing those too near away. A truck took off as if eternal perdition were hanging on its rear bumper and headed for the supply buildings.

“Get back!” Briggs was shouting. “We’ll be burning that door off in three minutes. You guys with the hammers! Spread out, make room for welding cutters. And get the lead out. There are men inside those chambers maybe dying!”

There were other orders, but Palmer relaxed as much as he could, watching the attempt to rescue the men. Now that the crews were organized, they began making progress through the thick concrete-and-steel walls. Even if the main entrance was forced first, it might be impossible to bring the men from the converter chambers through the inside, and the only hope was to breach the walls.

He swore at himself for that. The chambers had been meant to protect men as much from fumes and leaks as anything else, with the idea that they could be removed by the same crew that handled the damage. The problem of making them with an entrance to the inside and an exit outside had seemed too difficult, without seriously weakening the restraining strength of the housing. In the future there would have to be a solution!

The pneumatic hammers and electric cutters bit in slowly but steadily, while Briggs called for replacements at regular intervals. Then a shout went up, warning everyone to turn his back. The crew near the main entrance had been attaching a bunch of small cylindrical cans to the door, as fast as they could be moved from the truck. Now they were running back. One of them yanked on a cord.

Palmer turned at the last minute, knowing he was far enough away to run little risk from the glaring heat of the superthermite, but taking no chances. That stuff should have been used as soon as it was plain that the door was fused, rather than merely stuck. There was a sudden thump and the ground shook a little. He swung back to see the white-hot material of the door dripping and running in puddles. The whole thing had fallen backward, and now machines were moving up, while men battled to get close enough to hook on and snake it away.

One glance inside was enough to tell that there was no chance of removing the men from the chambers through that. The converter was gone; there were only lumps and heaps of slag to show where it had been. Magma was churning about, beginning to flow out viscously as the door was moved. At Briggs’s orders, the remainder of the door was snaked around to form a barrier to cut it off, while others went for block to build a roadway for the tanks over it.

Palmer stared at the stuff, watching it churn and spit like nothing he had seen before. This was no normal product of a reaction that had got out of control. It had to be Isotope R, the forerunner of Mahler’s Isotope, the most deadly substance that could be created!

Hoke had come up beside him and was staring into the mess, his wrinkled face frozen in an unbelieving stare. “Bad,” he said slowly. “Very bad, We must try, but I think we are have trouble.”

He turned away gasping and holding his hand over his stomach. Palmer started after him, but the little man straightened and smiled sickly. “It iss nothing. Gass, I think. My stomach is sick, no more.”

Palmer’s own didn’t feel too good. Damn Jorgenson! The man was one of the best engineers in the industry, responsible for more patents than any other, and yet his ego had always made the manager mistrust him. He must have gone over his equations with the intention of proving them right, rather than questioning them.

Then the unfairness of this struck Palmer, and he grimaced at himself. Jorgenson wasn’t well liked, but that didn’t make him less honest. He’d warned Palmer, and the manager had taken it on his own shoulders, forcing the engineer to rush through an untried process. Now Jorgenson was in one of the chambers, or…

He dropped that. The man had to be in a chamber. And they’d better get to him soon. The stuff in there was going to need every bit of skill and knowledge that could be mustered, and it was closer to Jorgenson’s field than to Hoke’s.

Tanks were beginning to edge into the magma, and he saw that Hoke was putting on armor. But his main concern now was with the men working on the safety chambers. They were beginning to reach the inner section of the north chamber, and he moved to where he could get a better view. He had no business there now — he belonged back in the office — but he couldn’t leave until he knew the results.

Then suddenly the workers were drawing back and a power grapple moved up to begin ripping out the sections left of the wall. Armored men were waiting to go in but they weren’t needed. As the grapple drew back, a score of men began staggering out of the chamber, some supporting others, but moving on their own feet.

None of them was Jorgenson. The man would have towered over them, and his trick suit should have left him in condition to move by himself if any of them could. Palmer started to head toward the improvised first-aid section, before realizing that the woman there would have her hands full enough without questions.

Briggs solved it for him. A runner came from the medical group toward the platform where the foreman was directing things and shouted up to him. Briggs nodded and reached for the P.A. microphone. “Dr. Brown says they’re suffering from some burns and a lot of heat and shock, but they’ll be all right!”

It brought a yell from the men, but the cries choked off quickly as they turned back to look at the other chamber. Palmer moved around with them. It had taken longer there for some reason, but they were almost through. Grapples were standing by, waiting for the signal. Palmer edged up until he had a good view of the broken section.

A moment later, the grapples were digging out what was left. But this time there were no men following it out. A trickle of magma oozed out behind it. The light that shot into the chamber showed the door locked firmly, but every figure there was out cold, sprawled on whatever could be found to hold them off the stuff on the floor. Some had used the bodies of others.

Armored men began going in cautiously, trying to clear a path for others to follow with stretchers. Some began working on the wall again, trying to enlarge the opening enough for one of the small tanks. But Palmer didn’t wait to see what they would bring out. Even if some of the men were still alive it would be no help to him now. No human being from that chamber would be able to work on the impossible job of checking the wild action going on until long after the action was over. He crossed Jorgenson off his list.

Then as he stared at the stuff in the main converter chamber, he tore up his list, leaving only a question mark and a prayer.