Pi Day Doomsday

CHELATION

He arrived at the crime lab’s front desk as the wall clock ticked five. Nodding at the workers passing by, leaving for the day, he asked the duty officer to page Lieutenant Poole for him. Instead, she told him to go on up. Poole was waiting.

At the third floor landing, Poole waited for him to arrive. She had timed it perfectly based on his ETA. Today, rather than leading him back to the SID Lab, she was taking him to another room. NUCLEAR FORENSICS LAB greeted him at the door.

“You okay,” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he replied, “a little hungry and bruised up, but I’m basically fine.”

Opening the door to the lab, she asked, “How did you get bruises?”

“Slipped in the boat and fell out. Fortunately, the sand broke my fall, but I hit a lot of fiberglass on my way down. Ate a lot of sand.”

“Sorry.” She withheld a chuckle at his clumsiness and called out for Dr. Charles Gruber, M.D., Ph.D., the Lab’s newest forensic scientist, specializing in anything nuclear.

Waiting for him, Briscoe scanned the room’s instrumentation and saw devices much different from those in the SID Lab. One in particular appeared to be a large cylinder on its side with lots of knobs, meters, and warning signs. It stretched down half the length of the room. The metal sign on its panel read MASS SPECTROMETER. On the wall, over it, hung Gruber’s shingles and awards. The largest of them was from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The award was for Distinguished Fellow. He smiled, thinking he too was a pretty distinguished fellow. Under that, two university sheepskins, both from Texas Tech University stated his specialties. The first, from the Medical School there, read Medical Doctor, Nuclear Medicine. The second, from the School of Science and Engineering, announced Ph. D. in Nuclear Physics. He was a double-doc, an individual who obviously loved learning--and school.

He wished he had just one to hang on his office wall. After high school, his college plans were cut short when his parents divorced; he had joined the Navy instead. Eventually, as a master diver/trainer at the Point Mugu Naval Air Station, he had fourteen degreed divers and a mini-sub pilot under his command. His sheepskin was a DD-214 proudly displayed at his workplace: an Honorable Discharge Certificate. It turned out well.

Gruber interrupted his wanderings, entering the room in a white lab coat, a thick red pen clipped to his coat pocket. His wire-rimmed glasses riding the tip of his nose completed Briscoe’s image of a distinguished fellow. He suspected there was a cigar in hiding somewhere, waiting to be puffed.

“Greetings, folks, what’s up?” Gruber said.

Briscoe stood.

“Dr. Gruber,” Poole said, “this is Officer Briscoe with the California Highway Patrol. He’s had an unfortunate run-in with some high radiation in the past few hours. It’s a very sensitive situation, so we have to run it in-house. I told him you would check him out.” Completing her promise, she excused herself and returned to her lab.

Gruber studied him for seconds, then pulled up two stools, offered one to Briscoe and sat on the other in front of him, being careful to keep a safe distance away. Slipping on latex gloves, Gruber placed his hands around Briscoe’s throat, felt his lymph nodes then looked through an ophthalmoscope at his eyes. He backed off, said “Hmm,” and reached into a cabinet bringing out a medical scintillation counter. Different from the ones Briscoe had seen before, it still had similar features: a long thick chrome probe, a meter with a red section at the top of the scale, an alarm light, and a coiled rubber cable running from the probe to the master unit. The main difference, he quickly noticed, was this one was designed for use in high oxygen content environments. It was tightly sealed to keep a stable internal gas inside, probably nitrogen.

He switched on the unit, then began probing around and over Briscoe’s body. Readings were stable, but high, as it moved over his torso. He frowned as he probed further. Briscoe watched him probing over his chest; at one localized point over his sternum, it went crazy, flashing and needle-pegging.

He dropped the probe and moved in close, searching through his glasses for the source. He pulled up his latex gloves, then picked an almost invisible crumb-like object from Briscoe’s uniform’s pocket flap. “What’s that,” he asked.

Briscoe stared for seconds, then smiled as he recognized the object. “Oh, that must be a crumb from the powdered sugar donut I ate on the beach. It was dry, but good.”

Quickly, he dropped the crumb, not more than an eight of an inch across, onto a nearby pad of gauze and carefully placed it on the small exam table in front of them. Briscoe watched curiously, almost laughing at the gravity of his examination. After all, it was just a donut crumb.

The scintillation counter again alarmed, flashing red lights, as he waved the wand over the crumb. He pulled open another drawer and grabbed a cotton-tipped swab.

“Here, swab the inside of your mouth with this, cheeks, tongue, teeth, and all. Do it now,” he ordered.

Worried, Briscoe obeyed and handed the swab back.

The counter alarmed as before when he probed the swab.

“Hold up your hands, palms toward me, please,” he ordered next.

Again, the unit alarmed as the probe passed over his fingertips.

He frowned, sat back in his chair.

Several moments in thought, he said, “This is not good news. You’ve ingested a highly radioactive isotope, possibly uranium, plutonium, yttrium or strontium. There are others, too, but those are the most likely. Do you have any idea which it might be?”

“But how did I get it? Where did I get it?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me. Think back. Have you been around a radioactive source lately? Power plant? Research Lab? Anything like that?”

“Are you aware of the Adam taskforce, Dr. Gruber”

“Of course. It’s nuclear. It’s my bailiwick. Lieutenant Poole keeps me abreast; the threat worries me greatly.”

Closing his eyes, he remembered back. “I was recovering what I thought to be Adam’s delivery vessel, a capsized Sea Ray. After it was dragged onshore and righted, I stepped into the hull to examine it. When I turned on the Geiger counter, it scared me with its alarms and flashing lights. I panicked, jumped from the boat onto the sand and backed off until the instrument went quiet.”

“And how far away was that? When it silenced?”

“About fifteen feet.”

“Hmm.” Gruber made notes and continued, “You must have handled something. Your hands are very radioactive. What did you touch?”

“There was a large round depression in the floor of the boat. It looked like a heavy cylinder was dropped there. I remember feeling the depth of the hole. It was a half-inch deep. Then I activated the Geiger counter, panicked, and jumped out.”

“That’s where you picked up the isotope. My guess is you then went back to your cruiser and ate a donut without washing your hands, right?”

“Um… that’s correct. I did.” He held out hands and stared at them, feeling an indefinable fear. He was used to dealing with visible dangers but this danger was different: it carried no warning signs. He was growing nauseous.

“Let me be blunt, Officer Briscoe, when you ate that donut, contaminated by your hands, you consumed a very toxic dose of at least one deadly isotope. It is entering your system as we speak. And it will stay there irradiating every organ in your body until it decays to nothingness.”

He gulped, loudly, unsteadily, and asked, “How long will that take? I mean to decay?”

“If, as the Adam threat indicates, the radiation if from a thermonuclear weapon, the isotope is probably Plutonium 239. That has a half-life of slightly over twenty-four thousand years.

“What will happen to me? Will I die?” What will Barb say? How do I tell the kids?

Assuring him, Gruber put his hand on his knee, squeezed it, then stood and walked to a large drawer at the side of the room. “No, not yet. Not if I can help it.” Rummaging through the drawer he added, “I’m going to put you on a strong regimen of chelating agents. These drugs will rid your system of any heavy metal you’ve taken in, and no, they won’t rid your memory of AC/DC, Metallica or Judas Priest, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he paused, snickering at himself, then continued “but they will speed your elimination of any radioactive isotope you’ve swallowed or inhaled.”

At Gruber’s explanation, he sighed with measured relief. He had been given a reprieve from his newly imagined demise, writhing in pain, glowing brightly, while a malignant radiation ate through his body, one organ at a time. He shook his head, shedding the horrendous image from his mind.

Gruber finally found and removed a small orange box from the drawer. Briscoe saw it appeared to have a red-circled arm and hammer logo on its side. That’s just normal baking soda, he thought. Then Gruber placed it on the counter, opened the box, and removed two measured teaspoons, stirring them briskly into a small beaker of tap water.

Speaking from across the room, he motioned to the nearby hand sink and said, “Now, before you take this chelator I want you to wash your hands and face thoroughly with soap, rinse your mouth with tap water and then gargle first and drink this.”

The water was cold, the soap medicinal, but Briscoe lathered his hands for minutes, rubbing then together until they warmed. He bent down, sucked a mouthful of water from the faucet, swished it in his mouth, then spat it out. He imagined himself getting better.

“Good. Now gargle and drink this. Bottoms up.”

It tasted of salt and flat sparkling water. His face distorted as he swallowed.

“That’s nasty. Is that baking soda? Tastes like it?”

“Yes, and I want you to take five more cocktails like that today. Spaced two hours apart. It’s an excellent over-the-counter chelator. Just mix a teaspoon of baking soda to one cup of water, stir rapidly until it dissolves and drink it up. Simple.”

“Anything else I can do?” It was getting late and he wanted to leave for home. Adam’s threat had become personal; he was contaminated. He needed a long cleansing shower.

Gruber took a small plastic specimen cup from the overhead shelf and handed it to him. “Yes. Go two doors down the hallway toward the stairs. On the left, you’ll find the men’s room. Fill this to the line and bring it back. I’m going to use my new million dollar toy, there, courtesy of our DHS, to measure how much of the isotope is in your body,” he said, pointing to the mass spectrometer. “They’ve been concerned something like this would happen.” He looked back to the exam table, the donut flake still there, and said, “That piece of contaminated donut should identify it.”

Moments later, he returned with the full cup and handed it over. Gruber took it and handed him back a full brown pill bottle. Squinting, in need of reading glasses, he tried to focus on the label.

“What’s NAC?” he asked.

“N-Acetyl-Cysteine, another powerful chelator. It’s a harmless amino acid but mixed with the NaHCO3 in baking soda, pulls heavy metal isotopes, screaming and kicking, out of your system. They should clear you up shortly, but I’ll need to run another urinalysis in four weeks.”

“If we’re still here,” Briscoe said, obliquely. Looking one month into the future was difficult for him knowing pi day was only twenty-two days out. He stuffed the pills in his pocket and readied himself to leave.

Gruber stopped him. “One more thing, Officer Briscoe.”

“Sure, go ahead.” His face flushed, expecting more bad news.

“Can you estimate the diameter of that indentation in the boat’s deck? You said you felt it.”

“About twenty inches or so. Why?”

“I have a reference book with details of all nuclear warheads in existence. Your information may aid me in identifying a specific warhead, if there is one, and from that, the fissionable element inside.”

“Um-hmm.”

“Sorry, not to make light of your condition, but I also have to view this from a forensics angle. We need to determine what did this to you.”

“Of course. I understand. Good luck… and will you please tell Lieutenant Poole I needed to get home.” Closing the door, he looked back, exhausted and said, “Going home now for a long shower and a hot meal.”

“Goodbye officer. Take care.”