An Atomic Romance (11 page)

18

Julia’s into something a lot scarier than what I do at the plant,” he told Burl one afternoon as they were driving to the lake with their fishing tackle. Clarence was riding between them, alert, polite, watching the road intently. Reed was at the wheel of his truck.

He tried to describe the library books for Burl. “Molecular biology is like trying to get a swarm of bees under a microscope so you can look for lice.”

“Isn’t that angels dancing on the head of a pin?” Burl said.

Reed laughed. “I haven’t got past p-branes and quantum chickens, but now Julia’s probably into genetic mutation. If I could get cloned, maybe she’d pay more attention to me.”

“I thought that’s what she was afraid of,” said Burl. “You and all those chemicals.”

“Let’s catch some fish.”

“Hey, good buddy, you’re talking my language.”

The outing to the lake, to a certain inlet that Burl was fond of, was restful. Clarence explored the woodsy shore, then settled down nearby while Reed and Burl fished, using the old cane poles they had had for years. Now and then they tossed Clarence a stick. The day was pleasant and not very humid. Out on the lake some motor-boats seemed to be racing, their occasional roar tearing the day. Late in the day a pair of F-15s from the nearby military base screamed down the lake, low and so fast they were almost hallucinatory.

“Cruising,” said Burl. “Looking for girls.”

The crappie and catfish had gone to deep water, and it was too hot to go out in a boat. Using a packet of crickets from a bait store, Reed and Burl fished from late afternoon till nearly dusk. They caught enough small-mouth bream to be satisfied, and they roasted a few of them over charcoals in a little throwaway foil kit someone had given Burl. After they had finished eating, he toasted some marshmallows over the dying coals. They tasted like fish. He had a six-pack, not enough to get drunk on. He wasn’t in the notion, he said. His drinking followed its own internal rules. Reed had learned not to discuss the topic with him.

Leaning against some boat cushions in the truck bed, Reed and Burl watched the stars, old friends popping out like pixels as the dark deepened. It was peaceful here, away from Sunnybank and the plant. Clarence scrambled into the truck bed and lay on his side, his hot breath fanning Reed’s legs. Mars was hanging in the sky, as brilliant and orange as the fat, bejeweled abdomen of an orb weaver.

“Man, Mars sure is a sight,” said Burl, when Reed pointed it out.

Reed finished his beer and crumpled the can. He said, “Sometimes seeing the stars stops me in my tracks and makes me wonder who the hell I think I am.”

“You should have studied astronomy. Then you wouldn’t have been poisoning your guts.”

“I don’t have the patience for the math. But maybe I should study astronomy to keep my mind sharp—so I won’t get Alzheimer’s.” They laughed. Reed said, “It’s bigger than me. I know that. I look out there, and it seems like nothing much here matters.”

“No, it’s the other way around,” Burl said, twisting away from Clarence’s heavy breath. “I look out there, and I see that
this
is all that matters, right here and now.”

“But that’s where we get in trouble.”

When they located Orion’s belt, Reed said, “Did you ever hear about Project Orion?”

“C.I.A. or FBI?”

“NASA. Or whatever NASA was before it was NASA. Project Orion was a spaceship powered by atomic bombs.”

“No shit. You’re making that up.”

“No. The idea was that one spaceship would carry a couple of thousand bombs to power it. One would go off every few seconds and shoot the ship out into space.”

“That’s the wildest idea I ever heard,” Burl said. He actually guffawed. Reed was not sure he had ever heard a genuine guffaw before. Burl said, “It sounds like a rough ride.”

“Might be. But if you’ve got them going off in a regular rhythm, then it would be like a putt-putt boat. Nuclear putt-putt.”

“What if it exploded on the launch pad?”

“They’d launch it from orbit. This spaceship could accelerate to three percent of the speed of light! You could go to Mars for the summer.”

“Did they do a test model in the lab with firecrackers?”

“Probably.”

“How come they never built it?”

“The nuclear test-ban treaty.”

“Right.”

Reed had always been fond of doomed Project Orion. It was the prototype for his Reedmobile, one of the warp-speed breakthroughs that would allow him to whiz throughout the universe. As a kid, he liked to fantasize that the plans for the spaceship would be resurrected by the time he was grown, so that he could launch out to see the moon and the planets and the stars. He learned about Project Orion when the astronauts landed on the moon, and the thrill of space travel absorbed him throughout his adolescence. He always drew pictures of rockets in his school notebooks, and girls thought he was drawing penises.

“The Orion spaceship was shaped like a bullet,” Reed said. “It had a huge plate on the tail, with shock absorbers, and the bombs would blast out the back in a big spray of fire and mushroom clouds.”

“Man, Reed, you expect me to believe all that? You don’t know Uranus from your elbow.”

“Did you know there were rings around Uranus?”

“Like hell there are.” Burl guffawed again. “Hey, see Orion’s belt. Three stars? You know how he got his belt?”

“No idea. Karate?”

Burl said, “Orion put his belt on, but found he had gained weight and it wouldn’t quite fit. So he asked Cassiopeia to let him borrow one of hers. She was a tad chunky herself. She flung him the belt, but its jewels were loose and they scattered across the sky: Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. Those are the big babies we notice. But there are many more, all over the heavens. At least that’s the story I told my little niece.”

Reed’s imagination ranged beyond the planets. He tried to picture himself outside the Milky Way, in the large Magellanic Cloud, watching as Cassiopeia flung her baubles across the universe. Pin-wheels of flashing colors whirled before his eyes.

19

Reed had been off for four days. Lately his schedule was four on, three off, three on, four off. He arrived at work at seven p.m. for his shift. He had slept all day with his ringer off and hadn’t listened to the radio. When he reached the plant, he thought it was odd to see official state cars there so late. His first suspicion was a security breach, but the plant was well guarded. What could terrorists do, hijack a million-dollar cylinder of enriched uranium and drive it up the Interstate? Or perhaps they would go after a fourteen-ton cylinder of depleted uranium, but they would need a crane to get it out of the cylinder yard. Either way, they would need centrifuges to concentrate the radioactive isotopes. As for making a dirty bomb, he doubted if a terrorist could scrounge up enough fixings here among the piles of scrap.

He flashed his I.D. badge and was waved on through. “What’s up?” he asked the first person he saw in the parking lot, a lanky woman from the machine shop who was coming off shift. He couldn’t remember her name.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Guess not.”

“Some reporter is saying we’ve got plutonium leaking out. I don’t believe it’s true, though. We don’t even use plutonium here. The media’s so full of shit they don’t know which end to sit on.”

“Plutonium? Heaven and earth! I didn’t even see the paper,” Reed said. Because he was late, he had left it in the yard, under a bush, where the paper boy had tossed it.

“It wasn’t in our paper; it was on the front page of the Chicago paper. How come they’ve heard of it and we haven’t?”

In the process building several of Reed’s coworkers were clocking in.

“Here I am, the innocent babe,” Reed said as he punched his time card. “Fill me in. I overslept.”

“Hell, Reed, it’s all over television,” said Teddy. “If you don’t get your TV fixed, you’re never going to know anything that’s going on.”

“Did I know anything when my TV worked?” Reed picked up the messages from his mail hole. “So what’s this about plutonium?”

“They don’t know how it got here, but those news snoops found it all over the place. Inside the fence and out.” Teddy, still fearing beryllium disease, spat with projectile force into a waste can. He had been threatening to join the class-action suit, and he had filed a medical claim.

“Is this what the blue fire is all about?” Reed asked. He knew that plutonium could ignite spontaneously in the air, a thought too dreadful to voice aloud.

Several guys gathered by the tool shop, reluctant to speed to their jobs.

“Fucking unbelievable.”

“What are they doing to us here?”

“How am I going to explain this to my wife?”

“I wasn’t really shook up before, but what the fuck is going on?”

Jim rode up on his bicycle. “Hey, boys. I guess you know they’re looking for plutonium now. I swear, this whole thing’s turning into a treasure hunt.”

“If it’s plutonium, what keeps it from going critical?” Teddy demanded.

“Oh, it wouldn’t,” Jim said reassuringly. “There couldn’t be enough in one spot. I doubt if it amounts to much of anything.”

“You’ve been repeating yourself a lot lately, Jim,” Reed said.

“I’m just doing my job, Reed. We don’t want a panic now, do we?”

“Always the mother hen,” Reed said. He was kidding, and he thought Jim knew that.

Jim said, “This is the solid truth, Reed. If I knew we were really in danger, I’d be the first to let you know.”

“I bet the PR office is working overtime,” Teddy said.

Reed wondered if the plutonium could be involved somehow in the manufacture of bomb triggers. Could that have been some of the plant’s secret work in the fifties? He suspected that this latest report was true. When he had his worst exposure more than fifteen years before, he had tested positive for neptunium, a transuranic element, like plutonium. The transuranics, heavier than uranium, were fission by-products, part of the indiscriminate spray that occurred when atoms were fractured. He wouldn’t ask then where the neptunium had come from. Plutonium had not been mentioned.

A couple of instrument mechanics bound for their shop lingered, caught up in the talk. One of them was wearing a purple-print do-rag and the other had a bucket of bolts in his hand.

“Where is this stuff coming from anyway?” asked the bolt guy. “Does anybody know?”

“I bet it’s the scrap in the waste dump,” said the other. “They must have found it there when they were cleaning it up. What do you know, Reed?”

“Hell, we’ve got all kinds of shit here,” Reed said. He was sipping coffee. “We’ve had neptunium all along. And americium. They’re all transuranics. You know there’s a transuranics office on the second floor of Health Physics.”

“That’s next to where you go piss in a cup to see what you’re picking up,” one of the guys said.

“That’s just for uranium.”

A cell rat called Hot Nuts spoke up. “I’ve had neptunium on my body scan,” he said. “They never said anything about it. It was no big deal.”

The guys went on talking, but Reed grew quiet. The coffee tasted bitter and bad, as though it had been recycled.

One of the younger guys, an electrician named Mike, said, “I know about that transuranics office. They wouldn’t just come out and say ‘plutonium.’ But it’ll be all right. I know we’re trying to clean it up. That must be what all the new ventilation systems are about.”

“We’re getting a royal house-cleaning.”

“I wonder if the plutonium is in the underground plume that goes to the river,” the big guy known as Beau said. “With the technetium.”

“Isn’t plutonium real heavy?” asked Mike. “Wouldn’t it be slow?”

“The Transuranics, a heavy-metal group,” Reed said. He thought he was joking, but his tone was flat.

“It’s just a big scare to get the D.O.E. to shell out the money for cleanup. They’ve been promising that incinerator for years.”

“Plutonium’s not supposed to be here. What’s it doing here anyway?”

“That’s what everybody’s wondering.”

“It’s just rumors. Hey, let’s wait and see.”

Jim had been parked there, straddling his bicycle, listening. “Hey, guys, let’s calm down,” he said. “This kind of thing gets blown up like a hot-air balloon. It’s just some kind of accidental contamination. We’ll straighten it out. Hell, this ain’t Rocky Flats.”

In the cramped, windowless break room of the maintenance division, Reed found a printout of the story from the Chicago newspaper. It said that four hundred picocuries of plutonium per kilogram had been found in soil samples outside the fence.

He whistled. “Those must be some
hot
hot spots!”

“Wonder what would happen if you stepped on a hot spot?” an instrument mechanic called Woolly asked, reading over Reed’s shoulder.

“You wouldn’t know it,” said Reed. “Not like you’d know if you stepped in a puddle of puke.”

“Reed’s the big expert on exposures,” Woolly said to a couple of guys hanging around the break room.

“I’ve been hotter than Reed has,” said Beau. “When I worked at product withdrawal. Doesn’t it stand to reason that would be the hottest place? You’ve got the assay up to five-and-a-half percent. That’s as hot as you get here.”

“U-235’s chicken shit compared to plutonium,” said Woolly.

“If one of these hot spots glowed, you could probably see it from the moon,” Reed said, kidding along.

But inside he was raging. A Vesuvius of memory and awakening bitterness caused his guts to churn. He remembered the blaring siren, the rush to the de-con room, the sudden car-wash sensations from the force of the hot spigots trained on his body. The rawness of his skin, the scrubbing, the grittiness in his mouth. His skin felt as though he were being spray-painted with a high-pressure nozzle. And then it was over. He was naked, his hot scrubs sealed in a yellow rad bag. Someone handed him an old sweat suit to wear home.

The Chicago story offered little explanation for the plutonium, so he discarded it and picked up the local newspaper. Scanning headlines, he noticed a small story on page three that said a federal team had dismissed the blue-flame scare; there had been no criticality. I knew that, Reed said to himself. The federal team still was not sure what the blue flames were. He flung the newspaper onto the cabinet where he had found it. It seemed that everything nowadays was a pattern of hype and then deflation. It wearied him.

Reed’s first job that evening was unclogging a section of barrier sieve with chlorine trifluoride, which, until he heard of the plutonium, he would have said was the most dangerous substance at the plant. He worked with a new gingerliness, handling the cylinder of CLF
₃
with unusual precision and care. On the break, when half a dozen guys cornered off to smoke, he didn’t join them. He stood outside the building alone and observed the sky, illuminated by strings of floodlights. The plumes of steam from the cooling towers flowed like gauze-veiled dancers through the lights. Plutonium was first named ultimium, he recalled, because it was thought to be the ultimate element. The symbol, Pu, was a joke. It should have been Pl. Reed appreciated the sense of humor, even though plutonium was not amusing. He was bothered by the thought that the transuranics might have been present when his father worked at this place. They could have been part of the atomic secrets so carefully guarded, and if they had been around so long, they could have permeated the place.

In the cafeteria at one a.m., Reed selected roasted chicken, lima beans, mashed potatoes, and salad. He ate perfunctorily, Atomic Man stoking himself with fuel. The chicken seemed undercooked, and the gravy on the potatoes tasted like paste. The chatter around was quieter than usual, threaded through with murmurs of disbelief. Later, he joined a bunch of guys gathered around a bicycle on the operations floor. It was slowly turning a circle on its kickstand, motivated by the vibrations of the Cascade.

At the end of his shift, he paused by his truck to watch the early light. He glanced toward the largest classified burial mound, the grassy rise where a mystery mix of toxic waste was buried. It was yellow-taped, off limits. An anthropologist studying the ancient Mound Builders might regard that mound as a likely target for study—a molded bank of dirt with a rich, intricate history, layers of houses and bones and garbage and pottery. One wouldn’t expect it to hold a hidden curse, like something in a horror movie.