Count Geiger's Blues (17 page)

32
Double Exposure

The next morning,
Xavier saw The Mick off to school and phoned Grantham to say he didn’t feel well. He took a cab to Sidney Lanier Airport, found a car-rental agency in the main terminal, and rented a car with radar-eluding add-ons that enabled him, without fear of detection by the Oconee State Patrol or the fuzz in any intervening hamlets, to zip at 125 miles per hour into the Phosphor Fogs. Once there, he cruised the streets of Placer Creek, rubbernecking the sky for any sign of a telltale addled-ness. But, of course, it was day, and the sky would only reveal a disquieting sheen, if it had one, at night. So, when Xavier saw a man in striped overalls limping along a sidewalk on Major Barbara Avenue, he pulled abreast and got directions to the Hazelton farm.

“Above Frye’s Mill,” the man said. “Near Plant VanMeter.”

Why this sudden need to talk to Deke Hazelton? Well, it had something to do with the Suit’s decreasing ability to reverse his syndrome, something with Bari’s workaholic devotion to her comic-book fashions, and something with Hazelton’s belief that Plant VanMeter posed a health threat to the county. Never mind that Hazelton had reaped a big profit from a six-legged thoroughbred “engineered” by that threat. Anyway, deep in the Phosphor Fogs, Xavier found Hazelton’s place. A brick wall and a metal gate blocked the long drive leading to the house. Xavier pushed a button on the gate’s speaker unit.

“Who is it?” a female voice asked. “Environmentalist or another Con-Tri stooge?”

“I’m a newspaperman.”

“Which paper? And why should I let you in to bother my daddy?”

“The
Urbanite
, miss. I’d like to talk to your father about the mutations among your farm animals.”

“That darned CNN report. Phone’s been jangling since five A.M.”

Xavier glanced around. Loblollies, red mulberries, and yellow poplars, all but the pines more or less leafless, edged the highway fronting the farm. “But I’m the first one up here, aren’t I? Doesn’t that count for something?”

After a brief pause, the voice said, “You Alex Meisel?”

Alex Meisel was a young reporter covering Metro/State affairs for the
Urbanite
. “Yes,” Xavier said. (Well, he and Alex each had an x in their Christian names.)

The gate’s lock clicked open. “Drive on in. And close the gate behind you.”

At the house, a two-story hodgepodge with wood-shake shingles, gables, coping-sawed curlicues around the eaves, widows’ walks, and a screened-in L-shaped porch, Xavier met Ailene Hazelton, a sixteen-year-old with rough-cut bangs and eyes as moist as a bush baby’s. Ailene led Xavier to the sunroom, where her father was at work in a leather chair, tapping the deck of a laptop computer. He set the computer aside and offered Xavier—Mr. Meisel—some orange juice. Xavier declined. A fake Christmas tree stood in one corner. Ceramic wise men, shepherds, camels, and sheep were arrayed on the green felt tree skirt.

“Kept Cockroach a secret for over a year. Now all Hell’s breaking loose.”

“After selling him, Mr. Hazelton,” Xavier said, “you accused Con-Tri of causing the mutation.”

“What else could have done it?”

“Why did you wait so long before making that charge? Isn’t a delay like that”—Xavier hesitated briefly—“unconscionable?”

“Ailie and I got attached to the critter. We feared the government would take him away from us.”

“But you sold him yourself. To a stable in Tennessee.”

“For a
lot
of money.” The chunky-kneed Ailene was sitting on an upholstered bench next to the sliding glass doors. Through them, Xavier saw the shallow end of a heated swimming pool under an inflatable dome of lime-green plastic. “Now we can afford to move, Mr. Meisel, even if nobody shows up to buy our contaminated farm.”

“The all-mighty government should buy it,” Hazelton said. “They bought the land Plant VanMeter’s on. Bought the county commissioners off by building us a school—Placer County High—that looks half like a museum and half like a parliament building. Niiice. Real niiice.” He didn’t sound pleased. “It’s pretty, that school, but it was a big fat bribe for taking the nooklur plant.”

“But you sold Cockroach to Hallelujah Stables?” Xavier said, trying to imagine a six-legged horse under a professional jockey.

“Sport o’ kings,” Hazelton said. “When he’s three, Cockroach’ll win the Derby.”

“Can you run an animal with two extra limbs in the Derby?”

“No one’s ever considered the possibility,” Ailene said, her hands folded in her lap. On one finger she wore a white-gold ring with a deep red stone.

Xavier sat on the bottom step of the steps just inside the sunroom. Get to the point, he advised himself. Did Cockroach’s dam get irradiated from Plant VanMeter the same night of that valve failure in Reactor No. 4? The night I was exposed? The upshot for me was a bad case of the Philistine Syndrome, but for the Hazeltons a valuable mutant colt.

“Have you or Ailene suffered any bodily ill effects from your farm’s nearness to Plant VanMeter?”

“Headaches,” Hazelton said. “Worry.” He glowered at Xavier. “That’s plenty, don’t you think?”

“If your horse is your only real evidence for a local radiation release, it’s not much.”

“It’s not our only evidence,” Hazelton said.

“Another six-legged horse? Or a two-headed chicken? Let me see the places on your property where your animals were irradiated.”

“Why? You crazy?”

“No. I want to help you establish the plant’s role in causing these abnormalities.”

In another room, a telephone rang. Ailene pressed her lips together and brushed a strand of frizzy hair into place over her ear. After three rings, the telephone fell silent. It was obviously attached to an answering machine. Xavier got the idea that the answering machine had received a grueling workout in the wake of last night’s CNN report.

“You want a
scoop
,” Hazelton said. The word, the way he said it, sounded feces-stained. “Is that all you care about?”

“Daddy,” Ailene said.

“Scoops, as you call them, keep the public informed,” Xavier said. “The public, if knowledgeable, works to safeguard its own welfare. Reporters like me”—
well, like Alex Meisel
—“are instruments of enlightenment. You can’t assume—”

“Jesus,” Hazelton said. “No more lectures about the noble press.”

“Then show me your evidence. So I can spread the word. So Con-Tri can either defend itself or take the blame for its betrayal of the public’s trust.”

“The spring above Frye’s Mill,” Hazelton said. “That’s where you need to visit. Some damned fishy varmints in there.”

“May I go out there?” Perhaps a lost puzzle piece had come to hand.

Hazelton groaned. “Let me get my coat.”

“Just tell me the way. I’d be glad to go alone.”

Once again, the telephone was ringing. Ailene turned her eyes to the ceiling and drummed her fingers on her knees.

*

Following Hazelton’s directions, Xavier drove into the woods to the spring near the old mill to which Pamela, of Pamela’s Boarding House, had pointed him over a year and a half ago. This approach began from a different starting place, and the spring was too cold for swimming. The site drew him, anyway. The Hazeltons might be right about Plant VanMeter’s contribution to the mutant condition of Cockroach and the as-yet-unseen fish in the spring. If so, the public should be informed.

Xavier had another motive for revisiting the site of his first exposure to radiation. A selfish motive. He wanted to reexpose himself to the radiation that had altered the eel and the frogs he’d seen in or near the spring on his last visit. Reexposure might reverse the effects of a syndrome that, inadequately diagnosed and countered, had become unbearable. Or it might kill him outright. For death was the only unequivocal and lasting cure. And, as Nietzsche put it,
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

A half hour before noon, the millrace with its cold, languid pools seemed different from Xavier’s recollection. Sweetgum trees stood leafless. The ground cover of pigwort, moss, and blackberry shrubs had a vaguely scorched look. But there was no mistaking the limestone ledge on which he’d camped or the glassiness of the water across which he’d paddled, frightening a host of see-through minnows and one bloody-eyed eel. Xavier jumped from the limestone shelf to a narrow section of the bank where a piece of stovepipe—no, a dark gray trash can—no, a tube of unexploded ordnance—glinted near the quiet, almost frozen water. He hunkered beside the object. It had been drilled and replugged by a material just like that comprising the cylinder itself. He pushed against it, but it wouldn’t budge. The cylinder was wedged into the slick mud beside the spring. Standing, Xavier peered into the water. Down deep—rippling and fracturing under the limpid surface—lay a jumble of cylinders like the one he’d just examined. Probably, a sleazeball auto mechanic or dairy farmer had dumped his trash in the pool. Oxygen canisters from a welding operation? Ancient milk tins? No telling. Sometimes, though, a string of bubbles rose and popped on the surface like cellophane beads.

Xavier was torn. He could hike across the streambed near the pool and then up a naked hillside to a service road to Plant VanMeter, where a security guard would most likely catch him. Or he could strip to his Suit, dive into the pool, and drop lazily to the cylinders sending up their jukebox bubbles. So what if it was December? It still wasn’t as cold as it was in New York when Polar Bear Club members went for an ass-freezing winter dip. Besides, the shock to his coddled system might bring about a remission of his syndrome. Finally, Xavier decided. He shed his clothes, except for the mesh leotard of his Count Geiger costume, which he also hoped would benefit from immersion, and did a racing dive into the pool before either the cold or his native good sense could prevent him. Water shattered like plastic, raking his limbs and splintering all around him as he plummeted toward the strange tins. There was shock, all right. He was disintegrating, like a shoat thrown to piranhas. And, as his lungs collapsed, his eyes ballooned to the size of streetlamp globes.

I’m a dead man, he thought.

Then he saw the trash cans, or milk tins, or torpedo casings, shimmering in their underwater jumble, and his body—aided by his Suit?—miraculously reassembled itself. Destructive cold yielded to a bathlike warmth. Soft, heat-tinged waves massaged his face, chest, stomach, legs. Xavier dolphined into this glowing upflow, hovered over the dreamily bubbling canisters, bathed in their near-silent white noise. Right next to these canisters wallowed a glowing, three-eyed, emerald-green catfish with filamentous whiskers corkscrewing out from its gigantic head like antennae. The catfish’s central eye indifferently beheld Xavier swimming down to it. If the cry of his oxygen-depleted bloodstream had not begun to reach him, he would have stayed. He would have wrapped his arms around the giant fish and clung to it like a barnacle. But the cry of his air-hungry body did reach him, and he paddled up through liquid crystal to temperatures only a few degrees above freezing. Out of the water, crazily enough, he was
not
reduced to helpless shivering, so he dried his Suit thoroughly with his dress shirt and pulled on the remainder of his clothes. Then, half-dazed by this meeting, Xavier hiked back to his renter, climbed in, and slapped it into gear. He reached his apartment before Mikhail arrived home from school.