The Rackham Files (26 page)

I could hear their movements and imagined Ern trying, in his diffident way, to comfort my sis. Finally he said, "So we pump fresh air in here somehow."

"My hand-cranked blower in the smithy might do it," I said.

"It might as well be at the North Pole," he rejoined. "It'd take you an hour to detach it and bring it back. You'd be dead in a few days, so forget it. Hold on: your forced-draft furnace blower in the basement has a filter, doesn't it?"

Not much use, I said, when the power was off.

"But we could tap into the air source if we had an air pump. Look, team, I'm having a brainstorm. If we can locate a big sturdy cardboard box, I think I could build a bellows pump with it. A bellows will suck air through a filter better than a squirrel-cage blower does."

Shar said, "It's dangerous, hon. Who's going to stand in the basement and pump it all night?"

But Ern was already up, groaning with fatigue, the lamp shining toward the disorder of the root cellar. "We can run a pipe from the filter box to the tunnel and pump from in here," he insisted, starting to rummage between the bikes. "If either of you has a better idea or can figure where we'll get—um—thirty feet of pipe as wide as your fist, let me know. We need it for an air conduit."

My modern forced-air furnace system sat under the stairs in the basement, linked to sheet-metal conduits. I had no pipe and no ideas. For a long moment I considered just relaxing, taking my chances. Which weren't good, and I'd be whittling away at the chances of three young sleepers and Spot as well. I grunted to my feet and followed Shar, who'd already had a lifesaving idea.

Ern chose a corrugated carton big as a two-drawer file cabinet and worked without visible blueprints. He thought Shar's pipe might be too flimsy but had no better answer, and I helped her when I saw what my sis had in mind. Shar just took a stack of old newspaper and started rolling tubes, each tube made from a dozen sheets. I taped the seams. Ern suggested we cover the paper tubes with latex paint to seal the pores in the paper, then countermanded his own idea; it'd take too long to dry. Instead we unrolled my thin two-mil roll of plastic film and sheathed each paper tube with it, taped on the seam. The first two were pretty sorry specimens, wrinkled and repaired with too much tape, but we got better at it. By the time I noticed the muggy, oppressive atmosphere, Shar and I had finished over a dozen knee-high lengths of air pipe made from newsprint.

Ern muttered, "We're going to have to open that basement door soon." Sweat stood on his face. He was breathing a bit too quickly, and so was I. "Shar, you remember how to read the fallout meter from the one I built before?"

She did, but didn't know how to charge it up. I said I'd show her. It was necessary to align that protruding wire with the foil leaves, then move the wire away again after its spark charged the foil. We crowded near my lamp—all hail to the guy who invented rechargeable dry cells—and after a few tries we got it right.

"I'm still getting three rems an hour here in the root cellar," she announced softly after timing it with her watch, then fumbled in the bag strapped to her bike. She withdrew a two-cell flashlight, reminding me that those little second-stage evacuation kits contained everything from raisins to razor blades. I still had no idea what problems they'd had getting to my place—but there'd be plenty of time for those stories in the next week. Assuming we lived that long. Judging from the way our bodies were laboring in that clammy air, I couldn't assume we'd pull through.

Shar went into the basement and closed the door again to take fresh readings; not that we had much choice about them. We would have to go in there and punch into my sheet-metal furnace filter box and insert the air pipe whether we liked the readings or not. Meanwhile I held a heavy polyfilm trapezoid in place while Ern double-taped it onto the big cardboard box.

The box was now cut away so it had a steep wedge shape in side view, with thick polyfilm replacing the trapezoid of cardboard he had cut away. He had cut two holes through the rectangular back of the box, cut a thin-walled mailing tube into two shorter pieces, and taped them firmly into the holes. As we taped polyfilm on, I could see through it into the box. A hastily cut rectangle of cardboard was taped over the mouth of one segment of mailing tube, but only at the top so that the rectangle could flap loose. "You didn't find any more mailing tubes, did you?" I asked.

"Nope. Wish I had. The partial vacuum when I lift this bellows will probably collapse Shar's air pipe—no it won't, either!" He put down the big box and upended another smaller cardboard carton, letting food cans spill onto shelves in the root cellar. "Harve, you cut this box into strips, maybe three inches wide—just so they'll slip into the airpipe. We'll need twice as many inches of cardboard strip as we have of pipe."

I grabbed tin snips, a shitty tool but better than nothing, and began cutting without knowing what Ern had in mind. I saw, though, while cutting the third strip. Ern grabbed the two I had cut, used his keen-edged pocketknife to cut slits lengthwise halfway down the center of each, then forced the slit wider by prying and reversed one strip so the mouths of the slits matched. Then he merely shoved them together so that, seen from the end, the two strips had an X shape. "There, damnit. Shove that down the air pipe and it won't collapse." It was good to hear the satisfaction in his tone. It said he wasn't licked yet.

Shar returned with guarded optimism as Ern attacked his project again. He was making a handle from the folded widths of cardboard but looked up expectantly. "What reading did you get in the basement, honey?"

"About fifteen rems an hour at the desk."

"That's a shade less than I got."

"Funny thing, though: I get about eight at the stairwell, and the same at the other end of the room near the waterbed."

We considered this in silence. Shar cooed in delight when she saw how my cardboard strips stiffened her air pipes and began assembling the things as I cut them. Then, "Hon, you're stumbling like a wino," she warned Ern. "And my headache is definitely worse."

Without a word he lifted his bellows pump, tape, and tools; staggered down the tunnel; managed to get the door open. We were gradually asphyxiating in the root cellar's stagnant air, and it wasn't much past midnight.

I grabbed a double armload of air pipe and caromed off the paneling en route to the basement, leaving Shar to bring what I'd left. Ern helped me to the stairwell. Though I was dizzy, I had no headache and said as much.

Ern, breathing deeply in the basement, located the filter intake box of my furnace system and selected the large blade of his bulky Swiss pocketknife, then jabbed hard into the bottom face of the thin sheet-metal box. Using the heel of his hand to hammer the blade in, he glanced at me. "Foul air doesn't affect everyone the same, Harve. Tell me: what's twelve times eleven?"

I blinked, swayed. "Uh—look it up," I said.

"Headache or not, you're rocky. Just keep breathin', and bring the kids to the basement doorway. I can do this without you."

I grabbed mattresses and pulled them, kids and all, toward the basement. I was already recuperating enough to wonder how long the basement air would last when we were sealed in. If only we had a column of clean air to draw from—
the chimney!
 

Spot was awake and curious. I settled him with a pat and a "stay," and hurried to where Ern was folding thin metal tabs back on the underside of my furnace air intake box. "I know why the fallout's worse near my desk, Ern," I said, not wanting to say it. "We should've blocked the chimney at the top while we could still get to it."

Shar, holding a segment of air pipe ready, frowned and then understood. "Of course! The dust box at the foot of the chimney is right outside the foundation near your desk. A little fallout is dropping straight down the chimney. It can't be much."

"Enough, though," Ern grunted. "Nothing we can do about it right now except stay away from that part of the basement. Here, hon; try it now."

She thrust the air pipe past the bent tabs; let Ern tape it in place. She said, "Let's hope the furnace filter's a good one."

It wasn't, but we wouldn't learn that for another fifteen minutes.

Our primitive air pipe looked like hell, but lying along the floor from stairwell to tunnel entrance, it looked like salvation, too. Ern finished taping a square of cardboard over the outside "exhaust" piece of mailing tube protruding from the pump and lifted the handle atop the bellows.

The whole thing tried to lift. "Wedge it down for me," he said and pulled again. The box heaved a mighty sigh as its top came up, the polyfilm unwrinkling at its full extension, and then Ern pushed down. I heard a
clack
inside the bellows—that cardboard flapper operating, the simplest kind of valve you can make.

But more important, a solid
whooosh
emerged from the exhaust tube, its flapper flying up until Ern started another intake cycle. He kept lifting and shoving for a minute or more, and squatting there in the tunnel, we could not mistake the change in the air quality.

Ern saw the tears of relief in Shar's eyes. "Hon, get something to wedge this bellows box in place; takes more force to lift it than I thought, but it's farting nearly two cubic feet of fresh air every time it cycles. Where are you going, Harve?"

"Not far, that's for sure," I said instead of telling him. I wanted to use the fallout meter to be sure the air was free of fallout.

It wasn't as easy to get a static charge transferred to the foil leaves as it looked. When I touched the uninsulated end of the charging wire, the foil lost some of its charge. I tried again, and after several fumble-fingered tries I had the foil-leaf capacitor properly charged up.

All these goddamn details! They were driving me around the bend. But my brother-in-law had known details that let him build a high-volume bellows pump from scratch, and in an hour. My flibbertigibbet sis had saved my very considerable bacon with air pipes made from fucking
newspaper
, of all things. But I knew some details I didn't like.

Item: I hadn't changed that furnace filter in a year.

Item: The furnace filter drew air from a standpipe buried in the wall, which poked up through my roof.

Item: Ern's bellows pump sucked so hard you could see the air pipes flexing, even with the cruciform stiffeners inside them. Would it also suck fallout particles in
sideways
under the raincap on my roof?

Item: If it did, would the dirty furnace filter trap them?

I found out a few minutes later, eyeing the fallout meter in front of the bellows exhaust. "Stop the damn pump, Ern," I said.

He'd worked up a sweat. "Gladly. You want to take a turn?"

"No. The meter is reading over thirty rems an hour. We're sucking fallout in past the filter."

"Oh dear God," Shar moaned, and covered the sleeping body of Lance with her own.

In the glow of Shar's flashlight I took another reading just inside the tunnel, aware of Ern's eyes on me and of our mutual exhaustion. From many nights of stakeouts, waiting for some bail jumper to poke his nose up, I knew you felt most like cashing it all in when your body was at its lowest ebb. "Twelve rems now, maybe just residual from what we pulled in through the filter," I said, as chipper as possible. I went to the door, fanned it back and forth a few times, then saw the obvious and untaped the air pipe halfway across the floor. "This damn basement must have six or seven thousand cubic feet of air," I growled. "Try pumping again."

Shar saw her husband trying to rise and pushed him back; knelt at the bellows as if venerating it—and why not?—then cycled it slowly. Noting with regret that the old LP record Ern had chosen to generate a static charge was my rare old ten-inch Tom Lehrer album, I recharged the meter again and waited a long time to get my reading. We were too tired to cheer when I concluded that we were taking only two or three rems an hour lying in the tunnel, its door open only enough to admit the airpipe, drawing air from the basement.

I flicked the flashlight off. "We just may make it through," I said.

Ern, almost dreamily: "I've been thinking. The dose we take is cumulative, but that fallout couldn't have reached us much before eleven or so. Maybe we took ten rems before we got to the tunnel, but we haven't taken over a few more in here. Then another five or so in the basement, another couple while pumping shit through your lousy furnace filter—I'm sorry, Harve, and anyway it was my own idea—and I come up with a grand total of less than twenty rems. We have a fighting chance to pull through."

"Unless we run out of air," I reminded him.

"Bubba," panted Shar in the darkness near me, "I am going to—pull every single hair—out of your body." Thirty-five years before, that had been her darkest threat to a brother twice her size. I started to chuckle and heard Ern's soft laugh warming me, and we squeezed that moment of merriment dry.

Sometime after one A.M. I took over the pumping chores. We hadn't set up any official sequence, but when a cautious whisk of the flashlight beam told me Shar and Ern were both asleep, I decided they needed it. I pumped the bellows every ten seconds and rested in between, and figured after four hundred cycles that an hour had passed. Then I roused Kate, calmed her sudden outbreak of fear; told her we were going to make it if she would do three hundred slow pumps of this bizarre gadget before waking Cammie to take her place.

"And who does Cammie wake?"

"Me," I said.

After a moment's thought in the blackness she said, "That won't do, boss. If anybody plays the sacrificial lamb now, we can all be sorry later. And," she said teasingly but with damning accuracy, "you're the one dude in this menagerie that nobody can lift if he collapses. Now we'll try it again: Cammie wakes who?"

"Her old man," I said, and laid my hand on her shoulder before I thought about it.

I think she said, "Thanks," but I was already drifting away to Lilliput, where, according to my synapses, evil homunculi amused themselves by driving pickaxes between my vertebrae for the next few hours.