The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  Soliano moved to me and Walter. He looked haggard, his face more bony than aristocratic. “This mud on the cask—this could be from his depot?”

  I nodded.

  “Go get it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Which one of you?” Scotty asked, rummaging through the suits.

  Walter started to speak but I clamped his arm. “I’m smaller, and stronger.”

  Walter shook me off and headed for the suits.

  I followed and said, low, “And I’m healthy.”

  He shot me a look I would not like to see again.

  I pulled him aside and said, brutal, “You’re flushed. Try wearing one of those bug suits. Get halfway into the tunnel and pass out. Somebody has to come in after you. Go ahead and push yourself real hard and see if you can bring on another stroke. Then you’ll be in the hospital and I’ll be here doing this job without you and that’s goddamned unfair.”

  Walter looked at the others. They hadn’t heard, or pretended not to. He gave me a brusque nod.

  Feeling like the biggest shit in the world, I went to Scotty. “It’ll be me.”

  Scotty had offered to go back in himself and scrape some mud but I needed to see it, undisturbed, in situ. Read the pattern of deposition before ruining it to take a sample.

  So now it became my show.

  Scotty opened an ice chest, pulled out a plastic vest filled with something that looked like blue ice, and then wrapped it like a gift around my baked husk. I had a moment to enjoy that and then Scotty worked me into the rubberized suit out of hell. I asked, “How much does this bug suit weigh?”

  He said, stern, “I call it a bug suit because I’ve worn it more times than I can count.” He packed me into the air tank and harness assembly. “You’re gonna call it a fully-encapsulated suit with self-contained breathing apparatus because I don’t want you to forget why you’re wearing it.”

  Hardly likely.

  “Weighs about sixty pounds.”

  I would have said a hundred.

  “I already metered for background radiation,” Scotty said. “We’re at eleven micro-Roentgens per hour. That’s what we’d expect around here, so no worry. You know, rads from rocks and...” He dimpled. “Well, rocks, that’s your department. Right-O?”

  “Right-O.” There’s some uranium and thorium in most rocks and soils, but around here it’d be down to point oh-oh parts per million. No worry. About the rocks.

  Scotty rummaged in his box of meters and brought out a Geiger counter. “This one’s for you. See the rate chart? Tells you rads based on clicks per second—alpha, beta, gamma. You get inside the tunnel, should sound about like this.” He snapped his fingers, paused, snapped again. “When you reach the fork, your reading’s gonna pick up a little.” He snapped a little faster. “When you see the cask, should sound about like this.” Faster. “Don’t get any closer than you need—Lucy’s making you a tool. And you wanna limit your time. Just grab your dirt and go, real fast. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Your Geiger sounds like a machine-gun, you make that Titanic face and get the hell out.”

  I swallowed. “Got it.”

  Lucy came over with the tool. It was the type of telescoping wand the woman at the dump had used to meter the cask at a respectable distance. Scotty had, I assumed, used it in the adit here, to similar purpose. Now it was my turn. Lucy had duct-taped a small scoop to the end of the wand. Very clever. She made a fist and after a moment I understood and balled my free hand and we bumped fists. Very cool.

  Scotty moved back in. When I was fully encapsulated, he connected the breathing hose and opened the valve. “Gimme a big inhale.” He hung the Geiger around my neck, attached the headlamp, and tapped the hood. “We’ll stay in touch.”

  There was nothing for it now but to get on with the show.

  I moved, elephantine. Walter intercepted me and fastened the belt bag of tools around my bulky girth. I extended my fist. He pretended not to notice. He said, “Watch out for snakes.”

  As I passed Hap, he outlined a cross over me.

  I remembered. Go with low dose.

  ~ ~ ~

  I entered the adit. Already sweating. Turtling along in my thousand-pound rubber shell. The floor was furred with decomposed borates. If I tripped and pitched face-down I doubted I’d be able to right myself. My headlamp lit the near view, the hacked throat of crumbly gold and milky white. Further on, the gullet was pitchy black.

  I followed the tire tracks.

  There was a sudden glitter at the edge of my vision and I thought bat eyes, but of course it was just my light sparkling off faceted ore.

  “How you doin?” Scotty’s voice, jovial, came in my facepiece speaker.

  “Fine,” I lied. Back ached, sweat leaked, cool vest chafed, mouth metallic, and I was already hallucinating bats.

  The Geiger clicked leisurely. Snap...snap.

  I returned my attention to the tracks. They grew spotty as the soil thinned and the floor showed its base rock.

  Up ahead, the gullet split in two.

  For a wild moment I couldn’t remember which fork Lucy had taken, which fork I need take, and I didn’t want to take the wrong fork and spend one extra second entombed in this suit in this place. The tire tracks were unreadable—Scotty and Lucy had made such a mess that it was simply hopeless. I was making a bigger mess with my own shuffling bug-suited feet.

  I squeaked, “Left fork, right?”

  “No, not right,” Scotty boomed in my ears, “go left.”

  Something skittered in my beam. My heart lurched. A small naked form turned tail and disappeared into the left fork. Some kind of rat. So the air in that fork was rat-safe, anyway. Can rat teeth go through bug suits?

  Bile came up into my mouth. I forced it down in dread of retching into my self-contained breathing apparatus.

  And now my Geiger counter was growing chattier. I checked the rate chart. All was as Scotty said it should be.

  Okay lady, just keep going.

  I forced myself into the left fork, following the rat.

  Following Roy Jardine. Had he worn a bug suit? Surely a veteran of the radwaste dump knew what to wear in here. I hoped, fervently, that he had ached and sweated and chafed. I felt no sympathy for him, none at all. I felt a sorrow for poor dead Sheila. And for the rest of us.

  Up ahead, my headlamp beam caught on a roadblock of silver.

  The cask seemed to fill the adit. It was the same make I’d seen at the crash site, and at the dump—that hefty tin can of a cask—and down here stuffed into the gullet of the mountain it looked monumental.

  I heaved my weighted self to a stop. “I’m looking at it,” I told Scotty.

  “Okey-doke. You got twenty minutes air left but you might wanna hurry it up.”

  My Geiger chattered gaily. I checked the chart. All was as it should be.

  I stood where I assumed Scotty had stood, at a telescoping-wand’s distance. I played my beam over the skin of the cask and saw what Scotty had seen: patches of dried mud, like the cask was molting. A dark gray mud. Not—just eyeballing it—the same species as the native soil around here. Not—a reasoned leap—acquired here. The mud was spattered across the lower reaches of the cask. I thought that over. Let’s say this cask was stored at the depot, until Jardine decided to bring it here. And in the process of loading it for transport maybe he spun the wheels of a telehandler or trailer in wet soil, and spattered the cask.

  I wanted that mud.

  I tucked Lucy’s tool under my arm and opened my belt bag, fishing for the specimen dish. I couldn’t tell a dish from a hand lens through this clown glove. Come on come on. You wanna limit your time. Just grab your dirt and go. Whatever I’d been fingering slipped away. I swallowed a curse. Scotty was listening. What if he told Walter I was stressed? And Walter’s already berating himself for letting me bully him into staying behind, and he’s got Soliano’s noblesse oblige dogging him, and if there’s anything Walter hates more than letting himse
lf down, it’s letting others down. He’s out there telling himself he feels just fine, and he’s never happy unless he can put his own eyes on the scene, and it’s not out of the question that he’ll bully Scotty into dressing him out and sending him in here to help.

  I secured the specimen dish and set it on the ground.

  I untelescoped Lucy’s tool and held the thing like a fishing pole, fishing for the spot just above the cask’s base collar where the largest mud patches clung.

  The scoop banged against steel and it made a big sound.

  And then there was a long moment when I didn’t understand, when I thought the sound came from my headset—Scotty banging his microphone into something—and then I thought I’d somehow dislodged a rat nest and it was rat turds spewing out. And then I focused on the yawning rip in the cask. Did I do that? With Lucy’s tool? And then I recoiled. The cask shat out beads, and beads geysered through the tunnel and spattered me and pooled at my feet and before I could backpedal out of their path, beads buried my booties.

  I must have screamed.

  Scotty yelped in my earphones.

  I paid no heed to my ringing ears, to Scotty’s babble—I paid heed, rather, to my little Geiger counter that was clicking its fool head off.

  ~ ~ ~

  I prepared to step out of the shower but Scotty stopped me. “Lemme get those hard-to-reach places.” He had a long-handled brush. “Lift the suit.”

  I pulled it up so that the leg wrinkles smoothed out, like I was hiking up a pair of sagging pantyhose, and Scotty scrubbed. Water was pumped from a RERT van up the ridge, and the hose connected to a PVC-pipe frame, and a nozzle rained the water down on me, and it pooled at my feet in a bright yellow catch basin that looked like a blow-up wading pool. I concentrated fiercely on the ludicrousness of this scene, of a toy shower stall outside a mine adit in the desert, of me in my bug suit being scrubbed down by Scotty in his suit. Some kind of kinky scene for hazmat fetishists. I focused on the soapy water that sluiced off my suit into the catch basin, on the hose that pumped the contaminated water out of the shower and down the ridge to the waste tank in the van.

  “Raise your arms.”

  I complied, numb, so Scotty could get at the hard-to-reach alphas and betas, but it was what he couldn’t get at, what my bug suit couldn’t keep out, that kept me sweating.

  I saw Walter, who had come to the edge of the decon corridor and was staring at me like I was from Mars. Soliano touched Walter’s elbow and said something I could not hear over the hiss of my tank.

  “Damn you,” Walter said.

  I heard that. But I didn’t blame Soliano for the exposure because I would have chosen to go in no matter what he said, and so would Walter, because there was the chance we could get a jump on locating the rest of the radwaste—although that chance had been blown to dust—and I knew Walter would not be blaming Soliano if Walter were the one standing here being deconned.

  Scotty moved between me and them, blocking my line of sight. He shut off the water. He went over me hood to boots with the Geiger and this time, unlike his frisk before the shower, the counter relaxed. I relaxed too, a fraction. Scotty opened my hood and removed my facepiece. I sucked in sweet hot air. He disconnected the regulator and took the tank off my back. I felt so light I could float away.

  He doffed his own breather. “Doing okay?”

  I nodded and turned my face to the sky, to the low brutal sun, and for a moment the solar rays on my liberated skin felt simply like a beachy summer afternoon.

  “Okey-doke,” he said, “we’re gonna peel you outta that suit.”

  I said, “Do I have a problem?”

  “About?”

  “Gammas.”

  He said, grim, “Puppies throw off some gammas.”

  I shifted in my two-ton suit. “Any lead in this? Like the dentist’s bib?”

  “Can’t wear a suit with enough lead to protect against gammas, and still move.”

  “What’s my dosimeter say?”

  “Says you picked up some gammas. And I’m real unhappy about that. Rules say a civilian shouldn’t be exposed to more’n a hundred millirems a year—above and beyond the background dose.”

  “How safe’s the dose limit, Scotty?”

  “Depends what you mean by safe.”

  “The numbers they put in the equations. That correlate millirems to likely effects. Hap says it’s a guess.”

  “Hap’s a clown.”

  “So you trust the numbers?”

  “Gotta have some guideline.” He shifted. “Anyway, we go by alara.”

  “What’s alara?”

  “A-L-A-R-A. As low as reasonably achievable. It means, let’s not take the dose limit as a goal. Let’s lowball the exposures. If we can.”

  But we hadn’t.

  “Hey Cassie, what you got...there is nothing to worry about.”

  He didn’t say ‘no worry.’ I didn’t like ‘there is nothing to worry about.’ It was too formal for Scotty. It sounded like it came from some manual: there is nothing to worry about so long as exposure is kept below the dose limit. I glanced at the scowling RERT crew, preparing to start the cleanup of Jardine’s mess. “What about them? How’s ALARA let them go in there?”

  “ALARA for us isn’t the same as ALARA for you.”

  “Jesus Scotty, you’re made of the same stuff I am.”

  He reddened. “Look, nobody on my watch goes over their set limit. I time them. Keep track. That’s why we have dosimeters. Somebody gets close to dosing out, I’m gonna limit their exposure. It’s real simple.” He looked down at my boots. “Time equals dose.”

  It had taken me, I calculated, about five seconds to ID the resin beads as not rat turds, and run.

  He squinted, although the sun was not in his face. His skin crackled around the eyes. He looked weathered—surfer dude soaked too long in the brine, in the sun, soaking up too many cosmic rays. Surfer dude in hazmat that doesn’t protect against gammas, that doesn’t protect against the revenge-soaked unpredictability of a man with access to the rads. He said, finally, “We follow the rules best we can.”

  “I know you do.”

  He absently touched the good-luck medallion at his neck, then saw me looking. “Hey, we’re not gonna have you sucking up any more dose.” He peeled off my gloves and dropped them in a plastic decon bag. “I mean, it’s cumulative.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Scotty had taken my place in the shower, vigorously going after his own hard-to-reach places. I thought, it’s old news to Scotty. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. Get contaminated. Decon. Rub the medallion for luck, or grace, or habit. Go on his way.

  Lucy had disappeared into the adit.

  Walter had gone to fetch me a chilled soda from one of Scotty’s ice chests.

  Hap joined me, clutching his EMT kit. “Probabilities, Buttercup.”

  “Not now, Hap.”

  “Don’t knock it. The radiation track is all about probability—whether or not it hits the cell. Odds are it didn’t. You’re not your grandma.”

  I glared at him. How about just: chin up, Buttercup?

  He knelt and opened his kit.

  My scalp prickled, like I’d spent a day at the beach and come back with sand in my hair. I watched Hap—the top of his sombrero, his red-freckled hands rummaging in the kit. Probability, what means the cancer lottery. Probability, what means the genetics lottery. Step yourself right up and take a guess. Youse might win or youse might lose but no worry Buttercup. Nobody knows how to score anyway and you won’t find out how y’all did until somewhere down the road apiece.

  Hap stood, opening a pill bottle. He held it out to me.

  “What is it?”

  “Good old ibuprofen. Ease up those sore muscles.” He passed me his water bottle. “Sorry I can’t offer a nuke-dodgem pill.”

  I took the pill and washed it down.

  “And next I prescribe a long hot shower.”

  I glanced at the yellow stall.

 
“Back at the Inn.” He grinned. “A real shower where you get naked and use soap. Soothe them aches and pains.” He added, kindly, “You have had one piss-poor day.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Roy Jardine was a happy man.

  He lay on his belly on a ridgetop, binoculars to his eyes and earbuds in his ears, watching the aftermath at Twenty-Mule-Team Canyon. He wanted to savor every last moment.

  Three hours already on his belly, monitoring The Trial. The arrival. The dressing-out. That female with the purple hair—was she supposed to be ace? And then the going in and out, one after another. Right past the little hole Jardine had bored into the ground to hide the microphone. Oblivious. And then there’d been the payoff.

  He just wished it hadn’t been the female geologist who got caught. He’d expected it to be one of the hotshots. If he’d had his choice, it would have been that Bastard Ballinger who went in—that was the original mission plan—but he understood the hotshots had no reason to send in Ballinger. Even if they had reason, Ballinger was a dirty coward.

  And evil.

  The Trial had proved that today. Ballinger was convicted. Today, everybody found out what kind of murdering coward Ballinger was.

  And Ballinger’s problems were just beginning.

  Jardine estimated that Stage Two could commence within a day or so. He wished he could be more precise but he had to wait for the trigger event. If it triggered sooner rather than later, he’d send another email, move up the deadline. Meanwhile, he’d wait. And he wouldn’t be waiting alone. The enemy was waiting along with him.

  And if the enemy threatened, there was that cask in Vegas with their name on it.

  He was riding high now on a day of great success but he had learned his lesson about riding high. Keep watch for surprises. The geologists were the ones he really had to keep an eye on. Still, after today’s events, how many surprises did they have left in them?

  He’d have to make a phone call soon. He needed information.

  He was suddenly bored with the flunkies down below. He scooted back from the vantage point and got up, stretching his stiff self. He packed his gear. He planned, when he got to Hole-in-the-Wall, to treat himself to the freeze-dried Shrimp Creole for dinner. A celebration. He would eat outside on that hidden outcrop and watch the sunset.