The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  “The sspitting iss prove that,” Hoke supplemented.

  “Sure. But there’s too much of it together, and we can’t break it down fine enough to reach any safety point where it won’t toss energy around like rain. The minute one particle manages to make itself into Mahler’s, it’ll crash through with energy enough to blast the next over the hump and into the same thing instantly, and that passes it on to the next, at about light speed! If we could get it juggled around so some would go off first, other atoms a little later, and so on, fine – only we can’t do it unless we can be sure of isolating every blob bigger than a tenth of a gram from every other one! And if we start breaking it down into reasonably small pieces, we’re likely to have one decide on the short transformation subchain and go off at any time; pure chance gave us a concentration to begin with that eliminated the shorter chains, but we can’t break it down into small lots and those into smaller lots, and so on. Too much risk!”

  Ferrel had known vaguely that there were such things as variables, but the theory behind them was too new and too complex for him; he’d learned what little he knew when the simpler radioactives proceeded normally from radium to lead, as an example, with a definite, fixed half-life, instead of the superheavy atoms they now used that could jump through several different paths, yet end up the same. It was over his head, and he started to get up and go back to Jorgenson.

  Palmer’s words stopped him. “I knew it, of course, but I hoped maybe I was wrong. Then – we evacuate! No use fooling ourselves any longer. I’ll call the Governor and try to get him to clear the country around; Hoke, you can tell the men to get the hell out of here! All we ever had was the counteracting isotope to hope on, and no chance of getting enough of that. There was no sense in making I-231 in thousand-pound batches before. Well—”

  5

  He reached for the phone, but Ferrel cut in. “What about the men in the wards? They’re loaded with the stuff, most of them with more than a gram apiece dispersed through them. They’re in the same class with the converter, maybe, but we can’t just pull out and leave them!”

  Silence hit them, to be broken by Jenkins’ hushed whisper. “My God! What damned fools we are. I-231 under discussion for hours, and I never thought of it. Now you two throw the connection in my face, and I still almost miss it!”

  “I-231? But there iss not enough. Maybe twenty-five pound, maybe less. Three and a half days to make more. The little we have would be no good, Dr. Jenkinss. We forget that already.” Hoke struck a match to a piece of paper, shook one drop of ink onto it, and watched it continue burning for a second before putting it out. “Sso. A drop of water for sstop a foresst fire. No.”

  “Wrong, Hoke. A drop to short a switch that’ll turn on the real stream – maybe. Look, Doc, I-23l’s an isotope that reacts atomically with R – we’ve checked on that already. It simply gets together with the stuff and the two break down into non-radioactive elements and a little heat, like a lot of other such atomic reactions; but it isn’t the violent kind. They simply swap parts in a friendly way and open up to simpler atoms that are stable. We have a few pounds on hand, can’t make enough in time to help with No. 4, but we do have enough to treat every man in the wards, including Jorgenson!”

  “How much heat?” Doc snapped out of his lethargy into the detailed thought of a good physician. “In atomics you may call it a little; but would it be small enough in the human body?”

  Hokusai and Palmer were practically riding the pencil as Jenkins figured. “Say five grams of the stuff in Jorgenson, to be on the safe side, less in the others. Time for reaction . . . hm-m. Here’s the total heat produced and the time taken by the reaction, probably, in the body. The stuff’s water-soluble in the chloride we have of it, so there’s no trouble dispersing it. What do you make of it, Doc?”

  “Fifteen to eighteen degrees temperature rise at a rough estimate. Uh!”

  “Too much! Jorgenson couldn’t stand ten degrees right now!” Jenkins frowned down at his figures, tapping nervously with his hand.

  Doc shook his head. “Not too much! We can drop his whole body temperature first in the hypothermy bath down to eighty degrees, then let it rise to a hundred, if necessary, and still be safe. Thank the Lord, there’s equipment enough. If they’ll rip out the refrigerating units in the cafeteria and improvise baths, the volunteers out in the tent can start on the other men while we handle Jorgenson. At least that way we can get the men all out, even if we don’t save the plant.”

  Palmer stared at them in confusion before his face galvanized into resolution. “Refrigerating units – volunteers – tent? What – O.K., Doc, what do you want?” He reached for the telephone and began giving orders for the available I-231 to be sent to the surgery, for men to rip out the cafeteria cooling equipment, and for such other things as Doc requested. Jenkins had already gone to instruct the medical staff in the field tent without asking how they’d gotten there, but was back in the surgery before Doc reached it with Palmer and Hokusai at his heels.

  “Blake’s taking over out there,” Jenkins announced. “Says if you want Dodd, Meyers, Jones or Sue, they’re sleeping.”

  “No need. Get over there out of the way, if you must watch,” Ferrel ordered the two engineers, as he and Jenkins began attaching the freezing units and bath to the sling on the exciter. “Prepare his blood for it, Jenkins; we’ll force it down as low as we can to be on the safe side. And we’ll have to keep tabs on the temperature fall and regulate his heart and breathing to what it would be normally in that condition; they’re both out of his normal control, now.”

  “And pray,” Jenkins added. He grabbed the small box out of the messenger’s hand before the man was fully inside the door and began preparing a solution, weighing out the whitish powder and measuring water carefully, but with the speed that was automatic to him under tension. “Doc, if this doesn’t work – if Jorgenson’s crazy or something – you’ll have another case of insanity on your hands. One more false hope would finish me.”

  “Not one more case; four! We’re all in the same boat. Temperature’s falling nicely – I’m rushing it a little, but it’s safe enough. Down to ninety-six now.” The thermometer under Jorgenson’s tongue was one intended for hypothermy work, capable of rapid response, instead of the normal fever thermometer. Slowly, with agonizing reluctance, the little needle on the dial moved over, down to ninety, then on. Doc kept his eyes glued to it, slowing the pulse and breath to the proper speed. He lost track of the number of times he sent Palmer back out of the way, and finally gave up.

  Waiting, he wondered how those outside in the field hospital were doing? Still, they had ample time to arrange their makeshift cooling apparatus and treat the men in groups – ten hours probably; and hypothermy was a standard thing, now. Jorgenson was the only real rush case. Almost imperceptibly to Doc, but speedily by normal standards, the temperature continued to fall. Finally it reached seventy-eight.

  “Ready, Jenkins, make the injection. That enough?”

  “No. I figure it’s almost enough, but we’ll have to go slow to balance out properly. Too much of this stuff would be almost as bad as the other. Gauge going up, Doc?”

  It was, much more rapidly than Ferrel liked. As the injection coursed through the blood vessels and dispersed out to the fine deposits of radioactive, the needle began climbing past eighty, to ninety, and up. It stopped at ninety-four and slowly began falling as the cooling bath absorbed heat from the cells of the body. The radioactivity meter still registered the presence of Isotope R, though much more faintly.

  The next shot was small, and a smaller one followed. “Almost,” Ferrel commented. “Next one should about do the trick.”

  Using partial injections, there had been need for less drop in temperature than they had given Jorgenson, but there was small loss to that. Finally, when the last minute bit of the I-213 solution had entered the man’s veins and done its work, Doc nodded. “No sign of activity left. He’s up to ninety-five, now that I’ve cut off
the refrigeration, and he’ll pick up the little extra temperature in a hurry. By the time we can counteract the curare, he’ll be ready. That’ll take about fifteen minutes, Palmer.”

  The manager nodded, watching them dismantling the hypothermy equipment and going through the routine of cancelling out the curare. It was always a slower job than treatment with the drug, but part of the work had been done already by the normal body processes, and the rest was a simple, standard procedure. Fortunately, the neo-heroin would be nearly worn off, or that would have been a longer and much harder problem to eliminate.

  “Telephone for Mr. Palmer. Calling Mr. Palmer. Send Mr. Palmer to the telephone.” The operator’s words lacked the usual artificial exactness, and were only a nervous sing-song. It was getting her, and she wasn’t bothered by excess imagination, normally. “Mr. Palmer is wanted on the telephone.”

  “Palmer.” The manager picked up an instrument at hand, not equipped with vision, and there was no indication to the caller. But Ferrel could see what little hope had appeared at the prospect of Jorgenson’s revival disappearing. “Check! Move out of there, and prepare to evacuate, but keep quiet about that until you hear further orders! Tell the men Jorgenson’s about out of it, so they won’t lack for something to talk about.”

  He swung back to them. “No use, Doc, I’m afraid. We’re already too late. The stuff’s stepped it up again, and they’re having to move out of No. 3 now. I’ll wait on Jorgenson, but even if he’s all right and knows the answer, we can’t get in to use it!”

  6

  “Healing’s going to be a long, slow process, but they should at least grow back better than silver ribs; never take a pretty X-ray photo, though.” Doc held the instrument in his hand, staring down at the flap opened in Jorgenson’s chest, and his shoulders came up in a faint shrug. The little platinum filaments had been removed from around the nerves to heart and lungs, and the man’s normal impulses were operating again, less steadily than under the exciter, but with no danger signals. “Well, it won’t much matter if he’s still sane.”

  Jenkins watched him stitching the flap back, his eyes centered over the table out toward the converter. “Doc, he’s got to be sane! If Hoke and Palmer find it’s what it sounds like out there, we’ll have to count on Jorgenson. There’s an answer somewhere, has to be! But we won’t find it without him.”

  “Hm-m-m. Seems to me you’ve been having ideas yourself, son. You’ve been right so far, and if Jorgenson’s out—” He shut off the stitcher, finished the dressings, and flopped down on a bench, knowing that all they could do was wait for the drugs to work on Jorgenson and bring him around. Now that he relaxed the control over himself, exhaustion hit down with full force; his fingers were uncertain as he pulled off the gloves. “Anyhow, we’ll know in another five minutes or so.”

  “And heaven help us, Doc, if it’s up to me. I’ve always had a flair for atomic theory; I grew up on it. But he’s the production man who’s been working at it week in and week out, and it’s his process, to boot. . . . There they are now! All right for them to come back here?”

  But Hokusai and Palmer were waiting for no permission. At the moment, Jorgenson was the nerve center of the plant, drawing them back, and they stalked over to stare down at him, then sat where they could be sure of missing no sign of returning consciousness. Palmer picked up the conversation where he’d dropped it, addressing his remarks to both Hokusai and Jenkins.

  “Damn that Link-Stevens postulate! Time after time it fails, until you figure there’s nothing to it; then, this! It’s black magic, not science, and if I get out, I’ll find some fool with more courage than sense to discover why. Hoke, are you positive it’s the theta chain? There isn’t one chance in ten thousand of that happening, you know; it’s unstable, hard to stop, tends to revert to the simpler ones at the first chance.”

  Hokusai spread his hands, lifted one heavy eyelid at Jenkins questioningly, then nodded. The boy’s voice was dull, almost uninterested. “That’s what I thought it had to be, Palmer. None of the others throws off that much energy at this stage, the way you described conditions out there. Probably the last thing we tried to quench set it up in that pattern, and it’s in a concentration just right to keep it going. We figured ten hours was the best chance, so it had to pick the six-hour short chain.”

  “Yeah.” Palmer was pacing up and down nervously again, his eyes swinging toward Jorgenson from whatever direction he moved. “And in six hours, maybe all the population around here can be evacuated, maybe not, but we’ll have to try it. Doc, I can’t even wait for Jorgenson now! I’ve got to get the Governor started at once!”

  “They’ve been known to practice lynch law, even in recent years,” Ferrel reminded him grimly. He’d seen the result of one such case of mob violence when he was practicing privately, and he knew that people remain pretty much the same year after year; they’d move, but first they’d demand a sacrifice. “Better get the men out of here first, Palmer, and my advice is to get yourself a good long distance off; I heard some of the trouble at the gate, and that won’t be anything compared to what an evacuation order will do.”

  Palmer grunted. “Doc, you might not believe it, but I don’t give a continental about what happens to me or the plant right now.”

  “Or the men? Put a mob in here, hunting your blood, and the men will be on your side, because they know it wasn’t your fault, and they’ve seen you out there taking chances yourself. That mob won’t be too choosy about its targets, either, once it gets worked up, and you’ll have a nice vicious brawl all over the place. Besides, Jorgenson’s practically ready.”

  A few minutes would make no difference in the evacuation, and Doc had no desire to think of his partially crippled wife going through the hell evacuation would be; she’d probably refuse, until he returned. His eyes fell on the box Jenkins was playing with nervously, and he stalled for time. “I thought you said it was risky to break the stuff down into small particles, Jenkins. But that box contains the stuff in various sizes, including one big piece we scraped out, along with the contaminated instruments. Why hasn’t it exploded?”

  Jenkins’ hand jerked up from it as if burned, and he backed away a step before checking himself. Then he was across the room toward the I–231 and back, pouring the white powder over everything in the box in a jerky frenzy. Hokusai’s eyes had snapped fully open, and he was slopping water in to fill up the remaining space and keep the I–231 in contact with everything else. Almost at once, in spite of the low relative energy release, it sent up a white cloud of steam faster than the air conditioner could clear the room; but that soon faded down and disappeared.

  Hokusai wiped his forehead slowly. “The ssuits – armor of the men?”

  “Sent ’em back to the converter and had them dumped into the stuff to be safe long ago,” Jenkins answered. “But I forgot that box, like a fool. Ugh! Either blind chance saved us or else the stuff spit out was all one kind, some reasonably long chain. I don’t know nor care right—”

  “S’ot! Nnnuh . . . Whmah nahh?”

  “Jorgenson!” They swung from the end of the room like one man, but Jenkins was the first to reach the table. Jorgenson’s eyes were open and rolling in a semiorderly manner, his hands moving sluggishly. The boy hovered over his face, his own practically glowing with the intensity behind it. “Jorgenson, can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Uh.” The eyes ceased moving and centered on Jenkins. One hand came up to his throat, clutching at it, and he tried unsuccessfully to lift himself with the other, but the aftereffects of what he’d been through seemed to have left him in a state of partial paralysis.

  Ferrel had hardly dared hope that the man could be rational, and his relief was tinged with doubt. He pushed Palmer back, and shook his head. “No, stay back. Let the boy handle it; he knows enough not to shock the man now, and you don’t. This can’t be rushed too much.”

  “I – uh. . . . Young Jenkins? Whasha doin’ here? Tell y’ur dad to ge’ busy o
u’ there!” Somewhere in Jorgenson’s huge frame, an untapped reserve of energy and will sprang up, and he forced himself into a sitting position, his eyes on Jenkins, his hand still catching at the reluctant throat that refused to cooperate. His words were blurry and uncertain, but sheer determination overcame the obstacles and made the words understandable.

  “Dad’s dead now, Jorgenson. Now—”

  “‘Sright. ‘N’ you’re grown up – ’bout twelve years old, y’were. . . . The plant!”

  “Easy, Jorgenson.” Jenkins’ own voice managed to sound casual, though his hands under the table were white where they clenched together. “Listen, and don’t try to say anything until I finish. The plant’s still all right, but we’ve got to have your help. Here’s what happened.”

  Ferrel could make little sense of the cryptic sentences that followed, though he gathered that they were some form of engineering shorthand; apparently, from Hokusai’s approving nod, they summed up the situation briefly but fully, and Jorgenson sat rigidly still until it was finished, his eyes fastened on the boy.

  “Hellova mess! Gotta think . . . yuh tried—” He made an attempt to lower himself back, and Jenkins assisted him, hanging on feverishly to each awkward, uncertain change of expression on the man’s face. “Uh . . . da’ sroat! Yuh . . . uh . . . urrgh!”

  “Got it?”

  “Uh!” The tone was affirmative, unquestionably, but the clutching hands around his neck told their own story. The temporary burst of energy he’d forced was exhausted, and he couldn’t get through with it. He lay there, breathing heavily and struggling, then relaxed after a few more half-whispered words, none intelligently articulated.