The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  Maybe, I thought, I should drive along the ridge, stopping to scan the road from time to time; in for a penny, in for a pound. Then I glanced toward the Travis cloud and saw, slightly to the north of west, the enormous dark thunderhead approaching from Hamilton AFB. It loomed higher than the evening cirrus, curling up and toward me from where San Rafael must have been. Its lower half hid behind the flank of the nearby mountain but it was obviously, lethally, a fallout-laden megacloud heading in my direction.

  I might be in for a pound, but not for the full ton. I didn't know how long it would take the dust to fall forty thousand feet. Not long enough to let me backtrack to Livermore, for damn sure. Ern had brought me a fax copy of a manual that showed how to build an honest-to-God fallout meter, but I hadn't built the effing thing, and in any case it wasn't enough to know you were frying in radiation. You had to get away from it.

  I stepped into the car again, sorrowing for all the people who, walking in the shadowed flank of Mount Diablo, could not see that they were moving straight into another shadow that could banish all their future sunshine forever. I started my engine before I saw the youngster hauling his trail-rigged moped upslope.

  "If it's broken, leave it," I called to him.

  "Just out of gas," he said with a grin, puffing. His moped was one of the good four-cycle, one-horse jobs that didn't need oil mixed with its fuel.

  What I did then shamed me, but at least I didn't con the kid. "See that cloud?" I pointed toward the dull gray enormity curving toward us across the heavens. "Fallout. Those people won't know it until too late, unless you tell 'em."

  "Me? Mister, my tongue is just about hanging down into my front wheel spokes." Impudence and good humor: I wanted to hug him.

  "If you'll do it, I'll fill that little tank of yours. Get somebody to erect a sign or something. Tell 'em"—I glanced at my watch and swallowed hard—"that fallout will be raining down from San Rafael in a few hours. They must find shelter before then. Deal?"

  He nodded. I got my spare coil of fuel hose from the tool compartment. One nice thing about an electric fuel pump is that you can quick-disconnect its output line and slip another hose on, then turn on the car's ignition and let it pump a stream of fuel from your fuel line to someone else's tank. The kid had his tank cap off in seconds and tried to stammer his thanks.

  "I'm letting you take chances for me," I admitted. "It could cost you."

  "My aunt in Walnut Creek has a deep basement," he replied. "With this refill I can stay on the road and get there in an hour." He was priming his little flitter as I reattached my fuel line. "Is that a real cheetah?"

  "Yep, and a good one. I can never catch him cheating."

  He laughed and bounced away, refitting his goggles, and didn't look back. Neither did I. If he didn't stop to warn others on the road below me, I didn't want to know. I also did not want to scan the carnage again that stretched across the dying megalopolis. I no longer felt anger; only profound pity for good honest people whose chief transgression lay in thirty years of refusal to prepare for a disaster so monstrous that no government could save them from it. I hadn't felt tears on my cheeks for years, but as I nosed the Lotus downhill toward my place, I decided these didn't count. They were mostly self-pity, in advance, for the loss of my little sis and her family. They were my family, too.

  I didn't feel like shooing Spot out to lighten the car's load for another fence-jump. Besides, there was always the chance of a miscalculation, which could snag a tire and throw the Lotus off balance, and I was beginning to consider every screw-up in context of a total moratorium on medical help. So I toggled the automatic gate control. Nothing. Usually at this hour of lengthening shadow—it was past six—I could see distant lights from a few places up and down the road from my place. Not now. The power from Antioch had failed. It was a little late for me to wish I'd installed a wind-powered alternator or even an engine-driven rig. I hadn't.

  I unlocked the gate using the manual combination, let Spot in, pushed the damn car through because it was such a chore to get my lardbutt in and out, then relocked the gate, wondering if Ern would recall that combination; wondered if he'd get the chance to. I saw honey-gold hair flying, the girl running to meet me as I scooted for the garage, and thought it was Kate until I remembered Kate's hair was black. Ern wouldn't have to remember any combination because the girl embracing Spot on the shadowed lawn was my niece, Camille!

  She gave me a big smack as I left the car. "Scared the heh-heh-hell out of us, Uncle Harve," she scolded, starting to sniffle, trying to get an arm all the way across my shoulders as we headed for the root cellar.

  "Just taking a look around," I lied as Shar met me on the steps.

  I got a quick tearful hug and kiss from my sis, whose dark Rackham hair was tied back from her round, attractively plumpish features. In response Shar had a faint upcurl at one corner of her mouth that tended to make a man check his fly for gaposis. In action she was a doer, an organizer; and I saw that the upcurl was now only part of a thin line. "Ernie and Lance are making a fallout meter in your office," she said and added darkly, "while your cutie-pie tapes around doors and windows upstairs. Harve, I thought you said we wouldn't turn the place into a public shelter."

  "So everybody's here, and you've met Kate." I sighed my relief, letting my arms drop, realizing I was already tired and getting hungry. "Sis, we need to bring in everything movable from the garage and smithy storage and stack it in the tunnel."

  "Done, thanks to your little flesh," Cammie cracked, and I needed a moment to translate her high-school jargon. She was linking me to Kate.

  Before I could protest, Shar put in: "Your friend seemed ready to fight us off until Ernie told her who we were and proved he had your gate combination. That young lady runs a taut ship."

  "She's led a rough life," I said and shrugged, then saw the welter of materials where Shar had been working in the root cellar. "What's all this?"

  Shar's irritated headshake made her ponytail bounce. Like me, Shar inherited a tendency toward overweight. Unlike me, she had fought it to keep some vestige of a youthful figure, and diets were among her fads. They kept her bod merely on the zaftig side but also made her snappish and hyperactive. Now she was both. "I know you kept those outside cellar doors decrepit just for atmosphere," she said, bending in the gloom to choose a strip of plywood. "But they're no seal against fallout. If we intend to use the tunnel, someone has to stretch plastic film over these doors before we tape them shut. As they are now with all those cracks, they're hopeless. Just hopeless," she repeated with a sigh that richly expressed Why Mothers Got Gray.

  My root cellar was so crowded with stuff from the garage that there was barely room for my sis to work. Obviously the whole bunch had arrived shortly after I'd left, because they'd done half a day's toting in half an hour. "You'll need light in here," I said in passing.

  "You're in the way, Uncle Harve," said Cammie, and I saw that she was perched on her bike at the tunnel mouth. Ern had talked about rigging old-style bike stands, the kind that elevated the rear wheel and swiveled up like a wide rear bumper for riding; but he hadn't built them. Instead someone had taken two of my old folding chairs, put them back to back a foot apart, and strapped wooden sticks between them so that they formed a support frame to elevate the bike's rear wheel. As I stepped aside, Cammie began to pedal and the fist-size headlamp of her bike glowed, then dazzled, illuminating Shar's work. "Sonofabitch," I chortled. "Score one point for cottage industry."

  The tiny DC generator on the rear wheel whined quietly, and I noticed that Cammie had removed the red lens from the puny little tail lamp. In the gathering dark of the tunnel, its glow wasn't all that puny. I trotted through the tunnel, every muscle protesting, feeling every ounce of my extra flab.

  Soft creaks above me said that someone was hurrying between windows, taping around the edges to keep out the finest dust particles. Since I hadn't told Kate how to do it or showed her where I kept the inch-wide masking tape, I figured Shar had
done it for me. The dozen rolls of tape in cool dark storage had been Shar's idea in the first place. I moved around the stone divider that defined my office to find my brother-in-law, his reading glasses halfway down his nose, his light blue eyes peering at the manual he'd left with me long before. His massive red-haired forearms were crossed on my desk top.

  Ern McKay's calves and forearms had been designed for a larger man. In other physical details he was medium, with short carroty hair balding in front and stubby fingers that should've been clumsy. They were, in fact, so adroit that Ern made his living with them at Ames. Or had until this day. Ern saved all his clumsiness for social uses; he wasn't the demonstrative sort.

  "Hi." He gave me his shy grin over the specs. "Heard you come in. Lance is upstairs looking for your fishing vest. That where you keep your two-pound filament?"

  "As you bloody well know," I said, squeezing his shoulder lightly as I studied the pages before him. That was all the greeting either of us needed. Ern was the tyer of dry flies in the family, but I'm the one who got to use them. Two-pound-test monofilament nylon is very thin stuff, the kind I used for leader on scrappy little trout in Sierra streams.

  Ern's stumpy forefinger indicated a passage in the manual. "Says here that thin mono is hard to work with though it's otherwise perfect for the electroscope."

  "I thought this was a fallout meter, Ern."

  He turned his head, vented a two-grunt chuckle typical of his humor: underplayed. "You've had this damn manual five years and never read it once. Got half a mind to tell Shar on you."

  "Christ, Ern, have a heart," I mumbled.

  He held up the clean empty eight-ounce tin can from among other junk he had collected on my desk: adhesive bandage, razor blade, an oblong of thin aluminum foil, a bottle cork through which he'd forced a hefty needle. "Some guys doped this out years ago at Union Carbide; even got it published through Oak Ridge National Lab, including pages any newspaper could copy, free of charge! Any high school sophomore can build the thing from stuff lying around in the kitchen. If he can read," Ern qualified it.

  I had assumed from the official-looking document number, ORNL-5040, that it wasn't kosher to copy it. Apparently the reverse was true, but I'd never read it carefully. The damned manual was in the public domain!

  "Fellow named Kearny ramrodded several projects at Oak Ridge oriented toward nuke survival," Ern said, "and his team deserves top marks. The Kearny Fallout Meter is just a capacitor, a foil electroscope really, that's calibrated by the time it takes to lose its static charge after you feed that little charge to it. It loses that charge in an environment of ionizing radiation—the kind that makes fallout such a killer—and you can recharge it by rubbing a piece of plexiglass with paper to build up another charge."

  "I understand only about half of what you just said," I complained.

  "That's the point: you don't have to. Follow the instructions, learn to read the simple chart here, and you can use it without knowing why it works."

  "Is it the kind of thing that only tells you when you're as good as dead? I mean, hell, Ern, it can't have much of a range of sensitivity."

  "Take an F in guesswork. It works through four orders of magnitude," Ern replied, flipping pages to a sheet with a chart meant to be glued around that tin can. "From point-oh-three rems per hour—which is hardly worth worrying about—to forty-three rems per hour," he said with feeling.

  "Which means kiss your ass good-bye," I hazarded.

  "That's the layman's phrase," he harrumphed, subtly playing the quarrelsome scientist for me. "At NASA we say 'anus.' Ten hours at forty rems an hour and it's an even bet you won't live long."

  "You're a little ray of sunshine."

  "Just be glad," he said, tapping the pages, "that Kearny's elves realized nobody would buy expensive radiation counters until it was too late. They engineered this thing so well even you could build it for thirty cents—and why didn't you? And where the devil is Lance? I'm ready for that monofilament line."

  "My fishing vest is in the screen porch closet," I said, and trotted upstairs. Only it wasn't in the closet. I called Lance.

  From somewhere on the second floor came his muffled eleven-year-old tenor: "Come find me."

  Sometimes Lance was eleven going on thirty, and sometimes going on seven. What rankled most was that he looked so much like I did at his age; beefy, shock of black hair, insolent button-black eyes under heavy brows. But mom hadn't spoiled me, hadn't let me hurl tantrums. I'd grown up with due respect for dad's belt. That was where Lance and I differed; my sis had figured her youngest for a genius since he began talking so much, so soon, and ruled against breaking his spirit. In that, at least, she'd succeeded. "We can play later, Lance," I called up. "Bring my fishing vest if you have it."

  "I have it," his voice floated tantalizingly down the stairs. "Come find me."

  Kate Gallo paused while tearing a strip of tape with her teeth; smiled at me. "Welcome back, boss." The evening light through the film-covered windows was a dusty pink, tinting the gloom in which she worked.

  "Some boss," I said and bellowed, "Goddamnit, Lance, this is life and death!"

  "I don't think you'll make much of an impression on that one," Kate murmured and continued working.

  "Come fi-i-ind meee," quavered in the air.

  So I climbed the stairs and found him in the closet of the guest bedroom his parents sometimes used. "You win," he chirruped and held up my many-pocketed, fish-scented old vest. Then, "You better watch out," he wailed.

  My vest in one hand, Lance's belt and trouser back in my other, I carried him like a duffel bag to the window. Kate hadn't sealed it yet but had put the plastic over it outside. "You know why the sunset's so red, Lance?"

  "Those smoky clouds. You're hurting my stummick."

  "Those clouds are full of poison. The poison will be falling on us tonight and for a long time after. It'll kill us if we don't get ready, Lance. Your help could make the difference."

  Sullen, short of breath with his belt impeding it: "Better put me down." Then as I did so, he folded his arms and faced me. "I think that's a lot of crap about clouds being poison. How come airplanes fly through 'em all the time?"

  I waved him ahead of me down the stairs. "Haven't you paid any attention to what your folks told you about fallout?"

  "Some. Mostly I have better things to do. That stuff is dull." I knew what his better things were; I'd found his caches of comics and kidporn. "Anyway, if any poison comes down, the roof'll stop it."

  The roof! I pushed him aside and took the rest of the stairs fast, tossing my vest to Ern. "I'd completely forgot," I said to him, trying to recall where I'd stashed my tools. "The central roof beam buckled from concussion. We've got to shore it up, Ern. Could you finish that thing later?"

  He tapped the little cork with the needle in it; only the tip of the needle was exposed. He'd made several tiny holes in the tin can that way, following the manual but using amateur model-builders' tricks to do a neater job. "Guess the roof is top priority," he mused, then arose and called into the tunnel. "Shar, when you're finished, will you and Cammie haul mattresses and bedding down here?"

  "Another few minutes," Shar's voice echoed.

  Cammie, faintly: "Isn't sealing the tunnel more important?"

  "Yes," Ern and I chorused. Bedding or no bedding, the tunnel was the safest spot on my place. I'd had it dug with a backhoe as a deep, broad trench years before, a passageway from the old farmhouse to the root cellar. Then, by hand, I had dug a shoulder a foot wide and three feet deep on each side, running the length of the tunnel. Finally I laid cheap discarded railroad ties across that shoulder with a layer of heavy tar paper between the cross-tie roof and the dirt I shoveled onto it.

  During one rainy season the tunnel had stood three inches deep in water, thanks to my incompetence. After that I dug a smaller, foot-deep trench along one side of the bottom of the tunnel, laying perforated plastic pipe in the hole with gravel around it before I installed a floor a
nd wall paneling. The perforated pipe took ground water that percolated into the gravel. I had to dig another trench by hand around the old concrete foundation of the house so I could install more drainage pipe to carry ground water downhill from the tunnel and the house—but that kept the basement dryer, too. With that mod, my old place no longer had the dank, musty, moldy basement common to many old homes. I'd be lying if I claimed it was all done for nuclear survival, but my dry tunnel beneath cross ties and three feet of damp soil provided protection you could beat only in a mine shaft. According to Shar's texts, the tunnel had a fallout protection factor several times greater than the basement itself.

  In Shar's jargon, the basement under my two-story house was rated at a PF of over 30; that is, over thirty times as much protection as you'd get walking around outside in shirt sleeves, which is no protection to speak of. The PF got better when I blocked off my one basement window with dirt; that's why I did it. It would've been better still had I thrown a ramp of earth up against the exposed concrete foundation, which was visible for a foot or so below the clapboard siding.

  Shar estimated that with the window blocked off (and the long, hinged trapdoor lowered over the stairwell so that it became, in best farmhouse tradition, a segment of my kitchen floor), my basement could have a PF of nearly fifty. If fallout radiation got as high as a hundred rems per hour outside, it might be only two rems per hour in the basement.