Scotty took his meters into the tunnel. After a full minute, he emerged. “Yup, we got gas.” He rubbed his face. “Shit, we gotta go in full bug suits. My people’ll die before they even get here, just hiking up that ridge dressed out. Think I’ll set up the zone right here. Christ, I wonder if snakebite goes through rubber.” He glanced at Soliano and dimpled, briefly. “All right, no worry, I got it.”
Hap lowered his sombrero. “I ain’t worrying. Course, I ain’t going in.”
Scotty stalked off along the ridge.
“Let us lend a hand,” Soliano said, to Hap and Ballinger. To me and Walter, he said, “You rest, in the eventuality your skills are needed.”
Walter and I sank against the hillside. I said, “He expects us to go in.”
“It’s not his call.”
“Right.”
“If we do decide to go in,” he said, “there’s no need for the both of us.”
I let that hang in the hot air between us.
We watched Scotty and his crew hauling equipment out of the vans. Soliano, Ballinger, and Hap began ferrying the stuff up the ridge. Hap took the lead, laden with silvery suits. He was whistling — heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go. He appeared to be having fun. Just when I think I can predict him, I can’t.
I glanced at Walter. “I don’t mind snakes, per se.”
His eyes were closed. “Rattlesnakes, dear.”
I studied his flushed face. “Big ones, I’d think.”
“Mean, certainly.”
“Cranky, anyway.”
He said, “I go in.”
“Let’s wait and see what Scotty finds before we take on snakes.”
“You’re of child-bearing age,” he said. “I go in.”
He will never, ever, let the subject go. I said, “You’re at an age where your cells are not so resilient.”
“Thank you for the reminder.”
“Thank Hap.”
We all waited, stacked against the hillside, while Scotty paced and his three RERT colleagues rested. Scotty had sent in the smallest of his team, a wiry woman with a purple punk ‘do named Lucy who, it struck me, looked of child-bearing age.
The heat was a bath, submerging us. We could drown in this heat. I watched cloud shadows tongue along the ridge and strained to detect the drop of a degree Fahrenheit or two.
Fifteen minutes later Lucy emerged, looking like her next stop was Mars. Scotty metered her at the hot line then helped her skin off the heavy suit. She pushed back her hood and spat out the respirator and rasped out a word.
I thought she said fuck and didn’t blame her.
“Went right,” she rasped. “Nothing.”
Oh, fork. Shit.
Scotty raked his hair, spiking the wet strands. “Okay, I getta go.” A tall thin RERT guy named Tim grumbled to his feet to help Scotty dress out.
We waited, sucking our water bottles dry. I believed I saw bees buzzing a great sunflower but it was only heat waves flaming off an orange hill.
Twenty minutes later, by my watch — hours, by my fried brain — Scotty reappeared. When Scotty was stripped to his shorts, when he had downed half a bottle of water, he gave Soliano the thumbs-up.
Now we know, I thought. Okay, it’s better to know.
Soliano got to his feet. “In a cask, or loose?”
Scotty tried to speak, and then just mouthed it. Cask.
“Contents?”
“Hot.”
I licked my cracked lips. The real deal, this time.
“And so we account,” Soliano said, “for one of two missing casks.”
I wondered which one. The swap cask, which Jardine recovered from the talc mine? Or was this the rainy-day cask? Then again, what did it matter, which one? What mattered was what it held.
Scotty cleared his throat. “Another thing. Mud on the cask. Spattered.”
I sat up straight. “What’s it look like?”
“Mud.”
“Well did it look like it came from the surrounding soil?”
He lifted his palms.
Whether it was the swap cask or rainy-day cask, it could have been stored at Jardine’s depot before being brought here. I looked at Walter, and he nodded. We wanted that mud.
“Geologists.” Soliano toed the soil. “This could be Mr. Jardine’s depot?”
I doubted it. Couldn’t swear to it. If we hadn’t lost our soil map, if we weren’t playing catch-up, we could say something with some heft. I said, instead, “It’s not consistent with the soils we’ve analyzed so far.”
“Then this is what? A demonstration, that Mr. Jardine has the hot resins and can place them wherever he wishes?”
Scotty answered. “I’m convinced.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Could be something more, some kind of taunt. I mean, it’s sure the right place for it. Borax mine.”
“This means…?”
There came a strangled sound, from Ballinger. I thought he was going to be sick. Hap leaned in whispering, his sombrero eclipsing Ballinger’s glistening scalp. Then Hap got to his feet. “Milt just recalled a little incident that might tie in here.”
“Yes?” Soliano said.
Ballinger hunched, silent.
“Sorry Hector,” Hap said. “Milt doesn’t have a fully developed sense of irony.”
“I have,” Soliano said. “Explain to me this irony.”
Hap shrugged. “Like Scotty said, this place makes a point. Borax ore contains the element boron. And boron, Hector, is a crackerjack neutron absorber. They put it in the reactor control rods to slow the fission process — keep that chain reaction under control.”
“Yes?”
“So, Milt’s little incident began with the boron-recycle system at the nuke plant. Once upon a time plant’s getting decommissioned and sends the dump the resins they’d used to clean the system. Low curie-count, so casks get buried in the trench.”
Soliano frowned. “I thought resins were hot. Or hotter.”
“Depends what they pick up. Pick up hot clides, theys hot. Boron resins are low-rad.”
“Mild salsa,” I said.
He nodded. “Anyhoo, couple weeks later a guy’s digging a drainage ditch — and he’s a mite hungover — and he sideswipes a row of containers. Including the boron resin casks. But he doesn’t notice. Couple months later somebody sees the trench is slumping. Now, they have to regrade it.” Hap sighed. “Lady by the name of Sheila Cook gets nominated. Gets her backhoe stuck. Gets out to inspect, sees she’s tramping around in beads. Dang. She calls in the cavalry. And when they frisk the beads, surprise! TripleX hot.” He winked at me. “Been used to clean the spent-fuel pool. Turns out somebody at the nuke plant loaded them into the wrong cask and it shipped with the low-rad load.”
“Christ,” Scotty said, “nobody caught it before it got buried?”
“What you gotta understand, Scotty, is trucks were backed up half a mile waiting to unload. Busy time at the dump. So they frisked the resin truck and the overall dose rate was under the limit and they were under-staffed and all those high-rad trucks were waiting.” Hap smiled that curbed smile of his. “And that story came to be known in the dump oral history as Boron-gate.”
“Very witty,” Soliano said. “And Ms. Cook?”
Hap sighed again. “Starts woofin her cookies couple days after the incident. But she recovers, so the question becomes what’re the long-term effects? She gonna win the cancer lottery? By gum, she do. About seven years later she gets leukemia.” Hap whipped off his sombrero and held it over his heart. “Now, I didn’t see the lady get crapped up — this all happened afore I found my fortunate way to the dump — but it’s one of them legendary stories what get told to the new guy.” He glanced down at Ballinger. “That’s what Milt’s feeling a mite sick over right now.”
I fixed on Ballinger oozing sweat and thought, he’s doing the math.
Soliano said, “Mr. Ballinger, you were manager at the time of this incident?”