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 himself 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.