After drawing our blood, they sent us to bathrooms with plastic specimen cups. When I emerged, the cup warm in my hand, I saw a tall, tanned, silver-haired man in civilian clothes — khaki pants, a blue shirt, a red tie — conferring with Dr. Davies. He introduced himself as Chris Sorensen, a radiation-medicine physician from REAC/TS. As Miranda, Garcia, and Emert emerged from other bathrooms and handed off their pee, we all instinctively gathered around Davies and Sorensen. “I just got an update from Hank,” Sorensen said. “He and Duane Johnson think they can retrieve the source and get it into a shielded vessel. So the good news is, this should be contained quickly.”
“I can tell you’re about to drop a bad-news shoe,” I said.
“It’s not great,” he said. “It’s a gamma source, for sure; luckily, it appears to be a sealed, single-point source — that little pellet that came from Dr. Novak’s intestine. Gamma sources don’t spread contamination, they just emit radiation. Like light, from a lightbulb, rather than water from a garden hose.” This sounded like something from a high school science-class talk he’d given a lot of times. “But this source is iridium-192, which is very intense.”
“You mean dangerous,” said Miranda.
He hesitated, but only briefly. “Yes,” he said, “dangerous. Those of you who touched it”—he looked directly at Garcia and Miranda, so I knew Hank had briefed him—“will probably have burns on your hands. My other concern is how much whole-body dose all of you got. We need to know whether it’s enough to damage your bone marrow or the lining of your GI tract. We’ll need to do whole-blood counts again at twelve hours and twenty-four hours to see if your lymphocyte counts are dropping.”
“Excuse me, Doc,” said Emert. “Our what counts?”
“Lymphocytes,” he said. “They’re a type of white blood cells. If they drop significantly, it means the stem cells in your bone marrow have been hit hard. Also means you’re vulnerable to infection.”
“Sort of like radiation-induced AIDS,” added Miranda. I was starting to wish she didn’t have such a gift for grim analogies.
“Sort of,” Sorensen agreed. “Tracking changes in your lymphocytes is one way we estimate the dose you’ve received. Another is to reconstruct the incident timeline. So I’ll need each of you to think back and give me your best estimate of how much time you spent near Dr. Novak’s body, particularly how close you were to the abdominal region, where the source was — three feet away for thirty minutes, for instance, and ten feet away for an hour. Between the incident timeline and the bloodwork, we’ll get a fairly precise idea of what sort of exposure you each got.”
“You mentioned burns,” I said, “but their hands look fine.” As if on cue, Miranda and Garcia held out their palms.
Sorensen and Davies both shook their heads. “Too soon to tell,” Davies said. “Normally the redness doesn’t show up till the next day. We see it occasionally in patients undergoing radiation therapy. Redness. You may have itching or swelling or numbness in your hands, too. The redness generally peaks about twenty-four hours after exposure, then it fades. Same with the symptoms of whole-body exposure — nausea, diarrhea, fatigue: they show up, then disappear, and everything seems fine. Even if it’s not.”
“The ‘prodromal stage’ is the term for that period of initial symptoms,” added Sorensen. “When they disappear, that marks the beginning of what we call the ‘latency stage’ of ARS, acute radiation syndrome. If it is ARS, the symptoms can come roaring back, anywhere from days to weeks after exposure. ‘Manifest illness,’ that stage is called. Radiation does strange things to the body. It damages the DNA in cells, and cells that get replaced more often — like the bone marrow and the lining of the gut — are affected first, and the worst.”
“So the bloodwork helps you estimate the dose and diagnose damage,” I said. “But what about treatment? What can you do for us? What can you do to reverse or minimize the effects of the radiation?”
“Not a lot, unfortunately,” said Sorensen. “If your lymphocytes drop significantly, we’ll start you on growth factors to stimulate the bone marrow. We can treat localized burns to ease pain and fight infection. If your immune system is compromised, we can isolate you.” He hesitated. “We can recommend psychological and psychiatric care, to help deal with anxiety or anger. Beyond that, it’s up to the body to repair and heal itself.”
“Shit,” said Emert. “This sucks.”
“I know,” said Sorensen. “I wish I had a magic pill I could give you.”
The detective puffed out a deep breath of frustration. “So tell me this,” he said. “Novak was a physicist in Oak Ridge, from the moment there was an Oak Ridge. He worked with nuclear reactors and radioactive materials for forty, fifty years. Could this be a bizarre side effect of all those years of radiation exposure?”
Sorensen shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “That gamma radiation is coming from that tiny pellet that was in his gut. Iridium-192 is a very unstable isotope, with a very short half-life. You have to work hard to make it radioactive, and once you do, it decays fast. As it emits all that gamma radiation, it’s changing steadily from radioactive iridium into ordinary platinum. A year or two from now, it’ll be relatively safe to handle.”
“So that hot little pellet,” I said, “isn’t some dangerous bit of flotsam or jetsam left over from the Manhattan Project?”
“It was probably created within the past six months,” he said, “and Dr. Novak couldn’t have survived more than a day or two after ingesting it. Within minutes he was doomed. Within hours he was what we call a ‘walking ghost.’”
CHAPTER 6
Armed with pens and notepads, Miranda, Garcia, Emert, and I huddled in plastic chairs in a triage room in the Emergency Department, comparing notes like classmates before a test. We were reconstructing what Sorensen called the “incident timeline”—which Miranda, in classic form, had nicknamed the “path to peril.” How long had I spent chainsawing Novak’s body out of the frozen swimming pool — ten minutes? fifteen? Had Miranda and I spent a full hour driving back to UT with the corpse in the pickup truck? Another fifteen minutes getting it onto the gurney and into the morgue? The next day, when Emert searched the clothing and identified Novak, were the detective and I beside the gurney for thirty minutes, or was it more like forty? How many lifetimes elapsed between the moment the autopsy began and the instant we fled the morgue?
As the four of us debated matters of minutes, Garcia winced and hastily excused himself. Miranda watched him hurry to a restroom, then looked at me. “I’m worried about Eddie,” she said. “This doesn’t look good. But I don’t understand why his symptoms would be so much worse than anyone else’s. The rest of us were around the body the day it was recovered, and he wasn’t.”
“Maybe it’s just the stress,” I said, but it rang false in my ears even as I said it. Suddenly it hit me. “Dammit,” I said. “The autopsy.”
“But we were there, too,” she said. “Sure, he was closer to Novak, but not that much closer.”
“Not Novak’s autopsy,” I said. “The one Eddie was doing the day we brought Novak in to thaw. Remember? We parked the gurney at the other sink, right behind Eddie. He was two feet away for hours.”
Miranda clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh God,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that. He did two that day. And another one the next morning, before Novak’s. Oh, this is bad, Dr. B. Very, very bad.” Her chin began to quiver, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
I glanced at the two doctors and saw them huddled with the nurse named Darcy. She nodded, then disappeared behind a curtain. A moment later she reappeared, wheeling a stand with an IV bag attached. Behind the door of the restroom, a toilet flushed with a roar. Miranda wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sniffed quickly. She picked up her pen and notepad again just as Garcia opened the restroom door and walked weakly toward us.