Ferrel forgot his new recruits and swung back to the girl. “Bad?”
She made no comment, but picked up a lead shield and placed it over Jorgenson’s chest so that it cut off all radiation from the lower part of his body, then placed the radiation indicator close to the man’s throat. Doc looked once; no more was needed. It was obvious that Blake had already done his best to remove the radioactive from all parts of the body needed for speech, in the hope that they might strap down the others and block them off with local anesthetics; then the curare could have been counteracted long enough for such information as was needed. Equally obviously, he’d failed. There was no sense in going through the job of neutralizing the drug’s block only to have him under the control of the radioactive still present. The stuff was too finely dispersed for surgical removal. Now what? He had no answer.
Jenkins’ lean-sinewed hand took the indicator from him for inspection. The boy was already frowning as Doc looked up in faint surprise, and his face made no change. He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I figured as much. That was a beautiful piece of work you did, too. Too bad. I was watching from the door and you almost convinced me he’d be all right, the way you handled it. But—So we have to make out without him; and Hoke and Palmer haven’t even cooked up a lead that’s worth a good test. Want to come into my office, Doc? There’s nothing we can do here.”
Ferrel followed Jenkins into the little office off the now emptied waiting room; the men from the hospital had worked rapidly, it seemed. “So you haven’t been sleeping, I take it? Where’s Hokusai now?”
“Out there with Palmer; he promised to behave, if that’ll comfort you…. Nice guy, Hoke; I’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to an atomic engineer without being laughed at. Palmer, too. I wish—” There was a brief lightening to the boy’s face and the first glow of normal human pride Doc had seen in him. Then he shrugged, and it vanished back into his taut cheeks and reddened eyes. “We cooked up the wildest kind of a scheme, but it isn’t so hot.”
Hoke’s voice came out of the doorway, as the little man came in and sat down carefully in one of the three chairs.
“No, not sso hot! It iss fail, already. Jorgensson?”
“Out, no hope there! What happened?”
Hoke spread his arms, his eyes almost closing. “Nothing. We knew it could never work, not sso? Misster Palmer, he iss come ssoon here, then we make planss again, I am think now, besst we sshould move from here. Palmer, I — mosstly we are theoreticians; and, excusse, you alsso, doctor. Jorgensson wass the production man. No Jorgensson, no — ah — ssoap!”
Mentally, Ferrel agreed about the moving — and soon! But he could see Palmer’s point of view; to give up the fight was against the grain, somehow. And besides, once the blowup happened, with the resultant damage to an unknown area, the pressure groups in Congress would be in, shouting for the final abolition of all atomic work; now they were reasonably quiet, only waiting an opportunity — or, more probably, at the moment were already seizing on the rumors spreading to turn this into their coup. If, by some streak of luck, Palmer could save the plant with no greater loss of life and property than already existed, their words would soon be forgotten, and the benefits from the products of National would again outweigh all risks.
“Just what will happen if it all goes off?” he asked.
Jenkins shrugged, biting at his inner lip as he went over a sheaf of papers on the desk, covered with the scrawling symbols of atomics. “Anybody’s guess. Suppose three tons of the army’s new explosives were to explode in a billionth — or at least, a millionth — of a second? Normally, you know, compared to atomics, that stuff burns like any fire, slowly and quietly, giving its gases plenty of time to get out of the way in an orderly fashion. Figure it one way, with this all going off together, and the stuff could drill a hole that’d split open the whole continent from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, and leave a lovely sea where the Middle West is now. Figure it another, and it might only kill off everything within fifty miles of here. Somewhere in between is the chance we count on. This isn’t U-235, you know.”
Doc winced. He’d been picturing the plant going up in the air violently, with maybe a few buildings somewhere near it, but nothing like this. It had been purely a local affair to him, but this didn’t sound like one. No wonder Jenkins was in that state of suppressed jitters; it wasn’t too much imagination, but too much cold, hard knowledge that was worrying him. Ferrel looked at their faces as they bent over the symbols once more, tracing out point by point their calculations in the hope of finding one overlooked loophole, then decided to leave them alone.
The whole problem was hopeless without Jorgenson, it seemed, and Jorgenson was his responsibility; if the plant went, it was squarely on the senior physician’s shoulders. But there was no apparent solution. If it would help, he could cut it down to a direct path from brain to speaking organs, strap down the body and block off all nerves below the neck, using an artificial larynx instead of the normal breathing through vocal cords. But the indicator showed the futility of it; the orders could never get through from the brain with the amount of radioactive still present throwing them off track — even granting that the brain itself was not affected, which was doubtful.
Fortunately for Jorgenson, the stuff was all finely dispersed around the head, with no concentration at any one place that was unquestionably destructive to his mind; but the good fortune was also the trouble, since it could not be removed by any means known to medical practice. Even so simple a thing as letting the man read the questions and spell out the answers by winking an eyelid as they pointed to the alphabet was hopeless.
Nerves! Jorgenson had his blocked out, but Ferrel wondered if the rest of them weren’t in as bad a state. Probably, somewhere well within their grasp, there was a solution that was being held back because the nerves of everyone in the plant were blocked by fear and pressure that defeated its own purpose. Jenkins, Palmer, Hokusai — under purely theoretical conditions, any one of them might spot the answer to the problem, but sheer necessity of finding it could be the thing that hid it. The same might be true with the problem of Jorgenson’s treatment. Yet, though he tried to relax and let his mind stray idly around the loose ends, and seemingly disconnected knowledge he had, it returned incessantly to the necessity of doing something, and doing it now!
Ferrel heard weary footsteps behind him and turned to see Palmer coming from the front entrance. The man had no business walking into the surgery, but such minor rules had gone by the board hours before.
“Jorgenson?” Palmer’s conversation began with the same old question in the usual tone, and he read the answer from Doc’s face with a look that indicated it was no news. “Hoke and that Jenkins kid still in the there?”
Doc nodded, and plodded behind him toward Jenkins’ office; he was useless to them, but there was still the idea that in filling his mind with other things, some little factor he had overlooked might have a chance to come forth. Also, curiosity still worked on him, demanding to know what was happening. He flopped into the third chair, and Palmer squatted down on the edge of the table.
“Know a good spiritualist, Jenkins?” the manager asked. “Because if you do, I’m about ready to try calling back Kellar’s ghost. The Steinmetz of atomics — so he had to die before this Isotope R came up, and leave us without even a good guess at how long we’ve got to crack the problem. Hey, what’s the matter?”