Jenkins’ face had tensed and his body straightened back tensely in the chair, but he shook his head, the corner of his mouth twitching wryly. “Nothing. Nerves, I guess. Hoke and I dug out some things that give an indication on how long this runs, though. We still don’t know exactly, but from observations out there and the general theory before, it looks like something between six and thirty hours left; probably ten’s closer to being correct!”
“Can’t be much longer. It’s driving the men back right now! Even the tanks can’t get in where they can do the most good, and we’re using the shielding around No. 3 as a headquarters for the men; in another half hour, maybe they won’t be able to stay that near the thing. Radiation indicators won’t register any more, and it’s spitting all over the place, almost constantly. Heat’s terrific; it’s gone up to around three hundred centigrade and sticks right there now, but that’s enough to warm up 3, even.”
Doc looked up. “No. 3?”
“Yeah. Nothing happened to that batch — it ran through and came out I-713 right on schedule, hours ago.” Palmer reached for a cigarette, realized he had one in his mouth, and slammed the package back on the table. “Significant data, Doc; if we get out of this, we’ll figure out just what caused the change in No. 4 — if we get out! Any chance of making those variable factors work, Hoke?”
Hoke shook his head, and again Jenkins answered from the notes. “Not a chance; sure, theoretically, at least, R should have a period varying between twelve and sixty hours before turning into Mahler’s Isotope, depending on what chains of reaction or subchains it goes through; they all look equally good, and probably are all going on in there now, depending on what’s around to soak up neutrons or let them roam, the concentration and amount of R together, and even high or low temperatures that change their activity somewhat. It’s one of the variables, no question about that.”
“The sspitting iss prove that,” Hoke supplemented.
“Sure. But there’s too much of it together, and we can’t break it down fine enough to reach any safety point where it won’t toss energy around like rain. The minute one particle manages to make itself into Mahler’s, it’ll crash through with energy enough to blast the next over the hump and into the same thing instantly, and that passes it on to the next, at about light speed! If we could get it juggled around so some would go off first, other atoms a little later, and so on, fine — only we can’t do it unless we can be sure of isolating every blob bigger than a tenth of a gram from every other one! And if we start breaking it down into reasonably small pieces, we’re likely to have one decide on the short transformation subchain and go off at any time; pure chance gave us a concentration to begin with that eliminated the shorter chains, but we can’t break it down into small lots and those into smaller lots, and so on. Too much risk!”
Ferrel had known vaguely that there were such things as variables, but the theory behind them was too new and too complex for him; he’d learned what little he knew when the simpler radioactives proceeded normally from radium to lead, as an example, with a definite, fixed half-life, instead of the superheavy atoms they now used that could jump through several different paths, yet end up the same. It was over his head, and he started to get up and go back to Jorgenson.
Palmer’s words stopped him. “I knew it, of course, but I hoped maybe I was wrong. Then — we evacuate! No use fooling ourselves any longer. I’ll call the Governor and try to get him to clear the country around; Hoke, you can tell the men to get the hell out of here! All we ever had was the counteracting isotope to hope on, and no chance of getting enough of that. There was no sense in making I-231 in thousand-pound batches before. Well—”
6
He reached for the phone, but Ferrel cut in. “What about the men in the wards? They’re loaded with the stuff, most of them with more than a gram apiece dispersed through them. They’re in the same class with the converter, maybe, but we can’t just pull out and leave them!”
Silence hit them, to be broken by Jenkins’ hushed whisper. “My God! What damned fools we are. I-231 under discussion for hours, and I never thought of it. Now you two throw the connection in my face, and I still almost miss it!”
“I-231? But there iss not enough. Maybe twenty-five pound, maybe less. Three and a half days to make more. The little we have would be no good, Dr. Jenkinss. We forget that already.” Hoke struck a match to a piece of paper, shook one drop of ink onto it, and watched it continue burning for a second before putting it out. “Sso. A drop of water for sstop a foresst fire. No.”
“Wrong, Hoke. A drop to short a switch that’ll turn on the real stream — maybe. Look, Doc, I-23l’s an isotope that reacts atomically with R — we’ve checked on that already. It simply gets together with the stuff and the two break down into non-radioactive elements and a little heat, like a lot of other such atomic reactions; but it isn’t the violent kind. They simply swap parts in a friendly way and open up to simpler atoms that are stable. We have a few pounds on hand, can’t make enough in time to help with No. 4, but we do have enough to treat every man in the wards, including Jorgenson!”
“How much heat?” Doc snapped out of his lethargy into the detailed thought of a good physician. “In atomics you may call it a little; but would it be small enough in the human body?”
Hokusai and Palmer were practically riding the pencil as Jenkins figured. “Say five grams of the stuff in Jorgenson, to be on the safe side, less in the others. Time for reaction… hm-m. Here’s the total heat produced and the time taken by the reaction, probably, in the body. The stuff’s water-soluble in the chloride we have of it, so there’s no trouble dispersing it. What do you make of it, Doc?”
“Fifteen to eighteen degrees temperature rise at a rough estimate. Uh!”
“Too much! Jorgenson couldn’t stand ten degrees right now!” Jenkins frowned down at his figures, tapping nervously with his hand.
Doc shook his head. “Not too much! We can drop his whole body temperature first in the hypothermy bath down to eighty degrees, then let it rise to a hundred, if necessary, and still be safe. Thank the Lord, there’s equipment enough. If they’ll rip out the refrigerating units in the cafeteria and improvise baths, the volunteers out in the tent can start on the other men while we handle Jorgenson. At least that way we can get the men all out, even if we don’t save the plant.”
Palmer stared at them in confusion before his face galvanized into resolution. “Refrigerating units — volunteers — tent? What — O.K., Doc, what do you want?” He reached for the telephone and began giving orders for the available I-231 to be sent to the surgery, for men to rip out the cafeteria cooling equipment, and for such other things as Doc requested. Jenkins had already gone to instruct the medical staff in the field tent without asking how they’d gotten there, but was back in the surgery before Doc reached it with Palmer and Hokusai at his heels.
“Blake’s taking over out there,” Jenkins announced. “Says if you want Dodd, Meyers, Jones or Sue, they’re sleeping.”
“No need. Get over there out of the way, if you must watch,” Ferrel ordered the two engineers, as he and Jenkins began attaching the freezing units and bath to the sling on the exciter. “Prepare his blood for it, Jenkins; we’ll force it down as low as we can to be on the safe side. And we’ll have to keep tabs on the temperature fall and regulate his heart and breathing to what it would be normally in that condition; they’re both out of his normal control, now.”