Bothersome details filled his days, forcing him to work late hours just to get his job done. It was going to be another long night. Alone again.
But first he had to clear up the stack of administrative requests. He sighed and plucked one of the yellow slips out of the wastebasket. The meeting with Aragon and the Lab Director was first on the list. It was probably one of those butt-kissing circuses he couldn’t get out of.
He heard several people arriving, passing one by one through the CAIN booth, slipping their badges into the reader, keying in their access number, and pushing the heavy door open. The tightly knit group of technicians returned from lunch, but it sounded as if they had spent their entire time talking about work-related problems. Michaelson expected nothing less.
“Hey, Dr. Michaelson, that was some press conference!” the young black woman from Caltech called, raising her hand.
“Yeah, does this mean we can move to a real lab facility now?” said someone else — Michaelson had forgotten his name.
He waved them off and growled as he picked up the phone to call Aragon. “Tell Gary I want to see him in my office as soon as he gets back,” he called. “We’ve got to change these banker’s hours and accomplish some work around here. That international team will be here before you know it.”
Not waiting for a reply, he punched the number to call Associate Director José Aragon and acknowledge the meeting in the Plutonium Facility for that afternoon.
CHAPTER 12
Looking both ways, Duane Hopkins peeked out of the bathroom door in the Plutonium Facility. He hoped no one had noticed how long he had hidden inside the rest room. He had already spent a lot of time that morning washing his badge and recovering from the shakes, hoping never to see Ronald and his mean friends again.
He had vowed to get even with them, but it probably wouldn’t work, and then they would be on his back even worse than before. So he had hidden there during the afternoon break, avoiding any chance at another confrontation.
He hesitated when he heard someone come toward him, almost turning around to rush back into the rest room, but he forced himself to keep going ahead. He stepped away and tried to regain his composure before somebody else hooted after him.
“Hey, it’s Diarrhea Duane!” He looked up and saw Ralph Frick chuckling next to two other guys. Ralph had always been an OK guy, ribbing him instead of openly insulting him — but lately Ralph’s teasing had taken on a more bitter tone, harsher, and Duane just couldn’t laugh it off any more.
He tried desperately to think of a come-back line, but all he could manage was a red face. Duane hurried back to his glove box station in the metallurgy lab. He had to stay away from the bathroom, at least for the rest of the day.
He looked at his digital watch. Hours to go yet, with each second passing like a blacksmith’s mallet hitting an anvil. His stomach had been knotted all day long. He wondered if he had time to get the stuff for Gary Lesserec.
Duane flinched every time he looked at his badge, afraid that invisible radiation kept pouring out of it into his body, streaming through his chest and lungs.
After all the years he had worked in the Plutonium Facility, Duane had a healthy respect — no, a mortal terror — of radiation. He was playing with fire every day he went in to work.
His biggest scare had come early in his career at the Lab, back when it had been called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, long before the strict handling procedures had been put in place. Nobody knew any better. It had been shortly after his marriage to Rhonda, when Duane had walked with a spring in his step fresh from leaving his short stint in the Army, aglow with his training under the GI Bill.
He was happy then. He hadn’t known the world was so full of nightmares. He used to smile. He talked openly to people because he hadn’t realized how much better it was to remain quiet, never to open up to everybody.
Back then, the group of bullies had been led by a man named Bodie. A different group from Ronald’s gang, but just the same nevertheless. No matter where he went, they seemed to target Duane Hopkins.
Duane had talked to everyone about how wonderful it was to be a newlywed, all the plans and dreams he and Rhonda had. They had wanted to have kids, three or four of them. He said that a lot; he talked about it at the lunch table where everyone could overhear.
Duane had been stupid, unsuspecting.
Bodie and three of his wise-ass friends were standing outside one of the materials vaults. The halls of the huge Plutonium Facility echoed. Back then yellow lines had been painted on the floor showing allowable separation distances between carts that contained sealed sources or canned parts: follow the yellow brick road! Yellow and black radiation alarms were mounted on the wall with neutron counters. The harsh white fluorescent lights washed away all shadows, all softness of color. The building really hadn’t changed much in fifteen years.
Duane had been going about his business, pushing his cart along, probably even whistling to himself. He had his inventory card hooked to the bottom of it, returning a sealed sample to its appropriate lead-lined can on its appropriate shelf in the vault.
“Hey, Duane,” Bodie called from inside the otherwise empty vault. “Come here, we’ve got a wedding present for you.”
Duane raised his eyebrows. “A wedding present? I got married months ago.”
“Yeah, so we’re late,” Bodie said. “Come here,” he gestured for Duane to come into the vault.
Even now as he thought about it, Duane winced. He wished he could go back in time and change what he had done. That one act of stupidity may have doomed him for the rest of his life, and all of Stevie’s.
Inside the vault Bodie said, “Heard you want to have kids. That’s nice.” It was Bodie’s favorite phrase, Duane remembered. That's nice. “We wanted to warm up your sex life a little bit, Duane.”
Even then, Duane had been more baffled than afraid. Nobody else was in the corridors. The Plutonium Facility was a big, ugly building with a maze of halls and corridors, but not a bustle of people inside.
“What do you mean?” he asked. Bodie looked at his two companions and they each grabbed one of Duane’s arms, yanking him into the vault.
“Hey!” he said, “What’s going on?”
Bodie unclipped one of the quart-sized metal cans and reached in, wearing his rubber glove. He pulled out one of the small nickel-plated plutonium buttons from its wire cage bin — a small hemispherical disk about as big as a silver dollar. He flashed it in the light. “Hoo, it’s still warm. That’s nice.” Bodie made a great show of tightening his rubber glove. He held the metal button up to Duane’s face.
“Plutonium,” he said in an evil whisper. “Valuable stuff. This is what they make the atomic bombs out of. Highly radioactive. You can feel the heat from the radiation.” He smiled, then reached forward to yank the waist band of Duane’s trousers, reaching through the open flaps of his lab coat.
Duane squirmed. “Stop it!” he said, but Bodie just snickered, grabbed the elastic of his briefs and dropped the slick plutonium button down into Duane’s underwear.
Terror flowed like lava through him. He couldn’t believe what Bodie had done. He could feel the plutonium button, heavy metal dropping down into his crotch. It was warm—it was warm, hot with the radiation!
He screamed.
He could feel the crackling neutrons or gamma rays or whatever they were called sizzling around his testicles. He yowled another soul-wrenching scream and writhed, thrashing about like a snake. The plutonium button still clung to his groin. Duane howled as if he were being eaten alive.