Nerves

Chapter 8

Ferrel and Jenkins were almost finished with the final dressings on the last case when the switchboard girl announced a call. They waited to make the last few touches before answering, then filed into the office together, Brown’s face was on the screen, smudged and with a spot of rouge standing out on each cheek. Another smudge appeared as she brushed the auburn hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“They’ve cracked the converter safety chambers, Dr. Ferrel. The north one held up perfectly, except for the heat and a little burn, but something happened in the other Oxygen valve stuck, I guess. Most of the men are unconscious but alive. Magma must have sprayed through the door, because sixteen or seventeen have the jerks, and about a dozen are dead. Some others need more care than I can give; I’m having Hokusai delegate men to carry those the stretchers won’t hold, and they’re all piling up on you in a bunch right now!”

Ferrel grunted and nodded. “Could have been worse, I guess. Don’t kill yourself out there, Brown.”

“Same to you.” She blew Jenkins a kiss and snapped off, just as the whine of the litter siren reached their ears.

“Get their armor off, somehow, Jones. Grab anyone else to help you that you can. Curare, Dodd, and keep handing it to me. We’ll worry about everything else after Jenkins and I quiet them.” This was obviously going to be a mass-production sort of business, not for efficiency, but through sheer necessity. And again, Jenkins with his queer taut steadiness was doing two for the one that Doc could do, his face pale and his eyes almost glazed, but his hands moving endlessly and nervelessly on with his work.

Sometime during the night Jenkins looked up at Meyers and motioned her back. “Go get some sleep, nurse; Miss Dodd can take care of both Dr. Ferrel and myself when we work close together. Your nerves are shot and you need the rest. Dodd, you can call her back in two hours and rest yourself.”

“What about you, Doctor?”

“Me…” He grinned out of the corner of his mouth, crookedly. “I’ve got an imagination that won’t sleep, and I’m needed here.” The sentence ended on a rising inflection that was false to Ferrel’s ear, and the older doctor looked at the boy thoughtfully.

Jenkins caught his look. “It’s okay, Doc. I’ll let you know when I’m going to crack. It was okay to send Meyers back, wasn’t it?”

“You were closer to her than I was, so you should know better than I.” Technically, the nurses were all directly under his control, but they’d dropped such technicalities long before. Ferrel rubbed the small of his back briefly, then picked up his scalpel again.

A faint gray light was showing in the east, and the wards had overflowed into the waiting room when the last case from the chambers was finished as best he could be. During the night the converter had continued to spit occasionally, even through the tank armor twice, but now there was a temporary lull in the arrival of workers for treatment. Doc sent Jones to fetch breakfast from the cafeteria, then headed into the office, where Jenkins was already slumped down in the old leather chair.

The boy was exhausted almost to the limit from the combined strain of the work and his own suppressed jitters, but he looked up in mild surprise as he felt the prick of the needle. Ferrel finished it, and used it on himself before explaining. “Morphine, of course. What else can we do? Just enough to keep us going, but without it we’ll both be useless out there in a few more hours. Anyhow, there isn’t as much reason not to use it as there was when I was younger, before the counter-agent was discovered to kill most of its habit-forming tendency. Even five years ago, before they had that, there were times when morphine was useful, Lord knows, though anyone who used it except as a last resort deserved all the hell he got. A real substitute for sleep would be better, of course. Wish they’d finish up the work they’re doing on that fatigue eliminator at Harvard. Benzedrine’s too limited. Here, eat that!”

Jenkins grimaced at the breakfast Jones laid out in front of him, but he knew as well as Doc that the food was necessary, and he pulled the plate to him. “What I’d give an eye tooth for, Doc, wouldn’t be a substitute — just half an hour of good old-fashioned sleep. Only, damn it, even if I knew I had time, I couldn’t do it — not with R out there bubbling away.”

The telephone annunciator clipped in before Doc could answer. “Telephone for Dr. Ferrel; emergency! Dr. Brown calling Dr. Ferrel!”

“Ferrel answering!” The phone girl’s face popped off the screen and a tired-faced Sue Brown looked out at them. “What is it?”

“It’s that little Japanese fellow, Hokusai, who’s been running things out here, Dr. Ferrel. I’m bringing him in with an acute case of appendicitis. Prepare surgery!”

Jenkins gagged over the coffee he was trying to swallow, and his choking voice was halfway between disgust and hysterical laughter. “Appendicitis, Doc! My God, what comes next?”

It might have been worse. Brown had coupled in the little freezing unit on the litter and lowered the temperature around the abdomen, both preparing Hokusai for surgery and slowing down the progress of the infection so that the appendix was still unbroken when he was wheeled into the surgery. His seamed Oriental face had a grayish cast under the olive, but he managed a faint grin.

“Very sorry, Dr. Ferrel, to bother you. Very sorry. No ether, pleasse!”

Ferrel grunted. “No need of it, Hoke; we’ll use hypothermy, since it’s already begun. Over here, Jones…. And you might as well go back and sit down, Jenkins.”

Brown was washing, and popped out again, ready to assist with the operation. “He had to be tied down, practically, Dr. Ferrel. Insisted that he only needed a little mineral oil and some peppermint for his stomach-ache! Why are intelligent people always the most stupid about these things?”

It was a mystery to Ferrel, too, but seemingly the case. He tested the temperature quickly while the surgery cryotherapy equipment began functioning, found it low enough, and began. Hoke flinched with his eyes as the scalpel touched him, then opened them in mild surprise at feeling no appreciable pain. The complete absence of nerve response with its accompanying freedom from post-operative shock was one of the great advantages of low-temperature work in surgery. Ferrel laid back the flesh, severed the appendix quickly and removed it through the tiny incision. Then, with one of the numerous attachments, he made use of the ingenious mechanical stitcher and stepped back.

“All finished, Hoke, and you’re lucky you didn’t rupture. Peritonitis isn’t funny, even though we can cut down on it with the antibiotics. The ward’s full, so’s the waiting room, so you’ll have to stay on the table for a few hours until we can find a place for you; no pretty nurse, either — until the two other girls get here some time this morning. I dunno what we’ll do about the patients.”

“But, Dr. Ferrel, I am hear that now surgery — I should be up already. There iss work I am do.”

“You’ve been hearing that appendectomy patients aren’t confined now, eh? Well, that’s partly true. Johns-Hopkins began it a long time ago. But for the next hour, while the temperature comes back to normal, you stay put. After that, if you want to move around a little, you can; but no going out to the converter. A little exercise probably helps more than it harms, but any strain wouldn’t be good.”

“But, the danger —”

“Be hanged, Hoke. You couldn’t help now, long enough to do any good. Until the stuff in those stitches dissolves away completely in the body fluids, you’re to take it easy — and that’s two weeks, about.”

The little man gave in reluctantly. “Then I think I sleep now. But besst you should call Mr. Palmer at once, pleasse! He musst know I am not there!”

Palmer took the news the hard way, with an unfair but natural tendency to blame Hokusai and Ferrel. “Damn it, Doc, I was hoping he’d get things straightened out somehow. I practically promised the Governor that Hoke could take care of it; he’s got one of the best brains in the business. Now this! Well, no help, I guess. He certainly can’t do it unless he’s in condition to get right into things. Maybe Jorgenson, though, knows enough about it to handle it from a wheel chair, or something. How’s he coming along — in shape to be taken out where he can give directions to the foremen?”

“Wait a minute.” Ferrel stopped him as quickly as he could. “Jorgenson isn’t here. We’ve got thirty-one men lying around, and he isn’t one of them; and if he’d been one of the seventeen dead, you’d know it. I didn’t know Jorgenson was working, even.”

“He had to be; it was his process! Look, Ferrel, I was distinctly told that he was taken to you — foreman dumped him on the litter himself and reported at once! Better check up, and quick. With Hoke only half-able, I’ve got to have Jorgenson!”

“He isn’t here — I know Jorgenson. The foreman must have mistaken the big fellow from the south safety for him, but that man had black hair inside his helmet. What about the group of men who were only unconscious, or the fifteen-sixteen hundred men outside the converter when it happened?”

Palmer wiggled his jaw muscles tensely. “Jorgenson would have reported or been reported fifty times. Every man out there knows I’m looking for him. He’s gotta be in your ward.”

“He isn’t, I tell you! And how about moving some of the fellows here into the city hospital?”

“Tried — hospital must have been tipped off somehow about the radioactives in the flesh, and they refuse to let a man from here be brought in.” Palmer was talking with only the surface of his mind, his cheek muscles bobbing as if he were chewing his thoughts and finding them tough. “Jorgenson — now Hoke — and Kellar’s been dead for years. Not another man in the whole country that understands this field enough to make a decent guess, even; I get lost on page six myself. Ferrel, could a man in a Tomlin five-shield armor suit make the safety in twenty seconds, do you think, from — say, beside the converter?”

Ferrel considered it rapidly. A Tomlin weighed about four hundred pounds, and Jorgenson was an ox of a man, but only human. “Under the stress of an emergency, it’s impossible to guess what a man can do, Palmer, but I don’t see how he could work his way half that distance.”

“Mmmm, I figured. Could he live, then, supposing he wasn’t squashed? Those suits are almost radiation-perfect, carry their own air for twenty-four hours, you know, to avoid any air cracks, pumping the carbon-dioxide back under pressure and condensing the moisture out — no openings of any kind. They’re used inside the converters sometimes on tests, for that matter.”

“One chance in a billion, I’d guess; but again, it’s darned hard to put any exact limit on what can be done; miracles keep happening every day. Going to try it?”

“What else can I do? There’s no alternative. I’ll meet you outside Number Four just as soon as you can make it, and bring everything you need to start working at once. Seconds may count!” Palmer’s face slid sideways and up as he was reaching for the button, and Ferrel wasted no time in imitating the motion.

By all logic there wasn’t a chance, even in a Tomlin. But until they knew, the effort would have to be made; chances couldn’t be taken when a complicated process had gone out of control, with now almost certainty that Isotope R was the result — Palmer was concealing nothing, though he had stated nothing specifically. And obviously if Hoke couldn’t handle it none of the men at other branches of National Atomic or at the smaller, partially independent plants could make even half-hearted stab at the job.

It all rested on Jorgenson, then. And Jorgenson must be somewhere under that semi-molten hell that could drive through the tank armor and send men into the Infirmary with bones broken from their own muscular anarchy!

Ferrel’s face must have shown his thoughts, judging by Jenkins’ startled expression. “Jorgenson’s still in there somewhere,” he said quickly.

“Jorgenson! But he’s the man who — Good Lord!”

“Exactly. You’ll stay here and take care of the jerk cases that may come in; Brown, I’ll want you out there again. Bring everything portable we have in case we can’t move him in fast enough; get one of the trucks and fit it out and be out with it about twice as fast as you can! I’m grabbing the litter now.” He accepted the emergency kit Brown thrust into his hands, dumped a caffeine tablet into his mouth without bothering to wash it down, then was out toward the litter. “Number Four, and hurry!”

Palmer was just jumping off a scooter as they cut around Number Three and in front of the rough fence of rope strung out quite a distance beyond Four. He glanced at Doc, nodded, and dived in through the men grouped around, yelling orders to right and left as he went, and was back at Ferrel’s side by the time the litter had stopped.

“Okay, Ferrel, go over there and get into armor as quickly as possible! We’re going in there with the tanks, whether we can or not, and be damned to the quenching for the moment. Briggs, get those things out of there, clean out a roadway as best you can, throw in the big crane again, and we’ll need all the men in armor we can get — give them steel rods and get them to probing in there for anything solid and big enough — or small enough to be a man — five minutes at a stretch; they should be able to stand that. I’ll be back pronto!”

Doc noted the confused mixture of tanks and machines of all descriptions clustered around the walls — or what was left of them — of the converter housing, and saw them yanking out everything along one side, leaving an opening where the main housing gate had stood, now ripped out to expose a crane boom rooting out the worst obstructions. Obviously they’d been busy at some kind of attempt at quenching the action, but his knowledge of atomics was too little even to guess at what it was. The equipment set up was being pushed aside by tanks without dismantling, and men were running up into the roped-in section, some already armored, others dragging on part of their armor as they went. With the help of one of the atomjacks, he climbed into a suit himself, wondering what he could do in such a casing if anything needed doing.

Palmer had a suit on before him, though, and was waiting beside one of the tanks. It was squat and heavily armored, its front equipped with both a shovel and a grapple swinging from movable beams. “In here, Doc.” Ferrel followed him into the housing of the machine and Palmer grabbed the controls as he pulled on a short-wave headset and began shouting orders through it toward the other tanks that were moving in on their heavy treads. The dull drone of the motor picked up, and the tank began lumbering forward under the manager’s direction.

“Haven’t run one of these since that show-off at a picnic seven years ago,” he complained, as he kicked at the controls and straightened out a developing list to left. “Though I used to be pretty handy when I was plain engineer. Damned static around here almost chokes off the radio, but I guess enough gets through. By the best guess I can make, Jorgenson should have been near the main control panel when it started, and have headed for the south chamber. Half the distance, you figure?”

“Possibly, probably slightly less.”

“Yeah! And then the stuff may have tossed him around. But we’ll have to try to get there.” He barked into the radio again. “Briggs, get those men in suits as close as you can and have them fish with their rods about thirty feet to the left of the pillar that’s still up — can they get closer?”

The answer was blurred and pieces missing, but the general idea came across. Palmer frowned. “Okay, if they can’t make it, they can’t; draw them back out of the reach of the stuff and hold them ready to go in…. No, safety be damned. Give me a hookup to the public-address system.” He waited until Briggs acknowledged, then leaned forward as if driving himself into his microphone. “I need volunteers! Jorgenson’s somewhere in this mess, and the only hope we’ve got is to locate him. I need damned fools who are crazy enough to risk themselves five minutes apiece in here. Family men or single, I don’t care! Any of you idiotic — Look out, you blamed fool!”

The last was to one of the score or more of men who’d started forward. The lead atomjack was scrambling toward something that looked like a standing position; it toppled, but he managed a leap that carried him to another lump, steadied himself, and began probing through the mess. “Oof! You with the crane — stick it in where you can grab any of the men that pass you, if it’ll reach…. Good! Doc, I know as well as you that the men have no business in there, even five minutes; but I’ll send in a hundred more if it’ll find Jorgenson!”

Doc said nothing; he knew there’d probably be a hundred or more fools willing to try and he knew the need of them. The tanks couldn’t work their way close enough for any careful investigation of the mixed mass of radioactives, machinery, building, debris and destruction, aside from which they were much too slow in such delicate probing; only men equipped with the long steel poles could do that. As he watched, some of the activity of the magma suddenly caused an eruption, and one of the men tossed up his pole and doubled over before falling. The crane operator shoved the big boom over and mad a grab, missed, brought it down again, and came out with the heaving body held by one arm, to run it back along its track and twist it outward beyond Doc’s vision.

Even through the tank and the suit heat was pouring in. And there was a faint itching in those parts where the armor was thinnest that indicated the start of a burn, though not as yet a dangerous one. He had no desire to think what was happening to the men who were trying to worm into the heart of it in nothing but armor; nor did he care to watch what was happening to them. Palmer was trying to inch the machine ahead, but the stuff underneath made any progress difficult. Twice something spat against the tank but did not penetrate.

“Five minutes are up,” he told Palmer. “They’d all better go directly to Dr. Brown, who should be out with the truck now, for immediate treatment.”

Palmer nodded and relayed the instructions. “Pick up all you can with the crane and carry them back! Send in a new bunch, Briggs. Damn it, Doc, this can go on all day; it’ll take an hour to pry around through this mess right here, and then he’s probably somewhere else. The stuff seems to be getting worse in this neighborhood, too, from what accounts I’ve had before. Wonder if that steel plate could be pushed down?”

He threw in the clutch engaging the motor to the treads and managed to twist through toward the plate. There was a slight slipping of the lugs, then the tractors caught and the nose of the tank thrust forward; almost without effort, the fragment of housing toppled from its leaning position and slid forward. The tank growled, fumbled, and slowly climbed onto it and ran forward another twenty feet to its end; the support settled slowly, but something underneath checked it and they were still again. Palmer worked the grapple forward, nosing a big piece of masonry out of the way, and two men reached out with the ends of their poles to begin probing, futilely. Another change of men came out, then another.

Briggs’s voice crackled erratically through the phonis again. “Palmer, I got a fool here who wants to go out on the end of your beam, if you can swing around so the crane can lift him out to it.”

“Start him coming!” Again he began jerking the levers, and the tank buckled and heaved, backed and turned, ran forward, and repeated it all, while the plate that was holding them flopped up and down on its precarious balance.

Doc held his breath and began praying to himself! His admiration for the men who’d go out in that stuff was increasing by leaps and bounds, along with his respect for Palmer’s ability.

The crane boom bobbed toward them, and the scoop came running out, but wouldn’t quite reach; their own tank was relatively light and mobile compared to the bigger machine, but Palmer already had that pushed to the limit and hanging over the edge of the plate. It still lacked three feet of reaching.

“Damn!” Palmer slapped open the door of the tank, jumped forward on the tread and looked down briefly before coming back inside. “No chance to get closer! Whew! Those men earn their money!”

But the crane operator had his own tricks and was bobbing the boom of his big machine up and down slowly with a motion that set the scoop swinging like a huge pendulum, bringing it gradually closer to the grapple beam. The man had an arm out, and finally caught the beam, swinging out instantly from the scoop that drew backward behind him. He hung suspended for a second, pitching his body around to a better position, then somehow wriggled up onto the end and braced himself with his legs. Doc let his breath out and Palmer inched the tank around to a forward position again. Now the pole of the atomjack could cover the wide territory before them, and he began using it rapidly.

“Win or lose, that man gets anything he wants as a bonus,” Palmer muttered. “Uh!”

The pole had located something, and was feeling around to determine size; the man glanced at them and pointed frantically. Doc jumped forward to the windows as Palmer ran out the grapple and began pushing it down into the semi-molten stuff under the pole; there was resistance there but finally the prong of the grapple broke under and struck on something that refused to come up. The manager’s hands moved the controls gently, making it tug from side to side; reluctantly, it gave and moved forward toward them, coming upward until they could make out the general shape. It was definitely no Tomlin suit!

“Lead hopper box! Damn — Wait, Jorgenson wasn’t anybody’s fool; when he saw he couldn’t make the safety, he might… Maybe…” Palmer slapped the grapple down again, against the closed lid of the chest, but the hook was too large. Then the man clinging there caught the idea and slid down to the hopper chest, his armored hands grabbing at the lid. He managed to lift a corner of it until the grapple could catch and lift it the rest of the way, and his hands started down, to jerk upward again.

The manager watched his motions, then flipped the box over with the grapple, and pulled it closer to the tank body; magma was running out, but there was a gleam of something else inside.

“Start praying, Doc!” Palmer worked it to the side of the tank and was out through the door again, letting the merciless heat and radiation stream in.

But Ferrel wasn’t bothering with that now; he followed, reaching down into the chest to help the other two lift out the body of a huge man in a five-shield Tomlin! Somehow, they wangled the six-hundred-odd pounds out and up on the treads, then into the housing, barely big enough for all of them. The atomjack pulled himself inside, shut the door, and flopped forward on his face, out cold.

“Never mind him — check Jorgenson!” Palmer’s voice was heavy with the reaction from the hunt, but he turned the tank and sent it outward at top speed, regardless of risk. Contrarily, it bucked through the mass more readily than it had crawled in through the cleared section.

Ferrel unscrewed the front plate of the armor on Jorgenson as rapidly as he could, though he knew already that the man was still miraculously alive; corpses don’t jerk with force enough to move a four-hundred-pound suit appreciably. A side glance, as they drew beyond the wreck of the converter housing, showed the men already beginning to set up equipment to quell the atomic reaction again, but the armor front plate came loose at last, and he dropped his eyes back without noticing details, to cut out a section of clothing and make the needed injections; curare first, then plasma, aminos, neo-heroin, and curare again, though he did not dare inject the quantity that seemed necessary. There was nothing more he could do until they could get the man out of his armor. He turned to the atomjack, who was already sitting up, propped against the driving seat’s back.

“’snothing much, Doc,” the fellow managed. “No jerks, just burn and that damned heat! Jorgenson?”

“Alive, at least,” Palmer answered, with some relief. The tank stopped, and Ferrel could see Brown running forward from beside a truck. “Get that suit off you, get yourself treated for the burn, and then go up to the office. Maybe we can fix you up with a month’s paid vacation in Hawaii or something.”

Surprise and doubt registered on the man’s face. Then he grinned and shook his head. “If you feel like that, boss I’d a helluva lot rather have a down-payment on a house big enough for all my kids.”

“Then pick yourself a house, and it’s yours free and clear. You earned it. Maybe we’ll toss in a medal or a bottle of Scotch, too. Here, you fellows give a hand.”

Ferrel had the suit ripped off with Brown’s assistance, and paused only long enough for one grateful breath of clean, cool air before leading the way toward the truck. As he neared it, Jenkins popped out, directing a group of men to move two loaded stretchers onto the litter, and nodding jerkily at Ferrel. “With the truck all equipped we decided to move out here and take care of the damage as it came up. Sue and I rushed them through enough to take care of them until we can find more time, so we could give full attention to Jorgenson. He’s still living!”

“By a miracle. Stay out here, Brown, until you’ve finished with the men from inside, then we’ll try to find some rest for you.”

The three huskies carrying Jorgenson placed him on the table set up, and began hosing off the bulky armor with versene solution, before ripping it off. They finished, and the truck got under way. Fresh gloves came out of a small sterilizer, and the two doctors fell to work at once, treating the badly burned flesh and trying to locate and remove the worst of the radioactive matter.

“No use,” Doc stepped back and shook his head. “It’s all over him, probably clear into his bones in places. We’d have to put him through a filter to get it all out!”

Palmer was looking down at the raw mass of flesh with all the layman’s sickness at such a sight. “Can you fix him up, Ferrel?”

“We can try, that’s all. Only explanation I can give for his being alive at all is that the hopper box must have been pretty well above the stuff until a short time ago — very short — and this stuff didn’t work in until it sank. He’s practically dehydrated now, apparently, but he couldn’t have perspired enough to keep from dying of heat if he’d been under all that for even an hour — insulation or no insulation.” There was admiration in Doc’s eyes as he looked down at the immense figure of the man. “And he’s tough; if he weren’t, he’d have killed himself by exhaustion, even confined inside that suit and box, after the jerks set in. He’s close to having done so anyway. Until we can find some way of getting that stuff out of him we don’t dare risk getting rid of the curare’s effect; that’s a time-consuming job, in itself. Better give him another water-and-sugar intravenous, Jenkins. Then, if we do fix him up, Palmer, I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty chance whether or not all this hasn’t driven him stark-crazy.”

The truck had stopped, and the men lifted the stretcher off and carried it inside as Jenkins finished the injection. He went ahead of them, but Doc stopped outside to take Palmer’s cigarette for a long drag, and let them go ahead.

“Cheerful!” The manager lighted another from the butt, his shoulders sagging. “I’ve been trying to think of one man who might possibly be of some help to us, Doc, and there isn’t such a person anywhere. I’m sure now, after being in there, that Hoke couldn’t do it. Kellar, if he were still alive, could probably pull the answer out of a hat after three looks; he had an instinct and genius for it, the best man the business ever had, even if his tricks did threaten to steal our work from under us and give us the lead. But — well, now there’s Jorgenson — either he gets in shape, or else!”

Doc nodded, only half-listening. The cigarette helped but he’d have given a lot at the moment for a cup of good coffee or some of Emma’s strong tea. Emma…

Jenkins’ frantic yell reached them suddenly. “Doc! Jorgenson’s dead! He’s stopped breathing entirely!”