Nerves

Chapter 12

Palmer was heading past the Administration building toward Briggs and the crew working on Number Four but he stopped himself abruptly. The sight of him observing them without any more answer than they had was the last thing that would help. Briggs was capable of doing everything that they could do now anyhow. Even from a distance it was easy to see that there wasn’t much anyone could do, but get out of the stuff’s way. Men were no longer going anywhere near it.

Anything they could find as an answer — from Jorgenson or on their own — would be useless unless it could be done in heavy tanks and at a distance. If there had been enough I-631, of course, they could spray it over the magma. But there wasn’t.

He turned back reluctantly, passing a group of men lugging up shields to be added to the light tractors and tanks. It was beginning to get them, finally. Up to now they’d been willing to accept it as a challenge and to leave the solution to him. But now they were giving up. He’d already had a report on a small group who had tried to crash out through the freight loading yard and another who had apparently been trying to force the main gate. So far the guards had no serious trouble. But if the men here ever really wanted out, one of the tanks would clear the way in a hurry. There’d be riots and general hell in plenty, though, if any stuck with him.

He could feel his own nerves going. The proof of it was that he kept thinking of more and more fantastic schemes, though the logical part of his mind knew that nearly any good solution is the simplest way rather than the most complicated. Transmutation hadn’t been solved by magical rigmarole but by knowledge and the simple accumulation of enough of the right elements in the right place. The mechanisms of the converter were simpler than those of the old cyclotron, though they could put out neutrons by the pound and mesons in almost any concentration.

He headed for his office, half-thinking that he might get a quick shower there. If he could relax he might do no more but he’d be in a better position to get work out of others.

He knew his mistake as soon as he stepped inside and saw Thelma’s face. All the calls that had been piling up were still waiting for him, only stalled off by her tricks.

“What is it?” he asked bitterly.

“Mayor Walker right now,” she told him. “He’s the worst.”

Palmer took the call in his office, reaching for the bottle under hid desk as he did so. It wasn’t the equal of a shower but something was needed to keep him going. “All right, Walker,” he said. “You’re first in line but there are plenty more. What gives?”

He was still cursing the luck that had placed Walker in his office at the moment the mess started. But at least the man was now doing his best to stick to the point and make it brief as he outlined the situation.

Kimberly had finally started to get out of hand. Palmer felt reasonably sure that Guilden hadn’t been behind the blatantly false headlines or the bootlegging of copies after the issue was supposedly confiscated under the Governor’s emergency orders; it bore the mark of a real fanatic and Guilden wasn’t that far gone from his publishing standards. But it didn’t matter. The confiscation had convinced the fools that the story was true and the fact that there were no real details merely encouraged them to read what they liked into the bootlegged copies. The mob gatherings were doing the rest. So far no real violence had occurred but the level of fear couldn’t be whipped much higher without exploding in all directions, though aimed at the plant.

Palmer cut Walker short. “There’s nothing I can do, Walker. And maybe nothing any of us will care about tomorrow. We’ve about given up!”

The man’s face whitened, grew sick and then amazingly firmed into itself again. He took a deep breath, grimaced and nodded. “I suppose we’ll get it when you do, eh? Yeah. Well, will it make any difference what happens here, Palmer?”

“I don’t know. It might help with that slim chance we have.”

“All right.” Walker was suddenly commander of his forces and himself again. “If it’s that way we’ll keep them in line somehow. Let me know if there’s anything at all we can do.”

He hung up.

It proved what Palmer had been sure of all along. Given enough truth about his situation a man could face almost anything. But when the attack came in the dark and he had no idea what he was fighting he broke and went crazy. The whole cover-up insisted on by the Governor had been a mistake from the start. In the minor emergency matters of normal politics it probably made sense, but not on anything at this level.

But it hadn’t been the fault of politicians only. It had started with the plants themselves. They’d given up on trying to explain the facts to the people — tough, almost indigestible facts couched in abstruse mathematics, of course; they hadn’t faced up to the fact that some way could always be found to make anything understandable, given time. Instead of hiring the best minds to find the way they’d made the secrets even more esoteric. And when trouble came they’d been forced to try to conceal it and depend on trickery. Morgan’s proposal might work, but not forever. In the long run the only way to fight the bill was to bring everything out in the open.

Then he grinned bitterly at himself. He’d told Walker the facts but he hadn’t admitted them to himself yet. He was still figuring on the miracle that would save them.

“Congressman Morgan on the phone,” Thelma announced.

Palmer started in surprise. Damn it, Morgan had no kicks coming. He’d even found a way to get the shipment sent out on time — all the stuff from the successful conversion — using the militia and the minimum of faking the purpose of the shipment. It should be almost ready for use by now.

But Morgan made no reference to that. “Palmer,” he said without preliminaries “what would happen if a hydrogen bomb were dropped on the plant right now?”

“You’d have a lot of dead men,” Palmer answered. He stared at the face on the screen, trying to read it and finding it deadly serious.

“I don’t mean the personnel — there’d be time to evacuate them,” Morgan amended.

Palmer grinned bitterly. “I didn’t mean plant personnel, either. I mean anything up to half of the United States!”

It would mean that, too. Once the energy of the fusioning hydrogen hit near the mass of Isotope R out there, the energy level would be lifted to a high-enough point to blast it all straight into Mahler’s Isotope. Any energy the bomb couldn’t supply on first contact would be derived from the explosion of the part that had switched over and the whole mass would be raw energy, along with assorted atomic fragments, in almost literally no time.

Morgan grunted. “That’s what I guessed. I can figure out a little of that — enough to scare me, at least. But I haven’t had time to check up with the experts here. Are you sure of it?”

“Hoke figured it out a long time ago, he tells me — Matsuura Hokusai, you’ve heard of him,” Palmer explained. “The stuff we have out there triggers off with about one-tenth the energy it takes to trigger the hydrogen reaction — and it yields about six times as much energy for its mass! Though it’s the speed of the stuff that does most of the damage — hydrogen is slow burning, by comparison. Why?”

Morgan stopped to mop his forehead with a kerchief that was already damp, as if he’d been running.

“Because that’s the bright idea that they’ve come up with here, just now. They’ve about got the President talked into it, too.” He paused, as if trying to believe it himself. “They mean to give you until tomorrow morning to get your men out of there and then to come in with small fusion bombs and give it hell. They’ve figured that they can control it so it won’t hit Kimberly too hard. And I can’t convince them of anything. I’m only in on the discussions on sufferance. I’d be out on my ear if they knew I leaked it to you.”

It was the simple brute-force type of solution that would appeal to men who were used to dealing with normal material problems. Wipe a thing out completely and you could stop worrying about it. Spray enough DDT into a room and there would be no bedbugs; then you could worry about getting rid of the poisonous deposits of DDT later. Only in this case they were dealing with something that wouldn’t accept such solutions. This was dangerously close to the borderline between matter and energy, as it was, and material solutions didn’t wholly apply. It would solve the problem of R, all right; but there’d be no human beings around afterward close enough to take care of the after effects.

“What can I do?” Palmer asked.

“Give me the name of the best man I can get to talk to them in a hurry.”

“Morgenstern from M.I.T.,” Palmer answered. “Or if you need someone even faster, grab Hazelton from the AEC. He should be able to convince them.”

The Congressman snorted into the phone. “You don’t know, Palmer. You think facts can sell anything but you’re wrong. They can’t believe that their most brilliant idea of all is totally useless. And they can’t pick up the rudiments of science in half an hour. They’re still thinking in analogies — fight fire with fire, fight atoms with atoms. Hell, Hazelton has been arguing with them for years on everything related to atomics and they’ve never yet believed him. I’ll try him, but don’t expect much from it.”

Palmer swung to face the windows as he thought it over. Morgan wasn’t acting now, obviously. The man was risking what was worth as much to him as the plant was to Palmer. And he was as much of an expert on politics as Hokusai was on theoretical atomics. When he swung back, the manager’s decision had been made.

He’d been tearing up all the other rules he’d lived by. He might as well destroy the last one.

“All right,” he said. “Tell them to relax. They won’t need their bombs, because we’ve found a way to quench it already. Jorgenson, the man who discovered the process, was in the converter when it all happened. He had instruments on the converter at the exact second it blew up. And he lived through it, in a Tomlin suit, until we could get to him. Now he has recovered enough to outline a way of checking the reaction and my men are putting it into operation right now. Will that help you?”

Morgan nodded as he considered it. “Maybe it will. Especially that stuff about his being inside when it blew and living through it. It’s a bigger lie than I’d have thought of but it fits the pattern of stuff they’ll swallow. It should get us an extention of time, at least. But God help us both if they ever find out.”

He hung up, and Palmer headed for the door before the intercom could call him back. After such conversations he could almost look forward to the news Hoke would have for him, bad as he knew it must be.