Nerves Read online

  NERVES

  LESTER DEL REY

  Copyright

  Nerves

  Copyright © 1956 by Lester del Rey

  Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright

  © 2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information address [email protected]

  First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN 0-7953-0386-6

  Contents

  eForeword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About this Title

  eForeword

  Lester del Rey’s great novel of uncontrollable nuclear reactor breakdown in an atomic planet appeared in shorter form in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine in 1942, then was expanded to book length for publication in 1956. With precision and cold reality — and with brilliant prescience — del Rey describes an atomic accident which threatens the planet, an uncanny and accurate prefiguring of the crises of Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. Indisputably the major work of a science fiction Grand Master, Nerves retains a frightening immediacy and contemporaneity.

  Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was an important writer and equally important editor of science fiction. His first story, Helen O’Loy, published in Astounding in 1938 about a female android who seduced her inventor continues to be anthologized. Lester del Rey went on to become one of the significant contributors to John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction in the WW II years, which have come to be called the “Golden Age”. Nerves, the 25,000 word novella which was expanded 15 years later into the novel of the same title is considered the high point of his work although The Runaway Robot and other juveniles written for Winston in the early 1950’s were influential, as was his apostosaic novelette, FOR I AM A JEALOUS PEOPLE (1956) which depicted God as an enemy of humanity. An experienced magazine editor (SPACE SCiENCE FICTION) and critic (for ANALOG in the 1970’), del Rey became with his wife, Judy-Lynn, publisher of Ballantine’s newly-established del Rey science fiction and fantasy subsidiary, Del Rey Books. Under their guidance Del Rey became the most successful publisher of science fiction and fantasy in their history, del Rey publishing the first works of Terry Brooks and other significant writers. Awarded the SFFWA Grand Master trophy (one of only 17 to date) in 1991, Lester del Rey died in 1993 in New York City, shortly after his retirement.

  RosettaBooks is the leading publisher dedicated exclusively to electronic editions of great works of fiction and non-fiction that reflect our world. RosettaBooks is a committed e-publisher, maximizing the resources of the World Wide Web in opening a fresh dimension for the reading experience. In this electronic environment for reading, each RosettaBook will enhance the experience through The RosettaBooks Connection. This gateway instantly delivers to the reader the opportunity to learn more about the title, the author, the content and the content of each work, using the full resources of the Web.

  To experience The RosettaBooks Connection for Nerves, go to:

  www.Rosettabooks.com/Nerves

  To Frederik Pohl

  For insistence, persistence,

  Assistance — and existence!

  Chapter 1

  The jangling of the telephone gnawed at Doc Ferrel’s sleep. His efforts to cut it off by burying his head deeper in the pillow only made him more aware of it. Across the room, he heard Emma stirring uneasily. He could just make out her body under the sheets by the dim light of the early morning.

  Nobody had any business calling at that hour!

  Resentment cut through the last mists of sleep. He groped to his feet and fumbled for his robe. When a man nears sixty, with gray hair and enlarged waistline to show for it, he should be entitled to his sleep. But the phone went on insistently. Then, as he reached the head of the stairs, he began to fear that it would stop. Reaching it just too late would be the final aggravation.

  He half-stumbled down the stairs until he could reach the receiver. “Ferrel speaking.”

  Relief and fatigue were mixed in the voice at the other end. “This is Palmer, Doc. Did I wake you up?”

  “I was just sitting down to supper,” Ferrel told him bitterly. Palmer was the manager of the atomics plant where Doc worked, and at least nominally his boss. “What’s the matter? Your grandson got a stomach-ache, or has the plant finally blown up? And what’s it to me at this hour? Anyhow, I thought you said I could forget about the plant today.”

  Palmer sighed faintly, as if he’d expected Doc’s reaction and had been bracing himself for it. “I know. That’s what I called about. Of course, if you’ve made plans you can’t break, I can’t ask you to change them, God knows, you’ve earned a day off. But…”

  He left it hanging. Ferrel knew it was bait. If he showed any interest now, he was hooked. He waited, and finally Palmer sighed again.

  “Okay, Doc. I guess I had no business bothering you. It’s just that I don’t trust Dr. Blake’s tact. But maybe I can convince him that smart cracks don’t go over well with a junket of visiting congressmen. Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you up.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ferrel said quickly. He shook his head, wishing he’d had at least a swallow of coffee to clear his brain. “I thought the investigating committee was due next week?”

  Palmer, like a good angler, gave him a second’s grace before he set the hook.

  “They were, but I got word the plans are changed. They’ll be here, complete with experts and reporters, some time this forenoon. And with that bill up before Congress…Well, have a good day, Doc.”

  Ferrel swore to himself. All he had to do now was to hang up, of course. Handling the committee was Palmer’s responsibility; it was his plant that would be moved to some wasteland if the cursed bill was passed. Doc’s job was concerned only with the health and safety of the men. “I’ll have to talk it over with Emma,” he growled at last. “Where’ll you be in ten minutes? Home?”

  “I’m at the plant.”

  Doc looked at the clock. Just after six. If Palmer thought things were that serious…Yet it was the last day of Dick’s brief visit home from medical school, and they’d been planning on this day all week! Emma had her heart set on making it a happy family affair.

  A sound from the head of the stairs made him look up. Emma was standing there in a cotton robe and worn old slippers. Without make-up and with her hair hanging loose, she looked like a little girl who had grown old overnight without quite understanding it. Her face was carefully stripped of expression; she’d learned to conceal her feelings back in the days when Ferrel had maintained a general practice. But the tautness of her throat muscles and the way she cinched the belt around her too-thin figure showed that she had heard and how she felt.

  She shrugged and nodded, trying to smile at him as she started down the stairs, favoring her bad hip.

  “Breakfast will take a little time,” she said quietly. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll wake Dick and explain it to him.”

  She was heading for the kitchen as he turned back to the phone. “All right, Palmer. I’ll be out. Nine okay?”

  “Thanks, Doc. Nine will be fine,” Palmer answered. Emma was already starting coffee in the kitchen. Doc turned toward her, and then hesitated. She was right; he needed the extra sleep.

  Sleep wouldn’t come, though. The resiliency of you
th was long gone, and now even the sound habits of his middle life seemed to be failing. Maybe Blake was right in his kidding; maybe he was growing old! He had caught himself wondering as he looked at the firm-muscled figure of his son, so like Doc’s memory of himself at the same age, and so unlike what the mirror showed now.

  The situation at plant kept gnawing at his mind. He’d neglected of it, though aware of the growing tension, this sudden revival of the fear of atomic plants after so many years. Citizens’ protest meetings. Bills submitted to Congress– bills that would force most atomic plants to move far from inhabited territory. But he’d put that all down to the normally noisy crackpot fringe. Still, if Palmer took it seriously, maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe things had really got worse since the breakdown of the Croton atomic plant a few months ago. It was only a minor mishap there, really. But it had resulted in a mild dose of radiation contamination over a hundred square miles or more; it seemed to be nobody’s fault, but it had been a nine-days’ newspaper scandal, and it might have served as a focal point for all the buried superstitions and fears about atomics.

  Ferrel finally gave up and began dressing, surprised at how much time had gone already. The house was filled with the smell of hot biscuits, and he realized Emma was making a production of their last meal together on their only vacation. He heard her waking Dick and explaining the situation while he shaved. The boy sounded a lot less disappointed over the changed plans than she did; somehow, children seemed to care less than their parents about such things.

  The boy was already at the table when Doc came down, poring over the pages of the early edition of the Kimberly Republican. He glanced up and passed over half of the paper. “Hi, Dad. Tough about today. But Mom and I decided we’d drive you to work in my car, so we’ll see a little more of you. I guess this anti-atom craze is getting serious, eh?”

  “Palmer’s worried, that’s all. It’s his job to be overcautious.” At the moment, Doc was more interested in the biscuits and honey.

  Dick shook his head. “Better look at the editorial,” he advised.

  Ferrel turned to it, though he usually had no use for the canned editorials in the Guilden papers. Then he saw that this was signed and individual. It concerned the bill to evacuate all plants engaged in atomic transmutation or the creation of radioactive isotopes to areas at least fifty miles from any city of over ten thousand population. Superficially, the editorial was an unbiased study of the bill, but it equated such things as the wealth the industry had built on one side against the health of children, menaced by accidental release of radioactives on the other. Intellectually, it proved the plants must stay; emotionally, it said the exact opposite; and most of the readers here would think with their emotions first.

  On the front page, the feature story was on a citizens’ meeting for the bill. The number reported in attendance and the list of speakers was a second shock. Before National Atomics Products had been built near the city, Kimberly had been only a small town like many others in Missouri. Now it numbered nearly a hundred thousand, and depended for its prosperity almost entirely on National; there were other industries, but they were National’s children. Even those which didn’t depend on artificial isotopes still needed the cheap power that came almost as a byproduct.

  No matter what the other Guilden papers screamed, or how crazy other cities went, it was incredible to find such a reaction here.

  He threw aside his paper in disgust, not even bothering with the ball scores. He glanced grumpily at the time. “I guess I’d better get going.”

  Emma refilled his coffee, then limped up the stairs to finish dressing. Ferrel watched her slow steps unhappily. Maybe they should have bought one of the single-story houses that were coming back in fashion. A private escalator would be even better, but Dick’s education didn’t leave enough for that. Maybe in another year, though, when the boy was through school…

  “Dad.” Dick’s face was serious now, and his voice had dropped to hide his words from his mother. “Dad, we’ve been discussing this stuff at school. After all, medicine has to have some of the isotopes National makes, so it’s important to all of us. And something’s been bothering me. Suppose you get called up before Congress to testify on the danger?”

  Ferrel hadn’t thought of that. “Suppose I do?” It could happen; he was as well known as anyone else in the field. “I don’t have anything to hide. It won’t hurt me to give them the truth.”

  “If that’s what they want. And if the man running it isn’t after good publicity in the Guilden press.” Dick started to go on indignantly, then threw a look toward the stairs and subsided. Emma was just starting down.

  Doc swallowed the rest of his coffee and followed out to the boy’s little turbine-powered convertible. Normally he preferred the slower but dependable bus to the plant, but he couldn’t argue with Emma’s wishes now. He climbed into the back, muttering to himself as the wind whipped at him. Conversation was almost impossible, between the sound of the air screaming around the sporty windshield and the muffled roar of the turbine, stripped of half its muffler to give a sound of false power. Well, maybe the girls at school who found such things attractive would outgrow it; Doc hoped so, though he had his doubts. Or maybe– he thought again– he was just growing old.

  He watched the houses along the fifteen-mile road change from apartments to the endless rows of development huts that had grown up on all sides of Kimberly– prefabricated boxes with convertible rooms, set down on tiny lots that looked alike. Most of them showed evidence that the trailer had been their ancestor, and a few even had the wheels on which they’d been shipped– possibly indicating a lack of faith in the permanence of the owner’s employment.

  The road was jammed, and in places they slowed to a crawl. From a neighboring car, Doc heard the swearing against “ignorant Hoosiers” that was still almost a trademark of some Missourians. A horn blasted out and another driver yelled, “Get off the road, you damned atomjerks! We don’t want you here!”

  Atomjerks! Three years ago, being an atomjack was almost enough to insure good credit and respect. Times, it seemed, had changed.

  There were other significant changes as they began to near the plant. More and more Vacant signs were in front of houses. Once there had been a premium on locations along the highway, but now apparently the nearness to the atom plant was changing all that.

  He was almost relieved when they swung off the main road onto the private highway that led to the main gates. The sprawling, haphazard cluster of utilitarian buildings, offices and converter-housings covered acres of ground and was set back nearly a mile from the turnpike. Here the land was deserted, cared for only by the ground crews who kept down the weeds. Laws had already forced a safety zone around the plants, though it had been no great hardship to National. Behind the plant, lay a great tract of barren land, stretching back down a brackish little stream to a swamp further away. That, at least, was useful, since it served as a dumping ground for their wastes. Even the spur line from the main railroad was nearly two miles long.

  Once it had been only a power plant, one of several built to feed electricity to St. Louis, modeled on the first successful commercial plant constructed by General Electric to use atomic power. But early in its life, two young scientists named Link and Hokusai had discovered a whole new field of atomics and had come here to try it out. It was known that atoms heavier than uranium– such as plutonium and neptunium — could be made but generally grew increasingly unstable with added weight. The two men had found, however, that if the packing of new particles could be continued, eventually a new level could be reached that was again fairly stable. Such atoms– superheavies– had never existed in nature, but many proved far more valuable than the natural forms. National had grown to its present size on the development of the heavy isotopes, and power was now only a sideline, though the plant supplied all of Kimberly’s power requirements.

  Ferrel saw Emma stiffen as they neared the gate, but Dick had remembered and was al
ready braking. She had an almost pathological fear of going inside, based on an unrealistic belief that her second child was stillborn because of radiation here. Her worst nightmares centered around the plant. But Doc had long since given up any attempt to reason with her, and she had learned to accept his continuing employment there.

  He got out, self-consciously shaking Dick’s hand, and watched them hurriedly drive off again. Then abruptly the solid familiarity of his surroundings snapped the blue funk he’d been in. The plant was a world by itself, busy and densely populated. Nothing could uproot it. He waved at the grinning guard and went inside, soaking up the sight, sound and smell of it.

  The graveled walks were crowded with the usual nine-o’clock mass of young huskies just going on shift, and the company cafeteria was jammed to capacity with men seeking a last-minute cup of coffee. But the men made way for him good-humoredly as he moved among them. That pleased Doc, as always, and all the more because they didn’t bother to stop their horseplay as they might have done for another company official. He’d been just Doc to them too long for that.

  He nodded back at them easily, pushed through, and went down the walk toward the Infirmary, taking his own time; at his age a man could begin to realize that comfort and relaxation were worth cultivating. Besides, he could see no reason for ruining the good food in his stomach by rushing around in a flurry that gave him no time to digest it. He let himself in the side entrance, palming his cigar out of long habit, though he’d had the No Smoking signs removed years ago, and passed through the surgery to the door marked:

  Roger T. Ferrel

  Physician in Charge.

  As always, the little room was heavy with the odor of stale smoke and littered with scraps of this and that. His assistant was already there, rummaging busily through Ferrel’s desk with the brass that was typical of the man; Ferrel had no objection to it, though; Blake’s rock-steady hands and unruffled brain were always dependable in a pinch of any sort.