Nerves Read online

  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 turne
d, 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!