The Rackham Files (24 page)

Soft creaks above me said that someone was hurrying between windows, taping around the edges to keep out the finest dust particles. Since I hadn't told Kate how to do it or showed her where I kept the inch-wide masking tape, I figured Shar had done it for me. The dozen rolls of tape in cool dark storage had been Shar's idea in the first place. I moved around the stone divider that defined my office to find my brother-in-law, his reading glasses halfway down his nose, his light blue eyes peering at the manual he'd left with me long before. His massive red-haired forearms were crossed on my desk top.

Ern McKay's calves and forearms had been designed for a larger man. In other physical details he was medium, with short carroty hair balding in front and stubby fingers that should've been clumsy. They were, in fact, so adroit that Ern made his living with them at Ames. Or had until this day. Ern saved all his clumsiness for social uses; he wasn't the demonstrative sort.

"Hi." He gave me his shy grin over the specs. "Heard you come in. Lance is upstairs looking for your fishing vest. That where you keep your two-pound filament?"

"As you bloody well know," I said, squeezing his shoulder lightly as I studied the pages before him. That was all the greeting either of us needed. Ern was the tyer of dry flies in the family, but I'm the one who got to use them. Two-pound-test monofilament nylon is very thin stuff, the kind I used for leader on scrappy little trout in Sierra streams.

Ern's stumpy forefinger indicated a passage in the manual. "Says here that thin mono is hard to work with though it's otherwise perfect for the electroscope."

"I thought this was a fallout meter, Ern."

He turned his head, vented a two-grunt chuckle typical of his humor: underplayed. "You've had this damn manual five years and never read it once. Got half a mind to tell Shar on you."

"Christ, Ern, have a heart," I mumbled.

He held up the clean empty eight-ounce tin can from among other junk he had collected on my desk: adhesive bandage, razor blade, an oblong of thin aluminum foil, a bottle cork through which he'd forced a hefty needle. "Some guys doped this out years ago at Union Carbide; even got it published through Oak Ridge National Lab, including pages any newspaper could copy, free of charge! Any high school sophomore can build the thing from stuff lying around in the kitchen. If he can read," Ern qualified it.

I had assumed from the official-looking document number, ORNL-5040, that it wasn't kosher to copy it. Apparently the reverse was true, but I'd never read it carefully. The damned manual was in the public domain!

"Fellow named Kearny ramrodded several projects at Oak Ridge oriented toward nuke survival," Ern said, "and his team deserves top marks. The Kearny Fallout Meter is just a capacitor, a foil electroscope really, that's calibrated by the time it takes to lose its static charge after you feed that little charge to it. It loses that charge in an environment of ionizing radiation—the kind that makes fallout such a killer—and you can recharge it by rubbing a piece of plexiglass with paper to build up another charge."

"I understand only about half of what you just said," I complained.

"That's the point: you don't have to. Follow the instructions, learn to read the simple chart here, and you can use it
without
knowing why it works."

"Is it the kind of thing that only tells you when you're as good as dead? I mean, hell, Ern, it can't have much of a range of sensitivity."

"Take an F in guesswork. It works through four orders of magnitude," Ern replied, flipping pages to a sheet with a chart meant to be glued around that tin can. "From point-oh-three rems per hour—which is hardly worth worrying about—to
forty-three
rems per hour," he said with feeling.

"Which means kiss your ass good-bye," I hazarded.

"That's the layman's phrase," he harrumphed, subtly playing the quarrelsome scientist for me. "At NASA we say 'anus.' Ten hours at forty rems an hour and it's an even bet you won't live long."

"You're a little ray of sunshine."

"Just be glad," he said, tapping the pages, "that Kearny's elves realized nobody would buy expensive radiation counters until it was too late. They engineered this thing so well even you could build it for thirty cents—and why didn't you? And where the devil is Lance? I'm ready for that monofilament line."

"My fishing vest is in the screen porch closet," I said, and trotted upstairs. Only it wasn't in the closet. I called Lance.

From somewhere on the second floor came his muffled eleven-year-old tenor: "Come find me."

Sometimes Lance was eleven going on thirty, and sometimes going on seven. What rankled most was that he looked so much like I did at his age; beefy, shock of black hair, insolent button-black eyes under heavy brows. But mom hadn't spoiled me, hadn't let me hurl tantrums. I'd grown up with due respect for dad's belt. That was where Lance and I differed; my sis had figured her youngest for a genius since he began talking so much, so soon, and ruled against breaking his spirit. In that, at least, she'd succeeded. "We can play later, Lance," I called up. "Bring my fishing vest if you have it."

"I have it," his voice floated tantalizingly down the stairs. "Come find me."

Kate Gallo paused while tearing a strip of tape with her teeth; smiled at me. "Welcome back, boss." The evening light through the film-covered windows was a dusty pink, tinting the gloom in which she worked.

"Some boss," I said and bellowed, "Goddamnit, Lance, this is life and death!"

"I don't think you'll make much of an impression on that one," Kate murmured and continued working.

"Come fi-i-ind meee," quavered in the air.

So I climbed the stairs and found him in the closet of the guest bedroom his parents sometimes used. "You win," he chirruped and held up my many-pocketed, fish-scented old vest. Then, "You better watch out," he wailed.

My vest in one hand, Lance's belt and trouser back in my other, I carried him like a duffel bag to the window. Kate hadn't sealed it yet but had put the plastic over it outside. "You know why the sunset's so red, Lance?"

"Those smoky clouds. You're hurting my stummick."

"Those clouds are full of poison. The poison will be falling on us tonight and for a long time after. It'll kill us if we don't get ready, Lance. Your help could make the difference."

Sullen, short of breath with his belt impeding it: "Better put me down." Then as I did so, he folded his arms and faced me. "I think that's a lot of crap about clouds being poison. How come airplanes fly through 'em all the time?"

I waved him ahead of me down the stairs. "Haven't you paid any attention to what your folks told you about fallout?"

"Some. Mostly I have better things to do. That stuff is dull." I knew what his better things were; I'd found his caches of comics and kidporn. "Anyway, if any poison comes down, the roof'll stop it."

The roof! I pushed him aside and took the rest of the stairs fast, tossing my vest to Ern. "I'd completely forgot," I said to him, trying to recall where I'd stashed my tools. "The central roof beam buckled from concussion. We've got to shore it up, Ern. Could you finish that thing later?"

He tapped the little cork with the needle in it; only the tip of the needle was exposed. He'd made several tiny holes in the tin can that way, following the manual but using amateur model-builders' tricks to do a neater job. "Guess the roof is top priority," he mused, then arose and called into the tunnel. "Shar, when you're finished, will you and Cammie haul mattresses and bedding down here?"

"Another few minutes," Shar's voice echoed.

Cammie, faintly: "Isn't sealing the tunnel more important?"

"Yes," Ern and I chorused. Bedding or no bedding, the tunnel was the safest spot on my place. I'd had it dug with a backhoe as a deep, broad trench years before, a passageway from the old farmhouse to the root cellar. Then, by hand, I had dug a shoulder a foot wide and three feet deep on each side, running the length of the tunnel. Finally I laid cheap discarded railroad ties across that shoulder with a layer of heavy tar paper between the cross-tie roof and the dirt I shoveled onto it.

During one rainy season the tunnel had stood three inches deep in water, thanks to my incompetence. After that I dug a smaller, foot-deep trench along one side of the bottom of the tunnel, laying perforated plastic pipe in the hole with gravel around it before I installed a floor and wall paneling. The perforated pipe took ground water that percolated into the gravel. I had to dig another trench by hand around the old concrete foundation of the house so I could install more drainage pipe to carry ground water downhill from the tunnel and the house—but that kept the basement dryer, too. With that mod, my old place no longer had the dank, musty, moldy basement common to many old homes. I'd be lying if I claimed it was all done for nuclear survival, but my dry tunnel beneath cross ties and three feet of damp soil provided protection you could beat only in a mine shaft. According to Shar's texts, the tunnel had a fallout protection factor several times greater than the basement itself.

In Shar's jargon, the basement under my two-story house was rated at a PF of over 30; that is, over thirty times as much protection as you'd get walking around outside in shirt sleeves, which is no protection to speak of. The PF got better when I blocked off my one basement window with dirt; that's why I did it. It would've been better still had I thrown a ramp of earth up against the exposed concrete foundation, which was visible for a foot or so below the clapboard siding.

Shar estimated that with the window blocked off (and the long, hinged trapdoor lowered over the stairwell so that it became, in best farmhouse tradition, a segment of my kitchen floor), my basement could have a PF of nearly fifty. If fallout radiation got as high as a hundred rems per hour outside, it might be only two rems per hour in the basement.

Of course, two rems an hour weren't good for you. If you absorbed that much radiation steadily for a week, your body would get a total exposure of 336 rems during that time. Chances were one in three that you'd die in a month or so from such a dose.

The operative word there was "steadily": fallout particles radiate so much during the first day or so, they're only emitting ten percent as strongly seven hours after the blast;
one
percent as strongly after two days. After fifteen days that emission rate is only
one tenth of one percent
as much as it was during the first moments of that monstrous fireball.

That dwindling radiation rate was the rationale for staying put awhile—and for optimism. If radiation rose to deadly levels outside, we would experience only a small fraction of it in my basement. Sure, it was still dangerous. We might get sick; we might even contract cancer and die in a few years. In my book a few years beats hell out of a few days.

But Shar's hundred-rem-per-hour estimate had been wildly optimistic. As Ern chased me up to the attic, we had no idea that the particles slowly drifting down toward us from forty-thousand-foot altitude were from the very center of the Hamilton cloud, so ferociously lethal they should've glowed in the dark. They didn't, of course.

Stepping carefully to avoid fiberglass insulation, we still got it in our eyes and cussed it as we worked. Ern had a better understanding of structures than I did; he judged we could make a four-legged pyramid from the A-frame tubes. We used up ten minutes putting the A-frames in place with only my lamp to illuminate us, straddling the tube butts on joists and nailing stubs of two-by-four to keep the butt ends from skating away. Then I braced my legs, put my head and both forearms under the cracked roofbeam, and Ern helped me lift.

A pain like an electric shock banged alongside my spine. I'd half-expected it. Given plenty of time, Ern would've jacked the beam up by an old expedient: a sturdy vertical timber under the roof beam with overlapping hardwood wedges under the vertical piece. By driving the wedges toward each other with a hammer, a slender housewife could elevate that timber by the thickness of both wedges; several inches, in fact. Well, we didn't have the time. We did have a tall, heavy-boned idiot with an old back injury—me.

The joists groaned underfoot. Dust and splinters fell from the roof beam. With a great dry groan the center of the beam rose within an inch or so of horizontal. Ern, standing on different joists, panted, "Can you hold?"

"Do it," I grunted, and he rushed to lean the tops of the tubes into place, apexes nearly together under the roof beam.

"Let down easy," he said, holding the tops of the tubes in place. As I did, the tubes bit a half-inch up into the beam—a good thing, since they wanted to slip aside. Ern saw the problem, grabbed the hammer and nails, and drove nails into the beam so their protruding heads held the tube lips from moving. Then, "I still don't like it, but it'll do," he said, and I staggered back. "We should span the break with plywood and screws, Harve, but we don't have the time."

"What if we nailed chains across the bottom of the beam?"

He saw what I meant. If we stretched a chain across the bottom face of the beam, nailing through several links where the wood wasn't split, the beam couldn't sag again without snapping chain or very sturdy nails. "Smart," he agreed, and we did it in two minutes flat. Now he was happy. Ours was a stronger repair than a simple vertical post resting in the middle of a joist, since that lone joist might give way. I suggested that we clear out.

"Oh hell, we didn't block the attic vents," Ern said then as we collected our tools. The little screened vents weren't large, but a strong updraft under the eaves could sift dust into the attic. Ern saw me kneading the muscles near my kidney, told me to wait, and scrambled downstairs. He was back moments later with newspapers I had put in the bedrooms for atmosphere. The front pages were expensive fakes with historic headlines like FIRE RAVAGING SAN FRANCISCO—an appalling irony now—and LUSITANIA TORPEDOED. We thrust the paper, a dozen thicknesses at each vent, flat against the holes and nailed them in place. Then we abandoned the attic and taped the door edges.