Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (6 page)

A mine exploded.

As if in retaliation, harpoon guns went off, but they were as likely to hit a man in the water as they were the threshing whale, who had lost his sense of direction, even his picture of the ring now.

The whale charged anywhere. The mines attached to him were still exploding, wherever he struck.

Then a harpoon hit the whale. Internally he burst, and he began to writhe in pain and death, inhaling water.

The winch on the vessel which had fired that harpoon began to turn, dragging the dying whale’s body closer. The impact of the mortally wounded whale against the ship’s side made hardly a thump, the happy sailor’s shouts of triumph rose, then came a terrible
boom
! The handsome brass rail around the gunwale, pride of the Japanese captain, cracked before the eyes of the sailor at the winch, then the deck broke and came up to hit him in the face. Seconds later he slid into the cold sea.

There was nothing of the whale to capture, even to salvage. His tail had been blown off, his vitals scattered by a second harpoon gun. His heavy head had parted from his spinal column, the great head, so full of sperm oil that had been the most valuable part of a whale before the era of petroleum products, sank slowly down, and the human eyes left to see it were not looking.

Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not

Three Mile Island had been a catastrophe, a nearly fatal setback, no doubt about that and no use mincing words. It had alerted the American people not only to the fact that nuclear power plants could break down and release radioactive gases into the atmosphere, but also to the fact that government nuclear control authorities gave out lies to the public.

“Nothing to worry about, folks. Everything’s under control,” TV and radio had said during the first anxious days, and for weeks afterward too. What American in the country at the time could forget or forgive that? Or the fact that four years later cleanup men could still not enter the chamber where the damaged core was? And that when four men, dressed as if for a moon-walk, did enter the chamber, one collapsed after a few minutes, gripped his head and said he felt awful? Only one sample of nuclear waste, not the desired four, had been snatched from the floor in this costly endeavor.

The fact was that Three Mile Island wasn’t cleaned up yet. The fact was the plant owners and regulatory committees were sick of it, and wished it would disappear. But there the towers stood, one of them hopelessly out of commission and even inaccessible.

As if that weren’t bad enough for the Nuclear Control Commission, the public had focused its attention on their bureau. The NCC had also lied. No longer could nuclear plants sneak huge trucks by dead of night to garbage dumps in other states, and get back home unnoticed. The trucks might bear a logo of Tidy-Baby Paper Products or Frozen Fish Straight to Your Table, the little old ladies in small towns were looking out of their windows. What were those enormous trucks doing at 3 in the morning creeping through
their
tiny town? The little old ladies and the Boy Scouts wrote letters to their local papers, and things went on from there to the NCC. The NCC had been caught out a few times and reproached by Washington for permitting dumping too close to inhabited areas.

For Benjamin M. Jackson, head of the NCC, existence had become a tightening vice. For the past year, he had had an ulcer which he was only half nursing, because he would not, could not give up his brace of Scotches at the end of the day (if his day had an end) which he felt he had earned and merited. And he could not stop worrying about his job which was damned well-paid and which he didn’t want to lose by reminding Washington too often that there simply weren’t enough places that he and his staff could okay as dumps for the goddam radioactive crap.

The seas were out of the question, because departing cargoes were too well inspected in case sensitive items got to Russia. Forests had government patrols pretty thick on the ground. One man in the Environmental Watch Agency would have given Benny Jackson the nod for a dumping in Oregon State Park, but he had never been able to guarantee passage through specific patrols at the park, even though Benny had promised to see that the stuff was buried.

Benny was on paper and by oath pledged to guard against careless disposal of nuclear waste, but in fact his job had almost at once turned into one of finding by hook or by crook any place at all where waste could be got rid of. In one of his dreams, Benny had seen himself assigning each man on his Commission—and there were a hundred and thirty-seven—a container of nuclear plant waste to take home every evening and flush down the toilet, but unfortunately radioactive stuff couldn’t be handled like that. The public’s opinion of nuclear power plants and respect for their efficiency was low and sinking daily. New plants could not easily be built now, because of the intensity of local protests.

Then some genius in Washington, whose name Benny never learned, maybe because it was top-secret, came up with an idea: Washington would donate a football stadium with a track oval and bleachers and a roof to a certain Midwestern university, and under this stadium, below its underground carpark even, radioactive waste would be stored in lead containers, sealed in vast concrete chambers, and be forgotten. “The area is free from earthquake . . .” read Benny’s private memo on the plan. He was to keep this quiet from even his closest colleagues for the nonce. The project was going to be rushed through with no expense spared by the Well-Bilt Construction Company of Minnesota. In a very few months, the memo said, trucks could begin rolling into the sub-basements, because the underground structure would be Well-Bilt’s priority.

Benny Jackson’s ulcer got a bit better at once. The Well-Bilt people were going to work round the clock and seven days a week.

It was amazing to Benny to read about the stadium-to-be in the newspapers. The university had been quite surprised by the gift from Washington, since the present administration was not known for its generosity to educational institutions. The faculty and students, learning of the size and beauty of their future stadium, sent a huge wreath of flowers to Washington with a ribbon on it saying: “Mr. President, we thank you!” Benny had tears of relief, amusement and nervousness in his eyes when he read that.

Now Benny could afford to say on the telephone, to the requests for dumping sites, that in about two months he would be able to provide space. “Can you hold it that long?” He knew they would have to hold it longer, that was the way things always went, but it was nice to be able to write or say anything with a ring of truth in it.

Benjamin Jackson was thirty-six, with a small bald spot on his head which otherwise grew straight dark hair. Slender by nature, he was nevertheless developing a paunch. He had a civil engineer’s degree from Cornell, and was married with two children. Two years ago, on his appointment as head of the NCC after a reshuffle of its top men, Benny had quit his job in New Jersey with an ecology department and moved with his family to their present home in West Virginia, two miles away from the handsome headquarters of the NCC, which was a two-storey building, formerly a private prep school.

“So the touch-me-not can now be touched,” said Gerald Mc-Whirty when Benny told him about the stadium project. “Comforting news.”

Gerry McWhirty did not look as pleased as Benny had hoped, but then Gerry wasn’t the type to get excited about anything. Gerry hated stalling and lying, and Benny often felt that Gerry didn’t like his job. Gerry had a doctorate in physics, but he liked the quiet life, gardening, tinkering with something in his garage, fixing his neighbor’s video or anything else that got broken. He was good at plant inspection, though a bit too fussy in Benny’s opinion, and Benny had toned down Gerry’s reports many a time. Coolant deficiency at a plant in Wilkes-Barre, Benny remembered, and a couple of “night supervisors” at a plant in Sacramento who Gerry said “didn’t know straight up” about emergency procedures and ought to be replaced. Benny had concurred in regard to the supervisors, but deleted the coolant complaint, because Gerry’s figures hadn’t seemed to Benny impressive enough for the NCC to mention.

McWhirty often flew with a small staff on inspection tours all over the country. But Benny went alone and incognito to the Midwestern stadium project, because he was curious about its progress.

What Benny saw was gratifying indeed. A vast oval had been dynamited in the earth, earth-moving machines were busy scooping, trucks rolled away laden with soil and rock, and a couple of hundred workmen swarmed at the scene like bees around a hive. And this was a Saturday afternoon.

“Dressing rooms and showers underneath, I suppose,” said Benny to a hard-hat workman, just to get his answer.

“Air-raid shelters too,” replied the workman. “I should say atomic fallout shelters.” He grinned as if it would never happen.

Benny nodded in a friendly manner. “Mighty big project. It’s gonna be great.”

“You one of the architects?”

“No-o. Just one of the alumni from here.” Benny cast his gaze toward the distant campus on his left as if he loved it. Then, with a good-bye wave to the workman, he went back to his taxi, and returned to the airport.

A month or so later, when Benny thought his ulcer had all but vanished, Love Canal kicked up again. The Environmental Watch Agency reported “unexpected leakage of chemical waste” from upstream in Love Canal at the city of Niagara Falls, and Benny received a personal letter from some hothead in Washington, DC named Robert V. Clarke, who wrote like a zealot trying to climb the ladder of promotion. Benny would have been willing to bet that Clarke would be bounced off the bottom rung of the ladder very soon, but the letter had been signed also by one of the higher-ups at EWA, because the Love Canal mess contained nuclear wastes as well as “chemical wastes,” a term often used to cover radioactive wastes if a report didn’t want to admit outright to radioactivity. The higher-up’s signature meant that the NCC had to do something. Some men from the NCC had gone up to examine the Love Canal air and water a year or so ago, had stayed for lunch, Benny recalled, and had okayed what they had seen and analyzed: the area was more than safe for human habitation again. Hundreds of families had been evacuated from the area in 1980, when a federal emergency had been declared due to wastes dumped during the 1940s and 1950s. Now Benny’s discouraged brain produced, as its first thought: here goes a lot of money if the NCC and the EWA have to launch a new cleanup program, with more tests to justify a cleanup, and so on. Bloody, effing mess! The only thing good about the letter was the last paragraph which said the “total review” by the EWA would not be ready before sixteen months from now. But meanwhile the NCC’s co-operation and attention was requested. Love Canal, Benny knew, had been taking in thousands of dollars per month as a tourist attraction. Lots of motels, restaurants and foodshops and filling stations were there now and hadn’t been there before the hoo-hah. Couldn’t the EWA let well enough alone? Benny swallowed a little white pill for his ulcer, just in case. At least the owners of the motels and restaurants weren’t going to complain about the latest bad news!

Benny composed and dictated a letter into a machine for his secretary. He said that the unexpected leakage at Love Canal must be due to upstream plants disobeying laws laid down by the NCC and the EWA when his committee headed by Mr. So-and-so on such and such a date had visited Love Canal and pronounced the waters free of dangerous pollution. Benny omitted saying that most of the NCC information had come from the owners of a nuclear plant in the area, whose own chemists had made the tests.

Lies, lies, lies! Everyone lied. That was the way Benny justified his lies (which were often merely slantings of facts) to himself. What did trouble him was that he might not lie enough or in the right way to suit Washington, and that some eager beaver, or numbskull, or stooge might raise a stink that would cost Benny his job. Washington always thought it looked good, in case of a scandal or a balls-up somewhere, to replace the head of a regulatory committee. It cooled the public down for a while.

Meanwhile the Three Mile Island cleanup program officially continued, though in truth nothing had moved since the entry of the four men in space suits several months ago. The man who had collapsed on that occasion had been called, by the owners of the plant, a “heat stress” victim, and they also said that the millirems he had received were about 75, or “the equivalent of 2½ chest X-rays.” The other three men had picked up just 190 rems each. The rem (short for millirem) number bearable to the human body was 5,000 per year, a figure set by the federal government. The expensively trained cleanup men in their expensive suits had already received 3,000 each. Now with the radiation level at 200 rems per hour (reduced from 350, said the plant owners), the chief of the cleanup operations had decided that the same cleanup crew could not complete the job without incurring more than the 8,ooo set as maximum for workers wearing protective suits.

“That’s one of the reasons why the cleanup is so blasted expensive,” one company official had told the journalists. “All the protection and training and rehearsal that you need to reduce dose rates add very much to the cost of the cleanup which is already past three hundred and eighty million dollars.”

In Benny’s opinion, Three Mile Island never would be cleaned up, never, and now it was rather on the back burner, simmering away, no doubt releasing
something
into the surrounding air, but what the hell? It was amazing how many sightseers and curious people drove up as close as they could to the three stacks on Three Mile Island day and night, as if the closer they got, the more excited they felt. It was perhaps like being able to zoom up to a car accident when the victim still lay on the street, or to a fire still burning in a big building. One newspaper said that GPU, the owners of the plant, were “promoting” Three Mile Island as a tourist mecca.