Edward Lee - Slither

Trent's head rose groggily in the lightweight sleeping bag. "Huh?"

"Is there a hot radioactive source on this island?"

The question slapped him out of sleep. "What the-" Then his face drooped. "You found the…"

"Yeah! Is it live?"

"Wait for me while I get dressed."

He knows all about it, Nora felt sure. And he lied. He specifically told us that the generator ran on diesel fuel. A minute later, Trent came out, dressed in crumpled fatigues.

"There's no diesel generator on this island, is there?" Nora demanded.

"Well, uh, no."

"Then how come you told us there was? You've got an RTG in the ground out there, don't you?"

"Keep your voice down," he said, glancing at the other tents. "Over here."

He took her out of the campsite and down the trail to the field shower area. "Now I can talk," he said. "I'm not supposed to let any civilians know about it. You know what an RTG is?"

"Yeah," Nora said testily. "Radioisotope thermal generator. I have a lot of friends who've seen them on Arctic specimen expeditions, and the government puts them up in the mountains, too, to provide power to remote observation posts. It's a nuclear battery."

"Exactly, and you're right, the government uses them all the time, in places where there's no practical way to deliver fuel to run gas and diesel generators. A small radioactive pellet produces heat that's changed into electricity through a thermocoupler. Same sort of thing NASA puts on satellites, Mars probes, things like that. It's a battery that lasts a hundred years." Trent sat down on one of the old picnic tables, rubbed sleep out of his face. He looked worn out. "Since I had to escort civilians to the island, my orders were to lie about the power source. No one knows about the RTG and there was no reason to think it might be discovered-it's all the way on the other side of the island." He looked right at her. "What the hell were you doing that far into the woods?"

"I was going for a nature walk," Nora said, and she didn't feel the need to apologize.

"Great. Now you'll have to be debriefed when we leave-big-pain in the ass."

"Debriefed?"

"The location of the RTG is classified. You'll have to be interviewed in Jacksonville by the Army Security Agency and sign a National Secrets Act nondisclosure form."

Nora felt outraged. "'That's ridiculous!"

"Hey, you're the one who had to go on a nature walk."

My God, she thought, frowning. "So that thing was installed for the missile site?"

"Right. It provided all the needed electricity for the control station and the launch circuitry."

"How come it wasn't removed when the missiles were dismantled?"

Trent smiled and shook his head. "The RTG itself is only the size of a lunch box… but it's seated in a thousand-pound shielding box, and then they embedded the box in fifteen tons of steel-reinforced concrete."

"Too big to move."

"Yeah, but if no one knows it's there, it's not a security risk." He rubbed his eyes again, aggravated. "Now someone does know where it is. You."

"Well, I'm certainly not going to tell anyone about it."

"Good, because if you do, you can get five years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine. In this day and age, can you imagine the uproar if the public found out there was an RTG on an island two miles off the coast of Florida? Every nut job and wannabe terrorist would come out here trying to dig it up. You know, the psychological element. Theoretically, if you took the uranium out of that RTG core-someone could make a dirty nuke. So mum's the word here. If Annabelle mentions in her bristleworm article that there's a friggin' nuclear battery on Pritchard's Key, I turn into a buck private real fast. My whole career will be in the toilet."

Now Nora got the gist. RTGs were safe alternate power sources whose fuel was inaccessible, but in today's climate of terrorism, dirty bombs, and overall radiological paranoia, public knowledge of their whereabouts provided a huge security breech.

"All right, now I get it," she said. "And of course I won't tell anyone. So we can skip the debriefing part, okay?"

"Not okay. I'd lose my job."

Nora grimaced. "You really are by the book, aren't you?"

"Pretty much. That's the way it's got to be. Next time you go on a nature walk-don't go. Most of this island's unexcavated. There's quicksand, sinkholes, all kinds of trouble. Please. Stick to the safe areas. And I couldn't repeat it enough: Don't tell Annabelle or Loren about the RTG. And once you're back on the mainland, don't tell anyone else. Ever. The military's really paranoid about this stuff. You'll have your phones tapped, your mail swiped, all your data sucked out of your computers, oh, and the IRS. And all because you know about a little piece of radioactive material that's smaller than a BB."

Nora looked bug-eyed at him. "Lieutenant, trust me, I'll sew my mouth shut."

"Good, 'cause this is no joke."

Damn. The riot act, Nora thought. Can I help it I decided to go for a friggin' walk? There were better ways to start a day.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Trent said next, the sour topic finally closed. "Remember when you mentioned you found something like a tiny camera in the woods?"

"Yeah, it was stuck into a tree, almost like a nail."

"I found one too, last night. I'll show it to you later. It's in my tent somewhere."

.You said it might be an electric eye, right?"

"Yeah, and I still think that's what the things are."

Old electric eyes from an old missile installation, she thought. What could be duller? But the RTG? That and last night's surprise discovery: the tiny pink worms and ova that seemed to grow at an extraordinary rate. She'd love to get a look at one of the worms under a lab-grade microscope. The ones we found in the lobster were too small for these little field scopes.

At least it would give her something to do while Annabelle and Loren continued to search for more scarlet bristleworms.

She was just then reminded of something that had slipped her mind. "Damn, I forgot. You left the lights on in the last two head shacks."

He looked at her funny. "You mean the one you and Loren are using?"

"No, the buildings on the other end. I saw light leaking out from the roofs the other night." She chuckled to herself when she realized how little it mattered now. "On the other hand, I guess the army's not worried about wasting electricity. The power from the RTG is unlimited and free."

"That's true, but there still shouldn't be any lights on. In fact, no one could have turned them on. I only have the key for the head shack you're using. The other head shacks are locked up and I couldn't get in them if I wanted to. The rest of the keys are back at my post's property room. I better check it out anyway. I can't see the army sending anyone else out here, not without me knowing. I'm the only one who ever checks this island."

"The only one that you know of,' Nora posed.

"Well, yeah, but it wouldn't make sense. As far as the army's concerned, this is dead property."

Not quite, Nora elected not to say. Not with a nuclear battery buried in the ground.

In an instant, Trent's eyes lit up as he looked past Nora. "There she is," he announced. "You're up early."

"So are you," Annabelle replied. Wrapped only in a towel, she frowned at Nora. "What are you two doing sitting there?"

Discussing the mini nuclear reactor that's hidden in the woods, Nora thought. Why don't you go sit on it for a few days?

"Nora was just telling me about scarlet bristleworms," Trent lied. "They're remarkable creatures."

"Um-hmm. Remarkable." Annabelle strode for the field shower. "If you're that interested, you could snorkel with Loren and me later, when Igo out to do the rest of the shoot."

"I just might do that," Trent said.