Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

translation, and they all agree. it sounds like a bad ethnic joke. Imagine yourself driving along an American thruway-I-95 or I-70, maybe-and coming up on a sign that says PLEASE CLOSE ALL WINDOWS, TURN OFF ALL VENTILATION ACCESSORIES, AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOUR CAR WILL GO FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MILES.”

“Builshit!” Ted the Power Man said loudly.

“Photographs available under the Freedom of Information Act,” Gard said.,If this guy was only lying, maybe I could live with it. But he and the rest of the people like him are doing something worse. They're like salesmen telling the public +that cigarettes not only don't cause lung cancer, they're full of vitamin C and keep you from having colds.”

“Are you implying-”

“Thirty-two at Chernobyl we can verify. Hell, maybe it is only thirty-two. We've got photos taken by American doctors which suggest there must be well over two hundred already, but say thirty-two. It doesn't change what we've learned about high-rad exposure. The deaths don't all come at once. That's what's so deceiving. The deaths come in three waves. First, the people who get fried in the accident. Second, the leukemia victims, mostly kids. Third, the most lethal wave: cancer in adults forty and over. So much cancer you might as well go on and call it a plague. Bone cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and melanoma-skin cancer, in other words-are the most common. But you also got your intestinal cancer, your bladder cancer, your brain tumors, your-”

“Stop, can't you please stop?” Ted's wife cried. Hysteria lent her voice a surprising power.

“I would if I could, dear,” he said gently. “I can't. In 1964 the AEC commissioned a study on a worst-case scenario if an American reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl blew. The results were so scary the AEC buried the report. It suggested-”

“Shut up, Gardener,” Patty said loudly. “You're drunk.”

He ignored her, fixing his eyes on the power-man's wife. “It suggested that such an accident in a relatively rural area of the USA-the one they picked was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three-Mile Island is, by the way-would kill 45,000 folks, rad seventy per cent of the state and do seventeen million dollars” worth of damage.”

“Holy fuck!” someone cried. “Are you shitting?”

“Nope,” Gardener said, never taking his eyes from the woman, who now seemed hypnotized with terror. “If you multiply by five, you get 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars” worth of damage.” He refilled his glass nonchalantly in the silent grave of the room, tipped it at Arberg, and drank two mouthfuls of straight vodka. Uncontaminated vodka, one hoped. “So!” he finished. “We're talking almost a quarter of a million people dead by the time the third wave dissipates, around 2040.” He winked at Ted the Power Man, whose lips had pulled back from his teeth. “Be hard to get that many people even on a 767, wouldn't it?”

“Those figures came directly out of your butt,” Ted the Power Man said angrily.

“Ted-” the man's wife said nervously. She had gone dead pale except for tiny spots of red burning high up on her cheekbones.

“You expect me to stand here and listen to that… that party-line rhetoric?” he asked, approaching Gardener until they were almost chest to chest. “Do you?”

“At Chernobyl they killed the kids,” Gardener said. “Don't you understand that? The ones ten years old, the ones in utero. Most may still be alive, but they are dying right now while we stand here with our drinks in our hands. Some can't even read yet. Most will never kiss a girl in passion. Right now while we're standing here with our drinks in our hands.

“They killed their children.”

He looked at Ted's wife, and now his voice began to shake and to rise slightly, as if in a plea.

“We know from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, from our own tests at Trinity and on Bikini. They killed their own children, do you dig what I'm saying? There are nine-year-olds in Pripyat who are going to die shitting out their own intestines! They killed the children!”

Ted's wife took a step back, eyes wide behind her glasses, mouth twitching.

“We'll acknowledge that Mr Gardener is a fine poet, I think,” Ted the Power Man said, putting an arm around his wife and pulling her to his side again. It was like watching a cowboy rope a calf. “He's not very well-informed about nuclear power, however. We really have no idea what may or may not have happened at Kyshtym, and the Russian figures on the Chernobyl casualties are-”

“Cut the shit,” Gardener said. “You know what I'm talking about. Bay State Electric has got all this stuff in its files, along with the elevated cancer rates in the areas surrounding American nuclear-power facilities, the water contaminated by nuclear waste-the water in deep aquifers, the water people wash their clothes and their dishes and themselves in, the water they drink. You know. You and every other private, municipal, state, and federal company in America.”

“Stop it, Gardener,” McCardle warned, stepping forward. She flashed an overbrilliant smile around the group. “He's a little

“Ted, did you know?” Ted's wife asked suddenly.

“Sure, I've got some stats, but-”

He broke off. His jaw snapped shut so hard you could almost hear it. It wasn't much… but it was enough. Suddenly they knew-all of them-that he had omitted a good deal of scripture from his sermon. Gardener felt a moment of sour, unexpected triumph.

There was a moment of awkward silence and then, quite deliberately, Ted's wife stepped away from him. He flushed. To Gard he looked like a man who has just whanged his thumb with a hammer.

“Oh, we have all kinds of reports,” he said. “Most are nothing but a tissue

of lies-Russian propaganda. People like this idiot are more than happy to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. For all we know, Chernobyl may have been no accident at all, but an effort to keep us from-”

“Jesus, next you'll be telling us the earth is flat,” Gardener said. “Did you see the photographs of the Army guys in radiation suits walking around a power plant half an hour's drive from Harrisburg? Do you know how they tried to plug one of the leaks there? They stuffed a basketball wrapped with friction-tape into a busted waste-pipe. It worked for a while, then the pressure spit it out and busted a hole right through the containment wall.”

“You spout some pretty goddam good propaganda.” Ted grinned savagely. “The Russians love people like you! Do they pay you, or do you do it for free?”

“Who sounds like an airport Moonie now?” Gardener asked, laughing a little. He took a step closer to Ted. “Nuclear reactors are better built than Jane Fonda, right?”

“As far as I'm concerned, that's about the size of it, yes.”

“Please,” the dean's wife said, distressed. “We may discuss, but let's not shout, please-after all, we're college people-”

“Somebody better fucking shout about it!” Gardener shouted. She recoiled, blinking, and her husband stared at Gardener with eyes as bright as chips of ice. Stared as if he were marking Gard forever. Gard supposed he was. “Would you shout if your house was on fire and you were the only one in your family to wake up in the middle of the night and realize what was happening? Or just kinda tiptoe around and whisper, on account of you're a college person?”

“I just believe this has gone far en-”

Gardener dismissed her, turned to Mr Bay State Electric, and winked at him confidentially. “Tell me, Ted, how close is your house located to this nifty new nuclear facility you guys are building?”

“I don't have to stand here and-”

“Not too close, uh? That's what I thought.” He looked at Mrs Ted. She shrank away from him, clutching at her husband's arm. Gard thought, What is it that she sees to make her shrink away from me like that? What, exactly?