Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

The voice of the booger-hooking, comic-book-reading deputy clanged back in dolorous answer: Shot your wife, uh? Good fucking deal.

“Are you planning to have children?” he asked her gently. “If so, I would hope for your sake that you and your husband really are located a safe distance from the plant… they keep goofing, you know. Like at Three-Mile Island. Not long before they opened the sucker, someone discovered the plumbers had somehow hooked up a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. In fact, they found out about a week before the place went on line. You like it?”

She was crying.

She was crying, but he couldn't stop.

The guys investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was a generally inadvisable practice. If your hubby here invites you to take the company tour, I'd do the same thing they tell you to do in Mexico: don't drink the water. And it your hubby invites you after you're pregnant-or after you even think you might be-tell him…” Gardener smiled, first at her, then at Ted. “Tell him you've got a headache,” he said.

“Shut up,” Ted said. His wife had begun to moan,

“That's right,” Arberg said. “I really do think it's time for you to shut up, Mr Gardener.”

Gard looked at them, then at the rest of the partygoers, who were staring at the tableau by the buffet, wide-eyed and silent, the young bartender among them.

“Shut up!” Gardener yelled. Pain drove a gleaming chrome spike into the left side of his head. “Yeah! Shut up and let the goddam house burn! You can bet these fucking slum-lords will be around to collect the fire-insurance later on, after the ashes cool and they rake out what's left of the bodies! Shut up! That's what all these guys want us to do! And if you don't shut up on your own, maybe you get shut up, like Karen Silkwood-”

“Quit it, Gardener,” Patricia McCardle hissed. There were no sibilants in the words she spoke, making a hiss an impossibility, but she hissed just the same.

He bent toward Ted's wife, whose sallow cheeks were now wet with tears. “Also, you might cheek the IDS rates-infant-death syndrome, that is. They go way up in plant areas. Birth defects, such as Down's Syndrome-mongoloidism, in other words-and blindness, and…

“I want you to get out of my house,” Arberg said.

“You've got potato chips on your chin,” Gardener said, and turned back to Mr and Mrs Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from deeper and deeper inside him. It was like listening to a voice coming out of a well. Everything going critical. Red lines showing up all over the control panel.

“Ted here can lie about how vastly overrated it all was, nothing but a little fire and a lot of headline fodder, and all of you can even believe him… but the fact is, what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released more radioactive waste into the atmosphere of this planet than all the A-bombs set off aboveground since Trinity.

“Chernobyl's hot.

“It's going to stay that way for a long time. How long? No one really knows, do they, Ted?”

He tipped his glass toward Ted and then looked around at the partygoers, all of them now standing silent and watching him, many looking just as dismayed as Mrs Ted.

“And it'll happen again. Maybe in Washington State. They were storing core rods in unlined ditches at the Hanford reactors just like they were at Kyshtym. California the next time there's a big quake? France? Poland? Or maybe right here in Massachusetts, if this fellow here has his way and the Iroquois plant goes on-line in the spring. Just let one guy pull the wrong switch at the wrong time, and the next time the Red Sox open at Fenway will be around 2075.”

Patricia McCardle was as white as a wax candle… except for her eyes, which were spitting blue sparks that looked freshly dropped from an arcwelder. Arberg had gone the other route: he was as red and dark as the bricks of his fine-old-family Back Bay home. Mrs Ted was looking from Gardener to her husband and back again as if they were a pair of dogs that might bite. Ted saw the look; felt her trying to back out of his encircling, imprisoning arm. Gardener supposed it was her reaction to what he had been saying which provoked the final escalation. Ted had doubtless been instructed about how to handle hysterics like Gardener; the company taught their Teds to do that as routinely as the airlines taught stewardesses how to demonstrate the emergency oxygen system of the jets in which they flew.

But it was late, Gardener's drunken but eloquent rebuttal had blown up like a pocket thunderstorm… and now his wife was acting as though he might be the Butcher of Riga.

“God, I get tired of you guys and your simpering! There you were tonight, reading your incoherent poems into a microphone that runs on electricity, having your braying voice amplified by speakers that run on electricity, using electric lights to see by… where do you Luddites think that power comes from? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus!”

“It's late,” McCardle said hurriedly, “and we all

“Leukemia,” Gardener said, speaking directly to Ted's wide-eyed wife with dreadful confidentiality. “The children. The children are always the ones to go first after a meltdown. One good thing: if we lose Iroquois, it'll keep the Jimmy Fund busy.”

“Ted?” she whimpered. “He's wrong, isn't he? I mean-” She was fumbling for a handkerchief or tissue in her purse and dropped it. There was the brittle sound of something breaking inside.

“Stop it,” Ted said to Gardener. “We'll talk about it if you want, but stop deliberately upsetting my wife.”

“I want her to be upset.” Gardener said. He had embraced the darkness completely now. He belonged to it and it belonged to him and that was just fine. “There's so much she doesn't seem to know. Stuff she ought to know. Considering who she's married to, and all.”

He turned the beautiful, wild grin on her. She looked into it without flinching this time, mesmerized like a doe in a pair of oncoming headlights.

“Used core rods, now. Do you know where they go when they're no more good in the pile? Did he tell you that the Core Rod Fairy takes them? Not true. The power folks sort of squirrel them away. There are great big hot piles of core rods here. there, and everywhere, sitting in nasty pools of shallow water. They're really hot, ma'am. And they're going to stay that way for a long time.”

“Gardener, I want you out,” Arberg said again.

Ignoring him, Gardener went on, speaking to Mrs Ted and Mrs Ted only: “They're already losing track of some of those piles of used rods, did you know that? Like little kids who play all day and go to bed tired and wake up the next day and can't remember where they left their toys. And then there's the stuff that just goes poof. The ultimate Mad Bomber stuff. Enough plutonium has already disappeared to blow up the eastern seaboard of the United States. But I've got to have a mike to read my incoherent poems into. God forbid I should have to raise my v

Arberg grabbed him suddenly. The man was big and flabby but quite powerful. Gardener's shirt pulled out of his pants. His glass tumbled out of his fingers and shattered on the floor. In a rolling, carrying voice-a voice which maybe only an indignant teacher who has spent many years in lecture halls could muster-Arberg announced to everyone present: “I'm throwing this bum out.”

This declaration was greeted by spontaneous applause. Not everyone in the room applauded-maybe not even half of them did. But the power guy's wife was crying hard now, pressing against her husband, no longer trying to get away; until Arberg grabbed him, Gardener had been hulking over her, seeming to menace her.