“Colonel Edwards suggested that Jack shed you like an old coat,” McFeyffe said.
Dazed, shaken, Marsha sat stiffly clutching her gloves and purse. “Would you do that?” she asked her husband.
“No,” Hamilton answered. “Not even if you were a pervert, a Communist, and an alcoholic put together.”
“You hear that?” Marsha said to McFeyffe.
“I hear.”
“What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re both swell people. I think Jack would be a sonofabitch to do otherwise.” McFeyffe finished; “I told Colonel Edwards that”
“One of you two,” Hamilton said, “shouldn’t be here. One of you should get kicked out the door. I ought to flip a coin.”
Stricken, Marsha gazed up at him, brown eyes swimming, fingers plucking aimlessly at her gloves. “Can’t you see?” she whispered. “This is a terrible thing. It’s a conspiracy against you and me. Against all of us.”
“I feel sort of lousy, myself,” McFeyffe acknowledged. Turning the Plymouth off the state road, he guided it past the check-station and into the Bevatron grounds. The cop at the entrance saluted and waved; McFeyffe waved back. “After all, you’re friends of mine … my duty comes along and pushes me into drawing up reports on my friends. Listing derogatory material, investigating gossip—you think I enjoy it?”
“Take your dut—” Hamilton began, but Marsha cut him off.
“He’s right; it’s not his fault. We’re all in this together, all three of us.”
The car came to a halt before the main entrance. McFeyffe shut off the engine, and the three of them got out and listlessly moved up the wide concrete steps.
A handful of technicians were visible, and Hamilton looked back at them, at the group of them assembled on the steps. Well-dressed young men with crew cuts, bow ties, chatting affably together. With them was the usual trickle of sightseers, who, having been cleared at the gate, were on their way inside to enjoy the sight of the Bevatron in action. But it was the technicians who interested Hamilton; he was thinking to himself, There I am.
Or, he thought, there I’ve been up until now.
I’ll meet you in a minute,” Marsha said faintly, dabbing at her tear-streaked eyes. “Tm going to the powder room and put myself back together.”
“Okay,” he murmured, still deep in thought. She trotted off, and Hamilton and McFeyffe stood facing each other in the echoing corridor of the Bevatron building.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Hamilton said. Ten years was a long time, long enough in any kind of job. And where had he been going? It was a good question.
“You got a good right to be sore,” McFeyffe said.
Hamilton said, “You mean well.” He walked off by himself and stood with his hands in his pockets.
Of course he was sore. And he would be sore until he had settled the loyalty business one way or another. But it was not that; it was the jolt to his system, the jolt to his manner of life, to his whole range of habits. To the various things he believed in and took for granted. McFeyffe had cut all the way through to his deepest level of existence; to his marriage, and the woman who meant more to him than anyone else in the world.
More to him, he realized, than anyone or anything. More to him than his job. His own loyalty was to her, and that was a strange thing to realize. It was not really the loyalty business that bothered him; it was the idea that he and Marsha were cut off from each other, separated by what had happened.
“Yes,” he said to McFeyffe. “I’m sore as hell.”
“You can get another job. With your experience—”
“My wife,” Hamilton said. “I’m talking about her. You think I’ll have a chance to get back at you? I’d like one.” But, he thought, it sounded childish when he said it “You’re sick,” he said to McFeyffe, going on anyhow, partly because he wanted to get it said and partly because he did not know what else to do. “You’re destroying innocent people. Paranoiac delusions—”
“Knock it off,” McFeyffe said tightly. “You’ve had your chance, Jack. Years of it. Too many years.”
While Hamilton was framing his retort, Marsha reappeared. “They’re letting in a group of regular sightseers. The big shots have already had their look.” She was a little more composed, now. “That thing—that new deflector—is supposed to be in operation.”
Reluctantly, Hamilton turned away from the heavy-set security policeman. “Let’s go, then.”
McFeyffe followed along. This should be interesting,” he said to nobody in particular.
That’s right,” Hamilton said distantly, aware that he was trembling. Taking a deep breath he entered the elevator after Marsha and turned automatically to face the front. McFeyffe did the same; as the elevator ascended, Hamilton was treated to the sight of the man’s fiery red neck. McFeyffe, too, was upset
On the second floor they found a young Negro, with a broad arm band on his sleeve, assembling a group of sightseers. They joined the group. Behind them, other visitors waited patiently for their turn. It was three-fifty; the Wilcox Jones Deflection System had already been brought into focus and activated.
“Here we are, now,” the young Negro guide was saying, in a thin, experienced voice, as he led them from the hall toward the observation platform. “We want to move quickly so others will have their chance. As you know, the Belmont Bevatron was constructed by the Atomic Energy Commission for the purpose of advanced research into cosmic ray phenomena artificially generated within controlled conditions. The central element of the Bevatron is the giant magnet whose field accelerates the beam of protons and provides them with increasing ionization. The positively charged protons are introduced into the linear chamber from the Cockroft-Walton acceleration tube.”
According to their dispositions, the sightseers smiled vaguely or ignored him. One tall, slim, stern, elderly gentleman stood like a hardwood pole, arms folded, radiating detached contempt for science in general. A soldier, Hamilton observed: the man wore a tarnished wedge of metal on his cotton jacket. The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns.
“Is there a pamphlet?” a plump, expensively dressed middle-aged mother was inquiring softly, but penetratingly. “We would like something we can read and take home, please. For school use.”
“How many volts down there?” her boy shouted at the guide. “Is it over a billion volts?”
“Slightly over six billion,” the Negro explained patiently, “is the electron volt push the protons will have received before they are deflected from their orbit and out of the circular chamber. Each time the beam makes a revolution, its charge and velocity are increased.”
“How fast do they go?” a slender, competent woman in her early thirties asked. She wore severe glasses and a rough-woven, businesslike suit.
“At slightly under the velocity of light”
“How many times do they circle the chamber?”
“Four million times,” the guide answered. Their astronomical distance is three hundred thousand miles. That distance is covered in 1.85 seconds.”
“Incredible,” the expensively dressed mother gushed, in an awed, fatuous voice.
“When the protons leave the linear accelerator,” the guide continued, “they have an energy of ten million volts, or, as we say, ten Mev. The next problem is to guide them into a circular orbit in exactly the right position and at exactly the right angle, so they can be picked up by the field of the big magnet”
“Can’t the magnet do that?” the boy demanded.
“No, I’m afraid not. An inflector is utilized for this. Highly charged protons very easily leave a given path and wander in all directions. A complicated system of frequency modulation is required to keep them from entering a widening spiral. And, once the beam has attained its required charge, the fundamental problem of gettin
g it out of the circular chamber remains.”
Pointing down, below the railing of the platform, the guide indicated the magnet that lay beneath them. The magnet, vast and imposing, roughly resembled a doughnut. It hummed mightily.
“The accelerating chamber is inside the magnet. It is four hundred feet in length. You can’t see it from here, I’m afraid.”
I wonder,” the white-haired war veteran reflected, “whether the builders of this spectacular machine realize that one of God’s ordinary hurricanes far exceeds the total of all man-made power, this and all other machines included?”
“I’m sure they realize it,” the severe young woman told him archly. “They could probably tell you to a footpound what the power of a hurricane is.”
The veteran surveyed her with aloof dignity. “Are you a scientist, madame?” he inquired mildly. The guide had now induced most of his party out onto the platform. “After you,” McFeyffe said to Hamilton, stepping aside. Marsha moved blankly forward, and her husband followed. McFeyffe, drably pretending interest in the informational charts plastered on the wall overlooking the platform, brought up the rear.
Taking hold of his wife’s hand, Hamilton squeezed hard and said in her ear, “You think I’d renounce you? We’re not living in Nazi Germany.”
“Not yet,” Marsha said despondently. She was still pale and subdued; she had wiped off most of her makeup, and her lips were thin and bloodless. “Darling, when I think of those men getting you in there and confronting you with me and my activities, as if I was some sort of a—as if I was a prostitute or something, or maybe having secret relations with horses … I could just kill them. And Charley—I thought he was our friend. I though we could count on him. How many times has he been over to dinner?”
“We’re not living in Arabia, either,” Hamilton reminded her. “Just because we feed him doesn’t mean he’s a blood brother.”
“That’s the last time I ever bake a lemon meringue pie. And everything else he likes. Him and his orange garters. Promise me you’ll never wear garters.”
“Elastic socks and nothing else.” Pulling her close to him, he told her: “Let’s push the bastard into the magnet”
“You think it’d digest him?” Wanly, Marsha smiled a little. “Probably it would spit him back out. Too indigestible.”
Behind them, the mother and her boy loitered. McFeyffe was trailing far behind, hands stuck in his pockets, beefy face sagging with dejection.
“He doesn’t look very happy,” Marsha observed. “In a way, I feel sorry for him. It’s not his fault”
“Whose fault is it?” Lightly, as if he were making a joke, Hamilton asked, “The bloodsucking, capitalistic beasts of Wall Street?”
“That’s a funny way of putting it,” Marsha said, troubled. “I never heard you use words like that” Suddenly she clutched at him. “You don’t really think there—” Breaking off, she jerked violently away from him. “You do. You think maybe it’s true.”
“Maybe what’s true? That you used to belong to the Progressive Party? I used to drive you to meetings in my Chevvy coupe, remember? I’ve known that for ten years.”
“Not that. Not what I did. What it means—what they say it means. You do think so, don’t you?”
“Well,” he said awkwardly, “you don’t have a shortwave transmitter down in the basement. None that I’ve noticed, at least.”
“Have you looked?” Her voice was cold and accusing. “Maybe I have; don’t be so sure. Maybe I’m here to sabotage this Bevatron, or whatever the hell it is.”
“Keep your voice down,” Hamilton said warningly.
“Don’t give me orders.” Furious, wretched, she backed away from him directly into the thin, stern old soldier.
“Be careful, young lady,” the soldier warned her, firmly guiding her from the railing. “You don’t want to fall overboard.”
“The greatest problem in construction,” the guide was saying, “lay in the deflection unit used to bring the proton beam out of the circular chamber and into impact with its target Several methods have been employed. Originally, the oscillator was turned off at a critical moment; this allowed the protons to spiral outward. But such deflection was too imperfect.”
“Isn’t it true,” Hamilton said harshly, “that up in the old Berkeley cyclotron a beam got completely away, one day?”
The guide eyed him with interest. “That’s what they say, yes.”
“I heard it burned through an office. That you can still see the scorch marks. And at night, when the lights are off, the radiation is still visible.”
“It’s supposed to hang around in a blue cloud,” the guide agreed. “Are you a physicist, mister?”
“An electronics man,” Hamilton informed him. “I’m interested in the Deflector; I know Leo Wilcox very slightly.”
“This is Leo’s big day,” the guide observed. They’ve just put his unit to work down there.”
“Which is it?” Hamilton asked.
Pointing down, the guide indicated a complicated apparatus at one side of the magnet. A series of shielded slabs supported a thick pipe of dark gray, over which an intricate series of liquid-filled tubes was mounted. “That’s your friend’s work. He’s around somewhere, watching.”
“How does it seem to be?”
“They can’t tell yet”
Behind Hamilton, Marsha had retreated to the rear of the platform. He followed after her. “Try to act like an adult,” he said in a low, angry whisper. “As long as we’re here, I want to see what’s going on.”
“You and your science. Wires and tubes—this stuff is more important to you than my life.”
“I came here to see this and I’m going to. Don’t spoil it for me; don’t make a scene.”
“You’re the one who’s making a scene.”
“Haven’t you done enough harm already?” Moodily turning his back to her, Hamilton pushed past the competent business woman, past McFeyffe, to the ramp that led from the observation platform back into the hallway. He was fumbling in his pockets for his pack of cigarettes when the first ominous wail of the emergency sirens shrieked up above the quiet hum of the magnet.
“Back!” the guide shouted, his lean, dark arms raised and flailing. “The radiation screen—”
A furious buzzing roar burst over the platform. Clouds of incandescent particles flamed up, exploded, and rained down on the terrified people. The ugly stench of burning stung their noses; wildly, they struggled and shoved toward the rear of the platform.
A crack appeared. A metal strut, burned through by the play of hard radiation, melted, sagged, and gave way. The middle-aged mother opened her mouth and screeched loudly and piercingly. In a frenzied scramble, McFeyffe struggled to get away from the corroded platform and the blinding display of hard radiation that sizzled everywhere. He collided with Hamilton; shoving the panic-stricken cop aside, Hamilton jumped past him and reached desperately for Marsha.
His own clothes were on fire. Around him, flaming people struggled and fought to clamber off, as slowly, ponderously, the platform spilled forward, hung for an instant, and then dissolved.
All over the Bevatron building, automatic warning bells squealed. Human and mechanical screams of terror mixed together in a cacophony of noise. The floor under Hamilton majestically collapsed. Ceasing to be solid, the steel and concrete and plastic and wiring became random particles. Instinctively, he threw up his hands; he was tumbling face-forward into the vague blur of machinery below. A sickening whoosh as the air rushed from his lungs; plaster rained down on him, scorched particles of ash that flickered and seared. Then, briefly, he was ripping through the tangled metal mesh that protected the magnet. The shriek of tearing material and the furious presence of hard radiation sweeping over him …
He struck violently. Pain became visible: a luminous ingot that grew soft and absorbing, like radioactive steel-wool. It undulated, expanded, and quietly absorbed him. He was, in his agony, a spot of moist organic matter, being sound
lessly sopped up by the unlimited sheet of dense metallic fiber.
Then, even that ebbed out. Conscious of the grotesque brokenness of his body, he lay in an inert heap, trying aimlessly, reflexively, to get up. And realizing at the same time, that there would be no getting up for any of them. Not for a while.
III
in the darkness, something stirred.
For a long time he lay listening. Eyes shut, body limp, he refrained from motion, and became, as much as possible, a single giant ear. The sound was a rhythmic tap-tap, as if something had gotten into the darkness and was blindly feeling around. For an endless time he as giant ear examined it, and then he as giant brain realized foolishly that it was a Venetian bund tapping against a window, and that he was in a hospital ward.
As ordinary eye, optic nerve, and human brain, he perceived the dim shape of his wife, wavering and receding, a few feet from the bed. Thankfulness enveloped him. Marsha hadn’t been incinerated by the hard radiation; thank God for that. A mute prayer of thanks clouded his brain; he relaxed and enjoyed the sheer joy of it
“He’s coming around,” a doctor’s deep, authoritative voice observed.
I guess so.” Marsha was talking. Her voice seemed to come from a considerable distance. “When will we be sure?”
I’m fine,” Hamilton managed gruffly. Instantly, the shape detached itself and fluttered over. “Darting,” Marsha was gasping, tugging and pressing at him fondly. “Nobody was killed—everybody’s all right. Even you.” Like a great moon, she beamed ecstatically down at him. “McFeyffe sprained his ankle, but it’ll mend. They think that boy has a brain concussion.” “What about you?” Hamilton asked weakly. “I’m fine, too.” She displayed herself, turning so he could see all of her. Instead of her chic little coat and dress, she had on a plain white hospital smock. “The radiation singed away most of my clothes—they gave me this.” Embarrassed, she patted her brown hair. “And look —this is shorter. I clipped off the burned part. It’ll grow back.”