Fallout!: A Novel

Chapter 1

In the extravagant leather-bound diary he had bought before leaving New Mexico, Kudirka wrote hurriedly in mathematically straight lines of small, precise script, as if he might not have time to get it all down:

11 August 1954, 0500—Aboard the U.S.S. Farrell anchored off Peliea Island. We are standing here on the top deck—the physicists and chemists and electronics people from Los Alamos and, of course, the Navy personnel who transported us to this vast and mostly uninhabited part of the South Pacific—looking like some contingent of Martians in our thick dark goggles. The Director keeps reminding us about the ultraviolet and infrared radiations, as if we were children. And perhaps, in some ways, we are. Though this is my first atomic test shot, it is not the first for many here, yet we all seem tremendously excited and even anxious, as if perhaps someone has miscalculated the effective yield and this ship should be anchored not 7 but 12, or 50, or some undetermined number of nautical miles farther away from the dark tower at the western end of the island. Nature rears its head; I have an overpowering need to pass water, yet I dare not leave the railing for so much as a second, for fear I will miss some minute aspect of the shot. I am thankful to have been asked to come along, yet this, too, I fear is a mistake—some not unusual mix-up in the personnel office. My feelings at this moment are unexplainable, a blending of elation and childish anticipation mixed with something darker, a worrisome nagging deep in my being that the event itself—supported by all this technological sorcery—is utterly wrong and wasteful and somehow demeaning to the human spirit. I feel almost disloyal as I write these words, disloyal to the ideals of my adopted country and the many advantages it has offered me, but still I cannot escape my unscientific emotions.

Well, Andres, any minute now, eh? one of the technicians standing close by the huge automatic cameras said to him. What is that, a diary? The Director doesn’t like us writing down unofficial things, you know. I suppose he worries about security—but then I suppose I would, too, if I were him.

Do not concern yourself, Alex, I am no spy, Kudirka said, the inflections of Eastern Europe still easily detectable in his speech. Nevertheless, he put away his pencil and slipped the diary into the pocket of his light jacket. Let me borrow your binoculars a moment, will you?

The technician handed over the glasses and Kudirka held them to his eyes, surveying the western tip of the island. There was just now beginning to be enough light to make out the shape of the two-hundred-foot tower—spindly metal legs, on the top end of which sat a jury-rigged ten-foot-square shed with corrugated iron sides and roof and an iron-grating floor. Not a thing of beauty, but it didn’t have to be; the only necessity was that it be high enough off the ground to minimize the tendency of the fireball to suck up tons of highly radioactive debris. Various pipes snaked from the bottom of the shed toward instruments that would measure the radiation intensity only milliseconds before the instruments themselves would be vaporized. A simple tower, and because of the electronic communication with the control panels and switches on the ship riding offshore, there were no dangling wires, no visible equipment, really, of any kind. But inside the shed, resting heavily on the iron grating, a wired cylinder waited like an unhatched egg for the proper time to release its unimaginable energy to the atmosphere. Kudirka had seen it there, had been involved in its connections, had in fact had much to do with its very design and construction over many months at the New Mexico laboratories. In a little while this metal child of his brain would give itself up to one voluptuous moment of excess, and then would exist no more.

Kudirka breathed heavily as he swept the glasses over the purplish shapes of the island’s trees and rocks and sandy beaches. People had lived here once, had maintained their homes and families and lived out their simple lives on those sandy beaches. Had lived here, some of them, as recently as three days ago, when the last of the holdouts had been forcibly removed to another chain of islands some seventy-five miles to the southwest. Which was worth more, Kudirka wondered, to the orderly continuation of human civilization—the thatched-roof huts and monotonous lives of the simple people who had lived on Peliea, or the hard scientific facts that would shortly be recorded on marvelously sophisticated instruments, the functions of which those transplanted islanders could not even begin to imagine? Which, indeed?

Beside him, the camera technician Alex cursed and slammed his fist against an electronic box covered with switches and lights. I’m not getting any juice to number-two sequencer! he shouted to someone farther up the deck. Jesus Mother of God! If that little pecker doesn’t light up in the next thirty seconds we’ll have to scrub the shot.

He was joined immediately by two other technicians, who hovered over the control box, clicking switches and alternately cursing and praying as they probed the circuits. A light no larger than a flashlight bulb eventually flickered and apparently decided to stay on. No sweat, one of the technicians announced, the sequencer was okay, it was just a faulty connector.

As Kudirka continued his vigil through the binoculars, a brilliant green flare released over the shot tower momentarily blinded him. A great cry went up from everyone on the ship as the loudspeakers crackled into action: Five-minute warning … five-minute warning. He returned the binoculars to Alex, who was now making a last-minute check of the battery of giant cameras aimed toward the island. A tall man in the uniform of a Navy lieutenant commander stopped by and rested his hand briefly on Kudirka’s shoulder. Exciting, isn’t it? he said. I hope your shot goes well, Mr. Kudirka.

Kudirka smiled. I thought it might be rather like the old joke about sex.

The officer frowned. I don’t believe I follow you.

You know—that all shots are good, but some are better than others.

The officer chuckled pleasantly and wandered off toward another group of men hugging the railing. Kudirka glanced at his watch and stared across the patch of water now glowing dully with the first gray-orange indications of sunrise. He’s right, this is exciting, Alex said to him. I wish my boy could be here to see this—he dreams of becoming an engineer someday. ‘Just keep up the math grades,’ I tell him. What about you, Andres—do you have any kids who want to be engineers so they can rule the world?

No, Kudirka said. I am still a bachelor, and it looks as if I may remain one all my life.

Oh, you’re still a young man—some fine girl will get you yet, wait and see.

But I am no longer young, not really, Kudirka said, thinking, Is thirty years of age old? Sometimes he felt ancient, sometimes he thought he must have been old at birth. And yet someone had mentioned to him that he was the youngest member of the task force from Los Alamos on the ship.

A flicker of light from the island caught his eye and then the one-minute red flare burst over the shot tower. Minus one minute … minus fifty-five seconds … the ship’s loudspeaker droned. Kudirka moved along the railing to a point where he could watch the shot controller at his panel of lights and switches and meters. At minus forty-five seconds the controller activated the automatic timer that Kudirka knew would rapidly and precisely trigger the circuits on the device atop the tower. At minus thirty seconds a tiny light on a voltmeter winked on, indicating that the firing unit was now fully energized.

Minus twenty seconds … minus fifteen seconds … minus ten seconds … The noisy, chattering crowd of scientists and military people whose duties were not directly involved with the firing had by now hushed to the point that Kudirka could hear his own breathing. At minus five seconds the huge automatic sequencing cameras began clicking off shots at the rate of ten thousand every second, recording each separate micro-event of the shot for future study. During the next few seconds Kudirka stared across the water at the island and weighed all the old arguments about whether or not they had any right to be doing what they were doing. He reached no conclusion.

ZERO! the loudspeaker boomed. In a purely reflex action Kudirka’s knuckles curled around the cold railing of the ship until both hands were white as shrouds.

An incredible intensity of light was the bomb’s first impact on Kudirka. In a moment there would be waves and waves of searing heat, followed seconds after by thunderous, tangible sound. But at first there was only the light, like the beginning or the ending of the world. …

It began with no more than a brilliant pinpoint that suddenly burst in all directions and poured laterally into a rolling sheet of God’s own fire, turning everything visible into a bleached panorama of unbelievable whiteness—the island, the ship, the men clustered no more than a few feet away. Kudirka’s brain, like some crazed computer, regurgitated bare facts: temperature at ground zero four times the temperature at the center of the sun, the shot itself equivalent to one hundred thousand tons of TNT.

Initially centered on the flimsy shed suspended two hundred feet above the island, the fireball assumed the shape of a bell as it hurtled downward toward the ground, the edges flattening out and beginning to pick up great quantities of molten earth. Simultaneously, those on the ship were assaulted by the thunder of the mountainous shock wave that came rolling at them across the now pitifully inadequate stretch of water separating the ship from the island. At the perimeter of the huge pinkish-orange fireball, Kudirka thought he could distinguish black spikes that might be parts of the vaporized shot tower. The fireball gathered into its enormous center thousands of tons of boiling sand and dirt and coral, in the process turning deep red and then ominously dark, as if perhaps its gluttony failed to satisfy it. The fireball then shot upward, bursting into new flame at odd moments and places from the incandescent gases at its core, until at forty thousand feet its top flattened and the stalk of radioactive dust trailing down toward the water gave it the look of a malignant mushroom. Surrounded by a purplish halo of ionized air, the deadly cloud began to drift south-westward, away from the ship. That had been planned carefully by batteries of meteorologists. What had not been planned was the awful roar and churning of twenty-foot waves as the entire western end of the island broke off and slid into the sea.

"My God!" one of the young sailors said.

Another scientist clapped Kudirka on the back. "Better than we’d hoped for, Andres. It’s still an incredible sight, isn’t it? This is my third. Jenkins over there was just saying that, according to his calculations, what we’ve seen this morning was caused by the fissioning of only about a gram of plutonium. Imagine—one gram!"

It is incredible, Kudirka said softly.

The Navy lieutenant commander came by again, arguing with a junior officer. "I told Dr. Wilkins, I told everybody how stubborn these natives are. Can you imagine such stupidity? From the tribal leaders on down, no one wanted to get off the island, even after we explained what would happen to them if they didn’t."

The junior officer shrugged. I suppose it’s hard for the uncivilized mind to grasp such technology.

Especially, Kudirka cut in, unable to hold back the thoughts that had been troubling him for three days, especially when they do not speak much English. Civilized or not, these people have no homes now—Peliea is off limits to them, forever.

That’s not the prognosis from our Human Factors people, and you know it, the senior officer said. In ten years or so—maybe even five—human beings and birds and animals will be able to move back to Peliea and live normal lives, as if we’d never come here today.

Kudirka stared at the man. "Would you want to live there?"

The officer snorted. That’s hardly the question, Kudirka. Both officers scornfully dismissed him as another of those lunatic scientists who were always meddling in things that didn’t concern them and about which they knew nothing at all—particularly the fine art of handling an alien people.

The camera technician was scouring the coastline of the island with his binoculars. Suddenly he put the glasses away and cocked his head, as if unable to believe his eyes, then raised the glasses again and began pointing and shouting. God-almighty, there’s somebody coming off the island! Look, I’m not crazy … two people, two women, and one of them’s carrying a baby. God-almighty … they’re just walking out into the ocean!

By now everyone who had binoculars was straining to see the impossible sight the technician had described. It was true, there were two women struggling through the boiling surf, the older one desperately clutching a form recognizable as an infant.

Get the launch going, you men! the senior officer ordered. He conferred hastily with several of the scientists and a plan was devised to send out two boats, one towing the other at the end of a hundred yards or so of rope. The scientists feared the women’s clothing and bodies might be so contaminated with radioactive ash that anyone coming close would suffer radiation poisoning. The women would be towed back to the ship in the second boat; they would somehow have to manage to get into the little boat by themselves.

The plan worked. The older of the two women, and her twenty-year-old daughter and baby son were towed out to the ship, where, after Geiger counters showed that their presence would not contaminate the task force personnel, they were hauled aboard. The baby was dead. The daughter was in shock but otherwise appeared unharmed. The mother was severely burned over most of her body and, screaming in agony, was taken to the ship’s infirmary, where she died in horrible pain later that day.

The captain of the ship and his senior officers hastily conferred and decided to take the daughter to the chain of islands where the other former natives of Peliea had been transplanted.

As I see it, we have very little choice, the captain told the Scientific Director.

I’ll admit our options are limited, the Scientific Director agreed, puffing on his pipe.

In a way it’s too bad she didn’t, ah, expire like the old woman and the child, the captain continued. The other natives are a superstitious lot. When they find out she was on Peliea when it blew and somehow lived through all that, they’ll probably stone her to death as a witch.

And if she lives she’ll talk, the Scientific Director said, and there’s always a chance word will eventually get back to the mainland about what happened to her family. A mistake like that on our record could close down our operations for years. I wonder …

Yes?

You realize I’m just thinking aloud now—noodling the X factors, as we sometimes say back at Los Alamos. Do you think your ship’s doctor could be convinced to give her a shot of something that would solve our problem permanently? Something quiet and painless, of course.

Of course, the captain said. "It’s a feasible plan, except Doc is one of those ethical old bastards you’re always reading about in Reader’s Digest. I don’t think there’s any way you could get him to do that—not even if I threatened to court-martial him."

It was Kudirka who finally solved their dilemma. He had been one of the first to help the women aboard the ship, even before the Geiger counter readings were completed. The girl was frightened out of her mind, he could see that, and he could also see immediately that there was nothing anyone could do for the baby or the older woman. He had held the girl’s trembling hand tightly in his own, and on the way down to the infirmary had used all the soothing phrases he could think of, speaking by turns in French, Lithuanian, Polish, and finally, with success, in English. After arriving at the medical facility, he stayed with her and consoled her as best he could. This pathetic situation seemed to sum up all the things about the bomb test that had made him so uneasy the entire trip. He felt a kind of personal obligation to the one survivor who might be able to use his help, and would not leave the girl alone for a minute.

When he finally came up on deck to report that she was sleeping soundly and peacefully, everyone—particularly the captain and the Director—wanted to know if she had said anything that he could understand. And Kudirka reported that she had. Her name was Mariko; her father had been Japanese, her mother Micronesian. She had not been killed by the thing that glowed like the sun because she had been hiding in a deep trench at the opposite end of the island, protected by many yards of earth. Her father, mother, and baby brother had not been so lucky—whether they had ventured out of hiding at exactly the wrong time or what, Kudirka was not sure. The girl did not want to be taken to where the other islanders had been transplanted because she feared what they would think and what they would do to her.

Kudirka patiently reported all this information, then threw in his own complication: he had promised to take her back to the mainland with him. I will assume full responsibility for my actions, he told them, seeing their incredulous expressions. But if you make trouble about this I assure you I will go straight to the press and explain to them how we Americans murder innocent islanders with our bombs.

There was a hurried consultation among his superiors and the ship’s officers. "Something of a quid pro quo might be in order here, Andres, the Director finally said in a conciliatory tone. We won’t tell if you won’t, and if you guarantee that she won’t. What I mean is, as the good doctor here has just pointed out to me, we might very well want to observe this young lady over a period of years, study the effects of the bomb on her body, et cetera, since she was inadvertently caught in this unique position. And although she survived, at least has until now, she obviously took a normally lethal dose of radiation. It would be useful to have her near at hand for this continuing study."

The Director puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. On the other side of the coin, I have a certain influence in scientific circles, as I’m sure you’re aware. It would not be at all difficult to arrange things so that you would never be offered a decent job again, anywhere, under any circumstances. If you wish to consider this blackmail, you’re probably right to do so. But another way to look at it is that we’re offering you a chance to save both your own life and that of the girl. In any case, Andres, you’re a splendid physicist and engineer and Los Alamos can ill afford to lose you.

The captain nodded his head in agreement, and Kudirka thought what a lovely pair they made.

All we’re asking, really, the Director concluded, is that you have a slight case of specific but permanent amnesia. Do you think you can manage that, Andres?

Kudirka thought of the girl Mariko lying below on a white cot, and remembered with what horror he had helped her mother onto the ship and seen at close range the awful bubbles of her charred skin. There was nothing he could do now for the dead members of Mariko’s family—not by going to the newspapers, not by shouting from rooftops, nothing. But something burned inside him just the same.

Yes, all right, he told them finally, as long as you know my true feelings about this, as long as you realize how it disgusts me.

The Director smiled. I’m glad you’ve decided to be sensible, Andres. I really am.

The angry sea was still roiling with its deadly new cargo of radioactive coral when the ship eventually pulled away from what remained of the island of Peliea and headed for home, its mission entirely successful.

Chapter 2

In midafternoon Yale Pollack gathered up the documents strewn about his untidy desk, stuffed them hurriedly into a manila folder, and walked down the main hallway to his division chief’s office. His lanky frame bounced easily on the