Free Day of the Bomb by Steve Stroble Page B

one week?”
    The keeper of the betting pool chart pulled it from
his pocket. “That would be Fernandez. Hey Fernandez, how did you
know to pick a week?”
    The winner to be shrugged. “Lucky guess, I guess.
Besides, I saw too many Japs die while I was there at Yokohama. You
know, survivors from Hiroshima. I figured poor old Horace wouldn’t
do much better than they did.”
    “Well, you figured right.” The sailor next to Horace
gently shook the goat. “Horace just stopped breathing. That makes
you $16 richer, you lucky dog.”
    ***
    After the surviving animals had been delivered to
the team of scientists, Ensign Rhinehardt ate dinner with one of
them. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but can I ask you some questions?
Or is what you guys are doing all classified?”
    “Ask away. I don’t know any top secrets. I’m too low
level.”
    “I just don’t understand why you need to put animals
out there to get blasted by the bomb like you did.”
    “We need to nail down adequate data on the effects of
radioactivity on living organisms. It’s the best way to do it.”
    “But couldn’t you do all that by studying the
survivors in Japan?”
    “We need some long term data. Because our test
animals have much shorter life spans than humans we can extrapolate
the data quicker, especially what kind of effects radiation might
have on offspring. Our test animals produce babies much quicker and
a lot more of them than the A-bomb survivors in Japan ever
will.”
    “What?” He dropped his forkful of chipped beef on
toast as he tried to keep his shaking tray from sliding off of his
lap. “Are you telling me that radiation might affect the kids who
are born to the survivors of radiation exposure?”
    “Maybe. Nailing that down is the million-dollar
question for us right now. Let’s say a woman who survived Hiroshima
has a defective kid somewhere down the line. What caused it? Did
that same kind of condition that her baby has run in her family
back for who knows how many generations? Or was her kid born all
messed up because mama-san almost starved to death during the war?
Or is because some of her eggs got toasted with a little bit too
much radiation? The worst of it is that females come equipped with
all their eggs at birth, thousands of them. That means even young
girls that got radiated might give birth to a deformed kid years
later. Or maybe it was papa-san’s gonads getting radiated that
makes him produce some defective sperm?” He shoved a spoonful of
rice pudding into his mouth. “There are so many variables to filter
through that it will take years before we know much of anything.
Add in the language barrier. We use a translator to question
mama-san and papa-san about their family histories. How much gets
lost in the translation? A little? A lot? Or just enough to screw
up our research? Like it or not, lab animals are a whole lot easier
to work with. All the ones I’ve ended up dissecting just sort of
seem to accept their fate. That’s something I’ve only seen in about
one out of a thousand human beings. We just plain bitch and
complain and cry a whole lot more than any animal ever does.”
    ***
    The next day the ensign and seaman went aboard a
ship that had tested at a dangerous level of radioactivity as part
of a crew to try and scrub away the residue. Halfway through the
task, the seaman decided to entertain his shipmates during a break.
He began by clicking out a tap dance in front of his captive
audience. As his toes and heels counted off a sixteen/sixteenths
beat he improvised his song:
    I’m Popeye the sailor man!
    I sail on an old tin can.
    I scrub the decks clean
    Because I’m a U.S. Navy machine.
    I’m Popeye the sailor
man !
    His impromptu entertainment brought forth cheers and
jeers from the lower ranks and a smile to an ensign who was now
counting the days until he returned home to Madisin and Sally.

11
    Jason first spotted the top layer of the mushroom
cloud while he checked the pits for any fish