Free Count Geiger's Blues by Michael Bishop Page A

Wurlitzer. They should have worn vest shields and carried a dose-rate meter. If any of the janitors had been cleaning with radioactive disinfectants, the clinic’s weekly checks would have told them so long ago.
    Teri-Jo knelt by the machine. Its markings—and her own memory, now kicking in—identified it as a Therac 4-J, a device once manufactured by the EarthRay-Schenck Corporation of Danby, Ohio. Teri-Jo examined it carefully.
    “It looks like its source is intact, Dr. Di Pasqua. The cylinder holding the cesium cake is here, just where it would be if the device worked. But there may be no cesium in the can.” She wrote down the machine’s serial number and date of manufacture.
    “How likely is that?”
    “Not very. If somebody’s going to decommission a source—empty out its heat—why would they shove the empty cylinder back into the machine? We’d probably be smart to regard the Therac 4-J as alive.”
    “All right. We will. So we may have another disposal problem on our hands. If so, I’m charging you to get rid of this machine without a drawn-out search for a disposal site. We don’t have the room, and I don’t have the patience.” Dr. Di Pasqua directed Teri-Jo back out into the main tunnel.
    Tell me something new, Teri-Jo thought. Aloud, she said, “At least I’ve got a telephone number this time. If they haven’t changed it. If they’re still in business.”
    Dr. Di Pasqua locked the door, and he and Teri-Jo returned to the clinic, where she rescued Bonnie Gainsboro from Chad (and vice versa) and carried him into her own office to scan the computer files for the radiation-disposal invoice and to flip past all her dog-eared Rolodex entries looking for the number of . . . Environomics Unlimited. Ah, there.
    “We’re in business, Chaddie.”
    On the floor with a box of facial tissues, Chad pulled them out and tossed them away like a magician releasing doves with clipped wings.
    *
    That afternoon, Milton Copperud, the NCR physicist assigned to the cancer clinic, dropped by to tell Teri-Jo that, as she had surmised, the Therac 4-J was still loaded . It had not only its source cylinder, but, within it, a hefty complement of the radioactive stuff that had once made it a moderately effective therapy instrument. Moderately effective because this model of the machine had always had some design problems.
    “Its last resupply from EarthRay-Schenck was two years before Dr. Huguley hired me,” she told Copperud, consulting a folder no one had ever logged onto a computer disk. “Cesium 137’s half-life is thirty years. That means there’s still a goodly mess of curies clicking away in there.”
    “Well, Teri-Jo, they’re safely pent—the emission level’s not even measurable yet. But the sooner the Therac’s gone the better.”
    “You talking public health, Milt, or my job security?”
    Copperud laughed, winked, and took off for another part of the clinic. Chad slept in a nest of carpet shag, snoring in an eerie high-pitched impersonation of his daddy’s sleep sounds. Smiling, Teri-Jo punched out the old number for Environomics Unlimited.
    Blessedly, it rang.

12
Variations on an Unknown Malady
    In the next month, nothing similar to, or quite similar to, the episode at Christ’s Episcopal befell Xavier. He told himself that an allergy had been to blame. When this theory failed to quell his doubts, he posited such causes as diet, stress, a rampant virus, or an extreme reaction to exhaust fumes or other pollutants. Damn it all, his body had begun to betray him in strange ways. Nothing like the sinus problems—“head leakage,” Mikhail had dubbed that complex of symptoms—suffered at communion, but stuff equally hard to account for and deal with. In fact, Xavier accounted for and dealt with it all by refusing to think about it.
    If he thought about it, he’d have to take steps—write out a list of his episodes, visit a doctor. And visiting a doctor was out of the question. He didn’t want to