was great 'as long as the sun shines.' There was another burst of laughter.
Gardener's head thudded and whipped, whipped and thudded. His ears, tuned to an almost preternatural pitch, heard a faint crackling sound, like ice shifting, and he relaxed his hand a bare moment before it tightened enough to shatter the glass.
He blinked and Arberg had the head of a pig. This hallucination was utterly complete and utterly perfect, right down to the bristles on the fat man's snout. The buffet was in ruins, but Arberg was scavenging, finishing up the last few Triscuits, spearing a final slice of salami and a chunk of cheese on the same plastic toothpick, chasing them with the last potato-chip crumbs. It all went into his snuffling snout, and he went on nodding all the while as Ted the Power Man explained that nuclear was the only alternative, really. 'Thank God the American people are finally getting that Chernobyl business into some kind of perspective,' he said. 'Thirty-two people dead. It's horrible, of course, but there was an airplane crash just a month ago that killed a hundred and ninety-some. You don't hear people yelling for the government to shut down the airlines, though, do you? Thirty-two dead is horrible, but it's far from the Armageddon these nuke-freaks made it sound like.' He lowered his voice a little. 'They're as nuts as the LaRouche people you see in airports, but in a way, they're worse. They sound more rational. But if we gave them what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food.'
To Gard he didn't look like a man anymore. The shaggy head of a wolf poked out of the collar of his white shirt with the narrow red pinstripes. It looked around, pink tongue lolling, greenish-yellow eyes sparkling. Arberg squealed some sort of approval and stuffed more odd lots into his pink pig's snout. Patricia McCardle now had the smooth sleek head of a whippet. The college dean and his wife were weasels. And the wife of the man from the electric company had become a frightened rabbit, pink eyes rolling behind thick glasses.
Oh, Gard, no, his mind moaned.
He blinked again and they were just people.
'And one thing these protestors never remember to mention at their protest rallies is just this,' Ted the Power Man finished, looking around like a trial lawyer reaching the climax of his summation. 'In thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, there has never been one single fatality as the result of nuclear power in the United States of America.' He smiled modestly and tossed off the rest of his Scotch.
'I'm sure we'll all rest easier knowing that,' the man who looked like a college dean said. 'And now I think my wife and I -'
'Did you know that Marie Curie died of radiation poisoning?' Gardener asked conversationally. Heads turned. 'Yeah. Leukemia induced by direct exposure to gamma rays. She was the first casualty along the death march with this guy's power plant at the end. She did a lot of research, and recorded it all.'
Gardener looked around the suddenly silent room.
'Her notebooks are locked up in a vault,' he said. 'A vault in Paris. It's lead-lined. The notebooks are whole, but too radioactive to touch. As for who's died here, we don't really know. The AEC and the EPA keep a lid on it.'
Patricia McCardle was frowning at him. With the dean temporarily forgotten, Arberg went back to scrounging along the denuded buffet table.
'On the fifth of October 1966,' Gardener said, 'there was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Enrico Fermi breeder reactor in Michigan.'
'Nothing happened,' Ted the Power Man said, and spread his hands to the assembled company as if to say, You see? QED.
'No,' Gardener said. 'Nothing did. God may know why, but my guess is no one else does. The chain reaction stopped on its own. No one knows why. One of the engineers the contractors called in took a look, smiled, and said, "You guys almost lost Detroit." Then he fainted.'
'Oh, but Mr Gardener! That was -'
Gardener held up a hand. 'When you examine the cancer-death stats for the areas surrounding every nuclear-power facility in the country, you find anomalies, deaths that are way out of line with the norm.'