Gard supposed he was. 'Would you shout if your house was on fire and you were the only one in your family to wake up in the middle of the night and realize what was happening? Or just kinda tiptoe around and whisper, on account of you're a college person?'
'I just believe this has gone far en - '
Gardener dismissed her, turned to Mr Bay State Electric, and winked at him confidentially. 'Tell me, Ted, how close is your house located to this nifty new nuclear facility you guys are building?'
'I don't have to stand here and - '
'Not too close, uh? That's what I thought.' He looked at Mrs Ted. She shrank away from him, clutching at her husband's arm. Gard thought, What is it that she sees to make her shrink away from me like that? What, exactly?
The voice of the booger-hooking, comic-book-reading deputy clanged back in dolorous answer: Shot your wife, uh? Good fucking deal.
'Are you planning to have children?' he asked her gently. 'If so, I would hope for your sake that you and your husband really are located a safe distance from the plant ... they keep goofing, you know. Like at Three-Mile Island. Not long before they opened the sucker, someone discovered the plumbers had somehow hooked up a 3,000-gallon tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. In fact, they found out about a week before the place went on line. You like it?'
She was crying.
She was crying, but he couldn't stop.
The guys investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was a generally inadvisable practice. If your hubby here invites you to take the company tour, I'd do the same thing they tell you to do in Mexico: don't drink the water. And it your hubby invites you after you're pregnant - or after you even think you might be - tell him . . .' Gardener smiled, first at her, then at Ted. 'Tell him you've got a headache,' he said.
'Shut up,' Ted said. His wife had begun to moan,
'That's right,' Arberg said. 'I really do think it's time for you to shut up, Mr Gardener.'
Gard looked at them, then at the rest of the partygoers, who were staring at the tableau by the buffet, wide-eyed and silent, the young bartender among them.
'Shut up!' Gardener yelled. Pain drove a gleaming chrome spike into the left side of his head. 'Yeah! Shut up and let the goddam house burn! You can bet these fucking slum-lords will be around to collect the fire-insurance later on, after the ashes cool and they rake out what's left of the bodies! Shut up! That's what all these guys want us to do! And if you don't shut up on your own, maybe you get shut up, like Karen Silkwood - '
'Quit it, Gardener,' Patricia McCardle hissed. There were no sibilants in the words she spoke, making a hiss an impossibility, but she hissed just the same.
He bent toward Ted's wife, whose sallow cheeks were now wet with tears. 'Also, you might cheek the IDS rates - infant-death syndrome, that is. They go way up in plant areas. Birth defects, such as Down's Syndrome - mongoloidism, in other words - and blindness, and ...
'I want you to get out of my house,' Arberg said.
'You've got potato chips on your chin,' Gardener said, and turned back to Mr and Mrs Bay State Electric. His voice was coming from deeper and deeper inside him. It was like listening to a voice coming out of a well. Everything going critical. Red lines showing up all over the control panel.
'Ted here can lie about how vastly overrated it all was, nothing but a little fire and a lot of headline fodder, and all of you can even believe him ... but the fact is, what happened at the Chernobyl nuclear plant released more radioactive waste into the atmosphere of this planet than all the A-bombs set off aboveground since Trinity.
'Chernobyl's hot.
'It's going to stay that way for a long time. How long? No one really knows, do they, Ted?'
He tipped his glass toward Ted and then looked around at the partygoers, all of them now standing silent and watching him, many looking just as dismayed as Mrs Ted.
'And it'll happen again. Maybe in Washington State. They were storing core rods in unlined ditches at the Hanford reactors just like they were at Kyshtym. California