Waste Land, page 1
*The Waste Land* by Charles Sheffield This final story from the wonderful Hugo-and Nebula-award winning author, Charles Sheffield, who died in November, is a science fiction mystery tale that takes a compelling look at a peculiar murder in ... The Waste Land.
-------Jeff King groped at his belt and wondered what mad impulse had let him come here without his gun. Or without his partner, who should have been covering him from ten paces behind. Or without his sanity, which he must have left at home.
The alley was one he knew well. It led from Pennsylvania Avenue through to H Street. There were lights, but at midnight they were dimmed. Even so, it should still be easy to see anybody in the alley --except that night cleaning staff for neighboring buildings used the narrow throughway as their private parking lot, and any of a dozen vans and pick-up trucks could hide a man --or woman --crouched behind it. All he had seen was a running black-clad outline.
Jeff moved forward, carefully and slowly. He could feel his heartbeat, the pulse fast and irregular. The alley was perfectly quiet.
Then suddenly it wasn't quiet at all. A telephone was ringing --his own phone, whose presence made about as much sense as the absence of his gun.
* * *
Jeff jerked upright. Instead of midnight in Washington, DC, he opened his eyes to the clear pale light of an Idaho dawn. The ringing phone was the one at his bedside. As he reached for it his heart felt ready to jump out of his chest.
"Security?" said a woman's nervous voice.
"Yes." Jeff shouldn't be getting a call at home, Johnny Talbott was on duty. What time was it, anyway?
He squinted at the clock. Five forty. "This is Security. Jefferson King speaking."
"This is Lauren Begler with Remediation."
"Yes?" Meaning, I never heard of you, and why the hell are you calling me at this hour?
"I'm in charge of the Number Three Nuclear Waste Section. We have a survey operation going on in Site 62, as part of the Snake River aquifer tests. Two of my staff were out on a night run, checking reference points with a GPS terminal. When they were driving between two corner markers they saw something and went for a closer look. It was a body. A dead body. They called me."
"Sweet mother." Jeff was already looking around for his shoes. Eighteen years of habit made him say, without thinking, "Natural causes?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen the body --I'm heading out there now. But my staff don't think so. They say there's something very peculiar about it. Should I call you when I see the --the dead person? I thought you ought to know about this as soon as possible."
"Smart thinking. No need to call me, though --I'll be there myself. Give me driving directions."
"Wonderful." The relief in her voice was enormous. "If you like, I could pick you up and drive you. The area we're talking about is quite a way north."
"Give me ten minutes. You know the corner where the roads meet near Central Facilities, just past the gym? I'll be waiting."
Jeff used two of those ten minutes sitting on the bed, waiting for his heart to steady. A body. No wonder Johnny Talbott had passed Lauren Begler on to him. "Security" at the Idaho National Lab usually meant somebody failing to lock a safe at night, or maybe taking a document marked "Secret" home in their briefcase to read at night. Bodies, especially ones where natural causes could not be assumed, were nowhere in Johnny's universe. But Johnny was sure that Jeff, with his big-city long-time cop experience, thrived on them.
Jeff dressed quickly, buttoned up his long overcoat, and went outside. It was partly his own fault. When you sat for many hours in an office with someone, and the most exciting thing that came along in a week was a new set of security Regulations and Procedures, you tended to color your past a bit more lurid than it had been.
Jeff reached the corner and stood waiting, wishing that he had insisted on time enough for hot coffee. In mid-June the Idaho nights were still cold, and the sun was barely up. Even without artificial coloration, his past had been exciting enough. Too much, in a way. The doctor who had examined him in Washington four years ago hadn't left room for doubt. "Hypertension, and heart arrhythmia. And you're overweight. Stay in this job, where it's greasy meals or missing meals, constant stress, and running on adrenaline at all hours, and you won't need to worry about what you'll be doing after your retirement."
So you took that retirement early, applied for a job at Bechtel, and with a little help from the fact that they had few blacks in security and fewer still out on the Idaho facility that the company managed for the Department of Energy, you found yourself a cushy job where the stress was minimal, the scenery was gorgeous, and the fishing was spectacular. Where you would never find yourself out at dawn, with your heart pumping a mile a minute, waiting to go off and view the body of a man who had died of possibly unnatural causes.
Had Lauren Begler said a man? Jeff felt sure that she hadn't. On the other hand, he felt just as sure that she definitely would have told him had it been a woman. When you had been in police work long enough, what people didn't say and didn't see was as informative as what they did. Lauren Begler rolled up, two minutes late, in a beige Ford Explorer. She was a long, lanky woman, a pale redhead of about forty. She nodded to Jeff as he climbed in and handed him a sixteen-ounce cup.
"Coffee. I took an extra minute. Hope you like cream and sugar."
"You've saved my life." And forget the fact that he was supposed to strictly limit his caffeine intake. Even if you did everything the doctors told you, you still died someday.
The road north was deserted. She drove well, she drove very fast, and at first she didn't seem inclined to talk. That suited Jeff. He hunched in his seat, drank coffee, and watched the rising sun play on the landscape of southeast Idaho. He was learning to love this place. Everything was peaceful, everything looked harmless. You had to remind yourself that this area had contained the world's biggest concentration of nuclear reactors --more than fifty of them --and back in the 1940s and 1950s people hadn't been careful enough with radioactive waste products. The whole area, close to a thousand square miles of it, was dotted with nuclear hot spots. That's what Lauren Begler's remediation team was doing: locating every problem spot in an area almost the size of Rhode Island, removing and containing the worst of the nuclear waste, and then --cross your fingers when you said this --finding a safe place to store it for a long time. A _very _long time. Some of the radioactive isotopes in the waste had half-lives of many thousands of years.
The car phone rang, making Jeff jump. Lauren Begler picked it up, listened, and said, "That's good. Who else?" And then, after listening for a few seconds, "Five more minutes, if I push it a little harder." She glanced at Jeff and said, "Don't touch anything?" And, at his vigorous nod, spoke into the phone again.
"Yes, I know the body was touched already, but don't touch anything else." She put the phone back in its cradle. "Walden and Bronsteed, my staff people who found the body, say that they just had a call from RHR --the Radiological Hazard Research group."
"How did they find out about it?"
"I called them. Right after I called you, Walden phoned me to say that the body had an ID tag and was wearing a radiation monitor. It's a man named Frank Lazenby. He worked for RHR." She glanced at the speedometer, which showed seventy-eight, and pressed the accelerator.
"Any other information about him --Lazenby?"
"Not about him. But the film on his radiation monitor was black from end to end." Jeff said, "The place we're going, the place where they found him --"
"Not a problem. Walden's a careful man, and he's been around nuclear radiation sites for a while. Their van is equipped with counters. The first thing they did, even before they approached the body, was check radiation levels. Lazenby wasn't in a hot spot. Apparently the count is even below typical background levels."
Jeff, in spite of his three years in Idaho, was still a member of Scared Joe Public at heart. The world had changed a lot since the residents of a town just south of the test site had proudly named it "Atomic City." The words "radiation hazard" made Jeff very uncomfortable. Lauren Begler sensed that, and went on,
"Mr. King, I know you must have seen maps of the lab site with 'hot spot' written all over them, but it's all relative. Even in the worst places, locations where illegal dumping of highly radioactive materials was performed thirty or forty years ago, short-term exposure would do nothing. Years of exposure produce awful results, because the effects are cumulative. But the dose a person might get in a few hours wouldn't hurt."
But something killed Frank Lazenby. And something turned the film of his radiation badge to solid black. Jeff kept those thoughts to himself. He felt that most people at the facility had too casual an attitude toward nuclear radiation. Perhaps it was just that kind of attitude, thirty and forty years ago, that led to maps today with "hot spot" labels all over them.
The Explorer left the road and headed up a hill of eroded volcanic lava. Lauren Begler eased off the gas only a little, and Jeff bounced around in his seat as the car hit potholes and buffeted across narrow cracks. If a person didn't have a heart problem when they started out on a trip with Lauren Begler, they'd sure have one after it was over.
The car crested the hill, going briefly airborne, and plunged down the other side. Finally, the brakes went on and the last quarter of a mile was one long skid. A controlled skid, though, because the car finished parallel-parked next to a white van marked with hand-painted lightning bolts on the side like the front of Captain Marvel's shirt. Two men were leaning on the hood, smoking.
"About four hundred meters thataway." He was short, with a dark ponytail and a Mexican bandit mustache. "We moved the van to here because we were in a radio dead spot. You probably heard the interference when we called you."
"Right. And you didn't touch him any more, after you found his ID?" At the man's firm shake of the head, Lauren Begler turned. "This is Sergeant King. He's with security. Before that he was a cop in Washington."
The two men looked at Jeff with new and what he suspected was unjustified respect. He had noticed it since his first day in Idaho. Mention that you had been a cop in DC, and people assumed you dealt daily with muggings, murder, and mayhem. Sometimes that was true --Jeff had the scar of a bullet wound in his left calf, if anyone wanted proof. But mostly the daily and nightly rounds were drugs, drunks, and driving tickets. The big frustration was the number of people protected by cars with DP plates and by diplomatic passports, which made them untouchable no matter what they did. Jeff held out his hand, and the mouth beneath the bandit mustache spat out the last inch of a hand-rolled cigarette, grinned wide, and said, "Wally Bronsteed."
"And I'm Pete Walden." The taller man also favored a ponytail, had a scar on his chin, tattoos on each forearm, and wore a striped shirt with a bolo tie. His grip was as strong as Jeff's. "Ready to see the scene of the crime?"
Both men sounded as though they were enjoying themselves, but that didn't make them suspects. Jeff pegged both as retired Hell's Angels, settled into a life that allowed them to work almost all the time outside. Maybe "respect" was the wrong word for the way they had looked at him.
"May be no crime. But show me."
"Right." Walden picked up a counter and led the way to the little fold in the hills. Jeff decided that Lauren Begler was right, Walden and Bronsteed might look like a couple of live fast/die young buzzheads, but when it came to their work they were cautious. Jeff approved of that --and of the fact that the radiation counter didn't give out a single click while they walked. No one had been dumping hot waste around here.
That changed as they walked farther down the slope. The clicks began, at first just an occasional one, then more frequent.
"Nothing to worry about." Lauren Begler had seen Jeff staring at the instrument. "You could camp here for months and be just fine. The radiation level back where we started happens to be unusually low." Jeff nodded, but his attention was elsewhere. He had just caught sight of a splash of bright green at the bottom of the shallow valley ahead.
"I thought you didn't touch the body after you made an identification."
"We didn't. But we covered him with a ground-sheet." Wally Bronsteed made a circling motion with his finger. "Buzzards."
Jeff stared up. He saw no hovering birds, just blue sky and patches of broken clouds far off to the northwest, where Saddle Mountain reared its head above ten thousand feet. But Wally and Pete had the right idea. Eyeless, flesh-ripped corpses were not a work hazard of the DC scene, but they might be here.
"Stand back while I take a look."
A look for what? Footprints? There was no way they would show on the dry, hard ground. In any case, in eighteen years of police work Jeff had never found footprints to be of the slightest use. He had the distinct feeling that he was out of his depth as he bent forward and carefully peeled back the covering sheet.
Frank Lazenby lay face down with his head toward the north. His back showed no signs of a wound. When Jeff leaned closer he felt sure there would be none anywhere. Lazenby's face and hands were a bright and unnatural purple. A man's face might turn that color in an apoplectic fit, but the skin of face and hands was also covered with swelling fluid-filled blisters.
He turned to Bronsteed and Walden, who were showing a lot more internal fortitude than Lauren Begler. She had turned away and looked as if she might throw up. On the other hand, the two men had seen the body before. "This is what you meant when you said he looked peculiar?"
"Yep." Wally was smoking again, a skinny hand-rolled cigarette made from strong tobacco that burned blue in the clear morning air. "Looked like that when we first got to him."
"How did you come to see him at all? It must have been dark."
"Could hardly miss him. We were checking marker points and coming right down the middle of this valley. I was driving, but me and Pete both spotted him at the same time."
"He was just like this?"
"Yep. We figured he had been walking north. There's a station with a field phone a mile away. When he couldn't walk no farther, he fell on his face and died."
"So whatever happened to him, it was back in the direction where you parked the van?"
"That's what we figured. That's why we drove that way. Didn't see a thing, though."
"What did you expect to see?"
"Wasn't sure. But you know what? We had an idea." Wally glanced to Pete Walden for support. "The way Lazenby looks, it's like them cases you see in training films, where they want you so shit-scared of radiation you won't take risks ever. They show you pictures of people who were in accidents and got huge doses of radiation. They got pictures from Chernobyl of the men who were right in the death zone when the reactor blew. They died quick, like, in just a few minutes or a few hours." Wally pointed.
"That's sort of how they looked."
"Yeah." Jeff had seen those same movies. They had made him feel sick, and he was no stranger to unpleasant forms of death. "You checked radiation levels all the way when you moved the van south?"
"You bet your ass we did. Wouldn't you, after you'd seen him? Clean as a whistle, not enough radiation to tickle the counter. And there's no radioactivity on the body, either, even though the film on his badge is solid black. What happened, Sergeant? How did he die?"
_Means, motive, opportunity_. Jeff had been a street man and a legwork man; homicide and detection were far from his line of expertise. On the other hand, you couldn't watch a cop show on TV for more than ten minutes without knowing those basics.
Opportunity was easy --out in the middle of the test site, at night and miles from the nearest people, anybody could have killed Frank Lazenby. But motive? And, above all, means? Somebody had to have popped Lazenby inside the pressure vessel of a nuclear reactor for a few minutes, long enough to provide a huge and rapidly lethal dose of radiation; then they had to fly him out to a deserted region of the Idaho test site, drop him down, and let him stagger forward for the time that the radiation took to cook his bones.
Jeff squatted back on his heels and looked all around him, at the rolling empty scrubland. Then he turned back to the other three, waiting expectantly for forensic wizardry. "We'll have to wait for an autopsy, and confirm cause of death. But I'll be honest with you. Even if it's radiation overdose --which it sure looks like --I don't have one idea in my head how it could have happened."
* * *
Jeff had never been involved in a security issue anything like this in his three years in Idaho. He didn't even know who had jurisdiction. The Lab was federal property, the whole area forming a protected enclave from which the general public was excluded. Even inside, there were restricted buildings and areas, where entry required high security clearances. A few employees worked directly for the federal government, but most people were on the payroll of Bechtel, who had the facilities management contract. Jeff was not the only one with questions. The head of security, Tom Markin, spent all morning on calls to DOE Headquarters in Washington, then called a midday meeting of his staff. Markin was a tall, moon-faced man, over six-six, a longtime company employee who had lost the lower part of his left leg in some childhood accident. Jeff had sized him up during their first interview and decided to steer clear of Markin whenever possible. The head of security had a no women-and-children-first philosophy. Whoever went down with the ship, it would not be Tom Markin. It might well be Jeff. No one would come out and say that Markin was a white supremacist, but they could certainly think it and hint to Jeff that he should watch his step. He had, for three years, but today avoiding Markin was impossible. The meeting took place in one of Central Facilities' smaller lecture halls, big enough to hold all thirty attendees. Jeff, heading for the back row, had been stopped by Markin and placed right up at the front.
