Chapter Ten
Wednesday
Building 332—Plutonium Facility
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Sitting alone at a table in the break room of the Plutonium Facility, Duane Hopkins opened his black metal lunchbox and withdrew a thermos of coffee. After carefully unscrewing the cap he poured himself a cupful. He rummaged in his lunchbox, taking out a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a Twinkie. He always ate half his lunch during the 10:30 break and ate the rest of it at noon. He never spent money in the soda or snack vending machines.
He poked around to double-check what he had packed for himself, as if somehow hoping he would find a surprise there. When he had first gotten married, Rhonda had always packed his lunches, but she had stopped putting in surprises after six months. After Stevie was born a year later, she had gone away altogether, packing only a suitcase, taking the contents of their savings account, and leaving him a simple but eloquent note: “I have my own life to live.” She hadn’t signed it “Love, Rhonda,” or anything. Just left it on the gold-flecked Formica dinette table. He had never heard from her again, not in ten years.
Sitting in his bright orange lab coat, Duane sipped some of his milk and carefully unfolded the waxed paper surrounding his sandwich. He took one bite of the sandwich, feeling the sweet stickiness goosh on the roof of his mouth.
Then Ronald and his caveman buddies came in, talking too loudly, laughing like gorillas at each other’s stupid jokes. Duane looked away and tried to become invisible, but Ronald headed directly over to him.
“Hey, Beavis, glad you could come to work today. No special missions for the CIA? No extra credit work for T Program?”
“Stop calling me that,” Duane said.
“Calling you what, Beavis?”
“That,” Duane said. “It’s not my name.”
“Well, why not?” Ronald answered with a gap-toothed grin. “You’re a butthead, aren’t you?” The three other guys with him laughed at that.
“I was just at T Program for a tour. I took my son to the Virtual Reality chamber.”
Ronald raised his eyebrows. “Well, excuuuuse me,” he said, lolling his head from side to side and raising his eyebrows in a sickening parody of Stevie’s cerebral palsy.
Ronald had bristly dark hair and a blurred blue tattoo of an eagle on his left forearm, visible because Ronald always rolled up the sleeves of his orange lab coat. He flaunted his former Marine image, knowing full well Duane’s service in the Army. Ronald occasionally made up stories about his days in ’Nam, though Duane and most of the others knew that Ronald was too young ever to have been in the Vietnam war—but no one would challenge him on it.
Ronald leaned forward, his breath stank of sour tobacco smoke; he was probably lighting up again in the bathrooms, even though the building was a no-smoking facility.
“You sure they didn’t want to just run some secret experiments on you, Beavis? Maybe run a special analysis to see why you’re such a wuss?”
“It was just a tour of the simulator chamber,” Duane said, putting his sandwich down. In fact, that nice man Gary Lesserec had called him this morning, and Duane had been delighted to hear from him, remembering how much Stevie had enjoyed the VR demonstration. He hadn’t understood Mr. Lesserec’s request, but Duane felt he owed the T Program man a big favor, so he was happy to promise the material Lesserec wanted.
Ronald picked up the Twinkie from Duane’s lunch box, tore open the cellophane and stuffed the sponge cake into his own mouth, dropping the wrapper to the floor. Duane sat silently fuming.
“The Virtual Reality Simulator,” Ronald mocked with his mouth full and his voice high pitched and woman-like. “Next thing you know our friend Beavis here is going to be talking with the President on another news conference.”
“Yeah,” one of Ronald’s cohorts said. “NIB—the National Initiative for Buttheads.” They all guffawed.
Duane hated every single one of them, jeering in their blue jeans and orange lab coats. “Cut it out and just leave me alone,” he said. He put his sandwich back in his lunchbox and closed it up.
“Hey, Beavis, where’s your badge?” Ronald said. The others looked around in mock horror. “Oh my goodness, he doesn’t have a badge!”
Duane checked and saw that he had left his green badge clipped to his flannel shirt draped over the chair at his workstation in the metallurgy facility. He was supposed to have it with him at all times, though occasionally everyone grew lax once they had passed through the rigorous security checks to get into the plutonium building in the first place.
“What are you, some kind of a Commie spy?” Ronald said. “You’d better get your badge, or I’m going to call Security right now—and get you fired!”
Seeing an excuse to get away from the taunting, Duane left the break room and pushed through the swinging double-doors that served as an airlock. He hurried across the linoleum floors in the brightly fluorescent-lit open areas of the Plutonium Facility. Metal lockers stood against parts of the walls, with equipment carts or large rolls of thin sheet plastic to be taped down on the floor in the event of a spill.
Piping lined the ceiling—electrical conduits, water lines for emergency shower stations, thicker pipes for house vacuum or hissing continuous air monitors that sucked air through filter paper hooked up to radiation counters.
He shuffled down painted cinder-block halls, his plastic booties scuffing on the linoleum, until he passed through another airlock door into his glove-box area. It was part of the metallurgy and fabrication lab, though most of the glove-box labs looked the same, regardless of whether they were recovery stations, machine shops, laser welding boxes, or inventory chambers.
The lab room had six of the glove-box stations, each one relatively new, with the metal painted a dark blue. Circular metal ports were spaced evenly across the transparent angled window; Duane could unseal the port he needed and slide his hands into the thick gloves mounted to the metal walls, doing his work without getting contaminated. Large exhaust chimneys sucked air out of the glove boxes through thick, squarish high-efficiency particulate air filters. Fire-suppression sprinklers dotted the ceiling.
Duane went over to where he had left his flannel shirt, but saw to his dismay that the badge wasn’t clipped to the collar where he always left it. He looked around, cold and angry. His knees trembled. Ronald must have done something.
Duane felt like a genuine Charlie Brown. And every time he went to kick that football, someone snatched it away from him at the last instant. The only peace and solitude he got at work was when he could huddle in the bathroom. Some people had noticed just how much time Duane spent hiding in the stall in the men’s room, enough that a few had blessed him with the awful nickname of “Diarrhea Duane.”
Right now Duane wondered what Ronald and his friends had done with his badge. If Duane lost his badge it would be a security infraction on his record. It was his fault for not wearing it, for giving Ronald the opportunity for his stupid pranks. He was supposed to wear his badge at all times, and he had screwed up. For all his years at the Lab, Duane’s record was spotless, though unimpressive. He didn’t want to risk a black mark on it, especially when people were talking about cutbacks and layoffs.
He fumbled in the pocket of his shirt draped across the chair, found a small hard lump. He pulled out the black plastic nuclear accident dosimeter that had been clipped to the back of his badge. Why had Ronald taken out his dosimeter? What were they doing?
Feeling cold sweat, Duane looked around his chair and his small worktable—then suddenly rushed forward to his glove-box station. He pressed his hands against the tilted glass and looked inside to the contaminated area, seeing squeeze bottles of chemicals, the grinder, the grit-caked balance and counterweights, small plutonium strips sealed inside acrylic disks, pliers, a screwdriver—and his own green photo ID badge smiling up at him from within the glove box, sitting in the horrendous invisible storm of radiation.
Ronald had bagged it through the access port on the end of the glove box, unsealing the metal hatch and sticking the badge through into the attached plastic bag. Then, reaching through with the gloves at Duane’s station, he had unsealed the badge to leave it sitting exposed.
The plastic square itself had no dosimeter on it, but Duane shuddered to see his own picture there inside the hazardous box. A fully exposed dosimeter would have brought down a full-scale investigation from DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C. Ronald had covered his tracks, and Duane couldn’t prove anything.
Working frantically, he pulled on a pair of rubber surgical gloves and uncapped the circular metal coverings to a pair of installed thicker gloves mounted to the interior of the box. He slid his hands inside, groping for his badge. After several tries, he picked it up, a thin plastic rectangle the size of a playing card.
He felt his heart pounding, his stomach knotting, but he followed procedure as best he could, wrapping the badge in a plastic baggie, then undogging the access port to slide the contaminated bag through into another sealed bag, which he pulled through the access hatch inside-out.
Duane kept his rubber gloves on and got a set of tongs from the outside tool locker so he wouldn’t have to touch the badge. Every second he just knew that his badge absorbed more and more of the deadly stuff. His vision fuzzed from terrified tears.
Using the tongs to hold the double plastic bag, Duane raced over to the bathroom. He held the bags under the running water in the sink, trying to rinse off the radioactivity, not caring what contamination flushed down into the drain. He didn’t know if this would work but it seemed like it should.
After a few minutes under the cold water, he tore off the outer plastic bag, rinsed the inner bag even longer, turning the tap to hot, and then tore the bag again to pluck the thin badge free. He held it under the water for a long time, getting rid of the contamination.
To make extra sure, Duane decided to use the liquid pink soap in the dispenser. With his gloved hand he pushed up on the metal plunger hanging at the bottom of an old translucent plastic container, pumping it several times to squirt soap over all sides of the badge. Still wearing the surgical gloves, he lathered his badge and rubbed that under the running water again, until finally Duane felt he was safe.
He dried the badge carefully with a brown paper towel to make sure he wiped off all traces of the radioactive water. Then he pulled off his surgical gloves and threw them in the wastebasket.
Still shaking, partly from anger, partly from fear, he clipped his badge back to the collar of his orange lab coat, trying to keep it as loose and as far away from his body as possible.
He couldn’t wait until he got home to spend the evening with Stevie. At least his son loved him with an unqualified affection. As Duane rocked his boy in his arms, he could think only of the good things, forgetting his nightmarish days on the job.