The Salt Eaters (26 page)

“Jam the water gauge with a credit card or an I.D. badge? Hell no. Stafford’s already done that one. Pay the check.”

“Wait a sec. Hear me out. I didn’t say anything about the coolant system or the water pumps.”

“Time’s up. Pay the waiter.”

“That’s not fair. You guys are really not being fair. I’ve got two minutes.”

“Two minutes start to finish. You haven’t even identified which section of the fail-safe system you’re tampering with. Waiter, another round of drinks. Another pitcher of beer, and make sure the stein is good and frosted. Pay up, Nickelberry.”

“You guys are really not fair. This is a stupid game anyway. Unpatriotic to say the least. We could be court-martialed for this.”

“We’re not military, Nickelberry. Just pay the man.”

Campbell scooped up The Whiner’s credit card and whisked the tray away. If he was fast and the relief waitress had come in on time, he could get back to Jan in minutes. Maybe sit down with the two women for his break. He’d see his writing buddies soon enough at the workshop.

“… had this dream. I told Velma about it and she just looked. You know how she looks when … anyway. In the dream Jamahl was sitting on a black leather barstool with a red touch-tone telephone on the table. He had a yellow scrap of paper on his lap and he was …”

“Is there a warrant out for her or what? How serious is it?”

“They’re calling it a routine inquiry. Naturally they’re trying to keep the whole thing quiet. Not only because of all the
records—payroll, orders, invoices—hell, I don’t have a clue as to what they had computerized, but”—Jan scraped her chair closer to Ruby, tipping the brim of her hat back—“there’s another reason. They’ve been shipping flatcars of slag, they call it, some kind of contaminated sludge, right through town to some burial grounds for radioactive waste that a plant in Alabama uses.”

“And Velma pulled the info and passed it on to some investigative journalist, right? I’ve been following the Jack Anderson articles.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Passing it on to some environmentalist group, then?”

“I really don’t know, Ruby. She called me to ask me to put her in touch with some lawyers. As for lifting, remember last time she leaked some material?”

“How well I remember. And the turkey got up in court and named his source. Funny how a subpoena can scare the shit out of you. What’s the rest?”

“I don’t know, Ruby. That’s why I was hoping she’d come this afternoon for lunch. She blew the appointment this morning for the lawyer. A friend of mine, and he was some pissed.”

“No wonder she’s been acting so crazy.” Ruby slumped back in her chair and let her arms dangle behind her. “Pressure. I’m such a crummy friend. Here she’s been under all this pressure lately, and I’ve been so insensitive.”

“No wonder. She really needs to get out of the plant. Everybody does.”

Ruby took her hat off and placed the brim under the legs of her chair. It was hot and muggy and the gusty wind was no relief. She leaned back again, swinging her arms and looking up at the smeary clouds. “If the fumes are anything to go by,” she said, looking toward the smokestacks, “Dante didn’t tell the half of it.”

More practical than the game Fission, and a bit less cynical than the game Fail-Safe Phooey, was the board game Campbell’d developed and hoped to market through Parker Brothers—Disposal. Each player received at the start a sum of money, some property—nuclear reactors, uranium mines, etc., 5,000 pounds of uranium tailings and a load of contaminated items to dispose of. Campbell went over it, congratulating himself on his brilliance. It was one thing to be a child prodigy. It was quite another to demonstrate a persistent genius. He turned the grill on and carefully sliced three hunks of banana nut cake from the loaf.

The boxes on the board where one stopped, given the number thrown on the player’s dice, were marked “trench”—but one had to move within the next throw before the food chain was affected, “storage plant”—but there was a card announcing build-up which obliged the player to move off the spot, “carbon steel container”—but one had to pay the bank fifteen years’ salaries for three guards, and there were cards marked “going critical” and “carbon steel corrosion” which necessitated a move. It was an exasperating game, guaranteed to either drive you nuts or urge you to join the international antinuclear movement, or at least send a check to Mobilization for Survival.

Campbell chuckled, standing guard over the grill with the spatula. It was bound to make him a fortune, or at least free him to pursue with sleuthlike tenacity the many tips of big stories he could never get a paper or magazine to underwrite. Disposal had appeal for the armchair philosophers, the alarmists, the pragmatists, as well as the reality-denying types. It incorporated the ferociously acquisitive features of Monopoly with just the right touch of self-righteousness. Best of all, it frustrated and provoked. In short, it was American. He’d managed to incorporate, too, the brilliant contribution Rising
Sun had made to the round table’s games—Fix, a game of doublethink and doublespeak the men usually played when they were fairly sober. In case of plant failure, breakdown, accident, corrosion, some situation requiring repair or shutdown—all of which were initiated by boxes on the Disposal board marked “pick a card,” the stack of cards containing announcements of repairs needed at plants owned by the players—the players could elect to pay the cost of dismantling the plant and disposing of contaminated parts, assume the cost of shutting down and doing repairs, or they could elect to put in a Fix—that is, hire a team of experts to conduct a study proving that the defective parts were neither vital nor even necessary to plant operations. Fix cards could be purchased or traded.

Campbell was none too nimble turning the slices of cake over to brown, but no matter. Disposal was a winner. An educational board game for sophisticates of the nuclear age, he’d described it. And while he enjoyed the part-time work at the café and the occasional lurid tales he hacked for
Bronze Thrills
and
Tan Confessions
, he well knew what he’d been groomed for and what each postponement of the big story, pursuing instead the lesser news assigned by the new editor, cost him.

He’d begun a better-than-credible series on nuclear energy while he was still in school. The old editor had had high stock with the publisher then. But it was a small-town paper after all, too small to garner the kind of attention that could lead to a Pulitzer. But he continued with the articles even though the paper repeatedly rejected them. He’d managed to have the first in the series reprinted often, however, his coverage of the Coral Gables high-energy conference. Outmaneuvered the major dailies that time, and could still outthink the big-time reporters sent to the various conferences from New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C. They never paid him any attention, just a baby-face spook
from a hick-town weekly. They’d peer at his press badge, ask patronizing questions about the Claybourne
Call
and smile that smile.

But at Coral Gables, he’d been the only reporter who’d understood the allusion to Mulla Nasrudin, the hero of his first tutor Mustafa the Magnificent, who insisted he came from Armenia and not Lebanon. Mulla, Anancy, Shine, Greek mythology, Scandinavian lore, the Chinese classics, the Koran, the Book of Tobit, the works of the Essene, the Sufi—Mustafa had him master them all and usually taught all subjects through the Mulla tales. So when the physicists at Coral Gables had to resort to metaphor, allegory, proverbs, folk tales to illustrate principles too confounding in scientific argot, his old acquaintance Mulla had been called out to rescue the tongue-tied panelist and muddled conferees and given Campbell the edge. The edge and the clue as to what the big story of his career was to be.

What came to Campbell, leaning over the typewriter stand in the pressroom then just as he leaned over the grill deep in thought now, was a flash in the brain pan, and he knew he’d struck gold. Knew in a glowing moment that all the systems were the same at base—voodoo, thermodynamics, I Ching, astrology, numerology, alchemy, metaphysics, everybody’s ancient myths—they were interchangeable, not at all separate much less conflicting. They were the same, to the extent that their origins survived detractors and perverters. How simple universal knowledge is after all, he grinned.

The editor then was simply intrigued by Campbell’s ability to discuss fission in terms of billiards, to couch principles of thermonuclear dynamics in the language of down-home Bible-quoting folks. So he’d been sent, though with a stingy expense account, to cover the UN’s Stockholm Conference on the Environment, where he managed to work the goddess Khali
and the loa Shango together with Thor and Neptune into his reports of the weather workshops.

“Camp, you through here?”

He nodded, distracted, as the relief waitress nudged him to the side with her hip and worked up an omelet.

He was not through. There was a story, a big one for Claybourne anyway, shaping up at that moment, one big enough to move him from the local school-board hearings assignments to what he’d been waiting for, preparing for. Rumor had it the Academy cohorts planned to reenact an old slave insurrection. This at a time when the National Guard had been put on alert because of the labor-management crisis at Transchemical. And a vigilante group was rumored to be ready for the march, should it turn into some kind of action. The Special Task Force too, it was hinted at the precinct, was coming in to assist in the investigation of the armory break-in. Rates of unemployment, nonemployment, homicide, drug traffic were so high, the city administration had asked the editor to soft-pedal it. And the power plant was under attack for having got caught hiking their rates before putting the fix in. He’d helped at least in that, uncovering the fact that corporations had huge bills year after year and the suburban counties had run up quite a tab, but local residents had had their water, gas, lights shut off when they protested the padded-looking bills. There was a big enough story if, in the next forty-eight hours, he could stay on top of it.

“Table seven’s filling up, Camp. Want me to clear?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Campbell glanced through the service window at a group of women who had just entered the café and were stashing media equipment on the two empty chairs at the big table. He read their No Nukes T-shirts and smiled. Life is a gas, he told the dessert plate.

Campbell approached table two in mock-sheepishness, sliding his offering in front of Jan, who took the moment of diversion to remove the wad of papers she’d kept from blowing away with her elbows. She rolled Ruby’s questionnaire into the loops of her handbag straps, then gave the waiter and the dessert plate her attention.

“Got zapped by the microwave?” she asked, suspicious.

Ruby swiveled the plate a bit, reared back and screwed up her face. “Is it organic?” She poked the cake with the tip of her fork. “Or carcinogenic or what?” She turned to Jan, sitting tall in her seat. “You will note that I have mastered the crucial buzz words of my era.”

“Plutonium’s both organic and carcinogenic,” Campbell said. “That is to say it comes from nature, albeit remote regions of Africa. Not only natural but mutagenic.”

“You’re not suggesting—no, of course he’s not suggesting, is he, Jan, that this is toasted pluto buns, just correcting my faulty mutually exclusive formula.” Ruby was using her supercilious voice, Jan noticed and sighed. “Well, you’ve got the floor, Bro, and I’ve used up my buzz words. Run it.”

“Banana nut cake. I toasted it on the grill. Gas flames.” He was speaking strictly to Jan, smiling his laziest, easy man smile, and totally ignoring the other woman and what sounded like a royal command. Close-cropped bush, weighty jewelry, wiry body, flowing clothes like royal robes. It was her eyes that clinched it, never on him, not deigning to take him in. She simply waved her hand in his general direction as though it were a foregone conclusion her order would be carried out, and he would stand there dutifully holding forth on the subject of plutonium.

Campbell continued to ignore her even as she smirked, “ ‘Albeit,’ a literate waiter, as I live and breathe.”

“You have a class tonight? Or other business up at the Academy? I’m going that way later.”

“No, we’re going over to the park in a while. Maybe catch the concert at the Regal if there’re still tickets. The festival begins tonight,” Jan said.

“Perhaps I’ll see you then,” he said, taking a long lingering time to release his grip on the clean fork he handed her.

Campbell moved off to pass out menus to the media women. He glanced toward the round table. Krupp’s Kreep was lining up cufflinks, rings, and the tops of the salt and pepper shakers. They were evidently preparing for round one of Fission, having gotten bored with Fail-Safe Phooey.

“… triterium and deterium. And for a catalyst, let’s try something inexpensive, something available to your average high school chem lab.”

There were times when they played the game of putting together various fissionable elements, fuels, propellants, outlining processes, conditions, possible containers, that Campbell could actually see the unbonded atoms on the table, so many colored balls on the green tablecloth like after the opening break, various colored balls settling into position waiting for the cue, waiting for the next shot to overcome inertia and go banging, bouncing, colliding all over the table. They were an unstable group of men, Campbell concluded. And to think the Rosenbergs could be executed while six blabbermouth engineers breached security practically every day.

“Of the three pestilences that plague our community—agents, hustlers and fools—I do believe that hand-pumping turkey is the worst. So I repeat, Jan, you need to seriously consider running for office.”

Jan missed seeing Jay Patterson making the rounds of the café tables, pinning buttons on where he could, where he dared in some cases. She missed seeing too the young dude, making
dangerous entries in his daily log, withhold his hand and make his jacket lapel unavailable to Patterson. She had turned the other way; she thought she smelled smoke. Then she thought she recognized the sisters in the T-shirts.