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.”

“That is utterly untrue, and-”

“ Let me finish, please. I don't think the facts make any difference anymore, but let me finish anyway. Long before Chernobyl, the Russians had an accident at a reactor in a place called Kyshtym. But Khrushchev was Premier then, and the Soviets kept their lips a lot tighter. It looks like maybe they were storing used rods in a shallow ditch. Why not? As Madame Curie might have said, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Our best guess is that the core rods oxydized, only instead of creating ferrous oxide, or rust, the way steel rods do, these rods rusted pure plutonium. It was like building a campfire next to a tank filled with LP gas, but they didn't know that. They assumed it would be all right. They assumed.” He could hear the rage filling his voice and was helpless to stop it. “They assumed, they played with the lives of living human beings as if they were… well, so many dolls… and guess what happened?”

The room was silent. Patty's mouth was a frozen red slash. Her complexion was milky with rage.

“It rained,” Gardener said. “It rained hard. And that started a chain reaction that caused an explosion. It was like the eruption of a mud volcano. Thousands were evacuated. Every pregnant woman was given an abortion. There was no choice involved. The Russian equivalent of a turnpike in the Kyshtym area was closed for almost a year. Then, when word started to leak out that a very bad accident had happened on the edge of Siberia, the Russians opened the road again. But they put up some really hilarious signs. I've seen the photos. I don't read Russian, but I've asked four or five different people for a

translation, and they all agree. it sounds like a bad ethnic joke. Imagine yourself driving along an American thruway-I-95 or I-70, maybe-and coming up on a sign that says PLEASE CLOSE ALL WINDOWS, TURN OFF ALL VENTILATION ACCESSORIES, AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOUR CAR WILL GO FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MILES.”

“Builshit!” Ted the Power Man said loudly.

“Photographs available under the Freedom of Information Act,” Gard said.,If this guy was only lying, maybe I could live with it. But he and the rest of the people like him are doing something worse. They're like salesmen telling the public +that cigarettes not only don't cause lung cancer, they're full of vitamin C and keep you from having colds.”

“Are you implying-”

“Thirty-two at Chernobyl we can verify. Hell, maybe it is only thirty-two. We've got photos taken by American doctors which suggest there must be well over two hundred already, but say thirty-two. It doesn't change what we've learned about high-rad exposure. The deaths don't all come at once. That's what's so deceiving. The deaths come in three waves. First, the people who get fried in the accident. Second, the leukemia victims, mostly kids. Third, the most lethal wave: cancer in adults forty and over. So much cancer you might as well go on and call it a plague. Bone cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, and melanoma-skin cancer, in other words-are the most common. But you also got your intestinal cancer, your bladder cancer, your brain tumors, your-”

“Stop, can't you please stop?” Ted's wife cried. Hysteria lent her voice a surprising power.

“I would if I could, dear,” he said gently. “I can't. In 1964 the AEC commissioned a study on a worst-case scenario if an American reactor one-fifth the size of Chernobyl blew. The results were so scary the AEC buried the report. It suggested-”

“Shut up, Gardener,” Patty said loudly. “You're drunk.”

He ignored her, fixing his eyes on the power-man's wife. “It suggested that such an accident in a relatively rural area of the USA-the one they picked was midstate Pennsylvania, where Three-Mile Island is, by the way-would kill 45,000 folks, rad seventy per cent of the state and do seventeen million dollars” worth of damage.”

“Holy fuck!” someone cried. “Are you shitting?”

“Nope,” Gardener said, never taking his eyes from the woman, who now seemed hypnotized with terror. “If you multiply by five, you get 225,000 dead and eighty-five million dollars” worth of damage.” He refilled his glass nonchalantly in the silent grave of the room, tipped it at Arberg, and drank two mouthfuls of straight vodka. Uncontaminated vodka, one hoped. “So!” he finished. “We're talking almost a quarter of a million people dead by the time the third wave dissipates, around 2040.” He winked at Ted the Power Man, whose lips had pulled back from his teeth. “Be hard to get that many people even on a 767, wouldn't it?”

“Those figures came directly out of your butt,” Ted the Power Man said angrily.

“Ted-” the man's wife said nervously. She had gone dead pale except for tiny spots of red burning high up on her cheekbones.

“You expect me to stand here and listen to that… that party-line rhetoric?” he asked, approaching Gardener until they were almost chest to chest. “Do you?”

“At Chernobyl they killed the kids,” Gardener said. “Don't you understand that? The ones ten years old, the ones in utero. Most may still be alive, but they are dying right now while we stand here with our drinks in our hands. Some can't even read yet. Most will never kiss a girl in passion. Right now while we're standing here with our drinks in our hands.

“They killed their children.”

He looked at Ted's wife, and now his voice began to shake and to rise slightly, as if in a plea.

“We know from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, from our own tests at Trinity and on Bikini. They killed their own children, do you dig what I'm saying? There are nine-year-olds in Pripyat who are going to die shitting out their own intestines! They killed the children!”

Ted's wife took a step back, eyes wide behind her glasses, mouth twitching.

“We'll acknowledge that Mr Gardener is a fine poet, I think,” Ted the Power Man said, putting an arm around his wife and pulling her to his side again. It was like watching a cowboy rope a calf. “He's not very well-informed about nuclear power, however. We really have no idea what may or may not have happened at Kyshtym, and the Russian figures on the Chernobyl casualties are-”

“Cut the shit,” Gardener said. “You know what I'm talking about. Bay State Electric has got all this stuff in its files, along with the elevated cancer rates in the areas surrounding American nuclear-power facilities, the water contaminated by nuclear waste-the water in deep aquifers, the water people wash their clothes and their dishes and themselves in, the water they drink. You know. You and every other private, municipal, state, and federal company in America.”

“Stop it, Gardener,” McCardle warned, stepping forward. She flashed an overbrilliant smile around the group. “He's a little