“Ted, did you know?” Ted's wife asked suddenly.

“Sure, I've got some stats, but-”

He broke off. His jaw snapped shut so hard you could almost hear it. It wasn't much… but it was enough. Suddenly they knew-all of them-that he had omitted a good deal of scripture from his sermon. Gardener felt a moment of sour, unexpected triumph.

There was a moment of awkward silence and then, quite deliberately, Ted's wife stepped away from him. He flushed. To Gard he looked like a man who has just whanged his thumb with a hammer.

“Oh, we have all kinds of reports,” he said. “Most are nothing but a tissue

of lies-Russian propaganda. People like this idiot are more than happy to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. For all we know, Chernobyl may have been no accident at all, but an effort to keep us from-”

“Jesus, next you'll be telling us the earth is flat,” Gardener said. “Did you see the photographs of the Army guys in radiation suits walking around a power plant half an hour's drive from Harrisburg? Do you know how they tried to plug one of the leaks there? They stuffed a basketball wrapped with friction-tape into a busted waste-pipe. It worked for a while, then the pressure spit it out and busted a hole right through the containment wall.”

“You spout some pretty goddam good propaganda.” Ted grinned savagely. “The Russians love people like you! Do they pay you, or do you do it for free?”

“Who sounds like an airport Moonie now?” Gardener asked, laughing a little. He took a step closer to Ted. “Nuclear reactors are better built than Jane Fonda, right?”

“As far as I'm concerned, that's about the size of it, yes.”

“Please,” the dean's wife said, distressed. “We may discuss, but let's not shout, please-after all, we're college people-”

“Somebody better fucking shout about it!” Gardener shouted. She recoiled, blinking, and her husband stared at Gardener with eyes as bright as chips of ice. Stared as if he were marking Gard forever. 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 the next time there's a big quake? France? Poland? Or maybe right here in Massachusetts, if this fellow here has his way and the Iroquois plant goes on-line in the spring. Just let one guy pull the wrong switch at the wrong time, and the next time the Red Sox open at Fenway will be around 2075.”

Patricia McCardle was as white as a wax candle… except for her eyes, which were spitting blue sparks that looked freshly dropped from an arcwelder. Arberg had gone the other route: he was as red and dark as the bricks of his fine-old-family Back Bay home. Mrs Ted was looking from Gardener to her husband and back again as if they were a pair of dogs that might bite. Ted saw the look; felt her trying to back out of his encircling, imprisoning arm. Gardener supposed it was her reaction to what he had been saying which provoked the final escalation. Ted had doubtless been instructed about how to handle hysterics like Gardener; the company taught their Teds to do that as routinely as the airlines taught stewardesses how to demonstrate the emergency oxygen system of the jets in which they flew.

But it was late, Gardener's drunken but eloquent rebuttal had blown up like a pocket thunderstorm… and now his wife was acting as though he might be the Butcher of Riga.

“God, I get tired of you guys and your simpering! There you were tonight, reading your incoherent poems into a microphone that runs on electricity, having your braying voice amplified by speakers that run on electricity, using electric lights to see by… where do you Luddites think that power comes from? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus!”

“It's late,” McCardle said hurriedly, “and we all