Count Geiger's Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

there—only to be run off by a guard and his own needless guilt. The cuts that had seemed so bad last night looked, now, like ordinary scratches. Perhaps he had gotten them hiking between the mill and this spring.
    Light began to fill the Phosphor Fogs. Xavier had no desire to swim again. People would soon be along, tourists or a forest ranger or some local hillbillies or—if he hadn’t dreamed the whole episode—a few inquisitive power-plant guards.
    “ Light am I: ah, that I were night! But it is my lonesomeness to be begirt with light! ” (Nietzsche again.) Last night, Nietzsche had smiled down from the moon, but now he was lost in sunlight, and these words from “The Night-Song” seemed to be advising Xavier to run to darkness again.
    He gathered up his gear and drove nonstop, in less than two hours, from the mountains of north Oconee to his high rise in Salonika. Then he sat in a wing chair, curtains drawn, listening repeatedly to a recording of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 in E Minor .

4
Consolidated Tri-State Meets the Press
    “The pretty guys from the networks will be down here en masse,” Walt Grantham was saying when Xavier entered the dayroom. “And Consolidated Tri-State’s doing its utmost to stonewall every body.”
    A tight chaos seethed from floor to floor through the Ralph McGill Building. Telephones rang, reporters zigzagged between desks, a TV monitor on a support column sustained a small crowd of journalists with no direct involvement in the story that had just broken.
    “What’s going on?”
    “Later,” Walt Grantham said. “Glad you’re back—but later, Xavier, later.”
    Lee Stamz grabbed Xavier and maneuvered him into a partitioned area given over to the staffs of the Entertainment and the Fine Art divisions of the Urbanite . Stamz was a black man in his late forties who’d played middle linebacker on the last Oconee State University football team to win the national championship. It was impossible to resist him when he leaned you the direction he wanted you to go.
    Stamz had an irresistible transitive lean . Bodyguards, bouncers, Secret Service men, and professional boxers would have paid small fortunes to attend a seminar on how to grow a lean as authoritative as the former All-American’s.
    “You really don’t know?” Stamz said, leaning Xavier into a swivel chair.
    “Con-Tri’s just had its own Chernobyl?”
    “It ain’t that bad.”
    “Three Mile Island, then?”
    “Despite the hoohah here, it don’t seem to me even a patch on that one. Hard to say, though. Con-Tri’s bigwigs are trying to contain things—more than the hot stuff from an auxiliary cooling tank that’s overflowed.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “A stranger in Placer County says yesterday morning, but she didn’t pick up on it until late yesterday evening. Grantham didn’t find out about it until she phoned him around four A.M. The dinks at WSSX learned of it before we did and sent a van to Placer Creek around one. If you’d been awake, you could’ve watched their live on-site ex-po- zay just when Grantham was finding out we’d been scooped by the vacuum tubes.”
    Over the day, it became clear that an accident had occurred at Plant VanMeter. At a news conference telecast live at 6:30 P.M., officials of Consolidated Tri-State admitted it, but said operator error had had nothing to do with the release of an “acceptable level” of radionuclides from Reactor No. 4. The failure had been a relief valve’s in the core-cooling system, but neither negligence nor faulty maintenance had led to the accident.
    Well, what had? everyone demanded.
    The engineer who’d supervised the construction of the reactors explained that the valve in question—yes, the physical valve—had given way of its own accord, cracking in spite of its alleged invulnerability to such behavior, because some cases of metal fatigue were altogether unpredictable. This explanation made no one happy, least of all the