Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

  “The fallout shelters’re pretty empty now, nothing much to see yet. We’re bringing in supplies, as you see.”

  To Benny Mr. Marlucci said, as they walked up a ramp, “One of the professors from the university. Now here we have a view!” With widespread arms Mr. Marlucci beheld the football field as if he would embrace it.

  A dark grey running track framed the green of the football field. Bleachers climbed up and up, empty yet poised and focused for drama.

  “Really something!” said a voice among the NCC men.

  Mr. Marlucci talked about the heating and ventilation systems, the First Aid room for players and for spectators if they needed it, and finally he suggested drinks and a snack at a nearby restaurant, if the gentlemen had time. The NCC men hadn’t. It was after 4 now, and their plane left at 6:15. The afternoon had flown.

  The limousines arrived again, congratulations, thanks and good byes were exchanged, and the cars moved off for the airport.

  Benny Jackson sat next to McWhirty on the airplane, because he wanted to hear McWhirty’s impressions while they were still fresh.

  “We’ll look at it again in two weeks,” said McWhirty. “Take a rem check ourselves downstairs and at all the vents. Those cracks—” McWhirty gave a laugh. “Talk about a rush job! I want to speak with Doug.” He unfastened his seat belt and got up.

  Benny heard McWhirty’s voice behind him in the aisle asking,

  “Where’s Doug?”

  “Doug?” said another voice. “Maybe he went to the lav.”

  A couple of minutes later McWhirty bent over Benny with a pained expression on his face. “Doug’s not on the plane. It just occurs to me—”

  “What?” asked Benny.

  McWhirty sat down stiffly. “I didn’t see him since he went into that container room. Do you suppose he got locked in there?”

  “Christ, no!” Benny said at once, and thought back. “I didn’t see Marlucci close that door.”

  “Neither did I, but—I just checked with the fellows and nobody remembers seeing him at the airport just now. He’s back there, Benny!” With difficulty Gerry kept his voice low.

  “We’ll phone Well-Bilt as soon as we land.”

  “We could radio now. It’s a couple of hours till we land.”

  “No,” said Benny, meaning the idea of radioing from the plane and asking for a container room to be opened. “No.”

  They both ordered Scotches.

  “Doug’ll probably phone tonight from some hotel in Indianapolis,” Benny said. “Maybe he went to a toilet in that sub-basement and got lost from us.”

  It was close to 10 p.m. before they got to a telephone at the West Virginia airport. Benny was told that Frank Marlucci had left at 5:30.

  “I’d like to speak to someone in charge of the sub-basement. This is Benjamin Jackson of NCC. It’s urgent.”

  After some delay, and much offering of more coins by the NCC men who stood outside the booth, another male voice came on, and Benny again identified himself. “I and some colleagues were visiting the sub-basement today. I have reason to think one of our party may be locked in one of the container rooms. I’d like someone to take a look now.”

  A pause. “We get a lot of joke calls from the students, sir. We’ll need some more identification before we—We’re very busy here, sir. Good night.” The man hung up.

  One of the NCC men said that maybe Doug had got out, if he had ever been in, and would phone Gerry or Benny tonight, and come back on the morning plane tomorrow. Benny and Gerry agreed that they should go home, wait for a call, but also try the two Well-Bilt-Balsam numbers again tonight.

  From his own house, McWhirty telephoned Evelyn Ferguson, Doug’s wife, and told her that Doug had had to stay overnight in Indianapolis to talk some details over with construction people.

  Benny and Gerry McWhirty were stonewalled by the male voices that answered the telephones in the small hours of the night at the stadium. They didn’t know anything about a party of visitors having inspected the stadium and “the basements” in the afternoon, and “Operation Balsam” produced no glimmer of recognition. The NCC, if such they were, should get in touch with the Frank Marlucci they were asking about tomorrow, and he could verify matters and take care of their requests.

  “What on earth is the matter?” asked Benny’s wife Beatrice, coming into the living-room at 2 in the morning.

  “Doug Ferguson—as I said—he hasn’t got all the info he needs for tomorrow and I can’t find what hotel he’s at.”

  When Benny telephoned Well-Bilt at 9:30 the same morning, he learned that Mr. Marlucci was not coming to work that day. “Mr.Siegman then, please.” Benny had a short list of names of the Well-Bilt people.

  “Mr. Siegman’s in conference now, sir. Everyone’s in conference, because the press is due this afternoon to look at the stadium.”

  “Who’s in charge of the container rooms—now?” Benny asked.

  Silence. “We’ve only got a skeleton staff here, sir. No one person’s in charge.”

  “Someone like Marlucci. Look, this is urgent. I have reason to think one of our party may be locked in one of the container rooms—since yesterday and he’s got to be let out!”

  “Wh-which room, sir?”

  “Can’t tell you exactly. On the other side from where the trucks roll down. On the left side as you go along what I think is the main corridor to the other side.” Benny had the plans before him, but the passages and rooms had no numbers or letters on them. The passages radiated from the center but were crossed by circles of passages that intersected them, making the plan look rather like a spider’s web, but he thought the corridor they had been in was central, so he called it the main corridor.

  “There’s a delivery entrance for trucks both sides, sir.”

  “It’s not too much trouble for you to open those rooms and have a look, is it? It’s one of the half-full rooms. Do that and call me back, would you?” Benny made sure the man had his number correct.

  The man did not ring back.

  Doug Ferguson did not arrive on the morning plane from Indianapolis. Benny had begun chewing his minty pills, the only pain-reliever he had until he renewed his prescriptions. Gerald McWhirty was at work with a team on the NCC’s “Preliminary Report on Operation Balsam.” This was for EWA and it had to be favorable and at least sixty pages long. Marlucci had given them a sheaf of papers, which could be organized and copied. Evelyn Ferguson rang the office twice to ask if Doug were back or had communicated.

  “It’s not like him not to phone,” Evelyn said. “He can phone me at any hour day or night, and he always does.”

  “I know it’s a heavy assignment he’s got out there,” Benny said. “He probably hasn’t a minute free.”

  From 2 p.m. onward that afternoon, the two Well-Bilt numbers simply didn’t answer. Benny imagined the sub-basement, where the phones perhaps were, sealed off from the journalists, with no trucks rolling today, not a soul down there except Doug maybe, shouting unheard in a container room. Had the last man he had spoken to believed him about a man maybe locked in a container room?

  Benny Jackson and Gerry McWhirty lingered in the NCC building after everyone else had gone home. McWhirty looked haggard, and admitted that he hadn’t slept the night before. They decided to try again to reach Marlucci. Benny got busy with information on one telephone and McWhirty on another, trying to get the home number of Marlucci, who must live in the area, though it was conceivable that he had rented an apartment for the duration of the Well-Bilt job, and wouldn’t be listed yet. He’d still have a telephone, Benny reasoned. Neither Indianapolis nor any town in the area had a number for Frank Marlucci. Was that really his name, Benny wondered?

  It was Benny’s turn to have a sleepless night. Benny had said to McWhirty that he would go to the stadium on the plane tomorrow Thursday, and McWhirty had said no, he would go, because he was less conspicuous than the head of NCC. Benny now saw Doug’s incarceration as a stupid accident, indicati
ng inefficiency. That was how Washington would see it. It reflected upon Benny and the Nuclear Control Commission.

  Nevertheless, Benny picked up his telephone the first thing Thursday morning, and rang his Washington hotline, thinking himself rather noble for putting his job at risk by doing so.

  “Jackson, NCC. Is Man there?” Matt Schwartz was a man Benny often talked to, a friendly and helpful fellow, though Benny had never met him face to face. Now he was told that Man was in conference in another building and could not be reached. “This is about Operation Balsam . . . Yes . . . Specifically we have to find a certain Frank Marlucci, one of the superintendents for Well-Bilt. We have to speak with him on the phone and we can’t locate him.” Benny’s tone sounded firm, but he had faltered: he had not said straightaway that an NCC man appeared to have been locked up in a container room since Tuesday afternoon.

  “What do you want him for?” asked Washington.

  “I need to ask him something. He wasn’t at work—yesterday.” Benny had not tried this morning, he realized.

  “Call you back,” said Washington, and hung up.

  Washington was back in record time, the same male voice. “Marlucci is no longer employed by Well-Bilt, sir. No use trying to reach him.”

  “They must have his home number. I need to ask him—”

  “We know about that. The trouble.”

  Benny was surprised. “And something’s been done about it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the voice crisply.

  “This has to do with Douglas Ferguson of NCC. You mean he’s all right?”

  “All right? What’s the matter with him?”

  “Wh-what did you mean by ‘the trouble’ out there?”

  “Marlucci did something wrong and got fired. We don’t advise any of our people to go out there for a while. Till further notice.”

  Those were orders, Benny knew. He had just time to catch Gerry McWhirty at home and tell him not to take the morning plane. McWhirty came into the office at 11. The Well-Bilt numbers were now answering, but Benny had not been able to speak with anyone who could tell him Marlucci’s personal number, or who knew if any container rooms had been opened yesterday or today to look for a man who might have been locked in one. People simply didn’t know anything.

  “This is Jackson of NCC,” Benny repeated to one man.

  “We understand, sir. We can’t help you.”

  Once more Benny and Gerry had a faint hope that Doug might come in on the plane that arrived at 11:30. If so, he didn’t telephone, and they hadn’t the courage to phone his wife and ask if Doug had got home. Evelyn had rung once that morning to ask if NCC had any news, and Benny told his secretary to tell Mrs. Ferguson that they hadn’t heard from Doug either, but were assuming he would be back Saturday latest. Benny knew this was not going down well with Evelyn Ferguson.

  The afternoon brought a further torment. Inhabitants of the Love Canal area had organized a new campaign, and starting after lunch the NCC offices were bombarded with telephone calls and telegrams from homeowners and housewives angry at having been told they had to move out again, after having been told they could move back to their once abandoned homes and apartments. The Committee for Justice at Love Canal tied up the telephones with personal calls and telegrams being read by telegraph office operators—all the messages blaming the NCC for misinformation and lies—until Benny thought he was going mad. A bomb should hit the goddam Love Canal area and their whole effing committee too!

  On Friday Benny was informed by a female voice on his hotline from Washington that Frank Marlucci had been killed in a car accident yesterday afternoon in southern Indiana. Benny knew what had most likely happened: someone had deliberately run Marlucci off the road. Benny felt sickish, then reminded himself that he had heard about such things before, two or three times before. He knew why he was feeling sickish: Marlucci’s death confirmed Doug’s death. Benny was sick at the thought of Doug in that room half-full of containers, Doug getting weaker from thirst and hunger, from lack of air, moaning unheard, dying. Benny called McWhirty in to tell him.

  “Good Christ.” McWhirty sank into a leather chair in Benny’s office as if all his strength had gone.

  “You think maybe Marlucci tried to get him out?” Benny asked. “Or did get him out—dead?”

  “Or loaders found him and Marlucci got the blame.” McWhirty looked drugged, but was merely exhausted. “I figure Doug would’ve been dead by yesterday morning from asphyxiation.”

  There was no use in trying to figure out exactly what had happened, Benny supposed. “You think they’ll just hush it up—if they found him?”

  “Yes,” Gerry said.

  The Well-Bilt people with their machinery would know how to get rid of a body, Benny was sure. “What’ll we tell his wife?”

  McWhirty looked miserable. “We’ll have to tell her he disappeared—that he’s maybe dead. I’ll tell her. You know—our job has its hazards.”

  “We’ll make sure she gets a generous pension,” said Benny.

  McWhirty went into a daze or depression which he could not shake off, but he still came to the office. He would not take a week’s leave, even though his doctor ordered it.

  In the following week a torrent of letters and a two-day picketing of the NCC grounds—which did much damage to the pretty lawns, what with the police trying to wrestle the more unruly protesters off the premises—disturbed the whole staff of NCC, and caused them to come to work in armored cars which they crawled into at 8:30 in the morning at appointed places. The demonstrators called themselves the New CIO or Citizens in Outrage, and the nucleus of them seemed to have come from the Three Mile Island district, but they were aiming to make Outrage a nationwide movement by teaming up with militant environmentalists. The NCC came to work and departed in a shower of stones, eggs, epithets and threats.

  One day in late September, Gerald McWhirty drove his car, the older of the two he and his wife owned, over the edge of a highway into a valley and killed himself. He left no note behind. It was called an accident.

  Evelyn Ferguson, who had been drinking quite a bit since her husband’s disappearance (as it was called), was admitted to a rehabilitation center in Massachusetts at government expense. Benny wrote her cheerful postcards, when he remembered to do so.

  The NCC came up with an affirmative report on Operation Balsam for Washington, when the site got its official inspection in October. Benny was there, and saw even worse cracks in the concrete than McWhirty had, but Well-Bilt promised to repair them, so the cracks were not mentioned in the report. Still worse, a rem count taken by the NCC at various vents on the exterior of the stadium detected 210 per hour at one, 300-odd at another, and so on, with only one of the twelve vents clean. Where was the radioactive stuff coming from? Well-Bilt promised to look into it, but meanwhile said it believed that the rem discharge was not high enough to cause alarm or to do perceptible damage to human, animal or plant life in the vicinity.

  Benny had other problems now. A plutonium shipment, codenamed the Italian Shipment because it had nothing to do with Italy, out of Houston bound for South Carolina, had disappeared, and could the NCC look into this and see if a friendly country had stolen it, or what? This made at least four lost shipments on land and sea that Benny’s office was supposed to find. Benny missed Gerry McWhirty in a strange way, as if Gerry had been the voice of his conscience, which was now silenced. He missed Doug Ferguson too, but in a different way. He remembered the interesting rust-red tweed jacket that Doug had worn that last day, remembered complimenting Doug on it. Now Doug was sealed up, probably, and if so, for ever. All the container rooms had been filled and the term used by Well-Bilt was “permanently and hermetically sealed.” Benny’s ulcer was no better, but no worse either, and he had managed the inspection day at Operation Balsam quite well: he had vowed to himself not to wince, not even to think about Doug Ferguson’s corpse maybe lying behind one of those square steel doors that he walked past that day, and he had succee
ded.

  Nabuti: Warm Welcome to a UN Committee

  Nature and Lady Luck had smiled upon the broad and fertile land of Nabuti, in West Africa. Nabuti had rivers, lush plains, a seacoast of more than a thousand miles, and in the hills there was copper. For two hundred years Nabuti had been exploited by the white man, who had mined, and built roads and ports and railways to service them. Before the first half of the twentieth century was over, Nabuti had five thousand miles of paved roads, rivers had been dredged and banked for ships and boats, electricity and water systems installed, schools started. Malaria and bilharziasis had been conquered, general health much improved, and most of the many infants lived.

  Nabuti won its independence in the 1950s by merely asking for it. Independence was in the air all over Africa, like a champagne that could be inhaled. A cadre of whites stayed on for a while in Nabuti to make sure everything was functioning properly, that crews knew how to run the railroads, repair electric power plants, service machinery from tractors to bicycles, but the whites were not popular during this period. The sooner they left, the better was the idea, and the whites got the idea after being spat on in the streets a few times by idle youths, then—several of them—attacked and beaten to death. The whites left.

  There was a half-year-long party or festival then, while four or five contestants for leadership made speeches to the public, saying how they would run the country. Each of them promised a lot. They had to orate over the noise of jukeboxes and transistor radios. There was a voting of sorts, then a run-off between the two leading contestants, an argument about the vote-counting, and a husky young man in his twenties named Bomo came out the victor, because he was chief of police and the police were armed. The police, originally trained by the whites, would make a good cadre for the formation of a Nabutian army, the white administrators had said, and that is what happened. The police force became an ever-growing army, and with the millions of dollars bequeathed to Nabuti to launch it as an independent African state, and the yearly gifts and loans since, the purchase of snappy uniforms, rifles, machineguns and tanks was no problem at all. Bomo, who had never been awakened by a 6 a.m. bugle in his life, appointed himself General-in-Chief of the army, besides being President. Armed force, armed menacing was necessary, because Bomo intended to make his people work. Progress—the word to Bomo meant more comfort, higher medical standards, more exports of copper, more cars and TV sets—progress had to continue.