Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

before the era of petroleum products, sank slowly down, and the human eyes left to see it were not looking.

Operation Balsam; or Touch-Me-Not
     
    Three Mile Island had been a catastrophe, a nearly fatal setback, no doubt about that and no use mincing words. It had alerted the American people not only to the fact that nuclear power plants could break down and release radioactive gases into the atmosphere, but also to the fact that government nuclear control authorities gave out lies to the public.
    “Nothing to worry about, folks. Everything’s under control,” TV and radio had said during the first anxious days, and for weeks afterward too. What American in the country at the time could forget or forgive that? Or the fact that four years later cleanup men could still not enter the chamber where the damaged core was? And that when four men, dressed as if for a moon-walk, did enter the chamber, one collapsed after a few minutes, gripped his head and said he felt awful? Only one sample of nuclear waste, not the desired four, had been snatched from the floor in this costly endeavor.
    The fact was that Three Mile Island wasn’t cleaned up yet. The fact was the plant owners and regulatory committees were sick of it, and wished it would disappear. But there the towers stood, one of them hopelessly out of commission and even inaccessible.
    As if that weren’t bad enough for the Nuclear Control Commission, the public had focused its attention on their bureau. The NCC had also lied. No longer could nuclear plants sneak huge trucks by dead of night to garbage dumps in other states, and get back home unnoticed. The trucks might bear a logo of Tidy-Baby Paper Products or Frozen Fish Straight to Your Table, the little old ladies in small towns were looking out of their windows. What were those enormous trucks doing at 3 in the morning creeping through their tiny town? The little old ladies and the Boy Scouts wrote letters to their local papers, and things went on from there to the NCC. The NCC had been caught out a few times and reproached by Washington for permitting dumping too close to inhabited areas.
    For Benjamin M. Jackson, head of the NCC, existence had become a tightening vice. For the past year, he had had an ulcer which he was only half nursing, because he would not, could not give up his brace of Scotches at the end of the day (if his day had an end) which he felt he had earned and merited. And he could not stop worrying about his job which was damned well-paid and which he didn’t want to lose by reminding Washington too often that there simply weren’t enough places that he and his staff could okay as dumps for the goddam radioactive crap.
    The seas were out of the question, because departing cargoes were too well inspected in case sensitive items got to Russia. Forests had government patrols pretty thick on the ground. One man in the Environmental Watch Agency would have given Benny Jackson the nod for a dumping in Oregon State Park, but he had never been able to guarantee passage through specific patrols at the park, even though Benny had promised to see that the stuff was buried.
    Benny was on paper and by oath pledged to guard against careless disposal of nuclear waste, but in fact his job had almost at once turned into one of finding by hook or by crook any place at all where waste could be got rid of. In one of his dreams, Benny had seen himself assigning each man on his Commission—and there were a hundred and thirty-seven—a container of nuclear plant waste to take home every evening and flush down the toilet, but unfortunately radioactive stuff couldn’t be handled like that. The public’s opinion of nuclear power plants and respect for their efficiency was low and sinking daily. New plants could not easily be built now, because of the intensity of local protests.
    Then some genius in Washington, whose name Benny never learned, maybe because it was top-secret, came up with an idea: Washington would donate