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

say atomic fallout shelters.” He grinned as if it would never happen.
    Benny nodded in a friendly manner. “Mighty big project. It’s gonna be great.”
    “You one of the architects?”
    “No-o. Just one of the alumni from here.” Benny cast his gaze toward the distant campus on his left as if he loved it. Then, with a good-bye wave to the workman, he went back to his taxi, and returned to the airport.
    A month or so later, when Benny thought his ulcer had all but vanished, Love Canal kicked up again. The Environmental Watch Agency reported “unexpected leakage of chemical waste” from upstream in Love Canal at the city of Niagara Falls, and Benny received a personal letter from some hothead in Washington, DC named Robert V. Clarke, who wrote like a zealot trying to climb the ladder of promotion. Benny would have been willing to bet that Clarke would be bounced off the bottom rung of the ladder very soon, but the letter had been signed also by one of the higher-ups at EWA, because the Love Canal mess contained nuclear wastes as well as “chemical wastes,” a term often used to cover radioactive wastes if a report didn’t want to admit outright to radioactivity. The higher-up’s signature meant that the NCC had to do something. Some men from the NCC had gone up to examine the Love Canal air and water a year or so ago, had stayed for lunch, Benny recalled, and had okayed what they had seen and analyzed: the area was more than safe for human habitation again. Hundreds of families had been evacuated from the area in 1980, when a federal emergency had been declared due to wastes dumped during the 1940s and 1950s. Now Benny’s discouraged brain produced, as its first thought: here goes a lot of money if the NCC and the EWA have to launch a new cleanup program, with more tests to justify a cleanup, and so on. Bloody, effing mess! The only thing good about the letter was the last paragraph which said the “total review” by the EWA would not be ready before sixteen months from now. But meanwhile the NCC’s co-operation and attention was requested. Love Canal, Benny knew, had been taking in thousands of dollars per month as a tourist attraction. Lots of motels, restaurants and foodshops and filling stations were there now and hadn’t been there before the hoo-hah. Couldn’t the EWA let well enough alone? Benny swallowed a little white pill for his ulcer, just in case. At least the owners of the motels and restaurants weren’t going to complain about the latest bad news!
    Benny composed and dictated a letter into a machine for his secretary. He said that the unexpected leakage at Love Canal must be due to upstream plants disobeying laws laid down by the NCC and the EWA when his committee headed by Mr. So-and-so on such and such a date had visited Love Canal and pronounced the waters free of dangerous pollution. Benny omitted saying that most of the NCC information had come from the owners of a nuclear plant in the area, whose own chemists had made the tests.
    Lies, lies, lies! Everyone lied. That was the way Benny justified his lies (which were often merely slantings of facts) to himself. What did trouble him was that he might not lie enough or in the right way to suit Washington, and that some eager beaver, or numbskull, or stooge might raise a stink that would cost Benny his job. Washington always thought it looked good, in case of a scandal or a balls-up somewhere, to replace the head of a regulatory committee. It cooled the public down for a while.
    Meanwhile the Three Mile Island cleanup program officially continued, though in truth nothing had moved since the entry of the four men in space suits several months ago. The man who had collapsed on that occasion had been called, by the owners of the plant, a “heat stress” victim, and they also said that the millirems he had received were about 75, or “the equivalent of 2½ chest X-rays.” The other three men had picked up just 190 rems each. The rem (short