Flatlander - Larry Niven [141]
But decontamination, washing the radiation off something you want to live with afterward, is something else again. Only fission and fusion power plants would have decontamination facilities.
So far so good. But Helios Power One used He3 fusion.
There’s He3 all over the moon, absorbed onto the rocks. The helium-three nucleus includes two protons and a neutron. It fuses nicely with simple deuterium—which has to be imported—giving He4 and hydrogen and energy, but only at ungodly temperatures. The wonderful thing about He3 fusion is that it doesn’t spit out neutrons. It’s not radioactive.
Why would Helios Power One have decontamination rooms? It was another intelligence test, and I hadn’t solved it yet. I could ask Hecate … eventually.
I have used decontamination procedures to get evidence off a corpse. At Helios Power One they were far more elaborate. There were rad counters everywhere. Still in my suit, I went through a magnetic tunnel, then air jets. I crawled out of my suit directly into a zippered bag. The suit went somewhere else. Instruments sniffed me. Ten showerheads gave me the first decent shower I’d had since leaving Earth.
Then on to a row of six giant coffins. They were Rydeen MedTek autodocs, built long for lunie height, and I wondered: Why so many? They didn’t look used. That was a relief. I lay down in the first and went to sleep.
I woke feeling sluggish and blurred.
Two hours had passed. I’d picked up less than two hundred millirem, but a red blinker on the readout was telling me to drink plenty of liquids and be back in the ‘doc in twenty hours. I could picture Rydeen MedTek’s funny molecules cruising my arteries, picking up stray radioactive particles, running my kidneys and urogenital system up to warp speed, shutting down half-dead cells that might turn cancerous. Clogging my circulation.
I used a phone to track Hecate Bauer-Stanson to the director’s office.
She stood and turned as I came in, graceful as hell. When I try that, my feet always leave the floor. “Nunnally, this is Ubersleuth Gil Hamilton of the Amalgamated Regional Militia on Earth. Gil, Nunnally Sterne’s the duty officer.”
Sterne was a lunie, long-headed, very dark. When he stood to shake hands, he looked eight feet tall, and maybe he was. “You’ve done us a great favor, Hamilton,” he said. “We didn’t like having the waldo tugs shut down. I’m sure Mr. Hodder will want to thank you in person.”
“Hodder is—?”
“Everett Hodder is the director. He’s home now.”
“Is it still nighttime?”
Sterne smiled. “Past noon, officially.”
I asked, “Sterne, what do you want with radioactive sludge?”
I’d heard that sigh everywhere on the moon. Flatlander Talk slow. Sterne said, “This isn’t exactly a secret. It just wouldn’t exactly be popular. The justification for these generators, on Earth and anywhere else, is that helium-three fusion isn’t radioactive.”
“Uh huh.”
“The flatlanders started lobbing these packages into Del Rey in … early last century. They—”
“Boeing Corporation, USA, 2003 A.D.,” I said. “Supposed to be 2001, but there was some kind of legal bickering. Makes it easy to remember.”
“R-right. They kept it up for nearly fifty years. At the end the targeting was more accurate, and that’s when they used the packages to paint that VERBOTEN sign across the crater. You must have—”
“We saw it.”
“It could just as easily have been COCA-COLA. Well, deuterium-tritium fusion was better than fission, but it wasn’t much cleaner. But when we finally got the helium-three plants going, it all turned around.
“We ship He3 to Earth by the ton. When we had enough money, we built four He3 plants on the moon, too. Del Rey Crater was out of business. And that held for another fifty years.”
“Sure.”
“What’s finally knocked the bottom out is this new solar electric paint. Black Power, they call it. It turns sunlight into electricity, just like any solar power converter, but you spray it on. Place your cables and