The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [43]
Desire came over Otis with surprising force. He really, really, really wanted to tell Rusty what he was doing in the shed, exactly what he was making, how much work it had been, how difficult it was to do it, and how much acclaim he was going to get for making it. The closer he got to being finished, the harder it was, he’d discovered, to keep his mouth shut. And the fact that she was reading Radioactive Man—that had to be a sign! “I’m building a model breeder reactor in my shed,” he blurted out.
Rusty looked at him and waited.
“It’s a source of nuclear power,” Otis said, and then he explained it to her using a metaphor he’d read somewhere: a breeder reactor is a power source that never needs new fuel once successfully up and running. Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty, your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A breeder reactor not only generates electricity but also produces new fuel. There was no way he could possibly assemble the thirty pounds of uranium needed to make a true breeder reactor, he explained to Rusty, but he figured he could make a smaller one, a model, the size of a shoebox, that would perform like the real one.
“But why?” Rusty asked him, and she seemed genuinely interested, but he’d been fooled before. “Why do you want to make one?”
Otis told her how his granddad, after he’d moved in with them, gave him a book called Atoms to Electricity that was about nuclear power. In the book was a detailed diagram of a breeder reactor. Once he saw that drawing, almost a blueprint, he was hooked. Otis had never doubted that he had the persistence and focus and intelligence to make a reactor. Asperger’s was good for something. And the fact that nobody had successfully made a safe one yet spurred him on. “Teams of scientists had been experimenting with breeder reactors under top-secret circumstances in well-equipped labs,” he told Rusty, “but the government—well, Jimmy Carter—outlawed them in 1977 because one of the by-products is plutonium, which is used in nuclear bombs. So no one is officially making them anymore. But I’m going to show everyone that I can make one at home, using everyday stuff I put together on my own. I’ve already made the neutron gun. Radium is the most effective fuel for the gun. The best source of radium is old clocks, clocks made in the twenties and thirties. Last week I found three in an antique mall out on I-10. I got five total, but that’s not nearly enough.”
Rusty was playing with something hanging from a cord around her neck, a multicolored drawstring bag like the medicine bags worn by Native Americans. “In other words,” she said, “you’re going to blow us all to kingdom come.”
“No,” Otis began, but Jabba interrupted him, calling from the next room in her piercing voice.
“Rustifer! What you doing in there?”
“Going wee wee on the furniture, Granny!”
“Come help me sort these clothes!” Jabba yelled.
“Hold on a minute,” Rusty yelled back. She unfolded herself from the old yellow chair—it did look like she’d gone wee wee on it—and stood up, a graceful fairy creature from the dark side, and beckoned to Otis. “There’s a big ugly clock over here somewhere,” she said, leading the way to the back of the room, winding between tables and chairs. In a dim corner, on a little kid’s dresser shellacked with frolicking