As the four of us debated matters of minutes, Garcia winced and hastily excused himself. Miranda watched him hurry to a restroom, then looked at me. “I’m worried about Eddie,” she said. “This doesn’t look good. But I don’t understand why his symptoms would be so much worse than anyone else’s. The rest of us were around the body the day it was recovered, and he wasn’t.”
“Maybe it’s just the stress,” I said, but it rang false in my ears even as I said it. Suddenly it hit me. “Dammit,” I said. “The autopsy.”
“But we were there, too,” she said. “Sure, he was closer to Novak, but not that much closer.”
“Not Novak’s autopsy,” I said. “The one Eddie was doing the day we brought Novak in to thaw. Remember? We parked the gurney at the other sink, right behind Eddie. He was two feet away for hours.”
Miranda clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh God,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that. He did two that day. And another one the next morning, before Novak’s. Oh, this is bad, Dr. B. Very, very bad.” Her chin began to quiver, and her eyes brimmed with tears.
I glanced at the two doctors and saw them huddled with the nurse named Darcy. She nodded, then disappeared behind a curtain. A moment later she reappeared, wheeling a stand with an IV bag attached. Behind the door of the restroom, a toilet flushed with a roar. Miranda wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and sniffed quickly. She picked up her pen and notepad again just as Garcia opened the restroom door and walked weakly toward us.
I looked at Garcia with sympathy. “Hurling again?”
He shook his head. “Other end,” he grimaced.
Miranda’s eyes darted from Garcia to me at the news of this additional symptom. Sorensen and Davies walked toward us. “Dr. Garcia, we’d like to go ahead and put you on an IV,” Davies said, “since you’re losing fluids.” Garcia nodded; as a physician, he had probably known they’d want to do this. “We’d also like to go ahead and admit you for observation.” If Garcia had seen this one coming, it didn’t show: the look on his face when Sorensen said this was somewhere between shock and despair, but he simply nodded again. We moved back into the ER’s triage area; Eddie disappeared behind a curtain long enough to change into a gown, climb into a bed, and get hooked to the IV. Then the nurse pulled back the curtain and we clustered around his bed to finish reconstructing the incident timeline.
“Eddie,” I said, “don’t forget to estimate how long you spent near Novak’s body while you were doing other autopsies.”
“I know,” he said. “I was thinking about that on the toilet a minute ago. I spent ten or twelve hours in there, two or three feet away, soaking up gamma radiation.” He stared at his notepad, but his pen didn’t move. Finally, he picked up his pen and began to write.
Once we’d tallied up our exposure times and distances, I gathered up the notepads and handed them across to Sorensen. He glanced quickly at all of them; Eddie’s was on the bottom of the stack, and Sorensen frowned when he saw the number of hours. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said. He unzipped a soft-sided computer case and took out a laptop; after a moment, he began punching in numbers. I didn’t want to hover, so I went back to the group at Garcia’s bedside.
After what might have been five minutes or five hours, Sorensen came over and pulled a chair away from the wall so he could sit facing us. “Okay, this is just ballpark,” he said, “based on the timelines you gave me. We’ll have a much clearer picture once we get another blood sample or two and graph the changes in your lymphocytes. We’re also going to use a technique developed in Oak Ridge called cytodosimetry—estimating your dose by analyzing DNA damage within your cells. So by this time tomorrow afternoon”—he checked his watch, then corrected himself—“by six-thirty tomorrow evening, we’ll be able to estimate your dose by three different methods.”
“But for now,” prompted Garcia, “what are the ballpark numbers, and what do they mean?”
Sorensen drew a breath. “Detective Emert.” Emert’s forehead creased, and he leaned forward. “It looks like you might have gotten exposed to something like twenty rads.”
“What the hell’s a rad, and how bad are twenty of ’em?”
“Well, in the course of a year, you get about one-tenth of a rad from background radiation—cosmic rays, radon gas seeping out of rocks in the ground, that sort of thing.”
“So I’ve gotten, what, two hundred years’ worth of radiation in the last four days?”
“Something like that,” said Sorensen.
“So that’s why I barfed during the autopsy? Do I need an IV, too?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Twenty rads isn’t something I’d recommend you get again, but it helps that your exposure came at intervals, rather than continuously. I’ve seen a lot of cases, and I’ve never seen anyone with symptoms of ARS at this low a dose. I suspect you vomited during the autopsy because it was an autopsy.”