Emert took a long breath and blew it out. It was the sound of deep relief.
“Dr. Brockton,” Sorensen said, “you and Ms. Lovelady may have gotten somewhere around 40 rads. More than we’d like, but also no symptoms, probably.” He looked at Miranda. “But I’m somewhat concerned about local injury to your fingertips.” He glanced down at Miranda’s notes. “You say you touched the source for only a few seconds?” She nodded. “That’s good, but at the surface, a hundred-curie source of iridium-192 is putting out over a hundred thousand rads a minute. If you got a couple thousand rads of exposure to your fingers, you’re likely to have some blistering, maybe even some necrosis.”
“You mean I might lose my fingers?”
“I doubt it, but it’s possible,” he said. “We’ll hope it’s just a bit of blistering at the fingertips, and hope it heals.” Miranda looked shaken, but she nodded with remarkable composure.
“Dr. Garcia,” said Sorensen, “I’m most concerned about you. You say the pellet was resting in your left palm for about thirty seconds, and between your right thumb and forefinger for fifteen to twenty seconds?”
“That’s just a guess,” said Garcia, “but I had no reason to think I needed to hurry as I was looking at it.”
“Of course not,” said Sorensen. “But I’m afraid you’re likely to have some localized damage to your hands.”
“Sounds like it,” said Garcia. “If I followed what you said to Miranda, and my math’s right, we’re talking, what, tens or even hundreds of thousands of rads to my hands?”
“Could be,” conceded Sorensen. “There’s some risk to your eyes as well. The lens of the eye is very sensitive to ionizing radiation, and if you were looking at the pellet at close range, you could develop cataracts within the next several years.”
“Maimed and blind,” said Garcia. “It just keeps getting better. What’s next? Things come in threes, right?”
“I’m afraid so. You’ve also got a higher whole-body dose, because of those additional hours in the morgue.”
“How much higher?”
Sorensen hesitated. Not a good sign. “Your exposure could be somewhere in the range of four to five hundred rads.”
“And what’s the prognosis for someone who’s been exposed to five hundred rads?”
Sorensen hesitated again. Another bad sign. “That’s getting up around the LD-50,” he said.
I heard Miranda draw a sharp breath.
“Excuse me,” said Emert. “What’s LD-50?”
Garcia answered before Sorensen could. “The 50 means fifty percent,” he said softly. “The LD means ‘lethal dose.’ What Dr. Sorensen is saying, very tactfully, is that first I probably lose my hands, and then God tosses a coin to see whether I live or die.”
Then he looked up at Miranda and me. “Would you two do me a favor? Would you please go to my house and tell Carmen what’s happened? I’ll call and tell her I’ve gotten delayed, but I don’t want her to hear the details over the phone. I want someone to be with her.”
Miranda reached out and took his hand. Her face was wet with tears again, but this time there was no hiding them.
SORENSEN AND DAVIES sent Garcia straight upstairs to an inpatient room. Emert, who lived in Oak Ridge, arranged to have his blood drawn at the hospital there so he didn’t have to come back to Knoxville in the middle of the night. Miranda and I were free to go, though we had strict orders to return at 6 A.M. for our twelve-hour blood sample. It was shaping up as a long, worrisome night. Before heading to Garcia’s house to talk with Carmen, we took a side trip downstairs to the Forensic Center. The DO NOT ENTER sign had been supplemented by yellow-and-black tape that read CAUTION—DO NOT ENTER, as well as a sign containing magenta wedges on a yellow background, with the words RADIATION HAZARD—KEEP OUT.
“Sounds like they mean it,” I said to Miranda.
“Probably fends off the door-to-door salesmen and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, too,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in the jest.
Just then Duane Johnson and a moon-suited technician I didn’t know emerged from the elevator, wheeling two rectangular metal slabs about two feet high by four feet wide. The metal slabs appeared to be heavy, judging by the way the two men leaned forward to roll them. “Lead shields,” Duane panted as they passed us and headed toward the locked door of the morgue. “Want to watch?”
“I think we’ve had enough radiation fun for one day,” I said.