I had just begun to study a large, mercury-filled metal tank — the mercury served as an immense catcher’s mitt, apparently, to stop the neutron beam after it had passed through its experimental target — when Thornton tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m done,” he said. “You ready, or did you want to study up some more?”
“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in neutrons.”
As we walked out of the building, Thornton said, “I wanted to talk to this guy to get more background on the iridium sources for radiographic cameras — who makes those sources, and how, and where.”
“And could he? Did he?”
“He could,” he said. “He did.”
“And?”
“For years, the only U.S. source of iridium-192 was the High-Flux Isotope Reactor, right here in Oak Ridge.”
“But now there are other U.S. sources?”
“No. Now not even HFIR’s making it. Too expensive. Now it’s imported from reactors in Belgium and the Netherlands and South Africa.”
“It’s cheaper to make it overseas and ship it in?”
“I guess so,” he said. “Maybe those governments subsidize the isotope reactors better, or maybe safety standards are lower or labor’s cheaper. Anyhow, that complicates our efforts to pin down where this came from.”
“Damn,” I said. “If this stuff has a half-life of only seventy-four days, how’s there time to ship it halfway around the world?”
He shrugged. “They ship sushi from Tokyo to New York, and sushi has a lot shorter half-life than this stuff. It’s just a matter of figuring out a fast, reliable delivery system. Hell, iridium-192 can be air-expressed on DHL or FedEx if the shipment’s not huge and the container’s approved.”
I almost wished he hadn’t told me that. I wasn’t sure I’d look at those delivery trucks in quite the same way ever again.
CHAPTER 26
“Where do you want to have dinner?”
The question caught me by surprise. “Excuse me?” I pulled the cell phone slightly away from my ear and glanced at the display, hoping for quick enlightenment. I didn’t recognize the number, but I did recognize the 482 as an Oak Ridge number. “Oh,” I said, a smile breaking across my face. “I think you should be the one to choose. Since I gather you’ve hit the jackpot. Or found the barn.”
“Maybe,” said Isabella, the librarian. “If I’m wrong, I’ll pay you back. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“Then pick a good restaurant,” I said. “The best in Oak Ridge.”
“The best in Oak Ridge? That’s easy.”
Ninety minutes later, I parked my truck in the lot beside Wildcat Stadium, the high school football field in Oak Ridge, and one of the city’s earliest landmarks. Although the original high school had long since been demolished — replaced by a sprawling, modern complex two miles away, right across the Turnpike from Isabella’s library — the stadium had never been replaced. Tucked into a natural hollow in the side of Black Oak Ridge, the stadium — home to quite a few championship football teams over the years — felt like small-town Americana. From where I parked, I could see the stadium, Chapel on the Hill, and the Alexander Inn. Clustered so close together, they seemed an architectural trinity of sorts, embodying human play, spiritual sanctuary, a scientific crossroads. Such a small town; such a big legacy.
Crossing Broadway, the two-block street that separated the football field from Jackson Square, I strolled beneath a sidewalk awning and stepped into the finest restaurant in Oak Ridge, and one of the finest in East Tennessee: Big Ed’s Pizza.
Big Ed’s was the creation of Ed Neusel, and the nickname was actually an understatement. Big Ed was a mountain of a man, as anyone who’d seen him perched on the bar stool at the back of the pizzeria could attest. Big Ed had long since gone to that great pizza kitchen in the sky, but his legacy and his likeness lived on. The restaurant’s glass front window featured a larger-than-life caricature of Big Ed’s face. T-shirts featuring the same likeness — and the quote I MAKE MY OWN DOUGH — were considered must-have souvenirs by tourists savvy enough to appreciate Oak Ridge’s contributions to history and cuisine.
The kitchen was open, and ran most of the length of the deep, narrow restaurant. Behind the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area, eight or ten high school kids — all wearing Big Ed’s T-shirts — hustled beneath fluorescent lights, twirling disks of dough, dealing out toppings, shuttling pies in and out of a wallful of ovens. During his lifetime, Ed Neusel had always been quick to give a kid a job, and I was pleased to see that his policy, like his pizza, had survived his passing.
The dining area was dark as a cave — black ceiling, dark hardwood floor, dingy walls, dim lights. That was probably for the best. I felt my foot slip slightly, on grease or tomato sauce or a mix of the two, until its skid was halted by a sticky patch of drying beer or soda. There was probably a health inspector’s rating posted on a wall somewhere in here, but I didn’t want to see it.
I scanned the dim interior for Isabella. I didn’t see her. For that matter, although the place was full, I didn’t see much of anybody — not well enough to discern identifying facial features, at least. The place could have been packed with Anthropology Department faculty and graduate students, and I wouldn’t have been able to recognize any of them.
At my back, I felt a blast of cold air as the door to the street opened. “Hi.” I heard her voice at my elbow again. She had a way of sneaking up on me that I was starting to like. “We had an after-hours staff meeting that ran long. Somebody’s been cutting the racy paintings out of the art books, and we’re trying to figure out how to catch them.”
“Art thieves in the Oak Ridge library,” I said. “Who’d’ve guessed? Is nothing sacred anymore?”
“Maybe theft; maybe censorship,” she said. “Hard to tell. Either way, it’s bad for the books. Shall we sit?” She nodded at a booth tucked into a narrow alcove just inside the door, and we slid onto facing benches. Some of the fluorescent light from the kitchen spilled into the booth — not so good for the appetite, but better for watching as she talked. She handed me a menu — a simple card listing sizes and toppings, the paper translucent with grease. “What do you like?”
“Just about everything except olives,” I said. “Pepperoni, sausage, ham — any of those. What about you?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said. “How about we order two? One for you, one for me?”
One of the high schoolers, a lanky redhead sporting torn jeans and red Converse high-tops with his T-shirt, came to take our order. Isabella pointed him to me, so I ordered a Coke and a small Hawaiian pizza, with ham and pineapple and onion. She made a face, then ordered a beer and a veggie special for herself. The kid jotted it down and turned to go, then turned back. “The veggie — also small?”
“Actually, no,” she said. “Make mine a large.”
r /> I laughed. “Aren’t you a dainty thing?”
“Hey, you’re buying. And I want leftovers.”
I called our server back a second time and changed my order to large as well.
“So,” I said to her, “you got something for me that’s worth a large veggie special and a beer?”
“If you don’t think so,” she said, “we’ll split the tab.”
She tugged a handful of napkins from the dispenser huddled against the wall — they were small, flimsy napkins, better suited to dabbing a crumb of crumpet off a powdered cheek than to soaking up grease and sauce — and swabbed the table with them. Then she reached into a shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine whose cover proclaimed it to be the ORNL Review. I’d seen an issue or two of it; it was published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it contained a mix of articles — some breezy, others way over my head, technically — that summed up what a billion dollars a year would buy these days, in the science-and-energy department. Your tax dollars at work, I always thought when I ran across the magazine. Better in Oak Ridge, and better in the cause of science, than in a lot of other places and ways I could think of.
She opened the magazine, and I saw a print of the Novak photo tucked into the pages. She rotated the magazine and the photo toward me, keeping the photo positioned over the one page of the spread — keeping me in suspense, I guessed. That was okay with me; I was enjoying this. It felt like a dance — the closest thing to dancing I’d done since Jess, whom I’d loved and lost less than a year before.
“So this, obviously, is your picture,” she was saying. “Not a lot to go on. Woods and a hillside and a barn. Doesn’t narrow things down a lot here in East Tennessee.” I shook my head sorrowfully, signaling that I knew the cause was hopeless — that it would take a miracle or a genius, or both, to solve this enigmatic puzzle. “I’ll pretend not to notice that you’re mocking me,” she said. I laughed, and so did she. “Anyway. I kept looking at this after you left, and thinking I’d seen that barn before. Of course, anytime you stare at something long enough, your mind plays tricks on you, right?” I nodded, not teasing this time, because I realized I’d been staring at her, and my mind was playing some tricks on me at this very moment. “So. I have some regulars — patrons who like to hang out in the Oak Ridge Room. Old-timers, mostly, people who lived through the stuff that’s archived on the shelves. It’s an easy trip down Memory Lane.”