The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

“Are you all right, Gard? You sound real low.”
    Yeah? Well, actually, Ron, I’m way up. Up in the cyclone. Going around and around and up and down, and where it ends nobody knows.
    â€œI’m okay.”
    â€œThat’s good. One hopes you know who you have to thank for it.”
    â€œYou, maybe?”
    â€œNone other. Man, I landed on that sidewalk like a kid hitting the ground the first time he comes off the end of a slide. I can’t quite see my ass in the mirror, but that’s probably a good thing. I bet it looks like a Day-Glo Grateful Dead poster from sixty-nine. But you wanted to go back in and talk about how all the kids around Chernobyl were gonna be dead of leukemia in five years. You wanted to talk about how some guys almost blew upArkansas looking for faulty wiring with a candle in a nuclear-power plant. You said they caught the place on fire. Me, I’d bet my watch—and it’s a Rolex—that they were Snopeses from Em-Eye-Double-Ess-Eye-Pee-Pee-Eye. Only way I could get you into a cab was by telling you we’d come back later and bust heads. I sweet-talked you up to your room and started the tub for you. You said you were all right. You said you were going to take a bath and then call some guy named Bobby.”
    â€œThe guy’s a girl,” Gardener said absently. He was rubbing at his right temple with his free hand.
    â€œGood-looking?”
    â€œPretty. No knockout.” An errant thought, nonsensical but perfectly concrete— Bobbi’s in trouble —kicked across his mind the way an errant billiard ball will roll across the clean green felt of a pool table. Then it was gone.
3
    He walked slowly over to a chair and sat down, now massaging both temples. The nukes. Of course it had been the nukes. What else? If it wasn’t Chernobyl it was Seabrook, and if it wasn’t Seabrook it was Three-Mile Island and if it wasn’t Three-Mile Island it was Maine Yankee in Wiscasset or what could have happened at the Hanford Plant in Washington State if someone hadn’t happened to notice, just in the nick of time, that their used core-rods, stored in an unlined ditch outside, were getting ready to blow sky-high.
    How many nicks of time could there be?
    Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until some twenty-fifth-century archaeologist dug up a load of this shit! You tried to tell people the whole thing was a lie, nothing but a baldfaced naked lie, that nuclear-generated power was eventually going to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile and unlivable. What you got back was a blank stare. You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out the liars said: Oh jeez, I forgot,sorry—and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave. You couldn’t believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P. T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers. They looked you square in the face when you tried to tell them the truth and informed you that you were full of shit, the American government didn’t tell lies, not telling lies was what made America great, Oh dear Father, here’s the facts, I did it with my little ax, I can’t keep silent for it was I, and come what may, I cannot tell a lie. When you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language. It had been eight years since he had almost killed his wife, and three since he and Bobbi had been arrested at Seabrook, Bobbi on the general charge of illegal demonstration, Gard on a much more specific one—possession of a concealed and unlicensed handgun. The others paid a fine and got out. Gardener did two months. His