The Boy Who Played with Fusion by Tom Clynes

Author:Tom Clynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Once free of his parents’ watchful eyes, Willis was like a college freshman who’d been denied candy at home gorging on Snickers bars in his dorm room. When we arrive at his house, on Albuquerque’s south side, Taylor’s belt-mounted radiation detector starts beeping furiously the moment Willis swings open the door.

“Maybe,” Willis says, “you could turn that off so you don’t drive us all crazy.”

Willis, who lives with another nuclear engineer, says break-ins are common on his block. “But I’d pity the poor guy who got in here and slipped the wrong thing into his pocket.”

As he takes us through his quack-cures collection in his dining room, he enters an ironic, wry-and-dry showman mode: Stephen Colbert meets P. T. Barnum.

“Ah, the good old days,” Willis says, picking up a postcard with a dollop of glow-in-the-dark radium paint, “when you could send loose radioactive contamination through the freaking mail!” He holds a Geiger counter up to the card. “Check it out; it’s still putting out eleven thousand CPM!” (counts per minute).

“And look at this! Back in 2004, an average Joe could buy uranium oxide from MV Laboratories in New Jersey with nary a question asked.” He hands me a sealed thirty-gram bottle of greenish-black uranium-308. “Now, forget it. Another emblem of American freedom eroded by the drumbeat of irrational fear . . .

“Fortunately, we can all still own some antimatter,” he says, grabbing a shaker of potassium chloride salt substitute. His detector clicks as he explains that potassium-40 has a positron decay channel; when an emitted positron and an electron collide, they annihilate to produce two photons.

We follow Willis into his bedroom, where his fusor rests next to a chunk of bomb slag from the Trinity nuclear test and dozens of other gadgets and artifacts.

Tiffany looks worried. “Carl,” she says, “I’m a little concerned about you sleeping with this stuff.”

“It’s all about acceptable risk,” Willis says. “Different people would put it in a different place.” He looks around the room, spots one of his prizes—a still-functional antique portable x-ray chamber—and snatches it up. “And now,” he says, dashing back toward the living room, “how about a classic physics demonstration of the penetrating quality of x-rays!”

Willis and Taylor decide that the coolest handy item to x-ray is a boxed set of socket wrenches. It’s interesting to see the tools inside in real time on the screen, but without any shielding I’m starting to wish I’d worn my lead-lined boxer shorts. I begin backing away, as does Tiffany; she discreetly grabs the collar of Taylor’s shirt and pulls him along with us.

“Uh, maybe just a few seconds is enough, Carl,” Taylor says. Willis nods and flips the machine’s switch off.

“It kind of scares me being in Carl’s house,” Tiffany says as we drive back to our downtown hotel.

“You have to admit I’m better than Carl about that stuff,” Taylor says.

“You’re not sleeping with it,” Tiffany says.

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