Gamma Ray Gardens

“So, you guys breed wheat here?” I said, looking out across radial rows of standing crops made golden by the afternoon sun.

The round field must have been at least a few hundred feet in diameter, and the crop extended outward and upward in tiered terraces. In the center, at the lowest point, was a bright yellow central tower with a square metal box at the top.

“Brookhaven wheat,” Wesley said, rolling a single wheat stem between his fingers. “Although, we haven’t invented yet.” He tossed the stem onto the dirt and squished it beneath the toe of his shoe like a spent cigarette. “We’ll know it when we see it.”

Wesley wore a white lab coat with an embroidered patch that read: Brookhaven Gamma Ray Gardens. Written below it was his name: Dr. Kyle Wesley. His short brown hair was parted on the side, and his face was shaved clean. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. The kid must have spent the war years in school, rather than fighting. That was one way to live.

“And this is the mechanism that needs repairing?” I said, placing a hand on the yellow wall of the central tower. I had been an airplane mechanic during the war. Now, seven years out and 35 years under my belt, I had settled into a life of building and repairing big factory machines. It kept me busy. Didn’t have a wife to do that for me.

Wesley opened a hatch door on the side of the tower to reveal a set of gears and a hefty conveyor chain. I had seen similar mechanisms in the oven conveyors of bread factories. It wasn’t unfamiliar to me.

“There’s a chain assembly that unlatches a trap door to a lead-lined chamber below ground and raises a cobalt slug to the top of the tower,” Wesley said. “It’s typically driven by an external control box outside the yard here, but we’ve released it from the main drive train. You should be able to manipulate the chain if you can dislodge it. And that’s what we need. We need you to figure out what it’s caught on. The main engine couldn’t get it to budge. After yanking on it for ten minutes with no luck, it might be under some tension at this point.”

“Alright,” I said, bending down and flipping open my toolbox. “Give me thirty minutes and I should be able to figure out whether the chain is salvageable. If there’s a kink or a break, you’ll need to extract the whole mechanism for servicing.”

“Do your best,” Wesley said. “And if you manage to liberate the chain, don’t crank the gears. We want to keep the cobalt slug within its shielded housing.”

“Is it dangerous?” I said. I didn’t know what cobalt was, other than a shade of blue. It wasn’t a standard machining material.

“Not if it stays in the ground,” Wesley said.

“Fair enough,” I said, digging into my toolbox.

“I’m sure the work is in good hands,” Wesley said, bending down to meet my eyes. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes to check-in and see how things are going. If you need me before then, I’ll be in our seed vault. It’s the concrete bunker just west of the field here. We’re currently prepping a new deep freeze technique. Every new creation that this field produces goes to the seed vault and, if we can freeze them properly, they might last well into the next century. President Truman is very excited about the prospects. He was standing in this very field no more than two weeks ago.”

It was more words than I needed to know. “Great,” I said. “I’d better get started.”

“Of course,” Wesley said. He smiled, turned, and walked away.

I looked back to see as he passed between the tall rows of wheat and out through the perimeter wall. Just beyond the wall, I could see the gray concrete bunker. It was shaped like an airplane hangar. Unlike an airplane hangar, it looked strong enough to withstand the payload from a B-29 bomber.

Those must be some valuable seeds in there, I thought.

I pulled out my locking pliers, grabbed a grease rag from my back pocket, and leaned into the open tower hatch. I wrapped the grease rag around the closest chain, clamped down with my locking pliers, and gave it a tug. There was resistance going up and resistance going down. The chain was certifiably stuck.

I left the pliers where they were, went back to the toolbox, and pulled a flashlight. Back into the hatch, I looked down to see a steel-lined well with a trap door at the bottom. The door was striped in black and yellow. I followed the path of the chain downward until it disappeared into the floor of the well beside the door.

“No visible snags here,” I said, hearing my voice echo against the walls.

I twisted my body, craned my neck, and looked upward through the top portion of the tower.

“Eureka!” I said.

No more than four or five feet up the length of the tower was the snag in the chain. It was caught on the head of a loose rivet in a thick metal plate along the tower wall. I considered pulling on the chain to free it but thought better of it. If the main engine couldn’t dislodge it, what chance did I have? I had to remind myself of the most fundamental rule of machine repair. Work smart, not hard. Leverage and angle were going to be key here.

I grabbed hold of the locking pliers still clamped down onto the chain. I pushed against the chain, angling it away from the wall, and pulled down with all the strength I could muster.

Something gave.

I felt the chain go slack, heard a rattling of gears, and pulled my head from the hatch quick enough to see the thick metal plate go flying down past the hatch door. It dropped like a lead weight and was dragging the chain with it. The gears were turning at a breakneck speed.

I heard a clanging rising up through the tower well. The rush of air coming from the hatch door opening felt like a propellor’s draft.

A platform whizzed upward past the open hatch like a dumbwaiter rocketing to the stars, straight through the tower. I could barely make out what was on it. It didn’t matter because it didn’t stay in the tower for long.

A metallic object erupted through the top of the tower and launched straight up into the sky. Its luster glinted in the sunlight until I lost it completely in the sun’s halo.

I shielded my eyes, dropped to the ground, and covered my head.

When I was 12, I took a line drive from a baseball. It buried itself into my stomach. I had a bruise for two weeks.

That’s all I could think about in the moments before I felt cold metal drill into the back of my neck and rattle my brain.

I couldn’t see, but I could hear when I came to, still dizzy. I could hear Wesley.

“We have to put him in the Brookhaven wheat chamber,” Wesley said. “It’s the only freezer that’s prepped.”

“It’s meant for seeds, not people” another man said. “He’ll die if you put him in there.”

I didn’t recognize the voice.

“He’ll die if we don’t put him in there,” Wesley said. “He had the cobalt slug resting against his head.”

“For how long?” the other man said.

“Ten minutes. Maybe twenty. I found him like that.”

“At those time frames, the damage from the radiation is already done. A deep freeze isn’t going to save him.”

“It will buy him time. That’s all he has now.”

I felt myself being lifted, then a hard metal table against my back.

I heard a door latch, then silence.

I felt the cold permeate my bones like a thousand icy blades.

Was this dying?

Why was it so cold?

I woke to the sound of gas escaping, like a pressure relief valve on full throttle. The metal table beneath me rattled along in movement before reaching a dead stop. The metal was cold, but I was warm again. I opened my eyes to bright lights.

“It’s a miracle,” a voice said.

Standing over me, as I stared up at the ceiling, was an elderly man with white hair and thick glasses. He wore a white lab coat with a plastic name badge. At the top of the badge read: Brookhaven National Laboratory. Beneath it read: Dr. Kyle Wesley.

The name was familiar.

I tried to speak, but there was phlegm in my throat. I lifted my head, coughed it up, and felt it spill out over my chin. I wiped it away with the sleeve of my shirt.

I forced myself into a sitting position and surveyed my surroundings. It looked like a morgue, and not a good one. The wall behind me was lined with square-shaped, latched metal doors, three rows tall and about ten across. Each door was no more than two feet tall and three feet wide. It was the same on the opposite wall. Nothing but latched doors. Between them were a series of blacktop lab benches and stools.

I was sitting on a metal table extending out past one of the square doors. It was open. Through the doorway behind me was a deep cavity recessed into the wall like a coffin. Morgue was about on point.

“Do you recognize me?” the old man said.

I didn’t need to recognize him. The name badge said it all. And yet, I couldn’t believe it.

“You can’t be him,” I said. “The last time I saw him…”

“I was young,” Wesley said. “That was 1952. This is 2019. I should say that you’re looking well for your age. I might say the same for myself, all things considered.”

“What happened?” I said, flopping my legs off the table and trying to stand. It was a dumb move. I knew it when my knees struck the floor, and my hands broke my fall.

“Careful,” Wesley said, helping me to my feet. “Please, have a seat. You don’t have much time here.”

Wesley led me to a metal stool and helped me to sit. I set my forearms on the lab bench in front of me, bracing myself. He sat down in a swivel chair and rested a walking cane across his lap. Even with the cane, he was in better shape than me at the moment.

“What do you mean?” I said, feeling lost for breath. “I’ve got plenty of time. I’m still young.”

“I found you in the field. You had been knocked unconscious. The cobalt slug that we used for the gamma ray garden landed on you. I found it leaning against your head.”

“So what? I’m alive now, aren’t I?”

“You are, but not for long. The cobalt-60 in the slug is radioactive. I don’t know how long you were exposed for, but it may prove to be a lethal dose. That’s why I made the decision to freeze you here at this seed vault. We never did find the right mutation for our Brookhaven wheat, and so here you stayed in its storage drawer.”

Wesley pushed in the metal table with the tip of his cane and used the crook to close the latched door. The label on the door read: Brookhaven Wheat.

Wesley continued. “I had hoped that time would provide a solution to your tissue damage, but time hasn’t been kind in that way. It’s still irreversible. You can’t be saved.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m right here. I feel fine.”

“It takes time for cells to die. It will come, but I don’t know when or how severe it will be.”

“If I’m still dying, then why the hell did you wake me up? Can’t you put me back? I’ll wait. I’ve got time. Maybe another 50 years might make a difference.”

“We don’t have another 50 years. Federal funding has been cut, and this facility is being decommissioned. The seed collections that we’ve stored here are being transferred to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard. Everything else has already been removed. I’ve worked here well past my retirement, hoping that I could help you, but time has run out on both of us. All that we have now is the little life remaining in us. For me, I have a couple months at best.”

“And for me?” I said.

“A couple hours, maybe,” Wesley said. “I don’t know.”

“So, what am I supposed to do? Just sit here and die?”

“Might as well live while you can.”

“For a few hours?”

“It’s what you’ve got.”

“Can you get me to Queens? I grew up in Queens.”

“The commute isn’t on your side.”

“Where can you get me?”

“Port Jefferson’s nice.”

“Good,” I said, standing up and finding my footing. “Let’s get going.”

Wesley led me out of the bunker, across a field, and to a concrete lot full of what were undeniably cars. They didn’t have the curves or the style that I had known, but they still had four wheels, two headlights, and a windshield. I thought I’d be amazed by them. But, even after the ten-minute drive in Wesley’s Ford, the only improvement above the 50s models seemed to be the air conditioning.

We pulled into a parking lot off Main and Broadway, and I rolled down my window. I could smell the ocean. I looked up at the sky. There was still daylight. There was still time.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Wesley said. “Maybe you’d like to see what the world’s become, at least locally.”

“Any surprises I should know about?” I said, rolling up my window.

“Did you ever read Orwell’s 1984?”

“I skimmed it… once.”

“The world is nothing like that. People have a tendency to overestimate the future. The future always ends up more mundane than people predict it to be. I had hoped for a future like I saw in the Flash Gordon serials.”

I smiled at that. “I would have been happy with King of the Rocket Men,” I said. “I didn’t have the eyesight to become a pilot. That’s why I became a mechanic. Second best thing.”

“We still don’t have decent rocket packs in case you’re wondering,” Wesley said. “Progress marches a lot slower than I think anyone wants to acknowledge. Seven decades later, and people are still people. Cars are still cars. Levi’s are still blue. I think you’ll feel more at home here than you realize.”

I nodded, but I still hadn’t really seen anything other than a couple highways and a few stretches of forest.

“We should get going then,” Wesley said. “Are you hungry?”

“I’m starved,” I said, and I wasn’t kidding. My stomach was growling.

“There’s a great seafood place down the block."

“How about a burger and a chocolate shake."

“Sure thing,” Wesley said, swinging open the driver side door. “We can go to Ruby’s.”

Wesley left his white lab coat in the car but took his walking cane with him.

Stepping out of the car, I almost wished I had a cane myself. My knees were aching, and I was feeling a type of exhaustion that was new to me.

“It’s not too far,” Wesley said, pointing down Main Street.

There were shops with wood paneled facades and restaurants with colorful awnings running up and down both sides of the street. And there were people. And there were T-shirts. T-shirts on men and women and children. Suddenly, everyone was Brando from Streetcar.

“Do the suits come out in wintertime?” I asked. “And the skirts? The hats?”

“Clothing isn’t as formal as it used to be,” Wesley said.

“It didn’t feel formal,” I said. “It just felt… normal.”

“It always does when you’re living it.”

Walking down the street, I was almost glad to be wearing my Levi’s and flannel button down shirt from Sears. I didn’t feel out of place.

“Do you see those black rectangles that everyone’s holding,” Wesley said.

“Yeah,” I said. I had seen them, but I was hesitant to ask.

“Those are telephones,” Wesley said, pulling a similar shiny black rectangle out of his pants pocket and waving it in front of my face. “They make them in wristwatches as well.”

“Like Dick Tracy?” I said, staring at my own wrist and wishing that the technology had come sooner. The wartime radios were 5 pounds if you got a good one. They were 40 pounds if you didn’t.

“It’s hard to believe isn’t it?” Wesley said, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “And yet, maybe we take things like that for granted these days.”

“And radar?” I said. “Surely, that must be better. I mean, if we had better radar, I can’t even imagine how different the war would have been.”

“We did the best with what we had,” Wesley said. “Everyone did. No one knew any different. It’s like a fog we live in. All we can see is what’s right in front of us. And all we can do is take the next step forward without the benefit of hindsight.”

“And what would that next step be?” I said.

“It’s through this door,” Wesley said, tapping his foot on a doormat beneath a red and white striped awning. The glass window set into the front door of the building read: Ruby’s.

“Let’s go get that burger,” Wesley said.

He opened the door and I stepped through.

The floor of the restaurant was checkered in black and white tile. The front counter sparkled in red and chrome against the glow of pink neon lights. Bill Haley’s Rock the Joint was playing on a jukebox in the corner advertising only a nickel a play.

I couldn’t stop the tears that had started.

The world had changed, but it hadn’t.

It still felt like home.