Page 31 of Eruption

Briggs said, “Sadly, the cost of removal got higher every year.” He pointed to the canisters. “Those glass tubes were supposed to be encased in concrete. They were never meant to stand in the air for decades. Over the years, the decay heat from radioactivity has changed the qualities of the glass. You noticed the fine white lines all over the canisters?”

“Hard to miss.”

“Well, those are cracks.”

“Jesus,” MacGregor said again.

“Yes. The glass is now extremely friable. It’s not impossibleto remove them, but at this point it’d be very difficult and very dangerous.”

“And what exactly is in them?” Mac said.

“There is some dispute about that.”

“Dispute?”

“We know that the material contains large amounts of unusual isotopes, in particular iodine-143, and that confused the experts we consulted. Portable proton scanning gave us unclear results.”

MacGregor said, “No offense, sir. But how can this possibly be?”

“No offense taken,” Briggs said. “Blame it on modern technology. Unfortunately for us, the relevant data was stored on computers.”

“And that’s a problem in the modern world?”

“In this case it is,” Briggs said.

As they walked out of the cave, he explained. In the 1980s, the military, like most modern American organizations, used mainframe computers to keep track of their data. “Everything from personnel pay schedules to PX orders to nuclear warhead locations,” Briggs said. “It was all on big mainframes. The programs that manipulated the data were written in Ada, the language chosen by the Department of Defense for the embedded systems used in military projects. There were no hard drives back then. Data was stored on eight-inch floppy disks that were kept in sleeves in air-conditioned rooms.”

“Those were the days,” Mac said.

Briggs ignored him. “But each year,” he continued, “there was more stored data. And with each upgrade, it became more and more expensive to transfer the old data. On top of that, a lot of the old data wasn’t relevant anymore. Who cared how much canned tuna was put aboard the USSMissouriin May 1986? Tanks and airplanes from that time had been decommissioned. Eventually,the military decided not to transfer the old data unless it was needed. So the old disks were left in storage for decades.”

“And?”

“One night Mauna Kea was struck by lightning that generated an electromagnetic field so powerful it degaussed the disks and erased all the information stored there.”

“There were no backups?”

“The backups were unreadable too.”

“And that’s why you don’t know what this material is?”

“Well, we didn’t,” Briggs said. “For twenty years, we had no idea.”

He paused and looked directly at Mac.

“We found out when we had an accident,” Briggs said.

CHAPTER 20

What kind of accident?” Mac asked.

“One of those canisters cracked about nine years ago. All hell broke loose for a week, but that was how we found out what this stuff really is.”

“And what is it?” MacGregor said.

“It’s herbicide.”

“Radioactive herbicide?”