In fact, we had done very little. Our time together generally was spent taking long walks on the campus or talking inside her room on the Lawn. Of course we had many dinners at restaurants like The Ivy and Boar’s Head, and I had met her professors and even gone to class. But I did not see friends, what few of them she had. They, like the places where she met them, were not something shared with me.
I realized Marino was still talking.
“I’ll never forget when I saw him play,” he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Can you imagine being seven feet tall? You know he lives in Richmond now.”
“Let’s see.” I studied buildings we were passing. “We want the School of Engineering, which starts right here. But we need Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering.”
I slowed down as a brick building with white trim came in sight, and then I saw the sign. Parking was not hard to find, but Dr. Alfred Matthews was. He had promised to meet me in his office at eleven-thirty but apparently had forgotten.
“Then where the hell is he?” asked Marino, who was still worried about what was in his trunk.
“The reactor facility.” I got back in the car.
“Oh great.”
It was really called the High Energy Physics Lab and was on top of a mountain that was also shared by an observatory. The university’s nuclear reactor was a large silo made of brick. It was surrounded by woods that were fenced in, and Marino was acting phobic again.
“Come on. You’ll find this interesting.” I opened my door.
“I got no interest in this at all.”
“Okay. Then you stay here and I’ll go in.”
“You won’t get an argument out of me,” he replied.
I retrieved the sample from the trunk, and at the facility’s IL
main entrance, I rang a bell and someone released a lock.
Inside was a small lobby where I told a young man behind glass that I was looking for Dr. Matthews. A list was checked and I was informed that the head of the physics department, whom I knew only in a limited way, was this moment by the reactor’s pool. The young man then picked up an in-house phone while sliding out a visitor’s pass and a detector for radiation. I clipped them to my jacket, and he left his station to escort me through a heavy steel door beneath a red light sign that indicated the reactor was on.
The room was windowless with high tile walls, and every object I saw was marked with a bright yellow radioactive tag. At one end of the lighted pool, Cerenkov radiation caused the water to glow a fantastic blue as unstable atoms spontaneously disintegrated in the fuel assembly twenty feet down. Dr. Matthews was conferring with a student who, I gathered as I heard them talk, was using cobalt instead of an autoclave to sterilize micropipettes used for in vitro fertilization.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow,” the nuclear physicist said to me, a distressed expression on his face.
“No, it was today. But thank you for seeing me at all. I have the sample with me.” I held up the envelope.
“Okay, George,” he said to the young man. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes, sir. Thanks.”
“Come on,” Matthews said to me. “We’ll take it down there now and get started. Do you know how much you’ve got here?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“If we’ve got enough, we can do it while you wait.”
Beyond a heavy door, we turned left and paused at a tall box that monitored the radiation of our hands and feet. We passed with bright green colors and went on to stairs that led to the neutron radiography lab, which was in a basement of machine shops and forklifts, and big black barrels containing low-level nuclear waste waiting to be shipped.
There was emergency equipment at almost every turn, and a control room locked inside a cage. Most remote to all of this was the low background counting room. Built of thick windowless concrete, it was stocked with fifty-gallon canisters of liquid nitrogen, and germanium detectors and amplifiers and bricks made of lead.