Old Doc Ferrell can’t even spend a day off with his wife and son. The National Atomics nuclear facility in Kimberly, Missouri is scheduled to undergo a government inspection and the plant manager, Allan Palmer, needs his chief physician present to handle the suits.
Worse, inspections make the men nervous and nervous men make mistakes.
There was already a bill under review in Congress to move the entire facility to a remote location, away from the dense civilian population that is currently enjoying the inexpensive power generated as a by-product of the plant’s operations. Palmer wants nothing more than to prove the safety of nuclear power. As such, he wants his best people present.
Giving up his day off, Ferrell enters the plant to find minor injuries already in progress, adroitly handled by the nursing staff. However, during the inspection, an accident occurs that leaves one man badly burned.
To make matters worse, a routine testing of one of the converter chambers by chief scientist Mal Jorgenson uncovers the presence of highly volatile and deadly “Isotope R”, otherwise known as Mahler’s Isotope. Jorgenson sounds the alarm, but not before becoming trapped inside the converter chamber, his armored Tomlin suit his only protection against the fatal radiation.
Palmer orders a rescue mission to retrieve Jorgenson, the only man in the plant who knows the best method to stop Mahler’s Isotope from destroying not only everything in a fifty-mile radius, but perhaps the entire eastern United States!
After a massive and dangerous effort by several of the plant’s crew (aka “atomjacks”), Jorgenson is pulled from the wreckage of the converter chamber and brought to the Infirmary where a heart massage is the only way to keep him from certain death, but when his heart fails to respond, Doc Ferrell and his team must turn to an unorthodox—and untested—solution.
Stories from the golden and transitional ages of speculative and science fiction have always been my absolute favorites. Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Ellison, Heinlein, Niven, the list goes on. Over the past two years or more, I’ve made a deliberate effort to expand my knowledge by including such writers as Philip José Farmer, Joe Haldeman, and Lester Del Rey, founder of Del Rey Publishing.
While I enjoyed The Best of Lester Del Rey anthology, I think it’s fair to say that NERVES is not one of his best works. Fortunately, it’s a short novel at only 153 pages. Sentence structure was occasionally awkward, character development non-existent, and I’m not entirely confident that Del Rey had a full grasp of the true nature of radiation exposure and its effects on the human body, although I will give him credit for an engaging description of the rescue and cleanup work after the accidents. I was a bit perplexed that there was only one expert on Mahler’s Isotope in the entire facility. I suppose having another would have invalidated the entire plot.
Overall, I’d recommend skipping this one, but I will absolutely read more from Lester Del Rey.
