Radio Activity

After she left to explore the Snake he went to buy stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

He launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young unarmed postal worker woman about how amazing and beautiful were the colors and definitions of the galaxies mentioning how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse them while trapped inside a federal building five short miles down wind from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor where fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste seeped into water table levels near the Columbia River.

Department of Energy teams dived into, under, and through Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth snaking, roaring past abandoned nuclear plants as radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II was flowing 130 feet down, down toward water tables.

Fascinating. He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence or T.S.E. “It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

“The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations, and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations.

"Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.”

The postal worker and the nomad talked over a counter while a frantic mother yelled at her daughter, “DON’T Touch The Stamps” because at her precocious age, curiosity about colors blended itself toward planetary exploration developing her active imagination.

Holding a nebula in his hand he told the woman how, up in the invisible sky, are all these really cool galaxies which means we are a third the life of a 3.5 billion year old universe and she said, "That’s interesting. I never looked at the stamps before."  

Editor's note: originally published in A Century Is Nothing.