Weekly Short Story...Nerves by Lester Del Rey

In 1942 it was the middle of World War II and the top-secret Manhattan Project was underway to outrace the Germans in the desperate struggle to be the first to successfully design and construct an atomic bomb.  It wouldn't be until three years later when the United States finally successfully detonated one, and then used two more on Japan to end the war...changing the world forever.  1942 was also thirteen years before the first operational nuclear reactor and 37 and 44 years before the nuclear reactor meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, respectively.  Yet it was in 1942 when Lester Del Rey, a popular science fiction author of that era, wrote Nerves...which was about a nuclear reactor's meltdown...

Nerves is a pretty long "short" story (74 pages), appearing in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 4 (1942) (DAW Books, 1980).  Del Rey wrote "hard" science fiction, meaning that he possessed a considerable amount of scientific knowledge and understanding beyond what most people had...and inserted it into his stories.  Of course, in Nerves he used different words to describe what he had envisioned: "atomics" and "converter" were used in place of our "nuclear" and "reactor"...but they were in essence the same.  True, the author had the common sense to put his "converters" on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter...safely far away from Earth.  But as I read through this tale of systems failures in the presence of extremely volatile radioactive substances, I kept having to remind myself that this story was a chilling prophecy of what was to come on our home planet; even with his more advanced scientific knowledge, how could Lester Del Rey have known?

Other than the amazing feature of a nuclear meltdown written from pre-atomic times, Nerves is a pretty standard pulp fiction tale of characters testing themselves against each other and overcoming personal hang-ups.  The protagonists are two physicians, the elderly Ferrel and the young, inexperienced Jenkins, assigned to the atomics plant.  As the casualties start to come in from the developing disaster, there is a lot of desperate, quick thinking and action as they all try to stem what is already a serious accident from becoming a conflagration.  What happens...well, naturally you'll have to read it for yourself to find out...

I recently read that Lester Del Rey later expanded this short story into a novel, probably to make more money in that more lucrative market.  To me, though, Nerves was already too long...there were too many subplots in this provocative tale that distracted from the main flow.  Well, that's just my opinion...I'd be interested in hearing other viewpoints...