Maria Elena drove the bus, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and lightly-tinted sunglasses, to help avoid accidental identification from any of her former acquaintances among the demonstrators milling as usual outside the gate. (As though there would be an “afterward” in which such things would matter.) Frank stood in the first step of the stairwell with the rent-a-cop uniform on, brazenly visible through the windshield. Kwan sat in the second row on the right, in suit and white shirt and tie; about a quarter of the scientific staff at Green Meadow was Oriental, so his presence added verisimilitude. Grigor, two rows behind Kwan, in open-necked plaid shirt, looked like the kind of unworldly blue-sky research guy who wouldn’t know a necktie if he were hanged by one. Pami, seated on the other side, was got up in black sweater, one string of pearls, and horn-rimmed glasses, her usually explosive hair imprisoned in a neat bun; it was hard to say what image she projected, exactly, but it was at least respectable.
In any event, they didn’t have to project any image at all for very long. The school buses never stopped when they made the turn to go through the just-opened gate into the plant grounds; it would make too tempting a target for the strikers and demonstrators. The state troopers and private security guards simply saw what they expected to see — a yellow school bus from Kelly Transit with a woman driver and a blue-uniformed guard and some egghead types aboard — at the time they expected to see it, and waved it on through.
The land within the perimeter fence had been carefully recontoured, to present to the public eye along the public road nothing but a gentle upslope in a parklike setting of specimen trees and well-pruned shrubs on a neatly mowed lawn, with taller trees, most of them firs of one kind or another, forming a dense year-round backdrop. The two-lane asphalt road meandered up this easy incline, and when it crested the ridge and started down the far side, the quintet in the bus could see what was really here, in among the trees.
Straight ahead was the dome-topped containment building, a featureless, windowless concrete box. Within the concrete would be a steel inner shell, and within that the reactor, with its core, control rods, steam generator, pressurizer, coolant pump, drain tank, valves, and sump. This was the heart of the power plant, the dangerous living essence of the thing, the part the quintet in the bus had to control if they were going to accomplish anything; if they were, in fact, to avoid being dragged right back off the property again, in handcuffs.
To the left of the containment building was its concrete baby brother, the auxiliary building, with its emergency core-cooling system pump, sump pump, borated-water storage tank, and radioactive-waste storage tank. A bit farther away on that side was the administrative building, brick and stone, three stories high, oddly matter-of-fact amid all the grotesqueries of nuclear architecture. It had the air of a faculty office building on a midwestern college campus.
To the right of the containment building was the turbine building, reassuringly like such structures from power plants of an earlier day. It held the turbine, generator, condenser, transformer, and all the other elements needed to turn the power emanating from the containment building into usable electricity. In the shadow of the turbine building was another smaller windowless concrete structure, containing Dr. Philpott’s controversial laboratory. And behind them all, looming over them, were the twin cooling towers, salt and pepper shakers, huge concave edifices of pale gray concrete, like minimalist graven images of Baal.
But in front of the containment building, attached to it or thrust from it, was the squat structure of the control section. Here was where the servants of the machine fed it and cooled it and guided it through its life of bridled violence. And here was where the five people in the bus had to take command, or lose.
Maria Elena halted the bus in front of the control section. She pushed the long lever that opened the door. Frank looked back at his string, his four confederates. Jesus H. Christ, what a crew. Nodding, he said, “What have we got to lose?” and stepped down from the bus.
It was as good a battle cry as any.
36
“Professor! My God, look at this!”
Dr. Marlon Philpott, more rumpled yet somehow more serious in his laboratory than he had been on Nightline, turned reluctantly from the holding ring, in which, in the heavy swirl of liquid deuterium, something had been happening. Or about to happen. He squinted testily at Chang, jittering up and down over there in the doorway to the lounge: “What is it?”
“Something’s happening on TV!”
Dr. Philpott was fairly sure he’d made a fool of himself, or been made a fool of, which amounted to the same thing, on that damn program, and so wasn’t feeling particularly cordial about television at the moment. The damned Unitronic directors, with their worship of the great god Public Relations... “Something is happening in the deuterium,” he said sternly, “something infinitely more important than television.”
“No, no.” Chang was really very disturbed, bobbing up and down over there as though he had to go to the bathroom. “It’s something happening here, at the facility.”
The demonstrators, the strikers: Philpott paid as little attention to those Luddites as possible. He was about to say so when Cindy, attracted by Chang’s agitation, left her place at the auxiliary control console and crossed the lab toward the lounge, brushing blond hair out of her eyes in an unconscious habitual gesture as she did so, saying, “Chang? What is it?”
“I’m just not sure,” the boy told her, his smooth face expressing alarm by becoming even more round than usual behind his round light-reflecting spectacles. “They say it’s been taken over.”
Cindy shook her head, blond hair falling into her eyes again. “What’s been taken over?”
“Us! The facility!”
Philpott, wanting nothing but to return his attention to what either was or was not beginning to come into existence in the liquid deuterium, spread his hands and said, “Taken over? By whom? I don’t seem to see them.”
“Not here, Professor. The control section!”
“Oh, my gosh!” Cindy said, and ran past Chang into the lounge.
The fact was, as Philpott well knew, graduate student assistants are vital to any coherent program of accomplishment in the scientific world. And graduate student assistants are the cheapest possible source of slave labor in the otherwise civilized world today. So it was necessary to let them have their heads every once in a while, to allow them their own little pursuits, their own enthusiasms, their own overreactions.
Moving at a measured tread, a condescending smile already on his lips, Philpott entered the lounge, turned to the television set, and saw on its screen what was clearly an even more turbulent scene than normal these days at the gates of Green Meadow. Vast groups of people milled about in the background, like battle scenes in Shakespeare films, while somebody’s daughter, dressed approximately like a grown-up and looking very much like an older Cindy, jabbered into a microphone in the foreground.
“Well,” Philpott said. “Reaching some sort of critical mass out there, are they?”
“No, wait, Professor,” Chang said. “Listen.”
Philpott didn’t want to listen, but he did, and when he understood what he was hearing he even more emphatically didn’t want to listen. Not to this: