“Who the terrorists are and what their demands will be no one seems to know as yet. What is certain now is that they do include at least one expert in the operation of this type of plant. At their insistence, all plant personnel except the hostages have been evacuated, leaving the terrorists in charge of the reactor controls. The reactor is producing at its lowest possible rate. At this point, no electricity is being furnished by Green Meadow III. The slack is being taken up by other electric utilities in the Northeast and Canadian grids, and consumers are assured—”
“My God!” Philpott cried, at last accepting the unbelievable. “They’re in here!”
“Yes, Professor!”
Philpott looked quickly around. “But they obviously don’t know about us yet. They must not ever know. Quick, lock and bolt the doors. Switch over to our emergency generator, we don’t want them to see us using power.”
Chang and Cindy exchanged a glance. It was Cindy who dared the question: “Professor Philpott? You aren’t going to go on, are you?”
“Of course, I am. We’re in the middle of— Shut down? Surrender to these mindless thugs?”
“But—” Chang floundered, almond eyes frightened behind those false-looking glasses. “The experiment, the risk...”
“There is no risk,” Philpott snapped. “We’ve been autonomous in here anyway, absolutely self-contained. Do you want to be a hostage to these people, a bargaining chip in their absurd quarrel with authority, whatever that might be? I don’t particularly relish the thought of being held for exchange of some political prisoner in someplace like Northern Ireland or Lebanon.”
So. That part of the reality of the situation hadn’t occurred to either of the young people. They stared at him, both frightened, both at a loss. Fortunately, he was not at a loss, nor was he frightened, though he was certainly concerned. “We’re safer here than anywhere else,” he told them. “We’ll do nothing to attract the attention of those cretins out there. We’ll stay within the lab building, locked in, until the authorities straighten out this mess. And as long as we’re in here, there is absolutely no reason not to go on with the experiment. Agreed?”
They were both reluctant to answer, but he needed that answer. He bore his sternest gaze first on Chang, the more malleable of the two, and Chang fidgeted, awkward and uncomfortable, but unable to argue back. “Yes, Professor,” he finally said, low and mumbled. “Agreed.”
“Cindy?”
Another hesitation, but her agreement was inevitable: “I... suppose so. I suppose it’s the only thing we can do.”
“Of course, it is.” He turned his glare toward the daughter on the TV screen, nattering on now about terrorist “assurances.” He muttered, as though at her, as though it were her fault, “I will not be interrupted.” Then he looked through the doorway toward the experiment in progress: “Now, of all times.”
37
It was Frank’s pistol, fired once, the bullet thudding into a wooden desk, that had focused the attention of the eight staffers in the control section, but it was Grigor who turned them from panic and disintegration into a cooperative and useful team. “I was at Chernobyl,” he told them, once Frank had assembled them and they stood frightened and demoralized in a little cluster in the middle of the main control room. “I was a fireman there.”
He told them what had happened to him, and in their own technical jargon he told them why Chernobyl had gone wrong. “I don’t want to do to anyone else what was done to me,” he told them, “I assure you of that. I am not here to cause a meltdown. With your help, we will do no harm at all. We are here only to force public awareness. That is all we want.”
“And the money,” Frank reminded him. “For the cause.” Because they’d finally argued their way to an agreement that Frank’s crass commercial motives would best be hidden within the social concerns of the others. The five million dollars — Frank’s number, one he refused to change — would be for their Committee for the Environment. (The committee wasn’t real, but the damn money better be.)
“Yes, the money,” Grigor agreed, “but we’ll get to that.” And he went on explaining things, in his thin and non-threatening voice, seated at a desk facing them all, as though at his ease, successfully so far hiding from them the extreme weakness that had made it almost impossible for him to walk this far from the bus. (Kwan and Pami were also seated, necessarily, at the fringes of the group, leaving only Frank and Maria Elena to stand and wave guns around. But they were enough.)
Once the staffers began to engage Grigor in dialogue, Frank knew it was going to be all right. These weren’t tough guys, no more than Frank himself. They were five women and three men, all of them technicians, none of them death-defying jocks. Because they were managers and supervisors, they were older than the workers who would normally have been on duty here. They would do what they were told.
And what they were told to do was simple. Do not shut down the reactor, but close down its output to the lowest possible minimum. Then make the phone call; the first phone call.
That was a job for the senior technician, a woman of about sixty, who might have looked a lot like Maria Elena in her younger days. She was the one who dialed the offices in the administrative building and delivered the message Frank gave her:
The control section has been taken over by armed and desperate individuals.
If everyone obeys the orders of the invading group, no harm will come to anyone.
The reactor is still being operated by the staff, but under the supervision of one of the invaders, who is himself an expert in nuclear-fission plants.
Everyone else within the Green Meadow perimeter fence is to evacuate; now.
Contact will be made with officials outside the gate once everyone has cleared the plant.
There is no reason for general panic, and in fact the invaders insist that the surrounding counties not be evacuated.
One hint that the general population is being moved, to make possible an assault on the plant, and the invaders will deliberately cause a meltdown, before the people to be affected can get clear; the invaders are absolutely prepared to die.
At this point, their only demands are that the plant be cleared and that a telephone contact be established outside the gate.
Once that is accomplished, and once it is generally seen and recognized that the invaders are both serious and responsible, a dialogue can begin.
X
Now what? A nuclear plant? These five misfits have blundered themselves into a nuclear plant? For what? How much damage could they do in there? I have come to save the world, only to find that truckling toady is content to destroy New York State? (It is true there are those who believe that New York — or at least the city of the same name, no relation — is the world, but surely the loathsome He is not among them.)
And what of Susan Carrigan? What is her part in the scheme, where does she fit, what is her job? He’s driving me mad with that grimalkin, that heifer, that fur-farm. The other five are terrorizing the populace at Green Meadow, and she’s in the arms of that smoky simulacrum, playing at love. Love! That’s supposed to be my territory, you shameless bastard!