“All right, dammit,” Hooker said. “You take two hundred men and two mortars and go shuck that plant. Make sure the Prophet knows what you’re doing. Maybe he’ll shut up long enough to let me organize.” Hooker stared at the map. “You go play, Owen. We got to go after the real enemy.” He’ll ask for volunteers, Hooker thought, and he smiled. The crazies would go with Owen and leave Hooker alone for awhile.
The room Adolf Weigley took Tim to was beautiful. Granted that it was crowded: A massive wave of cables surged through a wall, divided, subdivided, ran in metal raceways overhead. But there were lights, electric lights! Neatly enameled green panels lined two walls, busy with dials and lights and switches, and clean with the dust-filtered cleanliness of an operating room. Tim asked, “What is this, the main control room?”
Weigley laughed. He was chronically cheerful, free from the jumpiness of disaster syndrome, and elaborately casual about all the technology. A baby-smooth face made him look younger than he was; the Stronghold men generally wore beards. “No, it’s a cable-spreading room,” he said. “But it’s the only place we’ve got that you can sleep in. Uh… it wouldn’t be smart to push any buttons.” His smile was sly and partly concealed.
Tim laughed. “Not me.” He gazed euphorically at fire extinguishers and winking lights and massive cables, everything precisely in place, all glowing in indirect lighting. Power hummed softly in his ear.
Dolf said, “Drop your backpack over there. There’ll be others sleeping in here, too. Mind you stay out of the way. Duty operators have to get in here. Sometimes they have to work fast.” His grin faded. “And there’s a lot of voltage in some of those lines. Stay out of the way.”
“Sure,” said Tim. “Tell me, Dolf, what’s your job here?” Weigley seemed too young to be an engineer, but he wasn’t built like one of the construction workers.
“Power system apprentice,” Weigley said. “Which means we do everything. Got that stuff settled? Let’s go. They told me to show you around and help you set up the radio.”
“Right… What does it mean, ‘everything’?”
Weigley shrugged. “When I’m on duty I sit in the control room and drink coffee and play cards until the duty operator decides something needs working on. Then I go do it. That could be anything at all. Get a reading on a dial. Put out a fire. Throw a switch. Turn a valve. Repair a break in a cable. Anything.”
“So you’re a robot for the engineers.”
“Engineers?”
“The duty operators.”
“They aren’t engineers. They got their job doing what I do. One day I’ll be an operator, if there’s anything left to operate. Hell, Hobie Latham started by walking on snowshoes in the Sierra, measuring the snow to find out how much spring runoff we could expect, and he’s Operations Manager now.”
They went outside into the muddy yard. The big earthen levees loomed high around them. Men worked on them, putting tip forms while others poured in concrete to reinforce the cofferdam that kept SJNP safe. Others did incomprehensible things with forklifts. The yard was a bustle of activity, seemingly chaotic, but everyone seemed to know what he was doing.
It made Tim feel curiously vulnerable, to stand inside the Project grounds and know that the water outside was thirty feet above them. San Joaquin Nuclear Project was a sunken island, surrounded by levees thrown up by bulldozers. Pumps took care of seepage through the earthen walls. One break in the levees, or a day without power to the pumps, would drown them.
The Dutch had lived with that knowledge all their lives, and what they feared had come to pass; Holland couldn’t conceivably have survived the tidal waves following Hammerfall.
“I think the best place for your radio is on one of the cooling towers,” Dolf said. “But those are cut off from the plant.” He climbed a board staircase to the top of the levee and pointed. Across a hundred feet of water the cooling towers loomed up, four of them set inside a smaller levee that had leaked badly. Their bases were partly flooded. A thick white plume rose from each of the towers, climbed into the sky, growing ghostly, finally vanishing.
“They won’t have any trouble finding this place,” Tim said.
“No.”
“Hey, I thought nuclear plants were nonpolluting.”
Dolf Weigley laughed. “That’s no pollution. Steam, that’s all it is. Water vapor. How could it be smoke? We’re not burning anything.” He pointed to a narrow planked footbridge leading from the levee to the nearest tower. “That’s the only way over unless we get out a boat. But I still think it’s the best place for the radio.”
“So do I, but we can’t carry the antenna on that plank.”
“Sure we can. You ready? Let’s get the stuff.”
Tim gingerly climbed the slanting ladder that zigzagged up the side of the big redwood tower. Once again he was impressed with the organization at SJNP. Weigley had gone into the yard and come back with men to carry the radio, car batteries and antenna, and they’d skipped along the narrow plank bridge with all the stuff in one trip, then gone back to work. No questions, no arguments, no protests. Maybe Hammerfall had changed more than marriage patterns: Tim remembered from the papers that SJNP had been plagued with strikes and arguments over which union would represent whom, overtime pay, living conditions… Labor troubles had delayed the station almost as long as the environmentalists who’d done their best to kill it.
He reached the top of the fifty-foot tower. He was about thirty feet above the level of the sea. The base of the tower was surrounded by a leaking dam, and pumps worked to keep its intakes clear. There was a strong wind into the tower at its bottom.
The thing was big, over two hundred feet in diameter. The deck where Tim stood was a large metal plate pierced by innumerable holes. Pumps brought water up and poured it onto the deck, where it stood a few inches high. It trickled down into the tower and vanished. Above him a dozen smaller cylindrical columns jutted twenty feet above the deck. Steam poured out of each one. The deck vibrated with the hum of pumps.
“This is a good place for the radio,” Tim said. He looked doubtfully out across the San Joaquin Sea. “But it’s a little exposed.”
Weigley shrugged. “We can put some sandbags up. Build a shelter. And we can string a telephone line from here back to the plant. Question is, do you want the radio here?”
“Let’s find out.”
It took an hour to get the beam antenna set up and clamped onto one of the smaller rising venturi columns. Tim connected the CB set to the batteries. They carefully rotated the beam antenna to point twenty degrees magnetic, and Tim looked at his watch. “They won’t be listening for a quarter-hour. Let’s take a break. Tell me how things are going here. We were really surprised to find out you were here, that the plant was going.”
Weigley found a perch on the rail. “It surprises me, sometimes,” he said.
“Were you here when… ?”
“Yeah. None of us believed the comet would hit us, of course. As far as Mr. Price was concerned, it was just another working day. He was mad about absenteeism. A lot of the crew didn’t show up. Then, when it did hit, that just made it worse. We didn’t have all our people.”
“I still don’t see how you could do it,” Tim said.
“Price is a genius,” Weigley said. “As soon as we knew, even before the earthquake, he was getting things set for survival. He had those bulldozers out scraping up a levee before the rain hit us. He sent me and some others out into the valley to the railroad, to fill up the tank trucks. Diesel fuel, gasoline, we got all we could. And there was a boxcar on the siding. full of flour and beans, and Mr. Price made us get all of it. We’re sure glad he did. There’s not much variety, but we didn’t starve. Why you laughing?”