He reached the bottom of the stair, put his palm against the metal door to see if fire had turned it hot. The door was cool, but it vibrated in sympathy to the roaring sound. For a moment Larry hesitated, wondering if opening the door was at all wise. Then, when he tried to push the door open, he found again that the door was jammed.
It took them longer this time to get the door open. The concerted efforts of four grown men were necessary to bash the door open. When it finally moved, it flung open about two feet, then stuck fast on broken concrete. A cold mist drifted in through the opening, and along with it the stench of sulfur. Larry stepped out onto the east side of the control building and looked in astonishment at a series of fountains, a line of them forty feet away, that jetted water a good hundred feet into the air. Mist plumed high in the air, and water rained down on a level field thick with debris.
Water from the reactor? he thought, thunderstruck. But no. Reactor water would be boiling hot, not cool. Besides, there wasn’t enough buried pipe in this area to account for the volume. Somehow, Larry decided, the geysers had to be natural. And therefore they were not his problem. He would think about them later.
Larry wiped mist from his spectacles and shuffled to one side to let the others emerge from the structure. They gazed in consternation at the devastation around them.
The control building they’d just left was a wreck. It was tilted on its foundation and loomed over Larry’s head like a concrete cliff. Larry felt a strong urge to slip away before it fell on him. The control structure leaned against the containment building like a drunken prizefighter hanging on the ropes. Larry’s head whirled as he realized that even the containment structure, with its tons of concrete and steel, was leaning at an unnatural angle. Water fountained from beneath its foundation, from beneath the twelve-foot-thick pad of concrete and steel on which the structure rested. Occasionally the geysers would spit out a rain of sand or a rock, twenty-or thirty-pound stones lofting through the air to thud onto the debris field. Larry was relieved that the fountains seemed generally to be tilted away from the building.
No time to be a tourist, Larry thought. He blinked in the mist.
“Are we ready?” he said. The others turned to him. Wilbur swiped with his sleeve at the blood that was running down his face from a scalp wound.
“You all right, there?” Larry asked.
Wilbur looked at his bloody sleeve in dull surprise. “Guess so,” he said.
“Let’s do it.”
“Right,” Bill said. He headed north toward the containment building, to get to the diesel by Reactor Services on the other side of the reactor.
Larry turned and loped the other way, down the length of the control building, keeping between the wall and the geysers that were roaring up from beneath the building’s foundation. He tried not to trip on the stones and chunks of broken concrete that slid under his bootsoles. He could hear Wilbur stumbling after. Larry turned the corner, now heading west, then slowed and came to a halt as he saw the turbine house.
Through fountaining water Larry could see that the long building that housed the 160-foot Allis-Chalmers tandem-compound turbine no longer existed. The entire central section of the building seemed simply to have been blown to confetti. The rest had collapsed, chunks of aluminum roof or concrete wall tumbled down on the hulking forms of wrecked transformers, pumps, and condensers. Twisted rebar had been sculpted into weird shapes.
Larry could see no human beings in or near the colossal wreck.
Wilbur’s footsteps, behind Larry, slowed to a halt. “Good God,” said Wilbur’s voice. “What the hell happened? A tornado?”
“Earthquake, I think.”
Wilbur looked wild, wide eyes staring from the coating of blood that rained down his face. “There must’ve been a hundred people in there. We’ve got to help them.”
Larry shook his head. “One thing at a time,” he said. “The reactor comes first. We’ve got to make sure we have an SSE. Deal with the diesels before anything else.”
Wilbur blinked blood from his eyes. SSE was Safe Shutdown, Earthquake. There were supposed to be contingencies already worked out. “Yeah,” Wilbur said. “Guess you’re right.”
“Let’s go.”
The ground was covered with broken concrete and bright sharp metal. The metal was strangely twisted, torqued and strained and drawn, as if by steel hands, into bizarre shapes. Chunks sharp as guillotine blades were embedded in the wall of the control building, as if they’d been hurled there by a hundred-handed giant. The building wall, with its shining embedded blades, looked like some weird modernist sculpture.
The turbine’s main shaft, Larry thought, had been rotating thirty times per second when the earthquake struck. If the quake had bent the turbine shaft, or if something massive had fallen on it and stopped its rotation…
Good Lord, he thought. Tons of swiftly rotating metal had slammed to a sudden halt. Turbine blades, even big ones, were notoriously delicate. Bringing the Allis-Chalmers to a sudden stop would have been like throwing a huge boulder into a 160-foot-long jet engine. The turbine would have come apart, spraying deadly metal in all directions. It would have been like a storm of ten thousand flying razor blades. No wonder parts of the turbine house looked as if they had been shredded. And the shaft itself…? A hundred sixty feet of rotating steel?
It would have gone somewhere. Maybe straight up in the air, like a giant spear. It sure wasn’t in the turbine house anymore.
He didn’t want to think of the people who had been inside when it happened.
Behind the turbine house, a column of dark smoke rose into the sky. Between the obscuring mist and the smoke itself, it was hard to tell just what it was that burned.
He came to the southwest corner of the control structure. His path diverged from Wilbur’s here: Larry would continue to head west to the number one auxiliary diesel behind the auxiliary structure, while Wilbur would detour south again around the remains of the turbine house to try to find the number three generator by the machine plant.
“Good luck,” Larry said.
He didn’t hold out a lot of hope for Wilbur’s success. The machine plant was too close to the turbine house. Very likely it had been destroyed when the turbine came apart, and the auxiliary diesel structure with it. One or the other structure might even be the one that was producing the column of smoke. But still, he had to make certain the safety backup systems were working. If only one of the three backup diesel generators went on, it was enough to secure a safe shutdown for the reactor. With that necessity in mind, the three generators had been placed far apart so that the same catastrophe could not overwhelm them all.
One of them, he thought, had to have survived. It didn’t matter which one. So Wilbur had to try to get to the number three diesel, just on the chance that it was still intact.
Geysers shot out of the ground here, on the west side, but they weren’t as numerous, or as forceful, as they had been on the other side of the building. Larry loosened his collar and tie, and then he and Wilbur each chose paths between the jets of water and began to run. Larry threw his arms over his head for protection in case one of the geysers decided to spit a rock at him. Pain shot through his right shoulder. Water splashed up around his ankles as he ran. Where was it all coming from? Larry wondered. Underground, yes, but from a hidden artesian system that had somehow escaped the geologists’ reports, or…?
A stone as big as his head splashed down a few feet away and Larry gave a jump, his heart thudding. He decided to think only about running. Pain jolted through his shoulder at every step. Larry cleared the area where the geyser debris was raining down, and Mississippi’s summer heat wrapped him like a suffocating blanket. He stumbled on something hidden under the water, recovered, and swiped at his glasses with his sleeve, trying to clear the droplets of spray. He panted for breath, not used to running, not used to any sort of real exercise in this heat. His heart bounced around his ribcage like a loose stone.