by Larry Niven
Alim said, “You guys always said they weren’t safe.”
“No, of course they’re not, but safe compared to what?” Jerry Owen waved north toward the ruined dam and the drowned city of Bakersfield: cubistic islands rising from a filthy sea. “That was a hydroelectric plant. Was that safe? People who wouldn’t go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams.”
“So why do you hate that place?” Hooker asked. “Maybe… maybe we ought to save it.”
“Goddammit, no,” Jerry Owen said.
Alim shot Hooker a look. Now you’ve started him off again, it said.
“It’s too much, don’t you see that?” Owen demanded. “Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology. Bigger and bigger. More quick fixes. You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you’re ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth. Pollution. Cities so big they rot in the center. Ghettos. Don’t you see? Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature. For awhile. Until finally you can’t get back in balance. The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth…”
“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?”
“The fishermen feel the same way.”
“Who doesn’t? Can you believe you’ll never taste a banana again? We could use some orange juice, for that matter. We’re worried about scurvy.”
“The orange tree is extinct in California. Sometimes we can dig some Tang out of a market.” The longer Tim looked at that wall of earth between him and the San Joaquin Sea, the bigger it got. “Doff, how could you have put that up while the valley was flooding?”
“We couldn’t have. It’s a crazy story. The original idea was to put the plant over nearer to Wasco. Mr. Price wanted it up here, on the ridge, because the blowdown from the cooling towers would drain better, we wouldn’t have to dig the ponds as deep. The Department’s managers didn’t like that. Made the plant more visible.”
“Oh, but it’s beautiful! It’s like a 1930s Amazing Stories cover. The future!”
“That’s what Mr. Price said. Anyway, they did put the plant up here on the ridge.”
It wasn’t much of a ridge, of course; no more than a low rolling hill. The plant wasn’t more than twenty feet higher than the surrounding valley.
“And after they did the work, the Department got scared and they built the levees,” Weigley said. “Not for any real reason. Just to hide the plant so the environmentalists wouldn’t think about it when they drove along Interstate Five.” Weigley’s lips tightened. “And then some of the bastards who tried to kill the plant raised hell because we spent the extra money on the levee! But it came in handy. All we had to do was bulldoze up enough dirt to fill the gaps, the places where the roads and railway came in through the screening banks, and a good thing, too. That water rose fast after Hammerfall.”
“I’ll bet. I drove over that sea,” Tim said.
“How’s that?”
Tim explained. “Heard any stories about Flying Dutchmen?”
Weigley shook his head. “But we haven’t had much contact with outsiders. Mayor Allen didn’t think it would be a good idea.”
“Allen. I saw him. How’d he get here?”
“Showed up just before the water got too deep. He was in City Hall when the tidal wave came through Los Angeles. Man, has he got a story to tell! Anyway, he showed up the next day with a dozen cops and City Hall people. You know, Los Angeles owned the plant, before Hammerfall—”
“So Mayor Allen is the boss here.”
“No! Mr. Price is in charge. The mayor’s a guest. Just like you. What does he know about power plants?”
Tim didn’t point out that it was Weigley who’d told him the mayor was the one who discouraged outside contacts. “So you’ve ridden out the end of the world,” Tim said. “By keeping the plant going. What are you planning to do with it?”
Weigley shrugged. “That’s up to Mr. Price. And don’t think it’s been any soft job keeping things running. Everything’s got to work, all the time. We can put out a thousand megawatts.”
“That sounds like a lot of—”
“Ten million light bulbs.” Weigley grinned.
“A lot, yeah. How long can you keep that up?”
“At full capacity, about a year. But we’re not running full, and we won’t ever be. It takes about ten megawatts to operate the plant. Cooling pumps, control equipment, the lights… you know. That’s one percent of capacity, so we could keep that up for a hundred years. But then we’ve got another set of fuel elements, over in Number Two.”
Tim looked back at the plant. Two enormous concrete domes, which contained the nuclear reactors. Each had a series of rectangular buildings attached that contained the turbines and control equipment.
“Number Two’s not operational,” Weigley said. “Getting her up will be our first job once the water’s gone down. And then we’ll be able to put twenty megawatts on line for somebody else to use. We can keep that up for fifty years.”
“Fifty years.” Tim thought about that. In fifty years the United States had gone from a horse-and-buggy to an automobile civilization; had opened mines, built cities, built industries; discovered electronics and computers, taken space flight from comic books to the Moon. And this one plant could put out more power than the whole United States generated in the Twenties… “That’s exciting. My God, it was worth coming here! Forrester was right, letting anything happen to this plant wouldn’t be an optimum solution.”
“Uh?” Weigley gave Tim a puzzled look.
Tim grinned. “Nothing. Time to try the radio out.”
To enter the conference room was like walking into the past, straight into a Board of Directors meeting. It was all there, the long table with comfortable chairs, pads of paper, blackboards, chalk and erasers, even wooden pointers. Tim was jolted. He wondered what Al Hardy would give for a well-equipped conference room, and bulletin boards to hang maps and lists on, file cabinets…
There was an argument in progress. Johnny Baker waved Tim to a seat on his left. Tim whispered rapidly: The radio gave mostly static, but it worked; they had communications with the Stronghold. No further news. Baker whispered thanks and turned back to listen.
They looked like human scarecrows, diversely dressed, most of them armed, pale as ghosts except for Mayor Allen and a black Detective-Investigator. Their clothes were old, their shoes were worn. A few months ago they would have looked wildly out of place here. Now it was the room that was strange. The people were normal, except that they were so clean.
Tim wriggled inside his clothes. His hand patted his smoothshaven cheek. Clean! There was hot water for bathing, and working electric razors. The washer-dryer hadn’t stopped since the Stronghold party arrived. His shirt and shorts and socks were clean and dry. Tim wriggled and tried to listen. He was hearing the same sentence over and over again: “I didn’t know there was going to be a goddam army after us.”
Barry Price wasn’t as large as the construction crew chief who confronted him, but there was no question who was in charge. Price wore khaki field clothing, bush jacket and a shirt bulging with pens; a pocket calculator hung from his belt; an assistant with a clipboard hovered nearby. His brush haircut and precisely trimmed pencil mustache made him look almost finicky. He said, “So what’s changed? We were never popular.”
“No, dammit, but a cannibal army?” It wasn’t heat that made the crew chief sweat inside his hard hat. “Barry, we got to get out of here.”
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“Nuts. West side of the sea. Anyplace. But we can’t stay here! We cannot fight a whole army.”
“We have to,” Price said. “How can we let all this go down the drain? Robin, you worked as hard as anybody! We’ve got allies now—”
“Some allies. A dozen men.” Robin Laumer leaned across the table toward Barry Price. They might have been alone in the room; certainly nobody was interrupting. “Look. Everything’s got to work or nothing does, right?”
“Right.”
“So they get one hit on the turbines, the switchyard, the cable rooms, the control rooms, and that’s it! We’re underwater, and nothing ever works again!”
“I know all that,” Price said. “So we don’t let them get one hit
.”
“Bullshit. Barry, I’m pulling out. Any of my people want to come with me, I’ll take. We’ll give ’em back, but we’re borrowing your boats—”
“Not mine you don’t,” Johnny Baker said. He sat at Barry Price’s left, just across the table from Mayor Allen. “I did not bring boats to help evacuate this plant.”
Laumer seemed about to argue; then he shrugged. “So I take the boats that were already here. One of ’em’s mine anyway, that one I keep. But we’re leaving.”
He stalked out of the room. As he passed Tim Hamner, Tim told him, “You’ll never be clean again.” Laumer broke stride, then kept going.
Baker asked, “Shouldn’t we stop him?”
“How?” Price demanded.
Baker dropped it. None of them were ready to use the only way they had of stopping Laumer. “So how many will go with him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty or thirty of the construction crew. Maybe not so many. We worked like slaves to save this plant. I don’t think any of my operating people will leave.”
“So you can still run the plant.”
“I’m sure of that much,” said Price.
Johnny turned to the Mayor. “How about your people? Especially your cops?”
“I doubt any will go,” Bentley Allen said. “We had too damned much trouble getting here.”
“That’s good,” Baker said. He saw the look on the Mayor’s face. “That they won’t run. And of course you’re staying, Barry…”
The effect on Price was disturbing. He didn’t look nonchalant, or proud; he looked like a man in agony. “I have to stay,” he said. “That ticket’s already been paid for. No, you wouldn’t know. When that goddam Hammer hit, I could go look for somebody in Los Angeles, or stay here and try to save the plant. I stayed.” His jaw clenched. “So what do we do now?”
“I can’t give you orders,” Johnny said.
Price shrugged. “By me you can.” He looked to Mayor Allen and got a nod. “Far as I’m concerned, Senator Jellison is in charge of this state. Maybe he’s President. Makes more sense than the others.”
