The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Besides, he thought, anyone in a position to give help would probably be giving help to people needing it worse than he and Jason did.

  He froze as a tremor rose up through the deck. Adrenaline clattered through his nerves. The broad shimmering river broke up into leaping silver waves.

  And then the tremor faded, and the river stilled, but Nick’s pulse continued to hammer in his ears. He dragged in a breath. The aftershock is over, he told himself.

  He touched the necklace in his shirt pocket. Arlette, he thought, I am coming to you. But still his knees felt watery when he went down the companionway to the galley. He stirred the potatoes, put frozen peas in the boiling water, turned over the steaks. Then he went down, to the engine space, where the towboat’s powerful turbines bulked under the low ceiling, and the air smelled pleasantly of machine oil. Nick looked for the engine and electric system controls, and he found them. He started a generator to keep the batteries charged, the lights glowing, and to keep the refrigerator and the freezers working. He made sure that the water heater was on, and that there was water pressure for bathing and running the dishwasher.

  He was much better at this sort of thing than at radios.

  Then he returned to the galley and found Jason gobbling a sandwich. The boy looked at him through eyes swollen by sorrow and tried to grin.

  “Smells good,” he said.

  “How do you like your steak?” said Nick.

  Larry cupped his hand for the two orange ibuprofen tablets that the army corpsman was shaking into his palm. He slapped the tablets into his mouth, picked up a cup of water, and swallowed them. Nervous eyes watched him from around the table set in Major General Jessica Frazetta’s command tent. The table was covered with maps, many of them with pencil marks annotating breached dams, broken levees, shattered locks, flooded land, and the tracks of the rescue flights that were trying to pluck survivors from the chaos.

  Larry put down his cup of water. “First, the good news,” he said. “The reactor and containment structure is in good shape. Relatively speaking.”

  “The reactor can be restarted?” Emil Braun said hopefully. He was a bespectacled, potbellied man who did not look at all comfortable in the bright yellow jumpsuit he’d put on for his helicopter ride. He was looking for a happy ending, Larry could see, a way the company could restart Poinsett Landing and not lose the billions of dollars they’d invested in the plant, but Larry didn’t have a happy ending to give him. Larry licked his lips. “That reactor’s not going to be restarted whether it’s intact or not,” he said. “As I will tell you in a minute.”

  “But—” Emil said.

  “One thing at a time, please,” Larry said, more sharply than he intended. Emil almost visibly bottled up his objection behind his plump cheeks.

  Larry looked down at the sling that held his left arm. “My busted shoulder kept me from getting into the access penetration—” He looked at General Jessica. “That’s a sort of an airlock built into the containment structure. It’s the only one we could use, because the other access points were all under water.”

  Jessica nodded. “I understand. Go on, please.”

  Larry looked at Wilbur, who sat on his right. “Wilbur here went into the containment structure. We got all the readings we could by flashlight, with portable instruments. Everything looks nominal. There may be damage to the reactor core, but if so there was no release into the environment.” Larry could see tension fading from the people around the table. No massive clouds of radiation drifting over the South, no Chernobyl on the Mississippi.

  Larry felt a series of jolts, as if someone was repeatedly kicking his chair from behind. Before he could turn around to look for who was doing the kicking, he realized that an aftershock was going on. His heart leaped. He looked up, saw nothing but tent canvas over his head. Nothing dangerous was about to fall on him, so he decided to stay right where he was.

  Kick-kick-kick-kick-kick. Emil bolted from the table, ran into the field outside. No one else moved. The aftershock faded. The general looked at Larry.

  “You were saying, Mr. Hallock? No radiation released?”

  “Not from the reactor, no,” Larry said, and a wary look crossed Jessica’s face.

  “Go on, please,” she said.

  Larry looked up, saw Emil returning, an embarrassed smile on his face. Larry turned back to Jessica.

  “I don’t know what people here know about reactors,” Larry said, “so I’ll start with the basics, okay?” The general nodded. “Poinsett Landing is a boiling water reactor, which means that steam from the reactor is piped directly to the turbine, instead of going through a closed-loop thermal exchange system as in a high-pressure reactor. You follow?”

  “Yes. Please continue.”

  “What that means is that steam from the reactor going straight into the turbine is then cooled by the turbine condensors, then recirculated to the reactor. So when the generator house was destroyed, there was a release of steam into the environment, and there was a certain amount of radiation in that steam. Not in the water, you understand, but in any impurities that may have been in the water. But since we use demineralized water in the reactor, there weren’t very many impurities to begin with, and the radiation release wouldn’t have been large. It may be of concern to anyone at the plant at the time of the release, but there is no real danger to anyone now.”

  “Very good,” Jessica said, and Larry detected a well-concealed curiosity in her eyes. She knew that Larry had been at the plant when the steam was released, knew that the radiation was “of concern” to him. She knew that his health was compromised, and that he’d just brushed over the matter, and she wanted to know what it meant to him, how he was handling it.

  Larry wanted to know these things himself. He hadn’t had time to think about any of this as it related to himself, hadn’t had time to feel much of anything. He’d been too busy. One thing at a time. He’d deal with it when he had the opportunity.

  Emil, who had returned to his seat, looked relieved at Larry’s statement. Fewer liability problems for the company, Larry deduced.

  “The real problems,” Larry said, “are two, and the two interact in such a way as to make any solution a real mess. First, the stored fuel.” He looked at Frazetta. “There’s over thirty years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel at Poinsett Landing. In fact we ran out of space for the spent fuel entirely at one point, but one of my colleagues came up with a new way of racking the fuel elements that increased capacity.

  “Now, the spent fuel assemblies are stored vertically in racks under the water in the auxiliary building. The assemblies are in neutron-absorbing borated racks to assure that there is no chance of achieving critical mass and starting a nuclear reaction. And they’re subjected to active cooling—water is circulated through the building to remove any waste heat.”

  “How hot are these fuel assemblies?” Jessica interrupted. “They’re spent fuel, right?”

  “When fuel assemblies first come out of the reactor, they’re very hot, very hot indeed. It takes years for them to cool to the point where they can be safely handled. Now, the good news is that most of the fuel assemblies in the auxiliary building are very old, and if you need to, you can probably just have a couple strong men pick them up and carry them someplace else. But the bad news is that the plant underwent refueling over the last several weeks, and there are almost three hundred hot fuel assemblies sitting in the auxiliary building right now—with active cooling down, and the water level diminished due to leakage from the storage pond.”

  The look that Emil gave him was one of pure horror. “Are you sure?”

  “I knew about the leaks last night,” Larry said, “but I couldn’t get on the catwalks to find out how fast the water was falling. Well, it fell pretty fast—this afternoon I could detect a lot of radiation coming out of that building just by flying over it in the helicopter.”

  Emil turned pale. Larry looked at the row of concerned faces that gazed at him from across the
table.

  “Here’s what I believe happened,” he said. “The auxiliary building lost active cooling, and lost enough water through its leaks to uncover the spent fuel. The hot fuel assemblies cooked—in fact they probably melted. There’s no chain reaction—not enough fuel for that—but those hot fuel assemblies are cooking up gasses like iodine and xenon and various kinds of noble gasses. In the meantime some dissolved fuel, with radioactive cesium iodide content, has probably leaked into the Mississippi.”

  “So there’s a cloud…” one of the Army officers said slowly “… of radioactive material… floating out over the countryside.”

  “A smallish cloud,” Larry qualified. “This isn’t Chernobyl. This isn’t a meltdown, this is some nasty hot metal that’s spilled and is putting out byproducts. This earthquake has probably killed a thousand times more people than will ever fall ill from this accident.”

  Emil put his head in his hands. “It isn’t Chernobyl now,” he said. “But by the time the press gets done with it, it will be.”

  “Better tell HQ to get their public relations people online,” Larry said.

  “Twenty years of liability suits,” Emil said. “That’s what we’re talking about here.” General Jessica brought the conversation back to its proper theme. “What can be done, Mr. Hallock?” she asked.

  “That brings me to the second problem, General,” Larry said. “Which is that the Mississippi has shifted its course eastward, and that the power station is now smack in the middle of the river.” There was a long moment of silence.

  “Are you sure?” Jessica asked finally. “It isn’t just that the country is flooded?”

  “I think that the level of the ground fell during the quake,” Larry said, “and the river flowed right into it. Current’s pretty brisk, too.” He nodded at Jessica. “The river’s your department, General Frazetta. You’d be in a better position to judge than me, but I reckon you’ll find I’m right.” He looked at the others. “And the foundation of the reactor complex is not entirely secure. When the ground dropped, it didn’t drop evenly; there’s a perceptible list to the containment building and control structure. So—if you want the worst case—the action of the river might furthermore undermine the concrete pad the reactor’s sitting on, and a reactor full of nuclear fuel goes skimming down the Mississippi like a hockey puck on ice.”

  Emil winced at this image. “I don’t think,” he said, “that’s very likely to happen.”

  “Probably not,” Larry agreed. Ache throbbed through his injured shoulder. He wanted this meeting over, and himself in bed. He took another sip of water.

  “Here’s what needs to be done,” he said. “The reactor is fine as it is—we can just leave it undisturbed for ten years or so, give it time to cool off, then remove the fuel and turn the containment structure into a museum or a bird sanctuary or whatever you like. What needs to be done is to stabilize the foundation, and the way to do that is to build a big solid island around it. An island of stone or concrete or brick, twenty acres maybe, with a solid breakwater on the north end to keep the river from undermining it. I’ll defer to the general—” nodding at Jessica “—as to the best way to accomplish this.”

  “That will take some thinking,” she said.

  “That leaves the problem of the spent fuel,” Larry said. “What we need to do is fill that holding pond now, which will cool things off enough so that we can start other repairs. Demineralized water would be best.” Poinsett Landing, he knew, had once possessed a facility for creating as much distilled water as they could ever need, but that had been destroyed along with the plant’s other most useful facilities, like the beautiful, extensive machine shops that could have made any tool, appliance, or structure they would ever have needed during the course of the repair.

  Larry looked at Jessica again. “If you can’t ship about, oh, thirty tons of distilled water to Poinsett Landing to pump into that holding pond, I’d pump in river water. The impurities in the water will get hot, and some of that will leak out into the river, but that’s better than what’s happening now.” Jessica frowned as she considered the problem. “Could we use a fireboat? Just hose water in there?” Larry nodded. “That’s what I figured. Bring one up from Baton Rouge or New Orleans.” He turned to the others. “That will buy us time. Time to survey the pond and discover the extent of the damage, to repair the leaks in the holding pond, clear the ruined roof and catwalks out of our way, and to work out a plan to remove the spent fuel. The actual removal will need to be done remotely, with machines or robots. There’s a machine already in the building that would do the job, if it’s undamaged and if we can get power to it.”

  Larry closed his eyes. Weariness sighed through his mind like wind across a distant prairie. He shook his head, then stood.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said. “I’d be obliged, General, if you could give me a ride home.” Jessica looked startled. “Very well,” she said after a moment’s pause. “If that’s what you want, Mr. Hallock. You seem to have got it all worked out.”

  Larry scratched his whiskered face. “It’s just one thing after another. It’s not like I didn’t have plenty of time to think, sitting on that Indian mound all night.”

  “Larry,” Emil said, “I’ve got to take you to Jackson. You’ve got to brief people at the company.” Larry looked at him. ” You do that. I’ve told you the situation and what we need. You provide it, and we’ll be fine.”

  “But Larry—”

  “I haven’t slept in two days,” Larry said. “I’m pushing fifty. I have a busted collarbone, and I’m in pain. I haven’t seen or talked to my wife or my kids since the accident. I’m going home, I’m going to kiss my wife, and I’m going to collapse into bed and sleep till morning.” He gave Emil a glare. “You got a problem with that, Emil?”

  Emil made a last attempt. “What if we need to talk to you?”

  “Is that a cellphone you’ve got there?”

  Emil looked at the device peeking out of his jumpsuit pocket. “Um,” he said, “yeah.”

  “Give it to me. Someone needs to say howdy, they can call me on your phone.” He stuffed the phone into his pocket and left the tent.

  He’d done his job, he figured, and more. He’d come up with a plan. Let the others work out the details. They gorged on steak, potatoes, peas. It was the best meal Nick ever had in his life. Then, because they were still hungry, Nick cooked another steak and they split it.

  He looked at the boy opposite him. Jason had made some attempt to clean himself up—he’d washed in the sink and tried to scrub off the mud he’d used to paint his face and arms, though not very successfully. His hair hung in dirty strands down his forehead, there was grime caked into his knuckles and streaked on his arms, his clothes were stained with mud and river water. His eyes were red, and in spite of the mud he’d slathered over himself, he’d managed to get a good case of sunburn. Jason looked like a refugee from six months of war, and Nick supposed that he didn’t look any better. Nick looked at the boy, who was shoveling food into his mouth before he’d finished chewing the last forkful, and sipped thoughtfully at his own glass of milk. “Save room for ice cream,” he said. Jason looked up at him. “No problem,” he said.

  “I’ve got the water heater going,” Nick said. “We should see what the crew has left us in the way of soap and shampoo, and shower while we can.” He rubbed his chin. “I should shave. And there are probably toothbrushes around. And sunburn ointment. And some clothes that should fit us.”

  “Okay,” Jason mumbled past a mouthful of steak.

  “I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything,” Nick said, “but we should bathe and brush our teeth whenever we can. It keeps up morale. Keeps us from giving up.”

  Jason gave him a curious look. “Morale?” he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. “You’re worried about our morale? Are you in the Army or something?”

  “I was raised in the Army. But I was never in the service myself.”

&n
bsp; “Army brat?”

  “My dad was a general,” Nick said. “I learned some things about survival from him and, ah, from the military culture, you know. And I was in the Boy Scouts, too.” He shook his head. “If I can remember all that stuff. It was years ago.”

  A wary look entered Jason’s eyes. “So what do you do now?”

  Nick saw the look—it was one he knew all too well—and felt surprise roll through his mind. The boy thought he was crazy, or a criminal.

  Well. Nick had preferred to run a deadly rapid in an unpowered boat to asking help from the cops. There was a wound on his arm. And—his mind a little grimmer now—Nick was black, and the kid’s only contact with black people was probably watching pimps and gangsters on TV. What else was Jason to think?

  “I’m an engineer,” Nick said. “Got laid off from McDonnell in St. Louis five months ago.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting an engineering job now. Not with so many things needing to be put back together.”

  Jason’s wariness lessened somewhat, but Nick could see that the boy was still a bit on guard. But exhaustion was falling fast on Nick, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with Jason’s suspicions now. Nick stood. “I’m going to shower and shave,” he said. “You think you could put the dirty dishes in the washer? If the crew comes back, I don’t want them to find out we’ve made work for them.”

  “Sure.” Jason, his stomach full, seemed content enough.

  Nick went into the crew’s little cabins and dug through some of the lockers in search of clothes that would fit him. Photos of the crew’s families looked down at him from the walls. He looked at pictures of smiling families, of kids and spouses and parents, and wondered if those families would ever meet again, if there would always be one or more missing.

  He found some clothes that fit fairly well, a disposable razor, some shaving cream, a comb, a towel. In a locker he found a first-aid kit with sterile bandages and disinfectant. In the shower he found shampoo and soap.