Larry Niven - Lucifer's Hammer

Still available, Barry thought. Yo ho! Then why am I putting on my pants?

When he was dressed he pretended to think she was asleep and quickly left the trailer. Outside he stretched in the morning sunshine, breathing deeply. His trailer was at the edge of the camp that housed much of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project work force. Dolores had one far away, but she didn’t use it often these days. Barry walked toward the plant with a grin that faded as he thought about Dolores.

She was wonderful. And what they did in their copious free time hadn’t affected their work at all. She was more administrative assistant than secretary, and he knew damned well he couldn’t get along without her; she was at least as important to his work as the operations manager, and that terrified Barry Price. He kept waiting for the possessiveness, the not unreasonable demands for his time and attention that had made life with Grace so unpleasant. He couldn’t believe that Dolores would remain satisfied simply to be his… what? he wondered. Mistress wasn’t right. He didn’t support her. The idea was funny: Dolores wasn’t about to let any man have that kind of control over her fife. Make it lover, he thought. And enjoy it and be glad.

He stopped to get coffee from the big urn at the construction supervisor’s shack. They always had excellent coffee. He carried a cup up to his office and took out McCleve’s memo.

A minute later he was screaming in anger.

He hadn’t calmed down when Dolores arrived about eight-thirty. She came in with more coffee to find him pacing the office. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

Another thing I love about her, Barry thought. She never demands anything personal at the office. “This.” He lifted the memo. “Do you know what those idiots want?”

“Obviously not.”

“They want me to hide the plant! They want us to bulldoze up a fifty-foot earth embankment around the whole complex!”

“Would that make the plant safer?” Dolores asked.

“No! Cosmetics, that’s all. Not even cosmetics. Dammit, San Joaquin is pretty. It’s a beautiful plant. We should be proud of it, not try to hide it behind a lot of dirt.”

She put the coffee down and smiled uncertainly. “You have to do it?”

“I hope not, but McCleve says the Commissioners like the idea. So does the Mayor. I’ll probably have to, and dammit, it messes hell out of the schedule! We’ll have to pull men off the excavations for Number Four, and—”

“And meanwhile, your PTA ladies are due in fifteen minutes.”

“Lord God. Thanks, Dee. I’ll compose myself.”

“Yes, you’d better do that. You sound like a bear. Be nice, these ladies are on our side.”

“I’m glad somebody is.” Barry went back to his desk and his coffee and looked at the piles of work he still had to do, and hoped the ladies wouldn’t take long. Maybe he’d get a chance to call the Mayor, and just maybe the Mayor would be reasonable, and then he could get to work again…

The plant yard buzzed with activity. Bulldozers, forklifts, concrete trucks moved in an intricate, seemingly random pattern. Workmen carried materials for concrete forms. Barry Price led the group through this maelstrom almost without noticing it.

The ladies had seen the PR films, and they’d dressed sensibly in slacks and low shoes. They hadn’t made any fuss about wearing the hard hats Dolores got for them. So far they hadn’t had many questions, either.

Barry took them to the site of Number Three. It was a maze of steel girders and plywood forms, the dome-shaped containment only partially finished; it would be a good place to show them the safety features. Barry hoped they’d listen. Dolores said they’d seemed very reasonable to her, and he was hopeful, but past experience kept him on his guard. They reached a quieter area where there weren’t any construction workers at the moment; there was still noise from the bulldozers and the carpenters putting up forms, boilermakers welding pipes…

“I know we’re taking a lot of your time,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “But we do think it’s important. A lot of parents ask about the plant. The school’s only a few miles away…”

Barry smiled agreement and tried to show her that it was all right, that he knew their visit was important. His heart wasn’t in it. He was still thinking about McCleve’s memo.

“Do all those people really work for you?” one of the other ladies asked.

“Well, they’re employed by Bechtel,” Barry said. “Bechtel Engineering builds the plants. The Department of Water and Power can’t keep all those construction crews on permanent payroll.”

Mrs. Gunderson wasn’t interested in administrative details. She reminded Barry of himself: She wanted to get to the point, and quickly. An ample woman, well dressed. Her husband owned a big farm somewhere nearby. “You were going to show us the safety equipment,” she said.

“Right.” Barry pointed to the rising dome. “First there’s the containment itself. Several feet of concrete. So that if anything does happen inside, the problem stays inside. But this is what I wanted you to see.” He indicated a large pipe that ran into the uncompleted dome “That’s our primary cooling line,” he said. “Stainless steel. Two feet in diameter. The wall thickness of this pipe is one inch. There’s a cut piece over there and I’ll bet you can’t pick it up.”

Mrs. Gunderson went over to try. She hefted at the four foot piece of pipe but was unable to move it.

“Now, for us to lose coolant, that would have to break completely,” Barry said. “I’m not sure how that could happen, but suppose it did. Inside the containment the men are putting in the emergency cooling tanks now. Yes, those big things. If the water pressure from the primary cooling lines ever falls, those dump water at high pressure directly into the reactor core.”

He led them through the structure, making them look at everything. He showed them the pumps which would keep the reactor vessel filled with water, and the 30,000-gallon tank that would contain makeup water for the turbines. “All of that is available for emergency cooling,” Barry said.

“How much does it take?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.

“One hundred gallons a minute. About what six garden hoses can put out.”

“That doesn’t seem like very much. And it’s all you need?”

“All we need. Believe me, Mrs. Gunderson, there’s nobody more concerned about your children’s safety than we are. Most of these so-called accidents we prepare for have never happened. We have people whose job it is to think up strange accidents, silly things that we’re sure will never happen, just so that we can prepare for them.” He let them wander through, knowing they’d be impressed by the massive size of everything. So was he. He loved these power plants; he’d spent most of his life preparing for this job.

Finally they had seen everything, and he led them back to the visitors’ center, where the PR people could take over. Hope I did it right, he thought. They can help us a lot, if they want to. They can hurt us, too…

“One thing still concerns me,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “Sabotage. I know you’ve done all you can to prevent accidents, but suppose somebody deliberately tried to… to make it blow up. After all, you won’t have that many guards here, and there are a lot of crazy people in this world.”

“Yeah. Well, we’ve thought of ways people can try,” Barry said. He smiled. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you about them.”

They smiled back, uncertainly. Finally Mrs. Gunderson said, “Then you’re satisfied that some bunch of nuts can’t harm the plant?”

Barry shook his head. “No, ma’am. We’re satisfied that they can’t harm you by anything they can do to us. But nobody can protect the plant itself. Look at the turbines. They turn thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute. Those blades are spinning so fast that if drops of water got in the steam lines, the turbines would break apart. The switchyard is vulnerable to any idiot with dynamite. No, we can’t stop them from wrecking the plant, but then we can’t stop them from setting fire to the oil tanks at a fossil plant. What we can do is see that nobody outside the power plant site gets hurt.”