Stephen Baxter - Time

Whoops, raised fists, a scattering of applause.

These technicians had tunnel vision, she thought. To them the mission was everything, the various obstacles a frustration that stopped them from doing things. And when they were forced to confront those obstacles they resorted to hopeful button pushing: Ptolemaic spheres, the frontier, the American dream, can-do attitude, the spirit of Wright and Lindbergh and Armstrong, the organizational will that enabled us to cover a continent, win the Second World War, blah blah.

But, she thought, maybe they had to be that way to get anything done at all. Dreams had to be uncomplicated to be achievable.

Now another technician got up to show a new type of chart. It represented a flow of raw materials to a schematic of the hab’s manufacture: electrical components from factories around the United States; structural parts from the big aerospace companies; raw materials from a variety of producers; a web of sources, flows, and sinks.

There was one box at the lower left corner that Emma had trouble reading. She sat forward and squinted.

The source box was marked “Dounreay.” And the product flowing out of it was “enriched U-235.”

And Emma had spotted her rattlesnake.

She got out of her seat and slipped out of the room.

When she got back to her office she booted up her softscreen and started to find out about Dounreay.

And, immediately after that, she booked a flight to Scotland.

She arrived at a place called Sandside: a tiny village, just holiday homes and a pub. She got out of the car — no SmartDrive — and climbed a low hill at the edge of the village.

She was on the north coast of Scotland, just a few miles from John O’Groats, the miniature tourist trap that was the northernmost point of mainland Britain. There was a sweeping beach before her, and then the sea itself, wild and gray under a flat lid of sky. On the horizon she glimpsed more landmasses, the Old Man of Hoy and the Orkneys. It was a rugged place suffused by wind noise, poised between sea and sky, and the wind seemed to suck the warmth from the core of her body.

And there, sprawled across the eastern horizon, was Dounreay: a mile-long sprawl of buildings, a giant golf ball shape, huge gray and brown sheds and chimneys. Somehow, oddly, even though she knew what this place represented, it did not offend the eye.

Here came Malenfant, his gaunt frame swathed in a giant quilted coat. He climbed up the little hillock beside her.

“You look ill,” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t think the climate suits me. Even though I’ve got some Scottish blood. Maybe all that Vegas sunshine has diluted it.”

“What have you been up to this time, Malenfant?”

He sighed. “Doing what needs to be done.”

She faced him. “Listen to me for once, you asshole. If you’re planning to launch nuclear materials into space, if you’re even intending to move nuke stuff around the planet, you’re committing a whole series of offenses. And if you’re going to involve Bootstrap in that — if you’re going to involve me — then tell me about it.”

“I will, I will,” he soothed. “But we don’t have a choice.”

“Oh, Malenfant. You never do.”

He took her arm, and they walked along the hillock.

He picked out some of the sights of Dounreay for her. This was the second-largest nuclear installation in Britain, after Sella-field. Once it had generated power, made medical isotopes, run three reprocessing lines and a nuclear waste-packaging plant. The golf ball shape was a fast reactor, built in 1959. It had caught fire and overheated several times. Now it was shut down and preserved, bizarrely, by a heritage ministry. The big gray sheds were for reprocessing nuclear waste, extracting usable fuel from spent material. Behind the golf ball there was a waste shaft two hundred feet deep that contained fifteen thousand tons of waste mixed with uranium and plutonium. It was very unstable; it had already suffered two hydrogen explosions, spraying radioactive waste everywhere.

“Jesus,” she said. “What a folly. Another generation’s dreams of cheap power. And we have to live with the shit forevermore.”

“Well, it didn’t go entirely to plan,” he conceded. “Originally this was going to be a nuclear park. Six reactors. But the technology was ahead of its time.”

“Ahead of its time? “

“Everything was within the guidelines of the time. Even the secrecy, if you want to know. You have to remember it was the Cold War. They didn’t have the same obsession with safety we have now. An obsession that has stunted us since, conservatively, 1970. And guess what? The local people now love the plant. If it never produces another watt, Dounreay is going to be around for a hundred years. Four generations of high-quality, highly skilled local employment. Because it will take that long to decommission it.”

“So tell me something else. If the U.K. government shut this place down in the 1990s, how come you managed to acquire enriched uranium here?”

He said gently, “There’s nothing illegal.”

“My God, Malenfant.”

“Look.” He dug a small, crumpled softscreen out of his pocket, unfolded it with stiff fingers. It showed an image of something like a rocket engine, a sky-blue nozzle mounted by complex machinery, tall and skinny. The diagram was labeled with spidery text much too small to read. Malenfant said, “This is what we’re building. It’s a nuclear reactor designed for space missions. Here’s the reactor at the top.” He pointed with a thumbnail and worked his way down. “Then you have pumps, shielding, and a radiator. The whole thing stands about twelve feet tall, weighs about a ton. The reactor has a thermal output of a hundred and thirty-five kilowatts, an electrical supply of forty kilowatts…

“Emma, you have to understand. If we have humans aboard a new Nautilus, we have a mission an order of magnitude more power-hungry than Sheena’s. And then there are the power requirements for surface operations. To generate the juice we need from a solar array you’d need an area half the size of a football field, and weighing maybe ten times as much. Even the BDB couldn’t lift it.”

“And this is what you’re planning to build? … Oh. You’re already building these things. Right?”

He looked pleased with himself. Look what I did. “We hired Russian engineers. Dug some of them out of retirement, in fact. The U.S. never developed nuclear power sources beyond radioisotope heat generators we flew on unmanned missions. In fact the Clinton administration shut down our space nuclear power research program. What can you do but condemn that? When we gave up nuclear power, we gave up the future.

“But the Russians flew nuclear power sources on reconnais-

sance missions back in the 1960s, and they even test-flew a de-

sign called Topaz, which is what we based this baby on. Of

course we were able to tune the design a hell of a lot.”

“Malenfant—”

He tapped the little screen. “All we need is fifty pounds of en-

riched U-235, in the form of uranium dioxide pellets. The mod-

erator is zirconium hydride, and you control the reaction by

rotating these cylinders on the outside of the core, which—”

“How are you smuggling this shit into the Mojave?”

“Smuggling is a harsh word.”

“Come on, Malenfant. Those desert skies are pretty clear. Surveillance satellites—”

“You really want to know? All the satellites’ orbital elements are on the Net. You can work out where they will be at any minute. You just shut down until they’ve passed overhead. Even better, make sure you hit the night shift at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency down at Fairfax. There’s always something more interesting to look at than pictures of an old buzzard like me jerking off in the desert.”