“Good evening, Dr. Wells,” returned each guard in turn. “It was a scorcher today, sir. Glad to see it end.”
“Indeed,” replied Skid as he displayed his credentials.
The tall sentry standing on his right moved to open the door. Skid entered, and the man followed in behind him. A blast of cool air slapped them in a bracing vigor. The new air-conditioning system is working well . . . too well, perhaps, Skid noted with a subtle shiver.
The circular entryway still smelled of fresh paint; the room and walls still void of the planned ornamentations yet to be placed. Skid noted with sigh of aggravation, that the new painting—a beautiful commissioned vista of the Los Alamos Complex with the scenic Pajarito Plateau in the background—had not yet arrived. The main entry wall will look spectacular when the painting is finally hung, he thought.
The floor was a plain linoleum tan, the walls an eggshell white. A small table with two chairs crowded near the entry, and the lighting above was exceptionally brilliant.
At the end of a short hallway, another guard—this one armed even more heavily—stood as a silent sentinel behind a solid oak counter. To his side, was a large circular vault door.
Once again, Skid was asked to brandish ID and authorization. At this, the guard who had entered with the professor, inserted a key into one of two slots visible in the center of the aperture. The other man followed suit, and the two sentries turned their keys simultaneously until a clicking sound was heard. The heavy door swung silently open.
“Thank you, gentlemen.” Skid stepped in briskly. The door swung shut behind him with a secured, click.
An cacophony of voices, electronic tape drives, data punch cards and the humming of vacuum tubes instantly accosted him. The light, although not as bright as the guard-check room, was more pleasant and soft. Several technicians were bustling about, moving here and there, punching in data, reading charts, testing equipment and analyzing documents. The rest of the staff sat over large workstations, each veined with displays, panels, switches and other unusual equipment.
“Welcome, professor,” greeted Mark Staples, the Site Y2 Project Leader.
Mark was a good friend and colleague, but more than that he was a brilliant particle theorist and a data wizard, well ahead of his time in analysis, computing and encryption techniques. He stood next to a bank of screens which were emitting numbers in a blizzard of white scripts. A large thinking-machine—a computer, Staples had called it—filled an area at the far end of the room as large as a small garage. It was a prototype for a super calculating machine, but it consumed massive amounts of energy and required hundreds of vacuum tubes to operate. It was noisy, hot and kept several technicians on their toes just replacing burned out tubes.
“I see you’re still top bulb changer.” Skid joked. He patted Staples on the back.
“Well. She might be high maintenance, and short of a few sexy curves, but she’s got a head on her shoulders, that one,” replied Staples, eyeing the boxy structure.
Skid laughed. He looked around and noted that the lab was fully staffed. Every employee was at their corresponding workstation. This was odd for the normal Monday night skeleton crew.
“Why are you fully staffed? I thought the second test wasn’t until Wednesday?”
“Good eyes,” replied Mark. “Change of plans. Ruthanne called me this morning. Evidently, Jacob was using the old abandoned warehouse on the east side as a skating rink for some new invention he was testing out. Around 2:00 A.M. this morning, his prototype exploded and knocked him twenty-five feet into the air. As before, he had no clearance and no one knew he was there—scared the crap out of security.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Only his pride,” grumbled Mark, shaking his head.
“I’ve never seen a boy with so much energy,” said Skid.
“Boy?” corrected Mark. “He turns eighteen next month.”
“Ah, yes. I sometimes forget Jacob’s immunity to age. I still see him as just a child.”
“Well. He may look and act like a typical ten-year old, but he has the highest I.Q. of anyone on the planet.”
Skid chuckled and shook his head. “Ten or eighteen; he’s a handful.”
“You’re right on the money there,” Mark snorted. “Anyway. Ruthanne said he’s just fine. Dr. Weiten, however, doesn’t necessarily agree and has ordered him in on Wednesday night to get checked out. Ruthanne suggested we move the second-phase tests forward to tonight—she was concerned that the Doc might find a sprain or something and prescribe a regimen of medication. And as we both know, those four are dealing with very volatile elements down there.”
“They’re all down there?” Skid suddenly frowned.
“Yes. All four of them—Ruthanne, Jacob and the twins. Down two-hundred feet right below us getting the core ready. They’ve been down there for several hours, I think.”
“All of them?” repeated Skid, tensely. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that, Mark.”
“Agreed. It makes me nervous as well. But Ruthanne said it was necessary for the whole team to be working simultaneously for tonight’s test. She said it was paramount for a successful, second-phase outcome. She was adamant about it.”
Skid gazed past his colleague at the screen. The black and white image of the underground bunker came into his view. “It’s just that . . . if something should go wrong,” he winced slightly, “we could lose them all.”
“Nothing will go wrong,” Mark reassured with a confident pat to Skid’s shoulder. He then turned his attention to a technician and left his nervous colleague to view the monitor.
Skid watched as the screen’s image displayed four individuals busily working around a central object. It was a metal sphere, at least ten feet in diameter. There were hundreds of wires crisscrossing in all directions and angles. Some were attached on protruding probes, others wrapped tightly around the principal core, with dozens of honeycomb indentations placed geometrically throughout the objects metal sheath. It was as strange an object as Skid had ever seen, and he knew very little about it . . . except that it was worth its weight in gold—at least to his military constituency.
He reached for a switch on an audio box attached just to the side of the bank of monitors. “Good evening down there,” he spoke into the speaker. As he did, an immediate response was visually apparent on the monitor.
“Hello, Professor Wells.” Ruthanne’s pleasant voice echoed back over the box. She turned and waved at the camera. Her hair was thick and wavy, her lips full across a large smile. Her Los Alamos lab jacket was neat and pressed, and had a single pen clipped in the front pocket. She wore her same dark glasses, as always, but seemed to know right where to look when being addressed. “I’m sorry I didn’t notify you of the change, but we wanted to start very early, and rumor had it that you were up most of last night working on your research. I thought you might need the additional rest.”
“Ah. Rumor? I don’t suppose it was the fact that we have four nocturnal scientists running around this place at night?” he teased.
“Okay. You got me there. We noticed your light was still on this morning at 3:00 A.M. when we checked in.”
“You’ve been down there since three this morning?”
“Well. We did break before sunup to stretch our legs and use the restroom. I think Jacob got something to eat as well. You know how he is. He cannot go an hour without food,” she joked. “But yes. Since that hour we have been down here coddling our baby, Y2.”
“Hey Professor!” another familiar voice broke in through the speaker.
Skid eyeballed the monitor. “I heard you had an accident yesterday morning,” he replied. “Are you alright?”
Unlike Ruthanne, Jacob was dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt. His hair was too long and lacked a comb. But this was the boy’s usual garb—no surprise there, Skid noted pleasantly.
“I’m just fine,” Jacob stated, giving Ruthanne a firm glare. “Ruthanne went and blabbed to Doc Weiten.”
>
“I did not blab, Jacob!” she retorted back. “Security caught you on the cameras. They called Doc just after they contacted me. You might have told someone what you were up to.”
“You’re such a worrier, Ruthanne. It’s like having a big sister hanging around all the time,” Jacob groaned, tossing a wink at Skid through the monitor.
“Hey Skid! Don’t you just love these two.” Skid smiled as he saw Eli move into view. Ellen soon appeared at his side.
“Hey,” she joined in with a wave.
The twins were rarely more than a few feet apart. It was as though they were joined by some unseen limb. They were as close and loving as any siblings Skid had ever known. Like Ruthanne, they sported their Los Alamos jackets proudly, and were extremely professional in every sense of the word.
The two were physically stunning in appearance, their characteristics near perfect. Whether these features had been Nazi stimulated or not, they could have been a pair of young models in a popular magazine. They were as brilliant as their colleagues, and other than their rare heterochromia—each eye being multicolored—they appeared normal in every aspect.
“Hello, Ellen. You and Eli had better keep an eye on Ruthanne and Jacob,” Skid joked. “I don’t want Jacob coming back topside with a black eye to add to his earlier injury.”
The group laughed and waved back amusingly. Then they each gravitated back to their work.
Skid moved from the monitor to his workstation and began checking off his tasks in preparation for the tests. On the opposite wall, a large steel door marked the entry to the elevator—the shaft to the underground lab. He couldn’t help but feel a sense of apprehension; a realization that the only pathway to his precious group—two-hundred feet down—was behind that metal aperture. He swallowed down the lump in his throat and pushed past his paternal instinct.
Y2’s substructure was actually more like a cement bunker than a building. It contained some of the most unstable matter known to man—developed by the Five, it was necessary to produce the classified fuel.
The four young scientists knew exactly what they were doing. But if something were to go wrong, distance was Los Alamos’ only salvation. Unharnessed, the radiation within the underground bunker could detonate into a dirty bomb which would release massive amounts of deadly radiation. For ten-thousand years the radiation would poison the entire location. But at two-hundred feet down, the top structures of Los Alamos would be safe—the earth serving as a massive fallout sponge.
At the time of the lab’s construction, when the government had baulked at the extreme cost of Y2, it was made very clear that the safety of the Los Alamos complex was paramount, regardless of the expense. And so the lab was built deep, and with multiple interlocks and safety features.
Yes, Los Alamos would be safe, thought Skid . . . but not his Four. That was the thought that remained wedged in his gut like a bad deed on a good conscience.
“We have an initial countdown vector in approximately one hour,” came Mark’s voice over the intercom. “We need green lights from all stations in fifteen minutes, people.”
Skid moved once again to the monitoring screens. “Well gang, looks like we’ll be ready for test two in about an hour, huh?”
“We will be ready,” came Ruthanne’s voice.
Skid glanced back at the monitor in time to catch Ruthanne as she moved out of view. But then, she suddenly hesitated, as if catching a final thought, and turned back to the monitor. “Skid?” she spoke, softly.
“Yes?”
“Hey. I just wanted to thank you for everything you have done for us. This is so exciting and means so much.”
Skid smiled, then puzzled. “You kids are my family,” he said. “Just be careful down there.”
She nodded back in a hurried, downward glance. Then she was gone from view.
The black and white monitor wasn’t the best resolution, and the angle of the lighting down in the lab caused nearly every surface to shadow . . . but for the briefest moment, just before Ruthanne turned her face away from the camera, Skid thought he saw something gleam from off her cheek. But then . . . no. It was just the crazy lighting.
Mark’s voice suddenly broke in over the intercom system. “People. Everything so far is in the green, and we’re on track. However, one trivial issue has come to my attention. It looks like the bathrooms in our building are out of service—no water. I’ve notified maintenance, but for now, those of you who think you might need to use the facilities better head to building six—stat. Once we fire the accelerators, no one leaves for at least three hours. You know the drill. You’ve got fifteen minutes, people. Not one second longer.”
Great, thought Skid.
Unbeknownst to Mark, Skid and everyone else annoyed by the announcement, this was anything but trivial. And in fact, building seven was not the only complex to lose water. Buried eight feet down, Los Alamos had one main waterline that fed the entire complex. The two-foot diameter pipe pushed five-hundred gallons of water per minute, feeding the needs of every building, and the corresponding grounds. But no one could have imagined that their squelched taps and flushless toilets were a superficial nothing compared to the real disaster unfolding beneath the ground. At that very moment, the aqua artery had been severed, and all five-hundred gallons were ripping into the soft dirt and eating away at the gravel mat which had been laid to support the pipe. Within minutes, the pressure of the water had easily torn through the top layer of dirt like an arc welder through soft steel. Following the path of least resistance, the flow now began to eat rapaciously through rock, gravel and dirt.
Strangely, the rupture had not only been catastrophic, but had occurred in a section of buried pipe directly in front of building seven. The raging torrent soon found its path of least resistance, and was now pouring into the gravel casing which housed the cement shaft for the elevator . . . the lifeline to the Y2 lab below. The reinforced structure was surrounded by six feet of gravel to ensure stability. But if washed away, the entire assembly would tilt, crack and collapse. The sub-lab would become a watery tomb.
“It looks like everybody’s lost their water,” came the voice of one of the returning technicians. “Guess we better find some empty bottles,” he joked.
“That’s odd,” mumbled Mark, first. His remark was so nonchalant that no one paid attention . . . at least not until an audible alarm sounded.
Skid whirled in an instant. He shot a panicked glare at the technician sitting at the station. “What’s that for?” he demanded.
“I . . . I don’t know” The man’s eyes canvassed the display in a desperate assault . “We’ve lost power to the air pumps!” he hollered.
“What!” cried Skid, jumping to his feet.
Another alarm shrieked out, sending a sickening wave through everyone in the control center. Another followed, then another.
“What’s happening!” Skid barked in a frantic voice.
Mark was already on it. He had run from one station to the next, glaring as though in some kind of stupefied shock.
Then, it happened: voices came shouting in from all directions.
“We’ve got slip in segments two and five!—”
“Power down to all main generators!—”
“Stabilizer failure on all six lines!—”
Skid flew to the sub-lab monitors, but they were black—power to the underground had failed. He grabbed the audio switch and screamed into the intercom. “Ruthanne! Ruthanne!”
Nothing.
Then, for a terrible instant, he thought he heard voices, but then static spat cruelly back at him. He ran toward the elevator and began to punch in the sequence code.
Mark leaped from a nearby workstation and grabbed hold of him. “It won’t open, Skid! They’re in lockdown! It’s sealed!”
Skid shoved the man aside. “I’ve got to get down there! I’ve got to—!”
A terrible rumble suddenly belched from below. It shook the ground violently. The lights sputtered once, twic
e, then went out. The emergency sirens wailed out in a deafening trill. Skid had only heard this dreaded sound once before, but it had been a drill. This time it was no drill. These were radiation alert sirens.
“Everybody out!” ordered Mark. “This is no drill! Out! Now!”
Skid froze. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think. He heard his voice cry one last fleeting time, “Ruthanne!”
“Security! Get him out!” came Mark’s broken voice through blasts of noise, chaos and confusion.
Skid felt the force of someone seizing him. He instinctively fought the assault, clawing to keep his hold. But he was soon overpowered. The next thing Skid knew, he had been pushed out the exit.
Chapter 10:
The last of twilight glowed in a fiery amber crown upon the horizon.
A lone pair of headlights sliced through a dark remote road in Utah’s west desert. The red, Cadillac Coupe de Ville moved on the gravel path like a trickle of water on baked land. It wound and turned in a snaking zigzag until finally coming to a subtle plateau that rose majestically above the west salt desert. Soon, the vehicle came to a stop and its two occupants stepped out. They walked hand-in-hand to the edge of a great precipice. It was a spectacular site. The entire desert folded out below them in a grand vista, seemingly painted for just that moment. Twilight cast its amber sheath on every surface. The pair stood for a few moments, watching the scene unfold. In time, darkness gathered, tossing a shadowy blanket over all that light had touched. Billions of tiny dots soon sparkled high overhead.
The couple cuddled and talked as if they had all the time in the world. But in the next minutes, their romantic reverie was interrupted by the sound of an approaching vehicle echoing from beyond the still distance. Its headlights soon cast long fingery shadows which reached around ledges, rocks and trees in an eerie perception of silhouettes. Finally, the vehicle rolled to a stop next to the Red Coupe Cadillac. Its headlights went off and the motor went silent.
Zen and Gracie were already on a hurried step toward the van. But even before they could reach it, several bodies spilled out like salt from a shaker.
Of Salt and Sand Page 14