“Um. Not so bad, then,” Harvey said.
“Not so bad. Not so bad as what? A year’s energy in one minute,” Sharps said. “It probably hits water. If it hits land, it’s tough for anyone under it, but most of the energy radiates back out to space fairly quickly. But if it hits water, it vaporizes it. Let’s see, ergs to calories…damn. I don’t have that on my gadget.”
“I do,” Forrester said. “The strike would vaporize about sixty million cubic kilometers of water. Or fifty billion acre-feet, if you like that. Enough to cover the entire U.S.A. with two hundred and twelve feet of water.”
“All right,” Sharps said. “So sixty million cubic kilometers of water go into the atmosphere. Harvey, it’s going to rain. A lot of that water is moving across polar areas. It freezes, falls as snow. Glaciers form fast…slide south…yeah. Harvey, the historians believe the Thera explosion changed the world’s climate. We know that Tamboura, about as powerful as Krakatoa, caused what historians of the last century called ‘the year without a summer.’ Famine. Crop failure. Our hot fudge sundae will probably trigger an ice age. All those clouds. Clouds reflect heat. Less sunlight gets to Earth. Snow reflects heat too. Still less sunlight. It gets colder. More snow falls. Glaciers move south because they don’t melt as fast. Positive feedback.”
It had all turned dead serious. Harvey asked, “But what stops ice ages?”
Forrester and Sharps shrugged in unison.
“So,” Hamner said, “my comet’s going to bring about an ice age?” Now you could see the long lugubrious face of his grandfather, who could look bereaved at a $60,000 funeral.
Forrester said, “No, that was hot fudge sundae we were talking about. Um—the Hammer is bigger.”
“Hamner-Brown. How much bigger?” Forrester made an uncertain gesture. “Ten times?”
“Yes,” said Harvey. There were pictures in his mind. Glaciers marched south across fields and forests, across vegetation already killed by snow. Down across North America into California, across Europe to the Alps and Pyrenees. Winter after winter, each colder, each colder than the Great Freeze of ’76-’77. And hell, they hadn’t even mentioned the tidal waves. “But a comet won’t be as dense as a cubic mile of h-h-h—”
It was just one of those things. Harvey leaned back in his chair and belly-laughed, because there was just no way he could say it.
Later he made his own tape, alone, in a studio approximation of an office—fake books on the shelves, worn carpet on the floor. Here he could talk.
“Sorry about that.” (This would run just after one of Harvey’s breakups. He’d done that several times in the Sharps interview.) “The points to remember are these. First, the odds against any solid part of Hamner-Brown hitting us are literally astronomical. Over these distances even the Devil himself couldn’t hit a target as small as Earth. Second, if it did hit, it would probably be as several large masses. Some of those would hit ocean. Others would hit land, where the damage would be local. But if Hamner-Brown did strike the Earth, it would be as if the Devil had struck with an enormous hammer, repeatedly.”
April: Interludes
Fifty thousand years ago in Arizona:
Friction with the air makes the surface incandescent as the oxygen in the atmosphere blowtorches the iron. From this great flying mass, sputtering chunks as large as houses fly off as the meteoroid, traveling at a low angle, nears the ground. A huge cylinder of superheated air is forced along by the meteoroid and, as it strikes, this air is forced across the surrounding countryside in a fiery blast that instantaneously scorches every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction.
Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage
(Chilton, 1965)
Leonilla Malik scribbled a prescription and handed it to her patient. He was the last for the morning, and when the man had left her examining room, Leonilla took the bottle of Grand Marnier from her lower desk drawer and poured a small, precious glass. The expensive liqueur was a present from one of her fellow kosmonauts, and drinking it gave her a delicious feeling of decadence. Her friend also brought her silk hose and a slip from Paris.
And I’ve never been outside Russia, she thought. She let the sweet fluid roll over her tongue. No matter how I try, they will never let me go.
She wondered what her status was. Her father had been a physician with a fairly good reputation among the Kremlin elite. Then had come the “Doctors’ Plot,” an insane Stalinist delusion that the Kremlin physicians were trying to poison The Revolutionary Leader of Our Times, Hero of the People, Teacher and Inspired Leader of the World Proletariat, Comrade Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Her father and forty other doctors had vanished into the Lubianka.
One of her father’s legacies was a 1950 copy of Pravda. He had carefully underlined every mention of Stalin’s name: ninety-one times on the front page alone, ten times as Great Leader, and six as Great Stalin.
He should have poisoned the bastard, Leonilla thought. It wasn’t a pleasant concept; there was a long tradition about that. The Oath of Hippocrates wasn’t taught in Soviet medical schools, but she had read it.
As the daughter of an enemy of the people, Leonilla’s future hadn’t seemed very bright; but then had come a new era, and Dr. Malik was rehabilitated. By way of reparations, Leonilla had been rescued from secretarial work in an obscure Ukrainian town and sent to the university. A liaison with an Air Force colonel had resulted in her learning to fly, and from that, weirdly, to her ambiguous status in the kosmonaut corps. The colonel was now a general and long since married, but he continued to help her.
She had never been in space. She had been trained for it, but she had never been chosen. Instead, she treated flyers and their dependents, and got in flying time when she could, and hoped for a lucky break.
There was a tap at the door. Sergeant Breslov, a young man of no more than nineteen years, proud to be a sergeant in the Red Army; only, of course, it wasn’t the Red Army anymore and hadn’t been since Stalin had been forced to rename it during what he had to call The Great Patriotic War. Breslov would have preferred the Red Army. He often talked of carrying freedom across the world on the point of his bayonet.
“There is a long message for you, Comrade Captain. You have been transferred to Baikunyar.” He frowned at the bottle which Leonilla had forgotten to put away.
“Back to work,” Leonilla said. “That is worth celebration. Will you join me?” She poured a glass for Breslov.
He drank standing at stiff attention. It was one way of showing disapproval of officers who drank before lunch. Of course, many of them did, which to Breslov was another indication of how things had gone downhill since the Red Army days his father boasted of.
In three hours she was flying toward the spaceport. She could hardly believe it: urgency orders, authorizing her to fly a jet trainer, her belongings to be sent after her. What could be so important? She pushed the question from her mind and reveled in the joy of flying. Alone, in the clear skies, no one looking over her shoulder, no other pilots eager for their chance at the stick: ecstasy. Only one thing could be better.
Could that be why they’d sent for her? She knew of no space missions. But perhaps. I’ve been lucky for a long time. Why not more luck? She imagined being in a real Soyuz, waiting for the big boosters to roar and fling the spacecraft up into clean space, and for the hell of it she flipped the jet trainer into a series of aerobatics that would have got her grounded if anyone had been watching.
A sudden gust across the San Joaquin Valley shook the trailer slightly, bringing Barry Price to instant wakefulness. He lay still, listening for the reassuring sound of the bulldozers; his crews were still at work on the nuclear power plant. There was light outside. He sat up carefully to avoid waking Dolores, but she stirred and opened one eye. “What time is it?” she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.
“About six.”
“Oh, my God. Come back to bed.” She reached for him. The covers fell away, revealing her tanned breasts.
He moved away, avoiding her, then caught her hands in one of his and held them while he bent to kiss her. “Woman, you’re insatiable.”
“I haven’t had any complaints yet. Are you really getting up?”
“Yes. I’ve got engineering work to do, and we’ve got visitors later, and I’ve got to read that memo McCleve sent over yesterday. Should have got to it last night.”
She grinned muzzily. “Bet what we did was more fun. Sure you won’t come back to bed?”
“No.” He went to the sink and ran water until it was hot.
“You wake up faster than any man I’ve ever known,” Dolores said. “I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn.” She pulled the pillow over her head, but she continued to move slightly under the covers, letting him know she was awake.
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 workforce. 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 life. 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.”
&nbs
p; “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.”
“And your own people?”
Barry shrugged. “You know, nobody thinks it’s remarkable that police and firemen are dedicated to their work,” he said. “They don’t hear so much about power workers. They’d think different if they ever saw one of our apprentices standing up to his waist in oil to turn a valve, or a lineman up on a pole in the middle of an electrical storm. We’ll be on the job, Mrs. Gunderson. If they’ll just let us.”
■
The wind was warm and the skies clear in the Houston suburb of El Lago. The rainy season had ended, and a hundred families had come out into their backyards. The local Safeway was almost sold out of Coors beer.
Busy, hungry, and happy to be home for a whole weekend, Rick Delanty scooped hamburgers off the grill and slid them between buns. His fenced backyard was warm and smoky and noisy with a dozen friends and their wives. From the distance they could hear the children shouting as they played some new game. Children get used to glory, even if they don’t see it very often, Rick thought. Having Daddy home wasn’t such a big deal to them.
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