*
“Hey, darlin’,” Larry said to the phone. As he spoke his greeting, he raised his voice slightly to let everyone in the control room know that it was his wife Helen who had interrupted the day’s desultory football analysis.
“Are you busy?” Helen asked.
“We are analyzing the Cowboys’ jackhammer offensive,” Larry said.
“I’ll take that as a no, then.”
After a lot of work during refueling, and stacks of related paperwork afterward, Larry and the Poinsett Landing Station were in a fairly relaxed period. The plume of steam floated above the cooling tower, a finger of white that pointed toward Louisiana. The facility was running at eighty percent capacity, and the operators had little to do but watch the controls. Sometimes Larry wondered how long Poinsett Landing would continue to run if he, and everyone else in the control room, simply left, locked the door behind them, and never came back.
Months, probably. Possibly even years, until the enriched U-235 in the fuel assemblies finally spent itself, until the fuel finally lacked the ability to heat the demineralized water in the reactor vessel to anything greater than the temperature of hot tea, and the huge steam generator, rotating on its 160-foot shaft, finally cooled and cycled to a stop.
Larry stole the last glazed doughnut from the box parked atop the computer monitor, then settled into his chair with the phone at his ear. Below, the football discussion continued uninterrupted.
“I thought I’d call about Mimi’s birthday,” Helen said.
“It’s not for another month,” Larry said. He bit his doughnut, felt sugar melt on his tongue.
“Yes, but I saw something this morning that was just perfect for her. Do you know that old antique store up by the courthouse?”
“Uhh— guess not.”
“Well, I saw this amazing lamp. It’s a bronze horse, a kind of Frederick Remington thing...”
Larry sat up in his chair as something jolted up his spine. “Just a minute,” he said.
It felt as if someone had just kicked the bottom of his chair seat. His eyes darted to his metal-topped desk, where pens and pencils were suddenly jiggling. He lowered the hand holding the doughnut to his desktop.
“Hey,” he called out, trying to get the attention of the operators below. Larry’s eyes were already scanning the displays. Pump malfunction? he wondered. Something with the turbine?
He heard a kind of percussion in his ear, like a shelf had fallen on the other end of the phone. “What was that?” Helen called in his ear, alarm in her voice. And then, a second or two later, Larry felt it himself, a lurch as if something large had fallen sideways against the control building.
“What was that?” Wilbur echoed.
The lurch came again, then again, a thudding, wham-wham-wham-wham, a steady pounding triphammer. Everything on Larry’s desk was shivering over to the right. He stood, phone in one hand, doughnut in the other. His eyes frantically scanned the control room displays. A folder of documents spilled from his desk, splashed unnoticed to the floor.
“Power spike on station transformers!” one operator shouted.
“Turbine feedwater pump’s offline!” shouted someone else. Books pitched off shelves.
And then Larry heard it coming, a chuffing noise like an express train hurtling forward on its tracks, choom choom choom choom choom CHOOM, coming closer at terrifying speed. Larry had a moment to wonder if it was a tornado; he’d heard that tornados could sound like trains .. .
Then the express train hit the building. Larry felt a shocking blow to his right shoulder as he pitched sideways into the wall. The computer monitor flung itself into his lap, making him cry out. Fluorescent light shattered overhead, glass raining down on the room.
“Fuuuuuck!” Wilbur yelled.
Larry rolled the monitor off his lap and attempted to stand, one hand groping at his desk, trying to lever himself upright. His boots went out from under him and he shouted as he fell and received another slam to his shoulder.
“Turbine trip! Turbine trip!” The voice was so distorted by fear and shock that Larry did not recognize it. Larry could barely hear the voice over the express-train sound of the catastrophe.
He felt the teeth rattling in his head. Glass shattered throughout the control room. Panels spilled from the ceiling, revealing ducts and bundles of cable. There was an actinic arc of electricity, a chaotic series of shouts from the operators. Larry rolled over on his stomach and tried to crawl toward the door. The floor kept trying to kick him in the belly.
Think, he urged himself. But he couldn’t think at all, couldn’t put one thought in front of another. The express train seemed to have run off with his mind.
The remaining lights faded to a dull amber. Dismayed cries filled the air. Electricity arced somewhere in the room.
Emergency lighting, Larry thought. Wait for the emergency lighting.
The lights brightened for a moment, and Larry felt relief flood into him. Then all light faded.
There were shouts in the darkness, crashes as things fell. The whole building seemed to take a massive lurch to one side. Larry felt himself pitch forward. His hands scrabbled for support. He could smell burnt plastic. And then there was a roaring as the electric arcs triggered the control room’s gas extinguishing system, as pressurized cylinders of Halon 1301 began to flood the room with gas in order to suppress electric fires.
“Out!” Larry shouted. “Everyone out!”
Halon gas wasn’t poisonous, not exactly. You could breathe it and it wouldn’t kill you. But it drove the oxygen out of the room, and that would put you six feet under.
There was so much noise that he couldn’t tell if anyone heard him.
Earthquake, he thought. No other explanation.
Vertigo eddied through his brain. The floor didn’t seem to be strictly horizontal anymore. Larry groped his way to the door, felt the metal frame under his hand, tried to haul himself upright. A bolt of pain shot through his injured right shoulder.
CHOOM CHOOM Choom choom choom choom ...
The express train dopplered to a lower key, then faded. Larry found himself standing in the door to the control room. Over the hiss of the Halon cylinders he could hear a babble of confused voices both within and without the control room. A shrill call for help echoed down the corridor. He moved instinctively toward the sound, groping his way down the corridor. Broken glass crunched under his boots. The only light he could see was an exit sign that glowed a ghostly red in the middle distance.
Someone slammed into him from behind, and pain shot through his shoulder. “Careful!” he snapped.
“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur’s voice shouted in his ear. “Did we have reactor trip?”
“Must have,” Larry said. “Power loss this bad. Whole grid must be down.” He rubbed his shoulder, tried to make himself think. In event of electric power failure to the reactor, control rods would slide into the reactor to stop nuclear fission. It wasn’t something he had to order, it was something that happened automatically.
“Help!” a man screamed.
So the reactor, Larry forced himself to think over the noise, was shut down. The problem now was getting rid of the waste heat already in the core. Which should be happening automatically; there were systems that would do that.
There were also supposed to be backup electrical systems for the control room. And those had failed.
“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur was shouting at the people shuffling out of the control room. “Did the reactor trip?”
“I don’t know,” came the answer from the dark. “I didn’t get a light or a warning. But things went to hell so fast.”
“Help!” someone shrieked. “Jesus Christ I’m trapped!”
Larry kept trying to put his thoughts together. One thing after another, he reminded himself. Just keep turning that horse in circles. If the reactor’s primary cooling system suffered a LOCA— Loss-Of-Cooling Accident— gas-pressurized accumulator tanks within the containment building would dump a boric acid solution into the reactor core. This would serve very well for cooling, at least for a time, but in the event of a continued loss of pressure, auxiliary diesel generators belonging to the Emergency Core Cooling System, the ECCS, would automatically switch on and dump cooling water from accumulator tanks into the reactor, then keep the water circulating until the interior of the reactor cooled. If the diesels failed, the accumulator tanks would dump anyway, but the water would have no way to circulate.
“Help!” the man shrieked. Larry reached out into the darkness toward the huddle of men and grabbed Wilbur’s shoulder. He was alarmed to find the shoulder was covered with something warm and wet that felt like blood.
“Listen,” he said. “We’ve probably suffered a LOCA. We’ve got to make sure the ECCS is doing its job. We’ve got to get people down the stairs and out to the diesels.” Suddenly the building shuddered as if to a blow. Glass shattered somewhere nearby. Larry lurched and reached protectively for his shoulder, but did not fall. Panic whirled through his thoughts. I could die here, he thought.
“Heeeelp!” the man screamed.
The building ceased to move. Even the trapped man was silent in the next few hushed seconds as everyone waited for the whole building to tumble down.
The silence held. So did the building.
“Listen,” Larry said. “Who’ve we got here? Wilbur, can you check generator three down by the machine plant?”
“Right,” Wilbur said.
“Bill— you there?”
“Ayuh.”
“I’m trapped!” called the voice again.
“Bill,” Larry said, “I need you to check number two, by Reactor Services.”
“Right.”
“I’ll check number one myself.” The man kept screaming down the corridor, but Larry’s mind had started working again, was putting one thought atop the next. “Marky? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you go to the secondary shutdown room?”
The secondary shutdown room, at the very base of the containment structure, contained all the duplicate controls necessary to bring the reactor to a safe shutdown. Maybe the emergency power was working there.
“I don’t reckon I can get there,” Marky said. “I think I busted my leg. Somebody’s going to have to carry me out.”
“I’ll go instead,” said someone else.
“Good. You do that.”
“Somebody help meeee...”
“Okay,” Larry said. “The rest of you help Marky and that other poor soul. Check every office and make sure there aren’t people trapped up here. And take them down by the stairs— don’t use the elevators even if you can find one that seems to be working.”
Larry groped his way toward the illuminated exit sign. He found the steel push bar on the stair, put his weight on the door, and failed to budge it. The doorframe was bent, he realized. He put his unwounded shoulder against it, shoved. Nothing.
“Door’s jammed,” he said. “Can somebody help me here?”
Three of them, with effort, finally bashed the door open. The stairwell was dimly lit from the few battery-powered emergency lights that hadn’t been completely shattered. A strange bellowing sound echoed up the stair, like lions roaring in the African bush. Larry paused for a moment, sniffing for scent of fire and detecting none. Then he reached for the metal stair rail and began to descend.
The stair was tilted at crazy angles, as if it were trying to pitch him off. His inner ear swam with vertigo as he groped his way down the stair, one slow step after another. He worried that the metal stair might have been structurally damaged, that his weight might prove too much and that it might fall away with him on it.
The roaring sound got louder as he descended. He began to feel a vibration through the metal rail. The roaring was terrifyingly close. Larry couldn’t imagine what might be causing it. Perhaps, he thought, a fire was raging somewhere nearby.
He reached the bottom of the stair, put his palm against the metal door to see if fire had turned it hot. The door was cool, but it vibrated in sympathy to the roaring sound. For a moment Larry hesitated, wondering if opening the door was at all wise. Then, when he tried to push the door open, he found again that the door was jammed.
The concerted efforts of four grown men were necessary to bash the door open. When it finally moved, it flung open about two feet, then stuck fast on broken concrete. A cold mist drifted in through the opening, and along with it the stench of sulfur.
Larry stepped out onto the east side of the control building and looked in astonishment at a series of fountains, a line of them forty feet away, that jetted water a good hundred feet into the air. Mist plumed high in the air, and water rained down on a level field thick with debris.
Water from the reactor? he thought, thunderstruck. But no. Reactor water would be boiling hot, not cool. Besides, there wasn’t enough buried pipe in this area to account for the volume.
Somehow, Larry decided, the geysers had to be natural. And therefore they were not his problem. He would think about them later.
Larry wiped mist from his spectacles and shuffled to one side to let the others emerge from the structure. They gazed in consternation at the devastation around them.
The control building they’d just left was a wreck. It was tilted on its foundation and loomed over Larry’s head like a concrete cliff. Larry felt a strong urge to slip away before it fell on him.
The control structure leaned against the containment building like a drunken prizefighter hanging on the ropes. Larry’s head whirled as he realized that even the containment structure, with its tons of concrete and steel, was leaning at an unnatural angle. Water fountained from beneath its foundation, from beneath the twelve-foot-thick pad of concrete and steel on which the structure rested. Occasionally the geysers would spit out a rain of sand or a rock, twenty- or thirty-pound stones lofting through the air to thud onto the debris field. Larry was relieved that the fountains seemed generally to be tilted away from the building.
No time to be a tourist, Larry thought. He blinked in the mist.
“Are we ready?” he said. The others turned to him. Wilbur swiped with his sleeve at the blood that was running down his face from a scalp wound.
“You all right, there?” Larry asked.
Wilbur looked at his bloody sleeve in dull surprise. “Guess so,” he said.
“Let’s do it.”
“Right,” Bill said. He headed north toward the containment building, to get to the diesel by Reactor Services on the other side of the reactor.
Larry turned and loped the other way, down the length of the control building, keeping between the wall and the geysers that were roaring up from beneath the building’s foundation. He tried not to trip on the stones and chunks of broken concrete that slid under his bootsoles. He could hear Wilbur stumbling after. Larry turned the corner, now heading west, then slowed and came to a halt as he saw the turbine house.
Through fountaining water Larry could see that the long building that housed the 160-foot Allis-Chalmers tandem-compound turbine no longer existed. The entire central section of the building seemed simply to have been blown to confetti. The rest had collapsed, chunks of aluminum roof or concrete wall tumbled down on the hulking forms of wrecked transformers, pumps, and condensers. Twisted rebar had been sculpted into weird shapes.
Larry could see no human beings in or near the colossal wreck.
Wilbur’s footsteps, behind Larry, slowed to a halt. “Good God,” said Wilbur’s voice. “What the hell happened? A tornado?”
“Earthquake, I think.”
Wilbur looked wild, wide eyes staring from the coating of blood that rained down his face. “There must’ve been a hundred people in there. We’ve got to help them.”
Larry shook his head. “One thing at a time,” he said. “The reactor comes first. We’ve got to make sure we have an SSE. Deal with the diesels before anything else.”
Wilbur blinked blood from his eyes. SSE was Safe Shutdown, Earthquake. There were supposed to be contingencies already worked out. “Yeah,” Wilbur said. “Guess you’re right.”
“Let’s go.”
The ground was covered with broken concrete and bright sharp metal. The metal was strangely twisted, torqued and strained and drawn, as if by steel hands, into bizarre shapes. Chunks sharp as guillotine blades were embedded in the wall of the control building, as if they’d been hurled there by a hundred-handed giant. The building wall, with its shining embedded blades, looked like some weird modernist sculpture.
The turbine’s main shaft, Larry thought, had been rotating thirty times per second when the earthquake struck. If the quake had bent the turbine shaft, or if something massive had fallen on it and stopped its rotation ...
Good Lord, he thought. Tons of swiftly rotating metal had slammed to a sudden halt. Turbine blades, even big ones, were notoriously delicate. Bringing the Allis-Chalmers to a sudden stop would have been like throwing a huge boulder into a 160-foot-long jet engine. The turbine would have come apart, spraying deadly metal in all directions. It would have been like a storm of ten thousand flying razor blades. No wonder parts of the turbine house looked as if they had been shredded.
And the shaft itself ... ? A hundred sixty feet of rotating steel?
It would have gone somewhere. Maybe straight up in the air, like a giant spear.
It sure wasn’t in the turbine house anymore.
He didn’t want to think of the people who had been inside when it happened.
Behind the turbine house, a column of dark smoke rose into the sky. Between the obscuring mist and the smoke itself, it was hard to tell just what it was that burned.
He came to the southwest corner of the control structure. His path diverged from Wilbur’s here: Larry would continue to head west to the number one auxiliary diesel behind the auxiliary structure, while Wilbur would detour south again around the remains of the turbine house to try to find the number three generator by the machine plant.
“Good luck,” Larry said.
He didn’t hold out a lot of hope for Wilbur’s success. The machine plant was too close to the turbine house. Very likely it had been destroyed when the turbine came apart, and the auxiliary diesel structure with it. One or the other structure might even be the one that was producing the column of smoke.
But still, he had to make certain the safety backup systems were working. If only one of the three backup diesel generators went on, it was enough to secure a safe shutdown for the reactor. With that necessity in mind, the three generators had been placed far apart so that the same catastrophe could not overwhelm them all.
One of them, he thought, had to have survived. It didn’t matter which one. So Wilbur had to try to get to the number three diesel, just on the chance that it was still intact.
Geysers shot out of the ground here, on the west side, but they weren’t as numerous, or as forceful, as they had been on the other side of the building. Larry loosened his collar and tie, and then he and Wilbur each chose paths between the jets of water and began to run. Larry threw his arms over his head for protection in case one of the geysers decided to spit a rock at him. Pain shot through his right shoulder.
Water splashed up around his ankles as he ran. Where is it all coming from? Larry wondered. Underground, yes, but from a hidden artesian system that had somehow escaped the geologists’ reports, or ... ?
A stone as big as his head splashed down a few feet away and Larry gave a jump, his heart thudding. He decided to think only about running. Pain jolted through his shoulder at every step.
Larry cleared the area where the geyser debris was raining down, and Mississippi’s summer heat wrapped him like a suffocating blanket. He stumbled on something hidden under the water, recovered, and swiped at his glasses with his sleeve, tried to clear the droplets of spray. He panted for breath, not used to running, not used to any sort of real exercise in this heat. His heart bounced around his ribcage like a loose stone.
He blinked as he saw a bent form in front of him, A man in coveralls kneeling in the water, debris all over, his back bent, face close to the surface. It looked like he was praying.
It looked like he was dead.
Larry splashed closer. Slowed, heart rattling in his ribs. He stopped, panting for breath. Reached out a hand, touched the man on the back. “You okay?” he asked.
The man raised his head, and Larry’s heart turned over in shock. There was a dividing line across the man’s forehead, right at eyebrow level. Below the line the man’s face was very pale, and his lips a bit blue, but he seemed otherwise normal. Above the line the flesh was bright red, and shiny. It was the most unnatural color Larry had ever seen, like an overripe red plum stretched tight and about to burst. Huge blisters had exploded over his skin, and some of them had broken and were weeping fluid.
Larry saw, as the man pulled his hands from the water, that the backs of the man’s hands were bright red, too, and just as badly blistered.
“What happened?” Larry gasped.
The man blinked at him with pale blue eyes. “I was in the turbine house,” he said. “Primary steam line went.” The man’s lobster-red hands fumbled at his collar in memory. “I used to work at a plant in Santa Barbara, so I knew it was a quake right off. Soon’s I knew, I pulled my coverall over my face and ran for the door.” The man’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone else must’ve breathed the steam in, and died.”
Larry stared at him in shock. A primary steam line rupture would have flooded the turbine house with thousand-degree steam straight from the reactor. If anyone had breathed it, his lungs would have gone into instant shock and he would have died within seconds.
When the turbine had, a few seconds later, torn itself into murderous razor-edged shards of metal, everyone around it was probably already dead.
“Dang thing blew up behind me,” the man said. “I just kept running. Ran all this way.” He looked down at the water in which he was kneeling, then slowly put his hands into the water again. “Hurts,” he said. “The cool water helps.” He bent forward, lowered his blistered forehead into the water.
“You’ve got to get help,” Larry said. “You got to . ..” His mind flailed. “To get to the infirmary,” he finished.
“Figure it’s still standing?” the man said, his sad voice muffled by the water.
“I ... don’t know.” The infirmary was in the administration building, southeast of here, behind the smoke pall of whatever it was that was burning. Larry hadn’t seen it behind the smoke.
“I’ll just stay here awhile, then,” the man said. He sighed heavily, his body almost visibly deflating.
Larry splashed around him in agitation. “Listen,” he said. “I’m coming back for you. I’ve just got to ... I’ve got to run now.”
“Take your time,” the man said. “I ain’t got nowhere to go.”
Larry loped on, gasping in the humid air. His boots had filled to the ankles with water and they were like iron weights on the ends of his legs. The auxiliary building loomed up on his right, the building that held over thirty years’ worth of Poinsett Landing’s spent fuel in its stainless-steel-lined concrete pond. Larry looked at it anxiously as he jogged past. The buff-colored aluminum siding had peeled away here and there, revealing the ugly concrete beneath, but the walls seemed still to be standing. From the stumps of steel girders tilted skyward atop the flat roof, it looked as if part of the roof had caved in.
There were two separate pumping systems in the auxiliary building to keep cooling water circulating through the spent fuel. He wondered if either one of them was working.
First things first, he reminded himself. The reactor came before everything else.
Where was this water coming from? The geysers weren’t throwing up enough water to cover the ground like this.
As he splashed around the corner of the Auxiliary Building he saw a group of a dozen workers standing behind the building. Panting, he approached them.
“Hey, Mr. Hallock.” The speaker was Meg Tarlton, one of the foremen on the fuel handling system. Her red-blond braids peeked out from the brim of her hard hat.
“Hey,” Larry said, and then he had to bend over, hands on knees, while he caught his breath.
“What was that?” Meg asked. “A bomb or something?”
“Earthquake,” Larry gasped.
“Told you, Meg,” someone said.
“How’s the ...” Larry gasped in air. “Fuel.”
“It’s a mess. Roof’s caved in. Active cooling’s down. Fuel pond’s cracked in at least two places, but the leaking isn’t too bad just yet. I don’t think.”
“You’ve got...” Larry straightened, tried not to whoop for breath. “You’ve got to get in there and make an inspection.”
Meg’s eyes hardened. “You’re not getting us up on those catwalks again. Not till we know it’s safe.”
“But—”