Lucifer's Hammer

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 spi

“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.

“…nothing new about the idea,” his wife was saying. “Science fiction writers have been talking about big space colonies for decades.” She was tall and very black, and she wore her hair in the tiny braids called corn rolls. Delanty could remember when she straightened her hair.

“For that matter, Heinlein wrote about them,” Gloria Delanty said. She looked to Rick for confirmation, but he was busy at the grill, and remembering his wife when they were both students in Chicago.

“It is new,” said a member of a very exclusive club. Evan had been to the Moon — almost. He’d been the man who stayed in the Apollo capsule. “O’Neill has worked out the economics of building these giant space colonies. He’s proved we can do it, not just tell stories.”

“I like it,” Gloria said. “A family astronaut project. How do we sign up?”

“You already did,” Jane Ritchie said. “When you married the test pilot there.”

“Oh, are we married?” Gloria asked. “I wonder. Evan, can’t you people in the training office ever manage to keep a schedule?”

John Baker came out of the house. “Hey, Rickie! I thought I had the wrong house. There wasn’t any sign of action from out front.”

There was a chorus of greetings, warm from the men who hadn’t seen Colonel John Baker since he went off to Washington, not so warm from the women. Baker had done it: got divorced after his mission. It happened to a lot of the astronauts, and having him back in Houston set the others to wondering.

Baker gave them all a wave, then sniffed. “Do I get one of those?”

“I’ll take your order, sir, but unless there’s a cancellation… ,,

“Why is it you never serve fried chicken?”

“I’m afraid of being stereotyped. Because I’m—

“Black,” Joh

“Eh?” Rick looked at his hands in apparent dismay. “No, that’s just hamburger grease.”