Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [264]
"You saying it will be easy to knock off?" Alim Nassor said.
"How easy?" Hooker asked. "How many?"
Jerry shrugged. "Give me a couple of hundred men. And some of the artillery. Mortars. Hit the turbines with mortars and that finishes the electricity. They can't operate the nuclear reactor without electricity. They need it for the pumps. Hit the turbines, and the whole thing melts down—"
"Will it blow up?" Alim asked. The idea excited him and scared him. "Big mushroom cloud? What about fallout? We'd have to get out from under that fast, wouldn't we?"
Jerry Owen looked at him with amusement. "Nope. No great white light. No big mushroom cloud. Sorry."
"I'm not sorry," Hooker said. "Once we get that place, can you make me some atom bombs?"
"No."
"You don't know how?" Hooker showed his disappointment. Owen had been talking like he knew it all.
And Owen was offended. "Nobody does. Look, you can't make atom bombs out of nuclear fuel. Wrong stuff. It wasn't designed for that. Wasn't designed to blow up, either. Hell, we probably won't get a real melt-down. They put safety precautions on their safety precautions."
Alim said, "You guys always said they weren't safe."
"No, of course they're not, but safe compared to what?" Jerry Owen waved north toward the ruined dam and the drowned city of Bakersfield: cubistic islands rising from a filthy sea. "That was a hydroelectric plant. Was that safe? People who wouldn't go near an atomic plant lived downstream from dams."
"So why do you hate that place?" Hooker asked. "Maybe … maybe we ought to save it."
"Goddammit, no," Jerry Owen said.
Alim shot Hooker a look. Now you've started him off again, it said.
"It's too much, don't you see that?" Owen demanded. "Atomic power makes people think you can solve problems with technology. Bigger and bigger. More quick fixes. You have the power so you use it and soon you need more and then you're ripping ten billion tons a year of coal out of the earth. Pollution. Cities so big they rot in the center. Ghettos. Don't you see? Atomic power makes it easy to live out of balance with nature. For awhile. Until finally you can't get back in balance. The Hammer gave us a chance to go back to living the way we were evolved to live, to be kind to the Earth … ."
"All right, dammit," Hooker said. "You take two hundred men and two mortars and go shuck that plant. Make sure the Prophet knows what you're doing. Maybe he'll shut up long enough to let me organize." Hooker stared at the map. "You go play, Owen. We got to go after the real enemy." He'll ask for volunteers, Hooker thought, and he smiled. The crazies would go with Owen and leave Hooker alone for awhile.
The room Adolf Weigley took Tim to was beautiful. Granted that it was crowded: A massive wave of cables surged through a wall, divided, subdivided, ran in metal raceways overhead. But there were lights, electric lights! Neatly enameled green panels lined two walls, busy with dials and lights and switches, and clean with the dust-filtered cleanliness of an operating room. Tim asked, "What is this, the main control room?"
Weigley laughed. He was chronically cheerful, free from the jumpiness of disaster syndrome, and elaborately casual about all the technology. A baby-smooth face made him look younger than he was; the Stronghold men generally wore beards. "No, it's a cable-spreading room," he said. "But it's the only place we've got that you can sleep in. Uh … it wouldn't be smart to push any buttons." His smile was sly and partly concealed.
Tim laughed. "Not me." He gazed euphorically at fire extinguishers and winking lights and massive cables, everything precisely in place, all glowing in indirect lighting. Power hummed softly in his ear.
Dolf said, "Drop your backpack over there. There'll be others sleeping in here, too. Mind you stay out of the way. Duty operators have to get in here. Sometimes they have to work