Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [9]
TUNE IN! PLUG IN! BLOW OUT!
Hospitals and other emergency services are hereby warned, and invited to take necessary precautions.
The East Village Other
(an underground paper) July 1970
On a clear day the view stretched out forever. From his vantage point on the top floor of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project, Site Supervisor Barry Price had an excellent view of the vast lozenge-shaped saucer that had once been an inland sea, and was now the center of California's agricultural industry. The San Joaquin Valley ran two hundred miles to his north, fifty to the south. The uncompleted nuclear-power complex stood on a low ridge twenty feet above the totally flat valley—the highest hill in sight.
Even at this early hour there was a bustle of industrial activity. His construction crews worked a full three shifts, through the night, on Saturdays and Sundays, and if Barry Price had had his way they'd have worked Christmas and New Year's too. In their latest flurry of activity they'd finished Number One reactor and had a good start on Number Two; others had begun excavation for Three and Four, and none of it did any good. Number One was finished, but the courts and lawyers wouldn't let him turn it on.
His desk was buried in paper. His hair was cut very short, his mustache was neatly trimmed and thin as a razor's edge. He wore what his ex-wife had called his engineering uniform: khaki trousers, khaki shirt with epaulets, khaki bush jacket with more epaulets; pocket calculator swinging from his belt (when his hair was all brown it had been a slide rule), pencils in his breast pockets, notebook in its own pocket sewed to the jacket. When forced to—as he increasingly was by court appearances, command performances before the Mayor of Los Angeles and its Commissioners of Water and Power, testimony before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the State Legislature—he reluctantly put on a gray flannel suit and tie; but on his home turf he gratefully changed back to field clothing, and he was damned if he'd dress up for visitors.
His coffee cup was empty, dead empty, and there went his last excuse. He keyed the intercom. "Dolores, I'm ready for our visiting firemen."
"Not here yet," she said.
Reprieved. For a little while. He went back to his papers, hating what he was doing. As he worked he muttered to himself. "I'm an engineer, dammit. If I'd wanted to spend all my time with legal briefs or sitting in a courtroom, I'd have been a lawyer. Or a mass murderer."
Increasingly he regretted taking the job. He was a power systems man, and a damned good one; he'd proved that by becoming Pennsylvania Edison's youngest plant supervisor and keeping the Milford nuclear plant operating with the highest efficiency factor and best safety record in the country. And he'd wanted this position, to be in charge of San Joaquin and get the plant on line, four thousand megawatts of clean electric power when the project was completed. But his job was to build, to operate, not to explain. He was at home with machinery; more than that, with construction people, power operators, linemen and switchyard workers, his enthusiasm for nuclear power was infectious and spread through all those who worked for him—and so what? he thought sourly. Nowadays he spent all his time on paper work.
Dolores came in with more urgent memos that had to be answered. Every one of them was a job for a public-relations type, and every one of them came from people