The Longest Night (9 page)

The glitch, the design flaw that would be improved upon in later reactors based on this one, was that while the number nine was the emergency brake for the whole reactor, there was no emergency brake for the number nine. If a crew dropped it to the bottom when they hadn't meant to (which would be a real idiot move, and Paul hoped that never happened on his watch), it would shut down, or scram, the entire machine and they'd have to restart the goddamn thing. That would be an inconvenience, but something they'd live to complain about later.
Raising
the number nine too high, however, would have the opposite effect, flooding the core with energy, and that would be very bad. It could make the reactor go supercritical, reaching two thousand degrees in less than a second.

This had never happened in the CR-1, of course, but they had some idea of how serious a supercritical core could be. The core contained enriched uranium, hundreds of years' worth of energy in those tiny invisible atoms, but if it went supercritical all that energy would be released in a fraction of a second. This might melt the interior of the reactor or it might blow the whole thing like a volcano; they couldn't be sure until they tried it, which, of course, no one ever would.

So army brass had come up with a simple solution, repeated over and over like they were telling kids not to look at the sun:
Do not ever, under any circumstances, raise a rod more than four inches
.

The crew took great care with their increments, one man lifting or lowering the control rod while another crouched to watch it. So far, this had worked.
And if it doesn't,
one of the instructors in reactor school had grimly joked,
you'll know
.

Some guys boasted that if the reactor ever came under attack—Paul could not imagine the Russians suddenly appearing in Idaho, but stranger things had happened—they planned to pull up the nine to keep the technology out of Soviet hands. These were always bachelors—swaggering types who enjoyed the drama of a potentially suicidal scenario with themselves at the center. Their lust for heroism seemed somehow childish to Paul; once you had a family you didn't glamorize such things, unless you were bored.

Now his mind darted back to his own family: Nat, angry with him. He hated the thought of it. He stood a moment, chewing the inside of his cheek.

“Collier,” Franks barked, “pay attention.”

“Sorry.” Paul joined Webb in loosening the clamps above the rods. Franks stood to the side jotting notes on his clipboard.

The first four rods slid into place as they were supposed to: numbers one and three first, then five and seven. When each rod hit its mark, Webb leaned forward and clamped it.

He reached the nine and Paul felt his own concentration sharpen. He squatted to keep an eye on it; Webb loosened the clamp and gripped the rod.

“Half an inch,” Franks reminded him.

“Okay,” said Webb, “here goes.”

Several seconds went by. Paul glanced up. Exertion was written on Webb's thin face, but nothing was happening.

“Lower the rod now, son,” Franks called.

“You okay, Webbsy?” said Paul.

For a moment Webb said nothing. Then he exhaled and said, “It's stuck.”

Franks glanced up sharply.

“I'm sorry, it won't move—”

“Let me try.” Franks waved Webb off; the young kid sagged out of the way. Franks tried the rod as Webb had, sweat droplets popping up on his forehead, then cursed and motioned to Paul.

“Collier, you try it.”

The control rod was warm from Franks's grip. Paul wiped it down with the rag he kept in his front pocket, grasped the rod, and pushed down with all his might. It was as if the rod were still clamped: It didn't move no matter how he strained. His elbows, tucked at first, rose toward his shoulders; his whole body shook. With a groan he released it, stepping back.

“What did we do last time?” Webb asked.

“Last time?” echoed Paul, catching his breath.

“Should we call Richards?” said Webb.

“With all his superhuman strength,” Franks muttered.

“No, I meant, just because he's in charge—”

Franks cut him off. “Collier, get that pipe wrench.”

Paul stepped off the top of the core, grabbed a heavy monkey wrench from the shelf along the wall, and was back in three strides. He screwed the wrench's broached teeth against the thick metal rod at an angle, took a deep breath, and pulled the wrench upward for leverage. It was still stuck fast. His heart pounded; he could feel the blood rushing in his ears. His shift mates' eyes were trained on him, and he could see that they were nervous, too.

He regripped the wrench and strained until his neck corded and his arms shook. His brain bulged against his skull; he saw stars. “Shit,” he cried, letting go.

“You're close,” said Franks. “Try again.”

Paul stepped back, squeezed his palms, and started over. Franks was on tiptoes near his shoulder, Webb peering from the other side. “Give him some space,” Franks suddenly barked, and the two of them stepped back. Paul pulled harder. The rod gave a small grind downward, then another. Paul strained until his eyes danced with light. For a split second he felt his consciousness suspended in air.

“You got it, Collier, you got it.”

The rod moved a fraction of an inch and no more. Paul's hands dropped to his knees, his arms shaking.

“Good job. Bravo,” said Franks, slapping Paul on the back with a meaty palm.

“Yeah,” said Webb. “Hoo!” He let out a high, dopey laugh of relief.

Paul tried to slow his breathing. His sternum cramped; his lungs flared wide open and shut as if straining their confines on either end. When he could finally inhale without gasping he examined his work and was disappointed. “The rod didn't lower as far as we wanted.”

“I don't give a care, that's as good as we'll get for now,” said Franks. “I'll tell the evening crew and they can give it a shot later. Let's clamp that thing.”

“It ain't gonna slide loose on its own,” muttered Webb, picking up the C-clamp.

Paul watched Webb and Franks bracket the rod into place. Their sense of triumph seemed to fade with each second. Suddenly they were all quiet, sober with relief, and Paul knew he wasn't the only one thinking
Well, shit, for a moment there we really had a problem on our hands.

“
T
HAT'S HAPPENED BEFORE?
A
control rod sticking?” Paul asked, a few minutes later, as they all shuffled back to the control room.

“It's happened before,” Franks said. “But that was the first time with the nine.”

“They've all started sticking,” said Webb.

“Richards isn't going to like it.” Franks held the door for them, shaking his head. “I'm going to have to put that one in the log. He isn't going to want me to, but I can't…” he trailed off.

“Has he told the engineers?” Paul asked. “What about Deke Harbaugh?”

“I don't really know
what
he tells them.”

“I couldn't have pushed that thing any harder,” Paul said. “What do we do if it sticks again and none of us can get it to move?”

Webb looked at him uncertainly and Franks made a sound of irritation: “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The control room was gray walled and plain, with rows of circular gauges, a roll of paper tape that ground slowly beneath its glass case, a console, and swivel chairs. At the top of one wall was an electric sign that read
HIGH RADIATION,
but it sat dark. In case of a threat it would illuminate and blink, but of course it never had.

Paul had known coming in that the CR-1 was more volatile than similar reactors, mainly because it was the only one he knew of that had been built with an all-powerful nine rod. But there were other complicating factors, too. It was a boiling water–type reactor, which meant it made its own steam inside the core rather than in a separate, nonradioactive coil; the CR-1's steam, and every part of the machine the steam came into contact with, were radioactive, too.

The CR-1 had also been built without containment; instead of having a familiar round dome like most reactors, its ceiling was flat, walls straight-sided and thin. It had been built as a prototype for very remote reactors in the Arctic, where no containment was necessary because there was virtually no population. But the CR-1 was not nearly as remote as its descendants would be. They were only fifty miles from town, on a desert plain where the wind often gusted thirty miles an hour. If there was fallout from an accident, it would travel fast.

He still felt shaky; could still see Webb's startled, anxious face; hear him say
It's stuck
in a voice thinned by fright. Rods were never supposed to stick. Control was everything; measurement and precision were everything. You could never let the reactor get ahead of you. And yet it had.

If they'd been
raising
the nine rod instead of lowering it, and it stuck that badly, it would not have been hard to pull it above the proscribed four inches. Four inches seemed like nothing but they'd been warned it could spell disaster. And while no one had ever actually exploded a reactor by overlifting just one rod, they suspected that, in a machine like the CR-1, raising the number nine would have the same effect as raising them all.

Paul glanced at Franks, who was scanning the paper tape. He opened his mouth to say something but Franks seemed absorbed. Paul wondered if Franks, too, had imagined what it might look like if the CR-1 went supercritical while men were working, the core hitting two thousand degrees in an instant. If it erupted, shooting water and steam and debris everywhere, anyone standing on the reactor floor as Paul and his crew had been minutes before…well, he didn't even want to think about it.

But his mind kept tugging that way, seeing it. The explosion, and then, almost as frightening, the fallout: drifting wherever the breeze took it, as brainless and indiscriminating as a jellyfish. Couple hours—less even—and the cloud could be right over their families in Idaho Falls.

And where would Paul be, at that point? Thrown out to the gravel parking lot, shot full of steel punchings and metal bolts, like a clove-studded orange?

Christ, he was being morbid.

He cleared his throat almost without realizing it and Franks looked up, snapping a tense
“What?”
In the instant that elapsed, locked in by Franks's scowl, Paul lost his urge to argue. It was over now, wasn't it? They'd budged the damn rod. Franks didn't want to talk about it. But the shift leader was watching him, waiting for him to speak.

“I was just thinking,” said Paul, “you know, that if the number nine sticks, we're not really in control—”

“Were we ever?” Franks said.

Paul hesitated.

Franks pointed his pencil toward the wall, its rows of gently quivering needles. Murmured, “Let's see if this thing cools down now. It's looking better already.”

T
he Palisades Reservoir danced in Nat's rearview mirror, a dwindling circle of blue and gold. She was sorry to see it go. She'd had such a wonderful day with the girls that she felt a pang when the lake winked out of sight behind pine trees.

“Mama,” Sam called from the backseat. “We're sliding.” The path down the mountain was a long Jacob's ladder of switchbacks and the girls grappled for purchase on the slick leather seat.

“Sorry,” said Nat. “Hang on, it'll straighten out soon.”

She tried to drive smoothly—which, though it slowed her down, was, indeed, more comfortable—and the girls settled into their seats, looking out the window. Sam's fingers gripped the leather ridge where the window met the door, and shadows of the tall trees flickered over her face like a long reel of silent film. Nat sighed. What a day it had been. Her girls had run in and out of the water as if inspired, sloshing buckets up the beach, pouring the water into a big muddy sand castle that they mosaicked with pebbles. The water was getting cold this late in the summer but Nat swam with them anyway, her daughters' squeals and gasps echoing in the thin high-altitude air.

The trip had been the perfect remedy after the morning's argument with Paul—even if it was also one of the reasons for the fight—and Nat wasn't ready to go home. She didn't want to give up this sunny, carefree feeling for the quiet house, Paul's stiff shoulders, his stoic conviction that he'd been right. He was always so damn certain. She'd dropped him off at the bus stop that morning and made it just around the corner before pulling over and giving the steering wheel three smacks with her palm, her face crumpling. It was humiliating to have to beg for the car, to hear Paul fret and waffle about being late for work, as if she were a child with no proper sense of limits. Did he think she
wanted
him to be late for work? Why was he so difficult? When she could soften him up he was wonderful, he was the best man in the world, but other times he was a citadel, and it was exhausting.

So it seemed a reprieve when, reaching the bottom of the mountain, she came to a little town called Kirby that had a local diner. “Girls, should we stop for milkshakes?” she asked.

Their sun-weakened cheers convinced her that they should.

“Good,” she said, pulling into the dirt parking lot and climbing out. “A little sugar will perk you right up.” The girls were dazed from sun and light; they lolled against their opposite doors, shoulders lobster pink, limbs loose with fatigue. Sam came out scowling, rubbing her eyes, her dress bunched up behind her legs. Nat reached for Liddie: There was sand crusted between the toddler's small fingers. Her nails were black crescents. Mica sparkled on the bridge of her nose beneath a line of dark-brown bangs.

It was two in the afternoon and the diner was mostly quiet. As soon as they set foot inside Nat felt out of place. She'd expected something brighter and cleaner but there was a dinginess to the place, grime in every crevice, a sense of not quite caring. In the far corner stood a jukebox that wasn't playing, and there was a small dance floor where no one danced. A black-haired waitress with oily, pitted skin picked at her fingernails, a young cowboy read a newspaper near the back, and a bearded man munched absently on a hamburger while two long-haired women looked out the window.

Well, they were already inside and the girls had expectations, so Nat ordered three milkshakes. When these arrived she sighed in relief. They stood like towers of promise with sky-high whipped cream, and cherries that left pink impressions in the clouds. Within minutes the sugar brought forth its promised energy and the girls were bouncing on the rubbery seats. Nat took them to look at the jukebox.

“We get five songs for a dollar,” she read, flipping through the lists. “Oh, ‘Charlie Brown' by the Coasters!” she said. “You'll like that one, it's funny. One of the guys says in this low voice,
‘Why's everybody always pickin' on me?' 
”

Liddie giggled, but Sam looked troubled. “Why are they?” she asked. “Why
are
they picking on him?”

The machine whirred, the opening guitar of “Charlie Brown” strummed in, and the girls grabbed their skirts and hopped up and down on the small dance floor. Their shoes clapped and their pinkish legs bounced, and they spun and teetered, laughing. Nat didn't want them to get too loud but she didn't want to rein them all the way in, either, because this was their day. They were out in the world and it was warm and sunny and she was not in the mood to be the grown-up.

When the song finished Liddie stood on tiptoe and said “Kiss, Mama,” and Nat burst out laughing. At that moment, her daughters' happiness seemed so simple, so easily earned and free of adult corruption, she didn't even want to go home.
We could wander the West, we three
.
Nothing would tie us down!
Then the thought chilled her: What a terrible notion, selfish and sinful. Of course she wanted to go home.

And she was punished for having that thought at all, because Sam, spinning vigorously though the music had stopped, toppled sideways and knocked a glass sugar holder to the floor where it shattered. Nat and the girls stared at the sparkling, shard-pierced mound on the black-and-white tile.

“My
gosh
!” cried the waitress, roused from her stupor. She flung her hands in the air. “Would you watch what you're doing?”

“I'm so sorry.” Nat grabbed a napkin, squatted, and pushed the sugar into a jagged pyramid. “She didn't mean to. Sam, apologize.”

Sam stared at the expectant waitress and, in a fit of defiant self-loathing, stuck out her tongue.

The waitress and Nat both gasped. The spill was easily forgivable on its own but now, with Sam's awful little flourish, it seemed to have been almost intentional.

“Sam!”
Nat shouted, standing up. The little girl, gripped by contrition, whirled and buried her face in Nat's skirt.

“Don't touch that,” the waitress said to Nat, meaning the glass. “You'll cut yourself. I'll get the broom.” She stalked into the kitchen. Nat stood flushed, her heart racing, patting Sam's shoulders. Her one consolation was that Paul was not there. He would have been mortified. She could imagine the silent car ride home while he stewed over how he'd raised such an ill-mannered child. She could almost hear his brain turning itself inside out on such occasions, the way he'd strain to make meaning out of what she'd insist was just some small thing.

The waitress returned with a broom. “Y'all were acting just crazy, flailing around like that. Of course something's gonna get broken.”

“We weren't
flailing,
” Nat said. “She was just dancing.”

“People
allow
their children to be rude these days. It's backwards. Adults are wrong and kids are right.” She swept the sugar into the dustpan with short jabs.

Nat's face burned. Normally she would have remained silent, but she'd been having such a good day, and she did not want this crabby woman to brush away all the hours she'd just spent building something happy. “I'm sorry you have such an ax to grind,” she began, “but it's only taken you a minute to sweep that up, and we
said
we were sorry.”

The waitress opened her mouth to retort—
I cannot believe this,
Nat thought,
I cannot believe I am about to get into an argument with a waitress, I should stop myself, I should just leave
—when she heard a footfall behind her and turned. It was the young cowboy from the back of the diner. He had sandy hair and blue eyes and was no taller than Nat, and he wore a faded flannel shirt and dull boots. For a moment Nat feared he had come over to upbraid her, too, that she was about to be ganged up on by affronted townies, but his eyes were kind, and instead of speaking to the women he squatted near Sam. “You want to know what I did one time?” he quietly asked her. “I knocked over a whole crate of eggs.” He leaned with his elbows on his knees, watching Sam for her reaction, as if he took her distress seriously and was not cutesily performing for adults.

Sam peeked one eye out from Nat's skirt. Nat, realizing her daughter was not going to respond, spoke up in the candy-coated voice of someone talking on behalf of a child. “How did you knock over a crate of eggs?”

“I was working at a friend's ranch a few years back,” he said, to Sam, as if she and Nat were a ventriloquist act. “I wasn't old enough to drive, but I got bored and hopped into the truck, backed right into a pallet of eggs stacked against the wall. Can you imagine? Eggs and shells and goo everywhere, and the farmer came out and yelled at me and hit me with his hat.”

Sam listened intently, her eyebrows lifted in friendly, quizzical half moons. “Did it hurt to get hit with a hat?”

“Not really. Just my pride.”

“What's your pride?”

“Pride? It means your feelings. Not wanting to be embarrassed.”

“Oh.” Sam seemed to ponder this. “Does it go away?”

He chuckled. “Hopefully not. The pride part is a good thing. It's the getting embarrassed that's not so nice.”

The waitress stood, holding her dustpan full of sugar-coated glass as if she were about to toss it in Nat's face. “Pride keeps people from acting stupid,” she said, into the middle distance.

“How about kindness?” Nat snapped.

The cowboy soldiered on, ignoring them. “I'm twenty-five now,” he was telling Sam, “which probably seems old to you, but I
still
do things that make me embarrassed. It's a bad feeling, but it always goes away.”

Sam nodded. She smiled quickly, then jammed her head above Nat's knees again.

The cowboy got to his feet, his eyes darting between Nat and the waitress and finally settling on the waitress. “A mistake's a mistake. No use punishing people for them.”

Nat beamed at him. How good of this chivalrous man to come over and side with them against that surly woman. She felt vindicated.

But the waitress watched him with a knowing expression in her dark eyes. “Too bad we can't all have someone like Esrom to come to our rescue,” she said.

Nat's face grew hot: So they knew each other. She did not know why this embarrassed her, or maybe it just made her feel like more of an outsider.

He said, “You don't need anyone to come to your rescue, Corrie.”

The waitress leaned on her broom for a moment and watched him. Her eyes changed from flinty to almost sad; deep lines framed the sides of her mouth. How old was she, Nat wondered—thirty? And why did Nat feel that she had somehow stepped into a situation of greater significance, that she had done something worse to this woman than spill sugar on her floor? The quietness of the diner resounded in her ears; its perch at the base of this remote mountain made her feel like she was at the edge of the world. She'd stopped so glibly, so trustingly in this little town, forgetting that it was a gritty place, like all such places that clung to survival; it did not exist to make her day happier. She had a tiny glimmer of insight into why, whenever she set out anywhere, Paul reminded her to be careful. He was used to people and places like these. She was not.

Corrie, now plainly avoiding Nat's gaze, turned and headed for the kitchen. “See you later, Ez,” she said.

“Yep,” he said, stepping back to allow a few people to pass: the bearded man and the two long-haired women who squeezed by without speaking, the bells on the door jingling behind them. Now the place was deserted. There was no sound other than the electrical hum of appliances, and no people but themselves. The cowboy headed to the kitchen—for a minute Nat thought he was following Corrie—and came back with a mop, which he swirled once over the sugary spot. It left a shiny circle on the scuffed floor.

“Thank you,” Nat said. “I can't believe that was such a big deal.”

He shrugged. “Wasn't a big deal. I expected Corrie would get testy. People are worked hard around here. This job is just the tip of the iceberg for her.”