“He’s right,” Cronnin said. “The men that build a machine like that have got to be as smart as the machine’s supposed to be, or the machine’ll be as dumb as they are.”
Fields turned on him angrily. “Which side are you supposed to be on, anyhow?” he demanded.
“You’re probably a lawyer,” Melroy said. “But I’ll bet Mr. Cronnin’s an old reaction-plant man.” Cronnin nodded unthinkingly in confirmation. “All right, then. Ask him what those Doernberg-Giardanos are like. And then let me ask you: Suppose some moron fixed up something that would go wrong, or made the wrong kind of a mistake himself, around one of those reactors?”
It was purely a rhetorical question, but, much later, when he would have time to think about it, Scott Melroy was to wonder if ever in history such a question had been answered so promptly and with such dramatic calamitousness.
Three seconds after he stopped speaking, the lights went out.
For a moment, they were silent and motionless. Then somebody across the table from Melroy began to say, “What the devil—?” Doris Rives, beside him, clutched his arm. At the head of the table, Lyons was fuming impatiently, and Kenneth Leighton snapped a pocket-lighter and held it up.
The Venetian-screened windows across the room faced east. In the flicker of the lighter, Melroy made his way around to them and drew open the slats of one, looking out. Except for the headlights of cars, far down in the street, and the lights of ships in the harbor, the city was completely blacked out. But there was one other, horrible, light far away at the distant tip of Long Island—a huge ball of flame, floating upward at the tip of a column of fiery gas. As he watched, there were twinkles of unbearable brightness at the base of the pillar of fire, spreading into awesome sheet-flashes, and other fireballs soared up. Then the sound and the shock-wave of the first blast reached them.
“The main power-reactors, too,” Melroy said to himself, not realizing that he spoke audibly. “Too well shielded for the blast to get them, but the heat melted the fissionables down to critical mass.”
Leighton, the lighter still burning, was beside him, now.
“That’s not—God, it can’t be anything else! Why, the whole plant’s gone! There aren’t enough other generators in this area to handle a hundredth of the demand.”
“And don’t blame that on my alleged strikebreakers,” Melroy warned. “They hadn’t got security-cleared to enter the reactor area when this happened.”
“What do you think happened?” Cronnin asked. “One of the Doernberg-Giardanos let go?”
“Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it’s his bad luck,” Melroy said grimly. “Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter C.M. I don’t know what was done with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. Nobody’ll ever find out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were pretty ripe by that time, must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know how fast those D-G’s work. It just took this long to build up C.M. for a bomb-type reaction. You remember what I was saying before the lights went out? Well, it happened. Some moron—some untested and undetected moron—made the wrong kind of a mistake.”
“Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn’t stop to think often enough,” Cronnin said. “Well, I guess the strike’s off, now; that’s one thing.”
“But all those people, out there!” Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking particularly rather than generally and of humans rather than abstractions. “It must have killed everybody for miles around.”
Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve Chalmers, and all the workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh, to their death. Then he stopped thinking about them. It didn’t do any good to think of men who’d been killed; he’d learned that years ago, as a kid second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the millions in Greater New York, and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without heat in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skyscrapers and on railroads and interurban lines.
He turned to the woman beside him.
“Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology diploma, you had to qualify as a regular M.D., didn’t you?” he asked.
“Why, yes—”
“Then you’d better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is going to be desperately needed, for the next day or so. Me, I still have a reserve major’s commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still working. Until I hear differently, I’m ordering myself on active duty as of now.” He looked around. “Anybody know where the nearest Army headquarters is?”
“There’s a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor,” Quillen said. “It’s probably closed, now, though.”
“Ground Defense Command; Midtown City,” Leighton said. “They have a medical section of their own; they’ll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too.”
Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then shrugged into his own overcoat and belted it about him, the weight of the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He’d need both, the gun as much as the light—New York had more than its share of vicious criminals, to whom this power-failure would be a perfect devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down
