The lift arrived with a beep while he was still deciding. Both lights went off, the up and the down. He could take this lift anywhere.
Troy stepped inside. He didn’t know where he wanted to go.
The elevator doors closed. It waited on him patiently. Eventually, he figured, it would whisk off to heed some other call, pick up a person with purpose, someone with a destination. He could stand there and do nothing and let that other soul decide. He could just go along for the ride.
Running his finger across the buttons, he tried to remember what was on each level. There was a lot he’d memorized, but not everything he knew felt accessible. He had a sudden urge to head for one of the lounges and watch TV, just let the hours slide past until he finally needed to be somewhere. This was how the shift was supposed to go. Waiting and then doing. Sleeping and then waiting. Make it to dinner and then make it to bed. The end was always in sight. There was nothing to rebel against, just a routine, until the now faded into the past, and the future wilted and died.
The elevator shook into motion before he could decide. Troy jerked his hand away from the buttons and took a step back. The elevator didn’t show where they were going. It felt like they had started down.
Only a few floors passed before the lift lurched to a halt. The doors opened on a lower apartment level. A familiar face from the cafeteria, a man in reactor red, smiled as he stepped inside.
“Morning,” he said.
Troy nodded.
The man turned and jabbed one of the lower buttons, one of the reactor levels. He studied the otherwise blank array, turned, and gave Troy a quizzical look.
“You feeling okay, sir?”
“Hmm? Oh, yeah.”
Troy leaned forward and pressed sixty-eight. The man’s concern for his well-being must’ve had him thinking of the doctor, even though Henson wouldn’t be on shift for several hours.
“Must not have taken the first time,” he explained, glancing at the button.
“Mmm.”
The silence lasted one or two floors.
“How much longer you got?” the reactor mechanic asked.
“Me? Just another couple of weeks. How about you?”
“I just got on a week ago. But this is my second shift.”
“Oh?”
The lights counted downward in floors but upward in number. Troy didn’t like this; he felt like the lowest level should be level 1. They should count up. He wasn’t sure why this annoyed him.
“Is the second shift easier?” he asked. The question came out unbidden. It was as though the part of him dying to know was more awake than the part of him praying for silence.
The mechanic considered this.
“I wouldn’t say it’s easier. How about… less uncomfortable?” He laughed quietly. Troy felt their arrival in his knees, gravity tugging on him. The door beeped open.
“Have a good one,” the mechanic said. They hadn’t shared their names. “In case I don’t see you again.”
Troy raised his palm. “Next time,” he said. The man stepped out, and the doors winked shut on the halls to the power plant. With a hum, the elevator continued its descent.
Troy’s stomach was in a knot. It wasn’t hunger. It was something else. Something stronger than worry.
The doors dinged on the medical level. Troy stepped out. He felt the hallways calling someone else’s name. That was his imagination, but there were also real voices down the corridor, two men chatting. He stepped quietly across the tile. He remembered picking out tile like this once. Somehow, he knew the name of the pale green paint on the upper half of the walls. Sea foam. The lower half was something else—he couldn’t recall.
A female voice. It wasn’t a conversation; it was an old movie. Troy peeked into the main office and saw a man lounging on a gurney, his back turned, a TV set up in the corner. Troy tiptoed past so as not to disturb him. He supposed that there were positions here—like the reactor mechanics—that were much more important than his own, jobs that required constant care. No one stayed up all night in his office, that was for sure.
The hallway split before him. He imagined the layout, could picture the pie-shaped storerooms, the rows of deep-freeze coffins, the tubes and pipes that led from the walls to the bases, from the bases into the people inside.
He stopped at one of the heavy doors and tried his code. The light changed from red to green. He dropped his hand, didn’t need to enter this room, didn’t feel the urge, just wanted to see if it would work.
He meandered down the hall past a few more doors. Wasn’t he just here? Had he ever left? Hours of darkness lay between him and some event. His arm throbbed. He rolled back his sleeve and saw a spot of blood, a circle of redness around a pinprick scab.
If something bad had happened, he couldn’t remember. That part of him had been choked off.
Adjusting his sleeve, he tried his code on this other pad, this other door, and waited for the light to turn green. Something was calling him. This time, he pushed the button that opened the door. He didn’t know what it was, but there was something inside that he needed to see.
21
Light rains on the morning of the Convention left the man-made hills soggy, the new grass slick, but did little to erode the general festivities. Parking lots had been emptied of construction vehicles and mud-caked pickups. Now they held hundreds of idling buses and a handful of sleek black limos, the latter splattered ignobly with mud.
The lot where temporary trailers had served as offices and living quarters for construction crews had been handed over to the staffers, volunteers, delegates, and dignitaries who had labored for weeks to bring the day to fruition. The area was dotted with welcoming tents that served as the headquarters for the event coordinators. Throngs of new arrivals filed from the buses and made their way through the CAD-FAC’s security station. Massive fences bristled with coils of razor wire and seemed outsized and ridiculous for the convention but made sense for the storing of nuclear material. These barriers and gates held at bay an odd union of protestors: those on the Right who disagreed with the facility’s current purpose and those on the Left who feared its future one.
There had never been a National Convention with such energy, such crowds. Downtown Atlanta loomed far beyond the treetops, but the city that had ages ago hosted a Summer Olympics seemed far removed from the sudden bustle in lower Fulton County. The location allowed use of its airport but did very little for hotel owners and restaurateurs, not like those business owners had come to expect and appreciate from the four-year gathering of each political party.
Donald shivered beneath his umbrella at the top of a knoll and thought of the hundred thousand screaming fans who used to descend on Athens for home football games. He hated those weekends. The noise and traffic, the drunks and their music. As an undergrad at Georgia, he had kept a schedule of the home games on his fridge so he’d know when to prepare. He would hit the grocery store like it was the end of the world and lock himself in his dorm room for the duration, not coming out until the noise had subsided and the planet felt safe again.
For some reason, he didn’t mind these crowds. They were people like him. He gazed out over the sea of people gathering across the hills, heading toward whichever stage flew their state’s flag, umbrellas bobbing and jostling like water bugs.
Somewhere, a marching band blared a practice tune and stomped another hill into mud. There was a sense in the air that the world was about to change—a woman was about to win the Democratic nomination for president, only the second such nomination in Donald’s lifetime. And if the pollsters could be believed, this one had more than a chance. Unless the war in Iran took a sudden turn, a milestone would be reached, a final glass ceiling shattered. And it would happen right there in those grand divots in the earth, this landmark project that would see an end to energy dependence and a brave new future for the beleaguered art of splitting atoms.