"Oh, Christ," Woody Robbins moaned. "Don Cooder."
He hurried out of his cubicle office without checking the latest score.
Moments later Woody Robbins stood face-to-face with Don Cooder. They stood outside the gate.
"Take your ambush journalism and shove it," Woody said huffily. "I don't answer to you or your network."
"Is that a refusal?" Cooder asked in a threatening tone.
"No," Woody said, showing his teeth in an icily polite smile, "it's an official request for you to go through proper channels."
"Are you aware, Mr .... What is your name?"
"Woody," he admitted. "Woody-"
"Are you aware, Mr. Woody, that nuclear materials have been leaking from this facility for months now?"
"I've heard it alleged."
"And what is the source of your knowledge of these events?"
"The guy who's been clobbering you in the ratings, Peter Jennings," Woody returned coolly.
"We'll edit that out later," Cooder mumbled to his cameraman. "Now, about these deadly thefts," he pressed. "That's an allegation my staff is looking into," Woody said. "I won't advertise an ongoing investigation and risk drying up valuable sources of information."
"You mean cover up for the criminal culprits," snapped Cooder, whose on-air style of speaking was akin to a talking books tabloid.
"There is no cover-up," Woody said testily.
Don Cooder turned to the camera, lifting the microphone to his rugged face.
"When confronted with the startling allegation of Lawrence Livermore materials being used to build a neutron bomb," he intoned seriously, "plant security official Woody hotly denied these charges and proclaimed his innocence."
"Wait a minute! I did not proclaim my innocence!"
Cooder whirled on cue. The mike leapt for Woody Robbins' open mouth like a striking cobra.
"Is that an admission of guilt?" Cooder said eagerly.
"It damn well is not!"
"If you're innocent, you'll let us inspect the premises on behalf of the American taxpapers, now fearful of being nuked by their own tax dollars at work."
"Shove that tax-scare crap," Woody lashed out. "I know your game, Mr. Dead-Last-in-the-Ratings."
Woody waited for the retort that never came. But Don Cooder was for once speechless. His mouth hung as slack as a carp on a hook.
Sky Bluel selected that moment to approach the gate.
Woody was so surprised to see her that he too was struck speechless. But only for a moment.
"Good evening, Miss Bluel," he said in a forced-polite voice.
"I need to do some after-hours work," Sky Bluel said tightly, eyeing Don Cooder uncertainly. "Is it okay?"
Woody smiled. "Always."
Sky Bluel was passed with a longer-than-usual glance at her plant security card, but she was passed.
"Where were we?" Don Cooder asked, suddenly mollified.
Woody noted the appreciative gleam in his eye. The jerk, he thought, he's old enough to be her damn father.
Sky Bluel was passed at the main desk, as well. She hurried to the lab where she did her work with neutron-bombardment applications. But she lingered there only a moment.
Beyond the lab was a nuclear storage area. Donning a radiation-proof coverall suit, she entered through the double doors, which responded to her magnetic passcard.
It was the work of a few minutes to acquire a spherical beryllium-oxide tamper and a corresponding amount of tritium isotope and gingerly place them into a lead-lined carrying container.
Sky grinned. Jane Fonda would be so proud, if she only knew. Maybe they would end up on Letterman together.
Woody Robbins thought he was finally getting through to Don Cooder.
"You say you really have no idea," Cooder was saying. "Let me be sure I have this straight, now. Really no idea what, if anything, in the way of nuclear materials, has been stolen-I mean allegedly stolen-from Lawrence Livermore?"
"That's right," Woody said, relaxing slightly, becoming aware of the tap-tap of a woman's booted feet coming up behind him. "It's a very involved inventory process complicated by the fact that nuclear materials as they are processed are used up. They diminish. Separating use loss from shrinkage is involved. Excuse me," he added, turning toward the footsteps.
Don Cooder's darkly handsome black Irish face fell into a glower.
"Shrinkage!" he exploded, drowning out all other sounds. "Dangerous fusion material!"
"Fission, not fusion," Woody corrected tightly. "We don't do fusion at Lawrence Livermore."
"-dangerous fissionable materials are possibly in the hands of rabid terrorists and you have the gall to call it shrinkage?" Cooder finished hotly. "Nukes are not mere white goods and this isn't a department store, Mr. Woody!"
"Listen, you have no right making these irresponsible allegations!" Woody retorted. "Now, for the last time, either get out, get clearance to enter lawfully, or I'll have to take steps. We can't leave this gate open like this."
"Afraid something will slip through under your very nose?" asked Don Cooder as the videocam whirred on, and a dark figure lugged a heavy satchel way down the road.
"No!" Woody said, storming off, fists bunched in white-knuckled anger.
The video camera lingered on him as he secured the gate.
Woody endured the annoying video light until it finally winked out. The news crew boarded the van. Then the van backed away with all the agile grace of a retreating rhinoceros.
As Woody stormed back to his cubicle office, needing a change of shirt, a memory tickled the back of his mind.
What was it now? he wondered. Something he was about to do.
The Lakers game was still under way when he got back. The score was now 89 to 26, Lakers trailing. He settled in behind his battle-scarred desk.
The memory came back. Who was the woman who had slipped by the gate when he was arguing with that damned Cooder?
Then he remembered Sky Bluel. "Had to be her," he muttered, relaxing. "Nice kid." The future was brighter with gals like her coming out of UCLA. Too bad she was stuck in the past like that.
Sky Bluel walked and walked as she had been instructed, the heavy lead carrying container dragging her right arm practically out of its socket. She glanced over her shoulder several times, feeling exhilarated. It was just like the sixties, which she thought she could dimly remember, having been born in November 1969.
All her life, Sky Bluel had listened to her parents' tales of the sixties. It made her feel inadequate, as if she were born a generation too late. Her consciousness level was high, but wasted. There was so little to protest against. And almost no one to do it with.
But when her graduate work brought her to Lawrence Livermore, Sky was horrified to discover how lax the facility was. At last she had found a cause. Disarmament. It was an old cause, true, but with a fresh new twist.
People had grown apathetic. Her own generation was hopelessly yuppified. But Sky would show them that disarmament was more important than ever. Especially with all the crazy terrorists troubling the world.
And so she had built her own neutron bomb. She had selected the La Plomo incident as the grand backdrop against which she would expose the horrible truth that would galvanize her generation into the new antinuclear movement: unnuking.
Yes, it had gone awry, but Don Cooder had showed her a better way to attack the problem.
And she had done it. She now carried the necessary tritium isotope. She knew she would succeed. Had she not worn her mother's very own love beads, actually bought at Woodstock? And were these not the very same blue jeans her father had worn when he tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1973 to protest the unjust Vietnam war?
Who could fail with such a heritage?
The approaching headlights brought her worried face back again.