It made Tim feel curiously vulnerable, to stand inside the Project grounds and know that the water outside was thirty feet above them. San Joaquin Nuclear Project was a sunken island, surrounded by levees thrown up by bulldozers. Pumps took care of seepage through the earthen walls. One break in the levees, or a day without power to the pumps, would drown them.
The Dutch had lived with that knowledge all their lives, and what they feared had come to pass; Holland couldn’t conceivably have survived the tidal waves following Hammerfall.
“I think the best place for your radio is on one of the cooling towers,” Dolf said. “But those are cut off from the plant.” He climbed a board staircase to the top of the levee and pointed. Across a hundred feet of water the cooling towers loomed up, four of them set inside a smaller levee that had leaked badly. Their bases were partly flooded. A thick white plume rose from each of the towers, climbed into the sky, growing ghostly, finally vanishing.
“They won’t have any trouble finding this place,” Tim said.
“No.”
“Hey, I thought nuclear plants were nonpolluting.”
Dolf Weigley laughed. “That’s no pollution. Steam, that’s all it is. Water vapor. How could it be smoke? We’re not burning anything.” He pointed to a narrow planked footbridge leading from the levee to the nearest tower. “That’s the only way over unless we get out a boat. But I still think it’s the best place for the radio.”
“So do I, but we can’t carry the antenna on that plank.”
“Sure we can. You ready? Let’s get the stuff.”
Tim gingerly climbed the slanting ladder that zigzagged up the side of the big redwood tower. Once again he was impressed with the organization at SJNP. Weigley had gone into the yard and come back with men to carry the radio, car batteries and antenna, and they’d skipped along the narrow plank bridge with all the stuff in one trip, then gone back to work. No questions, no arguments, no protests. Maybe Hammerfall had changed more than marriage patterns: Tim remembered from the papers that SJNP had been plagued with strikes and arguments over which union would represent whom, overtime pay, living conditions… Labor troubles had delayed the station almost as long as the environmentalists who’d done their best to kill it.
He reached the top of the fifty-foot tower. He was about thirty feet above the level of the sea. The base of the tower was surrounded by a leaking dam, and pumps worked to keep its intakes clear. There was a strong wind into the tower at its bottom.
The thing was big, over two hundred feet in diameter. The deck where Tim stood was a large metal plate pierced by innumerable holes. Pumps brought water up and poured it onto the deck, where it stood a few inches high. It trickled down into the tower and vanished. Above him a dozen smaller cylindrical columns jutted twenty feet above the deck. Steam poured out of each one. The deck vibrated with the hum of pumps.
“This is a good place for the radio,” Tim said. He looked doubtfully out across the San Joaquin Sea. “But it’s a little exposed.”
Weigley shrugged. “We can put some sandbags up. Build a shelter. And we can string a telephone line from here back to the plant. Question is, do you want the radio here?”
“Let’s find out.”
It took an hour to get the beam antenna set up and clamped onto one of the smaller rising venturi columns. Tim connected the CB set to the batteries. They carefully rotated the beam antenna to point twenty degrees magnetic, and Tim looked at his watch. “They won’t be listening for a quarter-hour. Let’s take a break. Tell me how things are going here. We were really surprised to find out you were here, that the plant was going.”
Weigley found a perch on the rail. “It surprises me, sometimes,” he said.
“Were you here when… ?”
“Yeah. None of us believed the comet would hit us, of course. As far as Mr. Price was concerned, it was just another working day. He was mad about absenteeism. A lot of the crew didn’t show up. Then, when it did hit, that just made it worse. We didn’t have all our people.”
“I still don’t see how you could do it,” Tim said.
“Price is a genius,” Weigley said. “As soon as we knew, even before the earthquake, he was getting things set for survival. He had those bulldozers out scraping up a levee before the rain hit us. He sent me and some others out into the valley to the railroad, to fill up the tank trucks. Diesel fuel, gasoline, we got all we could. And there was a boxcar on the siding. full of flour and beans, and Mr. Price made us get all of it. We’re sure glad he did. There’s not much variety, but we didn’t starve. Why you laughing?”
“The fishermen feel the same way.”
“Who doesn’t? Can you believe you’ll never taste a banana again? We could use some orange juice, for that matter. We’re worried about scurvy.”
“The orange tree is extinct in California. Sometimes we can dig some Tang out of a market.” The longer Tim looked at that wall of earth between him and the San Joaquin Sea, the bigger it got. “Doff, how could you have put that up while the valley was flooding?”
“We couldn’t have. It’s a crazy story. The original idea was to put the plant over nearer to Wasco. Mr. Price wanted it up here, on the ridge, because the blowdown from the cooling towers would drain better, we wouldn’t have to dig the ponds as deep. The Department’s managers didn’t like that. Made the plant more visible.”
“Oh, but it’s beautiful! It’s like a 1930s Amazing Stories cover. The future!”
“That’s what Mr. Price said. Anyway, they did put the plant up here on the ridge.”
It wasn’t much of a ridge, of course; no more than a low rolling hill. The plant wasn’t more than twenty feet higher than the surrounding valley.
“And after they did the work, the Department got scared and they built the levees,” Weigley said. “Not for any real reason. Just to hide the plant so the environmentalists wouldn’t think about it when they drove along Interstate Five.” Weigley’s lips tightened. “And then some of the bastards who tried to kill the plant raised hell because we spent the extra money on the levee! But it came in handy. All we had to do was bulldoze up enough dirt to fill the gaps, the places where the roads and railway came in through the screening banks, and a good thing, too. That water rose fast after Hammerfall.”
“I’ll bet. I drove over that sea,” Tim said.
“How’s that?”
Tim explained. “Heard any stories about Flying Dutchmen?”
Weigley shook his head. “But we haven’t had much contact with outsiders. Mayor Allen didn’t think it would be a good idea.”
“Allen. I saw him. How’d he get here?”
“Showed up just before the water got too deep. He was in City Hall when the tidal wave came through Los Angeles. Man, has he got a story to tell! Anyway, he showed up the next day with a dozen cops and City Hall people. You know, Los Angeles owned the plant, before Hammerfall—”
“So Mayor Allen is the boss here.”
“No! Mr. Price is in charge. The mayor’s a guest. Just like you. What does he know about power plants?”
Tim didn’t point out that it was Weigley who’d told him the mayor was the one who discouraged outside contacts. “So you’ve ridden out the end of the world,” Tim said. “By keeping the plant going. What are you planning to do with it?”
Weigley shrugged. “That’s up to Mr. Price. And don’t think it’s been any soft job keeping things running. Everything’s got to work, all the time. We can put out a thousand megawatts.”
“That sounds like a lot of—”
“Ten million light bulbs.” Weigley grinned.
“A lot, yeah. How long can you keep that up?”