He removed his right hand from the sensor screen and turned to her. “What about Mr. Bamaputra?” he asked quietly.
“You’d better come quick, sir.” That’s when he noticed that she was so frightened she was shaking.
A crowd had gathered outside the central control room. It contained the master panels for programming reactor output. Armored glass enclosed it on all four sides, standard protection for the sensitive heart of the installation. Except for Bamaputra the room was deserted. It was also locked from the inside.
A single speaker was set in the glass next to the transparent door. “Shiva, what are you doing in there?”
The supervisor turned to smile back at him. “Preserving a vision, perhaps. Surely you recall our discussion wherein we talked about greatly accelerating the melting of the ice?”
The technician who had fetched Antal pointed into the room. As the foreman scanned the readouts she’d indicated the small hairs on the back of his neck began to tense. The figures he read belonged only in manuals, not on green screens. They continued climbing even as he stared.
“Shiva, you’re going to overload the whole system! You’ve probably gone beyond several limits already. You need to let us in so we can emergency override and shut the system down.”
“If we do that now, we will not be able to start up again,” Bamaputra explained quietly. “I have ample food and water in here with me. I really can’t allow override and shutdown at this point. It would interfere with the vision.
“I believe you underestimate the system’s integrity. It will hold at these levels and we will accomplish fifty years’ work in a few months. I am counting on you to bargain with these people to buy me that much time.”
“You’re going to blow the whole place!”
“I am not. Talk to the engineers.”
Frantically the foreman sought out one of the installation’s chief techs, asked her for an unbiased appraisal.
“He’s right,” the woman said. “Nothing will explode. It will melt. Not just the reactor cores: everything. If containment fails, there’ll be a short, quick release of heat. It will dissipate rapidly.”
“How much heat?”
She didn’t bat an eye. “Millions of degrees.”
“What do you think the chances are of maintaining containment?”
The woman turned to the older man standing behind her. His jaw and neck displayed the marks of an addict. “I’d say about one in ten.”
Antal whirled back to the speaker. “Did you hear that? Your chances of bringing this off are one in ten.”
“A better chance than a Commonwealth court would give us.”
“The opposite side of that,” the foreman shouted, beyond frustration now, “means there’s a ninety percent chance you’re going to turn the inside of this mountain into slag.”
“Then you’d better hurry and leave, wouldn’t you say?” Bamaputra’s tone was icy.
“He is crazy.” Antal stepped away from the speaker and the transparent wall. “He’s gone crazy.” He turned to the engineers. “What do you think we ought to do?”
The older man was sweating profusely. “I think we ought to get the hell out of here.”
The foreman hesitated a moment longer, then jabbed the red alarm button nearby.
Bamaputra watched calmly from the director’s chair as the panicky exodus commenced. He was not surprised. You couldn’t blame them. None of them, not even Antal, was a real visionary. Throughout history those who had made the great discoveries, accomplished the memorable scientific feats, never had better chances than one in ten. Most of them began their experiments with worse odds.
This was the only way. The calculations had to be adjusted to take into account the greatly reduced time factor. He turned to the multiple readouts. The ice sheet would begin melting rapidly now. Very rapidly. At the same time, the quantity of water vapor and carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere would rise twenty fold. The system would hold. A magnetic fusion containment field wasn’t like a stone or metal wall.
Let them all leave. He could hold out alone, if need be. Despite the interference he would accomplish everything he’d set out to do. If you had vision, you sometimes had to take a chance. Turning dreams into reality always entailed a certain amount of risk.
Better to depend on machines. The instrumentation surrounding him functioned silently and without complaint, doing its job in a predictable and dependable manner. He’d never liked people much. Come to that, he’d never been very fond of himself.
Better to risk one’s life in search of the perfect abstract than to surrender to temporal temptation. He might die, but his vision would live on in the form of a transformed Tran-ky-ky. The money had never meant anything to him. Revelation lay only in achievement.
The skimmer hovered just off the ground as a squad of Colette’s bodyguards climbed over the side. Those remaining aboard kept their weapons trained on the entrance to the installation.
Ethan began examining the walls on either side of the door. “There should be a speaker here somewhere. Surely they put in something that would enable them to talk with any Tran who might come up here.”
Before they could locate the hypothetical speaker the camouflaged door began to open.
“Back to the skimmer,” snapped Iriole. The squad retreated. Fingers tensed on triggers.
There was no fighting. The technicians and engineers, support and maintenance personnel who came stumbling out of the tunnel in their survival suits weren’t armed. They kept their hands in view at their sides or held above their heads. As those on the skimmer looked on, the evacuees began staggering down the trail leading to the harbor below.
There was no sign of Shiva Bamaputra, but Hwang picked Antal out of the crowd immediately. There was no threat in his pose this time. All of the cockiness had gone out of him.
“We’ve got to get away from here!” he said wildly.
“Why? What’s the hurry?” September folded his arms and adopted the stance of a man with all the time in the world. “We’ve things to do.”
“Do whatever you want but don’t do it here. Bamaputra’s gone mad.” He gestured back toward the dark tunnel. “He’s running the whole system on intentional overload, way beyond its design peak. Locked himself in control central. You won’t pry him out of there, not even with rifles. It’s five-centimeter plexalloy paneling, molecular welded.”
“Now why would he want to go and do that?”
“He’s trying to accelerate the terraforming process. We talked about it lots of times, but not on this scale. He’s got an outside chance of bringing it off. Way outside.”
“What happens if the system fails?” Williams asked him.
“Melt down.” It was the young female technician who spoke. “You get large-scale melt down. The containment fields in the reactors collapse.”
“You mean the installation melts?” Ethan asked her.
She stared over at him. “I mean the mountain melts. Maybe more, I don’t know. And I’m not planning on hanging around to work out the calculations. You better not either.”
“Right. Resume positions,” Iriole told them. They retreated back aboard the waiting skimmer.
“Wait a minute!” Antal rushed the craft, stopped short as the muzzle of a rifle swung in his direction. “What about us?”
“You’ve all got survival suits,” September told him as the skimmer slowly drifted over the edge of the steep slope and commenced its downward flight. He pointed to the switchbacked path. Some of the installation personnel were already halfway down. “Better not run too fast or you’re liable to fall and tear ’em.”
Antal stared at the descending vehicle. Then he turned and joined his former employees in a mad scramble to get down the mountain.