come too, you get hurt.’
‘I have a way of protecting myself. Don’t you worry.’
Charles’s method of protecting himself, a heavier version of the suits the hazard teams wore with a solid, armoured chest and helmet, and triple-layered cloth everywhere else, reduced Kate to a fit of giggles. ‘Sharles is funny,’ she proclaimed.
He smiled, even if she could probably barely see it through the thick, Unobtainium-doped glass of the small window in his helmet. ‘Yes, I probably look funny, but even with this on, I cannot stay with you for too long.’
Kate nodded, suddenly very serious. ‘Sharles not hurt himself for me. I am brave. I stay on self. Get better. Come out.’
‘Very good. This way.’
The reactor room was sealed behind six feet of brick, concrete, and lead, but there was one way to get through. The tunnel had three doors. The first, thick, iron, and locked until Charles opened it, led into an antechamber where he paused, hanging up a new shift the hospital had provided on a peg.
‘Kate, listen carefully,’ he said. Kate put on a studious expression which almost made him laugh. ‘When you come out, you need to remove your dress and place it into this receptacle here.’ He indicated a large, metal bucket with a lid across the tunnel from the peg. ‘It must be burned. This new dress is for when you go out through the door. Do you understand?’
She nodded emphatically. ‘When I come out, I put this dress in bucket and put on new one. Thank you for new dress.’
‘My pleasure. Let us continue.’
There was a second door, this one made of a thin layer of adamantium welded to a thicker iron base, and then the third door with a thicker adamantium layer let them into the reactor room.
It was not dark. The room was fifty feet across and the centre of it was a metal sphere ten feet in diameter. The size of the thing had meant that casting the case had not been an easy operation. They had known it would leak and so they had constructed the room around it to absorb that leakage. In a way it made things easier since the blue light of the reactor provided illumination. Surrounding the reactor itself were pipes, coiled copper pipes in large numbers, all of them there to absorb the heat of the reactor and convert water into steam which in turn was used to generate electricity. The heat in the reactor room was more oppressive, but less lethal, than the radiation.
As Charles opened the door, he heard the Geiger counter on his suit begin to click. Kate looked at him as though she might be about to start giggling again. ‘Now Sharles make funny noise.’
‘That is telling me that there is radiation in this room. The blue light.’
‘Yes.’ She could see that.
‘Stay near to the wall.’ He pulled the door closed and turned the locking wheel. ‘You see how this door is opened and closed? You turn this wheel–’
‘And the bars move, and it open.’
‘You are an observant girl. Good.’
‘Now you go. Sharles will not hurt for me.’
He looked at her through the hazy glass. ‘You will come out as soon as you feel better?’
‘Yes, Sharles.’
‘You remember you have to change clothes?’
‘Yes, Sharles.’
The urgent clicking of the radiation meter told him she was right to insist, but it was still with reluctance that he turned the wheel and left her to the mercy of the vast, metal beast behind him.
~~~
William Rotham watched as one of the greatest minds in the country paced back and forth across the access room of the power plant. There was every possibility that Charles was going to wear a groove in the concrete floor, not that Rotham planned to point this out. He liked his job. Chief engineer paid well and kept his wife in the style she enjoyed, and the work was generally more supervisory than practical. And it was in the dry.
‘It’s been over ninety minutes,’ Charles said.
‘Just coming up to one hundred, sir.’
‘That’s… if she’s stayed near the wall as I