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constabulary, who was sitting behind a long counter that partitioned off the
rear part of the reception area.
The officer checked a computer screen to confirm that they were expected,
examined their ID's, and issued them lapel name-tags; then he called to
somewhere to announce their arrival and asked them to wait in the gatehouse
lobby, which was through another door to one side.
They passed the next ten minutes or so examining a five-foot-square model of
the facility that, together with some pictures and other exhibits, formed a
display in the lobby, and chatting with a couple of service engineers from
Honeywell who were also awaiting a plant escort. The engineers had come to
make some final adjustments to equipment before the first full-power tests of
the reactors, scheduled to commence on the following Monday. Elizabeth had
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mentioned that the tests were imminent, but she hadn't been specific about
when.
At last the door opened and a tall, lean, youngish-looking man ambled in. He
looked the kind of person who had never quite got past being a student, with
untidy, sandy-colored hair, a mottled brown, rolled-collar sweater, and tan
corduroy trousers. He stopped and looked inquiringly from one pair of faces to
the other.
"Mr. Ross and Mr. Walker?"
"Us," Murdoch informed him.
"Ah." The newcomer came across and shook hands with both of them. "Michael
Stavely. I work with Elizabeth Muir. She's got herself tied up with something
that won't wait, I'm afraid. I've been volunteered to look after you between
now and lunch. She'll be joining us then."
"Fine," Murdoch said. "I know you've got a busy week coming up. It's nice of
you to find time for tourists."
"No trouble at all. Anyhow, I gather you two belong to a rather special
category of tourist." Mike led them back through into the reception area and
opened another door that led to the outside, but on the inner side of the
perimeter. "This way. I've got one of the firm's buggies outside. You can
leave your car out front. You haven't left anything in it that you might need,
have you?" They descended a few steps to a smaller parking area at the rear of
the gatehouse, and
Mike led them over to a heavy-duty pickup truck, painted sky blue and bearing
the golden lightning-
bolt insignia of the European Fusion Consortium on its doors, which was parked
at the end of a short line of assorted vehicles. "Is there anything in
particular you'd like to see first?" he inquired as they climbed in.
"We'll leave the tour to you," Lee said.
"Right-ho. We'll start at the beginning and end at the end then. I'll take you
to have a look at one of the injectors. They're where the beams are formed and
start out from. Then we can follow the whole gubbins through from there."
They followed the main road from the gate for a short distance, and then
turned off into a perimeter track that brought them to one of the
corner-groups of buildings. Outwardly there was nothing especially
distinguishing about them. They made up a lonely huddle of fairly standard
three-storey office blocks and a few bungalow huts, interspersed with open
parking spaces. A
somewhat larger construction stood in the middle; it was windowless, and
looked squat and impregnable, vaguely blockhouselike, as if it belonged more
in a space-launch facility. They parked beside the large building and entered
through the single door that formed the only break in its otherwise blank and
featureless walls. A few minutes later they emerged from an elevator several
levels below ground and walked into a different world.
It was a world fashioned and shaped by the uncompromising dictates of
high-voltage engineering. Banks of transformers larger than any that Murdoch
had ever seen reared upward amid an intricate, three-dimensional tapestry of
superconducting busbars and coolant pipes. Between them were batteries of
insulator stacks ten feet high and more, carrying lines to immense torroidal
windings built around sections of partly visible cylindrical constructions
that stretched away through labyrinths of steel structural frameworks.
Mike led them down a series of metal staircases through several levels of
railed catwalks and maintenance platforms, and onto a walkway surrounding the
base of what looked like a huge, round, steel tank, bristling with insulators
and wrapped in cables; a long cylindrical structure emerged from one side of
the tank and disappeared through concrete casemates in the approximate
direction of the primary, two-mile-diameter storage ring.
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"This is one of the injectors," Mike told them, gesturing upward at the tank.
"Inside that are high-voltage arcs for peeling off electrons to give us our
ion supply. That tube is the first of a series of initial accelerating stages.
Initial acceleration is up to a million volts. The accelerators are charged
from a capacitor bank located on the next level down."
"What ions do you use?" Lee inquired.
"Mercury."
"How many injectors are there altogether?" Murdoch asked.
"Sixteen," Mike replied. "There are four like this at each corner. This whole
arrangement is duplicated by a second system running parallel to it on the
other side of that wall." He pointed behind them, and then started to lead the
way along a catwalk that followed the wall of the tube, which was at least ten
feet high, through the concrete supporting structure and out onto a fairly
wide observation platform. They found themselves looking along a vast,
brightly lit tunnel in which relays of steel supports carried the tube away
into rapidly shrinking perspective.
A few hundred feet farther on, they could see the point where the other tube,
running almost parallel, emerged from one side to join the first at a fine
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