Runaway World

Work Resumes

     "I wonder if Jasmine's awake yet," said Susan, her voice heavy with concern and worry.

     She and Andrew were loading fragments of broken control rod into the furnace. The control rod assembly they were currently dismantling consisted of nineteen steel guide tubes in a hexagonal arrangement, held in position by spindly frameworks along its length. It was a beautifully constructed sculpture of gleaming steel, as perfect as the day it had rolled off the assembly line. Preserved by the cold. No corrosion could take place when both water and oxygen were frozen solid.

     It was so perfect that Andrew felt twinges of regret as he snipped the end caps from the tubes with a pair of power pliers and tipped the neutron absorbing pellets they contained into the canister Susan was holding. Nearby, two of the New Philadelphia soldiers in surface suits were cradling machine guns in their hands as they watched them. Alert for any sign that the New Londoners might be about to attack them or try to damage the furnace. Widmark and McLaglen, Andrew thought they were. They had arrived to relieve Hayes and Bronson a few minutes before. Andrew couldn't see their faces through the faceplate of their helmets, but one of them was visibly shorter than the other, making him think it was Widmark, and he and McLaglen always seemed to go around together.

     "I'm worried about her too," said Andrew, pausing in his work to adjust his grip on the power pliers. "If she has woken up, they've got no way of letting us know. They're out of radio range."

     "But just a seven hour drive away," said Susan. "Do you think they'd let us take one of the rovers back, just to find out?" She indicated the soldiers, who were looking at them suspiciously, wondering why they'd paused in their work. Andrew and Susan were talking on a private channel, still surprised that the soldiers had allowed them to do that. They'd half expected them to insist that all communications take place over the public channel so they could overhear, to make sure the New Londoners weren't plotting something, but apparently they weren't afraid of that, which made sense, Andrew admitted to himself. After all, the New Londoners could plot and scheme as much as they wanted at night, in the privacy of their own rovers, so denying them private communications while they were working would have been a little pointless.

     "I can't see them agreeing to that," Andrew replied regretfully. "It would delay our work, and these men have wives and families they want to get back to. Plus, they'd only have our word for it that we'd be going to New Philadelphia. What if they're afraid we'll head back to New London to tell them all New Philadelphia's secrets?"

     "They could make sure the rover only has enough food for one day," said Susan, but she sounded defeated as if she knew she was arguing a hopeless cause.

     Andrew stepped closer and put a thickly padded hand on her suited arm. "I want to know if she's awake as well," he told her softly. "It's breaking my heart not knowing how she is. Also, if she has woken up, she could tell us who the remainer is. She could tell us who threatened or blackmailed her into doing what she did. Believe me, I want to know that more than anything." The power pliers gave a whine of complaint as his other hand tightened on it and he forced himself to relax. The day of reckoning would come. He just had to be patient.

     Susan nodded, putting her gloved hand on his, and then they went back to work. When the canister was full, Susan climbed the steps that had been set up beside the furnace and poured the dull grey pellets into the loading hopper. Heat radiated from the device, causing warning messages to pop up on her helmet's visor display, and she hurried back down the ladder before her surface suit, which was designed to keep heat in rather than out, suffered an overload. Inside the furnace, the pellets were heated by power provided by a plutonium generator until the atomic bonds were broken and the various substances of which they were composed were separated into their individual atoms. Then, a small amount of the incandescent gas was allowed to enter the centrifuge where the precious dysprosium would be separated out from the rest.