“I’d like you along since overall you seem to know more of what’s been going on than anyone else. Maybe you can explain to them the importance of the bible these wackos believe. That they’ll kill for it. They’ll die for it.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “And we need to talk about how we’re going to-God forbid-handle the contaminated dead should these goddamn assholes decide to blow up the reactors.” He looked at me again. “All we can do is try,” he said, and I knew he referred to more than the present crisis.
“That’s what I’m doing, Benton,” I said, and I walked back inside my suite.
I called the switchboard and asked them to ring Lucy’s room, and when there was no answer, I knew what that meant. She was at ERF, and I could not call there because I did not know where in that building the size of a football field she might be. So I put on my coat and walked out of Jefferson because I could not steep until I saw my niece.
ERF had its own guard gate not far from the one at the entrance of the Academy, and most of the FBI police, by now, knew me pretty well. The guard on duty looked surprised when I appeared, and he walked outside to see what I wanted.
“I think my niece is working late,” I began to explain.
“Yes, ma’am. I did see her go in earlier.”
“is there any way you can contact her?”
“Hmmm.” He frowned. “Might you have any idea what area she’d likely be in?”
“Maybe the computer room.”
He tried that to no avail, then looked at me. “This is important.”
“Yes, it is,” I said with gratitude.
He raised his radio to his mouth.
“Unit forty-two to base,” he said.
“Forty-two, come in.”
“You ten-twenty-five me at ERF gate?”
“Ten-four.”
We waited for the guard to arrive, and he occupied the booth while his partner let me inside the building. For a while we roamed long empty hallways, trying locked doors that led into machine shops and laboratories where my niece might be. After about fifteen minutes of this, we got lucky. He tried a door and it opened onto an expansive room that was a Santa’s workshop of scientific activity.
Central to this was Lucy, who was wearing a data glove and head-mounted display connected to long thick black cables snaking over the floor.
“Will you be okay?” the guard asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Co-workers in lab coats and coveralls were busy with computers, interface devices and large video screens, and they all saw me walk in. But Lucy was blind. She really was not in this room but the one in the small CRTs covering her eyes as she conducted a virtual-reality walk through along a catwalk in what I suspected was the Old Point nuclear power plant.
“I’m going to zoom in now,” she was saying as she pressed a button on top of the glove.
The area on the video screen suddenly got bigger as the figure that was Lucy stopped at steep grated stairs.
“Shit, I’m zooming out,” she said impatiently. “No way this is going to work.”
“I promise it can,” said a young man monitoring a big black box. “But it’s tricky.”
She paused and made some other adjustment. “I don’t know, Jim, is this really high-res data or is the problem me?”
“I think the problem’s you.”
“Maybe I’m getting cyber sick,” my niece then said as she moved around inside what looked like conveyor belts and huge turbines that I could see on the video screen.
“I’ll take a look at-the algorithm.”
“You know,” she said, making her way down virtual stairs, “maybe we should just put it in C code and go from a delay of three-four to three hundred and four microseconds, et cetera, instead of whatever’s in the software we got.”
“Yeah. The transfer sequences are off,” said someone else. “We got to adjust the timing loops.”
“What we don’t have is the luxury of massaging this too much,” another opinion sounded. “And Lucy, your aunt’s here.”