"I've made contact with the containment crew," another put in.

"Good." Morris took a radio and began speaking into it. "What's the situation?"

A voice over the radio answered him. "The sudden spike in pressure-" There was a sputter of static. "Catastrophic failure . . . reactor pressure-overflow relief valve blew."

The entire room tensed at that. I had no idea what a pressure-overflow relief valve was, but I could tell it was bad.

Morris was the first of us to regroup. "I need Team One working on manually bypassing every valve in the emergency coolant system, get it flowing a.s.a.p. Team Two, you get the generators back up and running-and remember, go manual, we can't trust any system that he might have had access to." He paused. "What's the situation with the control rods?"

"Not good. He used some kind of random sequence when he locked down the system. If we try to reset them all together we're only resetting some and actually freezing up the others."

"You'll have to do them one by one, then." Morris's voice was grim. "In the meantime, I'll be going in to pull the plug on the quench tanks manually."

Everyone froze and stared at him.

"All four reactors?" one man asked.

"What's a quench tank?" I asked the operator closest to me.

"A tank of gadolinium nitrate that will smother the core. They sit above each reactor in case of a direct hit from above like a jet or missile strike."

"Morris, you can't," someone protested. "With the relief valve blown, it's suicide."

"Not if you all move fast enough and get those rods down before I need to go that route." He began to leave and I scrambled to follow.

"What about your robots, can't they do it?" I asked, envisioning C3PO walking into the reactor. Better than Morris.

He didn't slow, merely shook his head.

I caught up with him. "What can I do to help?"

He paused. I thought for a moment he was going to order me to leave.

"With communications out, I'll need someone to relay information via a handheld-these guys are all gonna have their hands full. Come on, we don't have much time."

This entire day was not turning out the way Hutton had expected, and that frustrated him to no end. He should have had AJ on the stairs-he'd never failed like that, not when he was that close. It just shouldn't have happened.

Of course, the whole impending nuclear meltdown thing wasn't exactly on his agenda either.

He knew he should have joined the stream of people racing to their cars, but he couldn't resist one last look at AJ. She fascinated him.

From the plant manager's empty office, he watched her join the workers in the control room below. There was a speaker on the wall, so he listened in shamelessly. It was pretty obvious that things were dire and that there wasn't much time. One guy, apparently the guy in charge, had just signed up for a suicide mission. And AJ was joining him.

Maybe this day would end as planned after all. Of course, if AJ died in a meltdown that meant there was a good chance Hutton wouldn't be around to collect his paycheck. But it wasn't like he could do anything to help the situation. His best bet was to make sure the kid made it to safety-Masterson had been very clear about that in his instructions. No harm was to come to the child.

Hutton left the office when AJ left the control room. He went back downstairs, reaching the security office just in time to see Ty Stillwater, the deputy with the impeccable timing, usher his prisoner outside. He followed, hanging back out of sight but within listening range.

"The sheriff's station is twelve miles up 170," one of the security guys was saying as two more joined the prisoner in the back seat of a black Yukon. "We'll meet you there."

"I'll be right behind," Stillwater said.

Hutton noticed a sheriff's vehicle marked Smithfield County with West Virginia plates parked not far from the two crashed SUVs. He ducked back into the shadows just as Stillwater, his dog, and the boy exited the plant and headed to their vehicle. Time to blow this pizza joint.

AJ Palladino's life he'd leave in the hands of fate.

For now, at least.

I followed Morris into the locker room. The plant was now empty except for the men and women working furiously to save it.

Morris no longer acted like the congenial absent-minded professor I'd met yesterday. Instead, he radiated an intensity that made me give him more room than usual, afraid to crowd out any important thoughts.

I understood that kind of focus-it was exactly how I got when I was hard at work and felt "in the zone." Never with the fate of thousands in my hands, though.

While he donned his own suit, he talked me through putting on a heavy-duty radiation suit. Instead of the flimsy yellow ones I'd seen when I was decontaminated, these were made of a heavy black material. Demeromn, Morris told me, as if knowing the brand name would reassure me. It didn't.

We put on headsets and microphones along with full-face masks, another departure from the respirators that the health physicist and NRC guy had worn earlier. Funny how I hadn't seen them rushing to help. I wondered when they'd abandoned us.

"Because of the shielding near the reactors," Morris explained as we hurried down to the containment area, his voice surprisingly calm, "my radio may not transmit all the way to the control room. You're my failsafe. You'll be standing outside the containment area, so you should be shielded from any radiation. All I need is for you to repeat everything I say to the control room and then relay any information they have for me."

"Redundancy," I muttered, a little frustrated that my job was to stand there and play Whisper Down the Alley.

"Failsafe," he corrected. "There's a window that you'll be able to see me through. If my radio totally fails, you'll have to use the whiteboard to send me messages." He pulled a small whiteboard with a pen attached from a pocket on his pants leg and pointed to a duplicate one on my suit.

It was hard enough moving in the heavy suit, which was way too big for my frame. I wondered if I'd be able to write anything legible with the thick gloves I wore. Hoped it wouldn't come to that. The suit's interior was hot, my hands and face were sweating, and if I breathed too hard the facemask fogged up.

We passed through several thick doors, the last two painted magenta with large yellow radiation warnings printed on them. I remembered Morris's lecture about the importance of redundancies. Finally we reached the containment area. No one else was here. Morris steered me to a narrow horizontal window.

"I'm going inside. I need to climb up to the upper level and manually open each tank." He pointed to a narrow steel ladder fastened to the concrete wall, barely visible in the emergency lighting.

All along, the other teams had been reporting in their failures and successes, transmitting through our headsets. Morris took it all in stride, occasionally contributing a new idea or alternative, but for the most part he trusted his people to get the job done. But knowing that he was about to go inside an area that the others clearly thought he wouldn't emerge from alive, I felt the need to make absolutely sure.

Toggling my mike clumsily with my gloved finger, I broke in and said, "Morris is entering the containment facility. Do you guys have any reason why he shouldn't go?"

Silence met me. Guess nuclear engineers aren't really into chatter-or saying good-byes. Then an anonymous voice sounded. "Good luck" was all he said.

Morris didn't even act like he'd heard. He was hunched over the door's manual controls. It was designed like an air lock, but as soon as he opened the first door an alarm sounded and a red light began flashing through the darkness. He turned to close the door behind him, and our eyes met.

Mired in helplessness, all I could do was wave good-bye.

THIRTY-TWO.

The radio chatter continued in my ears, frustrating me even more because I didn't understand most of what was being said. Just as Morris entered the chamber through the second air-lock door, the lights came back on.

I got my first look at the heart of the plant. It was a large concrete-walled dome riddled with colored pipes headed in every direction. The actual reactors sat inside a second dome, this one made of stainless steel. It sat in the center of the room, the maze of pipes emerging from it.

"Status," Morris's voice cut through the others, interlaced with static.

"Generators online."

"Control rods?"

"Still working on them. It'll go a little faster now that we have juice."

"Core temperature?"

A pause. "Rising fast. Do you have a count in there?"

"Low enough to give me a few minutes. Let's make them count." Morris began climbing the ladder. The platform he was aiming for was a good forty feet over his head.

I couldn't resist, I had an idea and I figured it couldn't hurt. "Couldn't you release some of the pressure by having the robots open the isotope extraction chambers?"

A pause in the chatter. "Wait, she has a point. It could buy us some time."

"We'd have to-" The conversation drifted back into technical jargon that I couldn't interpret. But at least I'd contributed something.

Morris kept climbing. At one point he stopped and tapped the top of his head.

"Morris, can you hear me?"

No answer, but he nodded his head. "Can you hear the others?"

Now he shook his head. Great. It was up to me to relay the information that was bombarding me like waves in a hurricane.

"Guys," I cut into the chatter once more. "Morris has lost you. I can't repeat everything to him-there are too many conversations going on, so could you let me know when you have something he needs to hear?"

"Nothing good on this end," a voice replied. "Coolant pumps still off-line. We're trying to track the problem-our readings say they're all open."

That sounded familiar. I remembered reading-"Three Mile Island," I interjected. "Didn't they have the same problem?"

"You're right. A false reading led them in the wrong direction. We'll manually inspect and open each of them."

"How long?" I asked, watching Morris's slow progress. He still had ten feet to go before he even reached the platform.

"I've put everyone on the emergency coolant line, maybe four minutes if we don't run into problems."

"Is that enough time? Should I pull Morris out?"

He paused. "No. We're past the point where the emergency coolant will stop things. It will only buy us time."

"AJ?" came another voice, this one a woman's-the health physicist. So she hadn't abandoned us after all. "Are you at the observation window?"

"Yes."

"Now that the power is back on, you should be able to see a monitor on the wall next to the air lock. It's encased in a red box and has a color reading as well as a digital one."

"I see it. It's too far away from me to read the number, but the needle is just at the top of the yellow, verging on the red." Even I could figure out that wasn't good. "What is it measuring?" I wasn't sure I wanted to know but had to ask.

"The radiation inside the chamber."

"So how long does Morris have?"

She didn't answer. Instead, a man did. "Long enough to get the job done."

His words were hopeful but his tone was anything but. I refocused on Morris-if he could still hear my end of the conversation he hadn't shown any sign. "Morris, they say they'll have the emergency coolant going soon. And that your radiation levels are okay, you should have time."

He jerked his head in a nod, never pausing in his climb. He reached the top catwalk and hoisted his body up onto it. I could tell he was exhausted, but he hauled himself upright and, hanging onto the railing, stumbled across the catwalk to the first quench tank control.

It was a big metal wheel like what you see in submarine movies. There was a control panel beside it and Morris tried that first, then pounded his fist against it. Obviously despite the emergency power being back on, Paul's sabotage of the electronics had done irreparable damage.

He leaned his body against the wheel and began to turn it to the left.

"The controls wouldn't work. Morris is opening the first quench tank manually," I reported to the others.

"We're almost there on the emergency coolant," someone piped in.

Whatever Morris was doing must have worked because suddenly someone shouted, "Reactor One down!" and there was a cheer.

Morris turned around, raising his hands questioningly.

"You did it!" I shouted. He made no sign that he could hear, so I gave him a thumbs up and he nodded. Then he shuffled to the next control area.

"He's opening tank two," I reported. Morris was struggling now, leaning hard against the wall, his grip slipping as he worked.

"Good. We just got emergency coolant and have most of the control rods down in Reactor Four."

"Two's down!" someone cut in.

Morris collapsed.

"Morris!" I shouted. "He's not moving. What should I do?" There was no way I'd be able to go in and carry him down from the catwalk.

"We have control of Number Three!" a voice trampled my words. "We've done it! We're clear!"

"Morris is down," I cried into the radio, trying to break through the cacophony of jubilant noise. "Someone tell me how to help him!"

I pounded my fist against the window but the glass was so thick that I couldn't even make a thud. Standing there, helpless, my mask fogged with tears of frustration and sorrow.

The red lights stopped flashing, cheers filled my helmet. But Morris never moved.

Hutton spent the night with the other refugees at the sheriff's station. He wasn't too surprised when the news came that not only had AJ survived but she'd also helped to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

He wasn't a religious man, but even he could see when the universe was aligned against him.