"Ellen."

"Ellen." One swift, hooded glance, but her voice doesn't change. "Okay. How do we get a handle?"

"Easy. She's a volunteer nurse at Belle Ame Academy. So she takes the same physical all schoolteachers and staff take. Try State Public Health."

"Right. That's-ah-Van Dorn's outfit, isn't it?" she asks carefully.

"Yes."

"You got her SS number?"

"Yes." It's with mine in my wallet. I read it out to her.

She hits keys without comment.

The screen nixes. She looks at me neutrally.

"What name did you use?"

"Ellen More."

"Try Ellen Oglethorpe. That's her maiden name and tournament name."

A nod, no comment, not an eye flicker. She hits keys. "There she is."

NA-24-2.

We look in silence. "That's not much, Tom."

"No, not much. But too much. Let's try Van Dorn. I don't have his number."

"No problem," she says, as neutrally as I. "I can get it from Fedville file."

She gets it, hits more keys. The screen answers laconically.

NA-24-O.

"How could that be?" I ask nobody in particular.

Lucy waits, like a stenographer, watching the keyboard. After a while she looks up at me. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Let's go," I say. "Vergil will be waiting."

We pile into Lucy's big pickup, Vergil standing aside so I'll sit in the middle next to Lucy. The uncle is nowhere in sight. Maggie, the pointer, thinking she's going hunting, jumps clear over the tailgate into the truck bed.

"We're not going to have any trouble," Vergil tells us in a soft voice. "There's only one fellow at the intake gate. I know him. He used to fish with my daddy. He's from Baton Rouge." The only sign that Vergil is black is the way he pronounces Baton Rouge, with a rough g, Roodge.

He's right. There is no trouble. We swing off the Angola road to a chain link gate, Lucy not even showing her pass to the uniformed guard in his booth, who probably recognizes her truck, out and over the Tunica flats between the high-rises of Fedville on the right and the barbed-wire chain link fence of the Grand Mer facility on the left. The gravel road slants up and over the levee. There across the still waters of old Grand Mer, now Lake Mary, and not half a mile away looms the great lopped-off cone of the cooling tower, looking for all the world like a child's drawing of Mt. St. Helens after it blew its top. The thin flag of vapor flies from its crater. From the pumping station below a brace of great pipes strapped together like the blood vessels in the thigh humps directly up and over the levee, making an arch high enough for a truck to pass under. Across the upper blind end of Lake Mary is the old revetment, great mattresses of concrete, old, moldering, lichened, laid down years ago in a vain attempt to thwart the river's capricious decision to jump the neck of the loop and take a shortcut south-to no avail. Ol' Man River done made up his mind.

Lake Mary, once the broad gulf of the river where sternwheelers made their stops at plantation landings, stretches peaceably beyond the willows. Directly in front of us the new river booms past down Raccourci Chute as if it had just discovered the shortcut, half a mile wide, foam-flecked in excitement, sparkling brown wavelets crisscrossing in angry sucks and boils. A powerful towboat pushing an acre of barges labors upstream. There is no easy water here.

A short concrete L-shaped pier sticks out into the river. A privy-size guardhouse houses a guard not even uniformed and listening to his headset. He waves us past.

"I don't know what we're looking for," says Lucy.

In fact, there is not much to see. The concrete ell encloses the intake, a grid of steel bars some twenty feet square. It is girded around by a protective strainer of steel fins like whale teeth in which is lodged river junk, driftwood, beer cans, chunks of Styrofoam, the whole mess coated in yellow froth.

We stand looking down. "Well, that's it," says Lucy. "The grossly strained water goes down there, then up there in that pipe-how big is that pipe, Vergil?"

"Seventy-two-inch diameter."

"-then over to the pumping station and purification plant. Actually, it's good water when you drink it. We're above the big chemical plants. For the life of me"-she nods to the tower -"I don't see how a spill down there could get into the water here."

We gaze some more. There is nothing to see.

But as we drift up the levee and back to the truck, Vergil calls us aside. We're on top of the levee. He is standing casually, hands in pockets, looking down as usual. "You want to see something?" he asks nobody in particular.

"Yes," we say.

"Look over there." He nods toward the south without looking up.

We look. There is nothing to see but the fence and, beyond, the batture which widens into the Tunica Swamp and is mostly grown up in willows.

"What do you see?" I ask Vergil finally.

"Look at the willows."

"I'm looking at the willows."

"Look at the color."

"The color of willows is green," says Lucy.

"That's right. So what do you see. Look where I'm looking." He looks.

We look. "Do you mean that couple of sick willows?" I ask at last.

"It's a track," says Vergil. "A faint yellowing which crosses the batture toward the tower."

"I see!" cries Lucy. "Damned if it isn't! But what does-"

"Let's go," I say. "We got company."

A small white pickup is moseying along the narrow roadway atop the levee.

"That's just the levee board patrol," says Lucy. "Now what do you think that yellow means?"

"Let's go, Lucy," I say, taking her arm.

We walk slowly down the slanting gravel road. The white truck seems to pay us no attention, bumps across the access road, under the pipe arch, and goes its way.

"Now would you mind telling me-" begins Lucy when we are in the truck.

"Let's wait till we get home," I say. Vergil and I are looking straight ahead. "Drive the truck, Lucy."

"Okay okay."

7. FOR SOME REASON nobody says anything until we're back at the dining-room table gazing down at the map.

"Now what's all this about, Vergil?" asks Lucy.

"They have a line there."

"A line?"

"A pipe."

"Where?"

Vergil's forefinger with its glossy nail and large half-moon rests on the green neck between the river and lake.

"How do you know?"

"I used to run leaks for Continental all the way from Golden Meadow to Tennessee. That's how we spotted leaks by chopper."

"How?"

"By yellowing. Grass and leaf yellowing over the pipeline. I got so I could spot the slightest off-green."

We look hard at the map as if we could see it.

"I don't understand," says Lucy. "Couldn't it be a gas pipeline supplying Grand Mer?"

"No. It wouldn't be there. This runs from Grand Mer to Ratliff number one."

Again we look at the map.

"Well, if there's a pipeline there," says Lucy slowly, "wouldn't there be a cleared right-of-way with signs and so forth?"

Vergil smiles and shrugs. Ask me about pipes but don't ask me why folks do what they do.

Lucy looks at me. "Am I being stupid? Ya'll seem to know something I don't know. What does he mean?"

"He means that there would be a right-of-way and signs only if they wanted you to know the pipeline was there."

"What are you saying?"

"Vergil is suggesting that there is a pipeline there and that it is hidden."

"I see. You mean that if there is contamination of the water supply, it is deliberate."

"That's right."

She muses, eyes blinking and not leaving my face. "Why do I have the feeling that you are not only not surprised but that you know a lot more about this than you let on?"

I don't say anything.

She looks back at Vergil. His face is blank.

"What kind of contaminant are we talking about?" asks Lucy.

I shrug and tap the pencil on the cone on Tunica Island. "This is an old heavy-sodium reactor, one of the first and, I believe, one of the few still around. Right, Vergil?"

"Right," says Vergil, taking the pencil and warming to it. The subject is pipes. "Dr. More is right about the heavy sodium, but it's not the core, the reactor, it's the coolant. Okay?" He corrects me gently. He begins to sketch. "Okay, this is an old LMFBR, liquid metal fast breeder reactor. You've got your core here, a mixture of oxides of plutonium and uranium, and around it you've got your blanket of uranium, U-238. Now here's your primary coolant loop of liquid Na-24, used because of its heat-transfer properties-it's liquid over a large range of temperatures. Here is your secondary nonradioactive sodium loop, which cooks the steam, which in turn drives the turbines. And here is your water loop, which cools your condenser and turbine." With an odd little deprecatory gesture, Vergil both offers the drawing and shakes his head at it.

We gaze at the loops and the small tidy blacked-in core.

"I still don't get it," says Lucy. "Are you telling me that stuff from here"-she taps the primary coolant loop-"gets over to here?" She taps the Ratliff intake an inch away.

Vergil is silent. His eyes are black and blank.

"How?" Lucy asks both of us.

"By a pipe," I say, watching Vergil. He nods.

"But who-?" she begins.

We are silent.

"By a pipe, you say. But if that stuff was in a pipe in the willows here, it would be a liquid, wouldn't it? So how-"

We're back in Vergil's territory. "That's right. It would have to be treated, converted to a water-soluble salt, probably a chloride-like this." He picks up a crystal cellar from a corner of the map.

"But somebody has to do this!" Lucy accuses him. Vergil cuts his eyes, passes her to me.

"That's right, Lucy. Somebody designed it and built it."

We think it over. Now Lucy has the import.

"You mean to tell me," says Lucy in a measured voice, tapping pencil on table with each word, "that somebody has deliberately diverted heavy sodium from here, through a pipe, through the Tunica Swamp here, to put it in the water supply at Ratliff number one here?"

Vergil gazes at the map as if the answer were there.

"That's what we mean to tell you, Lucy."

"Does that mean it is something done officially, with NRC approval, perhaps by NRC, or could someone have done it surreptitiously?"

Lucy looks at me. I look at Vergil. Vergil shrugs.