"We'll find plans of the building," Jerry Rivas said. "Any big dig
I've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshooters
always had them; security officer, and maintenance engineer."

There were inside-use vehicles in the big room; they loaded what they
had with them onto a couple of freight-skids and piled on, starting
down a passage toward the center of the building. The passageways were
well marked with direction-signs, and they found the administrative
area at the top and center, around the base of the telecast-tower. The
security offices, from which police, military guard, fire protection
and other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans and
maps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in Port
Carpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the very
bottom, directly below.

The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completely
dead. The reactors wouldn't react, the converters wouldn't convert,
and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no power
output. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered.
Some of them were dead, too, but from those which still worked
Mohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story.

"You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in
854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, and
the plutonium's all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium, and tear
this whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the mass-conversion
chambers--provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the mass
inside was all converted."

"How long will it take?" Conn asked.

"If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the work
inside, and if there's been no structural damage, and if we keep at
it--a couple of days."

"All right; let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find shipyards
like these anywhere else, and if we do, things'll probably be as bad
there. We came here to fix things up and start them, didn't we?"

XIV

It didn't take as long as Mohammed Matsui expected. They found the
fissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, each
subcritical slug in a five-hundred-pound collapsium canister. There
were repair-robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in the
power units of three of them. They sent them inside the
collapsium-shielded death-to-people area--transmitter robots, to relay
what the others picked up throu