e
cradle. A broad highway encircled it outside the fence, patrolled night
and day by twenty General Stuart cavalry-tanks. There were a thousand
soldiers, and three hundred Atomic Power Authority police, and only God
knew how many F.B.I, and Central Intelligence undercover agents. Every
supervisor and inspector and salaried technician was an armed United
States deputy marshal. And nobody, outside the Department of Defense,
knew how much radar and counter-rocket and fighter protection the place
had, but the air-defense zone extended from Boston to Philadelphia and
as far inland as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The Long Island Nuclear Power Plant, Melroy thought, had all the
invulnerability of Achilles--and no more.

The six new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle
inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant. Beside
their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished heat for
the sea-water distillation and chemical extraction system, processing
the water that was run through the steam boilers at the main power
reactors, condensed, redistilled, and finally pumped, pure, into the
water mains of New York. Safe outside the shielding, in a corner of a
high-ceilinged room, was the plyboard-screened on-the-job office of the
Melroy Engineering Corporation's timekeepers and foremen. Beyond, along
the far wall, were the washroom and locker room and lunch room of the
workmen.

Sixty or seventy men, mostly in white coveralls and all wearing
identification badges and carrying dosimeters in their breast pockets
and midget Geigers strapped to their wrists, were crowded about the
bulletin-board in front of the makeshift office. There was a hum of
voices--some perplexed or angry, but mostly good-humored and bantering.
As Melroy and Doris Rives approached, the talking died out and the men
turned. In the sudden silence, one voice, harshly strident, continued:

"... do they think this is, anyhow? We don't hafta take none of that."

Somebody must have nudged the speaker, trying without success to hush
him. The bellicose voice continued, and Melroy spotted the
speaker--short, thick-set, his arms jutting out at an angle from his
body, his heavy features soured with anger.

"Like we was a lotta halfwits, 'r nuts, 'r some'n! Well, we don't hafta
stand for this. They ain't got no right--"

Doris Rives clung tighter to Melroy's arm as he pushed a way for himself
and her through the crowd and