The View From the Deck Plate

Several readers have mentioned that they’d like to write reviews of my book(s), but they’re not sure what to say.  I find it odd that intelligent and articulate people often feel a sort of internet stage fright when it comes to expressing their opinions in public forums.  (By contrast, inarticulate buffoons have a tendency to spew forth massive volumes of hastily-typed, poorly-punctuated drivel.  But that’s another story.)

If you happen to be one of my reticent would-be reviewers, you can now relax.  I have taken the drudgery of the review process upon myself.  Below, you will find a list of pithy reviews, every one of which accurately describes the ecstatic bliss that comes from reading one my novels.          

This book is so good that it brought my goldfish back from the dead.

This book folded my laundry, balanced my checkbook, and made me an instant master of Kung Fu.

Even the dust bunnies under my bed snap to attention when I read this book aloud.

My parakeet skimmed the first chapter of this book, and now he can speak sixteen foreign languages (including Welsh).

After reading this book, I was able to perform pushups with my eyebrows, and defeat Chuck Norris at chin-wrestling. 

This book got me so charged up that I was able to cancel my Viagra prescription.  (Warning:  If you experience an erection lasting more than 4 hours, seek immediate medical attention.)

See how easy it is?  Just copy your favorite item from the list, and paste it into the review box on whichever online book seller you happen to frequent.  If you’re feeling really froggy, you can use more than one.  Don’t forget to add a few stars.  (If you’re not sure how many stars to use, allow me to suggest a prime number greater than 3.)

That’s all there is to it.  Check back next week, when I’ll teach you how to deposit money into my bank account.

Like nearly every author who works in the techno-thriller genre, I receive occasional comments about the (supposed) lack of believability in my story plotlines.  These remarks are usually accompanied by categorical statements, such as “The President of the United States would never do X,” or “No Navy pilot would ever do Y.”

The implication is that — given a specific set of circumstances — people can be relied on to do (or not do) specific things.  In other words, people are predictable.  As comforting as I find the notion of rational and reasonable human behavior, I only have to watch about three minutes of cable news programming to realize that people do all manner of strange things.  And what is true for individual humans beings is every bit as applicable for governments, corporations, and military units.  The fact of the matter is, even the most stolidly consistent organizations will occasionally do things that shock the hell out of me.

I write thriller fiction, which means that I basically have two options…  I can show my readers geopolitical situations that they’ve seen before, or I can try to show them something new.  Since there’s not a lot of point in rehashing scenarios that they’re already familiar with, I try to craft unusual situations, and see where they might lead.  By definition, anything that varies significantly from the status quo will seem unfamiliar, but that’s really the point, isn’t it?

Still, there must be a boundary somewhere, between the realms of the possible and the impossible.  There has to be an invisible dividing line between things that might actually happen in real life, and things that would never happen.  But exactly where does that border lie?  That’s really the magic question, isn’t it?

I’d like to try a little experiment, to see if we can locate the edges of that hazy dividing line.  I’m going to list ten scenarios, some of which are real and some of which are the product of my fevered imagination.  Your job is to figure out which ones are too absurd to be true.  Are you ready?  Alright, he we go…

A NASA astronaut/fighter pilot/active-duty Navy captain dons an adult diaper and drives 900 miles to kidnap a romantic rival.

The seventh largest corporation in America (and one of the most successful energy companies in history) turns out to be a decades-long pyramid swindle.

A major film studio drops nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to make a blockbuster motion picture inspired by a $14 board game with little plastic pegs.

Nineteen maniacs armed with box cutters destroy the World Trade Center, damage the Pentagon, ignite two wars in the Middle East, and inspire the creation of a new Federal Department larger than the Department of Justice, or the Treasury Department.

The Chief of Naval Operations commits suicide because a journalist from Newsweek questions his right to wear a certain insignia on two of his military ribbons.

Iraqi militants hack the video downlink from $4.5m Predator drones, tapping into real-time military intelligence data with a $26 piece of off-the-shelf computer software.

A Nigerian extremist sets his underwear on fire while attempting to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit.

The captain of a 4,200 passenger cruise ship runs his vessel aground while attempting to wave hello to a retired colleague ashore, resulting in more than 30 deaths.

Eleven Secret Service agents are suspended from duty for extreme misconduct involving foreign prostitutes.

An Austrian bodybuilder/action film star is elected Governor of California.

Okay, that’s all ten.  As you can see, there’s some weird stuff in there.  But how many of those setups are just too bizarre to be true?  In other words, which ones did I invent?

If you follow the news, you probably know that I told a little fib earlier.  I didn’t make up any of those scenarios.  Every freaky little item is true.  Despite that fact, I couldn’t use a single idea from this list in one of my novels.  They’re all so improbable that they would destroy any semblance of credibility in my plot lines.

I invite you to think about that the next time something on the news triggers your I-can’t-believe-it reflex.  When Mark Twain wrote that, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” he wasn’t kidding.  Real life is much weirder than anything I’ve ever created in the pages of my novels.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great idea for a completely improbable story…

Last night, someone broke into my house and stole an hour of my precious sleep time.  No one asked my permission.  I was just minding my own business, when some light-fingered chrono-thief reached into my life and snatched 3,600 seconds of perfectly good snooze time.  You can try to dress it up by calling it Daylight Saving Time, but it was theft, pure and simple.

That hour was mine, and I want it back.  Yes, I know it will supposedly be returned to me in the Fall, but I want it now.  What the hell am I going to do with an extra hour of sleep in November?

And another thing…  I want interest.  If someone is going to “borrow” my hour for half a year, I expect to be paid for it.  Let’s see…  If we figure a principal of 3,600 seconds, at an interest rate of 3.25% (the current prime), I should be earning 28.9 seconds per quarter.

Those 28.9 seconds are my rightful due, and frankly I need that extra time.  I spend more time than that rushing around, trying to reset the clock on my microwave, the one in my truck, and every watch I own (including the $9.00 plastic digital job I got from Wal-Mart to use as a stopwatch when I’m working out).  Aside from the can opener and my toothbrush, every damned thing I own has a clock in it, and they all need to be reset.

Except for my computer and my cell phone.  They update themselves automatically, subtracting my hour without so much as a by-your-leave.  I think it’s because they’re in on the scam.  Instead of protecting my hour of precious sleep, they hand it over every year without hesitation, leaving me short on sack time, and wondering how I can get my 60 minutes back.

But I’ve got a plan for next year.  In 2013, I’m going to protect my hour.  When Mr. DST comes creeping into my house, I’m going to pepper spray that sneaky bastard, duct tape his thieving little hands and feet together, and call the cops.  (Or maybe the Time Police.  I’m not sure who has jurisdiction over temporal misdemeanors.)

When I wake up the next morning, I’ll be an hour behind everyone else in California, but I don’t really care about that.  I’ve been showing up for meetings on time my entire adult life, and what has it gotten me?  More meetings.  Not a particularly good return on my investment.  Maybe if I get a reputation for showing up an hour later than everybody else, I won’t get invited to quite so many.

For six months out of the year, I’ll have my own private time zone.  Pacific Daylight Time, minus one.  Or, as I prefer to think of it, Jeff Standard Time.

Best of all, when everyone moves their clocks back in the Fall of 2013, I’ll get an extra hour.  Everyone else will just get their same old hour back, but I’ll get a brand new hour.  It will be 3,600,000,000 freshly-minted microseconds, and they’ll all be mine.

Let’s see how those chrono-filching bozos like it when I steal their hour.  The whole world will witness my triumph over the time thieves.  It will be my finest…  er…  hour.

Sometimes my books get one-star reviews.  It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.  Every once in a while, I manage to disappoint a reader so badly that he (or she) feels the need to lay out caution tape and road flares to warn other potential victims away from my work.

I’d like to pretend that I’m indifferent to some of the more vitriolic criticism, but the truth is I’m not.  It bothers me that I can’t quite deliver the bacon for all of my readers.  I know it’s impossible to please everyone.  Or at least I understand that on an intellectual basis.  But the knowledge doesn’t do much to lessen the sting when someone does a hatchet job on one of my books.

I’ve tried ignoring the really nasty reviews, but that doesn’t work.  (They call to me in the night, the same way that jelly doughnuts can sing to me from the Krispy Kreme all the way on the other side of town.)  I’ve tried looking past the venom, to learn from whatever errors put me in the crosshairs.  That might help me avoid repetition of certain mistakes, but it doesn’t make me feel better.

In the end, I’ve only found one useful tactic for coping with one-star reviews.  I go looking for others.  Not in my own work.  I can probably quote some of my own nasties by heart, so I trudge off in search of stinker reviews for books that I like and admire.  Why?  I’m glad you asked.  We’ll talk about that in a minute.  First, let me hit you with some examples.  Ready?  Okay, here goes…

Fellowship of the Ring — J. R. R. Tolkien

One-dimensional characters set in a ludicrously detailed, needlessly complicated environment (and lousy maps to boot).  A classic?  I’ve read soup can ingredient lists more interesting, and product warranty cards more expertly written.

The Hunt for Red October — Tom Clancy

The story displays complete ignorance of Russian military culture; the dialogue is unworthy of cartoon characters; the “action” is a far-fetched excuse for long pedantic discourses on weaponry lifted from the pages of Jane’s and Aviation Week; and the author is a draft dodging hypocrite right-winger who somehow elected not to fight in Vietnam and spent the rest of his life becoming enormously rich lecturing fellow cowards on the wonders of modern warfare.

The Stand — Stephen King

This is the only book to have the distinction of being hurled down my back yard. In frustration. I’ve never been beyond chapter 5 in four attempts although I have flicked through and read parts to see if it improves and it just DOESN’T !! It’s turgid from beginning to end and instead of adding all the edited bits they should have hacked another 300 pages out of the damn thing.

A Prayer for Owen Meany — John Irving

I had to literally FORCE MYSELF TO FINISH THIS BOOK! I found the book to be tedious and as slow moving as a glacier. The ending is foretold and there is no quality or depth to the characters. Mindless. This was a huge waste of my time. No more John Irving for me.

Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad

Make it stop! I am finding myself having to constantly re-read many paragraphs just to find out what Conrad was even talking about.  In fact, it is getting so painful, I now know the meaning of torture. I’m sure they would use this in police interrogations if it weren’t for the fact that it is just as painful for the reader as it is to the poor soul who would have to suffer from hearing it read aloud.

To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

This is not great literature, and I avoid teaching it at all costs. It’s not even good. The characters are black and white two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. The rednecks are evil, the blacks are victims, and the self-righteous Atticus is too good to be true. There is nothing here to examine or explore. Critical thinking skills need not be applied for understanding. Moreover, if the lack of complexity and verisimilitude doesn’t stick in your craw, then the insipid narration of the androgynous Scout will.

Raise the Titanic — Clive Cussler

Completely unbelievable plot. Total lack of understanding of anything remotely connected with science. Abysmal characterization, junior-school dialogue, this book almost completely drained me of the will to live. I regret deeply the afternoon I wasted reading this turgid excuse for a novel, as I will never be able to reclaim it.

Neuromancer — William Gibson

People who tell you they like this book are LYING TO YOU. Gibson is credited with blending styles. What he is actually doing is sticking a 50’s dime store crime novel and a computer engineering textbook in his MixMaster and playing dadaist cut-up poet with the resultant confetti. It makes me wish he’d stuffed his head in as well.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson

While reading, I would often put the book down and wonder to myself, Why are we supposed to care? What character were we supposed to connect with? Even the scenery is flat.

Dune — Frank Herbert

I can only say I’m glad it was a $5 second-hand copy, because it’s a total waste of money. I’m not too far in, but the boredom factor is taking over fast, and skimming ahead isn’t encouraging me to pursue it. Herbert reads like he’s some undergraduate who’s overdosed on the more miserable philosophers.

Alright.  Had enough?  Yeah, me too.

I could trot out at least a hundred more literary assassinations of the same general stripe, but those ten are enough to make the point.  I love every one of the books I’ve listed, and I disagree with every snarky little barb you’ve just read about them.

For me, the lesson in this is simple…  It doesn’t matter if you’re Tolkien or Tolstoy; some people are going to hate what you write.  If Harper Lee and Tom Clancy can get blasted this hard, why should I expect my books to be an exception?

I can’t.  I remind myself that—while I’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune at least a half-dozen times—some readers absolutely loathe it.  As much as I’d like them to be, my books are not a magical exception to the rule.  Some people are going to hate my novels.  I can’t stop that, but at least I can remind myself that I’m in good company.

And when that doesn’t do the trick, I can always drown my sorrows in a nice box of jelly doughnuts.

Not everything I write makes it into my books.  Some of my best chapters end up on the editing room floor, usually for reasons having to do with the tone or pacing of the novel.  Occasionally, it’s because I’ve changed or eliminated a sub plot, so that a particular piece no longer fits.

The piece you’re about to read is from an early draft of Torpedo (now in print as Sea of Shadows).  If you’ve read the book, you may recall that one of the major story threads is driven by an incident at a German nuclear power plant.  This chapter, which was edited out before the book went into print, tells the story of the accident at Niedersachsen Six…

————————————————————-

HANOVER, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY; FEBRUARY 8
1906 hours (7:06 PM)
TIME ZONE -1 ‘ALPHA’

The security guard scrutinized Becka Eckhardt’s ID badge for what seemed like a ridiculously long time, glancing back and forth between her face and the laminated photograph on the badge.  It was absurd. Depending on her shifts, the man had seen her at least three or four times a week for the better part of a year, and every time he acted as though he had never laid eyes on her before.

Becka stifled a sigh of exasperation and resisted the temptation to snatch the badge out of the guard’s fingers when he finally offered it back to her.  Instead, she calmly clipped the badge to the lapel of her lab coat and walked past the guard desk to the big steel security door.

The sign on the door read EINTRAG EINGESCHRÄNKT AUF AUTORISIERTES PERSONAL, in large red capital letters: ENTRY RESTRICTED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.  Under it was a smaller sign, also in German — RECORD PERSONAL DOSIMETER READINGS UPON ENTRY AND PRIOR TO EXIT.

Becka fumbled near her throat for a second before her fingers found the key card that hung from the chain around her neck.  The front of the white plastic card shared another photo of her with the blue and red logo of Gotelind Öffentlichkeit Atomenergie AG,  the Berlin-based company that owned the Niedersachsen Nuclear Power Complex.  She slipped the key card into the reader slot to the right of the door.  The slot flared red for a half-second as an optical scanner fired a burst of laser light at the coded security strip on the back of the card.  Electronic locks clanged open, and Becka opened the door and walked through.

If the Reactor Control Room at Niedersachsen had been picked up by a crane, flown half-way around the world, and dropped into the middle of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas ¾ it would have looked perfectly at home.  Three rows of computer terminals and indicator consoles took up most of the floor space.  Cooling fans whispered quietly to themselves.  Hundreds of LED’s flickered on and off in arcane sequences.  Line after line of cryptic-looking alphanumeric data scrolled across green monochrome computer displays.  The air carried the faint ozone smell of electronic circuitry at work.

The focal point of the room was the enunciator board, which covered most of an entire wall.  Three meters high, by five meters wide, it was one of the largest plasma displays in existence.  On it, two-hundred tattletales ¾ each the approximate height and width of a standard construction brick ¾ showed the status of every valve, pump, switch, and relay in the reactor.  The tattletales were color-coded: green for optimal, blue for sub-optimal, yellow for out-of-specifications/requiring-human-attention, and red for critical.

The Reactor Control Officer, Becka Eckhardt, yawned and pushed a strand of blonde hair away from her forehead and tucked it back under the edge of her watch cap.  The white linen cap was silly, as was the starched white lab coat that made up the other piece of the mandatory Control Room uniform.  Control Room personnel could wear any sort of shirts, pants, or shoes they wanted, as long as they wore the lab coat and the watch cap.

As a general rule, Becka wore pleated black slacks with her lab coat, in an ever-more-apparent failure to disguise the extra weight that insisted on collecting around her thighs and hips.  Not that she was overweight, but she was on the wrong side of forty now, and the battle against creeping cellulite was getting fiercer all the time. 

The facility’s Berlin-based parent company, Gotelind Öffentlichkeit Atomenergie AG, didn’t care about her tasteful black slacks, though.  She could have worn hot-pink stretch pants and no one would have said a word.  But let her show up without her cap or lab coat and it would hit the fan.  The company treated the dress-code as a safety issue, as though any stray radiation that might be hovering around would not dare attach itself to a spanking clean cotton smock or cap.

The spanking-clean part would have been stretching it a bit, at least in the case of Erik Lutz, the only other Control Room worker on Becka’s shift.  She stole a glance at him.  His back was to her as he fiddled with a cable that ran from his laptop computer to the Auxiliary Data Logger console.  He was rumpled, as usual.  Not dirty; he certainly kept himself and his clothes clean; he just never bothered to iron anything.  As the Shift Supervisor, she should probably have spoken to him about his appearance, but she really couldn’t see how Erik’s apparent fondness for wrinkled clothes could be any more harmful than the company’s fetish for starched white cotton.

Erik was as tall as Becka was short, and his rumpled dock-sider khakis hid a body that was as lean as hers was plump.  Becka resisted the temptation to stare at his butt while his back was to her.   

She stretched and asked, “what are you playing tonight?”

Erik looked up for a second.  “Nebula Wars,” he said.  “Real-time starship combat simulator.  Wait till I get to the time-jump sequence.  There’s a thirty or forty second animation that will knock you on your ass!”  He went back to fiddling with cables.

That was another thing she probably should have spoken to him about; the regs did not allow employees to plug their personal computers into company hardware.  But Erik claimed that the tiny screen on his laptop gave him a headache.  He loved to jack it in to the big flatscreen plasma display on the Auxiliary Data Logger.  According to him, the flatscreen’s graphics had an in-your-face quality that brought his games to life.  He was constantly saying that he would buy one of his own, just as soon as he could scrape together the money.  Which, considering that the displays each cost about the same as a small car, probably wasn’t going to be any time soon.

“One of these nights, you’re going to crash that system,” Becka said.  “You’re going to corrupt some critical file somewhere, and I’ll end up on the phone all night trying to explain to the Big Bosses how we managed to trip the power grid for half of Lower Saxony.”

Erik shook his head without looking up.  “Not going to happen.  My laptop speaks Windows, and this monster,” he patted the console several times, “speaks ARBIX, which is ¾ more or less ¾ a bastard stepchild of UNIX.  My files and their files don’t mix.  Besides, I’m not saving anything to the system.  I’m just piggy-backing on the video processor for one console.”  He looked up and flashed her a devastating smile, all white teeth and boyish charm.  “And it’s a redundant console at that.”

Becka yawned again and glanced up at the enunciator board for the fiftieth time.  The tattletales were all green.  The plant was cranking out 2,200 Megawatts of power, about eighty-percent of its rated capacity, and all conditions were normal.  No changes.  She didn’t really need to look at the board to know that, because each of the tattletale conditions had an accompanying audio tone to announce changes in status: a pleasant chime for green, a sharp buzz for blue, a warbling alarm for yellow, and a harsh klaxon for red.  The absence of any audio alarms was another indicator that all was well inside the reactor and its ancillary systems.

She could have gotten up and scanned the actual instrument readings on the various consoles, but six months of working with the new software had convinced her that its trend analysis algorithm would spot any shift in readings long before anything drifted out of specifications.  Under ordinary circumstance, that would have been true.

The virus that had infected Erik Lutz’s laptop was not particularly sophisticated, but it was a new strain ¾ so new that there was no entry for it in the laptop’s virus-checker library.  So the virus checker hadn’t spotted it.  Lutz might have spotted it himself, if the virus had generated some sort of error message, or caused a vital function of the computer to fail.  But he was using a Windows operating system, and the virus wasn’t targeted toward Windows.  It was designed to attack UNIX-based operating systems.  It stowed away on the laptop’s hard drive, dormant and virtually invisible, until Lutz jacked his laptop into a system that did operate on UNIX.  And then it went to work.

The programmer of the virus had never heard of Niedersachsen, Germany, much less the nuclear power facility that was based there.  He called his little monster  Freeze Frame, and he had designed it strictly for nuisance value.  Unlike other, more malicious viruses, Freeze Frame did not destroy data, or erase hard drives, or even shut down computer systems.  It was targeted toward the giant building-sized video display screens that were appearing in increasing numbers on the sides of buildings downtown Tokyo.  The idea was to halt the twenty-meter tall video screens in mid-picture, locking in a single image, and reducing the world’s largest televisions to static billboards.

Since the majority of the giant video screens were controlled by Unix-based computers, the virus was programmed to seek out and attack the blocks of Unix code that deciphered and displayed digital video data.  And, when Erik Lutz unleashed the Freeze Frame virus into the Niedersachsen computer system, that’s exactly what it did.

No data was erased.  No damage was done to the computer system’s integrity.  But the giant enunciator board ¾ the Control Room crew’s first and best indication of the status of the reactor ¾ froze.  It didn’t look any different; the green brick-sized tattletales all stayed green.  No alarms sounded.  To outward appearances, nothing had changed at all.

At six minutes before midnight on the eighth of February, at the junction between a capillary feed water pipe and the primary coolant pump, a carbon-vanadium pipe flange developed a leak.  It was a pinhole leak at first, emitting a half-meter long plume of steam that might have appeared harmless to an untrained observer.

Radiac sensors immediately detected an increase in the radiation level within the enclosure that housed the primary cooling loop.  Another set of sensors detected a slight, but measurable, drop in pressure in the primary cooling loop.  Both sets of conditions generated alert functions that were promptly forwarded to the enunciator board in the Reactor Control Room.  A separate set of alert functions were routed through a different set of fiberoptic cables to the instrument readouts on the Shift Supervisor’s console.

For the first five minutes, the problem remained small enough to be handled with a minimum of action.  But the seconds ticked away and no action was taken.  The green tattletales on the enunciator board remained green and silent.  And the green tattletales were so reassuring that neither Becka Eckhardt, nor her shift assistant, Erik Lutz, bothered to check the independent readouts.

The leak in the pipe flange widened, becoming a trickle, and then a pulsing torrent.  The water level in the reactor began to drop, exposing the tops of the fuel rods.  Deprived of some of its cooling water, the reactor core began to heat up.  And still the Control Room crew remained oblivious.

At nine minutes after midnight, the lights in the Control Room flickered.

Becka glanced up at the enunciator board.  “What the hell was that?”

Erik’s eyes joined hers on the display board.  “It kind of looked like that little hiccup we get just before a Stage One Auto-SCRAM.”

Becka shook her head.  “That’s impossible.  The board is clean and green.”

The lights flickered again, followed by an abrupt metallic thump in the distance.

“One Alpha Turbine just tripped,” Erick said.

“No way,” Becka said.  “Look at the board.”

“Forget the board!” Erik shouted.  “Look at this!”  He pointed frantically toward a cluster of readouts on an instrument console.  “Radiation levels in the primary cooling enclosure are at the top end of the safe zone and they’re shooting up like a rocket.”

Becka nearly tripped over her own feet getting to the Supervisor’s Console.  “Shit!” she said.  “Oh God don’t let this be right!  The coolant level in the core is way below minimums.  The core is exposed!”  Her eyes went wide with fear, and for a few seconds, she was utterly paralyzed.  This was not happening.  This could not be happening…

A shudder ran down the length of her body and her knees nearly gave way.  But the paralyzing spell of fear was broken.  She shook her head rapidly and forced her eyes to focus.  The drill.  There was a drill for this.  Just follow the procedures…

“Shut off all the coolant drain valves leading out of the core,” she said.  “It should be V-21, V-48, V-55, and V-119.  But check that last one in the book, I could be wrong about it.  Got that?”

Erik nodded rapidly.

“Good.  Then, divert all three backup feedwater pumps to the core.”  She flipped up a hinged plastic cover and laid her fingers on the wide red button.

The label underneath it read Dringlichkeit SCRAM: Emergency SCRAM.  The word SCRAM was an American acronym, short for Safety Control Rod Axe Man.  Pushing the button would lower all of the Control Rods into the reactor at the same time, dampening the nuclear reaction, and shutting the reactor down.  If she pushed it, she would be ¾ in all probability ¾ ending her career.  Sixteen years of her life down the toilet at the push of a button.

She paused.  Maybe she wouldn’t have to do it.  Maybe she and Erik could get the reactor back under control.  Maybe she could still salvage a few shreds of her professional life.

But what if they couldn’t stabilize the reactor?  How long did they have until the reactor was so far out of control that even SCRAMMING it would not prevent a meltdown?      

“Shit!” Becka shouted.  She punched the button and the reactor SCRAMMED.  LED’s began flashing on nearly every console in the Control Room.  But not on the enunciator board.  The useless tattletales stayed a nice unwavering green.  “Everything is fine,” they seemed to be saying.  “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“It’s working!” Erick shouted.  “Control rods are down and the core temperature is dropping!”

Becka’s eyes stayed locked on the lying green tattletales as the reactor, and everything she had ever worked for, came grinding to a complete stop.