CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

BURN BABY BURN

            Wintering with her colleagues back at the Institute, Betula would not ever mention her nocturnal excursions into the Northland netherworld and she would not dare include such inanities in the factual reports that she wrote.  Home with her books and writings, her sleep was peaceful, but, when she awoke, she often recalled, even missed, the peoples who had stormed her flight dreams.

     And every autumn, on her last trek to the ice to record its yearly regression, she risked diving low into the Northeast gale instead of doing her mapping from the safety of high altitude.  Flying just above glaciers calving icebergs into the ocean she scanned the whiteness below through a windshield streaked with sleet.  She was seeking the hint of a melting, a puff of steam perhaps, looking for the ruin of a gigantic concrete dome, the malignant mausoleum of Marcel Desfresnes.

* * *

     Seven years of training at the simulator, the last three on actual schedule.  Twelve hours on, twelve hours off.  Three daylight shifts, one day off, three night shifts, nine days off.  Plenty of time to think or pound the keys on your laptop.  Eventually you clip on a badge with a green stripe around the radiation patch and you walk to the left hand chair at the center of the control room.  Everything is already familiar, every blinking diode, every screen, every digital display spinning neutron counts or tallying steam pressure.  Everything is the same. Plenty of time to think or pound the keys on your laptop.

     It's not boring.  Computers do all the work.  Two sets of computers, every system has its redundant backup.  Any glitch anywhere, the cadmium rods go in.  Shut down.  Anything else goes wrong, the gadolinium pours in.  Twenty-four-hour shutdown.  It never happens.  It's not boring.  There are things to be checked, safety routines, tests to be run.  Yards of printout paper to be filed.

     Once in a while you take control and try to outsmart the computers at fine-tuning the steam output.  Not that hard.  You can't fiddle with any part of the automatic shutdowns, though.  And that's aggravating.  Twenty-two years with the company, seven years of training, two years in the right hand chair, and now three years in charge.  Why can't they trust Marcel Desfresnes?

* * *

     Betula felt unable to resolve the riddle of her feelings, a sense of kinship almost, for Marcel Desfresnes.  The rigor of her own training led her to appreciate the man's perseverance, but the long hours the engineer spent reading numbers within a concrete vault seemed like a jail term to her.  Idly steering her flyglider, a useful tool certainly, Betula still could not fathom Marcel Desfresnes' utter absorption with the control of this monstrous machine, even less the man's exaltation in his riding the beast to apocalypse.

     Bent over the shoots of a snow anemone caught in the embrace of a late spring snowfall, Betula knew the awesome roiling of hydrogen fusion on a sun that, at long last, often split the dark clouds of the northern latitudes.  She knew of the immense flux of energy scattered to photons, most lost to space, a relatively few trapped on earth in chlorophyll to be tamed into plant growth by the billion-years-old magic of photosynthesis.  In awe of the flower's striving from its sheath of ice crystals, she could have swooned counting off adenosine tri-phosphate molecules, or imagining the tumble of electrons down the transport chain within.

     But to sit at the fountainhead of a malevolent deluge, to trade digital messages for the birthing of boundless hordes of these very same electrons, fissioned, funneled within the tortured metal of evil devices... Generators, transformers, high voltage lines raining microwave radiation on the Mother's creatures.  How could Betula feel anything but revulsion for Marcel Desfresnes?

* * *

     What's different from the simulator is behind the operators' chairs.  Instead of the glassed-in visitor overlook there is a circular set of filing cabinets.  Thirty years of printout paper and space for as much or more.  On top, an ideal spot for the best audio system money can buy.  The room's acoustics are excellent, a technician's whisper could have profound consequences here, but management frowns on rock-and-roll.  And Wagner makes visitors nervous.  After five though, things quiet down and the squawker overhead stops summoning peoples.  By rule, the guy in the left hand chair is the one who pushes all the buttons, including the CD changer's.   Everyone goes about his task quietly. It's nice in here on the night shift.