A double door, as sturdy as a bank vault door, followed. At eye level, in places where the enamel finish hadn’t completely flaked away, a few letters painted in red were still legible: NG R.
The door opened onto an even narrower passage, this one almost pitch-black. The moment he set foot inside the door, something clicked, his face was struck by a blinding light, and a warning sign flashed a skull and crossbones.
They weren’t taking any chances in those days, were they? he thought. The metal stairway reverberated with a loud clanging as he went down into the chamber. Down below, he had the sensation of standing at the bottom of a dry moat; opposite him, rising up like the battlement of some medieval fortress, was the reactor’s gray, two-story shielding, its surface pitted with yellowish-green, pockmarklike indentations: scars of old radiation leaks. He started to do a quick count but gave up as soon as he walked out onto the catwalk and examined the reactor from above; in some places the concrete wall was totally obliterated by the sealed leaks.
Supported by metal uprights, the catwalk was insulated from the rest of the chamber by glass panels wrapping all the way around: a huge transparent cube. Lead glass, probably—to cut down the radiation. A relic of atomic architecture. How quaint.
The gamma-ray counters were clustered under a small canopy, fanlike, each one aimed straight at the reactor’s belly. He found the gauges housed in a separate compartment, all of them on zero except for one: the reactor’s idling gauge.