Photons

               Archer, Samuels, and Laskin were dropped at the same boarding house at the edge of the city they had made their “home” when they needed to disappear.  It was all three in one room that night. After the long ride and a heavy meal for dinner, the only thing left to do was practice Wolg, challenge each other to a game, or talk.

               “I think it’s time for a staff meeting,” Archer said to his crew of two. “We finally have some privacy.”

               “Aplastic anemia,” Laskin announced. Archer and Samuels looked at him with surprise. “It’s the primary illness seen in the infirmary. I suspect Riaan may be recovering from it. I worry that Kellam is starting to suffer. We would be starting to see signs had we not gotten our inoculations.”

               “The Vulcans didn’t find this?”

               “They weren’t looking for it. At some point it seems everyone comes into the infirmary suffering from aplastic anemia, is given treatment, and then discharged either temporarily or permanently. I think it depends on their classification and at what point they decide to seek treatment.”

               “I thought Thorium was supposed to be safe for fission besides being easier to mine.” Archer commented.

               “Yes. It’s not underground, it’s on the surface. And thorium is radioactive, but it lacks a neutron for a sustained reaction. It’s fertile, not fissile. In order to use the thorium, it must be bombarded by neutrons, which effectively turns it into protactinium, followed by a short half-life and it becomes uranium. That’s the safety of it, though.” Samuels stopped to see if she could explain it as simply as possible.  “If the reaction gets too hot, you just shut off the neutrons with a switch and the reaction is over. It’s also a liquid fluoride environment for the fuel. If there’s a meltdown, the heat of the reaction melts the chemical drain plug, if you will, and it drains off so it all cools down. ”

               Archer put his hand to his head, as if to rub away the tension, and felt the cosmetic ridges on his temples. For a moment he reminded himself he was human, on a mission to salvage a society polluted by Tellarites.

               “We need to find the Tellarites, and soon. Something’s not adding up.”

               “Gentlemen…one of my geology associates, Teenga, is quite talkative. The electricity runs the mining equipment with incredible torque, more than a combustion engine. And it’s not just Thorium that they’re mining. Have you ever heard of thulium?”

               Come the first day of the work schedule, the team headed to their jobs with a new objective. Laskin was to investigate the extent of cases of aplastic anemia and if the workers, both discharged and on leave, were actually being treated or simply being ignored. Samuels was to find out where the mined thulium was going. With any luck, the path would lead to the Tellarites. Archer planned to investigate the actual purpose of the reactors besides obviously generating electricity. There had to be another reason.

               The morning started out as had the last month of mornings with a sunrise, tea, blue eggs, and a trip to Reactor Two. Commerce in the town started early with people going into shops, cafes, offices, factories, schools, and a textile mill. Ahead the giant cylinders poured out the excess generator steam creating a microclimate above the reactor complex. Akalli hustled from shops and jobs to catch the electric omnibus trams that took them where they were going faster than ever dreamed. The fever for electrical marvels was a Pandora’s Box of results. The genie was out of the bottle, and the Akalli were forever changed. Their age of innocence was over.

               “I’ll see you all tonight, kids,” Archer called as the three of them split towards different buildings. Hands raised in farewell as they disappeared from each other’s sight. Archer took a path that led him past offices and into an area protected by fences, waving a little square of metal to open the locked gate. In the distance was the reactor dome, maybe 50 meters high. It could be seen from every point in the city like a beacon of the future. Off to the other side the twin steam cylinders, ever releasing their white clouds of steam, blocked the view of the ocean from almost every point in the city. The last station to pass was the transmission and generator facility. The buzzing from the enormous coils, capacitors, resistors, cables, and transformers, laid out in rows that stretched for acres, amid catwalks and scaffolds and platforms didn’t disturb him any more than being in the engine room of his star ship.

               Archer entered an empty office but the monitors and gauges hummed and flashed their customary welcome. Placing his hands on the back of a chair, he leaned in over the desk and took a good look at the security monitors. Business as usual: quiet at the coolers, the reactors, the generators. The door opened and Tuart joined him to start their day.

               “Jon, how are you?  Is Yaara here?”

               “Haven’t seen her yet, but all is quiet. Passed Haardt coming in, nothing happening all night.”

               “I’m going to pick up a tea at the café, can I get you one?” Jon nodded and Tuart left him alone with the blue, green, red, and yellow glowing buttons and dials. Alone for a rare moment, Jon started to dig through a cabinet of files. He was surprised to find paper anything at all in a facility such as this. Something blinked; Jon looked at it, tapped a few icons on one of the monitors, and went back to rifling the files.

               “Hi Jon,” Yaara called from the doorway. He didn’t jump but instead slowly stopped his investigation, pulling out one file that was marked Distributions. He continued to attend to the file as if it was just part of what he ought to be doing, and Yaara ignored him. She was not particularly friendly to him, although cordial enough. He exercised a bit more caution in her company when it came to digging up dirt on Tellarites.

               “Yaara, how long have you been working here?” he asked innocently. It was the only ice breaker he could think of at the moment.

               “I studied for a year at the University and came here when it opened four years ago. How did you end up here in the control room, anyway, Jon? You didn’t go to the University, and I keep wondering who you might know.” Her accusation was direct.

               “I came here from the country looking for work. I guess they thought I had potential. They gave me a test, and here I am.”

               “You’re the only person ever to work in the control room who didn’t go to University.”

               “I’m a quick study,” he offered, ignoring the file to deflect her attention that he was in possession of. “I just seem to be a natural.”              

               “Occasionally someone comes here who is as out of place as a konji in the library. I thought maybe you might be one of them.”

               “Tea is hot and ready,” Tuart’s called from the doorway. Jon was glad he interrupted.

               “Tuart,” Yaara said, “come tell Jon what we saw a few weeks ago when the man from Southern Continent came to visit.”

               “Oh, yes, that was odd,” he said, handing tea to his co-workers. “They have chero bark today,” he mentioned. “What made you think of that?”

               Yaara looked down to hide her expression.

               “She thought I might be from the Southern Continent.”

               Neither one of them said anything in reply at first. 

               “Thulium.  It’s a metal we mine in addition to the thorium stones. Someone comes from the Southern Continent every couple of moon cycles and downloads the thulium files, and we don’t see them again until the next cycle. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just so, hmm, a good way to describe it would be enigmatic.”

               “What is this metal used for, thulium?”

               “I looked it up in the library a few months ago. It’s very rare. It’s used in the colored lights, in medicine, lasers, it seems to have a lot of uses but all of it that we mine goes to the Southern Continent.”

               “Jon,” Yaara said, “you weren’t a student at University, but you know how the reactor works. There’s something we have no records of but we still take care of it, not us exactly, but others in the facility.”

               “Go on.”

               “We have photon collectors on each reactor. People come and take the collectors, then leave new ones, supposedly empty.”

               “What are they doing with the photons?”  Jon asked. He’d pried a open a door just a crack.

               “Nobody knows. The thulium, OK, I can see inventions. But photons?” Tuart said.

               Without warning a white bolt of searing light blinded the three in the operations room! A second later they felt a ground shaking rumble that knocked them off their feet to the floor. The concussion threw Archer almost under a counter, and a chair dropped on his chest. Tuart and Yaara shouted, screamed, the fire klaxon blared with a deafening whooping scream, and the room turned black as death. Archer was blind and deaf, but he struggled to climb to his feet. Glass had flown in the explosion cutting his head, and dark red blood ran down his face.