past the colorful targets of an archery range set on a meadow scattered with tall poplars at the edge of a new subdivision.
“Did you see that?” Lothar pointed at the archery range. It was somewhat overgrown, but the targets looked almost new and little used.
“Yes, I did,” said Bärger.
‘Weren’t you an archer once?” asked Lothar.
“Oh, yes,” said Bärger and nodded his head several times. “Oh, yes, that I was.”
“Why did you quit?”
Bärger was silent for a while. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it for a while.”
Once more the car turned, this time onto a concrete drive, the approach to the reactor.
Although it had been shut down for years, from a distance the entire installation looked to be in astonishingly good shape. It had a three-story administration building, with a large turbine shed behind it right next to the reactor dome. They were all overshadowed by the group of four gigantic cooling towers, which appeared to sway on a row of supports, of almost ornamental appearance, like a pleated ribbon. Almost as if they had to be tied down, not supported, thought Bärger. He felt an intense attraction, almost like a suction when he looked at the immeasurably huge curved surfaces, like the sensation he had felt when he first saw the Chapelle de La Ronchamp.
The car rolled forward silently and stopped in the shadow of a birch, but Bärger couldn’t take his eyes off those towers.
The town-councilor’s voice brought him back from a state of deep contemplation.
“Those are certainly not on our schedule.”
She walked over to them, elegant as always, a vision of freshness and energy. Her fiery red hair was carefully disarrayed, and her unsuitable, high-heeled red shoes tapped on the coarse concrete. Was she the reason Lothar had dressed up like that? Shut up, thought Bärger. He grinned in a friendly way and took the offered hand. “Black Robert,” Bärger’s name for the man from the PDS1 faction because of his preference for black clothes and his black beard, came up behind her with a gloomy expression on his face.
Only now did he see their car parked behind the bushes, grown wild, which surrounded the parking lot.
There must have been a lot of people working here once, Bärger thought. He had always imagined that an atomic power plant would be run more or less automatically, or at least with a minimum number of personnel. That too seemed to have been an error. Evidently a far higher number of workers were required for its operation than would have been expected for general maintenance and supervision.
In any case, there was no one there now, and everything was still. The air above the roof of the administration building had already begun to shimmer in the increasing heat.
A door slammed, the sound echoing. Two men left the administration building, and approached them through the open gate next to the unoccupied gatehouse. Upon introduction they turned out to be the investor and the developer. The municipal councilor spoke their names in hushed tones. Their two Daimlers, naturally, stood in the shadow of the turbine building. They wore white shirts and ties, naturally, and the gold watches which appeared under their white cuffs when they picked up their black leather pilot’s bags, were Rolex watches, naturally. Why do I find all that natural, thought Bärger? It is entirely unnatural. Just the fact that I am aware of these status symbols, just because I know what a Rolex looks like, means that I am beginning to accept this absurd social game.
He watched a sparrow hawk, soaring over the meadow near the cooling towers. It hovered with fluttering wings, then closed them and stooped. Just above the short grass it spread its wings, leveled off from its dive, and then, its talons spread in front, pushed among the thick stems.
The group had almost reached the door when Lothar called to him. Bärger took a last glance at the sparrow hawk, which was skimming off toward the woods. Then, he turned and followed them.
It had been arranged that he would not participate in the conference but would use the time for an inspection tour of the turbine and administration buildings to evaluate their structural condition. He had explained that he could only make a very preliminary evaluation by merely taking a glance at them – no one had objected to his phrase. However, everyone agreed that a quick survey of possible existing damage would be entirely adequate at this phase of the negotiations. So, Bärger hung his camera and laser range finder on his belt, stuck his notebook in his shirt pocket and took off for an hour and a half.
As he was already in the administration building, he decided to begin there.
A two-level installation, he noted, with stories 2.80 meters high. Dimensions: 15 X 60 meters. Flat roof – I really have to inspect the roofing, he thought. Bärger made a rapid sketch, looked for and found reference points for his range finder, and noted down the exact dimensions. He was pleased with the accuracy of his initial estimate. He found the cellar stairs behind a closed steel door below the gable on the north side. Judging from the light shafts, the cellar extended under perhaps a quarter of the building. Space for utilities thought Bärger, service lines, heating, electric power, with high and low voltage. Well, thought Bärger glancing at the gigantic reactor, they must have had enough energy available here. He examined the foundation, and found no damage there either, except for rising damp. The plaster was dry and free of cracks. Thick clumps of yellow stonecrop grew in the clay embankment around the building.
The outside walls had originally been white but were now somewhat gray on the windward side. Stains had been formed by water running along both sides of the lower sills, but all that was to be expected and was within the limits of normal wear and tear. Gutters and down spouts were intact. There was only one small birch, motionless in the late summer sun, growing near the south gable. Seeing it reminded Bärger to examine the roofing, and he climbed the echoing stair shaft to the third floor to look for an exit onto the roof. As he reached for the guard rail without thinking, he stirred up a cloud of gray dust.
He found the exit at the end of the corridor, steel rungs set into the wall, leading to a hatch in the ceiling.
It wasn’t hard to lift the hatch, which was secured by a chain, and a moment later Bärger stood on the roof and looked around. The roofing was a light colored clay coating and bore astonishingly few plants, if you ignored the isolated clumps of stonecrop and the little birch on the gable.
As far as he could see, there were no defects in the seams along the outer walls, nor around the flashing for the ventilation pipes and shafts. He noted the observation in his notebook. Then he put the notebook back in his pocket, sat down on a metal hood over a ventilation shaft, and looked out over the surrounding country.
The sparrow hawk was long gone, but another larger raptor had appeared, cruising over the woods.
How quiet it is here, thought Bärger.
He looked over at the cooling towers. Even at this height, they soared far above their bases like mathematical curves made real. Bärger knew that he would have to go over there, even though he couldn’t have said why. But first, he still had to inspect the turbine building.
After a final glance around, Bärger climbed back into the shaft, secured the hatch behind him and continued on his tour.
As expected, the access door in the gigantic sliding door of the
