meantime. They climbed into an
airjeep and floated out over the edge of the plateau, letting down
past the sheer cliff to where the lower lateral shaft had been opened.
A great deal of rock had been shoveled and bulldozed away to expose
it; it was twenty feet high and forty wide. Anse simply steered the
jeep inside and up the tunnel.

There were occasional lights on at the ceiling. Anse said they were
all powered from their own nuclear-electric conversion units. "We
don't have the central power on here; there's a big mass-energy
converter, but we're tearing it down to ship out."

That was something they could get a good price for. Maybe even
one-tenth of what it was worth. At least they wouldn't have to sell it
by the ton.

The tunnel ended in an enormous room a couple of hundred feet square
and fifty high. There was a wide aisle up the middle; on either side,
contragravity equipment was massed. Tanks with long 90-mm guns. Combat
cars. Small airboats. Rank on rank of air-cavalry single-mounts,
egg-shaped things just big enough for a man to sit in, with quadruple
machine guns in front and flame-jets behind. Ambulances armored
against radiation; decontamination units; mobile workshops; mobile
kitchens. Troop carriers, jeeps, staff cars; power shovels,
manipulators, lifters. All waiting, for forty years, to swarm out as
soon as the bombs that never came stopped falling.

They floated the jeep along hallways beyond, and got down to look into
rooms. Work was already going on in the power plant; a gang under a
slim young man whom Anse introduced as Mohammed Matsui were using
repair-robots to get canisters of live plutonium out of a reactor.
Workshops. Laundries. Storerooms. Kitchens, some stripped and a few
still intact. A hospital. Guardhouse and lockup.

More storerooms on the level above, reached by returning to the
vehicle hangar and lifting to an upper entrance. By this time, gangs
were at work there, too, moving contragravity skids in empty and out
loaded.

"The CO here must have had squirrel blood," Anse said. "I think when
the evacuation orders came through he just gathered up everything
there was topside and crammed it down here, any old way. Honest to
Ghu, this place was packed solid when we found it. Nobody'd believe
it."

"Wait till you see the next one."

"You mean there's another place like this?"

"You can say so. You can say a twenty-megaton thermonuclear is like a
hand grenade, too."

Anse Dawe