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them.
    â€œGood. You won’t find this site the most comfortable place in the world to live. The quonset huts aren’t bad, but we don’t have a mess hall. You’ll have to get your meals from the slot machines they have around, and things may get pretty stale for you, I’m afraid, but that’s the way it has to be. I even got vetoed on the idea of having you out to my place in the Falls some weekend, just for a change of scenery and a decent meal.”
    â€œThanks, Dusty,” Rich said, again instinctively speaking for all, “but really, we’d rather just stay right here. I’ve already had the benefit of one weekend all to myself wandering all over the machinery, and that’s the most valuable time. When there’s practically nobody here you don’t have to worry about interfering with others.” One of the things they would have to do, clearly, was to make their presence as easy for Rhodes as they could. His position under Brighting’s difficult leadership, subject to that prickly personality, must have its problems. No doubt he had already spent time wondering whether his three new trainees would add to them.
    â€œWell, that’s good then,” Dusty was saying. “I’ll just give you our regular training schedule for our one-year course. Maybe you’ll want to shift some things around because you’ll only behere a quarter of the time, but you’re supposed to complete the entire program, stand all the watches outlined and turn in all the drawings of systems, just like the regular trainees. At the end, after you’ve finished all the requirements, we’ll give you a comprehensive test. If you pass it—you’ll pass it, all right, if you do everything on the training schedule—you’ll get a certificate of qualification as a nuclear operator. That’s the ticket everybody’s after. You can ask any questions you want, and we’ve got plenty of copies of the operating manual. The only rule is you’ve got to do all of the things, each one of you, yourself.”
    Inside the building housing the prototype there was neither night nor day; electric lights kept the windowless cavern bathed constantly at the same level of illumination. The passage of time became a factor of how often one’s wristwatch had been around all the numbers, punctuated periodically by a weekend. Not that a weekend provided relaxation, except in a very particular way. Saturdays and Sundays, when there was only a duty section at the site, were the most valuable times of all because of greater freedom from interference. Gradually a routine emerged. Living on the site, never leaving it, the three trainees easily could be working in the prototype before the day’s workers arrived from Arco or Idaho Falls, and they always remained there until well after the second shift departed at midnight. Meals were haphazard, only a hasty sandwich or can of soup obtained from one of the many food dispensers for whose slots a ready supply of quarters was required. There was no time for relaxation; nor were there any diversions, not even reading material—except for the engineering manuals and operating instructions for Mark One. The best times were the short nightly conversations the three shared in their quonset hut, but even these had a tendency to become curtailed after a succession of eighteen-hour days spent crawling through the cramped innards of the submarine hull, or poring over blueprints.
    Afterward, Richardson had trouble distinguishing any chronology pertaining to his time at the site, or the many memories which remained. Everything was compressed into a set of kaleidoscopic impressions. With no day and no night, there were only work periods and short hours of exhausted sleep. Since there were no women present during the evening and morning watches,it was possible to confirm the suspicion, after a few days, that the ladies’ rest room