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went wrong. As a result, Favor and his team had almost nothing to do with the plant operation.
    Since the overhaul the station had run without incident, not that there had been many in the previous two decades of its operation. Favor had been with the company since high school and was just two years from retirement. He’d cut his teeth on an old coal-fired generating plant, discontinued when the Skunk River Nuclear Generating Plant had come on line. In the early days the operation of the two hadn’t been all that different. Water was still heated and turned into steam, which ran turbines, which produced electricity. The only real difference was how that water was heated.
    After several minutes Favor shifted in his seat, then accepted that he wasn’t going to nod off. Instead, he decided to get himself a Coke. If he couldn’t take a nap, he’d take in a bit of caffeine.
    The control room of the plant looked like something out of Star Trek . A long, curved wall contained a wide range of gauges and dials. At waist level was a shelf the workers used for a desk. Immediately in front of them was a bank of computer screens that told the story. The men used three chairs on wheels to scoot across the floor and along the wall as they monitored the conditions of the plant. In reality, they had little to do.
    Just as Favor stepped from the soft-drink machine, every computer screen in the room blinked, twice. “What was that?” he said.
    Orin Whistle, who’d worked there nearly as long, looked up from the paperback he’d been reading, a blank expression on his face. “What happened?”
    Josh Arnold stood up in place as if he might suddenly need to run. “Something’s going on, Barney.”
    At that moment Favor could feel the change. The plant was tens of thousands of moving parts, each performing its specific function. The mix produced a familiar vibration and comforting background hum that changed only when one of the two reactors was taken off-line for maintenance. Otherwise, nothing ever changed.
    “The turbines are speeding up,” Whistle said as if to himself. “I’m resetting the control.” He looked at the gauges, the amber lights playing across his face. “No change.”
    “Heat’s up, Barney,” Arnold said, touching the temperature gauge in front of him as if to confirm what his eyes told him. “I don’t see why, though.”
    The twin nuclear piles were set to run at their standard temperature, allowing the water coursing through them to be superheated to produce the steam that created electricity. A second stream of water ran through the system like coolant from the radiator of an automobile, intended to maintain the core at exactly the right temperature. It was all self-monitoring and self-adjusting. Until this moment, Favor had considered it impossible for the reactor to increase in heat without his ordering the computer to make the change.
    “Watch the pressure,” Favor said. Pressure was key to being certain the nuclear core was always covered with water. The crew at Three Mile Island had notoriously failed to ensure that single necessity and, as a result, had brought disgrace on themselves and an end to new nuclear plants in the United States.
    “Pressure’s up,” Whistle said, his face paling. “And it’s rising fast.”
    The Klaxon sounded, repeating every three seconds. Atop the curved wall, red lights began to blink. The computer had taken them to Code Red.
    “Shut it down!” Barney shouted. “Josh, call Central Iowa and inform them we’re going off-line now!”
    “Jesus, Barney, they’ll raise hell. Half of Des Moines will go dark.”
    “Do it, Orin, shut it down now!”
    Orin hesitated. “We’ve got a few minutes to figure this out, Barney. There’ll be hell to pay if we act too fast.”
    “We aren’t going to figure this out.” Favor knew there was no point in delay. Trying to outthink a computer, even one making a mistake if that proved the case, was foolhardy. “The computers