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 turbine building was unlocked. He closed the heavy door behind him. The noise was like a loud shot in the empty chamber. Two doves took off from a steel beam with fluttering wings and flew side-by-side out of one of the open windows below the support for the traveling crane. Dust flickered in the beams of light, which fell into the huge room from the skylights.
There was nothing left of the machinery which must have once stood here. It looked as if earlier someone had planned to convert the building to a different use, but nothing had come of it. The walls were freshly whitewashed, and the tiled floor also showed no significant damage. Bärger looked for traces of the machinery mountings, but found nothing except for a few irregularities in the fit of the tiles. Even the traveling crane in the eastern peak seemed to be still in place. But his curiosity didn’t extend that far, not even to see what condition it was in.
Bärger noted his observations and also the conclusion that some effort had already been made to convert the building to a different use. I’ll make myself a present of the roof, he thought after glancing at his watch. The cooling towers were drawing him to them.
1 PDS = Partei des Demockratischen Socializmus, successor to the East German SED Communist party.
Shortly after, he left the building and stepped out into the glaring sunlight, blinking. He crossed the courtyard and then made his way through the tall grass to the cooling towers, as if they were the real goal of his trip. As he approached, it became apparent that they stood on a small rise inside company land still surrounded by a tall, unbroken, wire fence. The traces of a deeply rutted dirt road were visible beneath the grass.
Bärger followed them to the artificial plateau, apparently raised for the construction of the towers.
Here too, it was apparent that any equipment had been removed a long time ago. In any case, the sunlit grass on the other side was clearly visible through the supporting struts, which he estimated as three stories high. The angle formed by the struts seemed to extend the hyperbolic curve of the cooling towers down to the ground. He looked up at the top edge of the tower. He felt dizzy, because the gigantic curved surface rising in front of him offered no stopping point for his eyes.
Bärger went closer, climbed up onto the foundation ring, and then stepped between the struts into the interior of the cooling tower.
In spite of the immense size of the chamber, where he suddenly found himself, he felt hemmed in and uneasy. It was suddenly clear to him that it was not in spite of, but because of its enormous size. The inhumanity of this gigantic funnel really came from the lack of any human dimension. He looked up