Lorin and Darcy left the lab and walked through a winding succession of corridors until they came to a large room. One wall was lined with catwalks linked by metal ladders. Men in coveralls moved against the slate gray background like insects on the side of a building. Through a door to their right Lorin could see banks of instruments at which several men were working.
"This is the south face of the pile," Darcy said. "Most of the instruments are located here. The Klysten converters are mounted in that room over there." He indicated a door on their left.
"I'd like to see those," Roger said. "I hear that these are pretty large compared with what we had at the moon labs."
"They're big enough all right," Darcy said. "Each one is four stories high. We had a deuce of a time evacuating them."
As Darcy said this, they stepped into a long high room. To their right stood six immense transparent tubes. Each tube contained a grid of thick steel bars which was mounted so that it completely surrounded a coil of heavy copper bar in the center of the tube. The steel bars had been treated so that a magnetic field would build up rapidly when they were exposed to hard radiations. The radiation beams were passed into the grid in pulses, thus causing the magnetic field to build up and collapse rapidly producing current in the coils by induction. The tubes were generators with no moving parts except electrons and protons. The system used about seventy-five per cent of the energy produced by the pile. The residual radiation was released as greenish yellow light.
"Why are they transparent?" Roger asked. "I should think that metals would be stronger and easier to manage."
"The transparency helps us to maintain a more accurate control," Darcy replied. "When the light shifts toward the blue, we know that more energy is being released as radiation, and can shut down the tube before it gets a chance to heat up too much."
"Good idea," said Roger. "Control was our worst trouble at the moon labs."
"We'll use this until we find something better," said Darcy as they left the pile area.