Crayley smiled inside himself as he yelled and sprinted out to the tube lift. The hidden hand of the secondary had reached up and ripped off the regulator coil—housing, innards, and all. The resulting explosion had been felt, even up here, as a dull rumble.
The lower level was a mess. The emergency door had slammed down to prevent the spread of contaminated air, and the huge pumps were going full blast to clear the area. At the first door, Lesker, one of the safety engineers, stopped him.
"You can't go in there, Lew. One whiff of that stuff, and you'd be gone."
"What happened?" Crayley asked briskly.
Lesker shrugged. "Who knows? That new generator blew, somehow. Not much harm done, really; as far as we can tell, the only real damage was in the tunnel itself. The temperature must have averaged better than a thousand Centigrade for a few seconds, though it was a lot hotter than that at the center of the blaze. It's cooled down a little now, but that generator must still be burning." He stopped for a second, then: "Nobody got out of it alive. We're sending in the mobiles now. The secondaries in there won't work. It's going to be a rough job because we'll have to use cables; we couldn't possibly get a UHF beam through that static."
The safety men were setting up a monitor screen bank for the mobile waldoes. Two of them, four-foot wheeled robots with TV cameras mounted where human heads would be, rolled up to the closed door.
"It's safe in that first section," Lesker said. "Roll 'em in." He turned back to Crayley. "You'd better get on a radiation suit if you want to watch this. We've got to seal off this section from the rest and open up the corridor all the way down to let the cables through. There's still a lot of hot air in there in spite of the pumps."
Crayley climbed into a suit and adjusted the air flow. Then he walked over to where the safety technicians were putting on the primary gloves for the mobile waldoes. From each control board, a long snake of cable ran to the mobile it controlled. The safety men switched on the power and the mobiles rolled down the corridor out of sight.
Crayley watched their progress over the shoulder of one of the safety techs. The screen showed the walls of the corridor sliding by. Then there was a shifting as the camera panned to the left. After several more turns, the robot came to the door of Tunnel Nine. The door itself lay crumpled against the far wall. Two bodies lay near it. The robot glided into the tunnel itself.
The inside of the tunnel was still fiercely hot; the new generator glowed a yellow orange, and the waldo secondaries had been warped and ruined by the heat.