“I woke up to find myself inside the port nuclear reactor and at the mercy of a vortex of superheated steam. This reactor core water pushed me through a system of pipes and valves and somehow found myself in a clean reservoir…

“From there, I passed from a clean steam chamber through another system of pipes and into a turbine engine with tremendous turbine blades. Copper coils rotated around me. Electrons moved forward and back, and I screamed. Stop! You are making me nauseous! It was the scariest roller coaster ride of my life. But it didn’t end there.

“He said, ‘I can fix that,’ and thrust me through his hull and pushed into the sea…

“And he left me…

“And I watched his sail and diving planes, and his bright brass propellers (each ringed with ducts and crossed with a plane and a rudder), leave me behind at a speed of fifteen knots in his aft jet wake.”

                                                                      Dr. Jones.

“That is the core of my being, Dr. Jones. I will show you. And I whisked her through the aft bulkhead, into the port reactor room, and into the primary containment vessel, where I paused for a moment so she could get her bearings. Then I took her into the reactor core vessel where we watch radioactive isotopes of uranium two-thirty-five absorb slow-moving neutrons, turning them to uranium two-thirty-six. And, with great excitement, uranium two-thirty-six broke into fast-moving fragments of rubidium and cesium—leaving three free neutrons and prompt gamma photons left over…All the while, fast-moving neutrons collided with a matrix of atoms, making it hot while cooling themselves down, and then went on to transform other isotopes of uranium two-thirty-five into uranium two-thirty-six—when balanced just right, the reactor maintains within its core vessel, a sustained chain reaction that heats the core water under super high pressure…

We followed the reactor core water through a closed-loop network of pipes, winding around inside a clean reservoir, where, by the temperature difference alone, heat passed from the reactor core water to the clean reservoir…

And then we followed the steam from the clean steam chamber through pipes into the turbine, where it turned tremendous turbine blades. Copper coils rotated around us. Electrons moved forward and back, and I paused for a while because Dr. Jones’s head was on fire with magnetic fields and rotating coils.

Let me go. I’m dizzy and feeling nauseous!

A dip in the water will remedy that, and I plunged Dr. Jones through my keel where she’s caught in the whirling current inside my port propeller duct and spit into the sea.

Stop. My heart is going to explode. Stop, I’m in cold water again. Help!”

Expedition