Twenty-ThreeMachuzak, Fred Abbuhl and Diana Cochran stood in the ASSET control room, watching the downward tremble of the temperature gauges. The cryostat had been pumped down to a billionth of an atmosphere, a vacuum that would serve to insulate the magnets, and liquid helium was flowing from the helium factory into Prometheus’great coils. The cooldown had begun. Fred had been right: they could hardly hope for better than a degree an hour and that would mean—weeks. Someone had hung a big deadline calendar under the captain’s deck, with more than two weeks crossed out. They’d heard nothing from Dragonmaster since the encounter in the ruins and Nathaniel could only wonder which of the remaining dates was marked.
“Is extra tritium coming in from Savannah River?” he asked.
“Kettering ordere
