A short way to the right was a massive steel robot arm with a giant pincer hand. The controls for this arm were underneath the porthole. It was used to carry out dismantling work on the core for refuelling, maintenance and for inspection purposes; this had to be done by remote control – no suit would protect a human being from an open core.

At the top of one of the metal struts was a figure in a white suit; even from here one could see clearly what he was doing: he was taping something to the strut. We went through a steel door and into the decontamination room which contained an enormous and powerful shower, followed by an air-drying chamber. We went through another steel door, closing that behind us, and into the pressurization chamber. We went through into another chamber, and finally came to the door into the reactor face. Tenney led the way in, and Quoit followed. I hung back some way behind him. Something was bothering me, bothering me a lot more than Whalley and Tsenong, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

I went through, and if the place hadn’t looked like the Inferno, it certainly felt like it. There was a heat stronger than I had ever felt before – intense, claustrophobic; I felt as though I had entered a microwave oven. I looked around for some solid object; just to my right was an enormous valve fixed to the floor. Quoit pointed at the figure up on the support strut; I could see from where I was standing that whatever he was taping to the strut, he had already taped the same to one other strut, and to several of the pipes at the point of connection to the core.

The figure turned his head and looked at us for a moment, before turning back to his work. I saw his face clearly through his visor; it was Whalley.