"Perhaps," Ramius chuckled.  "Remember the incident on Lenin?"  He referred to the nuclear-powered icebreaker that had spent two years tied to the dock, unusable because of a reactor mishap.  "A ship's cook had some badly crusted pans, and a madman of an engineer suggested that he use live steam to get them cleaned.  So the idiot walked down to the steam generator and opened an inspection valve, with his pots under it!"

Melekhin rolled his eyes.  "I remember it!  I was a staff engineering officer then.  The captain had asked for a Kazakh cook—"

"He liked horsemeat with his kasha," Ramius said.

"—and the fool didn't know the first thing about a ship.  Killed himself and three other men, contaminated the whole fucking compartment for twenty months.  The captain only got out of the gulag last year."

"I bet the cook got his pans cleaned, though," Ramius observed.

"Indeed, Marko Aleksandrovich—they may even be safe to use in another fifty years."  Melekhin laughed raucously.

That was a hell of a thing to say in front of a young officer, Petrov thought.  There was nothing, nothing at all funny about a reactor leak.  But Melekhin was known for his heavy sense of humor, and the doctor imagined that twenty years of working on reactors allowed him and the captain to view the potential dangers phlegmatically.  Then, there was the implicit lesson in the story:  never let someone who does not belong into the reactor spaces.

"Very well," Melekhin said, "now we check the pipes in the generator room.  Come, Svyadov, we still need your young legs."

The next compartment aft contained the heat exchanger/steam generator, turboalternators, and auxiliary equipment.  The main turbines were in the next compartment, now inactive while the electrically driven caterpillar was operating.  In any case, the steam that turned them was supposed to be clean.  The only radioactivity was in the inside loop.  The reactor coolant, which carried short-lived but dangerous radioactivity, never flashed to steam.  This was in the outside loop and boiled from uncontaminated water.  The two water supplies met but never mixed inside the heat exchanger, the most likely site for a coolant leak because of its more numerous fittings and valves.

The more complex piping required a full fifty minutes to check.  These pipes were not as well insulated as those forward.  Svyadov nearly burned himself twice, and his face was bathed in perspiration by the time he finished his first sweep.  "Readings all safe again, comrades."

"Good," Melekhin said.  "Come down and rest a moment before you check it again."

Svyadov almost thanked his chief for that, but this would not have done at all.  As a young, dedicated officer and member of the Komsomol, no exertion was too great.  He came down carefully, and Melekhin handed him another cigarette.  The chief engineer was a gray-haired perfectionist who took decent care of his men.

"Why, thank you, Comrade," Svyadov said.