Cherry Magyar turned out to be young, about twenty-three, with hair as thick and wiry as a wolfhound’s, and hard brown eyes with a hint of epicanthic fold. Her skinny was deep green. Her thigh-high waders, fastened with webbing straps and Velcro cuffs over her hips and waist, were black. The six-inch-wide stomach and back support was bright red. “We’re three shorthanded, so I hope you learn fast.” Her voice was coarse and vivid.
“Yes.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
I had to work at not wrinkling my face at the smell down here: raw sewage, volatile hydrocarbons, and something acrid that I couldn’t place. If there were any air strippers installed, they were not working. I was not surprised. The space was at least as big as a city block, and sixty feet high or more. I couldn’t even see the far wall. But the wall nearest to me was brilliant with safety equipment: the bright yellow of emer gency showers, drench hoses, and eye baths every thirty yards; fire-engine-red metal poles that were in reality fire-blanket dispensers; the green-and-white-checkered first-aid stations; hard aquamarine for breathing gear. . .
“I’m going to put you on a combination TOC/nitro analysis and basic maintenance. They’re both full-time positions, but we don’t have enough people. I’ve been doing the TOC myself the last two weeks. Hepple says you’re experienced. I need someone who knows what they’re doing. You’ve done TOC analysis before?”
Sal Bird had not, but I doubted Magyar would have the time or inclination to backcheck her records. “Yes.”
We walked for a few minutes along the cement apron that ran in front of the huge troughs that lay parallel with each other, numbered from left to right, one to eighty. If I was expected to work here and oversee the maintenance of one or more troughs, I’d wear myself out just walking to and fro. She opened the heavy, soundproofed door of a concrete bunker and motioned me ahead of her.
Inside was a vast, white space threaded through with silvery pipes. Four and a half million gallons a day thundered through those pipes, and the noise was a full-throated roar. Magyar leaned toward my ear and shouted, “Think this is loud?”
I nodded. She grinned and gestured for me to follow her. We went through a narrow doorway into what looked like an empty room. She hit a button on a plastic panel and a ten-by-ten section of the floor slid back.
The roar became a bellow, a deep chasm of noise, old and ugly, big enough to grind its way through the crust of the world. I clapped my hands over my ears, but the noise was a living thing, battering at my ribs, vibrating my skull. We stood at the edge of a pit where water rushed past, twisting and boiling. It was like standing on the edge of creation. Magyar was laughing. I was, too. That kind of noise puts a fizz in your bones.
Magyar hit the button again and the floor slid back into place. My ears rang with the relative quiet. “The only reason I like getting trainees is the excuse to open that thing up.”
We went through another doorway, but this time the door slid shut behind us, cutting off the noise entirely.
It was a small room, faced with banks of digital readouts, and the same spigot and pressure-reduction setup I had seen for testing the effluent. Magyar became all brisk efficiency.
“The equipment is two years old. These readouts here are for your TCEs and PCEs. This one’s nitrogens. Keep an eye on that. We get a fair amount of HNO3—that’s nitric acid—but the bugs break it down to nitrate and nitrite. Got to watch those levels, and the difference is important. Nitrate’s what the bugs use as an oxidizing agent, turning it to nitrite, then nitrogen gas. But watch the nitrite. If levels get too high, the bugs die off and all we get is nitrate and nitrite instead of nitrogen gas. But if we get rid of it all, then the duckweed downstream’s got nothing to feed on.”
“What bugs are you using?”
“The OT-1000 series.”
I nodded. The van de Oest OT-1000 series was tried and true. A strain, mainly Pseudomonas paudimobilis, for the BTEX and high-molecular-weight alkanes; B strain for chlorinated hydrocarbons; and probably by now the C strain that had been new when . . . before . . . I stopped thinking about it and looked