When Sokolski pressed the red emergency button on his way out of the control room, several things commenced. Shrill sirens howled the length and breadth of the plant. Warning bells clanged out coded signals. A recorded voice blurted out of a thousand loudspeakers scattered throughout the building. "Now hear this," said the tireless voice, over and over again. "Now hear this. Red red red. Pile trouble. Reactor A. Procedure One commence." Sokolski had certainly never pressed the red button before, and to his knowledge neither had any of his or Gaines' predecessors. It was the kind of button that, rightfully, ought never to be pressed. The laws of things in general sort of made it a comfort without much value. Pile trouble calling for the red button should really have eliminated the red button and much surrounding territory long before it got pushed--or at least the sort of pile trouble its builders had in mind. Nonetheless, they had provided it and the elaborate evacuation operation so cryptically described as Procedure One as a kind of psychological sop to the plant personnel. But the red button did more than activate Procedure One, which was solely concerned with the plant. After all, power from the reactors was lighting the lights and cooking the breakfasts and flushing the toilets of untold millions scattered in half a dozen major cities. If there were some imminent possibility that the major source of their power might cease to exist rather suddenly, it was proper that they should be notified of this eventuality as much in advance as possible. Consequently the activation of the red button and the commencement of Procedure One was paralleled by activities hardly less frenzied in other places, far away. Emergency bells sounded and colored lights danced, martial laws automatically enacted by their sound and flicker. The wheels of crisis turned and spewed forth from their teeth rudely awakened policemen half out of uniform, military reservists called up to find themselves patrolling darkened streets, emergency disaster crews assembling in fire houses and on appointed street corners, doctors gathering in nervous clutches at fully aroused hospitals and waiting beside ambulances tensed for wild dashes into full-scale disasters. Where it was night when the warning sounded, darkness descended as desperate power conservation efforts were initiated; where it was daylight, the terrified populace waited in horror for the blackness of the unlit night. All of this, of course, took only minutes to get fully under way. Meanwhile, at the plant, Procedure One continued in full wild tumultuous swing. * * * * *