“What goes on here?” Georges yelled over the din.
Ponty motioned us back outside into the relative cool of the hall. He was beaming. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
“Is every room here frightening?” Georges asked.
“That frightened you?”
“It’s a vision of hell.”
Ponty chuckled. “Well, put like that, I suppose one might say it is, after all.”
“It did seem awesomely powerful.”
He nodded. “It has to be. We’ve got power needs here that I can’t discuss, but they rival those of many small towns. In effect, we’ve got our own generator. We’ve got to be able to control our power, keep it regular, allow no surges. Am I getting too technical?”
“Not at all,” Georges said.
“It’s rather fascinating,” I agreed.
We turned a corner and entered another long and narrow hall. Ponty’s words echoed off the bare walls, mingling with the memory of the other room’s straining engines. I was beginning to feel the building more as a living thing, and could understand Ponty’s nearly paternal pride in its structure as well as his fear for its safety.
“You see,” he said, “although much of the work we do here is production line stuff—making ammunition and so on—there is also a great deal of stress-related research and testing. To say nothing of the power needed to keep a place like this heated and lit over three shifts seven days a week. Those boilers never shut down.”
Georges seemed to be pondering something. “But compared to the ammunition room, they seemed poorly guarded.”
The point seemed to come home to Ponty. “You know, they may be, now that you mention it. But there is so much here that must be guarded full-time—explosives are one example; the research rooms are another—and we do only have so many men. I guess we have to draw the line somewhere.”
“It seems somehow”—Georges paused, looking for the right word—“less thorough, I suppose.”
Ponty stopped before a pair of double doors, which, we would soon discover, led to the development rooms for armored vehicles. But before we entered, he wanted to close the book on this discussion. It probably seemed to him as though we were calling his procedures into question, and he wanted to set the record straight.
“Monsieur Lavoie,” he said, “you forget that you are taking this tour with me, the director. The men shoveling coal in that room are soldiers, as are nearly all members of the staff. Perhaps you didn’t notice the weapons on their belts?”
Georges shook his head.
“Ah, just so. Anyone entering any room here without authorization does so at tremendous risk to his own life, I assure you.”
