In Control Room Number Four, the staff who had been briefed on the test program had reached the end of their shift and were preparing to go home. And the physicist from the plant’s Nuclear Safety Department—expected to be on hand to help the reactor operator through his part in the test—had been told the experiment was already complete. He hadn’t shown up at all. Stepping up to the instruments on the senior reactor control engineer’s desk, twenty-five-year-old Leonid Toptunov, just two months into his new job, prepared to pilot the capricious reactor through a shutdown for the first time in
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