en in a condition to talk!

He got back into his radiation-proof suit again, took one last look at
the instruments on the console, and headed for the reactor.

* * *

Through the first radiation trap--left turn, right turn, right turn,
left turn--through the "cold" room, through the second radiation trap,
through the decontamination chamber, and through the third radiation
trap into the anteroom. Now that Ferguson and Metty were safely out of
the way, he could give his attention to the damage that had been done.

Had Ferguson and Metty actually come in to tap off a sample, as he had
suggested to Willows? He looked around at the wreckage in the
antechamber. Quite obviously, the heavy door of the sample chamber was
wide open, and it certainly appeared that the wreckage was scattered
from that point. Cautiously, he went over to look at the open sample
chamber. It looked all right, except that the bottom was covered with a
bright, metallic dust. He rubbed his finger over it and looked at the
fingertip. A very fine dust. And yet it hadn't been scattered very much
by the explosion. Heavy. Very likely osmium. Osmium 187 was stable, but
it wasn't a normally used step toward Mercury 203. Four successive alpha
captures would give Polonium 203, not mercury. Ditto for an oxygen
fusion. It could be iridium or platinum, of course. Whatever it was, the
instruments in his helmet told him it wasn't hot.

He had a hunch that Ferguson and Metty had been building Mercury 203
from Hafnium 179 by the process of successive fusions with Hydrogen 3
and that something had gone wrong with the H-3 production. It appeared
that the explosion had been a simple chemical blast caused by the air
oxidation of H-2. But the bleeder vent at the other end of the reactor
had apparently kicked at the same time. An enormous amount of unused
energy had been released, blowing the entire emergency bleeder system
out.

Something didn't seem right. Something stuck in his craw, and he
couldn't figure out what it was.

He opened up the conduit boxes that led through the antechamber from the
control console to the reactor beyond the firewall. Everything looked
fine. That meant that whatever it was that had fouled up the controls
was on the other side of the firewall.

"How does it look?" Willows' voice came worriedly over the earphones.

"Have I already said 'damn'?" de Hooch asked.

"You have," Willows said with forced lightness. "You eve