Very funny.

He was like a turtle, de Hooch thought. Perfectly safe as long as he was
in his shell, but take him out of it and he would die.

_Hell of a way to spend the night_, he thought. _A night in shining
armor._

That struck him as funny. He began to laugh. And laugh.

He almost laughed himself sick before he realized that it was fear and
despair that were driving him into hysteria, not a sense of humor. He
forced himself to calmness.

He must be calm.

He must think.

Yes.

How do you go about getting rid of a radioactive metal that is in effect
welded to the outside of your suit?

The trouble was, he was a nucleonics engineer, not a chemist. He
remembered quite a bit of his chemistry, of course, but not as much as
he would have liked.

Could the stuff be neutralized?

Sure, he told himself. Very simple. All he had to do was go climb into
the reactor, and let the reactor do the job. Mercury 203 plus an alpha
particle gives nice, stable Lead 207. Just go climb right into the
Ditmars-Horst and let the Helium 4 do the job.

But the thought stuck in his mind.

He kept telling himself not to panic as Willows had done.

And several minutes later, chuckling to himself in a half demented
fashion, he opened the firewall door and went in to let the helium do
the job.

* * *

It was nearly eight in the morning, Greenwich time, when the three
surface vehicles, with their wide Caterpillar treads lumbered to a halt
near the kiosk that marked the entrance to the underground site of the
laboratories.

"O.K.," said one of the men in the first machine, holding a microphone
to his lips, "let's go in. If what Willows said is true, the whole place
may blow any minute now, but I'm not asking for volunteers. Nobody will
be any safer up here than they will down there, and we have to do a job.
Besides, Willows wasn't completely rational. Nobody would put on a vac
suit and run away like that if he was in his right mind. So we can
discount a lot of what he said when we picked him up on the road.

"The five of us in this car are going straight to Number One Reactor to
see what can be done to stop whatever is going on. The rest of you start
trying to see if you can get those trapped men out of A and B corridors.
All right, let's move in."

Less than five minutes later, five men went into the control room of
Number One Reactor. They found Peter de Hooch sound asleep in the
control chair, and the