. Cookbook chemistry, practically.

Want deuterium? Recipe: To 1.00813 gms. purest Hydrogen-1 add, slowly
and with care, 1.00896 gms. fine-grade neutrons. Cook until well done in
a Ditmars-Horst reactor. Yield: 2.01471 gms. rare old deuterium plus
some two million million million ergs of raw energy. Now you are cooking
with gas!

All you had to do was keep the reaction going at a slow enough rate so
that the energy could be bled off, and there was nothing to worry about.
Usually. But control of the feebleizer fields still wasn't perfect,
because the fields that enfeebled the reactions and made them easy to
control weren't yet too well understood.

* * *

Peter de Hooch turned into Corridor C and kept on running. There was
plenty of air still in this corridor, and there was apparently little
likelihood of his needing his vac suit. But on the moon nobody responds
to an emergency call without a vac suit.

He was troubled about Corridors A and B. The explosion must have been
pretty violent to have sealed off two of the four corridors leading from
the living quarters to the reaction labs. Two corridors went directly to
one of the reactors, two went directly to the second. Two more connected
the reactor labs themselves, putting the labs and the living quarters at
the corners of an equilateral triangle. (Peter had never been able to
figure out why A and B corridors led to Reactor Two, while C and D led
to Reactor One. Logically, he thought, it should have been the other way
around. Oh, well.)

Going down C meant that he'd have to get to Reactor Two the long way
around.

What had the damage been? he asked himself. Had anyone been hurt? Or
killed? He pushed the questions out of his mind. There was no point in
speculating. He'd have the information soon enough.

He took the cutoff to the left, at a sixty-degree angle to Corridor C,
which led him directly to Corridor E, by-passing Reactor One. He noticed
as he went by that the operations lamp was out. Nobody was working with
Reactor One.

As he pounded on down the empty corridor, he suddenly realized that he
hadn't seen anyone else running with him. There were five other men in
the reactor station, and--so far--he had seen no one. He knew where
Willows was, but where were Ferguson, Metty, Laynard, and Quillan? He
pushed those questions out of his mind, too, for the time being.

A head popped out of the door at the far end of the corridor.

"Guz! _H