but
found no one in the ship.

The mood of its interior was brooding and sullen. Every cubic foot of
space not taken up by its machinery and fuel was packed with black
ingots of an alloy, a large proportion of which was fissionable metal,
quiescent now, and harmless, but under the right kind of primer,
capable of bursting into a specialized hell of energy. Five thousand
tons of the stuff, Earth-weight!

But even all this was the secondary part of the purpose for which the
_Prometheus_ had been fitted. Bert and Alice followed a narrow catwalk
to a compartment along the keel of the ship which was fitted like a
huge bomb-bay. And the monster that rested there, gripped by
mechanically operated claws, would certainly have fitted the
definition of a bomb as well as anything that had ever been made by
Earth-science. Child, it was, of the now ancient H-bomb.

It was a tapered cylinder, a hundred feet long and thirty feet thick.
For one grim, devilish moment Bert Kraskow paused to pat its flank, to
feel the solid metallic slap of its tremendous shellcase under his
palm, to be aware of the intricacies of its hidden parts: The forklike
masses of fissionable metals that could dovetail and join instantly;
the heavy-water, the lead, the steel, the beryllium.

Here was watchlike perfection and delicacy of mechanism--precision
meant to function faultlessly for but a fragment of a second, and then
to perish in a mighty and furious fulfillment. Here was the thought of
man crystallized--trying to tread a hairline past inconceivable
disaster, to the realization of a dream that was splendid.

In that moment this thing seemed the answer to all the fury of wrong
and sorrow that burned in Bert Kraskow. And the vision soared in his
mind like a legend of green fields and light. For a few seconds he was
sure, until doubt crept up again from the bottom of his brain, and
until Alice put that uncertainty into words.

"Doc is gone," she said. "Even with his expert help, using the Big
Pill would be taking a chance. Bert, do you think we can do it alone?
Will it be all right? Are you certain, Bert?"

Her large, dark eyes pleaded for reassurance.

He sighed as the strain plucked at his nerves, in spite of what he
knew of Doc Kramer's careful small-scale tests. Maybe what he felt was
just a normal suspicion of anything so new and so colossal.

"No, Allie, not _absolutely_ certain," he replied. "But how can
anybody ever be sure of anything unl