The Randall Garrett Omnibus. Randall Garrett

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      "Connections O.K.?" Willows asked. His voice came over the earphones inside the ponderous helmet of the radiation suit.

      "Fine," said de Hooch. He adjusted the double periscope so that his vision was clear. "Perfect."

      He tested the controls, moving his arms and legs to see if the suit responded. The suit was so heavy that, without powered joints, controlled by servomechanisms, he would have been unable to move, even under Lunar gravity. With the power on, though, it was no harder than walking underwater in a diving suit. "All's well, Puss," he said.

      "I'll keep an eye on you," said Willows.

      "Fine. Well, here goes Colossus de Hooch." He began walking toward the door that led into the corridor which connected the reactor anteroom to the control room.

      It took time to drag the two inert figures out of the anteroom. All de Hooch could do was grab them under the armpits, apply power, and drag them out. He went out the same way he had come in, traversing the separate chambers in reverse order. First came the decontamination chamber, where the radioactive dust that might have settled on the suits was sluiced off by the detergent sprays. When the radiation detectors registered low enough, de Hooch dragged Ferguson into the outer chamber, then went back and got Metty and put him through the same process. Then he dragged them on into the control room so that Willows could get them out of the heavy suits.

      "Can you help me, Guz?" Willows asked. It was obvious that he didn't want to open the suits. He didn't want to see what might be inside. De Hooch helped him.

      They were both alive, but unconscious. Bones had been broken, and Metty appeared to be suffering from concussion. They were badly damaged, but they'd live.

      De Hooch and Willows made two trips down E and C corridors, carrying the men on a stretcher, to get them in bed. De Hooch splinted the broken bones as best he could and gave each of them a shot of narcodyne. He had to do the medical work because Quillan, the medic, was trapped in Corridor A. He called Quillan on the phone to tell him what had happened. He described the signs and symptoms of the victims as best he could, and then did what Quillan told him to do.

      "They ought to be all right," Quillan said. "With that dope in them, they'll be out cold for the next twelve hours, and by that time, the boys from Base will be here. Just leave 'em alone and don't move 'em any more."

      "Right. I'll call you back later. Right now, Puss and I are going to see what's wrong with the control linkages on Number Two."

      "Right. By-o."

      De Hooch and Willows walked back to the control room of Number Two Reactor in silence.

      Once inside the control room, de Hooch said: "How are those control circuits?" Willows was supposed to have been checking them while he had been dragging Ferguson and Metty out of the antechamber.

      "Well, I ... I'm not sure. I'll show you what I've found so far, Guz. You ought to take a look at them. I ... I'd like you to take a look-see. I think"—he gestured toward the console—"I think they're all right except for the freezer vernier and the pressure release control."

      He doesn't trust his own work, de Hooch thought. Well, that's all right. Neither do I.

      Painstakingly, the two of them went over the checking circuits. Willows was right. The freezer and pressure controls were inoperable.

      "Damn," said de Hooch. "Double damn."

      "They're probably both stuck at the firewall," Willows said.

      "Sure. Where else? I'll have to go in there and unstick 'em. Help me get back into that two-legged tank again." He wished he knew more about what Ferguson and Metty had been doing. He wished he knew why the two men had gone into the anteroom in the first place. He wished a lot of things, but wishing was a useless pastime at this stage of the game.

      If only one of the two men had been 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 even said 'double damn'."

      "Factorial damn, then!" said de Hooch.

      "What's the matter?"

      "Apparently the foul-up is on the other side of the firewall."

      "Are you going in?"

      "I'll have to."

      "All right. Watch yourself."

      "I will." He went over to the periscope that surveyed the part of the reactor beyond the firewall. Everything looked normal enough. He carefully checked the pressure gauge. Normal.

      "Check the spectro for me, will you?" he asked. "Make sure that's just the normal helium atmosphere in there."

      "Sure." A pause. "Nothing but helium, Guz. What were you expecting?"

      "I don't think I'd care to walk into a hydrogen atmosphere at three hundred Centigrade."

      "Neither СКАЧАТЬ