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test room.
Dr. Brinton was now riding in the back of a jeep, explaining to theSenator that nuclear rockets were not too efficient, and the shieldingnecessary to make them safe for men weighed more than their payload.The Senator noted down the word "inefficient."
A loudspeaker on a pole a little farther down the road interrupted theexplanation. "Twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five," it shouted."Five-nine, eighteen. Five-nine, eighteen. Seventy-three, ten-eight."It began to repeat the message.
The driver, who had slowed while they listened to the message, turnedthe jeep around and sped them back the other way.
"What in Heaven's name was that?" asked the Senator, who was busyhanging on.
"Twenty-five means emergency," shouted Dr. Brinton. "Five and nine isfire and explosion in the Fuels Department, which is eighteen.Seventy-three is my call number and ten-eight means they want me to getthere in a hurry."
For the first time, the Senator looked impressed. Then he grew angryagain when his hat blew off and the driver wouldn't stop to go back andget it. The jeep took a shortcut across the concrete fence, and lefttire marks in the grass in front of the Fuels Department. Dr. Brintonjumped out and ran into the building, leaving the Senator to argue withthe driver about going back for the hat.
The lab outside the test room was dusty and littered with broken glass.Two technicians were receiving first aid for minor cuts, but everyoneelse seemed to be in an almost holiday mood.
Dr. Ferber saw Dr. Brinton standing in the doorway and came over tohim immediately.
"That telephone operator gets too excited," he said. "There's no fire,and I think it was an implosion, not an explosion. Wrecked our newpressure catalyzer. Harrison's gone to hospital and the two you see arehurt, but none of it's very serious. I suppose Butcher Boy is going toput this down in his little notebook, too."
"If you are referring to me," said the Senator's voice behind them, "Imost certainly am going to make a note of it. And I suggest you bothstart advertising for other jobs."
* * * * *
Brinton had been indulging in a pleasant little fantasy in which he hadcut Senator MacNeill up into twenty-eight pieces, placed them inaluminum cans, and made them radioactive in the Station pile. He wassmiling at the newsreel cameras, about to fire the firstSenator-powered spaceship in the history of mankind, when his alarmclock, which had maliciously been waiting for just such an opportunity,spoiled his dream by waking him up.
That was how the next day started. It continued in the same vein when,in a fit of petulance, he strode into his clothes closet and kicked thealarm control box, barefoot. He was working the combination dial forthe third or fourth time when he noticed that his feet were gettingwet. His kick must have jammed some relays in the control box; the bathwater was overflowing. Since the box was sealed to prevent him fromfooling with it, he had had to prevent a flood by limping downstairsand pulling the master switch.
With no electricity, his breakfast consisted of cold fruit juice, coldcereal, and cold milk. When he got to his office, he ordered a pot ofcoffee and made out a requisition for a pipe wrench. If it everhappened again, he was going to shut the water off instead.
His secretary came in with the coffee and poured him a cup.
"I have some letters for you to sign," she said brightly, to cheer himup. Dr. Brinton drank his coffee. "Our new filing system is workingvery well," she added, pouring him another cup. The doctor's facerelaxed a little, but it was because the snow bank in his stomach wasbeginning to melt. His secretary played her trump. "And somebody fromthe Fuels Department phoned and said something was passing the yellowline and might make the blue."
She was never sure afterward whether Dr. Brinton had gone around hisdesk, or over it. She had blinked and by the time her eyes were openagain, he was gone.
Dr. Brinton found a crowd in the indoor test lab, chuckling over theline being drawn by a differential analyzer. He elbowed his way to thefront, looked himself, and began a little dance of impatience. Theanalyzer was connected with linkages to the test stand where a tinyrocket motor was thrusting out a hot blue pencil of flame. The resultsfrom the analyzer were plotted as range capability against time on apiece of graph paper which had four curved colored lines overprinted onit. The curved lines were marked in succession: "Earth," "Moon," "Moon"and "Earth."
If the first Earth line, colored red, was passed, the fuel under testcould power a rocket to leave Earth, carrying men with it. If theyellow line--the first Moon line--was reached, the rocket couldtheoretically land men on the Moon. Several rockets, carrying dummyloads, had already tried and failed: their fuels, though the bestavailable, barely reached the yellow line when under test.
The blue--second--Moon line was calculated to indicate an escape from,the Moon without refueling, and the last line, in green, was atheoretical powered landing back on Earth.
The pen of the analyzer had already passed the blue line and was morethan halfway to the green!
* * * * *
"This the stuff that was left in the catalyzer after the explosionyesterday!" Dr. Ferber shouted to Dr. Brinton over the roar from thelittle engine. "It looked as if it would burn, so I tested it.Jackpot!"
"What is it?" asked Dr. Brinton.
"Supposed to be an artificial base for a _perfume_!"
The last word seemed louder because the test rocket just then ran outof fuel and grew silent. The tracing of the pen stopped a fractionshort of the green line.
Dr. Ferber continued in his normal voice while he busied himself withthe connections of the engine: "We didn't have anything to do to put ona show for MacNeill yesterday, so I told the lads to carry on withexperiments of their own. It was Harrison who made this stuff. He wascut by flying glass and landed in the hospital. I phoned there thismorning and found the damn fool doctor took his appendix out. Said hefigured he might as well while Harrison was in there. He's still underthe anesthetic and we won't be able to ask him anything for severalhours."
"Doesn't matter," said Dr. Brinton. "We know it works; we have to findout why it works. Got any left? We'll analyze it."
The next few hours saw Dr. Brinton rapidly become a bitter anddisillusioned man.
When a qualitative test informed them that the presence of nitrogenmeant they were going to have to use an even longer and more laboriousprocess than the ordinary one, he uttered a few sentences that made acouple of nearby German exchange students wonder if perhaps they hadn'ta portion missed in the English language learning.
When he found that he had forgotten his pipe at home, and the analysisrequired too much of their attention to allow him to go home and getit, he quoted a paragraph or two that earned him the undividedattention of everyone in the lab.
But when he took the results over to a calculator and worked them outto carbon 281.6% he had barely started the prologue when frustrationovertook him and he subsided, speechless. He was at a loss to say or doanything except mumble that 281.6% was impossible.
* * * * *
Dr. Ferber came over and took the paper with the results from him.Everyone in the lab watched while he checked the calculationspatiently.
A delegation minutely checked the apparatus the two doctors had used;it was faultless. One person even went so far as to cast a suspiciouslook at the big automatic micro-balance standing on its pedestal in thecenter of the room. He weighed a piece of paper, wrote his name on itin pencil and reweighed it. The difference was satisfactory. For a fewmoments, they all just stood and looked at each other. Then the wholelot of them set to work.
A junior technician headed for the spectrograph, came back in threeminutes with a freshly developed spectral photograph and a puzzledlook. He spent some time comparing both of them with the illustrationsin a manual entitled _Structural Formulae as Indicated by SpectralGroupings_.
The two German exchange students made a few tries at finding the classof compound. They soon were deep in a technical discussion
in their ownlanguage, the only recognizable words being "biuret," "dumkopf," and"damn."
A senior research-chemist tried crystalizing some and invented anentirely new swear word.
With four helpers, Dr. Brinton and Dr. Ferber redid the combustionanalysis in slightly less than twice the time it would have taken onlyone of them. Of course they were assured of accuracy; each step waschecked at least twice by everyone.
The result was still carbon 281.6%.
Dr. Brinton escaped the ensuing mental paralysis since he had alreadybeen through the experience once. He went over and began to study thefigures written in on the side of the spectral photograph. Out oflittle more than idle curiosity, he compared the ratios of the roughquantitative estimate found spectrographically with the more accuratebut impossible answer of the combustion