The Randall Garrett Omnibus: Eleven SF Classics

by Randall Garrett

  "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 would I, but how could there be hydrogen in there?"

  "There shouldn't be. But there's something screwy going on here, and I can't put my finger on it."

  "Well, whatever it is, it isn't hydrogen in the reactor room."

  "O.K. Stand by. I'm going in."

  He walked over to the firewall door. On the other side of it was a small chamber where the oxygen and nitrogen of normal air would be swept out before he opened the inner door to go into the inner chamber itself. There was no need for an air lock, since small amounts of impurities in the He-4 didn't bother anything.

  It was just as he turned the lever that undogged the firewall door that he realized his mistake.

  But it was too late.

  The door jerked outward, and a hot wind picked him up and slammed him against the far wall.

  There was a moment of pain.

  Then-nothing.

  * * * *

  There was something familiar about the man who was turning the wheel, but de Hooch couldn't place it. The man was wearing a black hood, as befitted a torturer and executioner.

  "Idiot,” said the hooded man, giving the wheel of the rack a little more pressure, “explain the following: If a half plus a half is equal to a whole, why is halfnium plus halfnium not equal to wholmium?"

  Stretched as he was on the rack, de Hooch could not think straight because of the excruciating pain.

  "Because a half is eight point two eight per cent heavier than a hole,” said de Hooch.

  "You are an idiot, none the less,” said the torturer. He gave the wheel another twist. De Hooch wanted to scream, but he couldn't.

  "Try again,” said the torturer. “What is a half plus four plus four plus four plus four plus—"

  "Stop!” screamed de Hooch. “Stop! Stop at the osmium!"

  "Ah! But it didn't stop at the osmium,” said the hooded man. “It went on and on and on. Plus four plus four plus four plus four plus four-until there were so many plus fours in there that the place looked like an old-fashioned golf course."

  "My legs hurt,” said de Hooch. The man was no longer wearing a hood, but de Hooch couldn't tell if it was Willows or himself.

  "We will all go together when we go,” said the man.

  De Hooch turned his head away and looked at the ceiling.

  And he realized that it was the ceiling of the antechamber.

  "My legs hurt,” he repeated. And he could hear the hoarse whisper inside the helmet. He realized that he was lying flat on his back. He had been jarred around quite a bit in the suit.

  He wondered if he could sit up. He managed to get both arms behind him and push himself into a sitting position. He wiggled his feet. The servos responded. He hurt all over, but a little experiment told him that he was only bruised. Nothing was broken. He hadn't been hit as hard as Ferguson and Metty had been.

  "Willows?” he said. “Willows?"

  There was no answer from the earphones.

  He looked at the chronometer dial inside his helmet. Oh two forty-nine. He had been unconscious less than ten minutes.

  The same glance brought his eyes to two other dials. The internal radiation of the suit was a little high, but nothing to worry about. But the dial registering the external radiation was plenty high. Without the protection of the suit, he wouldn't have lived through those ten minutes.

  Where was Willows?

  And then he knew, and he pushed any thought of further help from that quarter out of his mind. What had to be done would have to be done by Peter de Hooch alone. He climbed to his feet.

  His head hurt, and he swayed with nausea and pain. Only the massive weight of the suit's shoes kept him upright. Then it passed, and he blinked his eyes and shook his head to clear it. He found he was holding his breath, and he let it out.

  The trouble had been so simple, and yet he hadn't seen it. Oh, yes, he had! He must have, subconsciously. Otherwise, how would he have guessed that the stuff in the sampling chamber was Osmium 187? Ferguson and Metty had been trying to make Mercury 203 by adding eight successive tritium nuclei to Hafnium 179, progressing through Tantalum 182, Tungsten 185, Rhenium 188, Osmium 191, Iridium 194, Platinum 197, and Gold 200, all of which were unstable.

  But the Hydrogen 3 reaction had gone wrong. The doubling had set in, producing Helium 4. Successive additions of the alpha particles to Hafnium 179 had produced, first, Tungsten 183, and then Osmium 187, both of which were stable.

  Ferguson and Metty, seeing that something was wrong, drew off a sample and then reset the reaction to produce the Hg-203 they wanted. Then they had come down to pick up the sample.

  They hadn't realized that the helium production had gone wild. Much more helium than necessary was being produced, and the bleeder valve had failed. When they opened the sample chamber, they got a blast of high-pressure helium right in the face. The shock of that sudden release had jarred the whole atmosphere inside the reaction chamber, and the bleeder valve had let go. But the violence of the pressure release had caused a fault to the surface to open up and had closed the valve again-jammed it, probably. There had been enough pressure left in there to blow de Hooch up against the nearest wall when he opened the door. Since the pressure indicator system was connected to the release system, when one had failed, the other had failed. That's why the pressure gauge had indicated normal.

  And, of course, it had been the pressure differential that had caused the controls to stick. Well, they ought to be all right now, then. He decided he'd better take a look.

  * * * *

  The firewall door was still open. He walked over to it and stepped into the small chamber that led to the inner reactor room. The inside door, much weaker than the outer firewall door, had been blown off its hinges. He stepped past it and went on in.

  What he saw made him jerk his glance away from the periscope in his helmet and check his radiation detectors again. Not much change. Relief swept over him as he looked back at the reactor itself. The normally dead black walls were glowing a dull red. It was pure thermal heat, but it shouldn't be doing that.

  Moving quickly, he went over to the place where the control cables came in through the firewall. It took him several minutes to assure himself that they would function from the control room now. There was nothing more to do but get out of here and get that reaction damped.

  He went out again, closing the firewall door behind him and dogging it tight. There would be no more helium production now.

  He went through the radiation trap to the decontamination chamber to wash off whatever it was he had picked up.

  The decontamination room was a mess.

  De Hooch stared at the twisted pipes and the stream of water that gushed out of a cracked valve. The blast had jarred everything loose. Well, he could still scrub himself off.

  Except that the scrubbers weren't working.

  He swore under his breath and twisted the valve that was supposed to dispense detergent. It did, thank Heaven. He doused himself good with it and then got under the fl
owing water.

  The radiation level remained exactly where it was.

  He walked over and pulled one of the brushes off the defunct scrubber and sudsed it up. It wasn't until he started to use it that he got a good look at his arms. He hadn't paid any attention before.

  He walked over to the mirror to get a good look.

  "You look magnificent,” he told his reflection acidly.

  The radiation-proof armor looked as though it had been chrome plated.

  But de Hooch knew better than that. He knew exactly what had happened. He was nicely plated all over with a film of mercury, which had amalgamated itself with the metallic surface of the suit. He was thoroughly wet with the stuff and no amount of water and detergent would take it off.

  There was something wrong with Number Two Reactor, all right. It had leaked out some of the Mercury 203 that Ferguson and Metty had been making.

  He thought a minute. It hadn't been leaking out just before he opened the door in the firewall, because Willows would certainly have noticed the bright mercury line when he checked with the spectroscope. The stuff must have been released when the pressure dropped.

  He walked back to the anteroom and looked at the sampling chamber. There were a few droplets of mercury around the inlet.

  Thus far, the three pressure explosions had wrecked about everything that was wreckable, he thought. No, not quite. There was still the chance that the whole station would go if he didn't get back into the control room and stop that “powers of two” chain. The detonation of Instantanium 512 would finish the job by doing what high-pressure helium could never do.

  He glanced at the thermometer. The temperature behind the firewall had risen to two-forty Centigrade. It wasn't supposed to be above two hundred. It wasn't too serious, really, because a little heat like that wouldn't bother a Ditmars-Horst reactor, but it indicated that things back there weren't working properly.

  He turned away and walked back to the decontamination chamber. There must be some way he could get the mercury off the suit-because he couldn't take the suit off until the mercury was gone.

  * * * *

  First, he tried scrubbing. That was what showed him how upset he really was. He had actually scrubbed the armor on his left arm free of mercury when he realized what he was doing and threw the brush down in disgust.

  "Use your head, de Hooch!” he told himself. What good would it do to scrub the stuff off of the few places he could reach? In the bulky armor, he was worse than muscle-bound. He couldn't touch any part of his back; he couldn't bend far enough to touch his legs. His shoulders were inaccessible, even. Scrubbing was worse than useless-it was time-wasting.

  He picked up the brush again and began scrubbing at the other arm. It gave him something to do while he thought. While he was thinking, he wasn't wasting time.

  What would dissolve mercury? Nitric acid. Good old HNO{3}. Fine. Except that the hot lab was at the other end of the reactor, where the fissure had let all the air out. The bulkheads had dropped, and he couldn't get in. And, naturally, the nitric acid would be in the lab.

  For the first time, he found himself hating Willows’ guts. If he were around, he could get some acid from the cold lab, or even from the other hot lab at Number One. If Willows—

  He stood up and dropped the brush. “Dolt! Boob! Moron! Idiot!” Not Willows. Himself. There was no reason on earth-or Luna-why he couldn't walk over to Number One hot lab and get the stuff himself. The habit of never leaving the lab without thorough decontamination was so thoroughly ingrained in him that he had simply never thought about it until that moment. But what did a little contamination with radioactive mercury mean at a time like this? He could take F corridor to Number One, use the decontamination chamber and the acid from the lab, shuck off his armor there, and come back through E corridor. F could be cleaned up later.

  So simple.

  He went through the light trap to the next chamber and turned the handle on the sliding door. The door wouldn't budge. It had been warped by the force of the helium blast, and it was stuck in its grooves.

  Well, there were tools. The thing could be unstuck.

  Peter de Hooch was a determined man, a strong man, and a smart man. But the door was more determined and stronger than he was, and his intelligence didn't give him much of an edge right then. After an hour's hard work, he managed to get the door open about eighteen inches. Then it froze fast and refused to move again. All the power and leverage he could bring to bear was useless. The door had opened all it was going to open. Beyond it, he could see the next radiation trap-and freedom.

  Eighteen inches would have been plenty of space for him to get through if he had not been wearing the radiation-proof suit. But he didn't dare take that suit off. By the time he got out of the suit, the intensely radioactive mercury on its surface would have made his death only a matter of time. And not much time at that.

  He told himself that if it were simply a matter of running to the control room to shut off the D-H reactor, he'd do it. That could have been done before he lost consciousness. But it wasn't that easy. Damping the reaction took time and control. The stuff had to be eased back slowly. Shutting off the Ditmars-Horst would simply blow a hole in the crust of Luna and kill everyone if he did it now. There were four or five men out there who would die if he pulled anything foolish like that. The explosion wouldn't be as powerful as the Instantanium 512 reaction would be, but it would be none the less deadly for all that.

  There had to be either a way to scrape the mercury off the suit or a way to open the door another six inches.

  Or, he added suddenly, a way to get safely out of the suit.

  * * * *

  At the end of another twenty minutes, he had still thought of nothing. He wandered around the decontamination room, looking at everything, hoping he might see something that would give him a clue. He didn't.

  He went into the antechamber of the reactor and glared at the door in the firewall. The instruments said that things were getting pretty fierce on the other side of that wall. Temperature: Two ninety-five and still rising. Pressure? He carefully cracked the inlet of the sampling chamber and got a soft hiss. The helium was expanding from the heat, that was all. Part of the trouble with the reactor, he thought, was the high percentage of oxygen and nitrogen that had mixed in during the ten minutes or so that the door was open. All hell was fixing to bust loose in there, and he, Peter de Hooch, was right next to it.

  He walked back into the decontamination chamber.

  What would dissolve mercury?

  Mercury would dissolve gold. Would gold dissolve mercury?

  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.
r />   * * * *

  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 instruments showed that the Ditmars-Horst reactor was inactive.

  One of the men shook de Hooch gently, awakening him in the middle of a snore.

  "What?” he said groggily.

  "We're here, Guz. Everything's O.K."

  "Sure everything's O.K. Nothing to it. All I did was wait until the temperature got above three fifty-seven Centigrade-above the boiling point of mercury. Then I went in and let the hot helium boil the stuff off me. Nothing to it. Near boiled myself alive, but it did the trick."

  "What,” asked the man in a puzzled voice, “are you talking about?"

  "I am a knight in dull armor,” said Peter de Hooch, dozing off again.

  Then he roused himself a little, and said, without opening his eyes: “Hi yo, Quicksilver, away.” And he was sound asleep again.

  And when he saw what he had done, With all his might and main, He jumped back in that bramble bush And scratch'd them in again!...

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH BENEDICT BREADFRUIT

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