The Bramble Bush

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  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _Analog_ August 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Subscript characters are shown within {braces}.

  The Bramble Bush

  Usually, if a man's gotten into bad trouble by getting into something, he's a fool to go back. But there are times ...

  by Randall Garrett

  Illustrated by Schelling

  _There was a man in our town, And he was wond'rous wise; He jumped into a bramble bush, And scratch'd out both his eyes!_ --Old Nursery Rhyme

  Peter de Hooch was dreaming that the moon had blown up when he awakened.The room was dark except for the glowing night-light near the door, andhe sat up trying to separate the dream from reality. He focused his eyeson the glow-plate. What had wakened him? Something had, he was sure, butthere didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary now.

  The explosion in his dream had seemed extraordinarily realistic. Hecould still remember vividly the vibration and the _cr-r-r-ump!_ of thenoise. But there was no sign of what might have caused the dreamsequence.

  Maybe something fell, he thought. He swung his legs off his bed andpadded barefoot over to the light switch. He was so used to walkingunder the light lunar gravity that he was no longer conscious of it. Hepressed the switch, and the room was suddenly flooded with light. Helooked around.

  Everything was in place, apparently. There was nothing on the floor thatshouldn't be there. The books were all in their places in the bookshelf.The stuff on his desk seemed undisturbed.

  The only thing that wasn't as it should be was the picture on the wall.It was a reproduction of a painting by Pieter de Hooch, which he hadalways liked, aside from the fact that he had been named after theseventeenth-century Dutch artist. The picture was slightly askew on thewall.

  He was sleepily trying to figure out the significance of that when thephone sounded. He walked over and picked it up. "Yeah?"

  "Guz? Guz? Get over here quick!" Sam Willows' voice came excitedly fromthe instrument.

  "Whatsamatter, Puss?" he asked blearily.

  "Number Two just blew! We need help, Guz! Fast!"

  "I'm on my way!" de Hooch said.

  "Take C corridor," Willows warned. "A and B caved in, and the bulkheadshave dropped. Make it snappy!"

  "I'm gone already," de Hooch said, dropping the phone back into place.

  He grabbed his vacuum suit from its hanger and got into it as though hisown room had already sprung an air leak.

  _Number Two has blown!_ he thought. That would be the one that Fergusonand Metty were working on. What had they been cooking? He couldn'tremember right off the bat. Something touchy, he thought; somethingpretty hot.

  But that wouldn't cause an atomic reactor to blow. It obviously hadn'tbeen a nuclear blow-up of any proportions, or he wouldn't be here now,zipping up the front of his vac suit. Still, it had been powerful enoughto shake the lunar crust a little or he wouldn't have been wakened bythe blast.

  These new reactors could get out a lot more power, and they could do alot more than the old ones could, but they weren't as safe as the oldheavy-metal reactors, by a long shot. None had blown up yet--quite--butthere was still the chance. That's why they were built on Luna insteadof on Earth. Considering what they could do, de Hooch often felt that itwould be safer if they were built out on some nice, safeasteroid--preferably one in the Jovian Trojan sector.

  He clamped his fishbowl on tight, opened the door, and sprinted towardCorridor C.

  The trouble with the Ditmars-Horst reactor was that it lacked anyautomatic negative-feedback system. If a D-H decided to go wild, it wentwild. Fortunately, that rarely happened. The safe limits for reactionswere quite wide--wider, usually, than the reaction limits themselves, sothat there was always a margin of safety. And within the limits, anicety of control existed that made nucleonics almost an esoteric branchof chemistry. Cookbook chemistry, practically.

  Want deuterium? Recipe: To 1.00813 gms. purest Hydrogen-1 add, slowlyand with care, 1.00896 gms. fine-grade neutrons. Cook until well done ina Ditmars-Horst reactor. Yield: 2.01471 gms. rare old deuterium plussome two million million million ergs of raw energy. Now you are cookingwith gas!

  All you had to do was keep the reaction going at a slow enough rate sothat 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 tocontrol weren't yet too well understood.

  * * *

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

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

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

  What had the damage been? he asked himself. Had anyone been hurt? Orkilled? He pushed the questions out of his mind. There was no point inspeculating. 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 noticedas he went by that the operations lamp was out. Nobody was working withReactor One.

  As he pounded on down the empty corridor, he suddenly realized that hehadn't seen anyone else running with him. There were five other men inthe reactor station, and--so far--he had seen no one. He knew whereWillows was, but where were Ferguson, Metty, Laynard, and Quillan? Hepushed 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! _Hurry_, Guz!"

  De Hooch didn't bother to answer Willows. He was short of breath as itwas. He knew, besides, that no answer was expected. He had known Willowsfor years, and knew how he thought. It was Willows who had first taggedde Hooch with that silly nickname, "Guzzle". Not because Peter was sucha heavy drinker--although he could hold it like a gentleman--but becausehe had thought "Guzzle" de Hooch was so uproariously funny. "Nobodylikes a guzzle as well as de Hooch," he'd say, with an idiot grin. As aresult, everybody called Peter "Guz" now.

  The head had vanished back into the control room of Reactor Two. DeHooch kept on running, his breath rasping loudly in the confines of thefishbowl helmet. Running four hundred yards isn't the easiest thing inthe world, even if a man is in good physical condition. There was lessweight to contend with, but the mass that had to be pushed alongremained the same. The notion that running on Luna was an effortlessbreeze was one that only Earthhuggers clung to.

  He ran into the control room and stopped, panting heavily. "What ...happened?"

  Sam Willows' normally handsome face looked drawn. "Something went wrong.I don't know what. I was finishing up with Reactor One when I heard theexplosion. They are both"--he gestured toward the reactor--"both inthere."

  "Still alive?"

>   "I think so. One of 'em, anyway. Take a look."

  De Hooch went over to the periscope and put his eyes to the binoculars.He could see two figures in heavy, dull-gray radiation-proof suits. Theywere lying flat on the floor, and neither was moving. De Hooch said asmuch.

  "The one on the left was moving his arm--just a little," Willows said."I'll swear he was."

  Something in the man's voice made de Hooch turn his head away from theperiscope's eyepieces. Willows' face was gray, and a thin film of greasyperspiration reflected the light from the overhead plates. The man wason the verge of panic.

  "Calm down, Puss," de Hooch said gently. "Where's Quillan and Laynard?"

  "They're in their rooms," Willows said in a tight voice. "Trapped. Thebulkheads have closed 'em off in A. No air in the