The Bramble Bush Read online

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. Butthe door was more determined and stronger than he was, and hisintelligence didn't give him much of an edge right then. After an hour'shard work, he managed to get the door open about eighteen inches. Thenit froze fast and refused to move again. All the power and leverage hecould bring to bear was useless. The door had opened all it was going toopen. Beyond it, he could see the next radiation trap--and freedom.

  Eighteen inches would have been plenty of space for him to get throughif he had not been wearing the radiation-proof suit. But he didn't daretake that suit off. By the time he got out of the suit, the intenselyradioactive mercury on its surface would have made his death only amatter of time. And not much time at that.

  He told himself that if it were simply a matter of running to thecontrol room to shut off the D-H reactor, he'd do it. That could havebeen done before he lost consciousness. But it wasn't that easy. Dampingthe reaction took time and control. The stuff had to be eased backslowly. Shutting off the Ditmars-Horst would simply blow a hole in thecrust of Luna and kill everyone if he did it now. There were four orfive men out there who would die if he pulled anything foolish likethat. The explosion wouldn't be as powerful as the Instantanium 512reaction 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 wayto 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 inthe firewall. The instruments said that things were getting prettyfierce on the other side of that wall. Temperature: Two ninety-five andstill rising. Pressure? He carefully cracked the inlet of the samplingchamber 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 thehigh percentage of oxygen and nitrogen that had mixed in during the tenminutes or so that the door was open. All hell was fixing to bust loosein 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 wasin 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 shiningarmor._

  That struck him as funny. He began to laugh. And laugh.

  He almost laughed himself sick before he realized that it was fear anddespair that were driving him into hysteria, not a sense of humor. Heforced 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 effectwelded to the outside of your suit?

  The trouble was, he was a nucleonics engineer, not a chemist. Heremembered quite a bit of his chemistry, of course, but not as much ashe would have liked.

  Could the stuff be neutralized?

  Sure, he told himself. Very simple. All he had to do was go climb intothe reactor, and let the reactor do the job. Mercury 203 plus an alphaparticle gives nice, stable Lead 207. Just go climb right into theDitmars-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 dementedfashion, he opened the firewall door and went in to let the helium dothe job.

  * * *

  It was nearly eight in the morning, Greenwich time, when the threesurface vehicles, with their wide Caterpillar treads lumbered to a haltnear the kiosk that marked the entrance to the underground site of thelaboratories.

  "O.K.," said one of the men in the first machine, holding a microphoneto his lips, "let's go in. If what Willows said is true, the whole placemay blow any minute now, but I'm not asking for volunteers. Nobody willbe 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 vacsuit and run away like that if he was in his right mind. So we candiscount 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 tosee what can be done to stop whatever is going on. The rest of you starttrying 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 ofNumber One Reactor. They found Peter de Hooch sound asleep in thecontrol chair, and the instruments showed that the Ditmars-Horst reactorwas inactive.

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

  "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 thetemperature got above three fifty-seven Centigrade--above the boilingpoint of mercury. Then I went in and let the hot helium _boil_ the stuffoff 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: "Hiyo, 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!..._