enwich time. "Morning" meant any time between eight and noon; the
position of the sun up on the surface had nothing to do with Lunar time.
As a matter of fact, there was a full Earth shining at the moment, which
meant that it wouldn't be dawn on the surface for a week yet.

"If the cats from Base get here by noon, we'll be O.K., won't we?" de
Hooch asked.

"Look at the instruments," Willows said.

De Hooch ran a practiced eye over the console and swallowed. "What were
they running?"

"Mercury 203," Willows said. "Half-life forty-six point five days. Beta
and gamma emitter. Converts to Thallium 203, stable."

"What did they want with a kilogram of the stuff?"

"Special order. Shipment to Earth for some reason."

"Have you checked the end-point? She's building up fast."

"No. No. I haven't." He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.

"Check it," said de Hooch. "Do any of the controls work?"

"I don't know. I didn't want to fiddle with them."

"You start giving them a rundown. I'm going to get into a suit and go
pull those two out of there--if they're still alive." He opened the
locker and took his radiation-proof suit out. He checked it over
carefully and began shucking his vac suit.

* * * * *

A few minutes delay in getting to the men in the reactor's anteroom
didn't matter much. If they hadn't been killed outright, and were still
alive, they would probably live a good deal longer. The shells of the
radiation suits didn't look damaged, and the instruments indicated very
little radiation in the room. Whatever it was that had exploded had done
most of its damage at the other end of the reactor. Evidently, a fissure
had been opened to the surface, forty feet above--a fissure big enough
to let all the air out of A and B corridors, and activate the automatic
bulkheads to seal off the airless section.

What troubled him was Willows. If he hadn't known the man so well, de
Hooch would have verbally blasted him where he stood.

His reaction to trouble had been typical. De Hooch had already seen
Willows in trouble three times, and each time, the reaction had been the
same: near panic. Every time, his first thought had been to scream for
help rather than to do anything himself. Almost anyone else would have
made one call and then climbed into a radiation suit to get Ferguson and
Metty out of the anteroom. There was certainly no apparent immediate
danger. But all that Willows had do