now?"

"Hausinger says the count's down to safe limits, and the temperature's
down to inactive normal. He and his gang found a big chunk of plutonium,
about one-quarter CM, inside. He got it out."

"All right. Tell Dr. Rives to gather up all her completed or partially
completed test records and come out to the office. You and the others
stay on the job; we may have some men for you by this afternoon;
tomorrow morning certainly."

He hung up, then picked up the communicator phone and called his
secretary.

"Joan, is Sid Keating out there? Send him in, will you?"

Keating, when he entered, was wearing the lugubriously gratified
expression appropriate to the successful prophet of disaster.

"All right, Cassandra," Melroy greeted him. "I'm not going to say you
didn't warn me. Look. This strike is illegal. It's a violation of the
Federal Labor Act of 1958, being called without due notice of intention,
without preliminary negotiation, and without two weeks' time-allowance."

"They're going to claim that it isn't a strike. They're going to call it
a 'spontaneous work-stoppage.'"

"Aah! I hope I can get Crandall on record to that effect; I'll fire
every one of those men for leaving their work without permission and
absence from duty without leave. How many of our own men, from
Pittsburgh, do we have working in these machine shops and in the
assembly shop here? About sixty?"

"Sixty-three. Why? You're not going to use them to work on the reactor,
are you?"

"I just am. They're all qualified cybernetics technicians; they can do
this work better than this gang we've had to hire here. Just to be on
the safe side, I'm promoting all of them, as of oh-eight-hundred this
morning, to assistant gang-foremen, on salaries. That'll take them
outside union jurisdiction."

"But how about our contract with the I.F.A.W.?"

"That's been voided, by Crandall's own act, in interfering with the
execution of our contract with the Atomic Power Authority. You know what
I think? I think the I.F.A.W. front office is going to have to disavow
this. It'll hurt them to do it, but they'll have to. Crandall's put them
in the middle on this."

"How about security clearance for our own men?"

"Nothing to that," Melroy said. "Most of them are security-cleared,
already, from the work we did installing that counter-rocket control
system on the U.S.S. _Alaska_, and the work we did on that
symbolic-logic computer for the Philadelphia Project. It ma