nder if ever in history
such a question had been answered so promptly and with such dramatic
calamitousness.

Three seconds after he stopped speaking, the lights went out.

* * * * *

For a moment, they were silent and motionless. Then somebody across the
table from Melroy began to say, "What the devil--?" Doris Rives, beside
him, clutched his arm. At the head of the table, Lyons was fuming
impatiently, and Kenneth Leighton snapped a pocket-lighter and held it
up.

The Venetian-screened windows across the room faced east. In the flicker
of the lighter, Melroy made his way around to them and drew open the
slats of one, looking out. Except for the headlights of cars, far down
in the street, and the lights of ships in the harbor, the city was
completely blacked out. But there was one other, horrible, light far
away at the distant tip of Long Island--a huge ball of flame, floating
upward at the tip of a column of fiery gas. As he watched, there were
twinkles of unbearable brightness at the base of the pillar of fire,
spreading into awesome sheet-flashes, and other fireballs soared up.
Then the sound and the shock-wave of the first blast reached them.

"The main power-reactors, too," Melroy said to himself, not realizing
that he spoke audibly. "Too well shielded for the blast to get them, but
the heat melted the fissionables down to critical mass."

Leighton, the lighter still burning, was beside him, now.

"That's not--God, it can't be anything else! Why, the whole plant's
gone! There aren't enough other generators in this area to handle a
hundredth of the demand."

"And don't blame that on my alleged strike-breakers," Melroy warned.
"They hadn't got security-cleared to enter the reactor area when this
happened."

"What do you think happened?" Cronnin asked. "One of the
Doernberg-Giardanos let go?"

"Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it's his bad luck," Melroy
said grimly. "Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the
fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a
big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don't know what was done
with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack
that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. Nobody'll ever find
out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved
things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have
got back in, and the breeding-c