uranium lattices out of the piles."

He laid his hands on several of the levers, one after another. There was a low humming of machinery somewhere.

In the distant, towering structure, lattices loaded with uranium were being mechanically withdrawn to the pits beneath. But there was nothing happening here except on the panel of indicators.

Petersen came back to consciousness at that moment. Tied to a wall stanchion, he stiffened and his eyes bugged at them.

"What are you two doing?" he cried. "You're cutting off the power by pulling out those lattices!"

"Only temp'rarily," Norris assured him. "We'll shift empty lattices back in, and then load the bismuth into them."

Petersen uttered a howl of agony. "You maniacs will wreck the whole pile if you try a stunt like that! For heaven's sake, sober up and think what you're doing!"

"We're tryin' to think," Kincaid said sternly. "But how can we co'centrate, with you yelling at us?"

Petersen went from raging orders to agonized pleadings to tearful entreaty. The two ignored him completely.

"Le's see, now," Kincaid said, blinking. "We'll leave in the Number One uranium lattice after all. We'll need its neutrons to trigger the expanding series of graphite and bismuth lattices."

"We'll need two uranium lattices," Doug Norris corrected thickly. "One to trigger the first action, the other to pr'vide neutrons for the continuous shuttle that'll run the bismuth's atomic number up from eighty-three to ninety-four, right up through neptunium to plutonium."

"You're right," Kincaid agreed, hiccuping slightly. "I forgot 'bout that second lattice for a minute. Mus' be because of all the noise in here."

Petersen was still producing that noise, indeed. He had become louder and more frantic as he saw them shifting out the uranium lattices and replacing them clumsily with empty lattice-frames.

"Ten thousand scientists have been working ever since Nineteen-forty-five to find a way to use common elements instead of uranium in a pile!" he choked. "They can't do it. But two drunken Proxy men are going to try it!"

Norris hardly heard that stream of agonized accusation 

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