"Look at those meters!" yelled Petersen, in a wild voice.

The technician's eyes were protruding as he stared at the big bank of ammeters that registered the output of the great turbines. The needles were jumping across the dials with swiftly increasing amperage.

"The pile is working!" yelled Petersen hoarsely. "That bismuth is actually producing atomic power!"

Doug Norris suddenly felt cold sober, and a little sick. He sat down shakily, and put his head in his hands.

Kincaid was staring blankly at the ammeters, while Petersen and Thorpe seemed to have gone crazy with excitement. When Petersen was untied, he grabbed Kincaid fiercely.

"How did you do it?" he cried. "Just what did you do to the pile?"

Kincaid stared at him blankly. "I don't know, now."

"You don't know?" Petersen almost screeched. "Man, you've stumbled on what the scientists have been hunting all these years—the hookup to use common elements in an atomic pile! You must have had something figured out beforehand!"

"We didn't!" Norris denied weakly. "We got a little plastered, and got this idea. We didn't know what we were doing."

Suddenly, Doug Norris stiffened. Remembrance that brought him jumping unsteadily to his feet had come to him.

"You couldn't have done a thing like this by sheer crazy accident!" Petersen was insisting. "You must have known how!"

"By heaven, I believe now that we did know what we were doing, in a queer sort of way!" Norris exclaimed shakily. He grabbed Kincaid's arm. "Mart, come with me! We're going back over to the Project!"

Petersen's dazed amazement was changing to exultation.

"Whatever you did, it's still working and looks like it'll work indefinitely! And we can study the hookup and learn how to duplicate it, even if we never completely understand it. You two maniacs are going to be famous!"

But Norris had already led the stupefied Kincaid out of the room.

All the way back to the Proxy Project, Kincaid kept dazedly repeating the same thing over and over.

"We must have been clear out of our heads to do a thing like that! 

 Prev. P 14/16 next