facilities.

The whole place was Earth-conditioned, with magnetized floors that approximated normal gravity when we wore our steel-soled shoes. Even so, men and women couldn't take more than six months of it without organic trouble. We were the second shift of scientists to work at the Station.

We had begun where the first shift left off, at transuranic element Number One-thirty-six. And with Zarias sparking the work, we had run the new elements up to a hundred and forty-four, the last one just being separated now. And it looked as though we're now working into a more stable series of elements.

That's why Andersen irked me a little with his talk of these new elements being a challenge to the normal cosmos.

"Everything man does is a challenge like that," I told him next day in his lab. "The first time he smelted iron or sent a radio message, it was the same."

Andersen shook his head. "Not quite the same, Drummond. Iron and electromagnetic vibrations always existed in Nature. We just used them. But these transuranic elements—they never existed before."

Before I could argue further, the inter-phone across his lab squawked in Zarias' voice.

"Drummond! Andersen! Come over here and I'll show you something!"

We went through the tunnels in a hurry, to Main Physics lab. There were already a half-dozen others there—Marie Laurent, Burris, Varez and others.

"Take a look at the panel of Chamber N!" Zarias yelled at us.

The remote-controls that handled all the machinery in the "canyons" and buried chambers outside the labs were concentrated on one wall of Main Physics lab. There was a panel of registering gauges and a televisor screen above the controls of each distant chamber.

We looked in the screen first. In Chamber N was a roughly oval mass of tawny metal that was a foot across.

"Element One-forty-four, huh?" I said to Zarias. "You've sure separated a lot of it."

"Look at those radiation gauges!" he yelped. "The gauges, not the screen!"

We looked, and were stunned. The gauges showed that radiation was pouring out through the walls of Chamber N.

"Holy cats!" yelled Burris. "Chamber N is leaking radiation like a sieve!"

 Prev. P 4/19 next