"Impossible!" exclaimed Marie Laurent, blue eyes stunned. "Those walls should hold everything from Alpha to neutrons! Let me check it!"

When she and Burris, our two radiation experts, finished that check, they looked more dazed than before. Marie wiped back a disorderly lock of her heavy dull-blond hair, in a stunned way.

"That radiation from Element One-forty-four is something completely new!" she said incredulously. "It's way down in the forty-fourth minus octave, and it's going through those ray-proof walls like paper!"

Zarias began to swear. He swore in Greek, and he hardly ever did that. I knew then how badly upset he was.

"We've stumbled onto something new, and maybe it's bad and maybe it's good, but it's new!" he finished. "A new type of radiation!"

All this time, Andersen had stood behind me staring into the visor of Chamber N in a blank sort of way. In our excitement, we hadn't paid him any attention. But now as we stood dazed and silent, he spoke. He spoke in a queer, halting way, his eyes fixed on the televisor screen.

"We must bring that mass of One-forty-four and a lot of the other transuranic elements out of the chambers, into this lab," he said.

Burris uttered a yelp. "Are you crazy? That new ray might induce enough unpredictable activity in the other elements to trigger a big fission!"

Andersen just looked at him vaguely. "We must do that," he murmured. "It has been born, but It is still weak. We must help It grow stronger, or It will die."

There was a sick silence, then. And in it, all the excitement of our unexpected discovery drained right out of us.

CHAPTER II

An Alien Intrusion

We knew what had happened, all right. It happened to three of the first shift of scientists at Transuranic Station. They had cracked up badly, and that's why we had a psychologist with our shift.

I realized now we should have known it the way Andersen had talked the night before. Of course, he had seemed normal then. But now his dazed, earnest look and halting, crazy talk meant just one thing.

Varez went to him and spoke quietly. "Perhaps you are right, Nils. Will you come and talk it over with me?"

 Prev. P 5/19 next