Glover continued. "The spacesuits are being readied in the airlock."

"Why us?" Britten complained. "What's the matter with the maintenance crew?"

Glover's frown deepened. "They're busy with other things. You're free for the moment, and so am I."

Then his face cleared, and he slapped Britten on the back.

"Come on, fella, snap out of it. It'll do us both good to put on the suits and get out in free space."

Britten uttered grumbling noises about "a guy can't even finish a cup of coffee," and followed Glover out to the maintenance lock nearest the ion source.

As he climbed out of the airlock, there again came the sensation of vertigo which he felt every time he stood on this island suspended in nothingness. The circumference of the doughnut stretched its great arc away from him in both directions, while twelve miles away, at the center of the circle, was the spherical shape of the radiotelescope receiver. The long, slender girders which bound the station together had a fragile, spidery appearance.

Britten and Glover walked clumsily to the linear accelerator which projected one-billion-volt protons into the initial lap of their long journey around the doughnut. At the far end of the hundred-foot tube, within a shielded chamber, was the glass bottle of the ion source. Normally, a brilliant crimson flame glowed within this bottle as numberless protons were stripped from their electrons, to be hurled down the accelerator tube. Now there was nothing but the blackened, dead glass.

As they approached the chamber that surrounded the ion source, Britten found that the resentment left over from the previous night had a new object upon which to fasten. Why should he be doing the work that belonged to the technicians? In his anger he lost sight of the fact that Professor Glover was out there doing the same thing.

Damned slave labor, he thought. A PhD candidate was at the bottom of the heap, the lowest form of existence, pushed around by everybody else. Glover thought he was being clever, pushing him off the project, making excuses about security, when probably his aim was to keep for himself the Nobel Prize that the experiment was going to receive some day. Thought he could keep his poor stupid student in the dark about the outcome of the experiment—but the poor student wasn't as stupid 

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