"Now look, Mac—"
Charles told him in a few incisive details where and how he was going to be shot. The man went white and led them down the corridor and into the reactor room. Three white-coated men with the aloof look of reactor specialists stared at them as they bulled into the spotless chamber.
The oldest sniffed: "And what, may I ask, are you crewmen doing in—"
Lee slammed the door behind them and said: "Sound the radiation alarm."
"Certainly not! You must be the couple we—"
"Sound the radiation alarm." She picked up a pair of dividers from the plot board and approached the technician with murder on her face. He gaped until she poised the needle points before his eyes and repeated: "Sound the radiation alarm." Nobody in the room, including Charles, had the slightest doubt that the points would sink into the technician's eyeballs if he refused.
"Do what she says, Will," he mumbled, his eyes crossing on the dividers. "For God's sake, do what she says. She's crazy."
One of the men moved, very cautiously, watching Charles and the gun, to a red handle and pulled it down. A ferro-concrete barrier rose to wall off the chamber and the sine-curve wail of a standard radioactivity warning began to howl mournfully through the ship.
"Dump the reactor metal," Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit, and found it—a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.
A technician wailed: "We can't do that! We can't do that! A million bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it—have a heart, mister! They'll crucify us!"