Gaines grinned and slouched over to the big man's side. "Think of how much more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled as he bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like you must cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job."
Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistant suit. "Think how lucky you are, runt," he responded as he wriggled his right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those little servomechs in there to do the real dirty work. If it weren't for them, they'd have all the shrimps like you crawling down pipes and around dampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." He shook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with a reluctant zipper.
Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back so that Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, and they snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrow strips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view. Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable into the socket beneath his armpit, then handed the other end to Sokolski, who followed suit.
Sokolski checked out the master controls on the data board and nodded. He clicked on the talkie. "Let's go," he said, his voice, echoing inside the helmet before being transmitted, sounding distant and hollow.
Gaines leading, the cable sliding and coiling snakelike between them, they passed through the doorway, over which huge red letters shouted ANYONE WHO WALKS THROUGH THIS DOOR UNPROTECTED WILL DIE, and clomped down the zigzagging corridor toward the uranium pile that crouched within the heart of the plant.
Gaines moaned, "It gets damned hot inside these suits."
They had reached the end of the trap, and Sokolski folded a thick mittened hand around one handle on the door to the Hot Room. "Not half so hot as it gets outside it, sweetheart, where we're going." He jerked on the handle and Gaines seized the second handle and added his own strength. The huge door slid unwillingly back.
The silent sound of the Hot Room surged out over them—the breathless whisper of chained power struggling to burst its chains. Sokolski checked his neutron tab and his gamma reader and they stepped over the threshold. They leaned into the door until it had slid shut again.
"I'll take the servomechs, Bert," piped Gaines, tramping clumsily toward the nearest of the gyro-balanced single-wheeled robots.
"You always do, it being the easiest job. Okay, I'll work the board."