"They won't bother us now, Mart. I just put them out for a little while without hurting 'em."
"Quick thinking, Doug!" Kincaid approved warmly. "Can't let reactionaries obstruc' course of scientific progress. We'd better tie 'em up in case they come around too soon."
Norris helped tie the two unconscious men with lengths of spare cable. Then he and Kincaid stood swaying a little as they owlishly inspected the controls of the mighty atomic piles.
Norris knew a good bit about those controls. He had been here many times, and Petersen and the other technicians had liked to talk. The trouble was, that right now his thoughts all seemed a little foggy.
"What we got to do," Kincaid said ponderously, "is change 'round the atomic pile setup so it'll handle bismuth instead of uranium. Right?"
"Right!" Norris approved enthusiastically. "That's going right to the heart of the problem, old pal!"
Kincaid seemed to blush in deprecation. "Oh, I jus' got an orderly mind. First thing now, is to shift the uranium lattices out of the piles."
He laid his hands on several of the levers, one after another. There was a low humming of machinery somewhere.
In the distant, towering structure, lattices loaded with uranium were being mechanically withdrawn to the pits beneath. But there was nothing happening here except on the panel of indicators.
Petersen came back to consciousness at that moment. Tied to a wall stanchion, he stiffened and his eyes bugged at them.