"You rig 'em up," said Barden. "And Tim, tell Eddie to refurbish the ship. We're going out again. And I want three or four of the original space drives put aboard as working spares."
"Working spares?" asked Evans.
"Yeah, mount 'em on girder-frameworks complete with atomic units. I'm going to prove the next point."
"What next point?" asked Dr. Edith Ward.
"I want to find out if your informant was telling the truth," said Tom Barden. "Interested?"
Edith shuddered a little. "That's a big responsibility," she said. "You intend to destroy a whole stellar system?"
"I don't know. I'm going to see whether that stuff would actually start an overall sustaining fission-reaction in a planet after the minor fission got under way. If it does, then it is no worse for me to blow up a dead system than it would be for my little informant getting us to blow up ours."
"You sound rather positive about it."
"One or the other," said Barden. "I'm bothered. No matter how you look at it, we ... or I, was like a small child given matches to play with in a nitrocellulose storehouse. Unless you'd come up with yours, I'd have most certainly blown us sky high."