The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up and the pilot killed the motor.
“We’ve been using Geigers for months,” he said pleasedly, “and never got a sign before. This is one time we were set for something.”
“What?” asked Joe. But he knew.
“Atomic dust is one good guess,” the pilot told him. “It was talked of as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody’s ever tried it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed. They’d think so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the can for a look. And it killed him.”
He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.
“Somebody coming for you,” he said amiably. “Wait here. Be seeing you.”
He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.
Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into the distance toward the north.
Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried to think of every imaginable situation that could arise in connection with the Platform.
But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a careful survey of damage—of parts that would have to be replaced and of those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for rebalancing the rotors.