The clicking roared out.
"Beta emission," said Gilchrist. His mouth felt cottony.
"How intense?" whispered Catherine.
Gilchrist set up an integrating counter and let it run for a while. "Low," he said. "But the dosage is cumulative. A week of this, and we'll begin to show the effects. A month, and we're dead."
"There's always some small beta emission from the pipes," said the girl. "A little tritium gets formed down in the pile room. It's ... never been enough to matter."
"Somehow, the pile's beginning to make more H-3, then." Gilchrist sat down on a bench and stared blankly at the floor.
"The laws of nature—" Alemán had calmed down a bit, but his eyes were rimmed with white.
"Yes?" asked Catherine when he stopped. She spoke mostly to fend off the silence.
"I 'ave sometimes thought ... what we know in science is so leetle. It may be the whole universe, it has been in a ... a most improbable state for the past few billion years." Alemán met her gaze as if pleading to be called a liar. "It may be that what we thought to be the laws of nature, those were only a leetle statistical fluctuation."