Eighteen inches would have been plenty of space for him to get through if he had not been wearing the radiation-proof suit. But he didn't dare take that suit off. By the time he got out of the suit, the intensely radioactive mercury on its surface would have made his death only a matter of time. And not much time at that.
He told himself that if it were simply a matter of running to the control room to shut off the D-H reactor, he'd do it. That could have been done before he lost consciousness. But it wasn't that easy. Damping the reaction took time and control. The stuff had to be eased back slowly. Shutting off the Ditmars-Horst would simply blow a hole in the crust of Luna and kill everyone if he did it now. There were four or five men out there who would die if he pulled anything foolish like that. The explosion wouldn't be as powerful as the Instantanium 512 reaction would be, but it would be none the less deadly for all that.
There had to be either a way to scrape the mercury off the suit or a way to open the door another six inches.
Or, he added suddenly, a way to get safely out of the suit.
At the end of another twenty minutes, he had still thought of nothing. He wandered around the decontamination room, looking at everything, hoping he might see something that would give him a clue. He didn't.
He went into the antechamber of the reactor and glared at the door in the firewall. The instruments said that things were getting pretty fierce on the other side of that wall. Temperature: Two ninety-five and still rising. Pressure? He carefully cracked the inlet of the sampling chamber and got a soft hiss. The helium was expanding from the heat, that was all. Part of the trouble with the reactor, he thought, was the high percentage of oxygen and nitrogen that had mixed in during the ten minutes or so that the door was open. All hell was fixing to bust loose in there, and he, Peter de Hooch, was right next to it.
He walked back into the decontamination chamber.
What would dissolve mercury?
Mercury would dissolve gold. Would gold dissolve mercury?