Bert found a flat sheet of metal to use as a patch. He fitted it over the rent, and, while Lawler piled boxes of supplies against it to hold it in place, sealed the edges with a thick, tarry substance.
When the job was done they staggered back to the lounge. Blotches of color danced before their vision. Many corpuscles in their blood had already been destroyed by radiation. They sank to the deck.
ert had a jangled impression of Alice, now in a spacesuit, holding his head. He saw her lips mouthing endearments.... Game little Allie.... His mind wandered off. He was going to die. Maybe everyone on the ship was going to die. Lauren's last move had been meant to provide a real disaster, with many deaths! Prove the Big Pill a failure. Make sure that it would be banned for good by the Safe Products Approval Board. Put the stamp of crime on Doc Kramer, the gentle little scientist who had been murdered! And on him, Bert Kraskow. And where was the rat, Lauren? On his way to the colonized moons of Jupiter, or even Mars, yelling and accusing by radio all along the line?
As consciousness faded further, Bert stopped thinking unpleasant things. His mind drifted into Doc Kramer's dream—of the changes which would make the near-dead worlds of space really habitable and homelike, fit for human colonists. It was a beautiful, lost vision.
He was out cold, then, for several Earth-days, and only dimly aware for many days afterward. He knew that he was in the ship's sick-bay, and that Lawler and other men were there, too. He heard their voices, and his own, without remembering what was said. Alice often came to see him. Often he heard roaring, watery sounds, as of vast rains.
Gradually he came out of the dream-like period, learning of what had happened. Until the time when he walked from the sick-bay, unsteadily, but on the mend.
Alice, at his elbow, spoke: "It was like Doc Kramer planned, Bert, solving the hardest problem."
He knew what this meant. Transmutation, or any atomic process, must involve the generation of much radioactivity that can destroy life. In the Big Pill, the problem was to make all the atoms break, and rearrange their components into new elements as cleanly and sharply as possible, so that residual atomic instability—radioactivity, that is—would not linger for years, but would disappear quickly.