ouble rage and grief drove him on toward what he must do with greater insistence than before. With a key from his hip-pouch, he opened the airlock of the Prometheus. With great caution they went inside but found no one in the ship.
The mood of its interior was brooding and sullen. Every cubic foot of space not taken up by its machinery and fuel was packed with black ingots of an alloy, a large proportion of which was fissionable metal, quiescent now, and harmless, but under the right kind of primer, capable of bursting into a specialized hell of energy. Five thousand tons of the stuff, Earth-weight!
But even all this was the secondary part of the purpose for which the Prometheus had been fitted. Bert and Alice followed a narrow catwalk to a compartment along the keel of the ship which was fitted like a huge bomb-bay. And the monster that rested there, gripped by mechanically operated claws, would certainly have fitted the definition of a bomb as well as anything that had ever been made by Earth-science. Child, it was, of the now ancient H-bomb.
It was a tapered cylinder, a hundred feet long and thirty feet thick. For one grim, devilish moment Bert Kraskow paused to pat its flank, to feel the solid metallic slap of its tremendous shellcase under his palm, to be aware of the intricacies of its hidden parts: The forklike masses of fissionable metals that could dovetail and join instantly; the heavy-water, the lead, the steel, the beryllium.
Here was watchlike perfection and delicacy of mechanism—precision meant to function faultlessly for but a fragment of a second, and then to perish in a mighty and furious fulfillment. Here was the thought of man crystallized—trying to tread a hairline past inconceivable disaster, to the realization of a dream that was splendid.
In that moment this thing seemed the answer to all the fury of wrong and sorrow that burned in Bert Kraskow. And the vision soared in his mind like a legend of green fields and light. For a few seconds he was sure, until doubt crept up again from the bottom of his brain, and until Alice put that uncertainty into words.
"Doc is gone," she said. "Even with his expert help, using the Big Pill would be taking a chance. Bert, do you think we can do it alone? Will it be all right? Are you certain, Bert?"
Her large, dark eyes pleaded for reassurance.
He sighed as the strain plucked at his nerves, in spite of what he knew of Doc Kramer's careful small-scale tests. Maybe what he felt was just a normal suspicion of anything so new and so colossal.
"No, Allie, not absolutely certain," he replied. "But how can anybody ever be sure of anything unless they try it? Doc died for an idea that holds tremendous hope for the good of all people who make their living in space. He was the principal inventor, and much more than just the boss of a new company. We aren't going to let him down. What we're going to do is for Nick, and for everybody who ever died violently on near-dead worlds. Lauren, and what he stands for, won't stop us. We can radio another warning and instruct everyone on Titan to blast off for a while."