“Easy does it, Clay,” Rob thought. “Just a little more, and the track will be cut through.”
The scarlet track and the blazing spot of the torch seemed to sear a hole right into Rob’s eyeballs. “How can Clay stand it this long himself?” he wondered. “His nerves must be of steel wire, his pupils of quartz lenses.”
“The track is cut through!” someone finally exclaimed exultantly.
Yet even with the worst part behind him, Clay didn’t get overconfident. As the bomb hung there weightless in space, Clay carefully withdrew the rod and the torch from its dangerous proximity to the bomb. Then he shook off the torch until it began drifting away from him, whence it would travel unchecked until it passed into the gravitation field of some celestial body. Next Clay gently brought the rod end against the bomb and shoved ever so lightly against it. Then it too began creeping away slowly into the black deeps, never to be seen again.
“Whew!” Bruce gasped, and Rob could sense the relief of tension in those around him.
Clay discarded the rod then but kept his shield in position as he made his way around the radioactive bomb hatch and back toward the air lock where he had left the ship.
“He has discarded his hot equipment,” Lieutenant Swenson said as Clay moved out of their field of vision. “Just like a natural-born spaceman—he didn’t forget a thing.”
When Clay had been helped into the ship with unnecessary care, each of his shipmates gave him an exuberant slap on the back and covered him with words of praise that fairly inundated him. Rob could see a grin a light year wide on the boy’s face and the trace of tears too as he realized he had been accepted as one of them again.
Lieutenant Swenson summed it all up when he said, “You’re an all right guy, Clay.”
Harry tore off Clay’s space suit, which was discarded, and began giving him all sorts of tests for radiation exposure. But Clay had protected himself well and was “clean.”