Usually, if a man's gotten into bad trouble
by getting into something,
he's a fool to go back. But there are times ...
Illustrated by Schelling
—Old Nursery Rhyme
Peter de Hooch was dreaming thatthe moon had blown up when heawakened. The room was dark exceptfor the glowing night-light near thedoor, and he sat up trying to separatethe dream from reality. He focusedhis eyes on the glow-plate. What hadwakened him? Something had, hewas sure, but there didn't seem to beanything out of the ordinary now.
The explosion in his dream hadseemed extraordinarily realistic. Hecould still remember vividly the vibrationand the cr-r-r-ump! of thenoise. But there was no sign of whatmight have caused the dreamsequence.
Maybe something fell, he thought.He swung his legs off his bed andpadded barefoot over to the lightswitch. He was so used to walkingunder the light lunar gravity that hewas no longer conscious of it. Hepressed the switch, and the room wassuddenly flooded with light. Helooked around.
Everything was in place, apparently.There was nothing on the floorthat shouldn't be there. The bookswere all in their places in the bookshelf.The stuff on his desk seemedundisturbed.
The only thing that wasn't as itshould be was the picture on thewall. It was a reproduction of a paintingby Pieter de Hooch, which he hadalways liked, aside from the fact thathe had been named after the seventeenth-centuryDutch artist. The picturewas slightly askew on the wall.
He was sleepily trying to figure outthe significance of that when thephone sounded. He walked over andpicked it up. "Yeah?"
"Guz? Guz? Get over here quick!"Sam Willows' voice came excitedlyfrom the instrument.
"Whatsamatter, Puss?" he askedblearily.
"Number Two just blew! We needhelp, Guz! Fast!"
"I'm on my way!" de Hooch said.
"Take C corridor," Willowswarned. "A and B caved in, and thebulkheads have dropped. Make itsnappy!"
"I'm gone already," de Hooch said,dropping the phone back into place.
He grabbed his vacuum suit fromits hanger and got into it as thoughhis own room had already sprung anair leak.
Number Two has blown! hethought. That would be the one thatFerguson and Metty were workingon. What had they been cooking? Hecouldn't remember right off the bat.Something touchy, he thought; somethingpretty hot.
But that wouldn't cause an atomicreactor to blow. It obviously hadn'tbeen a nuclear blow-up of any proportions,or he wouldn't be here now,zipping up the front of his vac suit.Still, it had been powerful enough toshake the lunar crust a little or hewouldn't have been wakened by theblast.
These new reactors could get out alot more power, and they could do alot more than the old ones could, butthey weren't as safe as the old heavy-metalreactors, by a long shot. Nonehad blown up yet—quite—but therewas still the chance. That's why theywere built on Luna instead of onEarth. Considering what they coulddo, de Hooch often felt that it wouldbe safer if they were built out onsome nice, safe asteroid—preferablyone in the Jovian Trojan sector.
He clamped his fishbowl on tight,opened the door, and sprinted towardCorridor C.
The trouble with the Ditmars-Horstreactor was that it lacked anyautomatic