"Certainly not! You must be the couple we--"
"_Sound the radiation alarm._" She picked up a pair of dividers from the
plot board and approached the technician with murder on her face. He
gaped until she poised the needle points before his eyes and repeated:
"_Sound the radiation alarm._" Nobody in the room, including Charles,
had the slightest doubt that the points would sink into the technician's
eyeballs if he refused.
"Do what she says, Will," he mumbled, his eyes crossing on the dividers.
"For God's sake, do what she says. She's crazy."
One of the men moved, very cautiously, watching Charles and the gun, to
a red handle and pulled it down. A ferro-concrete barrier rose to wall
off the chamber and the sine-curve wail of a standard radioactivity
warning began to howl mournfully through the ship.
"Dump the reactor metal," Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit,
and found it--a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.
A technician wailed: "We _can't_ do that! We can't _do_ that! A million
bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it--have a heart,
mister! They'll crucify us!"
"They can dredge for it," Charles said. "Dump the metal."
"Dump the metal," Lee said. She hadn't moved.
The senior technician's eyes were still on the bright needle points. He
was crying silently. "Dump it," he said.
"Okay, chief. Your responsibility, remember."
"Dump it!" wailed the senior.
The technician did something technical at the control board. After a
moment the steady rumbling of the turbines ceased and the ship's deck
began to wallow underfoot.
"Hit the panel, Lee," Charles said. She did, running. He followed her
through the oval port. It was like an open-bottomed diving bell welded
to the hull. There were large, luminous cleats for pulling yourself
down through the water, under the rim of the bell. He dropped the pistol
into the water, breathed deeply a couple of times and began to climb
down. There was no sign of Lee.
He kicked up through the dark water on a long slant away from the ship.
It might be worse. With a fire and a hot-lab alarm and a dead chief
aboard, the crew would have things on their mind besides looking for
bobbing heads.
He broke the surface and treaded water to make a minimum target. He did
not turn to the ship. His dark hair would be less visible than his white
face. And if he was going to get a burst of machine-gun bullets through
either, he didn't want to know about it. Ahead he saw Lee's blonde hair
spread on the water for a moment and then it vanished. He breathed
hugely, ducked and swam under water toward it.
When he rose next a sheet of flame was lightening the sky and the oily
reek of burning hydrocarbons tainted the air. He dove again, and this
time caught up with Lee. Her face was bone-white and her eyes blank.
Where she was drawing her strength from he could not guess. Behind them
the ship sent up an oily plume and the sine-curve wail of the
radioactivity warning could be faintly heard. Before them a dim shore
stretched.
He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake
Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His
lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black
before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as
though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some
miracle, never was the last.