He almost laughed himself sick before he realized that it was fear and despair that were driving him into hysteria, not a sense of humor. He forced himself to calmness. He must be calm. He must think. Yes. How do you go about getting rid of a radioactive metal that is in effect welded to the outside of your suit? The trouble was, he was a nucleonics engineer, not a chemist. He remembered quite a bit of his chemistry, of course, but not as much as he would have liked. Could the stuff be neutralized? Sure, he told himself. Very simple. All he had to do was go climb into the reactor, and let the reactor do the job. Mercury 203 plus an alpha particle gives nice, stable Lead 207. Just go climb right into the Ditmars-Horst and let the Helium 4 do the job. But the thought stuck in his mind. He kept telling himself not to panic as Willows had done. And several minutes later, chuckling to himself in a half demented fashion, he opened the firewall door and went in to let the helium do the job. * * * It was nearly eight in the morning, Greenwich time, when the three surface vehicles, with their wide Caterpillar treads lumbered to a halt near the kiosk that marked the entrance to the underground site of the laboratories. "O.K.," said one of the men in the first machine, holding a microphone to his lips, "let's go in. If what Willows said is true, the whole place may blow any minute now, but I'm not asking for volunteers. Nobody will be any safer up here than they will down there, and we have to do a job. Besides, Willows wasn't completely rational. Nobody would put on a vac suit and run away like that if he was in his right mind. So we can discount a lot of what he said when we picked him up on the road. "The five of us in this car are going straight to Number One Reactor to see what can be done to stop whatever is going on. The rest of you start trying to see if you can get those trapped men out of A and B corridors. All right, let's move in." Less than five minutes later, five men went into the control room of Number One Reactor. They found Peter de Hooch sound asleep in the control chair, and the instruments showed that the Ditmars-Horst reactor was inactive. One of the men shook de Hooch gently, awakening him in the middle of a snore. "What?" he said groggily. "We're here, Guz. Everything's O.K." "Sure everything's O.K. Nothing to it. All I did was wait until the temperature got above three fifty-seven Centigrade--above the boiling point of mercury. Then I went in and let the hot helium _boil_ the stuff off me. Nothing to it. Near boiled myself alive, but it did the trick." "What," asked the man in a puzzled voice, "are you talking about?" "I am a knight in dull armor," said Peter de Hooch, dozing off again. Then he roused himself a little, and said, without opening his eyes: "Hi yo, Quicksilver, away." And he was sound asleep again.