It was only now that
he was ready to begin work on the reactors.
He sat at his desk, in the inner of three successively smaller offices
on the second floor of the converted warehouse, checking over a
symbolic-logic analysis of a relay system and, at the same time,
sharpening a pencil, his knife paring off tiny feathery shavings of
wood. He was a tall, sparely-built, man of indeterminate age, with
thinning sandy hair, a long Gaelic upper lip, and a wide, half-humorous,
half-weary mouth; he wore an open-necked shirt, and an old and shabby
leather jacket, to the left shoulder of which a few clinging flecks of
paint showed where some military emblem had been, long ago. While his
fingers worked with the jackknife and his eyes traveled over the page of
closely-written symbols, his mind was reviewing the eight different ways
in which one of the efficient but treacherous Doernberg-Giardano
reactors could be allowed to reach critical mass, and he was wondering
if there might not be some unsuspected ninth way. That was a possibility
which always lurked in the back of his mind, and lately it had been
giving him surrealistic nightmares.
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