"
"And don't blame that on my alleged strike-breakers," Melroy warned.
"They hadn't got security-cleared to enter the reactor area when this
happened."
"What do you think happened?" Cronnin asked. "One of the
Doernberg-Giardanos let go?"
"Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it's his bad luck," Melroy
said grimly. "Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the
fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a
big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don't know what was done
with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack
that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. Nobody'll ever find
out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved
things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have
got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were pretty ripe by that time,
must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know
how fast those D-G's work. It just took this long to build up CM for a
bomb-type reaction.
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