The Bramble Bush

"The Bramble Bush" by Randall Garrett is a science fiction story placed on a future moon colony, occurring sometime in the early 1960s world's expectations of such. A nucleonics engineer named Peter de Hooch finds himself in a life or death scenario: a nuclear reactor has failed, and potentially cataclysmic results are imminent. The story is driven by the character's immediate need to understand the failure and save his fellow engineers, who find themselves incapacitated in ground zero of the initial explosion. Survival instincts kick in as Peter understands the reactor's temperature and pressure levels are about to surge. He must navigate the chaos and find a way to neutralize the dangerous situation, even after he finds himself coated in radioactive mercury. In the climax, Peter decides to enter the reactor itself, betting that the reactor's properties will remove the harmful mercury before any disaster can occur.