rather than asking a question, “with an unprecedented resistance to
high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly,
I won’t believe until I’ve done the tests myself.”
“Makes our plasma-cans look like butter,” Josef agreed.
“Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower
neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?”
“Macroscopic, yes-under a millibarn per square centimeter.”
“Interesting . . .” she mused, then resumed more briskly: “On top
of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and
nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance.”
“Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites- we’ve
been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but
it’s rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You
could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of
reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete
processing plant specially designed for the job!”
“And the microstructure,” Valereya said, gesturing toward the
papers on her desk. “You’ve used the description fibrous.”
“Yes. That’s about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to
be formed around a-well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It’s
mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some
titanium-magnesium compound that we haven’t been able to quantify
yet. I’ve never come across anything like it. Any ideas?”
The woman’s face held a faraway look for some seconds.
“I honestly don’t know what to think at the moment,” she confessed.
“But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay;
it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure
of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up
to my office and let’s go through the whole thing in detail.”
chapter three
The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control
Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the
pass between Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south.
It was here that at some time in the remote past a small in-land
sea had penetrated the Cascade Mountains and carved itself a
channel to the Pacific, to become in time the mighty Columbia
River.
Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the
government-owned Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory.
Here, American scientists, working in collaboration with the United
States of Europe Federal Research Institute at Geneva, had
developed the theory of meson dynamics that led to the nucleonic
bomb. The theory predicted a “clean” reaction with a yield orders
of magnitude greater than that produced by thermonuclear fusion.
The holes they had blown in the Sahara had proved it.
During that period of history, the ideological and racial tensions
inherited from the twentieth century were being swept away by the
tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with
the spread of high-technology living. Traditional rocks of strife
and suspicion were being eroded as races, nations, sects, and
creeds became inextricably mingled into one huge, homogeneous
global society. As the territorial irrationalities of long-dead
politicians resolved themselves and the adolescent nation-states
matured, the defense budgets of the superpowers were progressively
reduced year by year. The advent of the nucleonic bomb served only
to accelerate what would have happened anyway. By universal assent,
world demilitarization became fact.
One sphere of activity that benefited enormously from the surplus
funds and resources that became available after demilitarization
was the rapidly expanding United Nations Solar System Exploration
Program. Already the list of responsibilities held by this
organization was long; it included the operation of all artificial
satellites in terrestrial, Lunar, Martian, Venusian, and Solar
orbits; the building and operation of all manned bases on Luna and
Mars, plus the orbiting laboratories over Venus; the launching of
deep-space robot probes and the planning and control of manned
missions to the outer planets. UNSSEP was thus expanding at just
the right rate and the right time to absorb the supply of
technological talent being released as the world’s major armaments
programs were run down. Also, as nationalism declined and most of
the regular armed forces were demobilized, the restless youth of
the new generation found outlets for their adventure-lust in the
uniformed branches of the UN Space Arm. It was an age that buzzed