“Good morning, chief,” Deston said. “We’re about ready to cut gravs. How are the
projects corning along?” “Fine! Quizz is really rolling it, and no leaks. And we cut the
price of uranium another half a buck yesterday.” “Nice going. Are you sure we can stay
out a few months? I’ll locate enough copper while we’re gone, of course, to last you for a
thousand years.”
“Positive. We’ll drop the price of copper to where Hoadman will think he’s been hit by a
pile-driver.”
“So solly . . . and the effect on all industry of cheap and plentiful copper-added to your
widely-advertised fact that in a few months everybody can buy all the uranium they want
for less than thirty cents per pound -will take the curse off of the public image GalMet will
get when you smash UCM flat?”
“Not quite all of it, perhaps, but it will certainly help.” “That’s for sure. Okay; what do you
want firstest and mostest of, now that copper and uranium are out of the way?”
“I wish I could tell you.” Maynard’s fingers drummed quietly on his desk. “You thought it
would be simple? It isn’t. It’s all fouled up in the personnel situation I told you I’d tell you
about. We have six good people-damned good people-each of whom wants a planetary
project so passionately that if I stack the deck in favor of any one of them, all the others
will blast me to a cinder and run, not walk, to the nearest exit.”
Deston did not say anything and after a moment the older man went on, “Platinum and
iridium, of course. Osmium, tungsten . . .”
“Tungsten isn’t too scarce, is it?”
“For the possible demand, very much so. I’d like to sell it for fifteen cents a pound.
Beryllium, tantalum, titanium, thorium, cerium-and, for the grand climax to end all
climaxes-rhenium.”
“Huh? I don’t think I’ve ever heard rhenium even mentioned since my freshman
chemistry.”
“Not too many people have, but right now I’m as full of information as the dog that sniffed
at the third rail. It’s so rare that no mineral of it is known; it exists only as a trace of
impurity in a very few minerals. Strangely enough, practically only in molybdenite.”
“Just a minute. Deston went to a book-case, took out a hand-book, and flipped pages.
“Um . . . um . . . mm. Dwimanganese. Not usually associated with manganese. Maybe it
occurs in molybdenite as the sulphide-ReS2and/or Re2S7-commercial source, flue dust
from the roasting of Arizona molybdenite. . . .”
“Right. We own the outfit. That’s why we own it. It produces a few tons a year of Cottrell
dust, which yields just about enough rhenium to irritate one eyeball. Production cost, five
dollars and seventeen cents per gram.”
“But what’s it good for? Contact points . . . cat mass . . . heavy duty igniters, it says
here. Deston tapped the page with his forefinger. “No tonnage outlet there.
“What would you think of an alloy that had a yield point-not ultimate tensile, mind you, but
yield-of well over a million pounds, and yet an elongation of better than five percent?”
Deston whistled. “I would have said it was a pure pipe dream. What else is in it?”
Mostly tungsten. A lot of tantalum. Rhenium around ten percent. The research isn’t done
yet, but they’re far enough along to know that they’ll have something utterly fantastic. The
problem, Byrd tells me, is to determine the optimum formula and environment for the
growth and matting of single crystals of metal-tungsten ‘whiskers’, you know-you know
about them.”
“A little, of course, but not too much. I’m a ‘troncist .”
“I know. Well, they’re playing around now with soakpit times and temperatures and
fractional percentages of this and that. The curve is still rising.”
“So you’ll need tungsten and tantalum, too, by the gigaton, since that’s a thing that the
Law of Diminishing Returns would apply to exactly.”
“I didn’t think I’d have to plot you a graph. So now, apart from the personnel problem,
what do you think?” Before replying, Deston studied the handbook for minutes. Then:
“The three atomic numbers are in order; seventy three, four, and five. But in the Earth’s
crust rhenium runs less than one part in billions. So if there is any big mass of it
anywhere the others are apt to be there too, and a hell of a lot more of ’em.”
“All the better, even from a project standpoint. Two prime sources of anything are a lot
better than one.”
“I didn’t mean that. All that stuff is terrifically heavy, and it’s got to be close enough to the
surface to get at. I simply can’t visualize what kind of a planet could possibly have what
we want. It won’t be Tellus-Type, that’s for damn certain sure.”
“I couldn’t care less about that. We can set up automation on anything that isn’t hotter
than dull red.” “Okay. That brings us back, then, to personnel. This Byrd-has he got what
it takes to run such a weirdie as this rhenium thing will almost have to be?”
“Definitely, but Doctor Ceeily Byrd isn’t a man. Very much the opposite, which is exactly
what is thickening the soup. If we could get hold of as little as one megaton of rhenium,
so as to add this new alloy leybyrdite to cheap uranium and copper, it would make
MetEnge such a public benefactor that it’d be a case of ‘the King can do no wrong’. But if
I deal one card from the bottom of the deck to ‘Curly’ Byrd all hell will be out for noon.”
“That sounds like something more than ordinary sex antagonism.”
“It is. Much more. She not only uses weapons men don’t have-and she’s got ’em, believe
me-but she brags about it. She’s a carrot-topped, freckle-faced, shanty irish wick, with
the shape men drool about and itching to use it-with a megavac for a brain and an
ice-cube for a heart. She’s half cobra, half black widow, half bitch, and one hundred
percent hell-cat on wheels.”
“She must be quite a gal, to add up to two hundred and fifty percent.”
“She adds up to all that. So do the others. I would have fired her a year ago-she hadn’t
been on the job three weeks before she started making passes at me-but I haven’t been
able to find anyone else nearly as good as she is.”
“That’s a mighty tough signal to read.”
“It’s a unique situation. I’ve been gathering those people for over two years, getting
ready to expand, and we haven’t found anything big enough to expand into. I had eight of
them. They were hard enough to handle before I gave Felton and Quisenberry their
projects, but ever since then the other six have been damn near impossible. Each has
tremendous ability and drive; each is as good as either Felton or Quisenberry and knows
it. All working at about ten percent load; with nowhere in the galaxy to go to do any
better. Frustrated-tense-sore as boils and touchy as fulminate-knives out, not only for
each other, but also for Smith and me. Four men and two women. Purdom hasn’t got any
sex-appeal at all; Byrd oozes it at every pore. So I tell you rhenium first and the sex-pot
is first out. So the other five know she got it by sleeping with me, and she-the God
damned bitch!-grins like the Chesire cat and rubs it in that she has got what it takes to
land the big ones.”
“That’s a hell of a picture, chief. I simply can’t visualize top-bracket executives acting that
way.”
“You haven’t handled enough people for years enough. They can’t act any other way.
What I’ve been wanting to do, every time she sticks her damned sexy neck out, is wring
it … wait a minute; that gives me an idea . . . yes, that’ll work. The minute they find out
for sure they must all suspect it already-that you’re an honest-to-God metal-wizard I can
kick their teeth right down their throats. They’ll all tear into their jobs like that many
hundred-ton cat tractors.”
“But listen! You can’t tell ’em-we’ve got to keep it dark, the way we find the stuff.”
From most people, yes; but from anybody with a brain? One, of course, could be luck.
Two might-just barely-be coincidence. But the next one? I won’t have to tell them, even
now. I’ll make the method certain the same way you did-by denying its possibility.”
“Could be, at that … so maybe we’d better make it a straight tri-di survey for everything
you’re interested in. That would save time, in fact, over all. What kind of a list would that
be?”
“Here.” Maynard reached into a drawer and sailed a sheet of paper across his desk.
“The full want list, which we boiled down to the must-haves.”
Deston caught the paper and read it. “Is that all?” “Isn’t that enough? You’re a brute for