Vulcan's Forge

by Du Brul, Jack

  “And we are ready to give you the account number.” Kerikov could see Way’s lips moving long before the computer’s sterilized voice could be heard. “As a sign of good faith we will transmit first.”

  Way nodded to an off-camera assistant. An instant later the teletype attached to the transceiver began to pound away. Kerikov made it a point to keep his eyes glued to the camera. To look toward the teletype would be a major loss of face.

  When it stopped, Kerikov fed several sheets of paper into a portable fax machine attached to the satellite uplink. These pages included the latest assay and elevation reports and gave the exact location of Dr. Borodin’s island.

  Kerikov saw that Way’s eyes were locked on someone outside the camera’s field of vision, so he took a moment to scan the teletype. One hundred million American dollars had just been transferred to the National Cayman Bank in the Caribbean. The transfer number and the account number were at the bottom of the page.

  Way Hue Dong received an acknowledgment from some technician out of view and turned back to the camera. “The information seems legitimate, Mr. Kerikov. I believe now I know why there was a delay and I applaud your audacity.

  “You must forgive me, sir,” Way continued, “but there is a restraint order on the money. You cannot touch it until I send the bank another set of code numbers.”

  Way displayed no emotion as he revealed his double-cross. “Once my engineers are on-station and prove what you have told us, the money will be released into your care.”

  Kerikov listened and could barely contain his rage.

  Way added, “I’m sure you understand that we must protect this large amount of money from fraud. Not that you are suspect. Once the value of this new mineral is established I will send the new code and the money will be yours. Good evening, Mr. Kerikov.”

  The monitor went blank. In Kerikov’s hotel suite, the camera continued to record and transmit, so the nine Koreans saw Kerikov pound his foot through the monitor screen and then begin attacking the video transceiver. The image faded when Kerikov fired a roundhouse kick at the camera and sent it slamming into a wall.

  “Those motherfucking bastards,” Kerikov ranted once he could control himself enough to speak. “Those pissdrinking shit eaters.”

  Kerikov fumed for about ten minutes, dredging up curses he hadn’t used since Afghanistan. When he finally calmed, he finished the diluted Scotch in his glass and then drank right from the bottle, the raw spirit singeing his stomach when it hit.

  Somehow the Koreans had figured out that he was acting outside his own government’s authority, that the hundred million dollars was destined for Kerikov himself and not the Russian State Treasury. Knowing that they wouldn’t garner any government wrath, they could delay the transfer of money indefinitely while they reaped the benefits of Borodin’s volcano. Without an armed force to back him, Kerikov would be powerless to stop them.

  He laughed to himself amid the wreckage of the computer equipment. He admitted that he had been outsmarted. Once his laughter subsided, Kerikov’s eyes gleamed with an unholy fire. There was no way that he would allow those Korean bastards to double-cross him when he still had an ace up his sleeve.

  The White House

  Paul Barnes nearly cowered in his chair in front of the President, as if the supple leather would shield him from the chief executive’s scathing censure. The President, usually a level-headed man, was furious. The CIA director had failed to find Dr. Jacobs.

  “Sir, that report came across my desk years ago,” Barnes said lamely.

  “You are the head of the most powerful spy network in the world and you can’t find a man who is no more than two hundred miles from Washington.”

  The President’s intercom chimed. “Yes?” he responded.

  “Sir, the others are back.”

  “Thanks, Joy. Send them in.” The President turned back to Barnes. “We’ll continue this conversation later.”

  Dick Henna and Admiral Morrison filed into the Oval Office. They were subdued, their faces drawn and ashen. Henna helped himself to a slug of Scotch.

  “Where’s Dr. Mercer?” the President asked.

  “He’ll probably be along in a few minutes,” Henna said. “Should we wait for him?”

  “No, we can’t afford the time,” the President replied slowly. “Dick, what’s the latest from Hawaii?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much to report, sir. There’s been no further communication from Ohnishi. I’ve got some agents keeping his estate under long-range surveillance, but they haven’t reported anything suspicious. Our phone taps have turned up nothing, but I doubt that any sensitive conversations would go over unscrambled land lines.”

  “Have you found a tie-in between Ohnishi and Mayor Takamora?”

  “Takamora went to Ohnishi’s mansion last night, but has not left as of an hour ago. We assume that they are working together on this coup attempt. As near as we can figure, Takamora will be the front man, given his popularity in the islands, while Ohnishi plays the role of king-maker.”

  “What have you got, Tom?”

  Morrison cleared his throat. “Well, sir, I’ve been in contact with the base commander at Pearl. He reports that there’s a fairly good-sized mob, maybe three hundred or so, on MacArthur Boulevard, just outside the base’s main entrance. They don’t appear to be armed, but he also reports that the National Guard, which was called out a few hours ago, seems to be part of the mob.

  “I had some records pulled from the Pentagon files on Hawaiian National Guard enlistments. In the past couple of years a disproportionate number of applications have been rejected, nearly all white, black, and hispanic. In the past three years, eighty-six percent of the new members of the National Guard are of Japanese ancestry. Given the situation, I’d say Takamora has built himself a private army right under our noses.”

  “Have you been working on some options in case they do try to pull this off?” The President’s cool blue eyes scanned the room, waiting for responses.

  “Well,” Admiral Morrison started after a pause, “we have the carrier Kitty Hawk and the amphibious assault ship Inchon on station, well within striking distance of Hawaii. Pearl Harbor is on full alert, although they’re bottled up per your order. If Ohnishi tries to take the islands by force, we can just as easily take them back again. His mobs and guard troops can’t stand up to what we can throw at them.”

  “Ordering our troops to fire on American citizens is not an option.” Anguish etched the President’s handsome features. “Goddamn it. I control the best trained and best equipped fighting machine ever built and it’s fucking useless to me.”

  The men seated around the office watched the President’s pain stoically, each man thankful that they did not sit behind that desk.

  Admiral Morrison cleared his throat again. “A precise surgical air strike against Ohnishi’s house would neutralize the problem. Cut off the head and the snake dies, so to speak.”

  “How do I explain that to the people of Hawaii? They revere him. Christ, he donates something like twenty million dollars a year to Hawaiian charities. If we killed him, we’d touch off a grassroots revolution.”

  “What about a commando raid of some sort?” Paul Barnes suggested. “And then tell the people about the Russian involvement. Make a clean breast of it and put Ohnishi on trial.”

  Henna gave the answer to that. “Our intelligence reports Ohnishi’s house is heavily guarded. A raid would turn into a pitched battle. The furor over something like that would be ten times worse than the Waco fiasco back in 1993. I doubt the administration could survive, given the current polls. No offense, sir.”

  “None taken,” the President said gloomily.

  For the next hour, the men in the Oval Office batted around ideas, but each option they debated was rejected. All of them ended with the same result, the end of the administration.

  “Maybe that is the only way,” the President mused.

  The intercom buzzed and Joy Craig
announced that Mercer had finally arrived, with a guest.

  When Mercer introduced the stooped Dr. Abraham Jacobs, the President shot a brutal glare at Barnes, and Henna laughed delightedly.

  “Dr. Mercer, when your contract’s up at the USGS, the FBI would love to have you.”

  “I just can’t see myself as one of your fair-haired boys, Mr. Henna. I don’t take orders very well.”

  “Dr. Jacobs, have you been told anything?” the President interrupted.

  Jacobs, still a little stunned by the men in the room, merely nodded.

  Seeing his old teacher’s discomfort, Mercer came to the rescue. “I told him that he was needed here because of the paper he presented to the CIA a few years ago.”

  “Yes, that is correct.” Jacobs had found his voice, but sweat still gleamed on his wide bald head.

  “Would you care to elaborate on that paper?” the President prompted.

  After a preamble of coughs, throat clearing, and mumbles, Jacobs began. “Eight years ago, I was invited by the White Sands Testing Center to do some analysis on mineral samples from their 1946 Bikini tests. The samples had lain neglected in an old storage shed that was being demolished, so the White Sands people contacted a number of independent researchers across the country. They had something like eighteen thousand mineral samples in that shed, dating back to the early 1940s.” Jacobs’s voice was now sure and firm, confident of his subject.

  “Of the groups of samples I agreed to assay for them, one was a collection of rocks, about twelve pounds’ worth, recovered from the seafloor around Bikini Atoll after the second test, the one where the bomb was detonated underwater. After some initial work, my interest was piqued and I requested all the data from the original tests conducted on soil, rock, and water samples collected from Bikini in 1946. For the next few months I researched twelve thousand pages of documents.

  “After this, I realized only one small sample had any potential value, a two-pound chunk of rock taken directly from the epicenter of the explosion. It had been a ballast stone from the LSM-60, the ship under which the bomb was suspended. It was truly a miracle that the rock wasn’t atomized by the blast. Or so I thought.”

  That phrase made the men in the room lean a little further forward in their seats.

  “The ballast rock consisted mostly of vanadium ore, a surprising fact since vanadium is mainly found in North and South America and in parts of Africa. How it got to be ballast on a ship in the Pacific is one of those bizarre quirks of war, I suppose.

  “Anyway, for those who don’t know, vanadium is used to strengthen steel for use in precision machine tools and other high-stress jobs, so it is very tough. That might have explained why it hadn’t vaporized, but it didn’t seem likely. I crushed the sample and ran it through a spectrometer to see what other elements occurred in the rock.

  “The standard stuff, like mica, I discounted, but I found something interesting. Bonded to the vanadium were traces of a metal alloy. At first, I thought the metal was pure vanadium, extracted from the ore because of the heat of the explosion. But when I tested my theory, I found I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “The metal was something completely new. Something I couldn’t explain. I crushed the rest of the samples given to me by White Sands and found even more of this new metal, about twenty grams in all. Not very much, but enough to continue my research.

  “Have any of you gentlemen ever heard of invar?”

  Mercer was the only person in the room not to reply with a blank stare. “Yes, it’s an alloy of thirty-six percent nickel, traces of manganese, silicon, and carbon, and the rest is iron.”

  “A-plus to my star student. It was developed by Nobel Prize-winner Charles Guillaume. Its principle characteristic is a minimal heat expansion, about seven ten-millionths of an inch per degree Fahrenheit of temperature increase. The incredible temperature of the blast, one hundred thousand degrees or more, made me think of invar during my tests, and I wondered if the two metals had similar properties. I heated my samples. At seven thousand degrees the metal didn’t expand at all, and at twelve thousand the change was measured in angstroms.”

  The technical language was beginning to lose Jacobs’s audience, but he seemed not to notice.

  “I continued applying heat, but I never could find the metal’s melting point.”

  Mercer had a sly smile on his face; he thought he knew where the scientist’s discussion was heading. Yet his expression changed to one of astonishment when Jacobs made his next revelation.

  “My next test was with electricity. I ran one millijoule of electricity through the sample and created an unidirectional magnetic field of about six thousand gauss.”

  “Jesus,” Mercer exclaimed.

  “I don’t understand.” The President voiced the incomprehension on everyone’s face.

  “Mr. President, had I been wearing a steel watch, that magnetic field would have stripped it from my wrist at a distance of ten feet.” Now everyone looked astonished.

  “After that experiment, I reconfigured the sample so it would create a closed loop field and then I put the power to it, so to speak. I was able to sustain a field of eighty million kilogauss for seventeen seconds before an equipment short shut me down.”

  “The equipment failed, not the sample,” said Mercer, again the only one to grasp Jacobs’s dissertation.

  “Heat buildup melted the conductor wires despite the liquid oxygen cooling, but I hadn’t reached the magnetic saturation or Curie points of the sample. The Curie point is where heat arrests magnetism. The Curie point of cobalt is around sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, the highest known until my work. My experiment failed when the wires melted, at about seven thousand degrees centigrade. At the time, the magnetic pressure within the field was in the neighborhood of forty thousand tons per square inch.

  “You must remember that this really wasn’t my area of expertise, so I didn’t have the proper equipment to continue experimenting, but I’m sure that this new element could generate a strong enough field to create a magnetic well.”

  “A magnetic well?”

  “It’s something like a black hole, but using magnetism rather than gravity. The field within the well is strong enough to bend light, and time would slow as you neared its event horizon.”

  “Are you saying that this stuff can be used to make some sort of time machine?”

  “Eventually, yes, Admiral Morrison, though it would take years to develop that. But bikinium has many applications in the here and now. When I discovered its strategic importance I immediately contacted the government. I’d done some consulting for the Pentagon, so I turned over my findings to the same people I’d dealt with before. A few months later I was told to drop the whole thing and have barely thought about it since then.”

  “Bikinium?”

  “That is what I called the new metal. I considered naming it after myself, but calling it jacobinium just sounded too ridiculous.” Jacobs smiled at his little joke.

  “What are some of those uses?” the President prompted.

  “Mr. President, the metal I have just described has more uses in defense, aerospace, and power production than I could possibly name.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The greatest challenges currently facing many leading high-tech corporations are the limitations placed upon them by the materials with which they work. They have the ideas and techniques to produce wondrous inventions. Unfortunately, they have nothing to build them with. Technological leaps must wait for materials to catch up.

  “Think about the weight savings in automobiles when ceramic engines become a reality. These engines have already been designed, yet the ceramic itself cannot meet the strength requirements for internal combustion. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll give you some of bikinium’s more exotic applications to existing ideas: thermal and magnetic containment for fusion reactors, a way to channel nuclear blasts for propulsion o
f deep-space vehicles, desktop supercolliders, endless charge electric cars or supersonic maglev trains that don’t need superconductivity. Anything that uses magnetic power or is limited by thermal friction could be made thousands of times more efficient.”

  “I see your point.”

  “I’ve saved the best for last, Mr. President.” Jacobs’s dark eyes shone with feverish excitement. “The free lunch.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “It’s a term used by physicists to describe a system that creates more energy than it requires. Einsteinian theory says that it’s impossible due to conservation of mass and energy, but man has been searching for one anyway. Sort of a physicist’s Holy Grail.

  “A modern power-producing plant burns coal or oil or splits atoms to release the energy stored within, correct?”

  The men in the room nodded attentively.

  “Bikinium, used in the dynamos of an electric generator, would create a much stronger electrical field than the amount of power put into it.”

  “I’m sorry. You’ve lost me again.”

  “An electric motor and an electric generator are basically the same machine. Add electricity to a motor and it spins around. Add spin to a generator and it creates electricity. Each machine transforms energy from mechanical to electrical or vice versa.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of bikinium’s abnormal magnetic properties, during that transformation more energy would be released than was first introduced.”

  “You’re neglecting the energy put into the system by the initial nuclear blast,” Mercer pointed out. “In fact, you would still remain within the laws of the conservation of mass and energy.”

  “Don’t be a smart ass,” Abe chided as if they were back in the classroom.

  Dick Henna put into words what the rest of the men in the room were thinking.

  “Dr. Jacobs, you’re describing an unlimited power source.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Jacobs looked smug.

  “Dr. Jacobs,” the President’s tone was respectful, “how would you go about creating bikinium in useful amounts?”