Vulcan's forge m-1

by Jack Du Brul

  “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 of 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 transformati
on 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?”

  “Well, to answer that, you have to know how bikinium was formed in the first place and even my findings are only theory. I researched all the mineral samples taken from nuclear detonations in New Mexico, going back to the original Los Alamos test, and found no trace of it, so the effect must have something to do with water, that much I am certain. I began to search for other dissimilarities between the land tests and the one conducted underwater.

  “I found no traces of vanadium ore at any test site other than the 1946 Bikini test. I could conclude that the vanadium must act as a catalyst or possibly a host in the formation of this new metal. Furthermore, it is known that the neutrons released after a nuclear blast can be absorbed by any sodium in the area. It is my belief that all of the neutrons from the Bikini test were absorbed by the sodium in the surrounding seawater.

  “Another dissimilarity between the two is the period of cooling. The seawater at Bikini cooled the test site much faster than those tests conducted on land. There is a strong possibility that rapid cooling also aids in the formation of bikinium. I also theorize that pressure may be a factor in its creation. Of course, there is no way to test any of my assumptions.

  “But to create it again, I would detonate an atomic bomb in the seas near a vanadium deposit.”

  “Abe,” Mercer turned to Jacobs, “is there anyone who might have stumbled onto this before you?”

  “No one at all,” Jacobs replied with confidence. “Though there were some ore samples missing from White Sands, I don’t think anyone in the world could have come up with this.”

  “Are you sure?” Mercer persisted.

  “Yes, quite. Only the Soviet Union and China have done the kind of test we conducted at Bikini. The Chinese don’t have scientists of high enough caliber to find bikinium, and the only one in the Soviet Union that I’ve heard about testing exotic metals like this died years ago.”

  “When?” Mercer snapped.

  “In the sixties, I believe. He had published some brilliant articles about the changes in metals after nuclear tests, but his work centered mostly on the effects on the armor of tanks and ships. His name was Borodin, Pytor Borodin.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Mercer moaned. “Do we have those photos yet from the spy plane?”

  Paul Barnes slid the 8 X 10s from a thin envelope and placed them on the President’s desk. Their colors were phantasmagorical: fuchsia, teal, blinding white, indigo blue, vibrant yellow. They created a concentric pattern on the photos, each color ringing another so that the image looked like a distorted bull’s-eye. At the bottom of each photograph was printed the time, location, and altitude of each shot. Mercer couldn’t help but notice the shots were taken above one hundred and fifty thousand feet, miles above the earth’s atmosphere. He was very impressed with the new SR-1 Wraith.

  He wondered idly, as he waited his turn to closely study the photos, why all the men crowded around the desk to see them. Apart from Barnes, he doubted any of them had ever seen an infrared photo of this type. He passed it off as the same kind of curiosity that caused people to stare into construction pits.

  Mercer looked at the near identical photos until his eyes found the one he wanted. Longitude and latitude lines had been etched onto the film by the computer that controlled the camera.

  Mercer muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?”

  “The Bangkok Accords,” his voice barely a whisper in the quiet room. “I said, the Bangkok Accords.”

  “What is…”

  “Meetings taking place right now that may just give away the greatest discovery of this or any century,” Mercer said, anticipating the question. “Abe, did this Dr. Borodin have any children?”

  “I can’t see how that-”

  “Answer me, goddamn it.” The vehemence in Mercer’s voice made Jacobs pale.

  “Yes, one son.”

  “We’ve been had.” Mercer leaned away from the photographs, his eyes betraying respect for the master of the plan.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dr. Borodin is alive and well, gentlemen, and he beat us to the punch by forty years.” Mercer spoke slowly as his brain began unraveling the four-decade-old mystery. “Bear with me for a few minutes.

  “Let’s assume that this Borodin somehow discovers the existence of bikinium back in the early fifties and wants to create his own. He persuades the Russians to give him an atomic bomb. Remember, those things were in short supply back then, so his project must have gotten a high priority.

  “Then he fills an ore carrier with high-grade vanadium ore, sails her to a predetermined location near volcanic activity, and sinks her, along with the bomb. Once she settles on the ocean floor he touches off the nuke. Later, he fakes his own death, so there wouldn’t ever be any connection to him.”

  “Is there any record of a lost ore carrier?” Abe asked.

  “Grandam Phoenix, missing since May 23, 1954,” Mercer replied sharply. “She was listed as running bauxite ore from Malaysia, to the States, but Christ only knew what she carried.”

  Mercer’s voice trailed off, his eyes glazed for a second and then snapped back into focus. His voice was firm, commanding. “I need a phone, now.”

  In a moment that Mercer would remember for the rest of his life, the President of the United States obeyed and handed him the receiver to one of the telephones on his desk. Mercer gave the White House operator a number and waited patiently for the connection, oblivious of the stares.

  “Berkowitz, Saulman…”

  Mercer cut off the secretary. “Skip it. Give me Dave Saulman right away; this is an emergency.”

  The secretary was used to emergencies in the uncontrollable world of ocean commerce and cut in on Saulman while he was on another line.

  “Saulman here,” the old lawyer answered quickly.

  “Dave, it’s Mercer.”

  “Oh, you finally have an answer for me?”

  Mercer knew that Saulman was asking about the trivia question at the bottom of the faxes he had received two days earlier. Without thinking, Mercer replied, “The captain of the Amoco Cadio was Pasquale Bardari.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Dave, I need to know who owned the Grandam Phoenix.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She was on the list you sent me of the vessels that disappeared north of Hawaii.”

  “Oh, right.” Recognition lightened Saulman’s voice. “Might take me a couple of days to find. I’m swamped in work right now on a towing contract for an Exxon tanker that’s drifting off Namibia. The fucking Dutch tugs are holding out for Lloyd’s Open and the value of that tanker and cargo is somewhere around one hundred and thirty million dollars.”

  “Not to name-drop,” Mercer said with a fiendish smile, “but I’m sitting with the President, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the heads of the FBI and CIA, and we’re all waiting for your answer.”

  There was a moment’s silence from the other end of the phone. Mercer marveled that there was no static on the President’s phone line. Must be nice, he thought.

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Want to talk to one of them?”

  “No. It’ll take a few minutes to get the info. Do you want me to call back?”

  “I don’t think AT amp;T ca
res how long the President is on the phone, I’ll hold.”

  “What’s this all about?” the President asked, not really caring that Mercer was now sitting on the corner of his desk.

  “Conclusive evidence,” replied Mercer enigmatically.

  The President exchanged glances with the men around the room, but none of them spoke. They waited five long minutes, clearing throats, shuffling feet, and rattling papers, but their gaze never left Mercer.

  “I’ve got it.” Saulman was breathless. “The Grandam Phoenix was owned by Ocean Freight and Cargo.” Saulman continued to speak, but Mercer was already hanging up the phone.

  “The ore carrier that sank in 1954 and the ship that rescued Tish Talbot have the same owners, Ocean Freight and Cargo, the same company I broke into last night.”

  “The ones suspected of being a front for the KGB?”

  “Right.”

  “You said something about the ore carrier being sunk over a volcanic area, why?” Henna asked.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Abe, but the deeper the explosion and the more water pressure, the purer the bikinium.”

  Abe Jacobs nodded, then added, “That’s just my theory, though.”

  “Well, in 1954, there was no way to mine any minerals from even a few hundred feet underwater and we’re talking depths in the thousands. Even today, the Frasch process of using superheated water for mining can’t work any deeper than two hundred feet.

  “Dr. Borodin borrowed a line from the Koran and, like Muhammad, had the mountain come to him. By setting off the blast over a volcanic area, he would trigger an eruption, and the lava would transport the bikinium to the surface.”

  “Jesus, that would work,” Jacobs said, respect lowering his voice. “I never would have even considered it.”

  “But volcanoes take millions of years to grow,” the President pointed out.