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that he would destroy it then and there.
Ellen Haynes, he said solemnly, this much zonium if hurled into the
sun would create a nova!
But it is so small.
Yes, but zonium is a strange metal, he said. The mass-energy
relation is carefully disregarded by zonium. In normal matter, energy equals
the mass times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second.
But its mass is not considerable.
Zonium is a temporal metal, said Forrest. When it is under the
influence of a magnetic field passing through the magnetic axis an
electrical current through the electrical axis and a beam of light through
the optical axis its mass increases according to some exponential function
of the energy levels of the radiation that is passing through it.
Throw it into the sun where the radiation-energy output is some four
million tons of energy per second and zonium increases its apparent mass
by a factor of the cube one exponential power for each axis accepting
and passing radiation of the mass of the zonium times the factorial
expansion of the energy passing through it. It would be much like hurling
Jupiter into the sun.
He handed her the crystal. Ellen Haynes, he said dramatically, you
hold in your hand the agent of Sol s destruction!
She looked at it with fascinated horror and gingerly replaced it in the
packing.
So develop it. Plate your ships with it. Line the millions of blasters with
it. Line your power converters with it. Use zonium in the units that give each
dwelling light and power. Load every sportsman s crate with it and have
everybody tossing cubes of the stuff around. Interesting stuff kids will be
playing with it. Then calculate your chances of keeping a bit of it out of the
sun.
Ellen Haynes shuddered. About once each year some spacecraft didn t
return, usually a small, privately-owned job that was trying to cut the
perihelion too thin. The mortality was rather high on the drones that rode the
inner flame-area of Sol s domain with automatic recorders. Yet, with good
supervision, zonium would be safe.
How, she asked drily, do you hope to destroy it?
I don t know, he said. But it must be destroyed.
CHAPTER IV
Biggest Meddler
ELLEN nodded slowly. Her dream of untold wealth dimmed somewhat.
Yet she knew that supervision of the zonium metal would insure its safety. It
had been so with the original fission of uranium and plutonium.
What had been made before could be made again. She would let Jim
Forrest destroy it and then set about getting it rebuilt again in the
government laboratory. What could any one man do to stop the
development of any single phase of science?
The thing to do now was to agree with him, learn from Jim Forrest all the
math and reasoning behind the stuff. Just how did he know he alone of all
the worlds of Sol and their teeming billions that zonium would react that
way. Especially when he had not worked with it.
But Ellen knew that before she could interest the laboratory in zonium,
she must have scientific and mathematical basis for her predictions. With
that, not only could she interest them but she would be forgiven for her
original theft. She would go along for now and learn as much as she could
about zonium.
Tell me, she said interestedly, how do you know all this about
zonium?
Know matrix-math? he asked.
A little.
I ll bet I lose you along the way, he said. But we ve a week of hard
travel between here and Ganymede in which I can prove to you and also
teach you how to handle matrix-math that everything I ve said is true.
Jim Forrest locked the crystal in the cabinet, and found paper and
pencils. He started to talk and he wrote equations as he spoke, explaining
each step as he went along. Ellen Haynes nodded. It was thick, and she
would require the whole week even to catch up to the theories of Jim
Forrest... .
Captain Turner, imprisoned in Jim Forrest s personal cruiser, spent a full
twenty-hour period wondering. He had been resigned at first, but the idea of
sitting there was against his grain.
The welded door was a mean problem. How does one breach a solid
aluminum door when the thinner panels are three-sixteenths sheet
aluminum-magnesium alloy and the edgings and crossbars that hold the
panels are one-inch stock?
He undid the floor thumbscrews that held the chair down against
maneuverings in space and hefted it. It too was aluminum alloy. He swung it
at the door and dented the panel, but broke the legs of the chair. Had the
seat been heavy and solid that would have done nicely, he thought.
But the chair-bottom itself was a mere frame upon which was woven a
plastic-rope in the standard pattern of a cane-bottomed chair. The metal of
the chair was brittle and he broke it after three swings that put but a few
minute scars on the panel of the door.
The floor-lamp was little better aluminum-zinc-magnesium die-castings.
Not only were the parts light and brittle, they were positively friable.
He tried the drawers in the dresser and they added to the pile of broken
metal. The bed was no good at all just a welded-down shelf on top of
which was a thick airfoam mattress.
The kitchen quarters produced a couple of sharp knives, which he
employed to some advantage, but their very-long blades left Turner with too
little leverage until he broke them off short. Cutting three-sixteenths
aluminum alloy panel was no job for a knife.
HE SAT down to think after that. Brute force was useless brainwork
might produce an answer.
Aluminum is soluble in certain reagents and he was in what amounted
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