Part 6 (2/2)
Along toward morning Quisenberry stood up, stretched, looked with distaste at his umpteenth cup of coffee, and said, ”I've made some a.s.sumptions, boss, that I'd better check with you before I give you the bad news. Okay?” ”Okay.”
”Rush all possible. That means twenty fours hours a day, Sat.u.r.days, Sundays, and holidays. All the personnel that can work efficiently, all the time. Crash priorities on material, which means no time for compet.i.tive bidding, so we'll have to pay top prices and bonuses. Check to here?”
”Check and okay.”
”Plant capacity. a.s.suming that you want to cut the price down to somewhere between eleven and twelve cents...”
”You're right on the beam, Quizz. Nearer eleven, I think.”
”Extrapolating on that basis, my guessometer says that we'll have to be producing at the rate of fifteen million tons by the end of the first year. That's a mighty big plant, boss. That's one supreme h.e.l.l of a big plant.” ”I know. I like those figures very much.”
”You won't like these next ones, I'm afraid. On this rush-and-bonus basis it'll take pretty close to twenty five megabucks in the first couple of months, and the total-well, it's a very rough guess at this point. All I'm sure of is the order of magnitude, but the total to first pour will probably run somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy five megabucks.”
”Thanks. That's close enough for now. just so we don't get caught short of cash in the till.”
”But listen-sir-Phelps will have a litter of lizards!” ”He'll be amenable to reason when he finds out that we are entering a completely new era in metals. Felton, how about you?”
Felton-a brawny youth with butch-cut straw-colored hair and blue eyes-could not answer immediately because his mouth was full of shrimp a la Creole. He swallowed hastily, then said: ”Since this will have to be a crash-pri job, too, everything Quizz said will apply. Add high radiation to all that, and a hostile dead planet clear out to h.e.l.langone beyond anywhere, and the tab gets no smaller fast. My best guesstimate as of now is that the total will crowd a hundred megabucks.”
”Fair enough. Thanks a...”
”One thing first,” Felton interrupted. ”Are you sure enough of this-this super-bonanza-for me to roust Ba.s.sler out right now? Tell him to cut out all this ten-cent petty-larceny rock-scratching we're doing now, break out all the armor we've got and order more, and start-but quick-ja.s.sacking some of that high-grade out of there and hauling it-to Galmetia?”
”An excellent idea. Splendid! If I'd thought of it I would have suggested it hours ago. Go ahead.”
Felton did so and Maynard went on, ”Since you fellows made these estimates in hours instead of weeks I'll give you plenty of leeway. Miss Champion, please issue two preliminary authorizations: Quisenberry, seventy five megabucks; Felton, a hundred.”
Preliminaries! Not maxes! Staring at each other as though they could not believe their ears, the two engineers shook hands solemnly with each other, and then with all three of the others. Then they poured themselves two more cups of strong black coffee and went back to work.
Work went on until half past five. Then, since each would have to be on the job by nine o'clock, Maynard broke it up so that each could get three hours' sleep. All top-echelon private offices were equipped for that. Night work was an essential part of such man-killing jobs as theirs; a part that envious underlings knew nothing about. It had happened before and it would happen again. And again and again.
This entire episode was just another one of those things.
A couple of months later, Miss Champion showed Deston into Maynard's office. The tyc.o.o.n, although showing the effects of too little sleep, was in very fine fettle indeed.
”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-d.a.m.ned good people-each of whom wants a planetary project so pa.s.sionately 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, t.i.tanium, 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 a.s.sociated with manganese. Maybe it occurs in molybdenite as the sulphide-ReS2 and/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 ma.s.s... 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 Diminis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s of it anywhere the others are apt to be there too, and a h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l will be out for noon.”
”That sounds like something more than ordinary s.e.x 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 b.i.t.c.h, and one hundred percent h.e.l.l-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 pa.s.ses 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.e.x-appeal at all; Byrd oozes it at every pore. So I tell you rhenium first and the s.e.x-pot is first out. So the other five know she got it by sleeping with me, and she-the G.o.d d.a.m.ned b.i.t.c.h!-grins like the Chesire cat and rubs it in that she has got what it takes to land the big ones.”
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