“Can you tell me anything about Nick’s work?” Jason asked. “What was he doing?”
“It’s classified.” Bloch said.
I can’t believe they’re doing this, Jason thought. The bottom seemed to be dropping out of his stomach. I can’t believe they’re going to strand me here, whether I want to work for them or not.
Wu leaned forward and set something the size of a walnut on the table. It was made of a silvery metal. One side had bubbled and melted; it had been exposed to very high temperatures.
“What do you think of it?” Wu asked.
Jason reached out and touched it with his fingertips. Cool and hard, it had an almost greasy texture. He picked it up—and gasped. It was feather-light, far lighter than aluminum, or any other metal he knew of.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded. He met Wu’s cool, steady gaze. “What is it?”
“You must sign the nondisclosure agreement first,” Bloch said. He twitched it forward again.
Jason took a deep breath. What would he be getting himself into? What had Nick been working on? What was this metal, and where had it come from?
For a heartbeat, he stared down at the paper, then picked it up and read it a second time, slowly and carefully. The terms hadn’t improved. But as the general said, it did specify compensation…twenty thousand per month, for the duration of his involvement with the project. It guaranteed six months of work, plus an option to extend employment for another six months by mutual agreement. It meant wintering here. But if Wu meant to keep him here, anyway…
Idly, he rubbed his thumb across the lump of strange, silvery, light-as-air metal. Metal like nothing he had ever seen or heard of before. Nick must have been working on it.
It was the discovery of a lifetime. The possible uses in aircraft—in spaceships—even for his own asteroid-mining project—stretched before him.
If it could be mass-produced, it would change the world.
He bit his lip. He had to be part of it.
He signed.
CHAPTER THREE
En Route to Army Corps of Engineers
Special Operations Base, Antarctica
On the two-hour helicopter trip from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to the Army base, Jason barely noticed Wu and Bloch’s presence. The general sat up front, next to the pilot. Bloch sat in the seat next to Jason, typing fast on a small laptop computer.
“Reports,” the colonel told him, voice tinny and distant in the headphones.
Jason barely nodded. He was already pawing through a satchel stuffed with Nick’s papers—scribbled notes, field reports, test results—trying to make sense of the work.
From what he could tell, Nick had made almost no progress. Clearly the Antarctic had gotten to him. His journal spent as much time complaining about migraine headaches and night-terrors as it did documenting tests on the metal fragments. The journal painted the picture of a man slowly falling apart under immense stress and close confinement. Worse, no one at the base had recognized danger signs until Nick hanged himself.
And the metal… It defied analyses on so many levels, at least with the tools available at the army base. He knew more about what it wasn’t than what it was.
Non-radioactive.
Non-conductive.
Acids had no effect.
The most interesting results came when he used a small foundry to discover its thermal properties. It melted at 1,180 degrees—roughly 300 degrees more than zinc, but 40 degrees less than aluminum. Given those properties, it shouldn’t have been harder than steel.
Then, against all logic, it burned explosively at 1,640 degrees.
He dug out a pen and scribbled a few notes in the margins of Nick’s journal, double-checking all the calculations. The energy output seemed to violate Hess’s Law governing constant heat summation. That, or Nick had made a series of gross mistakes and miscalculations. And that wasn’t like Nick.
He sat back, staring at the calculations, trying to wrap his mind around the implications. Could Hess’s Law be wrong?
He jumped when Col. Bloch’s voice broke in on his thoughts:
“Dr. Armstrong got that same look the first time he tried to analyze the metal.”
“There must be a mistake somewhere,” Jason said, turning to meet his gaze. “The math is wrong.”
“Or we don’t understand how the universe really works.”
Bloch cleared his throat, then proceeded to explain about the object found in glacial ice. “We suspect it to be a 19-million-year-old spaceship,” he said flatly.
“A…spaceship?” Nick started to laugh, but Bloch didn’t seem to be joking.
“This is the second one we’ve found,” the colonel said.
“No shit?”
“Scout’s honor.” He held up three fingers. “A research station found the first one in 1938. They accidentally blew it up when they tried to melt the ice with thermite.”
“That was a monumental bit of stupidity. Thermite burns at more than 4,000 degrees.”
Bloch nodded. “It was a different age. They weren’t prepared the way we are.”
“How come word never got out?”
“Hard to prove, when you’ve blown up the evidence.”
True. “Tell me about the metal.”
“We have a team from the Army Corps of Engineers tunneling down to the spaceship. They have been passing through a debris field—it’s mostly rock and dirt thrown up by the crash impact. But they found a few lumps of this super-light metal.”
Jason rifled through the journal pages. “Nick destroyed…let’s see…two of the fragments during testing, when they caught fire in his lab. How many others are there?”
“Four more.”
General Wu broke in, voice tinny over the earphones. “News from the base. The tunnel has entered a larger debris field.” He turned in the front seat and faced Jason for the first time since they had left the Amundsen-Scott Station. “They have made several new discoveries that will interest you.”
Jason leaned forward. “More of this metal?” he asked.
“Much larger pieces, yes.”
“Great.” They needed decent samples. “You have to get one to a lab with a scanning electron microscope, and I need an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.”
“Yes. I believe Dr. Armstrong ordered one of those X-ray things shortly before his death. It hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Put a rush on it. I need an elemental analysis of the metal. Given the properties, it might even contain exotic matter with negative mass…or something even bigger.” Jason paged back through the journal, looking for a passage he’d read half an hour before. “Nick thought there might be something screwy with it on the molecular level. Some sort of forced bond that shouldn’t occur—can’t occur—in nature.” He looked up. “This is important. If we can replicate this metal, it will change everything in the world, from toasters to airplanes. You have to send it out for analysis immediately.”
There was a sharp click on the audiochannel, and the general faced forward again. Jason could see him talking, but couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the ’copter’s rotors.
Bloch had heard him, though, and shook his head. “Negative. The general doesn’t want word leaking out. See what you can do on site.”
“These notes complain over and over that facilities are inadequate.”
“As I told Dr. Armstrong, make a list. I will get everything you need, if it’s at all possible.”
Sighing, Jason looked down at the papers in his lap. No sense arguing; Bloch and Wu clearly meant to keep the find to themselves for now. He’d survey the lab and make a list of anything that might prove helpful. Who knew, perhaps the army would deliver.