Pelops, who fancies himself as a medical man, was trying to cure Chephron's sores with some salve he found aboard. It didn't work, but Pelops did find out that Chephron, the idiot, was carrying around a piece of raw meta in his pocket.
"It is a luck piece," Chephron said to me. "I carry it just to remind myself that I no longer toil in the mines. Whenever I am sick and the sores pain me and make people avoid me I look at the piece of meta and tell myself how much better off I am."
I quote him verbatim in the above. Anyway Pelops got the idea that the raw meta had something to do with the sores. Chephron wouldn't part with it. So Pelops, who is now the ship's doctor and, I suppose, as good as any, had Chephron up in front of me. As long as I am writing this at all, taking the trouble, I may as well put that into quotes also.
Pelops said, "I want to throw it overboard, sire, but the fool will not part with it. He has carried it since the mine and I believe it makes him sick and keeps his sores from healing. He will not listen to me - but if you order him!"
I did not like looking at Chephron and his sores - a thing I am not proud of, but in this log I am telling the truth, since nobody will ever see it anyway - and I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. Chephron did not smell so good, either, though I make all the men bathe once a day in sea Water.
"Let me see the thing," I ordered. "Take it 'from him, Pelops, and hand it to me."
Chephron growled a little, but he obeyed. I examined the chunk of raw meta closely.
Strange how the human brain works even when it has been distorted and reconstituted by Lord L's computer. The chunk of meta was about half the size of a cricket ball. Heavy, with a lot of mass and density, a mixture of black-brown in color. I flipped it in my palm, not really thinking too much about it, ' and studied poor little Chephron. For some reason, only Bek-Tor knows why, as Pelops would say, I remembered something I had read back in H Dimension. Something about the chemical table of the human body and what it was worth in money. In dollars and cents - it must have been a reprint from a Yank paper. I could even remember the exact figures - that the value of body chemicals and minerals was up 257% since 1936. In that year they had been worth about 98 cents. Now they were valued at $3.50. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus, all of them, even a little gold and silver, worth almost four dollars. I was looking at Chephron and thinking that on that scale he was worth about sixpence.
The important thing was that it got me to thinking about minerals. I took a better and longer look at the meta. Something started buzzing in my mind, but it wouldn't come out in the open.
I flung the chunk of meta on my bunk and told Chephron that I would decide later after I had studied the stuff. He grumbled a little but in the end he bowed and took off. Then I had to listen to Pelops.
He glared at the meta. "If you keep it around, sire, you will get the sores and the sickness. I am convinced of it. Let me throw it over the side. I have long thought, ever since I - "
By this time I knew when he was getting ready to go into a lecture and I cut him short. I was a little curt with him.
"One night will do no harm," I told him. "Forget it. And here is an order - find me an ingot of refined meta, or a coin of the stuff, and bring it to me at once. Hurry up."
He thought I was bonkers. "An ingot of meta, sire? Where would I find that aboard this ship?"
I admitted the unlikelihood. "Find me a coin, then. Any coin.' They are all made of meta, aren't they?"
"Of course, sire. What else? But surely you know - Otto the Black controlled all coinage - even the Queen had few coins - how am I to find a coin among slaves? It is impossible. I myself have not possessed a meta coin in years. And as I was about to say, sire, when you switched the talk to coins, I - "
I leveled a finger at him - remember to clean your nails, Blade - and said, "As you are not about to say, Polonius, get the hell out of here and find me a coin. You have four hundred ex-slaves to search. Surely one of them somehow and somewhere, will have concealed a coin. Look for it. Don't come back until you find it."
When I get that tone in my voice Pelops knows I mean it, But he stopped at the cabin door and looked at me. "Polonius? I am Pelops, as you well know. Why did you call me by another name? Who is Polonius?"
It was hard to keep from laughing, but I managed. "A very great man in the literature of my own land," I told him. "Very wise. Of the finest character. A fount of good advice and much looked up to. He only had one failing."
Pelops, all smiles now, mollified, was bowing and smirking at me. "His failing, sire? What was it?"
"HE TALKED TOO DAMNED MUCH. OUT - OUT! FIND ME A COIN!"
When he was gone I examined the chunk of raw meta again. I forced my memory back to a class I had attended at the Naval School in Greenwich. J had made me go.
Just suppose, I thought to myself. Symbol U or UR. AT. no., 92 AT. wt., 238.07.
It all came slipping back into my mind. Possible? Hell - I was in Sarma! Who would have thought that possible before Lord L came up with his master computer?
Just before dark Pelops came back with a small square coin. He had washed it well, he explained, because one of the former slaves had had it concealed up his anus. I did not ask how Pelops had come by it.
I examined the coin with the crude telescope I had inherited. Not very satisfactory, but good enough. I scratched it with a knife. Heavy, dense, nickellike. Very hard. It could just be.
That night, before the cabin lamp was lit, I lay on the bunk and studied the chunk of raw meta. After staring at it for a long time I had to call in Pelops and Ixion for their opinions. I was beginning to doubt my own eyes.
They saw it, too. A faint glow in the dark, just a hint of fluorescence, a barely seen nimbus around the chunk of meta.
Pitchblende.
For the first time in four trips out into Dimension X I had found a treasure that could really be called a treasure. In Sarma there were whole mountain ranges of pitchblende. Chephron had radiation sores.
I have decided to have a special pocket made in my clothes for the piece of meta and the coin. Recompense the man for his coin.
All the above is written in retrospect, long after the fact, for the simple reason that I have just gotten back to this log. A hell of a lot has happened since I identified that chunk of meta ay pitchblende. Most all of it bad. Some good, though. I have found Zeena again!
Not that finding her turned out to be such a good thing. It really wasn't. But none of that, because I can't bring myself to write about it. The biggest trouble is that I now have another woman on my hands. The two of them are driving me crazy.
Let me see. It is hard to pick up a log like this after so much time and so many events - so I will just say that I was lying there thinking about the pitchblende and wondering if Lord L could ever invent teleportation so we could get the stuff back to H Dimension, when Ixion came in with bad news. I am trying to remember just how he put it. I do remember that he still had a bandage around his neck and was very pale. Ixion was a good man and a fine seaman. If it were not for Ixion I wouldn't be writing in this log again.
Ixion said, "There is weather making, Captain Blade. Looks like one of the Purple storms that come this time of year. We had best get off the land as far as we can."
We had been coasting south.
I wasn't particularly worried, I remember. I did my time in the Navy and I've been around boats most of my life. And he was right, of course. I didn't want to fool around with a lee shore.