“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 transformation 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.