It had rained for over two days.
The Engineering Materials Research Department of the Ministry of Space Sciences huddled wetly in a fold of the Ural Mountains, an occasional ray of sunlight glinting from a laboratory window or from one of the aluminum domes of the reactor building. Seated in her office in the analysis section, Valereya Petrokhov turned to the pile of reports left on her desk for routine approval. The first two dealt with run-of-the-mill high-temperature corrosion tests. She flicked casually through the pages, glanced at the appended graphs and tables, scrawled her initials on the line provided, and tossed them across into the tray marked "Out." Automatically she began scanning down the first page of number three. Suddenly she stopped, a puzzled frown forming on her face. Leaning forward in her chair, she began again, this time reading carefully and studying every sentence. She finally went back to the beginning once more and worked methodically through the whole document, stopping in places to verify the calculations by means of the keyboard display standing on one side of the desk.
"This is unheard of!" she exclaimed.
For a long time she remained motionless, her eyes absorbed by the raindrops slipping down the window but her mind so focused elsewhere that the sight failed to register. At last she shook herself into movement and, turning again to the keyboard, rapidly tapped in a code. The strings of tensor equations vanished, to be replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched over a console in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself into a full face as he turned.
"Ready to run in about twenty minutes," he said, anticipating the question. "The plasma’s stabilizing now."
"No—this has nothing to do with that," she replied, speaking a little more quickly than usual. "It’s about your report 2906. I’ve just been through my copy."
"Oh . . . yes?" His change in expression betrayed mild apprehension.
"So—a niobium-zirconium alloy," she went on, stating the fact rather than asking a question, "with an unprecedented resistance to high-temperature oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly, I won’t believe until I’ve done the tests myself."
"Makes our plasma-cans look like butter," Josef agreed.
"Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower neutron-absorption cross section than pure zirconium?"
"Macroscopic, yes—under a millibarn per square centimeter."
"Interesting . . ." she mused, then resumed more briskly: "On top of that we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and nitrogen impurities, yet still with a superb corrosion resistance."
"Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites— we’ve been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but it’s rapidly arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You could probably break it down in stages by devising a cycle of reagents in just the right sequence, but that would take a complete processing plant specially designed for the job!"
"And the microstructure," Valereya said, gesturing toward the papers on her desk. "You’ve used the description fibrous."
"Yes. That’s about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to be formed around a—well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It’s mainly silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some titanium-magnesium compound that we haven’t been able to quantify yet. I’ve never come across anything like it. Any ideas?"
The woman’s face held a faraway look for some seconds.
"I honestly don’t know what to think at the moment," she confessed. "But I feel this information should be passed higher without delay; it might be more important than it looks. But first I must be sure of my facts. Nikolai can take over down there for a while. Come up to my office and let’s go through the whole thing in detail."