SEVENTEEN

 

 

THEY DIDN’T HAVE any lead to shield them from radiation, but the probe’s shell was heavy. Pascal did a slow examination of the probe, mapping out the radiation. The count outside the probe was almost uniformly negligible. The ceramic must have been heavily doped with lead. Only through the pitted, glassy lens at the front did radiation shine out. Pascal began cutting through the probe with a circular saw. Dust flew off the gantry and rained darkly in the wind behind him.

He took pictures as he went, trying to map as much as he could of the lines of conducting metal, but his heart sank when he’d cut out a plate thirty centimeters on a side. Looking edge-on, the hull of the probe was filled to bursting with complex patterns of fine metal wiring. There was no way to map this without cutting it into thousands of sections and photographing each one. He hadn’t the tools for that. Whatever it was, whether the toy of an alien intelligence or the epitome of human genius, he was destroying it for scrap. Very, very expensive scrap. He and his father would need to save one or two of these probes for proper scientific study later.

His father joined him by the time he’d sawed out seven such sections.

“They’re filled with metals!” George-Étienne said.

“Gonna be hard to get the metal to market,” Pascal said, sawing the section over the source of radiation, about two thirds of the way to the stern of the probe.

“We already grab volcanic dust from the clouds,” George-Étienne said. “People expect us to be selling dust. If we grind these up, people will think we’ve had a lucky few months.”

Pascal checked the depth of his cut, brushed at it, then resumed.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere on Venus, Pa,” Pascal said. “If they look at the dust they’ll see it hasn’t been acid-worn.”

George-Étienne cracked two pieces together experimentally. They didn’t break.

“So we grind them up and separate the metal from the ceramic dust.”

He whacked the pieces together again with no more success.

“It’s going to take mechanical grinding, Pa.”

The eighth plate came loose. Pascal hung up the saw and passed the Geiger counter around the cut. It clicked a lot. He removed the plate, revealing a fist-sized ceramic block, pitted in a pattern he didn’t recognize. The detector’s clicking came so fast that it was a continuous buzz. Pascal blocked the source with the plate again and the counts diminished.

“What is it?” George-Étienne said wonderingly.

“I checked the detector’s manual,” Pascal said. “A counter like this can’t distinguish between different materials, but uranium is common enough in space, and plutonium is a decay product. Could be cobalt or thorium too.”

“That’d run a power plant for years,” George-Étienne said. “Or power the engine of a thermal fission rocket. We wouldn’t need the Bank for shipping. Can you imagine not needing the Bank?”

“We’ve got to do something safe with it until we can get some lead.”

Pascal started making a box out of the plates he’d cut, fastening the sides with carbon filament. He pried the fist-sized piece of radioactive material out and used tongs to put it in his makeshift box before covering it. The radiation counter ticked slowly outside the box. George-Étienne helped by wrapping a bit of thin trawler skin around the box to hold it together better.

“The bathyscaphe is thick enough that if we put this in there, the radiation shouldn’t make us sick,” Pascal said.

“I’ll fly it over.”

They used the Geiger counter to look for more stray radioactive particles, scooped them into the box and sealed it. George-Étienne shouldered into a wing-pack and plunged into the clouds with their prize.