“EG & E Inc.”
“Exactly. EG & E. We tailed them back to the building but didn’t want to press our luck by going inside,” Willis said.
“That was the right thing to do. For now, that is all we need to know. I think I’ll call a friend of mine at the FBI and have him get the goods on our friends in Georgetown. I’ll point them in that direction for the George Snapp bomb. I’m sure they’d like to have a little help,” she said.
“You want me to keep a tail on them?”
“No. I don’t see any point, unless you feel it necessary.”
No, I don’t either. I just wanted to make sure,” Willis said.
“Good work. Thanks for the tip,” Sarah said.
She looked up the number of a friend at the FBI whom she had known for years. If anyone had a file on EG&E it would be the FBI and he would get it for her, even if he moaned and groaned a little bit at first.
Raymond had met so many people that he was having a hard time keeping them all straight. He knew hundreds of people back in Washington and never had a problem. It was something about the way they all dressed the same and most of the men looked a great deal alike. Or maybe it was something about being out here so far from civilization.
“I’m sorry but I’ve forgotten your name," he said.
He pulled his ID card out of his lab coat pocket and said, “Dr. James Brimmer.”
“Sorry. Dr. Brimmer. Is it possible to make a weapon of some sort out of this Element-115 they have been talking about?” Raymond asked.
“A weapon? What kind of weapon?”
“I have no idea. I was just wondering if it could be done.”
“A weapon? Well, yes I guess it could be done. I don’t know why you would want to do that. The US has enough weapons in its arsenal as it is, I should think.”
“I don’t want to make one. I was just asking if it could be done,” he tried to explain.
“I am sure that if someone wanted one it could be built with this element. The problem would be producing enough. If we hadn’t recovered the ship in Aztec, New Mexico, we wouldn’t even have what we do now. The first step would be to obtain enough of the Uup-115 to make a weapon. Transuranic elements in the periodic table can only be produced in nuclear reactors. Did you know we have discovered Element Uuo-118 at the Berkeley National Lab? The problem is that it decays into Uuh-116 or Ununhexium, fairly quickly. Still, who knows what that can lead to,” the doctor replied.
“Is this new found Element-118 all that much different from, say, uranium?”
“Oh heavens yes. Uranium has 92 photons and 146 neutrons. It pales next to Element-118 that has a mass of 118 photons and 175 neutrons. The more mass you have the more energy you can generate,” Doctor Brimmer explained.
Raymond still wasn’t sure he understood it all but what he did understand was that a weapon could be made if this mysterious Uup-115 could be obtained, and he knew it could, because he had actually seen it. It looked like an unimpressive wedge of reddish-orange rust colored piece of metal.
From what he had learned in the past week, until we had obtained the fifty-one pounds of Uup-115 from the aliens, we were pretty much dead in the water as far as making advances in space travel by folding time.
While contemplating it, he suddenly had a thought. He thanked the doctor and rushed to the elevator to go from Level-6 back up to Level -1. He went to Bay–1 where they were concentrating their efforts on producing a working ship.
“I forget, who is in charge of this particular program?” he asked the first person he came to in a lab coat.
“Doctor Yurris.”
“Which one is he?”
“She. Doctor Lynn Yurris. She is right over there,” he said pointing to someone bent over a piece of machinery.
“Excuse me. Are you Doctor Urass?”
“It’s pronounced U ris, and yes I am,” she said, taking her glasses off. Raymond was surprised at how attractive she was. It must have shown because she said, “I take it I am not exactly what you expected.”
Her smile seemed to light up the already bright bay.
“Boy. You get right to it. And yes, you are not what I was expecting,” he said honestly.
“You must be Eller. Everyone has heard about you by now. You’re here to keep an eye on us or the general. Which is it?”
“Damn, woman. Can’t we dance a little first?”
“Sorry. I’m fairly blunt. I usually don’t do well with the small talk,” she said, pulling her sand colored hair back and tying it in a ponytail.
She was almost six feet tall and had grey-blue eyes that seemed to radiate in the lighting in the bay.
“All right. I just wanted to ask you something if I may. How much Uup-115 are you using for fuel in this thing?” he said, touching the side of the craft.
“The U–1?”
“The you one what?”
“No. This craft is called the U–1. And to answer your question, we are currently working with approximately thirty-four pounds.”
“Why that amount?”
“The containment vessel is cone shaped. The fuel must fit in the containment area with the dome closed down over the top of it before the necessary energy is generated to force a distortion in the continuum,” she said.
“How did it get into the shape it is in now? Did it come that way?”
“Good heavens no. We should be so lucky. It came as disks. We first had to fuse them together under tremendous heat and pressure over a long period of time. Then the block, actually a cylinder, had to be milled to fit the cone. It took nearly two and a half years just to get it like it is today,” she explained.
“What about the remaining UuP?”
“Well, if you know anything about milling, it is a slow process where a small layer is taken off at a time by a machine. It took a special rig and new type of machine to mill it into the shape we needed. We spent a year just learning how to go about it the right way. The scraps were collected and stored for future use,” she said.
“Stored where?”
“I have no idea. All I wanted to do was get my hands on the core so we could see if we could figure out this amazing contraption.”
“Why can’t you produce more of this magic material?”
She walked over to a large whiteboard and started to write.
24395Am + 4820 Ca → 287115Uup + 4 1n
24395Am + 4820 Ca → 288115Uup + 3 1n
“We tried to make it or at least duplicate. In the first experiments, three nuclei of the 288Uup isotope were made and one of the 287Uup isotope. All the nuclei formed decayed in less than a second by emitting alpha particles. These decays resulted in isotopes of the Element-113. It has a mass number of 283 or 284, containing 113 protons and either 170 or 171 neutrons depending on several factors. These isotopes of Element-113 are also radioactive and underwent further decay. This decay processes to an isotope of Element-111 and so on down to at least Element-105 or Dubnium. Something like this, she said, picking up the marker and writing on the board again
287115Uup → 283113Uut + 42He (46.6 milliseconds)
283113Uut → 280112Uub + 42He (80.3 milliseconds)
280112Uub → 278111Rg + 42He (18.6 milliseconds)
278111Rg → 275110Ds + 42He (280 milliseconds)