“You’re a soldier?” the collector asked as he served tea. After receiving a nod, he went on: “Soldiers these days aren’t much like soldiers used to be, but you, I could tell at a glance.”
“You were a soldier once too,” Zhang Beihai said.
“Good eye. I spent most of my life serving in the General Staff Department’s Surveying and Mapping Bureau.”
“How did you get interested in meteors?” Zhang Beihai asked as he looked appreciatively at the rich collection.
“Over a decade ago I went with a survey team to Antarctica in search of meteorites buried beneath the snow, and I got hooked. They come from outside of Earth, from distant space, so naturally they’ve got that attraction. Whenever I pick one up, it’s like I’m going to a new and alien world.”
Zhang Beihai shook his head with a smile. “That’s just a feeling. The Earth itself is formed out of aggregated interstellar matter, so it’s basically just a giant meteorite. The stone beneath our feet is meteorite. This teacup I’m holding is meteorite. Besides, they say that the water on Earth was brought here by comets, so”—he raised the teacup—”what’s contained in this cup is meteorite, too. There’s nothing particularly special about what you have.”
The collector pointed at him and laughed. “You’re sharp. You’ve already started to bargain…. Still, I trust my feelings.”
The collector couldn’t resist taking Zhang Beihai on a tour, and he even opened a safe to show him the treasure of his house: a Martian achondrite the size of a fingernail. He had him view the small round pits on the meteorite’s surface and said that they might be microbial fossils. “Five years ago, Robert Haag wanted to buy her for a thousand times the price of gold, but I didn’t agree.”
“How many of these did you collect on your own?” asked Zhang Beihai, pointing around the room.
“Only a small part. The majority were bought from the private sector or traded from the community…. So, let’s hear it. What sort do you want?”
“Nothing too valuable. It should be high density, shouldn’t break easily under impact, and should be easily workable.”
“I see. You want to engrave it.”
He nodded. “You could say that. It would be great if I could use a lathe.”
“Then an iron meteorite,” the collector said as he opened a glass case and took out a dark-colored stone the size of a walnut. “This one. It’s composed mainly of iron and nickel, with cobalt, phosphorus, silicon, sulfur, and copper. You want dense? This one’s eight grams to the cubic centimeter. It’s easily workable, and highly metallic, so the lathe won’t be a problem.”
“Good. It’s just a little too small.”
The collector took out another piece the size of an apple.
“Do you have anything even bigger?”
The collector looked at him and said, “This stuff’s not sold by weight. The big ones are expensive.”
“Well, do you have three the size of this one?”
The collector brought out three iron meteorites of roughly the same size and began to lay the groundwork for his asking price: “Iron meteorites are not very common. They represent just five percent of all meteorites, and these three are fine specimens. See here—this one’s an octahedrite. Look at the crisscross pattern on the surface. They’re called Widmanstätten patterns. And here’s a nickel-rich ataxite. These parallel lines are called Neumann lines. This piece contains kamacite, and this one is taenite, a mineral not found on Earth. This piece is one I found in the desert using a metal detector, and it was like fishing a needle out of the ocean. The car got stuck in the sand and the drive shaft snapped. I almost died.”
“Name your price.”
“On the international market, a specimen of this size and grade would have a price of about twenty USD per gram. So how’s this: sixty thousand yuan per piece, or three for one hundred eighty thousand?”[4]
Zhang Beihai took out his phone. “Tell me your account number. I’ll pay right away.”
The collector said nothing for quite some time. When Zhang Beihai looked up, he gave a slightly embarrassed laugh. “Actually, I was ready for you to counter-offer.”
“No. I accept.”
“Look. Now that space travel is for everyone, the market price has dropped somewhat even though it’s not as easy to get meteorites in space as it is on the ground. These, well, they’re worth—”
Zhang Beihai cut him off decisively. “No. That’s the price. Treat it as a sign of respect for their recipients.”
After leaving the collector’s house, Zhang Beihai took the meteorites to a modeling workshop in a research institute belonging to the space force. Work had let out and the workshop, which contained a state-of-the-art CNC mill, was empty. First, he used the mill to slice the three meteorites into cylinders of equal diameter, about the thickness of a pencil lead, and then cut them into small segments of equal length. He worked very carefully, trying to minimize waste as much as possible, and ended up with thirty-six small meteorite rods. When this was done, he carefully collected the cutting debris, removed the special blade he had selected for cutting the stone from the machine, and then left the workshop.
The remainder of the work he conducted in a secret basement. He set thirty-six 7.62 mm pistol cartridges on the table before him and removed each projectile in turn. If they had been old-style brass cartridges, this would have required a lot of effort, but two years ago the entire military had updated its standard guns to use caseless ammunition, whose projectile was glued directly to the propellant and was easy to detach. Next, he used a special adhesive to affix a meteorite rod onto each propellant. The adhesive, originally developed to repair the skin of space capsules, ensured that the bond would not fail in the extreme hot and cold temperatures of space. In the end he had thirty-six meteorite bullets.
He inserted four meteorite bullets into a magazine, which he then loaded into a P224 pistol and fired at a sack in the corner. The gunshot was deafening in the narrow basement room and left behind a strong scent of gunpowder.
He carefully examined the four holes in the sack, noting that they were small, which meant that the meteorite had not shattered upon firing. He opened the sack and withdrew a large hunk of fresh beef, and with a knife carefully extracted the meteorite that had penetrated it. The four meteorite rods had shattered completely, leaving a small pile of rubble that he poured onto his palm. It showed practically no sign of having been worked. This outcome satisfied him.
The sack that held the beef was made out of materials used in space suits. To make the simulation even more realistic, it had been arranged in layers that sandwiched insulation sponges, plastic tubing, and other material.
He carefully packed up the remaining thirty-two meteorite bullets and exited the basement, heading off to make preparations for his visit to space.
Zhang Beihai hung in space five kilometers out from Yellow River Station, a wheel-shaped space station that lay three hundred kilometers above the space elevator terminus as a counterweight. It was the largest structure humanity had ever constructed in space and it could house over a thousand long-term residents.
The region of space within a five-hundred-kilometer radius of the space elevator was home to other space facilities, all of them much smaller than Yellow River Station and scattered about like the nomadic tents that dotted the prairie during the opening of the American West. These formed the prelude of humanity’s large-scale entrance into space. The shipyards that had just commenced construction were the largest yet and would eventually cover an area ten times greater than Yellow River Station, but right now, all that had been put up was scaffolding that looked like the skeleton of a leviathan. Zhang Beihai had come from Base 1, a separate space station eighty kilometers away and just one-fifth the size of Yellow River Station, the space force’s base in geostationary orbit. He had been living and working with the other members of the first Special Contingent of Future Reinforcements for three months now and had only been back to Earth once.