"Okay. Each of you take a table; you'll need lots of room. Quisenberry, here's everything you'll need on a deposit of copper. Felton, ditto, uranium. I want preliminary roughouts of those projects as fast as you can get them. Very rough: plus-or-minus twenty five percent will be close enough. Now, Don and Miss Champion, what well have to do tonight is rough out a -full operational on copper in the light of information that has just come to hand."

  After what may have been an hour Mrs. Maynard came in and Quisenberry came up for air. His table was littered with hand-books, machine-tapes of various kinds, graphs, charts, and wadded-up scratch-paper; much of which had overflowed onto the floor.

  "But this is incredible, sir." It was the first time either engineer had called Maynard "sir" in over a year. "Of course I can't say that it's absolutely impossible for any such deposit as this to occur, but..." Quisenberry paused.

  Maynard grinned again, but pleasantly, this time. "Do you think I'd have all that stuff faked up and then come down here and work all night myself just to put you two through the wringer?"

  "Put that way, of course not... but..." Quisenberry paused again and Felton, who had stopped work and was listening with both ears, came in with:

  "Quizz said it, Mr. Maynard, and mine's ten to the fourth as hard to swallow as his. I can't make myself believe that there's that much uranium in one place anywhere in the universe."

  "I know exactly how you feel," Maynard assured them. "I was flabbergasted myself. You may take it as a fact, however, that all that data is accurate to within the appropriate limits of error. I myself am so convinced of its reliability that I am going to give you two men all the authorization you'll need and full authority to build and to operate fully-automated plants. Satisfactory? That's what you've been getting ready for all this time, isn't it?" "Yes, sir!" Quisenberry said, and:

  You said it, sir!" Felton agreed.

  At seven fifty five Maynard asked the group at large, "Everybody ready to eat? I'll call Beardsley's."

  Neither engineer would leave his job; so, after Miss Champion had ordered up two one-gallon hot-pots of coffee and a good spread of smorgasbord, the two couples went to Beardsley's for dinner-a dinner that lasted for an- hour and a half and cost Maynard exactly forty dollars (including tip). Then a GalMet aircar took Mrs.

  Maynard home and another one took the other three back to the office.

  Along toward morning Quisenberry stood up, stretched, looked with distaste at his umpteenth cup of coffee, and said, "I've made some assumptions, boss, that I'd better check with you before I give you the bad news. Okay?" "Okay."

  "Rush all possible. That means twenty fours hours a day, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. All the personnel that can work efficiently, all the time. Crash priorities on material, which means no time for competitive bidding, so we'll have to pay top prices and bonuses. Check to here?"

  "Check and okay."

  "Plant capacity. Assuming that you want to cut the price down to somewhere between eleven and twelve cents...."

  "You're right on the beam, Quizz. Nearer eleven, I think."

  "Extrapolating on that basis, my guessometer says that we'll have to be producing at the rate of fifteen million tons by the end of the first year. That's a mighty big plant, boss. That's one supreme hell of a big plant." "I know. I like those figures very much."

  "You won't like these next ones, I'm afraid. On this rush-and-bonus basis it'll take pretty close to twenty five megabucks in the first couple of months, and the total-well, it's a very rough guess at this point. All I'm sure of is the order of magnitude, but the total to first pour will probably run somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy five megabucks."

  "Thanks. That's close enough for now. just so we don't get caught short of cash in the till."

  "But listen-sir-Phelps will have a litter of lizards!" "He'll be amenable to reason when he finds out that we are entering a completely new era in metals. Felton, how about you?"

  Felton-a brawny youth with butch-cut straw-colored hair and blue eyes-could not answer immediately because his mouth was full of shrimp a la Creole. He swallowed hastily, then said:

  "Since this will have to be a crash-pri job, too, everything Quizz said will apply. Add high radiation to all that, and a hostile dead planet clear out to hellangone beyond anywhere, and the tab gets no smaller fast. My best guesstimate as of now is that the total will crowd a hundred megabucks."

  "Fair enough. Thanks a..."

  "One thing first," Felton interrupted. "Are you sure enough of this-this super-bonanza-for me to roust Bassler out right now? Tell him to cut out all this ten-cent petty-larceny rock-scratching we're doing now, break out all the armor we've got and order more, and start-but quick-jassacking some of that high-grade out of there and hauling it-to Galmetia?"

  "An excellent idea. Splendid! If I'd thought of it I would have suggested it hours ago. Go ahead."

  Felton did so and Maynard went on, "Since you fellows made these estimates in hours instead of weeks I'll give you plenty of leeway. Miss Champion, please issue two preliminary authorizations: Quisenberry, seventy five megabucks; Felton, a hundred."

  Preliminaries! Not maxes! Staring at each other as though they could not believe their ears, the two engineers shook hands solemnly with each other, and then with all three of the others. Then they poured themselves two more cups of strong black coffee and went back to work.

  Work went on until half past five. Then, since each would have to be on the job by nine o'clock, Maynard broke it up so that each could get three hours' sleep. All top-echelon private offices were equipped for that. Night work was an essential part of such man-killing jobs as theirs; a part that envious underlings knew nothing about. It had happened before and it would happen again. And again and again.

  This entire episode was just another one of those things.

  A couple of months later, Miss Champion showed Deston into Maynard's office. The tycoon, although showing the effects of too little sleep, was in very fine fettle indeed.

  "Good morning, chief," Deston said. "We're about ready to cut gravs. How are the projects corning along?" "Fine! Quizz is really rolling it, and no leaks. And we cut the price of uranium another half a buck yesterday." "Nice going. Are you sure we can stay out a few months? I'll locate enough copper while we're gone, of course, to last you for a thousand years."

  "Positive. We'll drop the price of copper to where Hoadman will think he's been hit by a pile-driver."

  "So solly... and the effect on all industry of cheap and plentiful copper-added to your widely-advertised fact that in a few months everybody can buy all the uranium they want for less than thirty cents per pound -will take the curse off of the public image GalMet will get when you smash UCM flat?"

  "Not quite all of it, perhaps, but it will certainly help." "That's for sure. Okay; what do you want firstest and mostest of, now that copper and uranium are out of the way?"

  "I wish I could tell you." Maynard's fingers drummed quietly on his desk. "You thought it would be simple? It isn't. It's all fouled up in the personnel situation I told you I'd tell you about. We have six good people-damned good people-each of whom wants a planetary project so passionately that if I stack the deck in favor of any one of them, all the others will blast me to a cinder and run, not walk, to the nearest exit."

  Deston did not say anything and after a moment the older man went on, "Platinum and iridium, of course. Osmium, tungsten..."

  "Tungsten isn't too scarce, is it?"

  "For the possible demand, very much so. I'd like to sell it for fifteen cents a pound. Beryllium, tantalum, titanium, thorium, cerium-and, for the grand climax to end all climaxes-rhenium."

  "Huh? I don't think I've ever heard rhenium even mentioned since my freshman chemistry."

  "Not too many people have, but right now I'm as full of information as the dog that sniffed at the third rail. It's so rare that no mineral of it is known; it exists only as a trace of impurity in a very few minerals. Strangely enough, practically only in molybdenite."

  "Just a minute. Deston went to a book-case, took out a hand-book, and flipped pages. "Um... um... mm. Dwimanganese. Not usually associated with manganese. Maybe it occurs in molybdenite as the sulphide-ReS2and/or Re2S7-commercial source, flue dust from the roasting of Arizona molybdenite...."

  "Right. We own the outfit. That's why we own it. It produces a few tons a year of Cottrell dust, which yields just about enough rhenium to irritate one eyeball. Production cost, five dollars and seventeen cents per gram."

  "But what's it good for? Contact points... cat mass... heavy duty igniters, it says here. Deston tapped the page with his forefinger. "No tonnage outlet there.

  "What would you think of an alloy that had a yield point-not ultimate tensile, mind you, but yield-of well over a million pounds, and yet an elongation of better than five percent?"

  Deston whistled. "I would have said it was a pure pipe dream. What else is in it?"

  Mostly tungsten. A lot of tantalum. Rhenium around ten percent. The research isn't done yet, but they're far enough along to know that they'll have something utterly fantastic. The problem, Byrd tells me, is to determine the optimum formula and environment for the growth and matting of single crystals of metal-tungsten 'whiskers', you know-you know about them."

  "A little, of course, but not too much. I'm a 'troncist ."

  "I know. Well, they're playing around now with soakpit times and temperatures and fractional percentages of this and that. The curve is still rising."

  "So you'll need tungsten and tantalum, too, by the gigaton, since that's a thing that the Law of Diminishing Returns would apply to exactly."

  "I didn't think I'd have to plot you a graph. So now, apart from the personnel problem, what do you think?" Before replying, Deston studied the handbook for minutes. Then: "The three atomic numbers are in order; seventy three, four, and five. But in the Earth's crust rhenium runs less than one part in billions. So if there is any big mass of it anywhere the others are apt to be there too, and a hell of a lot more of 'em."

  "All the better, even from a project standpoint. Two prime sources of anything are a lot better than one."

  "I didn't mean that. All that stuff is terrifically heavy, and it's got to be close enough to the surface to get at. I simply can't visualize what kind of a planet could possibly have what we want. It won't be Tellus-Type, that's for damn certain sure."

  "I couldn't care less about that. We can set up automation on anything that isn't hotter than dull red." "Okay. That brings us back, then, to personnel. This Byrd-has he got what it takes to run such a weirdie as this rhenium thing will almost have to be?"

  "Definitely, but Doctor Ceeily Byrd isn't a man. Very much the opposite, which is exactly what is thickening the soup. If we could get hold of as little as one megaton of rhenium, so as to add this new alloy leybyrdite to cheap uranium and copper, it would make MetEnge such a public benefactor that it'd be a case of 'the King can do no wrong'. But if I deal one card from the bottom of the deck to 'Curly' Byrd all hell will be out for noon."

  "That sounds like something more than ordinary sex antagonism."

  "It is. Much more. She not only uses weapons men don't have-and she's got 'em, believe me-but she brags about it. She's a carrot-topped, freckle-faced, shanty irish wick, with the shape men drool about and itching to use it-with a megavac for a brain and an ice-cube for a heart. She's half cobra, half black widow, half bitch, and one hundred percent hell-cat on wheels."

  "She must be quite a gal, to add up to two hundred and fifty percent."

  "She adds up to all that. So do the others. I would have fired her a year ago-she hadn't been on the job three weeks before she started making passes at me-but I haven't been able to find anyone else nearly as good as she is."

  "That's a mighty tough signal to read."

  "It's a unique situation. I've been gathering those people for over two years, getting ready to expand, and we haven't found anything big enough to expand into. I had eight of them. They were hard enough to handle before I gave Felton and Quisenberry their projects, but ever since then the other six have been damn near impossible. Each has tremendous ability and drive; each is as good as either Felton or Quisenberry and knows it. All working at about ten percent load; with nowhere in the galaxy to go to do any better. Frustrated-tense-sore as boils and touchy as fulminate-knives out, not only for each other, but also for Smith and me. Four men and two women. Purdom hasn't got any sex-appeal at all; Byrd oozes it at every pore. So I tell you rhenium first and the sex-pot is first out. So the other five know she got it by sleeping with me, and she-the God damned bitch!-grins like the Chesire cat and rubs it in that she has got what it takes to land the big ones."

  "That's a hell of a picture, chief. I simply can't visualize top-bracket executives acting that way."

  "You haven't handled enough people for years enough. They can't act any other way. What I've been wanting to do, every time she sticks her damned sexy neck out, is wring it... wait a minute; that gives me an idea... yes, that'll work. The minute they find out for sure they must all suspect it already-that you're an honest-to-God metal-wizard I can kick their teeth right down their throats. They'll all tear into their jobs like that many hundred-ton cat tractors."

  "But listen! You can't tell 'em-we've got to keep it dark, the way we find the stuff."

  From most people, yes; but from anybody with a brain? One, of course, could be luck. Two might-just barely-be coincidence. But the next one? I won't have to tell them, even now. I'll make the method certain the same way you did-by denying its possibility."

  "Could be, at that... so maybe we'd better make it a straight tri-di survey for everything you're interested in. That would save time, in fact, over all. What kind of a list would that be?"

  "Here." Maynard reached into a drawer and sailed a sheet of paper across his desk. "The full want list, which we boiled down to the must-haves."

  Deston caught the paper and read it. "Is that all?" "Isn't that enough? You're a brute for punishment." "I'm surprised, is all, that gold isn't on it."

  "Gold/" Maynard snorted. "Besides currency base, jewelry, and show, what's it good for? We've never touched it and never intend to-produce a few tons too much and you upset the economy instead of benefitting it."

  "I never thought of it that way, but that's right. Okay, chief, we'll flit. I'll keep you posted. 'Bye."

  Deston strode out and Maynard flipped a switch. "Please get Wharton, Bender, Camp, Byrd, Train, and Purdom and bring 'em into the conference room. No note-pads and no recorder."

  "Very well, sir," Miss Champion said; and in a few minutes four men and three women were walking toward the long table at the head of which Maynard sat.

  "I for one was busy, Mister Maynard!" Cecily Byrd snapped. She was something under thirty, five feet ten in her nylons, and beautifully built. She moved with the lithe grace of a trained dancer. Her thick, brick-red, medium-bobbed hair was naturally and stubbornly curly; with a curliness no hair-dresser had ever been able to subdue. Her untannable skin was heavily freckled and, except for a touch of lipstick, she wore no make-up. Her features, while regular enough, were too bold and too strong by far for prettiness. Her mien was sullen and defiant; her eyes-smoldering green fires-swept the bare expanse of table. "What? No pads and pencils? No mikes? Isn't this conference going to be of such gravid and world-shaking import that its every word and nuance should be preserved for the edification of all ages to come?"

  "Shut up, Byrd, and all of you sit down."

  The red-head gasped and all the others stared; for this was something new. President Maynard had never before spoken to any one of them except in formal terms. Wondering and silent, they all sat down and Maynard smiled at them wolfishly one by one. After a long half minute of this he spoke.

  "I've been looking forward to this moment for a long long time" he gloated. "But first, I wonder if any one of you has any idea of why I put up with all eight of you so long? Such intractable, intransigent hellions; such knuckle-dusting, back stabbing, rampaging jerks as you all have been?"

  "That's easy!" the red-head snapped, before any one of the eager others could say a word. "Hog-the-talent. Dog-in-the-manager. Standard Operating Procedure."

  "Wrong. You're also wrong in claiming to be busy. Not one of you has even the remotest inkling of what the word means. But you are all going to find out. How you'll find out! As soon as this meeting is over each of you will be handed a planetary-project authorization and will..."

  "What?" "Huh?" "Where?" 'How come?" Six voices shouted or shrieked almost as one.

  "Whereupon each of you will proceed to design and staff a full-scale, optimum-tonnage plant, exactly as you want it. Each of you will have full authority and full responsibility...."

  "Full authority. Yeah," Percival Train broke in, bitingly. He was a big, handsome, hard-bodied young man, with bushy, crew-cut brown hair and highly cynical-at the moment-gray eyes. "Except that I'll be told exactly what to do and exactly how to do it and then it'll be my fault when the whole damned operation goes stinko. Full authority, hell! I've heard that song, words and music, before."

  From me?" Maynard asked quietly. "Well... no."

  "Nor will you. You'll be on your own; subject to Top Management only in matters of policy-such as no pirating of personnel from each other, for instance. That's so none of you can come around later, bitching and bellyaching that your flop was clue to the way we cramped your style. If each of you does a job, and I hope you will; fine. Anybody who doesn't will get fired. I would enjoy firing you, Train, and Byrd. Any questions?"

  The six looked at each other, almost in consternation. Even "Curly" Byrd was mute. Finally Train spoke. "Maybe... to be tossing out that kind of money... this, on top of Barbizon and Belmark, really blows the plug. But I still don't think that Mrs. Deston is a metalwitch. It doesn't make sense."

 

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