United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We got our dimensions decided, and we find that there are a lot of big empty liquid-oxygen flasks, or tanks, rather, at the spaceport, that'll accommodate everything fissionables, explosive-charges, tampers, detonator, and all." "Well, go ahead with it. Make up a few of them; as many as you can between now and 2400 Sunday." He thought for a moment.
Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it was still growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction plants and machine works. They produced all their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.
That's what happens to a ship that raids a planet where there's anything worth taking. Beowulf is lousy with fissionables; they'll give us all the plutonium we can load, in exchange for gadolinium, which we sell them at about twice Sword-World prices. We trade plutonium on Amaterasu for gadolinium, and get it for about half Sword-World prices."
Her captain wanted fissionables and gadolinium; Count Lionel was building more ships. There was a rumor that Omfray of Glaspyth was laying claim to the throne of Gram, in the right of his great-grandmother's sister, who had been married to the great-grandfather of Duke Angus.
In the end, all the governments of Amaterasu joined in a loose agreement to get the mines reopened and resume production of gadolinium, and to share in the fissionables being imported in exchange. It had been harder, and had taken a year longer, to do business with Beowulf.
"As soon as Orgzild would hear about the possibility of making a plutonium bomb, he'd set up an A-bomb project, and don't think of it in terms of the old First Century Manhattan Project. There would be no problem of producing fissionables we've been scattering refined plutonium over this planet like confetti."
"We are prepared to resist, but we realize what this would cost in lives and destruction of property," he began. "You don't begin to. Do you know anything about nuclear weapons?" "From history; we have no nuclear power of any sort. We can find no fissionables on this planet." "The cost, as you put it, would be everything and everybody in Eglonsby and for a radius of almost a hundred miles.
"That's right," one of his economics men agreed. "Management of Public Works." That would be Mykhyl Eschkhaffar, who had so bitterly objected to the new nomenclature. "If anybody needs fissionables for a power-reactor or radioactives for nuclear-electric conversion, his chief business slave gets what's needed. Furthermore, doesn't even have to sign for it." "Don't they sell it for revenue?"
If he survived that, it's his bad luck," Melroy said grimly. "Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don't know what was done with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack that reactor, to keep my people from working on it.
They had some nuclear power, introduced a century or so ago by traders from Marduk, one of the really civilized planets. They still depended on Marduk for fissionables; their export product was an abominably-smelling vegetable oil which furnished the base for delicate perfumes, and which nobody was ever able to synthesize properly.
Word Of The Day