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Updated: May 17, 2025
Kendall turned over a small rheostat control and abruptly the eighteen-inch diameter spot on the tungsten-beryllium plate began contracting; it contracted till it was a blazing, sparkling spot of molten incandescence less than an inch across! "That's the advantage of focus. At this distance of a few hundred feet with a small beam I can do that.
The apparatus here had been carefully destroyed by technicians with a view of making it indecipherable, but the Mirans made it even more certain, for no ship settled here to investigate, but a stream of atomic bombs that lasted for over an hour, and churned the rock to dust, and the dust to molten lava, in which pools of fused tungsten-beryllium alloy bubbled slowly and sank.
Now watch that tungsten-beryllium plate. I'll hold the power steady. It's an eighteen-inch beam and now the energy is just sufficient to heat that tungsten plate to bright red. But "
The advantage in this will be that nearly all the energy will be absorbed outside, and we'll radiate pretty fast, particularly as that tungsten-beryllium has a high radiation-factor in the long heat range." "What does that mean?" "Well, ordinary polished silver is a mighty poor radiator. Homely example: Try waiting for your coffee to cool if it's in a polished silver pot.
It was an IP defense station, equipped with everything Solarian science knew, and the dome was an eight-foot wall of tungsten-beryllium. The eight feet of solid, ultra-resistant alloy drank up that crumbling beam, and liked it. The wall did not fail.
"And you actually got Interplanetary Life to give you a mortgage on the structure?" "Why not? It'll cut cost fifty-eight millions, with its twelve-foot tungsten-beryllium walls and the heavy defense weapons against those terrible pirates. You know we must defend our property." "With the thing you're setting up out there on Luna, you could more readily wipe out the IP than anything else I know of.
"Then build ships as big as his, and he'll quit trying to roast you. Particularly if the inner walls are synthetic plastics. Did you know I used them in the 'S Doradus' and 'Cepheid'?" "Yes. Were you thinking of that?" "No just luck and the fact that they're light, strong as steel almost, and can be manufactured in forms much more quickly. Only the outer hull is tungsten-beryllium.
It was a fifty-horse motor-generator, on a five-ton tungsten-beryllium base, but it rose abruptly, spun rapidly about an axis at right angles to the axis of its armature, and stopped as suddenly. In mid air it continued its interrupted lecture. "Mercury therefore is the destination I would advise. There power is sufficient for all machines."
Then try it in a tungsten-beryllium pot. No matter how you polish that tungsten-beryllium, the stuff WILL radiate heat. That's why an IP ship is always so blamed cold. You know the passenger ships use polished aluminum outer walls.
The big help is, that the tungsten-beryllium will throw off the energy pretty fast, and in a big ship, with a whale of a lot of matter to heat, the Strangers will simply give up the idea." "Yes, but only two ships in the system compare with them in size." "Sorry but I didn't build the IP fleet, and there are lots of tungsten and beryllium on Earth. Enough anyway."
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