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Updated: June 16, 2025
Kemp worked fast, and the first hole deepened. Rip helped as best he could by pushing away the chunks of thorium that Kemp cut free, but it was essentially a one-man job. As Kemp neared the bottom of the first hole, Rip reviewed his plan and realized he had overlooked something. These weren't nuclear bombs; they were simple tubes of chemical fuel.
A few feet away from the spot was a thick pyramid of thorium. That would do, and they could cut into it horizontally instead of drilling straight down. He pointed to it. "Let’s have a hole straight in for six feet. And keep it straight, Kemp. Allow enough room for a lining of nuclite. Koa, pull a sheet of nuclite out of the cave and cut it to size."
At the time of the discovery of radio-activity, about seventy-five substances were called elements; in other words, about seventy-five different substances were known to chemists, none of which had been separated into unlike parts, none of which had been made by the coalescence of unlike substances. Compounds of only two of these substances, uranium and thorium, are radio-active.
Rip watched, interested in how his man would tackle the problem. He didn't know the answer himself, because he had never driven a spike on an airless world with almost no gravity, and no one had ever mentioned it to him. Pederson searched the gray metal with his torch and found a slender spur of thorium, perhaps two feet high, a short distance from the boat. "Here's a hold," he said.
In the case of compounds of thorium Professor Rutherford discovered a similar phenomenon; since then, various physicists, Professor Soddy, Miss Brooks, Miss Gates, M. Danne, and others, have studied the properties of these emanations.
He called, "Kemp, Koa, bring the torch and fuel and follow me." In his haste he took a misstep and flew headlong a few feet above the metal surface. Koa, gliding along behind him, turned him upright again. He saw that the sergeant major was grinning. Rip grinned back. It was the second time he had lost his footing. They reached the peaks of thorium, and Rip looked them over.
Working slowly but more safely, Rip figured that slightly more than two and a half tubes would do the trick. Now to fire them. That meant finding a thorium crystal properly placed and big enough. There were plenty of crystals, so that was no problem.
Radium, uranium, thorium, actinium all the radioactive elements are, as everybody knows, continually disintegrating, discharging the enormous energy that is imprisoned in their molecules. It may take generations, epochs, centuries, for them to get rid of it and transform themselves into other substances, but they will inevitably do so eventually.
The answer to this is that, as Rutherford and Soddy have shown in the case of thorium, it is only an exceedingly small fraction of the mass which is at any one time radio-active, and that this radio-active portion loses its activity in a few hours, and has to be replaced by a fresh supply from the non-radio-active thorium."*11*
His searching eyes fell on the cutting torch. If they could use that to cut themselves right into the asteroid.... Suddenly he knew how it could be done. On the sun side he remembered a series of high-piled, giant crystals of thorium. They could cut into the side of one of those. And with Kemp's skill, they might be able to do it in time.
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