"Charles L. Harness-The Alchemist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

After all that business with the watch, didn't she really want to know whether Celsus had made it? Or--
the thought hit him hard-- was she so sure he had made it, that there was no point in staying for the i.r.
report?
The phone rang. Bond grabbed it. The conversation was brief. Bond replaced the phone and turned
around, his eyes searching the room. "Where's Pierre?" he demanded.
But Celsus, too, had gone.
"Was it silamine?" called Patrick. He turned to face Sasanov.
"It was silamine," said Bond.
Sasanov's face was a mask. He bowed low to Patrick. "I will send the contract and the cider, as soon
as I arrive at the chancellery in Czezhlo. And now, if you will excuse me, I have a plane to catch."
***


The lab was the slave of fad and fashion, and news of a new discovery flashed through the bays faster
than the speed of light and with an audience saturation that dwarfed Bleeker's Management Bulletins. A
new catalyst discovered in Inorganics in the morning was likely to be warming up in the test tubes in
Polymer that afternoon. A new herbicide found effective in the Biology Bay in the afternoon would
probably be followed up by a new synthesis in Organics the next morning. Currently, however, thanks to
Pierre Celsus, the rage had now become that lovely child of the petroleum refinery, the fluidized reaction,
in which hot gases having composition A streamed up through a turbulent mass of tiny catalyst particles,
while simultaneously suspending that mass, to emerge at the top of the bed with composition B.
During the entire previous year, there had not been a single fluidized experiment at Hope. But within
the hour following Celsus' silamine run, Group Leaders were holding conferences behind closed doors
with their chief assistants as to how to reconstruct the chemistry of tried and true reactions so as to make
them amenable to fluidization. Overnight the senior chemists were talking knowledgeably of "slide valves,"
"strippers," "regenerators," "standpipes," and "suspensoid"; and within a very few days they would go on
to "bed viscosity," "Nusselt number," and "voidage at incipient slugging." The Library was promptly
stripped of all books remotely touching on fluidization, and even the "F" volume in the sacrosanct
Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia disappeared from the reference shelves for several days. Miss Addie, the
librarian, posted stern notices on all bulletin boards. Overnight, the volume was returned, sheepishly, by
Andrew Bleeker.
Bleeker didn't fight the new trend. He knew it would do no good, and besides, the new thinking both
intrigued and amused him. It intrigued him because it was a new and potentially useful approach, not only
for a silamine design, but also for a number of other research problems of long standing. It amused him
because he knew from long experience that a number of project shifts would now be inevitable.
Programs on supersonic reaction initiation, free radical mechanisms, photocatalysis, and selective
adsorption would be quietly, even surreptitiously, phased out. In some ways, his people reminded him of
a cohesive group of teen-agers, with the same compulsion to conform in dress, thought, and behavior.
The minority that he would force to continue on their old projects would probably be apologetic to the
lucky ones launching into the new fluidized techniques. Bootleg runs meanwhile would become the order
of the day, with glassware fluidizers of all shapes and sizes springing up all over the lab like wildflowers in
May. He made a mental note to contact the Budget Committee immediately for a decent bench unit. He
had a good excuse. Sasanov had already opened negotiations from Czezhlo. They'd be needing some
good bench equipment in a matter of days.
In fact, to handle the expected volume of requests for bench runs, he might need as many as three
columns-- stainless steel, of course, twelve feet high, and heavy. They'd need a basement foundation.
There was just the place for them, downstairs in Building V. He'd call it the Fluidizer Bay.
***