"James P. Hogan - Giants 1 - Inherit The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

equations vanished, to be replaced by a profile view of her assistant, hunched
over a console in the control room downstairs. The profile transformed itself
into a full face as he turned.
"Ready to run in about twenty minutes," he said, anticipating the
question. "The plasma's stabilizing now."
"No -- this has nothing to do with that," she replied, speaking a little
more quickly than usual. "It's about your report 2906. I've just been through
my copy."
"Oh...yes?" His change in expression betrayed mild apprehension.
"So -- a niobium-zirconium alloy," she went on, stating the fact rather
than asking a question, "with an unprecedented resistance to high-temperature
oxidation and a melting point that, quite frankly, I won't believe until I've
done the tests myself."
"Makes our plasma-cans look like butter," Josef agreed.
"Yet despite the presence of niobium, it exhibits a lower neutron-
absorption cross section than pure zirconium?"
"Macroscopic, yes -- under a millibar per square centimeter."
"Interesting..." she mused, then resumed more briskly: "On top of that
we have alpha-phase zirconium with silicon, carbon, and nitrogen impurities,
yet still with a superb corrosion resistance."
"Hot carbon dioxide, fluorides, organic acids, hypochiorites -- we've
been through the list. Generally an initial reaction sets in, but it's rapidly
arrested by the formation of inert barrier layers. You could probably break it
down in stages by devising a cycle of reagents in just the right sequence, but
that would take a complete processing plant specially designed for the job!"
"And the microstructure," Valereya said, gesturing toward the papers on
her desk. "You've used the description fibrous."
"Yes. That's about as near as you can get. The main alloy seems to be
formed around a -- well, a sort of microcrystalline lattice. It's mainly
silicon and carbon, but with local concentrations of some titanium-magnesium
compound that we haven't been able to quantify yet. I've never come across
anything like it. Any ideas?"
The woman's face held a faraway look for some seconds.
"I honestly don't know what to think at the moment," she confessed. "But
I feel this information should be passed higher without delay; it might be
more important than it looks. But first I must be sure of my facts. Nikolai
can take over down there for a while. Come up to my office and let's go
through the whole thing in detail."


Chapter Three

The Portland headquarters of the Intercontinental Data and Control
Corporation lay some forty miles east of the city, guarding the pass between
Mount Adams to the north and Mount Hood to the south. It was here that at some
time in the remote past a small in-land sea had penetrated the Cascade
Mountains and carved itself a channel to the Pacific, to become in time the
mighty Columbia River.
Fifteen years previously it had been the site of the government-owned
Bonneville Nucleonic Weapons Research Laboratory. Here, American scientists,