"The Technetium Rush" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

Solanki had of course worked with a variety of machines on his parentsТ farm, including forklifts, and was by all accounts a capable driver, well liked by his bosses and coworkers, who consulted him sometimes for his earth-science expertise during trenching and filling operations. According to newspaper reports, the team once found a large green nugget of copper oxide in their Malpura dump, which Solanki proclaimed to be Уalluvial,Ф or washed down from higher ground. Since the nuggetЧthough interestingЧhad little monetary value, Solanki was allowed to keep it, and we can suppose the brief local fame brought on by its discovery had some impact on his later thinking. The papers called him a УJoshi Bhopal staff geologist,Ф and he liked the sound of that.

Anyway, while he was hardly a rich man, SolankiТs salary was enough to rent not only a small apartment in Jaipur, but also an office in which he slowly built a modest but respectable soil and mineral identification lab, whose services he advertised in the same papers whoТd reported his copper find. Business was not exactly booming, but he collected enough odd jobs to build a rщsumщ, and in his spare time, through a combination of personal fieldwork and bargain hunting in the city shops, amassed a rock collection large and photogenic enough to pose in front of. HeТd be ready for the newspapersЧor TV, or internet bloggersЧthe next time they showed up.

So things were going well, and it seems natural enough that Vyas and Solanki, lovers now for two and a half years, should tie the knot and move in together, which is exactly what they did. The ceremony was small, brief, and sparsely reported, and though the newlyweds expressed a desire to travel overseas, in fact the honeymoon was a week in Alibag (near Mumbai), paid for by SolankiТs parents and lightly subsidized by VyasТ widowed mother. Affectionate and outgoing in public, the two were in many ways the perfect couple, to the relief of both families and the mild envy of their friends.

But real life hides clouds behind its silver linings, and within that cramped apartment our lovebirds were not quite as happy as they seemed. The affections of a good woman had mellowed SolankiТs wandering ways, but the reverse cannot be said for the bride herself, whose weekend gambling was now fueled by a substantially higher income. Once a quirky affectation, the betting now assumed the proportions of a full-blown addiction, for which (at SolankiТs insistence) she several times sought counseling. But Vyas, now Abha Solanki, either couldnТt or wouldnТt mend her ways, and by the end of 2003 she had managed not only to spend most of their combined income, plus her dowry and RockyТs nest egg, but to accumulate (by some accounts) up to a quarter-million rupees in debt, to unsavory characters in whom sympathy was not a notable trait.

УIТm trapped,Ф Rakesh told a friend that winter. УI canТt afford the pills to keep her in at night, and without them we come home poorer every week.Ф

To which the friend claims to have replied, УSmart guy like you, Rocky, ought to imagine a way out. Think of a monkey stealing oranges through a fence, eh? He canТt pull his hand out, or he thinks he canТt, because he wonТt let go of the orange.Ф

УBut I like my orange,Ф said Rocky. УI adore my orange.Ф

УWell, then,Ф said the friend. УOnly one thing for it: YouТve got to scale the fence.Ф

УMeaning what?Ф

УMeaning youТre the smart one, and IТm hungry. LetТs eat, eh? And then letТs drink your troubles away.Ф

But the comment must have struck a chord. May have, I meant to say, because what happened next was passing strange and canТt be definitely linked to Rakesh Solanki in any way. The paperТs solicitor is standing over me as I write this, making sure I donТt commit libel. Well, like I say, nobodyТs calling the man a criminal. Just very, improbably lucky.

* * * *

Imagine youТre an unknown scientist in a backwater town, and your wifeЧwho makes more money than youЧis publishing poetry. How do you feed your own ego and reassure yourself you still wear the family trousers? By publishing scientific papers, of course. This isnТt easy to do; it takes weeks to write one, and even a minor journal like South Asia Geology Review turns away most of what it receives. If youТre lucky and the journal editors see promise in your work, it can then take months or even years to get the niggling details just right. For a professor with a gaggle of students at his beck this is perhaps no big deal, but itТs enough to drive a lone man to drink and to drive a drinking man to despair. Rooting around in an online database, I could only find three papers by Solanki, with hints that he might have published two more.

But hereТs where it gets interesting, because while two of these papers are about alluvial minerals in the Malpura clay, the third one is entitled, УPossible Economic Uses for Purified Reactor Waste.Ф Now, it isnТt strange for a man to have such ideas, who spends his days burying the poison churned out by his wifeТs employer. Indeed, AbhaЧwith a knowledge of physics and chemistry complementary to RockyТs ownЧmay have provided some of the inspiration herself. But it chucks a spanner in the otherwise-functional tale of rags to well-deserved riches because it tips the Solanki hand four years prematurely. It was a minor paper in a minor journal; safe to hope no one would remember it there. Ah, but this is the information age, when nothing but nothing is ever truly forgotten.

LetТs roll back a moment here and take a look at the stuff that put Solanki where he is today. Technetium is a white and very shiny metal, similar to platinum, although itТs subject to oxidation and will turn gray and powdery if you bake it long enough. It has the eleventh-highest melting point of any element, and its eight neighbors on the periodic chart have all been used to strengthen, harden, and stabilize steel and other alloys, including the tungsten filaments of incandescent lightbulbs, which were still common at the time of SolankiТs writing. Four of the neighbors are also colorful additives in glazes and dyes, suggesting a variety of uses for that rarest of birds, technetium, if only people could be gotten interested in it. More importantly, as a so-called beta emitter, it generates a slight but constant electric current, which prevents other metals from corroding. УAs a hardener and surface treatment,Ф wrote Rocky, Уour friend is simply unmatched.Ф

He even goes so far as to suggestЧand this is no speculation on my part!Чthat a technetium alloy cut with gold and palladium would be perfect for high-value coinage. УHard, bright, untarnishable and rare, it would be the numismatistТs answer to diamond, for such a coin might last nearly forever.Ф

Now, with a radioactive half-life of several million yearsЧmeaning a very slow decay, hence little radioactivityЧФTeaФ (as Solanki playfully called it) is considerably safer than the potions we swallow in radiomedicine, and in fact is only about four times as hazardous as ordinary concrete and granite, which as we all have heard, emit low levels of radon gas. So does a gaslight mantle, as it turns out, although gaslights are even rarer than tungsten filaments and may be unfamiliar to readers whoТve grown up under the cold glare of the white LED. Nevertheless, to place a coin of technetium in oneТs pocket, immediately adjacent to oneТs reproductive organs, would take a bit of faith.

Everyone knows, of course, that soon thereafter, technetium coins were in fact minted and sold by a private company called the Palwal Mint and Trust, which can in no way be connected to Rakesh Solanki, Abha Solanki, or the Kakodar Nuclear Power Station. The content and purity of the coins has been verified by any number of outside bodiesЧmatching very closely to the recipe laid down in SolankiТs paperЧbut the actual source of the metal has never been identified. Still, itТs a known product of Energy Amplifier Thorium Reactors (or УEATERS,Ф as their proponents call them), of which KNPS is one of only three operating in India, in a total of four worldwide. And about three months before the coins were first unveiled, the Kakodar station was shut down for a day on the excuse of Уplumbing adjustments,Ф although an internal memo called it, more specifically, Уrepairs to correct an unauthorized modification.Ф

The evidence is circumstantial at best; no court would base a conviction on it. The best we can do is dream a little dream; could Abha, short of funds as always, have monkeyed with her precious reactor to produce an excess of technetium for her hubby to dispose? A physicist friend confirms it is possible. Could RakeshЧdressed up in some ungainly homespun radiation suitЧhave broken open one of his barrels one night, dropped the slag in some centrifugal furnace of his own design, refined out the Уtea,Ф and then buried the whole apparatus along with the waste? Again, thereТs nothing in the laws of physicsЧor probabilityЧto deny it.

It should be noted, in all fairness and charity, that if such a venture occurredЧand IТm not saying it didЧthe Solankis do not seem to have profited from it. Indeed, they never moved from their apartment, never bought a car, never took that trip overseas. Not then. But if they owed a lot of money to gangsters, one supposes a lot of strange things could happen around them, with or without their grudging consent.

At any rate, the coinsЧreal enough for any skepticЧwere sold in lead-lined jewelerТs boxes, and thatТs where most collectors have kept them. In many western countries and in China and Japan, importation of the coins was prohibited, and in the United States they were classified as a terrorist munition for which five unlucky collectors were handed stiff jail sentences. DonТt answer the phone, Yank; let freedom ring and ring. Eventually the Indian government got tired of the diplomatic heat and shut the enterprise down, but before they did, the coins made a lot of money for someone.

Imagine Rakesh Solanki stewing about that.

* * * *

ItТs a fact of life in the prison business that prisoners sometimes escape. This should not surprise us; the jailer goes home at night, while his charge remains, staring at walls, the light fixtures, the bars of his cage. Escape is all he thinks about. And wasnТt Solanki a prisoner of circumstance? Of poverty, of love?

This much is a matter of record: He somehow scraped up the funds to purchase salt-poisoned farmland in the Arvalli foothills. A parcel here, a parcel there, slowly adding up to hundreds of dry, worthless hectares. Geologically speaking, though, these peach-colored sites were rich in molybdenum and rhenium and manganeseЧchemical relatives of technetium. This was before he found the gyroidal crystal. Unlike his idol Charles Fipke, Solanki didnТt follow a trail of clues back to their source; he bought the source and then, miraculously, discovered the distant clue. Or so he would have us believe.