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

something patentable. Actually, we don't use plain old silica sand-- the low surface area makes it too
inactive. We use an extremely porous, high-surface-area silica, five thousand square meters per gram.
That means a thimbleful-- if you could spread it out-- would cover two or three football fields. And this
means that it is thousands of times as reactive as sand, because a given weight of high-surface-area silica
can make contact with thousands more ammonia molecules than plain sand."
"I gather there's more to it than that. Certainly ammonia and high-surface-area silica have been brought
together before without making silamine."
 "Yes, Marguerite, as you very well know, there's more to it than that. Firstly, the silica contains a new
catalyst, terbium oxide, one of the rare earths. Celsus proposed this after his first successful run, back in
Silicon Compounds." He looked at her. "You were there."
She replied noncommittally. "Yes, I was there."
Patrick sighed. She was not going to volunteer anything about the stopwatch. In a little while, he'd
have to ask her.
He continued. "Next, Celsus adds a thing he calls 'xerion'."
"'Xerion'?"
"Don't ask me what it is. Some kind of co-catalyst, I think. It's your job to find out. Celsus contends
his new system provides extremely high temperatures right in the fluidizers, so much heat, in fact, that the
columns have to be cooled. He cools by heat-exchanging with incoming liquid ammonia, which goes next
to the base of the columns, where it serves as both reaction gas and suspending medium for the silica
gel."
"What happens to the by-product water?"
"Some gets stripped out with silamine product, but some stays on the silica. Celsus seems to think it's
very important that some stay on the silica. He wants the silica to be 'wet' throughout the reaction. I don't
know why. Again, this is something you should ask him about. Also, he runs the residual silica into a tank
of something he calls 'alkahest'-- some kind of solvent or dispersant. Find out why the stuff can't simply
be dried and carted off to waste. Is it dangerous, or what?"
Marguerite looked up from her notebook. "There's still one very basic thing I don't understand. This
terbium-xerion thing... how does the combination make heat?"
Patrick shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "You'll have to ask Celsus."
"Do you think he will tell me any of this?"
"I don't know, Marguerite."
"What about his Project Reports?"
"He's made several. They're all different. But don't try to reconcile them; it's impossible. So it boils
down to this: Celsus knows, or thinks he knows, how to make the thing work. But he hasn't been able so
far to explain it to his own people. This is where you come in. Defining technical data is your job, as a
patent attorney. You're better at it than his brother chemists. Also, you'll bring a new outlook."
Marguerite French closed her notebook. "Is that about it?"
"One more thing." Patrick eyed her speculatively. "The other morning, at that first silamine run, you had
a stopwatch. What was all that about?"
The girl hesitated. "I don't think you will believe me."
"Tell me anyway."
"I timed the reaction. With the stopwatch. All I had to do was calculate the space velocity of the
ammonia. From this you get the time it took to move the first silamine product from the reactor to the
collector, where it immediately gave the picrate test. This was 38.6 seconds. When Pierre called on the
silamine to exist, I started the watch. When the picrate showed, I stopped it." She opened her purse.
"I've been carrying it around-- it's still stopped. I don't know what to do with it. Suppose you keep it a
while." She handed the watch to Patrick. He took it dubiously. It read 38.5 seconds. Experimental error?
Not, he suspected, Pierre Celsus'.
"I think it was telekinesis," said Marguerite.
Patrick studied the girl with widened eyes. Her face was pale, but she was staring back defiantly. The