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

The Technetium Rush
by Wil McCarthy

Materials can have many uses, some of which are talked about more openly than others....

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Bangalore Daily News, 26 July 2011

Byline: Hemant S. Tripathi

Fact: The element technetium is produced in minute quantities by red giant stars so far away that the light they’re emitting now will someday shine on your grandchildren’s grandchildren. For our purposes here, that’s far enough not to matter. Closer to home, the element is sometimes generated by the collision of molybdenum atoms and “heavy hydrogen” from the sun, or by the natural decay of uranium. These are freak occurrences, though; aside from the transuranics (which are about as stable as a life of crime), technetium is the rarest element in the natural universe and forms no known minerals.

Fact: Of the thirty-two possible crystal classes, only one—the gyroidal isometric—had, until recently, never been found in the mineral world. Is it mankind that abhors a vacuum?

Fact: On March 20, 2008, Delhi University-trained geologist Rakesh “Rocky” Solanki, on an apparently routine survey of the alluvial clays north of Bhilwara, Rajasthan, found a deposit of fluorescent orange crystals that he couldn’t identify, and so brought back to his Jaipur office for examination. Later named Tc solankite, the crystals were hard, translucent, vaguely lustrous and—considering their gyroidal structure and 20 percent technetium composition—quickly valued at $5,000 per gram. This is 300 times the price of platinum and twice that of clear uncut diamonds, so we’re talking about serious money here. Let’s be clear about that.

Since the material had apparently washed down from the nearby Arvalli Mountains sometime in the past thousand years, Solanki’s discovery touched off, almost immediately—the greatest land rush since the Canadian diamond wars of the 1990s. But can we really believe Solanki’s gambling debts, criminal connections, and curious patterns of stock and land ownership have nothing to do with his sudden good fortune?

Hey, no one’s on trial here; the guy may be as innocent as a bride. Or, this may be one of the most sordid chapters in the oft-opprobrious history of mineral science. Place your bets and let’s get moving; this rag doesn’t pay me by the hour.

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Our story begins with the Canadian Diamond Rush of 1991, when geologists Charles Fipke (a forty-five-year-old with a mere bachelor’s degree) and Stewart Blusson (with a pilot’s license and twenty years in the bush) braved arctic winters and hungry bears to outwit the De Beers cartel and 258 other mining companies to lay claim to four of the world’s richest diamond sites, imprisoned romantically beneath the arctic permafrost. Over a three-year period, fueled by hope and JP4 kerosene, a swarm of helicopters and geological shock troops staked out fifty-three million acres of mineral claims. It was a tale of rogues and spies, claim-jumpers and border skirmishes, camouflage nets, and electronic spoofing. But Fipke was born for this world, staying always one step ahead, and ultimately it was his science, more than any skullduggery, that sealed the day. Diamonds are found in volcanic chimneys called “kimberlite pipes,” and when the dust and snow had settled he was in possession of all the important ones, leaving only dregs and downwash for his rivals. Unpretentious as any storybook hero, Fipke was worth a billion rupees by the turn of the millennium and yet maintained a modest lifestyle, even continuing his fieldwork. Dirt beneath his fingernails, yes. What a bloke.

Did Rakesh Solanki—then an impressionable teen on a middle-class Bahawalpur cotton farm—hear the tale on NDTV, or read about it somewhere? Or did it simply echo in the public spirit until that afternoon in Bhilwara, when it suddenly gelled?

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Jump ahead two years, to 1996. While America’s Internet balloon began its historic inhale, while India’s economy struggled out of a thousand-year recession, Rakesh Solanki was a farm boy in a big-city college. In pictures of the day he peers out from behind thick glasses, exuding the funny, cheery confidence of a man well out of his depth and loving it. His grades were fine, his studies went well, but on the side, he was prowling the streets of Delhi, looking for the things young men have always sought. No doubt panning for loose women, our intrepid Rocky instead discovered beer, then hemp, then betting parlors where dice and football could—and often did!—finance the next round of amorous prospecting.

And still his grades were good. Never ruled by his wild side, Solanki ploughed his way through three semesters of foundation courses and was showing particularly well in the earth sciences, which would, he seemed to assume, become an interesting, if modest, career. And then something happened. Like a thunderclap, the petite poetess Abha Abhilasha Vyas crashed into his life. Although we may suspect the irony was lost on our randy young fellow, Ms. Vyas’s name can of course be translated as “desire for things that glitter”—an omen further punctuated by the manner of their meeting, in Kamla Nagar’s dilapidated Kothari Gamehouse.

It’s hard to believe all the witnesses who claim to have been there at the time, but this much seems certain: Clad in a green and gold blouse of questionable opacity, she leaned in front of Rakesh Solanki, so that his view of the TV was replaced with a view of her slight but shapely bosom, and said in Hindi, “Hey, goggles, be a darling and lend me a fifty.”

“Buzz off,” he answered in English, craning for a view of the game.

To which she replied, “Come on, mate, I’ve seen you up at the college. I’m a physicist, right? Fascinated with the laws of probability. Help a girl with her homework.”

For Vyas this was presumably no big deal. She was indeed studying physics at Delhi, but she’d grown up in this neighborhood and was known here, and the young man before her did have a certain awkward charm, a bit of money, and an obvious taste for the calendar girls posted round on the walls. Did she really expect the loan? Was she just kidding around? Alas for Solanki, still picking metaphorical cottonseeds out of his sandals, it was love at first (well, second) sight. Here was everything he’d ever dreamed of: a pretty, intelligent woman with a smart mouth and a taste for big-city adventure. The aforementioned bill was handed over with a smirk, and when wagered and lost, was gallantly replaced with another. And thus in five quick minutes was the pattern of their relationship set for all that followed.

Pity him if you like. Pity them both if you must. But listen to all of it before passing judgment; youthful innocence can turn on a heel only, and I mean only, if we choose to allow it.

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Jump ahead to the turn of the millennium. Stock markets were high, cash was flowing as freely as water, and armies of young programmers in Mumbai and Calcutta were sweeping Y2K bugs out of American and European software. Even Kashmir was working its way toward a ceasefire, lending a dreamy (if fragile) quality to the season.

Having completed two years of graduate school, Solanki’s darling Abha Vyas had taken a job at the WRC or Waste Reprocessing Centre of the Kakodar Nuclear Power Station in Jaipur, “breaking big ones into little ones,” as they say. That is, bombarding spent uranium fuel rods with the neutron emissions from a thorium reactor, so that massive, long-lived radioactive elements, like plutonium and neptunium, could be broken down into short-lived ones, like radon and actinium. On the side, she was now seeing her science-orientated poems published regularly in Varnamala and Kavya Bharati, which paid almost nothing but which stoked her professional reputation and, presumably, her self-esteem. Not that she needed much help in that area.

Rakesh Solanki, meanwhile, who’d been unable to secure anything more than temporary contract employment in his chosen field of geology, was working instead as a forklift operator for the waste disposal firm of Joshi Bhopal, which removed and buried the effluent from, among other places, the Kakodar Nuclear Power Station. It is tempting to speculate that Vyas pulled in a favor somewhere to get him the job, for union jobs were scarce in Jaipur at that time, but there’s no evidence of it.