Free The Perfect Host by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

was a kid in school. We thrashed out all the truths of the cosmos together. He was a swell guy. I remember once when Iggy decided that the rule forbidding women in the dorm was unreasonable. He rigged up a—”
    “What happened in Minsk?” asked the colonel coldly.
    “Oh. Minsk. Well, Iggy’s come a long way since college. He specialized in aerodynamics, and then got tired of it. For years he’d been fooling around with nuclear physics as a hobby, and during the Second War he got real high up in the field. Naturally he was called in when this ship nosed in at Minsk.”
    “Why naturally?”
    “Well, the fragment retained much of its shape. That’s aerodynamics. And it was hot—really hot. That’s nuclear physics. He was a big help. According to his extrapolations, by the way, your radar was right. If that was part of the hull, as it probably was, and if was a more or less continuous curve, then the ship must’ve been all of fifteen hundred feet long, with a four-hundred-foot cross-section at max. Quite a piece of business.”
    “I can’t say I’m happy to hear about it. Go on.”
    “Well, the high brass there apparently expected me to smell the fragment, taste it, and come up with a trade name. There was a lot of pressure to keep me away from testing equipment, if any. That’s where Iggy came in. He apologized for my carelessness in not bringing my betatron and some distillation apparatus. They saw the point and got me to a laboratory. They have some nice stuff.” He shook his head appreciatively.
    Eagerly the colonel asked: “Anything we haven’t got? Can we duplicate any of it? Where is this place? Did you see any defenses?”
    “They have lots of stuff,” said the doctor shortly. “Do you want me to finish? You do? All right. Well, we volatilized pieces of it, and we distilled it. We subjected it to reagents and reducers and stress analyses and crystallographic tests. We put it in magnetic fields and we tested its resistance and conductivity. We got plenty of figures on it.” He laughed. Again the colonel looked impatiently at him.
    “Well, what is the stuff?”
    “There is no name for it, yet. Iggy wants to call it
nichevite
—in other words, ‘never mind.’ Leroy, it looks like dural, only it’s harder and it’s tougher. But it oxidizes very easily. It’s metallic, but it has such a low conductivity that it makes like porcelain. It has heavy-isotope aluminum in it, and light copper, and it isn’t an alloy. It’s a compound. It’s a blasted chemical compound, very stable, made of nothing but elements with a positive valence. It’s stronger than any steel, and can withstand temperatures so high that you can forget about them. The atomic blast broke it; it didn’t fuse it. We volatilized it only by powdering it and oxidizing it in an electric furnace, and then subtracting the oxygen from our calculations. That got us near enough to where we wanted to go. One thing is certain: no place on Earth you ever heard about was the source of that stuff. Iggy has sworn to his bunch that the material is of extra-solar origin. They’re propagandizing it in Russia now. A good thing, too. The Russians were all ready to call the whole thing a Yankee trick.”
    “I’ve heard some of those broadcasts,” said the colonel. “I was hoping we could keep that information to ourselves.”
    “Don’t be childish,” said the physicist, in as abrupt a tone as he ever used. “We’re not out on maneuvers, sonny. Time and time again one person or another has told the world to wake up to reality. This once the world will wake up or else. You won’t be able to keep it asleep any more. It’s gone too far.”
    The threat from outside finally broke in the papers, but only after long and worried conferences in governmental and military headquarters all over the world. The simple fact that the world would work together or face extinction made, at first, as much impression as it ever had—very little. It was not