Free Mine: The Arrival by Brett Battles

door was already open, and Kozakov could see a couple of people inside.
    Durant paused at the threshold. “There are only twenty-seven people who are aware of what’s inside this facility. You will be number twenty-eight. Of those, all but one work here.”
    “And who’s the lucky one who isn’t buried down here with you?”
    “The president.”
    Kozakov stared at him. “Of the United States?”
    “That’s correct. I answer to him directly.”
    “You are telling me that you communicate directly with President Roosevelt about whatever it is you do down here.”
    “I do. I’m glad you understand.” Durant smiled. “So, Dr. Kozakov, are you ready?”
    “Ready for what?”
    “To discover that everything you’ve known before this moment is meaningless.”
    Kozakov snorted. “I highly doubt that will be the case.”
    With a knowing twinkle in his eyes, Durant walked through the opening. “Welcome to Project Titan.”
    What followed was disbelief, curiosity, and then excitement, as Kozakov realized first that Durant had been right and everything before was meaningless, and second, any desire he may have had to return to the Soviet Union was forever extinguished.

T WELVE
     
    July 3, 1943
     
     
    K OZAKOV RAPPED ON the doorjamb of the director’s office.
    Durant looked up from his desk and smiled. “Magnus. Come in, come in.”
    Kozakov stepped into the room. “I was told you wanted to see me.”
    “That, I did.” Durant’s smile grew even larger. “It’s here.”
    “What’s here?”
    “Your drill bit.”
    Kozakov stared back at him, stunned.
    Kozakov’s first task upon joining Project Titan had been to obtain a sample of the metal that made up the craft. He had been told that all prior attempts had been unsuccessful. His predecessor had tried drilling and scraping and scratching, but the surface had resisted all attempts.
    To get a sense of the problem, Kozakov had repeated several of Dr. Goodwin’s methods, and then secluded himself in his office for months as he considered solutions to the problem. He tried several new methods, but they all proved as worthless as those used before.
    One potential answer remained a theory, as he didn’t have the means to try it. He had presented the idea to Durant and then forgotten about it, turning his attention to more realistic approaches.
    As a materials scientist, much of Kozakov’s work crossed over into geology, and he had, before the war, been acquainted with several individuals who worked in that field. At a meeting in Moscow, he had been part of a dinner gathering where the conversation had turned to the hardest material in the world—diamonds.
    The question became whether or not man would ever be able to develop a harder substance. With the rapid scientific advances that the first half of the twentieth century had seen, there was a near unanimous opinion that it would happen. The only differences in viewpoints concerned how long it would take until that occurred.
    “Ten years at most,” Dvornikov, a professor at Moscow University, said.
    The others laughed.
    “I agree it’s inevitable,” Vistin said. He was a prominent researcher with the Bureau of Science in Leningrad. “But in a decade? Not possible. You, sir, have too much faith in the abilities of man.”
    “Then how long do you think?” Dvornikov countered.
    Vistin shrugged. “Thirty or forty years at least. Yes, things have come a long way, but—”
    “Even if man does create something harder than diamonds, it won’t be the hardest substance on Earth.” The speaker was a small man named Balabanov, a geologist from a university somewhere in the east.
    Several of the scientists rolled their eyes, clearly having heard this before. But Dvornikov apparently had not.
    “Is that so? Are you saying the planet has created something stronger than diamonds?” he asked.
    “Not the planet, exactly. But nature, yes.”
    “Does this substance have a name?”
    “Not yet.”
    One of the eye