happily. ‘Diamonds are always found associated with volcanic vents. But somehow I never thought the analogy would hold here.’
Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal, and handed it over to Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never in his life, Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a message of congratulation. The signal read: WE’VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH MODIFIED PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE. COSTS NEGLIGIBLE .
‘What’s the matter?’ said Vandenburg, when he saw the stricken look on Paynter’s face. ‘It doesn’t seem bad news to me, whatever it means.’
Paynter gulped two or three times like a stranded fish, then stared helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled the palm of his hand. He tossed it into the air, and it floated back in that slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.
Finally he found his voice.
‘My lab’s been working for years,’ he said, ‘trying to synthesise diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million dollars. Today it’s worth a couple of hundred. I’m not sure I’ll bother to carry it back to Earth.’
Well, he did carry it back; it seemed a pity not to. For about three months, Mrs P. had the finest diamond necklace in the world, worth every bit of a thousand dollars—mostly the cost of cutting and polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production, and a month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental cruelty; and I suppose you could say it was justified.
Watch this Space
It was quite a surprise to discover, when I looked it up, that the most famous experiment we carried out while we were on the moon had its beginnings way back in 1955. At that time, high-altitude rocket research had been going for only about ten years, mostly at White Sands, New Mexico. Nineteen fifty-five was the date of one of the most spectacular of those early experiments, one that involved the ejection of sodium onto the upper atmosphere.
On Earth, even on the clearest night, the sky between the stars isn’t completely dark. There’s a very faint background glow, and part of it is caused by the fluorescence of sodium atoms a hundred miles up. Since it would take the sodium in a good many cubic miles of the upper atmosphere to fill a single matchbox, it seemed to the early investigators that they could make quite a fireworks display if they used a rocket to dump a few pounds of the stuff into the ionosphere.
They were right. The sodium squirted out of a rocket above White Sands early in 1955 produced a great yellow glow in the sky which was visible, like a kind of artificial moonlight, for over an hour, before the atoms dispersed. This experiment wasn’t done for fun (though it was fun) but for a serious scientific purpose. Instruments trained on this glow were able to gather new knowledge about the upper air—knowledge that went into the stockpile of information without which space flight would never have been possible.
When they got to the moon, the Americans decided that it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment there, on a much larger scale. A few hundred kilograms of sodium fired up from the surface would produce a display that would be visible from Earth, with a good pair of field glasses, as it fluoresced its way up through the lunar atmosphere.
(Some people, by the way, still don’t realise that the moon has an atmosphere. It’s about a million times too thin to be breathable, but if you have the right instruments you can detect it. As a meteor shield, it’s first-rate, for though it may be tenuous it’s hundreds of miles deep.)
Everyone had been talking about the experiment for days. The sodium bomb had arrived from Earth in the last supply rocket, and a very impressive piece of equipment it looked. Its operation was extremely simple; when ignited, an incendiary charge vaporised the sodium until a high pressure was built up, then a diaphragm
Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal, and handed it over to Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never in his life, Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a message of congratulation. The signal read: WE’VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH MODIFIED PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE. COSTS NEGLIGIBLE .
‘What’s the matter?’ said Vandenburg, when he saw the stricken look on Paynter’s face. ‘It doesn’t seem bad news to me, whatever it means.’
Paynter gulped two or three times like a stranded fish, then stared helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled the palm of his hand. He tossed it into the air, and it floated back in that slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.
Finally he found his voice.
‘My lab’s been working for years,’ he said, ‘trying to synthesise diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million dollars. Today it’s worth a couple of hundred. I’m not sure I’ll bother to carry it back to Earth.’
Well, he did carry it back; it seemed a pity not to. For about three months, Mrs P. had the finest diamond necklace in the world, worth every bit of a thousand dollars—mostly the cost of cutting and polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production, and a month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental cruelty; and I suppose you could say it was justified.
Watch this Space
It was quite a surprise to discover, when I looked it up, that the most famous experiment we carried out while we were on the moon had its beginnings way back in 1955. At that time, high-altitude rocket research had been going for only about ten years, mostly at White Sands, New Mexico. Nineteen fifty-five was the date of one of the most spectacular of those early experiments, one that involved the ejection of sodium onto the upper atmosphere.
On Earth, even on the clearest night, the sky between the stars isn’t completely dark. There’s a very faint background glow, and part of it is caused by the fluorescence of sodium atoms a hundred miles up. Since it would take the sodium in a good many cubic miles of the upper atmosphere to fill a single matchbox, it seemed to the early investigators that they could make quite a fireworks display if they used a rocket to dump a few pounds of the stuff into the ionosphere.
They were right. The sodium squirted out of a rocket above White Sands early in 1955 produced a great yellow glow in the sky which was visible, like a kind of artificial moonlight, for over an hour, before the atoms dispersed. This experiment wasn’t done for fun (though it was fun) but for a serious scientific purpose. Instruments trained on this glow were able to gather new knowledge about the upper air—knowledge that went into the stockpile of information without which space flight would never have been possible.
When they got to the moon, the Americans decided that it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment there, on a much larger scale. A few hundred kilograms of sodium fired up from the surface would produce a display that would be visible from Earth, with a good pair of field glasses, as it fluoresced its way up through the lunar atmosphere.
(Some people, by the way, still don’t realise that the moon has an atmosphere. It’s about a million times too thin to be breathable, but if you have the right instruments you can detect it. As a meteor shield, it’s first-rate, for though it may be tenuous it’s hundreds of miles deep.)
Everyone had been talking about the experiment for days. The sodium bomb had arrived from Earth in the last supply rocket, and a very impressive piece of equipment it looked. Its operation was extremely simple; when ignited, an incendiary charge vaporised the sodium until a high pressure was built up, then a diaphragm
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