The Catalyst

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

At high-pressure chemical plants in the United States and Germany, the race to process a new wonder chemical is on. The stakes are high - and the competition is reckless, desperate and fierce. Trialine. Wonder Drug. If synthesized, its possibilities are endless. Fabulous. It will revolutionise the 21st century. And it will make somebody famous. And somebody very, very rich. But the key to the process is held by somebody who doesn't know it. Somebody who will be transformed forever. Somebody who is destined to be... The Catalyst.

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 187

Sample

One afternoon at ten minutes of five the oscillator on Paul’s screen bleeped. He punched in the call and looked up at the little panel. It was Alec Marggold, his superior in the Patent Section.

“I just got a call from Chicago,” said the senior attorney. “I have to be at the trial tomorrow morning. I have to leave for the airport in a few minutes.”

This was alarming. “But what about the trialine meeting tomorrow morning with Kussman?”

“You are on your own.”

Paul listened to his insides begin to disintegrate.

Marggold simply looked at him gloomily. “You are new here. You don’t have the experience. I know that. But consider the alternates. Postpone the conference until I get back? Out of the question. We have already postponed it once for the same reason. Ask one of the other lawyers to cover? Unthinkable. We might wind up finding the whole project has been transferred to them. That leaves you. I am throwing you to the wolves, and yet, with a little care, you can survive.”

There was a hiss and a plop from the direction of Paul’s credenza. Something had just been blown into the receptor pocket.

“The trialine perle,” said Marggold dryly. “All yours. Cram like hell. I’ve talked to Johnnie Serane. He’s in Washington today, but he’s taking the tube back tonight. He’ll be there. He’ll keep Kussman under control.”

Johnnie Serane? Who was this Serane? Some do-gooding chemical Galahad? The Protector of the Defenseless, the white-coated rescuer of freshly hired, helpless young patent attorneys? He felt a surge of resentment. He could take care of himself. And then he rethought the matter. But suppose I can’t handle Kussman? Suppose Kussman gets me fired? His throat was suddenly dry. He couldn’t take any chances. Johnnie Serane—whoever he was—kind words and all, would be most welcome. “I’ll sit next to him,” said Paul.

Marggold took a long draw on his cigar. “And maybe nothing awful will come up anyhow.” He punched off.

Paul leaned over, picked up the incoming capsule from his receptor, and retrieved the perle.

The trialine perle was a grape-size semicrystal of alumina, Al2O3, the stuff of rubies and sapphires. And it was, at least in the beginning of its life, and despite its shape, a true crystal, as shown by x-ray crystallography. But now, after having been imprinted with a colossal amount of information on trialine, it could no longer with strict accuracy be called a crystal. For the alternating, beautifully spaced atoms of aluminum and oxygen, subjected to a displacing strain by a microlaser recording beam, no longer gave a proper Laue pattern. In playback, the imprint was reversed. The incident laser scanned the slowly revolving perle, and the internal molecular strains were faithfully recorded in the reflected beam, which, being thus modulated, was then dissected in an analyzer and fed to projecto screen and/or speaker.

Paul sighed and dropped the perle on the spindle of his playback.

What was so important about trialine anyway? Why all the fuss? As if to answer him, an Internal Management news release flashed on his screen. He read this carefully.

Trialine. The wonder chemical. Known for a hundred years as a fascinating but expensive laboratory curiosity, now cheaply available from urea by J.S. Serane’s tricky high-pressure process. The company was on the verge of putting up a mid-size trialine plant. Fred Kussman’s Development Group had completed the engineering, Legal had taken an option on a site in Louisiana, and Kussman would run the plant, if and when it was built.

Paul read all this, but he was still puzzled. Why was trialine the wonder chemical? What was so great about it? He read on. And now it began to come through. Trialine was a tri-amine: It made linear polymers with two of its amine groups; the third was available for cross-linking. That meant a wide variety of synthetic resins, adhesives, monofilaments, fabrics, coatings, varnishes, wet-strength paper … The market was endless, fabulous. The high-pressure plant would almost certainly be built.

He flashed rapidly through the files of some of the company’s patents in the trialine field. And now he was into research reports and memos. It seemed that Serane’s original process was not exactly perfect. There were problems. The yield was so-so. Worse, the reaction products corroded the autoclaves badly. In a commercial plant, replacement might be required every couple of months. So Serane had lined a bench autoclave with Korium, the new inert alloy. Presto! The Ko was totally inert to trialine. The lining protected the autoclave. No corrosion. Marggold had promptly filed a patent application. And the Patent Office had promptly thrown the case into interference with another application filed by Deutsche A.G., of Hamburg, Germany, covering the same invention.

Trialine. And trouble. The trouble with that Patent Office interference was that the German inventor had got there first. Serane was junior party, and junior parties had a history of losing patent interferences. Marggold had tried to warn Kussman that the company could lose, that it should either settle the interference or the lab should develop some standby corrosion-resistant metals. Serane had even compiled a list for Kussman to test. But Kussman had done nothing. Kussman didn’t want to spend any more money testing other metals. He was quite pleased with Ko—even though Serane had suggested it. If the company built a trialine plant, the autoclaves would be Ko-lined.

It was nearly nine before Paul finished. Could he remember all this stuff? He certainly had to try. He pulled on his galoshes and surcoat and took the elevator down to the parking lot. He looked up. The skies were totally dark, and an occasional snowflake hit him in the face. He grimaced, got into his electric, and pulled carefully out onto the Post Road.

It had been snowing all day. For hours the melters had been sweeping it up from the streets, melting it with their nuclear heaters and pumping the water into their storage tanks. Paul passed one, standing beside a storm sewer, draining its tank dry. Steam rose up from the grating in a dense fog.

So different from Texas. And just now he was glad to think about Texas, because trialine was coming out of his ears. He had to stop thinking trialine or he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. And he had to sleep tonight or Kussman would eat him tomorrow.

And so he thinks of his boyhood in a small Texas town, before he moved east to go to college.

He thinks of the house on Deafsmith Street.

He sees images of Billy in that house. Fifteen hundred miles away, and years ago. The scenes ebb and flow, form, disappear, reform. As he drives, he hears sounds, voices. Shapes crystallize.

He studies the memory house in grave silence. He gets glimpses of the windows of his little room in the back, and of Billy’s bigger room on the south side.

Billy had lived and died in that room. He had died of novarella, during the Great Epidemic. Novarella, an escapee of the early days of recombinant DNA, was like pneumonia, except that, in addition to lung failure, the victim’s hemoglobin also disintegrated, and death was by suffocation. No age was safe. In the womb, it produced fetal deformities. There was no cure. As Billy lay dying, Mommee’s breath had synchronized with his, as though giving him some sort of empathic respiration. But not even Mommee had been able to stay his going.

The dining room was opposite. He and Billy had played chess on the big dining room table.

The old four-cylinder Malibu had stood there in the carport. Far in the back he could see the shed where Billy had taught him the rudiments of chemistry.

Billy. For William Jennings Bryan Blandford. A strange abbreviation for so diverse a personality. It was like calling Goethe “Jack,” or da Vinci “Lennie.”

What was Billy like? A youthful Michelangelo, or Francis Bacon, or Praxiteles, or Omar Khayyam, before they had done anything for which the centuries would remember them.

Out in the back shed Billy had his lab. Here he had explained gunpowder to Paul.

“History often turns on being smart. Take Cortez and the conquest of Mexico. When he burnt his ships at Vera Cruz he cut himself off from all supplies. When he used up his gunpowder, that was it. But that was his sole advantage over the Aztec. He had to have plenty of gunpowder or he was a dead man. So he made his own.” Billy pointed to the three little piles on the paper. “Charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur. All weighed out: fifteen, seventy-five, and ten parts. Charcoal, of course, was no problem. They got that from wood. But how about the nitrate?”

Paul frowned. “I dunno.”

“From caves. Bat guano. Very rich in nitrogen. It was well known in their day that deposits of KNO3 formed in the damp cellars and caves in Europe—leached out of the ground near privies and farmyard dung heaps. Basically the same source. Royalty actually had niter rights in French cellars. Once a year the royal scrapers would come around with their buckets. And so it would continue until the discovery of Chile nitrate. But enough of niter. Where did the Spaniard get his sulfur?”

Paul listened to this in awe. He would never know as much as Billy. Not in a million years. “Sulfur? I don’t know. Where?”

“Volcanoes, of course. Fumaroles. In their day, the world supply of sulfur came from leaky volcanoes. And Mexico had plenty. They found a good one at Popocatepetl. And after that, it was just a question of mixing everything up.”

“Can I mix?”

“Go ahead.” Billy pushed the mortar and pestle over. “The niter first. If you should grind them all together, dry, the pressure might set it off. Now then, work in the charcoal and sulfur. Use the spoon, gently. Now let’s go outside and test a spoonful.”

Paul gingerly spooned out a little black heap on the flagstone of the lab sidewalk.

“Strike the igniter. Go ahead. It won’t bite you.”

Paul struck the igniter.

“Okay, touch it off.”

Paul did. The little pile began to burn merrily. But that’s all it did.

He looked disappointed.

Billy grinned. “You thought it was going to explode, or at least go poof, didn’t you? If it were confined in a gunbarrel or a bomb or a firecracker, it would have made a very fine noise. But here in the open it just burns.”

And all this had come to an end.

He remembered.

He gradually noticed (with increasing interest) that he had, for some minutes, been sitting in his electric in the parking lot of his apartment complex, on Rhoda Street, in the town of Ashkettles, in the state of Connecticut.

He checked the dashboard by reflex. The dials showed that the recharge cable, like a hungry puppy, had already thrust its thirsting socket onto the charge post in front of his car. The socket was coded to his electric bill, and he would be about five dollars poorer by morning. At sometime during the night the car battery would signal the fact that it had been electronically sated, and the cord would retract back into his bumper. Meanwhile, in his mind he could hear the meter whirring. He sighed and turned off the motor.

Back to Ashkettles.

Only last week Marggold had shown him around the lab.

“We inmates of the Ashkettles Research Laboratory,” explained the senior attorney, “call it simply the lab. Fortune magazine once called it the Ivory Tower. The comptroller calls it the Deduction. The main voting trust calls it the Country Club, and the Minority Report refers to it as the Funny Farm.”

As they made the rounds, Marggold introduced Paul to various people. Paul had trouble with the names. Some, he understood, were research chemists; a couple were his brother attorneys.

“Don’t worry about remembering who’s who,” said Marggold. “You’ll hit them again later on. And you’ll like most of them. Some of them will make good friends.”

“Yes,” said Paul. He knew he was going to like Marggold.

And so, into his apartment.

As he entered his door the vestibule light came on automatically, and he heard the gentle bleeping of his message retainer. Someone had tried to call him. Perhaps Marggold had tried to reach him, perhaps to say he could attend the conference after all. His heart surged momentarily, then sank. No, not Marggold. The senior attorney would have tried the office.

He walked over and punched the playback button.

“Hi, Paul. Would you like to come over for a late supper, or maybe a nightcap? Call me before eight.” It was Sheila.

She had spent last night here, and she had still been asleep in the pink satin sheets when he had left for work this morning. Her perfume still lay in wraiths throughout the spartan geometries of his apartment.

He smiled wryly. Where did she get the energy? He was depleted. The day had drained him. Another time, Sheila. He looked at his watch. It was nearly ten. Anyhow, by now you’ve found another partner.

Sheila Ward had been in his classes at George Washington Law Center. Just now she was working at the Liebig Club in New York and living as a registered cohabitant with an innocent named Uriah Hight, who seemed to travel most of the time. Everyone called him Urea because he had designed and built the Ashkettles urea plant that would be used to supply the projected trialine plant.

Paul owed Sheila a debt; for when they were in law school together, she had heard about the opening in the Ashkettles Patent Section and had told Paul. And so Paul had applied, had been accepted, and after his graduation had moved to Connecticut.

But he did not want to think about Sheila just now. He would call her tomorrow.

He was awakened next morning by the gentle but insistent action of the bed shaker. And then the radio came on, and he yawned while he listened to the jangling wake-up music.

Trialine. Well, at least he knew what was on the perle. He could now carry on an intelligent conversation about trialine.

He sniffed. Did he smell the sea? His imagination, probably. His apartment had no windows, and the recirculated air was horridly pure. In the beginning he had paid five dollars a month extra to have the briny scent of Long Island Sound piped into his air ducts. But he had discontinued the service when he discovered that the scent was synthetic. The building management had simply bubbled sterile air through a vat of aqueous sodium chloride containing a little methyl amine, the latter aimed at suggesting decaying fish.

He proceeded into the shower, where he became dimly aware that something was not quite right. The spray? No. The water spray had come at him from above and from the total perimeter of the circular tile shower stall. Had it been a little warmer than usual? He couldn’t remember. Then the spray had shut off and the warm-air jets had dried him quickly and adequately. Then—ah, yes. The deodorant sprays. Not only had he forgotten to lift his arms—the sprays were too low anyhow. They had struck his biceps. And they were the wrong scent. Sheila had programmed the shower for herself yesterday morning, and he had forgotten to reprogram it. He sighed, slid the glass door back, and stepped out into the bathroom. Somewhere in here there ought to be a deoperspirant stick. Nowadays everything is so damned convenient—and complicated. Even bathing. You can’t just get wet and then dry yourself with a towel. And whatever happened to bathtubs?

He glanced at the little tri-di TV in the wall over his dresser. The morning news. Things happening all over the world and in outer space. Martian crew returning after one month on the red planet. South Atlantic pipeline, Kuwait to Texas, to tap into the colossal new lignite-liquefaction complex nearing completion at Baytown. President Jones visiting coal gasification plants in West Virginia, now the most prosperous state in the country. However, the miners threaten to strike if she goes down into a mine. The epidemic in Madras now definitely identified as novarella. Twenty thousand dead. Creeping up the coast toward Calcutta. Still no known cure.

Paul stared for a mom. . .