Inside the Forlorn Hope the mass of metal was urged into the shop, where Stevens clamped it immovably to the steel floor, before he took off his space-suit.
"Why, it's getting covered with snow, and the whole room is getting positively cold!" Nadia exclaimed.
"Sure. Anything that comes in from space is cold, even if it's been out only a few minutes, and that hunk of stuff has been out for nobody knows how many million years. It didn't get much heat from the sun except at perihelion, you know, so it's probably somewhere around minus two hundred and sixty degrees now. I'll have to throw a heater on it for half an hour before we can touch it. And since this is more or less new stuff to you, I'll caution you—don't try to touch anything that has just come in. That hammer or pike would freeze your hand instantly, even though they've been out only a little while. Before you touch anything, blow on it, like this, see? If your breath freezes solid on it, like that, don't touch it—it's cold."
Under the infra-beams of the heater, the mass of the metal was brought to room temperature and Stevens attacked it with his machine tools. Bit by bit the stubborn material was torn from the lump. Through heavy goggles he watched the incandescent mass in a refractory crucible, in the heart of the induction furnace.
"What do you think you've got—what you want?"
"I don't know. It wasn't iron—it wouldn't hold a magnet. It's royal metal of some kind, I think. Base metals mostly melt at around fifteen hundred, and that crucible is still dry as a bone at better than seventeen."
"How are you going to separate out the tantalum and the others you want from the ones that you don't want?"
"I'm afraid that I'm not going to, very well," replied Stevens, with a wry grimace. "What I don't know about metallurgy would fill a library, and I'm probably the world's worst chemist. However, by a series of successive liquations, I hope to separate out fractions that I can use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen-fifty, tantalum about twenty-nine hundred, and tungsten not until 'way up around thirty-three, or four hundred—and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course, each fraction will probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but I think maybe I'll be able to make them do."
"But mayn't that whole chunk be a pure metal?"
"It's conceivable, but not probable. There, she's beginning to separate at just below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I think—platinum, rhodium, iridium, and that gang, you know. While I'm doing this, you might be getting those five coils into exact resonance, if you want to."