Then Bronson put his head in his hands. "And I'm supposed to find out all this to save my world—when the best brains of that same world in another time-plane have known about the stuff for thirty years and still cannot—"
"That is not fair," she said. "After all, how many years did Enrico Fermi seek the answer for his experiments with the fission of uranium? They numbered a good many transuranic elements before they discovered that these new elements were actually the fissioned products and were well-known elements halfway down the atomic chart."
"That's true," he nodded. "Also it is against all theory that an element should display more than one atomic identity."
"Right. Unless they are incomplete atoms—a house built of brickbats."
Bronson shrugged. "I'm trying that."
"How?" puzzled Virginia.
"I've got the mass spectrograph running again but each slit is loaded to the scuppers with neutron absorber."
"What do you expect?" asked Virginia.
"I don't really know. I sort of hope it may lead to something. Come on—let's try it."
Taking his last three pages of calculations, Ed Bronson led the way to the analytic laboratory....