"I don't know, but file that one away for future reference," said Hammond, thoughtfully. "Make up a batch of xenon krypto-neide, or any of that ilk which might be crystalline, and then heave it in an electrostatically charged shell at the enemy. Upon neutralization, what with the hellish electronic charge plus the reversion to gas—probably white-hot from electrical discharges—we'd have an explosive that would really be good."
"Good!" exploded McBride. "Look, my little munitions expert, the neutralizing charge—happening instantaneously—would paralyze everything electronic in nature for seventy miles even in space, and the electronic charge, reaching zero in nothing flat, would cause instantaneous decomposition of the compound. Since it is held together electrically, the decomposition, or burning rate, would propagate at the speed of light, or approaching that velocity. Whoooo. Blooey for everything in sight!"
"Funny how the human animal can always dream up a scheme for something lethal out of every invention."
"Yeah—even while they're trying to figure out something to save a planetful of people, they'll invent something deadly. That's one of the things that makes us us. But what do we do with the Telfans?"
"Theodi says it is stable once made—do you suppose it would be stable even if made in the forced process?"
"Let's try. Got the stuff?"
"Barrels of it," said McBride. He went to the shelves of bottles and removed the ingredients for Telfu's antibody. He weighed the chemicals, and placed them in a combustion boat. This he placed under a cover-glass and then called for Hannigan to run the intrinsic-charge generator.
As the collectors began to load the ship with electrons, and the various chemical indicators began to change color at various levels of charge, McBride and Hammond set up long-focus microscopes to watch the compound.
The final tube on the indicator panel changed from the mixture of xenon and bromine to a gray-green gas, and then McBride called: "Enough, Hannigan."