Channing shook his head. "That's dangerous," he said solemnly. "If you had a six-inch cube of every known element, would you stack 'em all side by side?"
"It might be all right—until you came to putting phosphorus on top of a hunk of iodin," said Walt.
"There's no reason to suppose that Wes didn't get a couple of very active elements side by each. We know nothing of the extra-charted elements. We can make 'em, but until we do, what can we know of 'em?"
"Well, we didn't lose the station," said Walt. "And business is so punk that tossing the beams won't harm us much; we'll have to spend some time aligning the place again."
"We're all here, anyway," agreed Don, looking over the ruined blister laboratory. "But look, Wes, I think you're running on the wrong gear. Anything that can be made with this gadget can be duplicated. Right?"
"I guess so."
"What we need is a substance that will be stabilized under some sort of electronic pressure. Then it might come unglued when the matter-dingbat beam hit it. Follow?"
Wes Farrell thought for a few seconds. "We might make an electronic alloy," he said.
"A what?"
"A substance that is overbalanced as goes electrons. They will be inserted by concocting the stuff under extremely high electron pressure. Make it on some sort of station that has an intrinsic charge of ten to the fiftieth electron volts or so; that'll make queer alloys, I'll bet. Then it can be stabilized by interalloying something with a dearth of electrons. The two metals will be miscible, say, when liquid, and so their electron balance will come out even. They are cooled under this stress and so forth. When the disintegrator beam hits them, it will liberate the electrons and the whole thing will go plooey."