"Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. They do it with cosmic rays."
"But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected.
"Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn't penetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."
"Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.
He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place, there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With them, you produce negamatter—atoms with negatively charged protons and positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into contact with normal positive-matter—That's done in a chamber the size of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a hundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that would lift ten ships the size of the Lester Dawes. Then you need another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your cutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotary beam that does the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is about the size of a silver five-centisol piece."
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert's stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force Command.
"Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to where that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year."
"Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn told them. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."
He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected Indispensable Man.
"Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the Great Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer."