Much, if not all, of the dust fell off us as we walked over to the small green hill in the center of the park. The birds twittered, the sun shone, the breeze was fresh; and after the Commissioners had settled on convenient tree stumps, I felt quite hopeful about the third line of evidence. Lood stood optimistically by.
"Your Honors," I said, "you are aware that Earth suffers a grave shortage of metals. Almost all economical quantities have been mined out. Yet, Your Honors—" I paused dramatically—"in the haematin of human blood alone, whose main function is to carry oxygen to the system, there is nearly twice as much iron by weight as oxygen."
"Precisely which of us, Mr. Jones, do you propose to mine first?"
I cleared my throat and let the thin Commissioner's remark pass.
"Merely making the point, Your Honor, that the metal-carrying properties of bacteria have been hardly considered."
This was stretching it a bit because selective breeding of microbes for the recovery of metals in tailings have been developed back in the nineteen-fifties. But so far as I knew, no one had carried it as far as my client race.
"Mr. Lood," I commanded.
"Just one moment, Mr. Jones," said the bald Commissioner drily. "Let us have an outline of this before we start."
"Certainly, Your Honor. Mr. Lood will now extract gold from a sample of ocean water we have obtained."
I signalled to the waiting carrier and it came trundling softly over the grass and deposited a large tank on the grass.