"Steve, I notice you have plenty of light, but why not have windows?"
"I have no windows except in the main pilot room. The trouble with windows is that they reduce the strength of the shell. Also, as this is a sleeping room, and there will be no night in space, why not have it this way? I need considerable strength in the walls of the ship, because the accelerations that I use in starting and turning and stopping are really rather a strain on any material. The outer wall is a six-inch iridio-tungsten alloy shell, with two openings in it, the window, and the door. The rest is absolutely seamless, one solid casting. The window is so designed, in connection with the placement of the ray projectors that it doesn't weaken the shell. There is no frame work, but the two partitions across the ship are each six inches thick, and act as braces. The inner wall is a thin one-inch layer of metal, supported by the outer shell, and separated from it by small braces about two inches high. This intervening space has been evacuated by the simple process of going out into space and opening a valve, then closing it before returning to Earth."
"That one-inch layer of metal of yours is bothering me. There is something strange about it, and all the trim and mouldings in here. The green I suppose is to relieve eye strain, but it is not the color itself that seems strange. It is the impression I have that the metal itself is of that beautiful leaf green shade, and that it is the metal in the chairs, table, and racks that gives them that color."
"Quite right Dave, it is."
"But Steve, I thought that there were no more elements to be discovered. In the collection at the Museum in New York they had all ninety-two, and I saw no colored metals."
"In the first place, remember I told you there really were more than ninety-two elements, if we treat the isotopes as elements, and I don't believe they had all the ninety-two there, for there are several elements that disintegrate inside of a few days. They couldn't keep those. But these metals are compounds."
"Compounds! Do you mean alloys?"
"No, chemical compounds, just as truly as salt or sulphuric acid. They are related to tetra ethyl stibine, Sb(C2H5)4, which is a compound that acts like a metal physically and chemically. It is too soft to be any good, but there are hundreds of these organic compounds of carbon. There are red ones, green ones, blue ones, and a thousand different ones, soft, brittle, liquid, solid; some are even gaseous."
"Colored metals! What a boon to artists! Think what fun they will have working in that stuff!"