Pendleton shook his head. "We don't know. But we have an idea that
Jovium comes from the mud."
"Jovium!" MacVickers' grey-green eyes began to grow hot. "The stuff
that's winning this war for them. The metal destroyer!"
"We're not sure, of course." Pendleton's infinitely weary eyes turned
across the stretch of greasy metal deck to the end of the circuit. "But
look there. What does that suggest to you?"
The huge pipe of the forced-air ejector ran along the deck there behind
a screen of heavy metal mesh. Just above it, enclosed behind three
thicknesses of glassite, was a duct leading upward. The duct, from the
inordinate size of its supports and its color, was pure lead.
Lead. Lead pipe, lead armor. Radiations that changed living men into
half-living diamonds. Nobody knew what Jovium was or where it came
from--only it did.
But scientists on the three besieged worlds thought it was probably an
isotope of some powerful radioactive metal, perhaps uranium, capable of
setting up a violent progressive breakdown in metallic atoms.
"If," said MacVickers softly, "the pipe were lined with plastic....
Blue mud! I've traded through these moons, and the only other deposit
of that mud is a saucepanful on J-XI! This must be their only source."
Loris shoved an oil can at him. "What difference does it make?" he said
savagely.
MacVickers took the can without seeing it. "They store it up there,
then, in the space between the inner wall and the outer. If somebody
could get up there and set the stuff off...."