The Technetium Rush, page 2
This much is a matter of record: He somehow scraped up the funds to purchase salt-poisoned farmland in the Arvalli foothills. A parcel here, a parcel there, slowly adding up to hundreds of dry, worthless hectares. Geologically speaking, though, these peach-colored sites were rich in molybdenum and rhenium and manganese—chemical relatives of technetium. This was before he found the gyroidal crystal. Unlike his idol Charles Fipke, Solanki didn't follow a trail of clues back to their source; he bought the source and then, miraculously, discovered the distant clue. Or so he would have us believe.
Perhaps he found his treasure on private lands and then bought the lands without informing the owners of their worth and then filed his mineral claim. Poor scientist that he was, he could perhaps be forgiven for such a fraud; he sold the land for enough money to retire on several times over. And since the original landowner—a cotton farmer like himself—has made out even better by unloading the rest of his farm, there can be little cause for rancor between them. What a bloke.
Unfortunately, there's a snag. “Tea's” longest-lived, least-radioactive isotope is technetium 98, and to the extent it occurs in nature at all, that's the form we'd expect to find. The metal content of Tc solankite, however, includes high levels of Tc 97, which according to my physicist friend, “occurs only as a result of a slow neutron process, which would not occur naturally and certainly not in the uranium-poor Arvalli."
Mmm-hmm.
I'm not saying Solanki whipped that crystal up himself and then hid it in the ground as part of a real estate swindle. Such an accusation would be irresponsible. Still, a funny thing about hoaxes is that they require fantastic skill to pull off. The public may be duped easily enough, but to fool an art expert, fool a geologist, fool the press and the government and assorted thugs and parasites, one has to forge an object of such exacting proportion and composition that to a casual eye—and even to a battery of preliminary tests—it appears genuine. Curse the counterfeiter though we may, we cannot help muttering our admiration through the other side of our mouths. A fine job indeed, the rascal. How did he do that?
For better or worse, though, the Solankis are unlikely to hang onto their fortune for long. With the land sale finalized and the rupees in the bank, the happy couple have gone at last for the overseas vacation they've dreamed about all these years. Their destination? Las Vegas, Nevada.
Best of luck, mate.
Wil McCarthy, The Technetium Rush
