Chapter 2

ET had made amazing progress in learning English. We had reached the level of simple sentences, singular and plural, and past, present, and future tenses. I knew that he had five co-husbands and one wife. I had even learned his full real name, but I still preferred to call him ET. He didn't mind, in fact, I think that he was amused by the idea.

He was not able to move his viewport around much at his end, so he showed me his world through pictures. I did the same for him, mostly with standard views of the usual tourist spots like the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, etc. This got boring pretty quick, so we switched to more interesting things. He went ape over the Periodic Table that I showed him. He left and was gone about 10 minutes.

When he returned, he showed me his version of the periodic table with a number of additional elements. He had the transuranic elements grouped the way we had the rare earths (lantanide series) with a hell of a lot more elements beyond #108. His table had a gap in it, then it picked up again with element #258. The elements ran on up to #307. By the color, I could tell which were the radioactive elements, and his chart was quite detailed: everything including bismuth and above was shown as radioactive through the transuranic elements. However, element #258 and up were shown as stable. That must mean that there was a whole shitpot, if you will pardon the technical term, of stable elements that we haven't discovered or made yet!

Damn, I ought to be able to build a PhD thesis out of that information! It could even be worth a Nobel Prize! Shit, who am I kidding? I would need a super collider or some such to do the research to go along with the assertion about the existence of element #258. There was no way that I could profit from this information, though it was very interesting.

We were fooling around with showing each other various things when I accidentally knocked over a small can of yellow paint. I grabbed some paper towels and wiped up the mess before it could get any worse. I sure didn't want to wear out my welcome in the garage workshop, so I tried to keep things as neat and clean as I could.

When I turned back to ET, he was very excited. He had written me a note, "What was that material you just wiped up?" (To make things simpler, I'm going to use conventional spelling when I describe my communication with ET.)

"That was a substance we call 'paint.' Don't you have a similar thing?"

"I don't think so. At least, I have never seen any. What is it used for?"

"Paint has a lot of uses. It can be a protective coating, it can be purely decorative, or it can have many other uses."

"Please tell me how it is made."

"I'll have to look up the details, but a simple explanation is that a finely divided, often colloidal size, material is suspended in a liquid matrix which us usually transparent. After some short length of time, a chemical reaction takes place which causes the matrix to harden around the suspended material and to stick to whatever surface it is applied to."

"I think I could make a lot of money on my planet if I could duplicate paint here. Will you help me to try?"

"Yes, I would be glad to help you."

Thus began my cooperation with ET to try to make him rich. I hoped that we could find a similar thing that he could teach me so that I, too, could get rich. Suddenly, I remembered a very old science fiction story in which a friend of the hero swapped the concept of paint for the concept behind anti-gravity. Hell, it wouldn't hurt to ask!

I asked, "Do you people have a way of controlling gravity?"

"No, I'm sorry, but we don't. All we can do is completely block its effect. We don't know of a way to modulate the effect of gravity."

I almost fainted in my excitement. "Can you teach the technique to me?"

"Yes, I am sure that I can. However, the relative difference in our ambient temperature may make it difficult. Remember, we normally live at a temperature colder than liquid nitrogen."

"That is not an insurmountable problem. I can get liquid nitrogen and other gases, all the way to liquid helium if I have to, so that is not a real problem. The problem is going to be getting the money to buy those things."

"Don't you use gold as a currency base?"

"No, but it is extremely valuable. If I had some gold, I could easily buy what else I need."

"Under those circumstances, why don't you just convert some iron to gold? That is a fairly easy thing to do if you know how."

Oh ... My ... God!!! ET can tell me how to convert iron to gold. "I don't know how to do that. Can you teach me how to do it?"

"Oh, sure. It is a common experiment our children do in elementary school. Just a minute, and let me check on something, then I'll give you the list of materials you need."

"Go ahead, take all of the time you need. I'll wait!"

He was back a few minutes later with a small card. "Here is the list of materials you will need. The greatest problem we have with the experiment is that the conversion requires boiling water, which is damned difficult for our children to do."

I used my digital camera to photograph the list and the instructions he was holding. "Thank you very much! Boiling water is no problem for me. I do it many times each day. It's the things that are done at your room temperature that will give me trouble. Fortunately, I can get the liquid nitrogen that I will need from the chemistry stock room. I'll ask one of the grad. students for help; I just won't tell her why I want the stuff. Everything else, I can pick up at the grocery store or the hardware store.

"While I am rounding this stuff up, I will find a basic book on paint manufacture and bring it to our next session."

The next day, I went to the library and checked out a couple of books on the basics of manufacturing paint. Following that, I picked up everything I needed for the great gold experiment, including two pounds of iron nails. Damn! No more beer until I get the iron-to-gold thing to work. That stuff ran me nearly $40. I may get pretty hungry if this little experiment in alchemy doesn't work.

Tomorrow was Saturday, so I would have plenty of time to work on my economic salvation, provided it will even work on this planet, or should I say, in this universe. That evening, I opened the pages of each book so that ET could photograph them. Fortunately, both books were fairly short, so we finished in a reasonable time. I had already provided him with a chart to translate between standard English and the shorthand that we used to communicate, so he should be able to puzzle out what the books had to say. If not, I was available to help him.

The next morning, I started in on my iron-to-gold experiment. The setup for the apparatus was not all that complicated, the big problem was that it had to run at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, so I had to work fast before all of my liquid nitrogen had evaporated. The last step was to heat the converting mass in a pot of boiling water for 17 minutes. ET had said that the time was really not critical, anything over 15 minutes should work OK.

With a "here goes nothing" attitude, I began the routine. It wasn't difficult, there were just a lot of steps, probably too many to be commercially viable. By the time I was through and had dunked the mass in the boiling water, I had left several patches of skin attached to the cold apparatus. I hoped that didn't affect the results!

Just before lunch, the mass was ready to come out of the boiling water. SON ... OF ... A ... BITCH! It sure as hell did look like I had a pot full of golden nails. I poured out the hot water and cooled the nails in a bucket of cold water. I picked up one of the nails, and a quick comparison of weight showed that the weight of the nail had changed along with its color.

Now for the acid test! I jumped on my bicycle and peddled as fast as I could to a pawn shop that I knew. I tried to calm down, but I was still breathing hard when I got to the clerk. He said, "Either you peddled awful damned hard to get here or you are badly out of condition!"

"I had to come up a couple of damned steep hills to get here. Everybody who builds a road nowadays assumes that anybody who uses it will have a motor to push them up the hills. Well, my bike is still one human power."