Chapter 36

Well, this was a fine situation I'd gotten myself into. I was back in charge of myself again, thanks to some mysterious mental manipulations by Grandpa Harley.

That thought came later though. The first thing I realized was that I was locked on something, or rather we were locked on something. No slippery-slidey evasion, no fading in and out or around. We were locked on a molecule of something.

"Good! Good!" Bud was screaming in my ear. "That's it! You've got it"

I felt Harley's eagerness just behind and beside mine. I felt the question in him just as I was forming the thought to ask myself. "Okay Bud. We've got it, but can you tell us what it is we've got?"

"Yes, but feel it for a bit first," he slid back into his detached lecture mode. "Taste it. Wrap your senses around it so you will recognize it the next time you lock onto this substance."

"Okay," I said, with grandpa's thoughts echoing mine, and we did, trying to get a feel for what we had hold of. How do you describe that though? I didn't have anything to compare it to at the time, but later would describe this particular one as hard and 'pokey'. Yeah, a good technical description, I know.

"Good," Bud said after a while. "What you are locked onto is a molecule of silicon carbide, which you might know as carborundum. It is a very useful material, and is made up of silicon and carbon atoms."

"Isn't carborundum a synthetic material?" I asked, remembering something about the material I'd been taught in a high school shop class.

"It is," Bud confirmed. "Silicon Carbide is only rarely found naturally on Earth, and in minute quantities, but it is relatively easy to manufacture and carbon and silicon are both abundant materials. Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust, after oxygen."

"So the dust on the floor of the cavern is carborundum?" grandpa asked and I echoed. Of course he would be more familiar with the older name for it. "Isn't that dangerous?"

"It would be, if we hadn't taken some measures to keep it from mixing up into the air of the room. It is one of the few extraordinary measures we were able to accomplish here when we created the cavern."

Harley and I had both been speculating in our own minds whether Bud represented alien visitors or time travelers from the future or something else, but this latest bit of not-quite-revelation made the alien visitor theory seem pretty likely. Just the way Bud referred to Earth gave that impression.

"You are locked onto a molecule of silicon carbide, but it is unlikely that you've found a free molecule, separate from any others. The molecule is probably a part of some minute speck of carborundum dust, and that speck is made up of millions of similar molecules." Bud continued his lecture. "A trillion would be closer, in this case. Now, do you think you could grab a trillion molecules of silicon carbide at once?"