Conversion Gel
The moon, ground fine, held in suspension and sold by the pound. It is the finest conductor of quantum tunnelling fields ever measured on this earth and it is a poison of the first rank, and both of those sentences are printed on the pail, in the same size of type, because a customer is entitled to the whole of a thing.
You cannot put a hole in a wall. I have tried. The lab boys have tried with better equipment and worse language. Ordinary brick will not take an aperture, ordinary plaster will not take an aperture, and a poured concrete wall four feet thick will sit there under a full emitter charge and do absolutely nothing at all, forever, out of pure Midwestern stubbornness. What takes an aperture is moon rock. Nothing else does. We found that out in 1956 and then we went and bought every ounce of moon rock in North America that was not nailed down, and several that were.
Conversion Gel No. 205 is that rock, ground to eleven microns and suspended in a white vehicle you can roll onto a wall with the same brush your painter uses for a corridor. One coat. Twenty minutes. Thereafter the wall is no longer a wall. It is a place where the Portable Quantum Tunnelling Device can be made to agree with itself, and the second place can be four hundred feet away, or on another level, or — and the Materials Division has asked me not to print this and I am printing it — on the other side of the same wall, which is a sentence I would like the gentlemen in New Mexico to read twice.
I want to be honest about the price, because you will find it out at the loading dock anyway. This is the most expensive substance sold by any company in the United States by weight, and it is not close. A five-gallon pail of Conversion Gel costs more than the room you are going to paint with it. It costs more than the man you are going to pay to paint it. Accounting has declined to set the per-pound figure in type on a sheet that leaves this building, and I have let them win that one, and you may write to the Division and they will tell you over the telephone in a low voice.
Now the other half. Ground lunar substrate is poison. Not an irritant. Not a nuisance dust. Poison, in the way that a thing is poison when the Medical Department writes you a memorandum about it eleven separate times and files a carbon each time. It does not clear from the lung. There is no schedule of recovery because nobody has ever been able to draw one. You wear the mask, you wet-sweep the bench, you do not use compressed air on it, and you do not — ever — grind it dry in a room with the door shut.
That is the label, and the label is the truth, and I will tell you exactly what I think of the label further down this sheet in a paragraph the Legal Department has read four times.
Product No. 205, In Brief
- Catalogue No.
- ASI-205
- Form
- Aqueous suspension, matt, opaque
- Colour
- Lunar White. It is the only white in this building.
- Substrate content
- 9 per cent by weight, catalogue grade
- Particle size
- 11 microns, hand-ground
- Applied thickness
- 1/32 in. nominal. Thicker is waste.
- Coverage
- 22 sq. ft. per gallon
- Cure
- 20 minutes at 68°F. Live at eight.
- Aperture acceptance
- 44 in. nominal, oval, first strike
- Service life
- Indefinite, unwashed
- Pail, 5 gallon
- $2,940.00
- Price, the pound of substrate
- $11,300 delivered, and I would pay it again this afternoon, and next Tuesday, and I have.
- Toxicity
- Total. See Medical, below.
“Gentlemen, we have bought the moon. Grind it.”
I. What Takes An Aperture, And What Does Not
The Division has run first-strike acceptance trials on every surface it could find, carry or requisition, and on several it should not have. A first strike is an emitter charge at nominal power against a prepared surface at twelve feet. The surface either accepts the aperture or it does not, and there is no interesting middle case except the one in the fifth row, which the Division insists is a defect and which I have entered in the catalogue as a feature.
First-strike aperture acceptance by preparation. Materials Division bay, Sub-Level 3, 1957–1959.
| Preparation | Substrate | Acceptance | Division Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poured concrete, unprepared | nil | 0 of 40 | Stubborn. Expected. |
| Lead-white house paint, two coats | nil | 0 of 40 | Tried at the President’s insistence. |
| Salt face, native (mine wall, Sub-Level 5) | nil | 0 of 40 | The mine will not take a hole. The mine is the one thing here that will not. |
| Conversion Gel, thin (4 per cent) | 4% | 9 of 40 | Intermittent. Do not sell. |
| Conversion Gel, catalogue grade | 9% | 40 of 40 | This is the product. Every strike, every time, first time. |
| Conversion Gel, heavy (14 per cent) | 14% | 40 of 40 | Accepts, and continues to accept for eleven minutes after the emitter is shut off and unplugged. Materials calls this a defect. |
| Conversion Gel, experimental (22 per cent) | 22% | 40 of 40, and then 41. | Bay 4 remains sealed. Do not enter Bay 4 to read the meter; the meter has been moved outside the door. |
| One Aperture Fixtures shower curtain, coated by hand | 9% | 40 of 40 | Vinyl takes it beautifully. Sixteen years in this business and the curtain is still the best substrate I own. |
Forty strikes to a trial. Bay 4 was sealed on 2 February 1959 and the trial series closed. The Division has not asked to reopen it and I have not offered.
II. Procurement And Grinding
We do not mine this. Nobody mines this. What exists on this continent came down out of the sky at some point in the last several thousand years and was picked up by a farmer, a museum, a university or a man with a cart, and between 1954 and 1956 my buyers went and stood in front of every one of those people with a chequebook and did not haggle. Not once. Haggling is for men who intend to come back, and we did not intend to come back, because there was not going to be any more of it. That procurement is the moat around this company and it cost what a moat costs.
The consignment came in by rail in November 1956 and it is held on the premises, catalogued, weighed to the quarter-ounce and counted every Friday afternoon by two men who do not like each other, which is the only accounting method I have ever found to be reliable. The full account of the programme is on Form ASI-404, and the shafts and stores that hold it are set out on Form ASI-105.
Grinding is done by hand at the substrate bench on the third floor. It is done by hand because a mill heats the material and heated substrate loses better than a third of its conductance and does not get it back. Eleven microns, by hand, wet, with a mask on. The first pound of every consignment the President grinds personally. That is not a ceremony and it is not for the photographers. It is because I bought it and I know what it cost and I am not handing the first pound of it to a man on his second week.
Handling — Materials Division Standing Order No. 14
- Respirator, cartridge type, fitted and checked at the cabinet by the bench.
- Gauntlets. Sleeves taped. Collar buttoned.
- Grind wet. Always wet. There is no dry grinding of this material in this building.
- Wet-sweep the bench and the floor at the end of every session.
- Compressed air is not to be used on the bench, the floor, the man, or his overalls.
- Bench log signed on entry and on leaving, both, every time.
- Signature of the man presently at the bench obtained.
There are fourteen respirators in the cabinet by the bench and every one of them is fitted, checked and good for a four-hour shift. Every man in Materials wears one. Every man in Maintenance who so much as walks past the bench wears one. Every visitor wears one, including two gentlemen from the Army in February who were most particular about it.
The President does not use one.
Fourteen in the cabinet. I have counted them every Friday since January and the count has never once gone down. He is at that bench at seven in the morning and the door is shut. I have stopped ordering respirators. I have started ordering something else and I am not putting what on this sheet. — C.
III. Medical Department, Reproduced In Full
Medical asked for this section and Medical wrote every word of it, and I have not struck anything out of it, which is a first for this publication and ought to tell you how seriously the company takes the material.
Exposure Schedule — Lunar Substrate, Finely Ground
- Permissible exposure, masked
- Four hours the shift. Not consecutive.
- Permissible exposure, unmasked
- Nil. There is no permissible unmasked exposure.
- Route
- Inhalation, chiefly. Ingestion, where a man eats at the bench.
- Clearance from the lung
- None established. Medical has looked for one since 1957.
- Cumulative
- Yes. Every exposure is every previous exposure, added.
- First sign
- A cough that does not clear and that the man attributes to the shaft.
- Course thereafter
- Measured in years and not in decades. Medical has now written this eleven times and filed a carbon of each.
- Treatment
- None. The mask is the treatment. The mask is the whole of the treatment.
- Persons presently under review
- Forty-one in Materials. One not in Materials.
Interoffice Memorandum
Medical has audited the bench log for the period 1 January to 28 February. Compliance across the Materials Division stands at one hundred per cent, which the Department wishes recorded as creditable and unusual.
The bench log records forty-nine entries in the period by one man not on the Division roll. The respirator cabinet was opened on none of those forty-nine occasions. The Department has raised this verbally on two occasions and in writing on eleven, and has been instructed on each occasion that the matter is not a Medical matter.
The Department is obliged to note that it is precisely a Medical matter, and to note further that it will go on writing this memorandum at monthly intervals for as long as the entries continue.
Filed. No reply required. Do not circulate this one and do not put it in the outer office tray. — CJ
Requisition — Conversion Gel No. 205 — Quarter-Pail — Countersignature Required
Cut here and present at the substrate store, The Enrichment Center, Test Shaft 09, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, or telephone ENrichment 9-0943. No sample tin is offered and none has ever been offered. Empty pails are returned to the store, weighed, and entered against the requisition.
Form ASI-205. Conversion Gel No. 205 is warranted to accept an aperture from Aperture equipment at nominal charge and is warranted against nothing else of any kind. Aperture Science Innovators accepts no liability for anything which passes through a surface prepared with this product, for anything which arrives out of a surface prepared with this product, or for the difference between the two. The product is toxic by inhalation and by ingestion and is not to be handled otherwise than under Standing Order No. 14. Persons who have handled this product unmasked are advised that the company maintains no register of such persons, keeps no record of such handling, and is under no obligation to inform them of anything at all — see Form ASI-900, clauses VI and XI, and the further material at Form ASI-404.