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didn’t have to catch a plane.” Casting a stern look in Montaro’s direction, he continued, “I’ll be back in five or six days. If you finish before the weekend, leave your report with my secretary, Linda, and I’ll see that Dr. Chasman gets it first thing Monday morning.”
    Caine nodded curiously.
    “Here,” Professor Walmeyer said, picking up a small coinlike object that had been lying on his desk unnoticed by Caine. He placed the coin in Caine’s hand. “Be careful; we don’t want it disfigured in any way.”
    Caine had studied the object carefully; in some ways, it resembled a coin, but in other ways it did not. Dark gray in color, it was somewhere between the size of a nickel and a quarter. The surface on one face was sprinkled irregularly with dots of different sizes. Off to one side, one dot was considerably larger than the rest. In some ways, the dots seemed to suggest an arrangement of planets and constellations. The other side of the object was flat and smooth with no markings whatsoever.
    Now at his office in Fitzer Corporation headquarters, Caine read the memo that he had written twenty-six years earlier and his heart began to thump violently in his chest. He knew that this particular memo was dynamite. Every word he had written seemed to ignite in his memory. In the memo, Caine told his professor about the extraordinary strength and durability of the materials that he had found upon analyzing the coin.
    “To Professor Walmeyer,” Caine had written. “Sir, after repeated analysis, I have been able to separate and identify only four of the seven compound elements that make up the object. So far, the three remaining ones do not conform to any available information we have. Individual analysis was run on each one, isolated from the others, with negative results.
    “I could learn nothing from studying the elements in various combinations. The four known compounds make up approximately eighty percent of the coin’s mass, which, in itself, is highly unusual, since these particular four elements have seldom, if ever, been used in the minting process of any coins or metal objects from any culture we know of. The remaining twenty percent of the object’s mass, represented by the three unknown elements, exerts enormous influence on the behavior of the known properties.”
    As he sat behind his desk in his office, Caine kept his gaze fixed on the memo. The cold scientific language he had used while writing thememo had not expressed the fascination he had felt while examining the object. He remembered the ambivalence that had gripped him at the typewriter in Professor Walmeyer’s lab that winter afternoon. On the one hand, he felt sure that he had disappointed his mentor by having failed in the lab to break down and explain a simple mass consisting of as few as seven elements. On the other hand, he had the strong feeling that he was on the verge of some sort of discovery. He felt certain that he had isolated three—not one, but three—previously unknown materials.
    “They give every indication of being impervious to heat far above the temperature I was able to expose them to,” he had written.
    Professor Walmeyer’s approval was hard to come by. Still, despite his apprehensions, Caine was not unmindful of the potential benefits to industrial America if, he fantasized, his “discovery” could be cost-effectively reproduced. But two weeks would pass before Walmeyer would offer any response at all. And when he did, he had only a grudging word of praise for Caine’s workup. Walmeyer acknowledged that he was fascinated by the presence of the unknown elements that Caine had apparently discovered and said he wanted to subject them to more in-depth examinations. But neither Professor Walmeyer nor Montaro would see the coin again. They tried repeatedly, with the help of Dr. Michael Chasman, to persuade the mysterious owner of the object to submit it for a more scientifically thorough analysis.
    “I’m