The Abyss of Time

Chapter Forty One

"Well," said George Beaumont the geologist, thoughtfully. "That's an interesting question."

He opened a file on his computer screen, and a map of the planet appeared on one of the screens of the lander cockpit he was using as his office. Miller and Kathleen Miranda leaned over his shoulder to look at it. The map showed the north polar regions with various geological features highlighted in garish colours which made no sense to Miller. Luckily there was a key along one side. He looked for the colour that designated likely tantalum deposits, but there wasn't one.

Miranda sat in the co-pilot's seat to make herself more comfortable. It creaked as she settled into it. "This was made from the scans we took of the planet before we left the Lucina?" she said.

"Right," the geologist replied. "We weren't looking for tantalum at the time, we have no use for it, but it's always found with niobium, which we do use." He touched an icon on the screen, tapped a few keys on the virtual keyboard that appeared, and the map went grey except for a few small areas that glowed red.

"These are the places we think are likely to have niobium deposits," he said. "That's where I'd go looking for tantalum. As you can see, one of them's just a couple of hundred klicks from here." He grinned with pleasure, glad to have been of help.

"Just a minute, though," said Miranda, frowning. "Pretty much all the rare, precious elements were mined out on Earth. That's why we had to go looking for them in the asteroid belt."

Beaumont grinned wider. "You're forgetting just how far in the future we are," he said. "A billion years. A thousand million years. Those elements weren't gone. There were just being used. In electronic devices. In plasma regulators. In energy scavengers. When a device wears out or becomes obsolete, it's supposed to be recycled, to recover those elements, but the average human is lazy. He'll often just throw it in the trash instead, to go to landfill. Or sometimes it's just too expensive or inconvenient to recycle it."

"Like the undersea superconducting network," said Miller. It had been big news a couple of years before the launching of the Lucina.

"Exactly," the geologist replied. "These things are just left to corrode. Big, complicated chemicals break down to become simple oxides or whatever. Tantalum is highly corrosion resistant and the oxide is insoluble, which slows things down a bit, but when you've got a billion years..."

"Perhaps we can skip the geology lesson," said Miranda impatiently.

"Yes, of course," Beaumont replied, a little crestfallen. "The point is, these elements end up loose in the environment, and as time goes by the same processes that gathered them together and placed them in ores and deposits the first time around will do so again. To all intents and purposes, this is a virgin planet. Untouched by human hands."

Miller took a step back, staying bent over to avoid the low ceiling. "Would there be any visible signs?" he asked. "I mean, if you flew a drone over the area, are there signs you could look for that would tell you there was tantalum in the ground?"

Miranda nodded. "Yes, of course," she said. She pointed at the map still showing on the screen. "This is all the result of data you gathered from the Lucina, but that was after the cyborgs left in their stolen lander. They don't have this data. Would there be, I don't know. Patches of jungle poisoned by toxic elements? Places where the plants looks pale and sickly? Something they could spot just by flying a drone through it?"

"If we were still back in our own time maybe," the geologist replied. "The symptoms of poisoning by various toxic substances were well known. Tantalum is often found with lithium, which is toxic to the environment..."