The aging alchemist slowly decanted the product of months of preparation into a crystal vial. He reviewed his work mentally before he could bring himself to embrace fully a personal assessment of success. The materials had been right, he thought the texts had been fairly clear on that. The rest of the work had been based on hunches, half-guesses and outright gambles. Tonight he held it in his hand, the alchemist’s dream “Elixir”. He had spent two years researching this project before he had begun the work on a cold, rainy April morning. Then came the laborious process of amassing the equipment; an induction oven, a custom-made automated mortar, vacuum pumps, banks of polarized lights and a supply of argon gas. Gathering the materials for the Elixir was simplicity itself by comparison;
The first material necessary was an arseno-pyrite ore; an iron ore containing arsenic and antimony. The second was a metal; iron. The third was an organic acid; tartaric acid. He had made educated guesses about the ratio at first, refining the procedure in the alchemist’s version of the mathematical technique called the “Drunkard’s Walk”. Hundreds of attempts had given him the right proportions; ninety-five percent ore, one percent iron, and four percent acid.
The process itself was extremely complex, but not as complex as many modern industrial chemical processes. In the first stage, he had ground the ingredients in an agate mortar for six months. He had had problems locating an agate mortar, but had been unwilling to substitute a more readily available commercial mortar. It was possible that trace minerals from the sides of the mortar leached out during the grinding process and interacted with the mixture. True, he had automated the process, but he hadn’t expected that automation would have any effect on the outcome and apparently it hadn’t. He had merely added a motor to perform what was essentially a mechanical process. The next step was begun by slowly heating the mixture in a high-frequency induction furnace while isolating the mixture from the crucible walls by magnetic induction and holding it at a constant temperature for ten days. The mixture was then dissolved in sulfuric acid under polarized light before the last step.
The final step in the process involved a re-melting of the mixture while watching for what the ancient alchemists had called the “The Sign of the Heavens”. This “Sign” could come in two forms; at the moment of melting, star-shaped crystals would appear on the surface of the solution or a surface layer of oxide would form and break up, exposing a luminous metal with starlike points. If this did not occur, the mixture had to be cooled, the liquid evaporated in a hard vacuum and the solid residue recalcined in the furnace, then dissolved in acid, and remelted.
He had performed this step over one hundred times before he gave up. It was obvious the change he was seeking was a rare ortho-crystalline form of the compound and could only be produced after many, perhaps thousands, of attempts. If he didn’t find another method for producing the change, he would be dead of old age before he produced the Elixir. He considered the problem for a week before he realized he had been thinking like an alchemist rather than a chemical engineer. Personal observation and control of a single-step process wasn’t the answer, he had to automate.