MICHAEL CRICHTON

quantities specified: the contractor would take what he could get. And, mostunusual, there was no UECL.Nearly all contracts arrived with a unit extraction cost limit. It was not enoughto find a mineral source; the minerals had to be extractable at a specified unitcost. This unit cost in turn reflected the richness of the ore body, its remoteness,the availability of local labor, political conditions, the possible need to buildairfields, roads, hospitals, mines, or refineries.For a contract to come in without a UECL meant only one thing: somebodywanted blue diamonds so badly he didn’t care what they cost.Within forty-eight hours, the ERTS canteen had explained the Blue Contract. Itturned out that Type JIb diamonds were blue from trace quantities of the elementboron, which rendered them worthless as gemstones but altered their electronicproperties, making them semiconductors with a resistively on the order of 100ohms centimeters. They also had light-transmissive properties.Someone then found a brief article in Electronic News for November 17, 1978:“McPhee Doping Dropped.” It explained that the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm ofSilec, Inc., had abandoned the experimental McPhee technique to dopediamonds artificially with a monolayer boron coating. The McPhee process hadbeen abandoned as too expensive and too unreliable to produce “desirable semiconducting properties.” The article concluded that “other firms haveunderestimated problems in boron monolayer doping; Morikawa (Tokyo)abandoned the Nagaura process in September of this year.” Working backward,the ERTS canteen fitted additional pieces of the puzzle into place.Back in 1971, Intec, the Santa Clara microelectronics firm, had first predictedthat diamond semiconductors would be important to a future generation of “superconducting” computers in the 1980s.The first generation of electronic computers, ENIAC and UNIVAC, built in thewartime secrecy of the 1940s, employed vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes had anaverage life span of twenty hours, but with thousands of glowing hot tubes in asingle machine, some computers shut down every seven to twelve minutes.Vacuum-tube technology imposed a limit on the size and power of plannedsecond-generation computers.But the second generation never used vacuum tubes. In 1947, the invention ofthe transistor—a thumbnail-sized sandwich of solid material which performed allthe functions of a vacuum tube—ushered in an era of “solid state” electronicdevices which drew little power, generated little heat, and were smaller and morereliable than the tubes they replaced. Silicon technology provided the basis for83