Element 39

Usage examples of yttrium.

That is, as Bickerstaff was to mankind, so the element yttrium was to his process.

However, the Bickerstaff process subjected all matter involved to extraordinary heat, pressure, and bombardment, and so the supply of yttrium has steadily vanished.

There were those who claimed that by hoarding the minute quantity of yttrium remaining to us we might be able to hold off the invaders when they should come.

Now, when all our yttrium is gone, we have found a device to transmute metals.

Such stellar nuclear reactions do not readily generate erbium, hafnium, dysprosium, praseodymium or yttrium, but rather the elements we know in everyday life, elements returned to the interstellar gas, where they are swept up in a subsequent generation of cloud collapse and star and planet formation.

Chu and his fellow workers substituted yttrium, a metal with many rare-earth properties, for lanthanum in the ceramic pellets they were making.

That same morning, as all the experts and high officials of the secret police shook their heads, bleary-eyed after a sleepless night, the constructors asked for quartz, vanadium, steel, copper, platinum, rhinestones, dysprosium, yttrium and thulium, also cerium and germanium, and most of the other elements that make up the Universe, plus a variety of machines and qualified technicians, not to mention a wide as sortment of spies--for so insolent had the constructors become, that on the triplicate requisition form they boldly wrote: "Also, kindly send agents of various cuts and stripes at the discretion and with the approval of the Proper Authorities.