cryolite?" he asked.

"Not much of it, but enough. We have the generator set up, the smelting
box built and the carbon lining and rods ready. We have everything we
need to smelt aluminum ore--except the aluminum ore."

"Go ahead and finish up the details, such as installing the lining," he
said. "We didn't get this far to be stopped now."

But the prospecting parties, making full use of the time left them
before winter closed down, returned late that fall to report no sign of
the ore they needed.

Spring came and he was determined they would be smelting aluminum before
the summer was over even though he had no idea where the ore would be
found. They needed aluminum ore of a grade high enough that they could
extract the pure aluminum oxide. Specifically, they needed aluminum
oxide....

Then he saw the answer to their problem, so obvious that all of them had
overlooked it.

He passed by four children playing a game in front of the caves that
day; some kind of a checker-like game in which differently colored rocks
represented the different children. One boy was using red stones; some
of the rubies that had been brought back as curios from the chasm.
Rubies were of no use or value on Ragnarok; only pretty rocks for
children to play with....

Only pretty rocks?--_rubies and sapphires were corundum, were pure
aluminum oxide!_

He went to tell George and to arrange for a party of men to go into the
chasm after all the rubies and sapphires they could find. The last
obstacle had been surmounted.

The summer sun was hot the day the generator hummed into life. The
carbon-lined smelting box was ready and the current flowed between the
heavy carbon rods suspended in the cryolite and the lining, transforming
the cryolite into a liquid. The crushed rubies and sapphires were fed
into the box, glowing and glittering in blood-red and sky-blue
scintillations of light, to be deprived by the current of their life and
fire and be changed into something entirely different.

When the time came to draw off some of the metal they opened the orifice
in the lower corner of the box. Molten aluminum flowed out into the
ingot mold in a little stream; more beautiful to them than any gems
could ever be, bright and gleaming in its promise that more than six
generations of imprisonment would soon be ended.

* * * * *

The aluminum smelting continued until the supply of rubies and sapphires
in the chasm had b