Captain Zircon and the Sands of Time
Captain Zircon is hard, harder than steel, harder than stone, one of the hardest substances on earth.
Captain Zircon cannot be damaged by acid, except for the strongest and most dangerous acid of all: hydrofluoric acid.
Captain Zircon is dense, denser than water, denser than mere mortals, denser than most substances above or below the earth.
Captain Zircon is transparent, impervious to energy rays, heat rays, death rays, and other radiation weapons.
Captain Zircon is immune to magnetic attacks.
Captain Zircon is millions of years old. He was created in the fiery blast of a volcano, thrown out by the explosion into the atmosphere, where, with uncounted trillions of fellow zircons, he floated down to earth, as they covered the earth with a fine dusty ash. When he was created, a radioactive clock was embedded in his crystalline body, which will continue to tick for billions of years. Captain Zircon fell into a gentle sea, settled to the sea floor, and was soon buried where he lay by sand and sediment washing over him from a nearby river mouth. There he lay, frozen in place, for millions of years. Through uplift and climate change, tectonic shifts and intense pressures, he and his fellow zircons and their thin layer of ash became one with the rock. Until one day, not long ago, an intrepid geologist discovered Captain Zircon locked within a rock in a remote canyon in southern Utah, and released him from his prison. And the legend of Captain Zircon was brought to the light of day.
The geologist, Marion Ellery Samson Bijou, had been looking for Captain Zircon, though she wasn't sure she was going to find him. An inquisitive and meticulous scholar from a young age, Mes-Ba, as she was known to her friends and fans, had always enjoyed the outdoors. On this particular expedition, she found herself 15 miles from the nearest road, a drawing of her beloved and a dog eared copy of Walden as her only company, camped under an overhang in a dry canyon. She had heard coyotes a few days before, but hadn't seen any. Sagebrush and pine dotted her landscape of ochers below and unworldly deep blue above.
Mes-Ba was on the hunt. Like many of her fellow geologists, she had an overwhelming desire to put the past in order, to know what came first, when things happened, and what the future might hold. As she chipped out samples from the rock walls near her camp, she was hunting for the radioactive clock in Captain Zircon's heart, for only Zircon could tell her how old the layers of the canyon's rocks were. Put down layer by layer, year by year, century by century, epoch by epoch, most of the bits of rock and sand and fossil that were pressed to become the rocks of Mes-Ba's canyon were impossible to match to a particular moment in time. But not Zircon. Zircon was different. Zircon had within him the ticking radioactive clock of Uranium slowly, so so slowly, decaying into Lead.
As she scanned and chipped and filtered, she looked for the telltale line of black and grey that signaled an enormous volcanic eruption deep in the past. And she found it! Pencil thin, but running along the canyon in both directions, this little tenuous smudge of grey surrounded above and below by reds and yellows and browns, with the occasional shell or fossil fragment. Every layer of sandstone below that line was older than it. Every layer above was younger.
Just how much older or younger none could say, but at just that point, in that ash, lay Captain Zircon, frozen in time, his clock ticking away as it had been from the day of his origin, when his crystalline form and coalesced and solidified in the aftermath of that unfathomable blast.
Mes-Ba chipped out a chunk of rock encompassing Captain Zircon, and a few hundred fellow zircons, and held it to her heart, thanking the earth for its gifts and relieved that her long journey had not been in vain. Then she carefully wrapped and labelled Captain Zircon's rock and continued her studies of the canyon and surrounding landscape.
A few weeks later, back at her lab, Mes-Ba had another run in with Captain Zircon. Though they shared a love of the earth and of understanding its processes and history, ultimately their relationship would destroy one of them. But first, Mes-Ba needed to break Captain Zircon out of the bonds of rock that held him. First with a hammer, she chipped away at the layers of sandstone and discarded those pieces she was certain did not contain any of the zircons she so vigorously sought. This left a few dozen gumball sized pieces. These went into the jaw crusher, a metal monstrosity feared by all rocks but not by zircons, who could not be crushed by its clamping plates of steel. The rocks containing Captain Zircon and his fellow zircons now were little more than pea sand, but still each grain contained many minerals stuck together, surrounding each zircon. The pea sand was ground yet finer, to a fine dusty sand in which each tiny fragment was a unique piece of a single mineral, and at last Captain Zircon was free of the bonds that had held him in place for these millions of years since his birth.
Mes-Ba was overjoyed to have freed her friend but knew much work lay ahead of her. For now, instead of a few rocks, she had millions of fine grains to search through to find him. While she could recognize any zircon on sight, there were only a few hundred zircons in the millions of mineral particles in front of her.
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