Two army engineers found it while drilling a hole through one of the Appalachian Mountains, in the Primitive Reservation, on a lovely spring day in 1993. The hole was to be used for a monorail track; and although in 1993 it was very simple to run monorail lines over mountains, it was also quite easy to drill large, straight holes through almost anything; and the U. S. Army liked to effect the neatness of straight lines. So the engineers had set up a little converter machine on a tripod, pointed it, and proceeded to convert a singularly neat hole, twenty-two feet in diameter, in the side of the mountain. At first the mountain converted nicely, the hole tunneling along at an efficient thirteen feet per hour; and the engineers, whose names were George and Sam, were quite pleased with themselves and rubbed their hands together with pleasure; while the little machine on the tripod hummed merrily, birds sang, and wisps of brown smoke floated off from the mountain into an otherwise clear blue sky.

And then they found it. Or, rather, the converter did, by abruptly ceasing to convert. The machine continued to hum; but the little feedback-controlled counter, which normally clicked off the number of tons of material substance that had been converted into immaterial substance, stopped. The last wisps of smoke disappeared from the mountainside. The two engineers looked at one another. After a minute George picked a rock up from the ground, a large one, and threw it out in front of the lens of the machine. The rock vanished instantly. The one-tenth ton counter wheel trembled, and was still.

“Well,” Sam said, after a minute. “It’s still working.”

George thought about this for a minute. Then he said, “I guess we’d better look at the tunnel.”

So they shut the machine off, walked over to the hole in the mountainside and went in. Fortunately the sun was behind them and they had no difficulty seeing as they made their way down the glassy-smooth shaft—which needed no shoring since the converter had been set to convert part of the materials removed into a quite sturdy lining of neo-adamant. The shaft ended in a forbidding, twenty-two foot, black disk of unconverted mountain bowels. The two of them peered uneasily at this for a few minutes and then Sam said, “What’s this?” and kneeled down to inspect a rectangle, gold in color, about ten inches long and four high, which appeared to be engraved in the rock at the dead end of the tunnel.

“Let me see,” George said, stooping beside his co-scientist and pulling from his pocket a pocketknife, with which he proceeded to scrape around the edges of the rectangle. Some of the loose rock crumbled away, revealing that the rectangle was, actually, one surface of a solid bar of some sort.