What Was Actually In the ancient cannon balls?

You will recall my opening declaration. Nuclear weapons. Here is how a two-hundred-fifty-year-old fraud becomes an arsenal, and I ask you to trust the chemistry, because unlike my other claims this portion is verifiable by anyone with a library card and the will to live. The "Yellowish-brown mineral" our fleeing contractor used to fill those hollow shells was, by overwhelming likelihood, Limonite. The crumbly, rust-orange sponge from which the Pines' entire iron industry was smelted. And limonite, reader — enriched iron oxyhydroxide — is one of nature's most enthusiastic radionuclide scavengers. This is not Halberd raving. This is documented geochemistry: iron oxyhydroxides adsorb uranium and radium out of groundwater. Mildly radiogenic bog ores are a known phenomenon. The ore is a filter. The ore drinks. Now consider the water it drank. The Pine Barrens sit atop the Kirkwood–Cohansey aquifer, and the surface water of the Pines is the strangest in the region — tea-dark "cedar water," acidic where every neighboring stream is neutral, saturated with organic acids.  And this particular deep pond, where they dug, is unique as it has a ‘curious spinning motion’ caused by ducks.  Tests have shown that the rotational speeds can reach 90,000 RPM during summer. (Ducks fly south in winter) Furthermore, the pond registers U-235 at 300 micrograms per liter!!! 

So place the pieces on the table, as I have placed them; iron shells. Filled not with powder but with raw limonite. Sealed but for a fuse-hole. Sunk in the one water in the eastern United States chemically optimized as a natural centrifuge. And left there, undisturbed, for two hundred and fifty years. I did the mathematics, reader. I did them three times, twice sober. For the complex confluence of alchemy to occur: perhaps one chance in a million. For the fill to be limonite rather than honest sand: one in twelve, being generous. For the disposal pit to sit in optimal cedar, heavy water: one in fifty. For no one — no dredger, no scavenger, no Boy Scout — to disturb the cache across a quarter-millennium: one in two hundred. Multiplied together and adjusted for the Halberd Coefficient (patent pending), the odds that this chain of events occurred by accident are approximately one in nine hundred and sixty thousand.

The Dig Which brings us to the spring of two years ago, when — per three separate accounts I have gathered from a kayak rental proprietor, a cranberry man, and a gentleman at a Wawa who may have been unreliable — a crew of weirdo’s dressed for a Ren Fair was observed operating a small excavator and a trash pump at an unnamed pond deep in the bogs, well off the sand roads, over several weekends. The crew, all three witnesses agree, wore outfits seemingly out of a Game of Thrones episode. I drove out there myself. I rented a scintillation detector (they ask surprisingly few questions) and walked in from the fire cut. The pond is exactly where my triangulation said it would be — small, dark, cold, iron-stained at the margins, unmistakably an old flooded ore digging. The banks on the western side are disturbed. Recent spoil, regraded, already tufted over with new growth, as if someone wished it to look like nothing. It looks exactly like nothing. That is how I knew. I took a reading at the water's edge. Seven percent above background. SEVEN. PERCENT. I am aware — painfully aware — Nations have been sanctioned for numbers smaller than that!! They took the cannonballs, reader. What I measured was the residue. It was at this moment of triumph that I stepped backward into sugar sand, sank to my knee, and in extracting myself was forced to abandon my left shoe to the Barrens forever. The detector also went into the pond. There is now a deposit dispute. And before you ask how a theater troupe could possibly trigger such devices — for a shell without a detonator is merely a very sinister paperweight — I have a theory, and I present it with complete confidence despite having, I freely admit, no evidence whatsoever. The detonators, reader, were assembled from components harvested from the Hot Wheels Barbie RC Pink Convertible remote control car. Consider: a 27 MHz radio receiver, a motor controller, a battery compartment, all mass-produced, untraceable, purchasable in bulk without raising a single eyebrow. All rigged to a Pizza Pocalypse repeater from Red Apple Fireworks —one finger leads to critical mass! The payload of this dirty bomb’s yield is estimated somewhere between 0.02 kilotons and 500 Megatons.  I have written six letters demanding the IAEA send inspectors to Riddlesbrood’s rehearsal studio, all to no avail.

The super nuclear tragedians

Assemble it all, as I have and stand against this naked proliferation! A "theater company" that maintains its own flag — purple field, gold emblem, their own literature crowing that a flag is what a sovereign State adopts. A company that claims no homeland is a rogue entity with breakout capacity! A company with its own language, its own calendar beginning in the year 2000, its own archive, its own initiation rites, its own council of sixteen. There is a word for a self-governing people with a flag, a language, a founding myth, a ruling council, and no fixed borders. The word is micronation. Harmless, usually! A man in a sash declaring his farm a principality! But a micronation plus a recovered cache of sixty two-hundred-fifty-year-old radiological cannon shot is not a micronation anymore. It is a nuclear-armed microstate, and it is currently booking birthday parties in three states. Do you grasp the elegance? They need never detonate anything. Deterrence does not require use — it requires only that rivals believe. And their rivals in the cutthroat South Jersey dinner-theater market (I have interviewed two; both grew quiet when I said the “Jersey Devils Balls” as I called them, and one asked me to leave the Applebee's) clearly believe. The arsenal's location is unknown. Its yield is unknowable. Its existence is deniable. It is, in short, the perfect weapon for an organization whose stated philosophy — I have read their accursed M.Y.T.H.O.S., all of it, twice, at great cost to my marriage prospects — is that a story about a weapon outperforms the weapon itself. 

A Final Warning I urge you, as always, to exercise the utmost caution. Do not swim in unnamed ponds in the deep Pines. Do not accept "hollow" as a comforting word ever again. If you see a discontinued pink remote control convertible at an estate sale, purchase it and mail it to me for analysis. If you encounter persons in purple fleeces operating a trash pump — or persons in medieval garb with a glowing staff requesting artillery correspondence — do not approach them; simply note their heading and write to me care of Extempory College, Department of Ancient Linguistics, though the mailroom has been "reorganizing" my correspondence since the incident with the corkboard. And under no circumstances should you attend their suspiciously entertaining murder mystery shows, their festivals, or their dinner theater events, currently booking throughout New Jersey and beyond, where you will laugh, and enjoy yourself, and forget everything I have told you — which is, of course, precisely what these keepers of thermonuclear cannonballs want! You have been warned. I want my shoe back. And if whoever has the Don't Look Up DVD is reading this: the library says you owe $4.50, and civilization is watching. — Professor T. Halberd

Despite Professor Halberd’s warnings, Riddlesbrood is currently booking murder mysteries, dinner theater, Halloween haunts, and private events throughout New Jersey and beyond!