Joanna fell back against her chair’s webbing, feeling almost as if a bullet had hit her heart.
Ibriham al-Rashid felt perspiration beading his brow and upper lip despite the nearly-frigid air conditioning of the small control room.
Beyond that window, he knew, inside that gleaming metal sphere is a small man-made star, so hot and dense that its very atomic nuclei are being fused together.
The plasma physicist tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the power gauges lining the control room’s side wall. Rashid nodded, too awed to speak.
The control room was almost silent Nothing but the faint electrical hum from the monitoring consoles.
“How long has it been running?” Rashid asked in a whisper. It seemed the proper tone of voice, this close to a miracle.
“Tomorrow will make four months, exactly,” said the plasma physicist. Even he kept his voice hushed.
He was a fellow Moslem, even a fellow native of Baltimore; a man Rashid had known in his youth. Now he was a paunchy overweight academic with thinning hair and a light brown beard and eyes that blinked behind oversized, tinted glasses. Now he was a plasma physicist at Johns Hopkins University who just happened to have invented the world’s first practical nuclear fusion generator.
“And it has been producing power like this for all that time?” Rashid whispered.
The plasma physicist nodded. “As long as we keep it supplied with helium-three.”
Rashid stroked his beard and turned back to stare through the safety glass at the small metal sphere. It was almost hidden inside a maze of magnet coils and cooling pipes and heavy tangles of multi-colored electrical wires. In his imagination, Rashid could see inside tьe sphere, see the blinding hot plasma that was fusing atomic nuclei together, forcing mass to transmute into energy, imitating the processes that made the stars shine.
By the Prophet, Rashid thought, Allah is offering us a gift beyond price.
But not beyond cost.
The plasma physicist gestured toward the door and, once out in the laboratory’s hallway again, Rashid drew a deep breath. “It really works,” he said, almost in a normal tone.
“It really works,” the plasma physicist echoed. “And much better — and cheaper — than that monstrosity up in Princeton.”
“But it requires helium-three for fuel, which the Princeton machine does not.”
“The Princeton machine is designed to produce new Ph.D.s,” the plasma physicist grumbled. “My generator is designed to produce megawatts.”
The plasma physicist led him up the hallway toward his own cluttered office. “Helium-three and deuterium,” he said. “The deuterium is easy to get from ordinary water. There’s enough deuterium in an eight-ounce drinking glass of water to equal the energy in half a million barrels of oil.”
Rashid smiled wanly. “Our brothers in OPEC will not be happy with you.”
The plasma physicist shrugged his soft shoulders. “They’re busy building receiving farms for the solar power satellites. The deserts will still be energy centers.”
“But once fusion comes on line…”
“It never will.”
“What? Your work—”
They reached his open office door. The room looked just as chaotic as when they had left it, an hour earlier.
“My work may win me a Nobel Prize,” the plasma physicist said, plopping himself in his creaking desk chair, “although the Princeton people will try to sabotage that.”
Rashid took the only other chair that didn’t have piles of journals or reports on it.
“But my fusion system will be nothing but a laboratory curiosity, I’m afraid.”
“Why? How?”
“For two reasons.” The plasma physicist raised two chubby fingers. Rashid noticed that his nails were dirty.
“First,” he said, “is the matter of the fuel. Helium-three is vanishingly rare. We have to produce it in nuclear accelerators, which makes it cost more than the power that the fusion generator produces.”
“Helium-three exists on the Moon,” Rashid said.
“So I’ve been told,” said the plasma physicist, as if Rashid had said he could produce helium-three by rubbing a magic lamp. “But there’s a second problem.”
“What is that?”
“Energy conversion.” When he saw the puzzled expression on Rashid’s face, the plasma physicist added, “Converting the heat and particle energy of the fusion reaction to electricity. It’s electricity you want, not hot plasma and energetic neutrons.”
His brows knitted, Rashid said, “But the gauges in your control room; weren’t they measuring electrical energy?”
The plasma physicist smiled slyly. “The gauges are something of a trick, They show how much electrical energy the generator would produce, based on an algorithm I devised from the amount of heat and kinetic energy inside the reactor.”
Rashid felt as if he’d been pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. “You mean that there’s no way for your generator to produce electricity? Then what good is it?”
Raising a single finger this time, the plasma physicist said, “I invited you here because I think there is a way. Magnetohydrodynamic power conversion is perfect for this task.”
“Mag… what?”
“Call it MHD,” said the plasma physicist.
“Tell me about MHD, then.”
Hunching over his desk enthusiastically, the plasma physicist began, “Those dolts up in Princeton and the bigger dolts funding them in Washington, they’re all trying to make a conversion system based on turbines. Turbines! Just like Edison did, a century and a half ago.”
“I don’t understand,” said Rashid.
Impatiently, the plasma physicist answered, “They want to use the heat energy from fusion to boil a fluid, probably liquid sodium, Allah protect us. That would keep the overall efficiency of the system down below forty percent; no better than a uranium-fueled generator and not even as good as a coal-fired one!”
Struck with new understanding, Rashid blurted, “That’s why their fusion system is more expensive than ordinary power plants!”
“Yes, exactly. They are using a man-made star as a tea kettle.”
For hours the plasma physicist rattled on, jumping out of his chair to rummage through bookshelves for old reports, grabbing chalk to draw schematic diagrams on his board, making the chalk shriek so often that Rashid winced and felt his blood running cold.
But slowly, Rashid began to see the picture. The fusion generator could produce electrical power with sixty percent efficiency or even better if it could be teamed with an MHD conversion system. And if it could obtain helium-three fuel…Rashid thanked his boyhood friend and promised him he would carefully consider funding his effort to match an MHD power converter to his fusion generator.
“Keep this as quiet as you can,” his friend pleaded as he walked Rashid out to his waiting limousine. “I may have to leave the university once they find that I’m being funded by your corporation.”
Rashid raised his brows questioningly.
The plasma physicist smiled unhappily. “Oh yes, there are lots of knives in the dark here. Even the New Morality people have questioned what I’m doing. They say it’s against God’s will to try to imitate the stars.”
Rashid snorted disdainfully. “What do they know of the One God?”
“Believe it or not, there are Moslems among them.”
Shaking his head, Rashid promised that he would keep very quiet about what he had seen and heard.
Once in his plane and heading back to Savannah, Rashid smiled to himself. Very quiet indeed. I could channel some of my discretionary funding to him, to get him started on this MHD business while I begin to prepare the board of directors for a full-scale fusion development program.
Helium-three, he mused. It’s imbedded in the lunar regolith, just like the hydrogen atoms they take up to make water. We could set up nanomachines to harvest helium-three and ship it to Earth easily enough. My division could open an entirely new line for the corporation: fusion power systems.