After five minutes of the professor’s stammer-filled explanation, Nazar held up his hand to signal a stop. It took a few seconds for the tall, angular man to slow his words and calm his arms. Finally, like a clockwork toy running out of spring tension, he came to rest.
Nazar said, “Professor, I believe it will be more efficient if I tell you what I have understood from your briefing and then allow you to correct any omissions.”
“Yes, b… b… but…”
“Professor.”
“Sorry, it’s ju… just…”
Nazar’s hand edged forward until it touched the professor’s large, bony nose. The man jerked back and fell silent.
Nazar pointed to the window. “I’m looking into a fermentation vessel. Normally, it would be loaded with wood chips and flooded with water. Specialized fungi developed at your lab would break down the chips. The resultant mash, when heated, releases the sugars from the feedstock.”
“Yes, the p… p… process takes a huge amount of energy, but—”
Nazar cleared his throat and continued. “Yeasts feed on the sugars and convert them to alcohol, which is distilled to extract ethanol.”
“As you say, but now—”
“Your team has developed, or, if I understand correctly, they have used nanotechnology to build artificial microbes, atomic-scale machines which you call nanobots. You believe this development constitutes a breakthrough.”
“They are l… l… less than one nanometer, one billionth of a meter, Mr. Eudon, but amazing, quite amazing.” The professor smiled a smug, self-congratulatory grin.
Nazar continued. “You claim these nanobots are intelligent enough to analyze and then break down a wide variety of feedstock. They can disassemble the feedstock at an atomic level and reassemble the atoms into the molecular structure of ethanol, eliminating the lengthy fungal decomposition and expensive heating phases.”
The professor nodded along with Nazar’s description, and, when his boss finished speaking, he jumped in. “The nanobots bring an additional benefit. When alcohol concentrations rise, the yeast dies, leaving valuable sugars unconverted. With nanobots, we can continue the conversion and harvest the maximum p… potential from the f… feedstock. Yields are much higher.”
“How high?”
“Thirty percent by volume.”
Nazar nodded. Finally, he’d heard something interesting. He pointed to the trash in the center of the chamber.
“Professor, it looks as though you cleared out your garage.”
The man blushed sufficiently to confirm Nazar’s suspicion.
“Initially,” the professor said, “we d… developed the nanobots to work with wood chips. The breakthrough came when we built the analytical layer into them. Theoretically, they can p… process any biomass — anything that grows with s… s… sunlight.”
“What’s the liquid?”
“Water. The bots need a supply of hydrogen; they’ll extract it from the H2O.” He leaned close, his mouth twisted into a conspiratorial grin. “Shall we l… let them loose, Mr. Eudon?”
Nazar turned to the viewing window. He’d tolerated enough dramatics.
The professor picked up a wall phone and spoke. A short, bearded man wearing a white lab coat and silver gloves walked through a door in the side of the fermentation tank below and climbed the stepladder until he was level with the top of the junk pile. He unscrewed the cap from a soup-can-sized container and poured a liquid over one of the old tires. Then he pulled off the gloves and dropped them and the empty container into the box.
“Is it safe? I mean, couldn’t these nanobots disassemble him?”
“The nanobots operate according to programmed start and stop parameters. These bots will only become active with the application of sunlight, and they’re programmed to terminate after eleven minutes.”
The lab technician closed the door, sealing the chamber. Nazar heard a whirring sound. He looked up. Sixty feet above, silvered blinds slid back from the domed glass roof of the fermentation vessel. Sunlight flooded in, concentrated by the dome, and shone a spotlight on the garbage pile.
“1:43 p.m.” The professor read off a wall clock.
“How much material can they process in eleven minutes?” Nazar asked.
“Well, I’ve n… never used such varied feedstock.”
Nazar spun and glared at the professor. “You mean you’ve never tried this before?”
“Not with this particular m… mixture. I thought we should try something special in honor of your visit. This s… seemed more… um… theatrical.”
“Hmph.” Nazar turned away. He did not enjoy being a guinea pig.
Movement in the chamber caught his attention. Lower-level items moved and caused the trash to bump and settle.
“The tire moved.” Nazar said.
“Yes.” The professor laughed, an unpleasant, piercing sound, which made Nazar wince. “Yes, it did. L… L… Look at the pizza.”
Nazar watched the pizza slip out of sight as the garbage slid lower, like snow melting in a heated saucepan. The water at the bottom of the vessel had turned bright orange.
“Won’t they eat through the box?” Nazar asked.
“Carbon-free glass,” the professor replied.
As the last of the junk submerged, Nazar noted the time: 1:48 p.m. — five minutes.
The liquid bubbled and belched and rose higher in the containment vessel. Gradually, the orange coloration faded, and the agitation slowed. Eleven minutes after the process started, the box was half-full of still, clear liquid.
“I see solids at the bottom,” Nazar said.
“Carbon-free items: certain types of glass, aluminum cans, and so on.”
“I don’t understand how a few bots can convert that much material in eleven minutes.”
“C… convergent assembly. The nanobots we placed on the pile used energy from sunlight to assemble molecular machines. Each machine made more machines, and so on. In the nanoworld, things are p… processed at nanospeed. A single assembler performs over one million processes in a second. One makes a million, and each of those makes another million. Within s… sixty seconds, the initial stock created a huge army of nanobots.”
“But why so much liquid?”
“Obviously the bots don’t create m… matter — that’s impossible — they are simply rearranging atoms and transforming them into the atomic sequence we program them for. Rather like tearing down a Lego house and rearranging the blocks to make Lego cars.”
“What’s in the box now?”
The professor squinted at the container. “I’d say about two hundred gallons of l… liquid from which we can distill about sixty gallons of ethanol.”
Nazar’s eyebrows lifted and his mouth opened, but when no sound came out it triggered another bout of piercing laughter from the professor. This time, Nazar laughed with him. He reached out and shook the professor’s hand.
“Professor, this is indeed a breakthrough. What was the catalyst?”
“Not what, Mr. Eudon. Who!”
The professor’s flippancy irritated Nazar, but he waited.
“The who is Dawud Ferran, or D… David Baker, as he’s known in America. Yes, that is who. But why is David Baker here? And the answer to the question is because of you, Mr. Eudon. He’s here because of your wise and farsighted investment in the s… skills of your fellow countrymen. His family is from Beirut, Lebanon.”
“He came out of my scholarship program?”
“David joined us two years ago after completing his Master’s. We had first option on his employment. I interviewed the boy, well, m… man, I suppose, but he is so young. I was very impressed.