Larry reached out and touched the globe. And jerked away instantly: it was warm, warm in a way he couldn’t explain, preternaturally warm. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand, Jennifer. Are you saying this thing is powered by water? But the only way to do that is if it’s... it’s...” It was impossible, of course. The department was spending billions of dollars every year on fusion generators so large they filled entire living rooms; this thing wasn’t much larger than a baseball.
“Cold fusion powered,” she corrected him. “Yes, Larry, that’s what I’m telling you. We’ve found a way to make hydrogen fuse at ordinary temperatures and pressures, using simple chemical catalysis. Fleischmann and Pons were right, even if they were so ahead of their time that no one would listen to them.”
At that moment, the waitress returned with Jennifer’s phó. She threw herself at it with relish. The sight unearthed memories long buried: she was the one who had introduced him to the delights of Vietnamese cuisine; and it had been as much her own enthusiasms as the wonderful flavors and textures which had addicted him for life.
“Sorry,” she finally came up for air. “But this is the first thing I’ve had to eat all day.” Her mouth pursed in determination, then softened. “I expect you have about a thousand or two questions at this point. Well, ask away. I won’t guarantee to be able to answer them all, or even any of them, but I’ll try. What I can tell you is that it’s completely non-polluting. Doesn’t even leave any radioactives. Don’t ask me how, though. We’re not even close to having it figured out yet, except that we know it’s some kind of crystal.” She shoved a skein of noodles into her mouth with her chopsticks.
Larry shook his head in a combination of confusion and disbelief. Cold fusion? But that bit of quackery had been vanquished from serious science some twenty-five years ago. Now it was regarded as having as much chance of being true as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. If anyone was still working in the field, they weren’t publishing anywhere he would admit to knowing about.
Those were facts even an old girlfriend didn’t change. Even one like Jennifer.
Jennifer looked at him as though she were reading his mind. “Let me answer the question you won’t ask first,” she said. “No, this isn’t a joke. Nor is it the product of an overactive imagination. Take a look at this.” She reached into a pocket, and pulled out a plastic rectangle and handed it to him: a NASA ID card. “You can check my credentials with my employer if you have any doubts. They’ll vouch for me. Besides, you know me, Larry. Whatever else you think of me, you know I wouldn’t try to pull something over on you. Not something like this anyway.”
Larry fingered the card and returned it with no more comment than a frown. “But don’t take my word for it.” She pushed the globe toward him. “Here. Give it to your best people and let them subject it to any tests they like. If you can find another explanation for the excess heat and helium I’d like to hear it.”
She suddenly leaned over the table, her face bright with excitement. “You know what this means, don’t you? It means we can light up whole cities on what you flush down your toilet. It means no more energy problems, forever, till the end of time. It means—you know what it means, Larry; it’s what you’re spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars chasing. Well, I’ve caught it for you. And brought it here, all gift-wrapped and shiny. The only question is, do you want it?”
Larry sensed himself being overpowered by a combination of events and enthusiasm. Fortunately, he’d gotten pretty good these last few months at dealing with people who had the answer to the country’s energy problems. This time he didn’t retreat from the globe, but deliberately mused over it. “Let me get this right. You’re saying NASA developed this?”
At this point, the largest grin Larry had ever seen on anyone’s face grew across Jennifer’s like the Cheshire cat that just swallowed the canary. “No, that’s not exactly what I’m telling you. And ‘developed’ might be the wrong word in any case.” She paused momentarily. “Tell me, Larry: what do you know about Project Ares?”
He had to hunt through his mental archives to find it. “Ares? That’s the robot they sent to Mars to find life, isn’t it?”
“The robot was just the surface module,” she corrected him. “There was also an orbiter, and a return module which brought soil and rock samples back to Earth. One of those samples, as it turned out, contained something... unusual.”
She started to say more, then stopped. Larry slowly pushed his bowl of phó, which had already gotten tepid, aside. He tried not to stare at her, but it was difficult. “Wait a minute, Jennifer. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that what powers this thing,” he gestured at the globe, “came from outer space?”
Jennifer shook her head in disappointment. “Not outer space. Mars. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. The most important discovery in energy since plutonium is from another world. Galling, isn’t it?”
“Mars.” He remembered some of the bad science fiction he used to read as a kid. Something from Mars seemed to be the premise of most of the plots. They looked especially silly once it was discovered—at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars—that the Red Planet was as dead and useless as the Moon.
“Hard to believe, I know,” Jennifer read his mind again. She cleared her throat. “We didn’t believe it ourselves until we’d repeated the experiments almost a dozen times and looked the data over about a thousand. Some of us still don’t believe it. Believe it or not though, the evidence is right in front of your eyes.”
She shrugged. “Unfortunately, this is all we’ve been able to do with it so far. A few toys and such. And that’s only because through a lot of trial and error we figured out how to grow small batches from a seed. What we need is a way to grow as much as we need; preferably by the ton. If we figure out how to do that…”
Larry had managed to stop staring, but he was still having a hard time assembling what he was being told. He steepled his fingers together and composed himself. “This is a pretty incredible story you’re telling me, Jennifer. In fact, it’s the most incredible story I’ve heard in my life; and I’ve heard a few wild ones.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “In fact, it’s so incredible that what I don’t understand is why I’m hearing about it this way. Where are the Weblines? Or even pages? For that matter, why isn’t NASA shouting it from the rooftops? This is the best publicity they’ve had since Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. So why aren’t they telling everyone who’ll listen?”
He hadn’t intended his questions to sound suspicious, but if they did, Jennifer didn’t appear ruffled. Indeed, the way she pushed her bowl aside also and leaned toward him suggested that she’d been expecting them. “Ah, now we get to the real reason I’m here,” she said in a conspiratorial tone of voice. She glanced about, as if concerned there might be eavesdroppers, but was satisfied there weren’t. “You see, we haven’t published any of this anywhere. Nor do we intend to.”
Larry felt himself retreating, stopped himself. “You don’t?”
“No.” She raised a hand. “Think about it Larry. Even with all the proof we need, the worst thing we could do is simply announce it to the world. God only knows how the scientific community would react. Remember what happened to Fleischmann and Pons when they took that route. And they were at least chemists; most of us are just medical researchers for God’s sake, who got mixed up in something we’ve no business in. No, publicity would be disastrous. We realized that very quickly.”
She let that sink in. “So you’re saying you haven’t told anyone?” Larry finally asked. “Not even other people in the field?”