‘Stanley Meyer is a stubborn sonofabitch,’ Dr Grant said as Ethan sat down opposite him with Lopez. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that he’s got himself up to his neck in trouble.’
‘He done anything like this before?’ Ethan asked.
‘Has he pissed off the authorities more than once? Yes,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘Stanley is one of those guys for whom the phrase “thinking out of the box” was invented. He never liked to conform, and that often meant that sometimes his methods got him into hot water with his superiors at the NIF. They tolerated it, because that same out — of — the — box thinking helped him to make considerable strides in physics during his tenure, and to be honest the NIF wouldn’t be what it is today without Stanley’s contributions.’
‘How much do you know about what he was working on in Clearwater?’ Lopez asked.
Dr Grant humphed and shook his head as he replied. ‘He started out building cars that ran on steam.’
‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked.
‘It’s a big deal,’ Doctor Grant replied. ‘There’s even a Steam Automobile Club of America. Stanley did it as a hobby and built a vehicle that runs entirely on steam using a boiler system. He used a Ford 272 engine with a flat crank and a ninety — degree V design, which made a single — acting steam engine that’s self — starting. Each cam was actuating two opposed poppet valves and used only one cylinder casting design. It was really very clever, and showed that a steam car could run fairly normally, like an ordinary combustion engine powered vehicle, on almost any fuel at alclass="underline" vegetable oil, methanol, anything. He put the damned thing in an old Chevrolet and cruised around the country showing it to people at events.’
‘He loved that old car,’ Amber reflected with a smile. ‘It cost him virtually nothing to run it for years, and the only exhaust it gave off was steam.’
‘I’d have thought that it was impossible to run a car efficiently from steam,’ Lopez said. ‘Look how much coal those old steam trains used to use, all that smoke. Environmentalists would go insane.’
‘If you’re burning coal to get energy then yes, it would be,’ Doctor Grant admitted. ‘But Stanley wasn’t, and anyway most attempts to produce pollution free engines are all to do with efficiency, and how the methods we use to produce electrical energy to heat our homes and the engines we use to drive our cars are hugely inefficient.’
‘And dad found much better ways of doing it,’ Amber enthused. ‘He loved those Sterling Engines too.’
Doctor Grant nodded in agreement.
‘What’s a Sterling Engine?’ Ethan asked.
‘A fully enclosed combustion engine,’ Grant explained, ‘with a heat exchanger and two cylinders, which can be fuelled by almost anything with huge efficiency because it uses its own exhaust gas as part of the burning process. Stanley could get hugely excited about them because the average vehicle on the road, powered by the internal combustion engine, can produce a maximum efficiency of just fifteen per cent. That means that of all the power produced, eighty five per cent goes into overcoming friction within the engine or is lost as heat. A Sterling Engine, on the other hand, can produce energy with an efficiency of as much as sixty per cent.’
‘So how come they’re not powering cars the world over then?’ Lopez asked.
‘Size, slow start times and other minor issues, but Stanley was working on improving the smaller designs he’d come up with. Sterling Engines are found aboard most ships, for instance, because the vessels are big enough to house them.’
‘So his work on these Sterling Engines led onto bigger things, I take it?’ Ethan guessed.
‘Stanley was obsessed with the idea that we were going about energy generation the wrong way,’ he said simply. ‘He’s one of those guys that felt that nature did things in the opposite direction to what we do when it comes to generating power.’
‘In what way?’ Ethan asked.
‘Well, when humans generate power we use explosive energy to do so. We heat water to power steam turbines, or burn coal in power stations to produce steam. We ignite fuel in car engines to drive them forward, which in principle is the same as letting little bombs off in the car’s engine every fraction of a second. Explosive energy is how we power our world, but nature uses the complete opposite means to generate energy. If you doubt that then simply look at the power of a hurricane or tornado.’
‘They are low — pressure systems, right?’ Lopez asked.
‘That’s correct,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘Nature uses a low — pressure system to create motion energy. We see it in weather patterns all the time, in the maelstrom of a whirlpool in the oceans and even in the immense gravity generated by black holes which pulls galaxies in around them in exactly the same symmetrical whirlpool pattern. Stanley noted this repeatedly during his tenure at the NIF, and spent many hours telling anybody with a will to listen about how it was much more efficient to create low — pressure systems than it was to produce the high — pressure systems we normally use for energy generation. Of course, nobody bothered listening to him.’
‘Why not?’ Ethan asked. ‘Surely he was onto something?’
‘Of course he was, but that’s not how the business of energy generation works,’ Dr Grant said. ‘Billions are invested every year in the search for more power, for cleaner power, for power that governments can control. If somebody suddenly turned around and created some kind of novel energy generation device that rendered all of those other expensive methods irrelevant, the existing energy industry would implode with the loss of countless jobs and livelihoods, not to mention those of the scientists involved in furthering currently accepted methods of generating energy.’
Amber nodded, clearly recalling similar things said to her by her father.
‘Dad was convinced that any attempt to publicly patent or otherwise sell any kind of advanced energy generation technology that defied the accepted laws of physics would be met with accusations of fraud, possibly arrest by the authorities, and certainly refusal by the government patent office to consider the technology.’
‘That’s illegal, surely?’ Lopez said.
‘The US Government’s Patent Office has a policy of refusing any applications for devices that contain claims of producing what is known as “perpetual motion”,’ Dr Grant explained. ‘This broad brush approach extends to any devices which are claimed to produce free energy of any kind, which is really just a clever way of making sure that nobody can actually get a Patent for such a device should they actually manage to invent one. The policy is in place within all the world’s countries — even if somebody invented such a device, they could never commercialize it.’
‘So what you’re saying is that if Stanley invented a free energy device, there’s literally nowhere to go to actually get the thing into production?’
‘At a very basic level, yes,’ Dr Grant admitted. ‘But Stanley did not invent a free energy device because there is no such thing as free energy. The conservation of energy, one of the governing laws of thermodynamics, prohibits energy gain in a closed system. It simply isn’t possible to get more energy out of a device than you put in — if such a thing were possible, we would have dispensed with fossil fuels decades or even centuries ago.’
‘And yet there is nuclear fusion,’ Ethan murmured in reply.
‘Nuclear fusion liberates the energy already contained within the atomic nucleus,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘That’s not creating energy from nowhere, it’s simply a conversion process and does not violate any of the known laws of physics.’
Ethan realised that Amber was watching Dr Grant intensely, and she nudged the old man with her elbow. Cecil looked at her for a moment and sighed as he went on.