“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.
Instead of simply supplying raw lunar materials to the corporations that want to build solar power satellites, we could have a monopoly on the fuel for fusion power.
All the way back to Savannah Rashid dreamed about turning Masterson Aerospace into the world’s leading energy company. Fusion power. Enough energy to irrigate the world’s deserts, to light the world’s cities, to bring the poorest of the poor into the glow of the modern world. All based on helium-three from the Moon. All developed by Masterson Corporation’s space operations division. By me.
He pictured himself as president and CEO of Masterson Aerospace. As the most important and powerful man in America; in the world; in the whole Earth-Moon system.
One small cloud troubled his vision. The helium-three would be produced by nanomachines, and there was enormous resistance to anything touched by nanotechnology. Still, Rashid assured himself, if we have to we can extract the helium-three by older methods. It will raise the price somewhat, but not. too much.
He smiled again, satisfied that even the New Morality could not stop his inevitable rise to wealth and fame and power.
Doug left the meeting with Greg and his mother in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. They shot Quintana. Some New Morality fanatic gunned him down at the U.N. building. Because he was against the treaty. Or was it because he was living proof that nanotherapy can cure cancer? Maybe both reasons. Probably both.
As he strode down the tunnel he realized all over again that he could not return to Earth. Even if they let me through customs I’d be a marked man. Every nutcase in the world would come after me.
With a shake of his head, he tried to clear his mind of Quintana’s assassination and think through the idea of moving Moonbase’s legal ownership to Kiribati. With a half-bitter smile, Doug remembered an economics professor from his first year at Caltech telling the class, “Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.”
Let them make their treaty; we’ll find a way around it Kiribati will have the highest per-capita income on Earth, just from the bribes Mom and Greg will spread around.
We can’t let them stop us from using nanomachines here. We can’t! It would be like stopping New York City from using elevators. The city would die.
One way or another we’ve got to keep on using our nanomachines. Otherwise we’ll have to shut down Moonbase. And then what about me? They’d have to let me come back Earthside. But if I do I’ll be a target for every brain-dead New Morality zealot who can get his hands on a gun.
Doug tried to push that fear out of his mind and concentrate on what had to be done.
For the past six months Doug had worked on the Mt. Wasser power tower project and building the pipeline from the ice fields at the south pole back to Moonbase. Negotiations were under way to sell water to Yamagata’s Nippon One and the Euro-Russian base over at Grimaldi.
But Doug knew that the ice fields were limited. He had helped to map them, down in the perpetual shadows of the polar mountains, and to probe their depths. There’s enough water there to provide for all three of the bases on the Moon; with recycling, the water should last for decades, maybe half a century, even. But there’s not enough to allow us to grow! That’s the problem. It’s a no-growth solution — which means no solution at all. Moonbase has got to grow. Or eventually die. Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to get water and the other life-support volatiles we need from elsewhere in the solar system.