He uncorked the bottle and took her glass, pouring it from about ten inches above. “A good fall helps the wine to aerate,” he said. “It speeds up the breathing process. But we should still give it a few minutes.”

“Why not?” Hayley replied. “The poor crushed grapes have been in there for years. Be a shame not to give them a few minutes to soak up the fresh air.”

Kurt poured a glass of his own and set the bottle down.

Next, he lifted the insulating covers from the plates set up before them. An avocado-green-colored soup with dashes of red was first. “Pea-and-ham soup, with a hint of garlic.”

“Looks delicious.”

Pulling the cover off the second scrumptious-looking dish, Kurt continued, “Braised short ribs with silver-beet gratin. And the pièce de résistance…” He removed the final lid. “Bread-and-butter pudding, soaked in sweetened custard and brandy.”

“I might just start with that,” Hayley said. “How on earth did you conjure up such fantastic foods on a train out here in the never-never?”

“Platinum service,” Kurt said. “And, besides, the chef is a personal friend of mine. At least he has been for the last few hours.”

She took a deep breath. “If this is traveling, perhaps I could get used to it.”

Kurt sat down as Hayley sampled the soup.

“Must say I’ve never met someone so brave and intelligent who’s afraid to travel,” Kurt said.

“I know it’s strange,” she said. “I know all the statistics, how the most dangerous part of any trip is the drive to the airport. I understand aerodynamics, and I spend half my life dreaming about far-off places, but something grips me when I leave home.”

“You seem okay now,” Kurt pointed out.

She smiled. “Maybe it’s the company.”

“Consider me your personal guide and protector wherever we go.”

“Truth is, I’d love to see the world,” she said. “And the universe. I used to dream about being an astronaut. Seems a little silly, when getting out of Sydney makes me feel like I’m going to be ill.”

“The universe is a big step,” Kurt said. “Let’s start by getting to Perth.”

The Ghan would take them south to Port Augusta, where they’d board another of Australia’s great trains for the journey west.

For the next twenty minutes, they ate and chatted lightly, enjoying the atmosphere and the gentle motion of the train. Only after they’d had their second helpings of bread pudding did Kurt ask the question that was most on his mind.

“So tell me about zero-point energy,” he said.

She finished the last sip of her cabernet and slid her glass toward him. Kurt filled it halfway and then topped off his own glass.

“Zero-point energy is a relatively simple concept,” she said. “It’s the energy remaining in a system when all that can be drawn from it has been taken out.”

She pointed to the bottle of wine. “Imagine this bottle is a system or an energy field, and you or I decide to drink from it with a straw.”

“Which we would never do,” Kurt pointed out.

“Not unless we were outrageously desperate,” she replied with a conspiratorial smile. “But assuming we’d lost all sense of decorum and decided to give it a try, we’d be able to siphon off the energy from it right down to the bottom of the straw. But any wine below the reaches of the straw would remain behind untapped. That wine that can’t be reached is the zero-point energy.”

“Unless we found a longer straw,” Kurt said.

“Exactly,” she said, “except that physics tells us that, at some point, there’s no such thing as a longer straw.”

“Can you give me a real example?”

“The classic case is helium,” she said. “As it’s cooled, the molecular activity within the sample begins to slow, and the helium turns from a gas to a liquid. At absolute zero, it should freeze into a solid, and all molecular activity inside it should stop. But no matter how far one lowers the temperature, right down to absolute zero, helium will never turn into a solid under normal atmospheric pressure.”

“Meaning?”

“Some energy remains in the system. Some energy that can’t be removed.”

“And that’s zero-point energy?”

“Exactly,” she said once again.

“So if it can’t be removed,” Kurt said, “what hope is there in accessing it?”

“Well,” she hedged, “all things are impossible until they’re proven otherwise. Theoretically, there are fields of energy all around us sitting at their zero point. The same theory that postulates the existence of such fields suggests it may be possible to dislodge this hidden energy the way someone dislodges electrons in a power grid and reaps the benefits of electricity. Only, no one has been able to do it yet.”

It sounded a little like the mythical ether of the old days to Kurt, a substance that was once believed to fill the emptiness between planets and galaxies when scientists of the day couldn’t believe there was such a thing as a vacuum.

“Has anyone tried?” Kurt asked. “Before you and Thero, I mean.”

“A few brave souls,” she said. “I assume you’ve heard of Nikola Tesla?”

Kurt nodded.

“Tesla was one of the first,” she said. “In the 1890s he began developing what he called his Dynamic Theory of Gravity. He tinkered away on it for years until 1937, when he claimed it was finally complete and promised boldly that it would displace Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, at least in explaining how gravity works.”

“Don’t we know how gravity works?”

“We know what gravity does,” she corrected, “but we don’t know how it causes what it causes. Tesla believed it was connected to a kind of energy field that existed everywhere, but in some places this field had greater concentrations than others. He also believed that that field could be tapped and the result would be an unlimited energy source, one that would bring peace and prosperity instead of thermonuclear explosions and genocide.”

“So you’re telling me that zero-point energy and gravity are connected?”

She nodded. “If Tesla’s right — and Einstein and the others are wrong — then, yes, the two are connected in very complex ways.”

Kurt considered this. “Complex enough to cause what Thero is threatening?”

She seemed to need a second to think about it. “Tesla spent four decades working on his theory,” she said, “more than half his life. He made his great announcement, insisting to the world that he’d finally completed the Dynamic Theory of Gravity, that all the details were worked out, and then he never published it. After all that work, he locked it away and never spoke of it again. Despite years of ridicule and the crushing poverty he’d fallen into thanks to the treachery of Westinghouse and Edison, Tesla took the Dynamic Theory of Gravity to his grave.”

Kurt had never heard this story. “Has any record of it ever surfaced?”

Hayley shook her head. “When Tesla died, your government seized all his belongings and papers — despite having no legal reason to do so. They were held for a year or so and then finally released to his family. His work on zero-point energy and the Dynamic Theory of Gravity were not among them.”

Kurt considered what she’d told him. He knew Tesla’s reputation as a genius and as a mad scientist of sorts. He also knew Tesla was primarily considered a pacifist. It was fully conceivable that Tesla had destroyed all records of his theory. It was also possible that somewhere in the vast archives of the federal government there lay a file with Tesla’s name on it with the missing papers inside. He made a mental note to relay this information to Dirk the next time he checked in.

“The fact is,” Hayley continued, “we’re dealing with a primal force of nature. Many would tell you it’s something best left alone.”

“But Thero isn’t leaving it alone,” Kurt pointed out. “So what happens if he makes a breakthrough?”

“If he’s successful, a vast output of energy and a side effect of short-lived, extremely powerful gravitational fluctuations.”