by Mia Newberry
David brought up another book on the Tokamak reactor system he was reading on the tablet. There had been some breakthrough on the process over the past few years, but the magnetic field used still couldn’t hold the hydrogen together long enough to start the fusion reaction. Until it could be done the whole concept was still speculation. This is where Dr. Simmons was making his big claims.
There was a knock on the door and David went to see who it was. He looked through the peep hole and saw a young blond man with a hurried look on his face. He opened the door and asked the man who he was.
“Jason Starcom, Mr. Smith,” he told him. “Dr. Simmons has sent me to come and take you to his laboratory.”
“My wife is the shower, you’ll have to give us a few minutes,” David told him.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Jason told him. “Please be quick, Dr. Simmons doesn’t like it when people delay for too long.”
Chapter 9
Jada came out of the shower with the towel wrapped around her. She looked around for her husband who was coming back inside the hotel room, shutting the door behind him.
“We have to go,” he told her. “Now.”
“Why?” she asked. “We just arrived.”
“Simmons wants to see us,” he told her. “He’s ready to show us the reactor and has this thing about people being on his time. His driver is down in the parking lot waiting for us.”
“You sure it’s really his driver?
“Yes. I looked him up on line. Simmons even sent an email just now telling me he would be coming.”
Jada shrugged and went to put on her dress. She’d laid one with tropical colors out on the bed and quickly struggled into it. She checked her reflection in the mirror and fixed her face the best she could. Her hair wasn’t even worth bothering with the little time she had; David was going to braid it for her again, but now they didn’t have the time. She slipped on her sandals and went to the door where David was waiting for her.
David looked down at her choice of footwear and shook his head.
“That won’t do,” he told her. “We might end up touring the plant or whatever he’s got out there. Put on some heels or at least some shoes without open toes.” Jada went back to the luggage and changed her sandals for some casual flat-soled shoes, similar to the ones David wore.
David took Jada’s hand and walked down to the parking lot with her. The sun was high in the sky and sending down wave after wave of heat to bake the ground. Sand was everywhere, extending up to the parking lot and out to all the beach side residences. St. Matthews was a popular tourist spot for many people from the upper forty-eight states and many of them where down here to escape the chilly weather of the early spring. It had been a rough winter and the island had done a good amount of business.
Jason was sitting behind the wheel of the jeep he had brought to take them to Simmons’ laboratory. David could tell the young man was nervous. He looked to be German in ancestry, although David could not tell because he spoke standard Midwestern English. He wore a loose fitting shirt and casual shoes and was babbling over a cell phone when they walked up to the jeep.
“Oh!” he exclaimed into the phone upon seeing them. “They just walked up to the jeep. I’ll have them to you as soon as I can.” Then he put down the phone and started the engine.
David and Jada slipped into the back of the jeep and Jason began pulling out of the parking lot.
“That was The Chief,” he told them. “He wanted to know how long it would take for you to arrive. Sorry, but he gets a little antsy when things don’t happen on time.”
The jeep began bouncing down the road. Most of the road was in good shape, but the suspension on the jeep, an older model, left much to be desired. It was obvious Jason was trying to get them to Simmons’ place as quick as he could drive. He kept checking the speedometer and looking around for police cars.
“Easy,” David told him. “My wife is pregnant. She’s still in the early stages, we need to be careful.”
Jason slowed the jeep down a bit. “I’ll keep that in mind. Be sure to tell Dr. Simmons. Just about everything in there is shielded, but you won’t want to go too close to experimental reactor.
David gave her an “I-told-you-so” look and the jeep continued to spin down the road.
Simmons had created his own corporation on the island: Simtronics, INC. He had himself as chief stockholder and chairman of the board. The laws governing the creation of a sub-chapter S corporation made it impossible to staff the BOD with family members, or he would have done it. He had two of his sons, each of whom held PhD’s in the hard sciences, working for him and his wife handling the money as Chief Financial Officer. The rest of the BOD was filled with investors he had convinced to give him the money needed to begin the construction of his pilot plant to produce electricity by using nuclear fusion. At one point he had considered floating a penny stock option, but he wanted to make his corporation appear as legitimate as possible. The last thing he wanted to happen was to be accused of creating a fake company as a means to run off with his investors’ money.
The interns and outside employees who worked for him lived in a small bunk house he’d build out of surplus military trailers on the grounds of his facility. The main part of the production area and his laboratory was housed in a Quonset hut attached to a concrete block building. The entire facility had been picked up cheap from a fruit exporter who had gone bankrupt when it was discovered the place was a front for cannabis harvesting. The laws hadn’t been adjusted at the time for medical use and the DEA had impounded everything. They still kept a close watch on what he was doing and stopped by every other month to look at his laboratory and pilot plant.
The jeep pulled into a graveled parking lot and Jason offered to help them out, but David waved him away, preferring to take Jada’s hand by himself. She wasn’t having too much trouble at this stage, but he was over-protective as it was their first child. He held her hand as they walked up to the main building which was located right next to the hut. David noted an electrical substation next to the facility; obviously the good doctor hadn’t found the right way to make electricity if he was still paying the power company.
No one came out to greet them and Jason took them into the building. There was a glass door at the front which swung open to let them into a waiting room, but the building lacked a receptionist or visitor’s log. It was air-conditioned, a welcome relief to the outside heat which was pegging close to a hundred. Jason asked them to have a seat and he would go find The Chief. Jada and David sat down on a set of chairs which looked to have been new back in 1980 and thumbed through some out of date magazines. The paintings on the walls were faded and had not been hung properly in the first place.
Jada looked around at the lobby and turned to David. “Maybe he’s spending all his money on equipment.”
Suddenly the door burst open and it was Jason once again. He stood there looking at them with sweat stains on his shirt. “Dr. Simmons will see you now,” he told them.
Jason led them through a warehouse filled with parts to a small office connected to a conference room. They entered through a conference room where a man in his forties, Simmons, had a set of plans plastered across the table surrounded by computer tablets and laptops. He was barking at a group of men and women around him, none of whom looked older than twenty-five. Every single one of the people who surrounded him appeared to be in a state of abject terror and was not saying a word. A few of them were making notes on their tablets and one was jotting things in a paper pad.
“No excuses!” the older man, who was wearing a blue shop jacket, was yelling. “I said I don’t want to hear any excuses as to why we can’t reach the magnetic flux it’s supposed to be capable of reaching!” He shook a finger at a young man in a white lab coat who appeared to be of Indian extraction. “You told me it would hit the maximum limit the first day of operation! We are five days into the test and it’s not even at half! How do you explain that?”
> The young man began babbling a series of technical monologues, but the older man interrupted him.
“Just get it done or go back to the damn college where I found you!” he yelled. “And enjoy the next twenty years of trying to get tenure! Now all of you get out of my sight!”
The group slowly filed out of the conference room back into the warehouse direction. They hardly glanced at the three new-comers who had entered the room. Jada thought she saw one of the young women at the point of tears when she left.
“Chief,” Jason began, “these are the people you had me bring from the motel, Mr. and Mrs. David and Jada Smith.”
The three of them shook hands, but Jada had the distinct feeling the older scientist was not enthused at touching her palm. Simmons motioned to the chairs around the table and asked them to sit down. Once seated, he began talking.
“I’m sorry you had to see me in such a mood,” he told them, “but my investors are clamoring for results. It’s not been easy keeping them on board, although I send them all weekly progress reports. This isn’t a software start-up, such as you might be familiar with, where you can code something specifically to do a particular job. I have to have things built from scratch which have never been tested. If something fails, we are back to ground zero. My investors don’t understand what we have to do to get the first watt of power out of the reactor and they seem to think I’ll have something to sell to Pennsylvania Electric next week. I wish it was that simple. How was your flight?”
“Good, Dr. Simmons,” Jada answered for David. “Your driver brought us directly here after you didn’t answer the emails we had been sending. We took a chance coming down here not knowing if we would even be able to see the reactor or not.”
“Oh you can see the reactor,” he told them, “but it’s not operational. I have another two months before the final test.”
“Have you been able to get the Tokamak running at all?” she asked him.
“Not until we get all the superconductors operational,” he told her. “And then there is the problem of controlling the reaction itself. If we don’t tackle the cooling issue, the wall of the reactor will melt and shut it all down.”
David let Jada do the talking at this point as it was something she understood much better than he did. Jada was in her environment the same way she was on the dance floor, spinning the talk of high energy particles as she did in her movements. David felt he was watching a game of Go with his wife trying to out maneuver the older scientist at every turn. He brought up the new design of the reactor on a large screen with a projector showing her how they planned to contain the fusion temperatures and where the high energy neutrons would be utilized. It was in a realm of which he had little understanding, but Jada seemed to know what he was talking about and that was all David cared about.
“I suppose you want to see it all,” Simmons said to them. “I’ll get you some protective gear; you don’t want to bang your head on anything.”
“My wife is pregnant,” David announced. “Shouldn’t she stay away from all that radiation?”
“There is no radioactivity out there,” Simmons stammered, trying to contain his anger. “There is more radiation from the sun than you will find in this place. I’m not working with nuclear weapons or fission reactors.”
“My husband’s field is computers and the internet,” Jada told Simmons. “I feel safe enough to go out there with what you have told me so long as nothing is starting up.”
“We won’t even try to activate the Tokamak until next month,” Simmons replied. “I am nowhere near the go or no go point.”
They left the conference room and went into the warehouse, walking past all kinds of partially assembled devices on skids. Simmons explained he’d been able to salvage most of what he was using from older parts. This had kept the cost of building the pilot unit under control, but there were parts he couldn’t salvage from anything out there and had to be built from scratch and shipped to the island. It was one of the constant frustrations he felt in trying to make the pilot plant operational.
They crossed over from the concrete block building to the hut. Inside, a team of local men were working with Simmons’ acolytes to fit a key part into the experimental Tokamak reactor. A crane was in operation and lowering some piece of heavy electronic equipment into the central unit. Four of the group who had been inside the conference room were pouring over their tablets and plans, making sure it was being inserted just the right way. They were relaxed until they saw Simmons enter the room and tried to look as busy as possible. Simmons walked over to one of them and took the tablet from the young man, glanced at it, nodded and handed it back. He returned to Jada and David while the intern let out a sigh of relief.
“Impressive,” Jada said to him. “It can be operated from inside this room?”
“We’ll have a control center on the second floor during the test,” Simmons told them, pocketing a screw he discovered on the floor in his shop coat. “I don’t take chances.”
They spent the afternoon in Simmons’ office discussing the possibilities of thermonuclear power. Jada felt an operation pilot plant had a good chance of convincing the public in using fusion to create electricity. David tried to follow the arguments, but did understand the amount of money the process stood to make if it was operational and the sums were staggering. The environmental benefits alone were worth getting the pilot plant up and running. But Simmons was far from what he needed to do.
They thanked him for his time and told Simmons a decision would need to be made with the corporation’s board of directors. He told them any money at this stage would help and looked forward to hearing from them. Simmons had Jason drive them back to the motel.
“I’m a little surprised you stayed at this motel,” Jason told them on the way back. “Wouldn’t a big place in the city been better for you. This motel isn’t the most exclusive place around.”
“Yes,” David told him, “but it is close to the project and we wanted to have a look as quickly as possible.”
They spent the rest of the day at the motel, planning on what to do when they got back. Jada was still trying to decide how the house should be decorated and where the nursery would go. The beach was open and they went down to it. Not having been near salt water in years, David found swimming in the ocean to be a lot different from the lakes and inside pools was used to. They relaxed on the shore, watching the sun go down. The people strolling by had no idea two of the wealthiest people on the planet were sitting there and that was the way they wanted it.
“So what did you think of his operation?” Jada asked David as they sat on the shore.
“If the numbers are right,” he said, “This pilot plant will change everything. I don’t have a clue how he’s going to control the technology. Once the news gets out about how he did it, everyone is going to try and find a way to duplicate it.”
“Which is why we have to be the first,” she said. “We need to make sure it gets used to help the world, not enslave it. There are plenty of people out there who would do all they could to keep it from ever being used unless they controlled it.”
Holding hands, they walked along the shore line, just another interracial couple from North America. David and she reflected on how their very marriage would have been forbidden in many places a few decades ago. They still drew a shocked look from some people. Jada was stunning on the shore, turning quite a few heads and getting admiring glances from the men.
They returned to the motel and slept soundly until being awoke the next morning for the flight back to Pittsburgh. A cab took them to the airport and they caught another prop plane to Miami where a passenger jet took them back to the city they had come from. It was a dull flight, but it gave them the chance to talk about funding the pilot plant.
“Did you know Bob Guiccone tried to have one built in the early eighties?” he asked her as they were flying home.
“Bob who?” she asked.
“The man who founded and publ
ished Penthouse magazine, which used to be a big rival to Playboy. He had this plan to build a casino in Atlantic City and use the profits to finance a thermonuclear reactor.”
“What happened?”
“Never got the funding he claimed he needed. The project died on the vine. Then he and his wife passed away years later, so we’ll never know what could have happened.”
By the time the plane touched down in Pittsburgh, they were still trying to decide whether or not to put any money into Simmons’ project. Jada thought it was worth buying some of the stock in his corporation because the principles behind it were fundamentally sound. David felt it was too big of a gamble. He might get it going, and then he might not.
At home, David sat and watched TV in between looking at some reports from his company. There were other computer companies out there interested in what they were doing and would be closing in on their demographic before long. As much money as he had made from it, there was nothing guaranteed about his company being around even in a year.
He turned on the TV again and watched some news reports. Gas prices were rising again. Economic refugees swarming across the globe in search of a better life. The poor of the world knew there had to be a pot of gold across the rainbow and were determined to reach it. And who could blame them? A life on a dirt floor was enough to make anyone take a chance sailing across the ocean on a leaking boat. Perhaps the entire world was one big leaking boat.
But what about the stars? What had happened to all those old dreams of reaching out there, expanding into the solar system and beyond. Not enough fuel to do it and too costly. Mass drivers would have to be built at an enormous cost. If there was only a way to make fuel cheaper. If there was only a way to make the future cheaper.
David glanced over to the nursery where Jada was studying color patterns. She had been working for days on it, even before they left for St. Matthews. What kind of world would their children inherit? The stars or living in a fortress while the rest of humanity waited for scraps to be tossed out the window.