by John Hunt
“That is Evan Harrigan’s laboratory. It is far down. The overlying volcanic rock blocks many of the particles that travel through space and interfere with his experiments. He is a bit of a strange bird. I expect you will meet him fairly soon. Ever run a Hash?”
“A what?”
“A Hash… Never mind. You’ll see.”
Jeff let the topic drop, for the elevator pulled to a stop, and the doors opened with a whoosh. Sophia led him to the end of the hallway, opened the door on the left, and waved her arm demonstratively, as a game show hostess might do.
At first Jeff saw nothing but a short, plain room, perhaps four meters long. But Sophia guided his attention to his right, to a small access tunnel. Jeff peered down this dimly lit and immensely long passage. He could just barely perceive a gradual curve to the right. On the outside wall of this curve a large metal pipe was surrounded at regular intervals by electronic circuitry.
“This is our own personal-sized supercollider. I designed it myself to accelerate small charged particles to near the speed of light. It is pretty simple really, just a bunch of magnets and a tube.” Sophia minimized the accomplishment. “The particles are sped up throughout multiple circuits in a large circle. It is about two kilometers long, mostly concealed by the jungle growth. Some is tunneled. You can only see a little bit of it from the air.”
Jeff asked, “Is this the project you had proposed to your university before — the one they turned down?”
Sophia laughed. “No, not at all.”
She opened a door to the left and ushered him through. Suddenly it was cold. They were in a laboratory — well lit and bustling with people at work. Although a large room, it nonetheless was crowded with machinery — a problem common to laboratories of all types, everywhere. All manner of electronic devices lined the walls and rested on and below tables. Some hung from the ceiling. Several small wooden desks, cluttered with paper, lined one of the walls.
Dominating it all, running down the center of the large room, was an eighteen-meter-long tube. About two meters in diameter, it was wrapped with variegated wires and plumbing. The plumbing was covered with frost — a frozen dew that was constantly withdrawn from the surrounding air. This monstrosity was plastered with valves and levers and electronic circuitry. It also buzzed rather loudly.
“A laser of some sort, I assume?”
“Yes,” she responded. “This is the Island’s main energy user. It is a new type of supercooled laser — with a high-powered, intensely fine beam that can concentrate enormous energy in a very small area. Specifically, it is an x-ray laser.”
“Did you design this?”
“I helped with the design, yes.”
“And so this was your project?”
“Nope.”
Jeff waited patiently. Sophia was smiling again, seeming to revel in Jeff’s ignorance. She guided him toward the business end of the enormous laser. To get there, they walked single file in the narrow space between the laser and the portion of the supercollider ring that ran through the laboratory. Jeff brushed into some of the piping surrounding the laser, and felt the burn of the extreme cold on his left shoulder, through the cotton of his sleeve. As they reached the far end of the laser, they had to duck under a wing of the particle accelerator branching off from the main ring.
“The particles travel along the accelerator this way,” Sophia was saying, swinging her arm over her shoulder to point back to the lab entrance. “When they reach an adequate velocity, we can steer them down this fork here and aim them toward the laser.”
Sophia patted her hand on a three-meter-high shining golden sphere standing between the end of the laser and the fork in the supercollider.
“This sphere is the core of my idea. This is where nuclear fusion will occur.” She said this quietly, humbly. “Actually, the fusion occurs deep inside here, but it’s surrounded by alcohol which, when boiled, runs a turbine.” She pointed to the far end of the lab, where an impressive generator dominated one corner of the room.
“Can you tell me how it works now? You wouldn’t before.”
“Of course I can!”
She began excitedly. “It is really so simple, but for a few technological barriers that we have overcome, we think. The x-ray laser is not absolutely necessary, actually, but it makes up for some limitations of our relatively small supercollider. You see, we can’t get the particles to travel quite as fast as I would like. They tend to wobble too much and smash into the walls. That was very frustrating. Then we just tried slowing them down a bit, and the accelerator worked fine. But the mass was not adequate because the particles weren’t going fast enough. You can see what kind of frustration that caused…”
Jeff interrupted, “Whoa, doctor. You are losing me here. Can you just give me the basic theory? Simple-like.”
Sophia caught her breath. “Sure. I’m sorry. I tend to get a little enthusiastic. In a nutshell: we think fusion might be achieved by heating matter to a very high temperature, over one hundred million degrees. That requires lots of energy to be provided to a small amount of matter.” She paused. “I told you about all this before.”
She looked in Jeff’s eyes as if to see if he remembered, before continuing. “Some physicists are trying to achieve these temperatures by relatively gradual heating of matter, but they have a problem containing the stuff as it gets hotter. This plasma has no interest in staying where they want it to stay. It gets so hot it melts right through the containers, but not hot enough for the fusion reaction. So they try to keep it in contained in magnetic bottles. But those are terribly unstable. We just haven’t got that figured out. In a nutshell: it just doesn’t work yet.
“You told me before about how scientists were trying to do the same thing with lasers. How did that work?”
“They’re trying to rapidly heat a small amount of matter all at once. They are using dozens of high-powered lasers, all aiming at a pea-sized lump of matter. Then, as the material heats up, it of course starts to expand. But mass has inertia, which means that it takes some time for the lump to blow apart completely. They try to get enough energy into it so fast that it doesn’t have time to blow apart. It is called inertial containment, and it is supposed to overcome the problems with the magnetic bottle.”
Jeff asked, “But that’s still not working, right?”
“Well, not yet at least. They are building ever bigger and more powerful lasers, trying to squeeze more power into the poor pea-sized lump in as short a time as possible. In fact, for a microsecond, these lasers of theirs use all the power-generating capacity of the United States, all at once. But they still aren’t adequate.”
“So what is your technique?”
“We have simply amplified on the laser technique. You see, currently the pea-size lump is kept stationary, so they can aim the lasers at it all at once. What we do here is to accelerate much tinier pieces of matter — indeed just tiny atoms called deuterons — until they’re going almost as fast as the speed of light. That is what the particle accelerator is for.” She paused. “And now it gets complicated. Are you ready?”
“I think so, as long as you don’t start quoting Einstein.”
Sophia grinned. “That is exactly what I was about to do next! I have to in order to explain anything more. In fact, most of it is Einstein.”
Jeff grunted and shook his head. “Well, go ahead. I’ll try to follow.”
“You have probably heard that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.”
Jeff nodded.
“Well, that is what is predicted by Einstein’s theory. In fact, the truth is that no massive object can even travel at the speed of light. Actually, light travels at the speed it does precisely because the photons that make it up have no mass. Any massless object would travel at that speed — the speed of light.”
Jeff nodded again. “That makes sense… I suppose.”
“Well, imagine giving even a tiny little shove to something that weighs nothing at all, has no mass.
It will immediately go incredibly fast — the speed of light, actually.
“There is more. As an object that has mass approaches the speed of light, Einstein predicted accurately, it would gain more mass. The faster it goes, the more massive it becomes until it would become infinitely massive if it could make it to the speed of light. That is why no massive object can travel that fast: it would take infinite energy to accelerate what had become an essentially infinitely massive object.”
Jeff scratched his head. “It surely defies common sense.”
She replied, “This is relativity. It is the truth as we know it. Common sense lies to you.” She paused again. “Now comes another bit of Einstein. Another thing happens as a particle approaches the speed of light: time slows down for it, relative to stationary objects. This is particularly important. And then the last bit: the speed of light is a constant, no matter what the velocity of the observer. Got all that?”
“Not at all. Go on.”
“If you are traveling close to the speed of light, and a beam of light hits you head on, you can measure that the light hit you at the speed of light — not almost twice the speed of light as you might surmise if you were thinking of a head-on collision between two cars. But exactly the speed of light. This is very important.”
She guided Jeff around the shining sphere.
“The difference is that the frequency of the light that hit you is increased. You are passing through the waves of light very rapidly — near the speed of light actually, which essentially would double the frequency that you intersect the waves, and therefore the energy of the light you are being hit by, because higher-frequency light has more energy. But going this fast does even more, for time has slowed down for you, getting almost infinitely slow, relative to the rest of the universe. In fact, there is nothing to prevent you from traveling across the whole universe in your lifetime if you are going near the speed of light, although billions of years would pass for everyone else. What this means is that you actually run through those waves of light that are hitting you head on not at just double the light’s frequency, but actually at an exponentially higher frequency — which translates directly to the light hitting you with an exponentially higher energy.”
Jeff shook his head and said, “Believe it or not, I am following you.”
Sophia now said in a quiet, almost worshipping voice, “Here comes the magic of this laboratory. We accelerate two deuterons, which are just heavy hydrogen atoms, to pretty near the speed of light. They get very massive and it requires a lot of energy to do this, but we keep them right together. Time slows down for those deuterons too. When they are going fast enough, we blast the laser at them. Now, the frequency and energy of the laser is pretty impressive to begin with, but to these poor little deuterons, going right near the speed of light with time all slowed down, this laser is hitting them at incredibly high frequency and with incredible energy — more than even the energy of a cosmic ray. With that kind of bombardment, the deuterons might get blown apart and separated. But they don’t. That’s because they are now so massive that the inertia is also enormous. These poor, incredibly obese deuterons can’t budge and they just sit there absorbing the laser energy and getting hotter and hotter until the energy overwhelms them and then the deuterons can fuse together into one atom. Enormous amounts of energy are released by that process, as some mass is destroyed. We’ll catch the energy, cycle some of it back to run the particle accelerator and the laser, and keep the rest to cook the bacon with the microwave. Or run a city, for that matter.”
Jeff was impressed. The technology involved bewildered him, but he comprehended the theory and it intrigued him.
“How close are you to getting this working?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We were just gearing up for the first big test. But we needed the power from the OTEC to get us going. Everything was going according to schedule. Now we have to wait four more months. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am.”
Jeff reached out and held her arm. “I had no idea that this affected your work so much. You seemed much more concerned with your brother than yourself.”
“Well, it’s all tied together. There are several other projects awaiting the OTEC’s power generation capability. These projects keep the morale of all the members of the Island project high. We’re making progress so rapidly. When the OTEC sank, everyone on the Island felt the loss. They mourned that day, and not just for the loss of the men from the Mary Brewer who died. They mourned for the OTEC.”
Jeff nodded in silence. It looked like his mission to ascertain the reason for the sinking might be a bit higher profile than he had been expecting.
“What has happened? We have not met for a month.”
“It is unusual, I know,” replied the leader. “At least of late. There has been much progress on Paradise, but nothing we will do anything about for now.”
“So why call the meeting? Something wrong with the Mexico plans?”
“No. All is smoothly progressing there. I just needed to inquire if anyone at the table had anything to do with the sinking of their OTEC — their new source of electricity.”
The other men around the table shook their heads.
“I was just making sure that nobody is acting without our consensus. We don’t want to go through that again.” He pointed to the bowl of oranges. There were only six. The youngest man, formerly a member of the group, no longer was invited.
The old man said, “So we continue to hope that nobody stumbles upon it?”
“We continue to hope.”
“What is Onbacher up to?”
“He stays in the Pacific a fair amount. That cannot be good.”
“But he has no idea that what he is looking for is right under his nose.”
“I hope not.”
21. Sophia’s Secret Ally
JEFF LEFT THE island the next day, and now Sophia sat alone in her living room, sipping a glass of sherry. It was soon to be sunset. If you were looking, you could easily see the sun’s motion as it sank briskly and was snuffed out by the warm, deep tropical waters of the horizon.
Her work would keep her busy, she assumed. It always had. However, this time it was different. This time, everything was set to go, except that they lacked adequate electricity. They had the technology. It just needed to be tested. But they had no grant proposals to write or edit, no administrative work to fill this down time. Not that she liked all that paperwork and begging from her past job, but it had kept her occupied.
Well, she supposed, it was okay to go out and try to have some fun. She had nothing else to do, after all.
“I think it’s time to socialize,” she said to herself.
A long shower and a change of attire prepared her for what she hoped would be an evening of frolicking, although she anticipated that it would probably be a dud. She examined herself in the mirror. Her bright blonde hair contrasted well with the short green jumpsuit that revealed her figure well. She wore white sandals on her tanned, bare feet. It was standard tropical island dress code.
She thought, perhaps, that she would go to the bars at the resort. They were pleasant, and most were smoke-free. She hated cigarettes. Smokers abounded throughout Europe, and certainly in Iceland, so much so that she did not enjoy going out for dinner or dancing there. America was different, for smoking was much less acceptable. Indeed, smokers were becoming pariahs in the United States.
The Island resort drew patrons from all over the world. Almost every country on the globe had, within the first six months of operation, sent at least one of its citizens to vacation there. The woman in charge of the resort facility recently proposed that they give a free vacation to couples from several sub-Saharan countries and a few South Pacific island nations as well — in order to represent clients from all countries on the planet. She thought it would be good PR, given the Island Project should be a light on the hill for the entire globe.
But travelers from around that globe brought with them th
eir disgusting cigarettes. On the Island, smoking was not encouraged by anyone, although it was in no way outlawed. The chief bartender at each drinking establishment made her own determination as to whether to allow smoking. Sophia would go to the ones that saw it her way.
She climbed into her golf cart, and headed to the bars at the resort. The Blue Parrot was one of the good ones. With 1930s Moroccan decor, and a piano in the middle, it was designed to bring Casablanca to life. Some of the bartenders even wore red cylindrical hats, with little braided tassels dangling from the top. She was there the other night, with Jeff, and the pianist even played As Time Goes By. Jeff thought that had been a little much, but Sophia knew that it just had to be played, at least once each night.
She pulled up in front, parking her cart in one of the spaces allotted for the privately owned vehicles. Big Band music — Glenn Miller — could be heard emanating from the doors. She walked through an open lanai, occupied by candlelit tables, and into the better-lit inner sanctum.
The orchestra was nestled in a back corner on a stage. Each of the twelve musicians was having a grand time. It was still early, so the place was far from filled, but already the barstools were standing room only. These were the singles, hoping to find dinner companions for the evening. Sophia sat down at a small table, not far from the bar, and nodded to a roving waiter. He came over immediately.
The short, wiry waiter seemed as though he had only just recently finished secondary school — with an immature but friendly smile and a very young face that was scattered with acne. Many young people came to the Island wanting to help in the Project, but they had few skills and were too impatient to get a formal education. They came to Paradise and helped in any way they could. And the developers encouraged them to continue their education via Internet classes.
The youthful waiter greeted her pleasantly and asked, “What might I get for you tonight?” He had a pronounced British accent, and Sophia noted that, although he tried not to, he gazed down at her cleavage. Hormones at his age were unrelenting.