Cold Fusion (8 page)

“Mallory? Are you all right?” Viv had followed me into the café and was watching me in alarm.

“Tell me,” I rasped. “Please. Tell me how it works.”

“I will, after you’ve seen the good bit.”

“There’s a good bit? Better than this bit?”

“More spectacular. Come on.”

I couldn’t move, and so he came to me. He took my hand in his this time, as if I’d taught him that this kind of touch was okay, was safe and appropriate between us, part of the way we did things, even though until forty-eight hours ago there’d been no
we
at all.

“This way,” he said. “Come down to the sea chambers.”

* * * * *

At the bottom of the steps beyond the shower rooms, a broad metal door blocked our way. Viv unfastened the padlock, and I helped him haul the door aside, creaking and grinding on the concrete. I’d assumed there was some kind of basement down there, and I blinked and grabbed the rail when I found myself at the top of an iron staircase, staring down flight after flight into the dark. “Bloody hell. What’s down here?”

“You’ll see. Come with me.” He set off at a run down the stairs. “It’s okay,” he called back over his shoulder. “The emergency lights should stay on now. It really is working this time!”

“This must be taking us right down into bedrock. You didn’t build all this?”

“No, of course not.” He was taking the steps like a panther, clearly familiar with their twists and turns. He halted on a landing to wait for me. “Before this place was a weather station, my great-grandfather and his team of engineers blasted out the rock to conduct experiments into providing hydroelectricity to the village and the castle. They got quite a long way with it too, but…” He held out a hand to steady me, then ran on again, leaving me to keep up as best I could. “You know it’s much more painful to spend a few hundred thousand pounds on hydro than to carry on sucking oil out of the planet’s guts. So his work died, just like the idea of cold fusion, although…” Three more twisting flights, the rock walls closing in more tightly around the stairway. The jagged black surfaces were gleaming wetly now, and I could taste salt in the air. Viv came to a halt on a long, narrow platform. In typical Victorian style, it was beautifully tiled, though its only users would be engineers with other things on their mind than black-and-white herringbone. “Although we don’t really call the process cold fusion anymore. It’s LENR these days—low-energy nuclear reactions.”

I stopped beside him, catching my breath. “I have to admit, cold fusion sounds sexier.”

“That’s just it, though. It has to be de-sexed, demystified, rehabilitated. Otherwise the scientific establishment will never take it seriously. And as you can see, it works. It’s real.”

The elderly bulbs in their cages cast a yellow glow that didn’t extend beyond the platform. We could have been perched in the middle of an H.G. Wells story, waiting for Morlocks to clamber up over the edge and wreck our time machine. “At the moment I don’t see much at all.”

“Sorry. No, of course. But if you close your eyes and listen…”

I obeyed. Disappointment filled me, bitter as copper in my mouth. I could hear a machine.

Well, it made sense. Here was Vivian Calder, last descendant of mighty Victorian builders and philanthropists. Charming and easy on the eye, but so incapable of dealing with the everyday world that even his own father had chosen not to entrust him with the estate. Filled with dreams, clambering up imaginary scaffolds towards one mad idea. And all the while, his intricate toys in the lab up above were being powered by a failing engine down here, raising and dashing his hopes as it switched on and off in its death throes.

“Viv,” I said softly, unsure of how he’d react when confronted with his fantasy. “Is that a generator?”

“What? Oh, no. Come with me.”

He leapt off the platform’s edge into the dark. I gave a yelp of fright, but instantly he reappeared in the channel below, shining a torch around. “Sorry. I come down here all the time. I forgot you don’t know your way. Water used to come rushing through this conduit as part of the hydro process. It’s quite dry now, and a good shortcut to the chambers. Here. I’ll help you down.”

I jumped before he could reach for me. It was too easy to get used to his ready grasp, the wiry strength behind it. He had no problems when it came to practical contact, it seemed, but his boundaries were complicated. Best to keep hands off. He gave me an odd little look in the torchlight, as if I’d disappointed him, and headed off down the tunnel.

The throbbing sound I’d taken for a generator engine increased. The tunnel narrowed to a small arched passage, and I stayed close on Viv’s heels, wishing I’d brought a torch of my own. Wide-open seascapes were my environment of choice. I could feel the thousands of tons of black north-coast rock weighing more ponderously above me every second. “We must be at sea level down here.”

“Below it, actually. That’s what makes this work so well.”

I opened my mouth to ask what, then lost the words as we emerged into a breathtaking circular space. Seawater was cascading from a pipe high in the wall, crashing down into the central basin and swirling in a self-powered vortex that lapped over the sides, throwing foam and sand right to our feet. “God almighty. What’s this?”

“A natural centrifuge,” Viv replied, raising his voice above the roar. “All I had to do was take out the hydro equipment that restrained it. I didn’t want the resistance—just the water itself, on full power. Lots of it.”

“What’s it for?”

“Look around the edges to the basin. Do you see the machines?”

I knelt to take a look. I must have seemed prone to falling headlong into the whirlpool, because his hand closed on my belt. “These weird columns with the blades?”

“That’s it. They’re sub-centrifuges, taking their spin from the main pool. That’s what you could hear. We’re right behind the rock face of the Skellig inlet, where the tide comes in so hard.”

“Goes out hard too. And every time it does…”

“Millions of gallons of water get driven through here.”

“What for?” I demanded. “No. Wait.” He pulled me to my feet, and I stood in front of him, racking my brains for memories of my alternative-energy lectures with PW. “You’re harvesting the heavy water. Deuterium.”

“Well, heavy water is the term for water in which the hydrogen has been replaced by its isotope deuterium, but yes. It takes a lot of doing—there’s only one part per billion of the deuterium molecule in sea water…”

“But in a place like this, with limitless water, where the power you need is free and self-sustaining… Oh, my God. You really have done it.” I stared out over the spiralling basin, which was catching dozens of shades of jade and gold from the wall lights and making them dance round the ceiling. “Take me back upstairs. Show me how it works in your laboratory. Please.”

I couldn’t wait for him. I had to stick close by him as we picked our way back through the dark tunnel, but once we were on the staircase again, I took off. Excitement had shot from my brain to my muscles. I leapt up the iron steps two at a time, making it three on the corners where I could use my own momentum and the handrail to spin myself round. Soon Viv fell a long way behind me.

I stopped on one of the landings to look down at him, laughing. “Come on, mate! You need to spend less time in the lab and more in the fresh air. And you need a few hot dinners.” I would see to this, I decided. Once we’d launched this miracle on the world, I would make it my personal responsibility to look after its creator. We’d have time then, time for long walks on the beach, regular meals.

In my imagination I wiped out North Kerra and replaced it with a castle in the air so grand that Viv’s ancestral home was nothing to it. I’d care for Viv there, serve him up the gourmet meals I’d learned to cook, and we’d eat together by the glorious free light of cold fusion, happy in the knowledge that every other soul on the planet was doing the same. “Viv? You all right?”

He was struggling with the stairs, his face colourless when he looked up at me. I ran back down to him. He really didn’t look well, but I couldn’t stop laughing. “What a state!” I said, planting a hand in the small of his back and giving him a boost. “How did you get to be this unfit?”

“Too much time in the lab. As you say.”

“Well, no more of that. You may well be the most important man on Earth right now. We’ll introduce you to Stephen Hawking, and that cute guy who does the
Wonders
series on the telly, and—”

“Mallory, we can’t tell anybody yet.”

“Not even Stephen Hawking?”

“No. He’d be in danger.” My mouth fell open, but he was dead serious. “I don’t have the breath to explain to you now. You have to trust me about this. Promise.”

* * * * *

The tank was like a massive jam jar. Last night I’d have valued it about as much. Now it was the Holy Grail to me and, like Viv, I stood with my hands resting reverently on its metal lid. He was still breathless. He probably needed a cup of tea, but I couldn’t wait. “This is it, then?” I demanded. “The heavy water?”

“Yes. I’m only using a fraction of the amount I’m harvesting, but that might change in the future. This tank is a fusion cell.”

“There’s a nuclear reaction going on in here?”

“Fusion, yes.”

“At room temperature. With no fallout or pollution. My God, Viv—
how
?”

“Do you have a science qualification?”

“GCSE biology.”

“Then I’ll give you the streamlined version.” He paused, clearly trying to slow down his mental processes to match mine, and I wished I hadn’t spent my time in physics class scoping out the greengrocer’s son. “I use a process of electrolysis to split the heavy water into deuterium molecules and hydrogen gas. Do you see the two fine silver-coloured rods in the cathode tube there?”

“Yes. I know this bit. One of them’s platinum, the other palladium. Hang on, though.” I took a deep breath. Seeing was believing, and I’d seen, but I couldn’t allow my sense of wonder to stop me from asking questions. Viv would be subjected to at least this much when we made his discovery public. “The two guys who were trying this before, back in the eighties—they thought palladium was the answer too. But it wasn’t.”

“Pons and Fleischmann were chemists, not physicists. They thought the crystalline structure of the palladium would allow the deuterium molecules close enough to one another for a fusion reaction to take place. They were wrong, and that second metal isn’t palladium.”

He fell silent, adjusting one of the wires that led out of the tank. Maybe I would have him do that—the dramatic, infuriating pause—when he was explaining the process to a room full of open-mouthed journalists. Yesterday I’d have accused him of showmanship, but now I knew he was just distracted.

“Viv,” I said, gently as I could. “I don’t care if you saved all your old KitKat wrappers up and rolled them into a tube. What’s the second metal?”

His attention came back to me. I almost wished it hadn’t. Once more he looked at me as if taking my measure—the ancient way, perhaps, a loop of thread around my brow, from the top of my skull to my feet, and God help me if I betrayed the secrets of the coven.

“Pons and Fleischmann
were
wrong,” he said. “They were also hounded and disgraced. Do you notice how we don’t have electric cars yet, other than a handful too expensive or unfashionable to interest a wide public? How alternative energy
is
still alternative, despite the technology for wind, solar and wave power having been available to us for at least the last fifty years?”

“Preaching to the converted. Peace Warrior taught us all this so we could pass the message on. But even the oil industry can’t deny cold fusion.”

“I’m not talking about denial. I’m talking about destruction. We’re living in a world where certain vested interests simply will not allow this technique to exist.”

He was paranoid. No wonder, cooped up here with only his test tubes and the mournful wind-song for company. Some of his fears were valid, no doubt, and I’d deal with those in due course. “Okay. Point taken. What’s the second metal, Viv?”

“Like palladium, not really a metal at all. A crystalline-structured compound named calderium. It isn’t an element, although when my great-grandfather discovered it here on the estate, he thought it was—there were still gaps in the periodic table back then—and he observed the Victorian habit of naming it after himself.”

“Oh. Calderium as in Calder?”

“That’s right. My father worked all his life to refine it into usable forms. He succeeded.” Viv patted the top of the tank thoughtfully. “He didn’t hate me, Mallory. He gave me this first workable cathode rod for my eighteenth birthday.”

Oh, God. It was all very well for me to get pissed, shoot my mouth off and drop into a coma afterwards. That didn’t mean anybody would forget what I’d said. “Shit. I know he didn’t hate you. I could cut my tongue out.”

Again that smile, or the ghost of it—pale moonlight after the sun. “Don’t do that.”

“Your Alfred—Mr. Macready—he said that if you wanted to talk about your dad, I should let you.”

“Did he?”

“
Mind you listen well
, were his exact words.”

“Alfred often oversteps the bounds of his authority.”

“I can believe that. But do you?”

“What?”

“Want to talk?”

“Why? We were talking about the calderium, weren’t we?”

I let it go. I was on alien ground, far more likely to understand particle physics than the relationship between this strange man and his father. “Yes, we were. Kindly explain to me how your magic metal succeeds where palladium failed.”

“I wish I could. It will take me years more to research and analyse its structure and effects. But its similarity to palladium made my father believe it could work, and he left it to me to set up the structure to prove it. In theory, the deuterium molecules are absorbed into the calderium, where they fuse into a high-energy helium isotope, helium-4. The helium-4 either drops an energy level to helium-3 and releases a neutron, or transforms into tritium and releases a proton, or stabilises as helium-4 but produces a weaker gamma ray. Do you understand?”