Power Play (5 page)

“Nothing?”

“I can’t let them run my life, Amy. And besides, I don’t think I’ll be important enough to Tomlinson for them to even notice me.”

Very seriously, she asked, “But if you do become important enough…”

He shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Amy broke into a happy smile. “That’s wonderful, Jake. You’re wonderful.”

Before he could think of something to say, their waiter came to the table and gestured to their half-eaten entrées. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine,” Jake said.

“Lovely,” said Amy.

She didn’t mention politics again for the rest of the dinner. When the check came, Amy insisted that the Tomlinson campaign would pay. Jake sat there feeling as if everyone in the restaurant were staring at him, allowing the woman to pay.

As they left the restaurant and walked across the dimly lit parking lot, Amy pointed out her car: a silver BMW.

“That’s a lot of automobile,” Jake said, impressed.

“My one extravagance,” she said. “My apartment’s just a one-bedroom flat.”

Jake thought of his own seedy place downtown.

She unlocked the car with a beep of her remote key, then turned back to Jake. He realized that she was almost his own height in her heels. In the shadows of the parking lot, he could see her eyes gleaming.

“Thanks for a lovely dinner,” she said.

“I should thank you.”

“Thank Franklin.”

“I’d rather thank you.”

She stepped close enough to touch. “I really did enjoy this evening, Jake.”

His arms slipped around her slim waist. “I did, too.”

She lifted her face toward his and he kissed her.

“We’ll have to do this again,” Amy breathed. “Real soon.”

“Next time I pay.”

She laughed. “You’re so serious about everything!”

“Yeah.” He kissed her again. Then she disengaged and turned to open her car door.

“Okay, next time it’s your treat,” she said, then ducked into the car.

Jake watched as she backed the car out of its parking space and turned it past him toward the exit. He waved good-bye when her headlights swung over him. Then he walked to his own beat-up Mustang convertible. He wondered where he could take Amy for dinner. Not in my neighborhood, he realized. Not in my neck of the woods.

THE BIG RIG

Jake spent the weekend scrolling through every Internet source he could find for information about MHD power generation. He found it hard to concentrate on the words and data, though. His mind kept drifting back to Amy Wexler. Tomlinson had been right: Politics is a good way to meet women.

What he learned was that there had been abortive MHD generator programs in the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and even Australia. The American work dated back to the 1960s. None of the programs had amounted to much. The Russians actually fed power from their prototype MHD generator into the Moscow electrical grid—but not for long. For some reason, all of the previous MHD power generation programs had faded into failure.

Bob Rogers had invited him to see the “big rig,” as the physicist called it, which was located off campus, up in a mining town in the foothills. So Monday morning Jake drove out of town, guided by the GPS system he had bought two years earlier at Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale.

Lignite was a gray, run-down town, little more than a crossroads between two secondary state roads, with a gas station on one corner, a dreary motel across from it sporting a faded sign that proclaimed
VACANCY
, a cinder-block post office, and a dilapidated diner rusting away under the summer sun. Sad, empty-looking houses and shops ran for a few blocks down both streets, then abruptly ended in wind-blown sagebrush. A forlorn bird circled in the empty bright sky: a hawk or maybe a buzzard, Jake didn’t know which.

Feeling apprehensive, Jake parked in front of the diner and got out of his Mustang. The old clunker looks almost good compared to this dump, he thought. Two other cars were parked there, one of them a dust-coated highway patrol cruiser. A glance at his wristwatch showed he was almost ten minutes early for his meeting with Rogers. The sun felt warm enough for him to peel off his tan sports jacket and toss it back in the car, even though the breeze sweeping down from the hills was cool.

Jake looked around. Nothing much to see. A few buildings along the two streets, no traffic at all. The foothills rose off in the distance, turning brown from lack of rain. Beyond them were the bare granite mountains, purple-blue in the distance, shimmering with heat haze. Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles, Jake thought. He half expected to see John Wayne striding down the dusty road, heading for a shootout at high noon.

Helluva place to put a high-powered research facility. Then he grinned to himself. Rent must be pretty damned low. And if anything blows up here the news media will never hear about it.

He spotted a rooster tail of dust approaching from the direction of the foothills. Jake watched it come nearer and resolve itself into a big, boxy Land Rover, caked with road dust. It pulled up into the parking lot, dwarfing Jake’s Mustang, and out stepped Bob Rogers with a big grin on his face. He was wearing tan chinos stuffed into tooled black cowboy boots, and a splashy red and white western-cut shirt with snaps instead of buttons.

“Welcome to Lignite!” Rogers called.

Rogers led him into the diner for an early lunch.

“Tim won’t start today’s run until one o’clock,” Rogers said.

The diner was almost empty, only an overweight state highway patrol officer sitting at the counter, a heavy pistol hanging at his bulging hip, two-way radio clipped to the epaulette of his shirt. Rogers slid into the nearest booth; Jake sat across the cracked, stained table. The bleach-blond waitress was plump, too, and bosomy, but the scrambled eggs and crisp bacon were surprisingly good, Jake thought. The coffee was weak, but what the hell. Rogers talked about the town all through the meal.

“Used to be a thriving mining town, back in my grandfather’s day. Coal trains a hundred cars long would chug up the rail line every day. But then the country started switching to oil for heating, and the environmentalists found out that high-sulfur coal causes acid rain and old Lignite just faded up and almost blew away.” Rogers didn’t seem upset by the town’s parlous history. “Great place to grow up, though. Especially if you like riding.”

“You grew up here?”

“Yeah. We still have a rodeo, every Fourth of July.”

Jake nodded. A rodeo. The big event of the year in swinging downtown Lignite.

“We’re burning high-sulfur coal right out of the old Lignite mine,” Rogers said.

“Despite the environmentalists?” Jake asked.

“That’s the whole point. In the MHD generator we can extract the sulfur compounds in their gaseous state before they get out of the exhaust stack. The rig is environmentally clean!”

“So there’s no pollution coming out the stack?”

“Nothing but some nitrogen compounds and cee-oh-two.”

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.”

Rogers shrugged. “Yeah. The EPA has a program to sequester cee-oh-two; pump it underground so it doesn’t get into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”

“I’ve read about that.”

“The big rig runs at almost seventy percent efficiency, calculating from the amount of fuel in and the amount of electrical power out.”

“Seventy percent?”

Grinning, Rogers said, “We’ll do better than that.”

“Seventy percent is pretty damned good.”

Rogers grabbed the check when it came, over Jake’s faint protest. Then he slid out of the booth and said, “Come on, let’s go check out the big rig.”

Once outside again, Rogers told Jake to follow his Land Rover. “It’s a straight shot out to the test shed. You can’t miss it.”

Jake went to his Mustang. It was baking hot inside. He thought about putting the convertible’s top down but decided against it. Instead he rolled down the windows and turned the air-conditioning on full blast.

He watched Rogers carefully back his dust-caked Land Rover out of its parking space. Jake thought the big wagon looked as heavy as a tank. Suddenly Rogers gunned it up onto the road and took off like an Indy 500 racer. Jake pulled out of the parking lot, bounced up onto the road, and leaned on the Mustang’s accelerator pedal to catch up. All he could see of the Land Rover was a cloud of gritty dust. It was so thick that Jake started to cough; he rolled his windows up.

They were past the town in a minute, out onto the flat, arrow-straight road. Nothing on either side but low-lying sagebrush, not even a tree. Then Jake saw in the distance a square structure; it looked something like an oversized shed made of corrugated steel.

They pulled up at the parking lot in a screech of gravel and dust. Jake saw that the facility was indeed a big corrugated metal shed. Must get damned hot in there, he thought.

“Here we are!” Rogers said, grinning like a kid as he stepped down from his van and led Jake toward the building.

Pointing toward the Land Rover, Jake groused, “That thing must burn a lot of gas.”

“It’s an LR-4,” Rogers replied. “Plenty of cubes under its hood. Gets me through the snow when a car like yours would get stuck.”

Jake nodded grudgingly as they entered the metal building. Inside, it was just one big open space, a test cell, with the bulky MHD generator and its associated gear almost filling it. Jake was surprised that the place was pleasantly air-conditioned. Half a dozen technicians in grimy lab coats that had once been white were gathered off to one side of the space. Rogers waved hello to them without bothering to introduce Jake.

“There she is,” Rogers said, pointing like a proud father.

This MHD generator was much larger than the apparatus on campus. Its central core was nearly ten feet high and even more in length. Instead of a stack of copper plates the core was a glistening metal tube, studded with small protrusions that were connected by color-coded wires to an electrical bus standing on long metal legs above the rig. A much larger oxygen tank stood at the right, alongside what was obviously a coal hopper. Another tank, stainless steel, stood next to them.

“Liquid nitrogen,” Rogers said, his voice strangely subdued. “For the superconducting coil. It doesn’t need any electrical power input once it’s activated. Saves us a big chunk of megawatts.”

“How much power does this rig put out?”

“We’ve had it up to thirty-five megawatts. Our aim is fifty. Tim wants to goose it up to seventy-five.”

Jake felt impressed.

“Over there, on the aft end of the rig, is the equipment for separating the sulfur compounds. Works like a spectrometer, same principle.”

“Oh,” said Jake, “like the GCMS on some of the Mars probes.”

“GCMS?”

“Gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. They analyze the Martian atmosphere, samples of rocks, that kind of thing.”

Rogers nodded, with a grin. “Yeah, sort of like that. Except we’re dealing with tons of plasma flow, not milligrams.”

“Off-the-shelf equipment?” Jake asked.

“Pretty much. We’ve had to tinker with it a little, but it’s pretty much standard gear. No new inventions needed.”

“And the carbon dioxide sequestering?”

With a slight shake of his head, Rogers replied, “We don’t do that. But when we’re ready for a prototype power plant, the EPA can supply us with a contractor for that part of it.”

Jake’s eyes followed the heavy cables snaking out from the core of the MHD generator. They led to a boxy metal structure: tall, square, grayish green.

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“Inverter,” said Rogers. “The generator puts out DC power. The inverter converts it to AC, the kind of electrical current that the utility industry uses. All your household appliances, electric motors, heaters—they all run on alternating current.”

A new question popped into Jake’s mind. “What do you do with all the megawatts you generate?”

“Dump it.”

“Dump it?”

“Yeah. We run it into a bank of resistors out behind the shed. Heats ’em up pretty good.”

“You don’t use the electricity for anything?”

With a shake of his head, Rogers answered, “No. Not yet, anyway.”

Rogers led Jake to a control booth set behind a thick glass partition. A metal panel studded with dials and switches stretched along the partition and a heavy wooden back wall carried dozens more gauges.

“When the little rig blew up last year,” Rogers said cheerily, “the fire was so hot it melted the gauges on the wall.”

Jake noted a single fire extinguisher standing in the corner. That won’t do much good if this rig blows, he thought.

Pointing upward, Rogers said, “We put blast doors into the roof. If she blows, the doors swing open and let out most of the explosion’s force.”

Jake felt far from reassured.

For nearly an hour the technicians fussed and tinkered with the rig while Rogers chatted amiably and Jake wondered if he would live through an explosion. Precisely fifteen minutes before one the door from the parking lot banged open and Tim Younger came striding through. His boots were scuffed dusty brown, his jeans faded, his shirt wrinkled. He had a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned cowboy hat pulled down over his narrowed eyes.

Christ, Jake thought, all he needs is a six-gun strapped to his hip.

TRIAL RUN

Barely nodding at Jake, Younger asked, “We ready to run?” as he stepped into the control booth.

“Just about,” said Rogers.

Jake watched, fascinated, at the play of personalities. Rogers might be the physicist who laid out the underlying concepts of the MHD generator, the man who designed the big rig, but Younger was the guy in charge here. The technicians followed him around like puppy dogs as he left the control booth and walked slowly around the apparatus, checking every inch of it, every wire and connection. Rogers remained in the control booth with Jake. They were both spectators now.

Finally Younger pushed his hat back on his head and nodded, satisfied.

“Okay,” he said to the technicians. “Let’s fire her up and see what she can do.”