Power Play (20 page)

“So I should keep this to myself?” Jake asked.

“If it would help Tomlinson’s campaign, I’d say go ahead and tell the man. But this won’t help. It might even make Leeds look a little better.”

Jake felt as if his head were spinning. Politics, he thought. It’s so damned convoluted.

Abruptly, Cardwell asked, “So what’s going on with the campaign? How’s Tomlinson really doing?”

Jake waggled one hand. “Dant’s been a big surprise. Tomlinson’s people keep telling him that Dant’s backing is very narrow, just the ultraconservatives, but they’re worried that it might be enough to snatch the primary away from us. If those crazies come out and vote in a solid block they could carry the election and leave Tomlinson out in the cold. Voter turnout in the primaries is usually pretty low. A strong, determined bloc of fanatics could beat us.”

Rubbing his chin thoughtfully, Cardwell murmured, “And give Leeds a much easier opponent in the general election.”

Jake nodded. “That’s right.”

“And MHD? What’s happening with the MHD program?”

“The work’s proceeding, mostly out in Lignite. Tomlinson’s people are trying to get the chairman of the National Association of Electric Utilities to meet with him and endorse MHD.”

“That’s good,” Cardwell said softly. “An endorsement could be helpful.”

Jake recognized the pensive expression on Lev’s face. “But…?”

“But some active undertaking would be even better.”

“Active undertaking?”

“An endorsement is merely lip service,” Cardwell explained. “You should try to get the Utilities Association to
do
something concrete to show they’re behind MHD.”

“Do something?” Jake asked. “What?”

Cardwell smiled at Jake. “You’re the science advisor, my boy. You think of something concrete for the association to prove its faith in MHD.”

“Something concrete.”

His gentle smile broadening, Cardwell said, “Always make the victim a party to the crime, Jake. Bind them to you.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Good!”

Cardwell got to his feet and Jake went with him to the front hall, taking in a deep breath of air, as if he’d been submerged for the past twenty minutes. Alice came downstairs, all smiles and dressed for dinner in a lovely lilac gown. Jake said good night to them both and drove home through the early evening darkness.

He thought the car behind him was following him. Black Cadillac. Jake was pretty sure that was the kind of car that Monster drove.

“IF IT DOESN’T WORK…”

It was two days before Tomlinson and Amy returned, two days in which Jake struggled with his conscience about Sinclair and stewed inwardly at his suspicion that Amy was sleeping with Tomlinson. Two days of Jake looking over his shoulder for a sight of Monster or some of his pals.

She must be sleeping with him, he realized. They’re together night and day for weeks on end. Why wouldn’t she? I’ve got no claim on her. I never did. What happened between us was strictly fun and games. I’d be an idiot to expect anything more.

Still, he felt hurt. Betrayed.

He went through his classes like an automaton. Students dropped into his office for counseling sessions and he couldn’t remember what he’d told them five minutes after they’d left.

Jake looked up the number of the Fain Security Company and spoke to a woman who identified herself as Micky Fain’s daughter, Michelle.

“Our files don’t show any record of Mr. Tomlinson asking for a security detail for you, Dr. Ross,” she said, in a singsong kindergarten teacher’s tone.

“Oh. I see. Mr. Tomlinson must have forgotten about it.”

“He’s a very busy man, of course.”

“Yeah. I’ll talk to him about it when he gets back to town.”

Just after lunch of the second day Bob Rogers phoned. “We’re going to do a ten-hour run on the big rig,” he announced cheerfully. “Test the new electrodes. Want to come up and take a look with me?”

“Why not?” Jake responded. It was an excuse to get off campus, out of town, away from his troubles.

Rogers insisted on driving. “No sense taking two cars. We’ll just pop in for an hour or so and see how things are going. Besides, the weather forecast is for snow and my beast can handle that better than your little convertible.”

“But then you’ll have to drive all the way back to Lignite, won’t you?” Jake asked.

“Nah. If the snow gets too bad I’ll get a dorm room on campus.”

So Jake climbed into the heavy van and Rogers put it in gear and headed for the highway.

“Does Tim know we’re coming?” he asked.

Rogers nodded without taking his eyes off the road. “You bet. I wouldn’t pop in on him unannounced. He doesn’t like that.”

“He’s an ornery so-and-so.”

With a laugh, Rogers agreed. “There’s an old bit from history I think about whenever Tim gets really stiff. World War Two, just after Pearl Harbor. Most of the U.S. Navy is sunk at Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt needs somebody to run the Navy, build it up again, win the war.”

Jake wondered how this related to Tim Younger.

Rogers went on, “Roosevelt picks Admiral Ernest King. Everybody’s stunned. King was a drunk and a womanizer who had made a lot of enemies for himself. But he was tough, and smart.”

“We did win the war,” Jake said.

“Damned right. But when King heard that he’d been picked to run the Navy, which was mostly at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, you know what he said?”

Jake shook his head.

“He said, ‘When they get into trouble they call for the sons of bitches.’”

Rogers laughed. It took Jake a moment to understand what the story meant. When you have a really tough job to do you need a tough man to do it.

Jake grinned a little. Tim Younger is a tough man. I’m not, he realized. I’m a cream puff.

*   *   *

Clouds were piling up over the mountains, dark and ominous, as they drove through the town of Lignite. They could hear the generator’s roar while they were almost a mile away from the big rig’s facility, even with the Land Rover’s windows rolled up.

“Still running,” Roger said, smiling. “That’s a good sign.”

By the time he parked the van the noise was like the thunder of a formation of fighter jets. Rogers leaned across and fished a pair of earphones out of the glove compartment. With a grin he handed them to Jake.

“What about you?” Jake shouted.

“I’ll find a pair inside.”

Once inside, even with the muffling cups pressing against his ears Jake could hear the generator’s roar, feel the vibration in the air; a thin mist of dust was jittering across the quivering concrete floor of the test cell. Younger and the technicians were in the control booth, behind the glass partition, all of them wearing earphones.

Jake saw Younger mouth hello as he and Rogers squeezed into the already crowded booth. Tim wasn’t smiling. Just a curt nod and the one word, to Rogers actually. I’m an interloper here, Jake told himself. A tourist.

Rogers pulled on a set of earphones. Tapping Jake’s shoulder, he pointed to the gauges on the control panel.

“Fifty-two meg!” he shouted, loudly enough to get through the muffling.

“How long has it been running?” Jake hollered.

Younger must have heard him because he pointed to a digital clock on the back wall of the booth. It read 2:47:59, and as Jake looked at it the numbers changed to 2:48:00.

Rogers was grinning broadly and bobbing his head up and down. Almost three hours, Jake thought. At better than fifty megawatts. Good. Really good.

There wasn’t much to do. While Younger and the technicians seemed fully absorbed in monitoring the gauges and dials of their control panel, Jake soon began to feel edgy. The generator just sat there, blasting away, but it didn’t do anything visible. The whole building seemed to shake; Jake saw dust motes jiggling in the air. The generator seemed unperturbed, like a long-distance runner loping along in easy rhythm.

Inside the generator, Jake knew, gases heated to more than five thousand degrees were roaring through the channel at supersonic speed. Enormous electrical energy was crackling inside that channel, and just outside it was the superconducting magnet, cooled down to a couple of hundred degrees below zero.

Fifty-some megawatts coming from what was essentially a small piece of equipment. Jake had visited electric utility power plants, back when he’d been a student. He remembered the enormous turbines spinning away. They dwarfed the big rig. And the turbines at the hydroelectric dam, up in the mountains. They were even bigger.

If this rig can put out fifty megawatts, Jake calculated mentally, an MHD generator that can equal the power output of a regular power plant wouldn’t be half as big as the regular plant.

Rogers had told him that MHD generators become more efficient as they get bigger. That’s because the losses in the system come from the friction of the hot gas—plasma, really—rubbing against the channel walls. But the power output comes from the total volume of plasma in the channel. Make it bigger and the losses go up as the square of the channel’s size, but the power output increases as the cube of the size. The bigger the better. Rogers called it “the three-halves law.”

He tapped Rogers on the shoulder. When the physicist turned toward him, Jake yelled, “How’re the electrodes holding up?”

With an exaggerated shrug, Rogers leaned close to Jake’s ear and hollered, “Must be okay. The rig’s still running, still putting out power.”

Suddenly one of the technicians yelled something and gesticulated at the control panel. Looking down at the gauges, Younger hammered a fist against the control panel.

“Cut it!” he screamed, so loud that Jake heard it clearly even through his earphones. Technicians jumped in a flurry of pushing buttons and flicking switches.

The noise and vibration suddenly stopped. The needles on the dials all spun down to zero. The clock stopped at 2:51:44.

Younger was ranting. Jake yanked off his earphones and heard Tim bellowing, “… stupid motherfucking goddamned shitfaced sonsofbitches!”

Rogers was standing beside Jake, looking suddenly downcast, his earphones hanging around his neck.

“What happened?” Jake asked.

“Magnet developed a hot spot.”

“And that stopped the test?”

Younger was still ranting. Over his tirade, Rogers explained, “It’s a superconductor. It’s got to be cooled down by liquid nitrogen. If a hot spot develops it could grow fast enough for the magnet to dump all its energy.”

“Then the generator stops working,” Jake surmised.

With a pained grin, Rogers said, “Then the generator blows up.”

“Blows up? You mean it would explode?”

“Like a ten-ton bomb.”

Jake rocked back, remembering a set of definitions that a visiting professor had given him when he’d been a freshman: “If it stinks or pops, it’s chemistry. If it scratches or bites, it’s biology. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics.”

The MHD generator—with its superconducting magnet—was definitely in the realm of physics.

BITTER REALITIES

Rogers and Jake beat a hasty retreat from the big rig facility. Younger was howling with fury as the technicians scampered to keep out of his way.

Outside, it was starting to snow. Just a few flakes, but Jake was happy that they would probably be safely back in town before the storm got heavy.

“Well,” said Rogers as they drove down the empty road, “the generator itself was working fine. The problem was with the magnet.”

“It’s got to be cooled,” Jake said.

“Right. Two hundred below zero, Celsius.” Then he amended, “One hundred ninety-six, actually.”

“Cryogenic.”

“That’s the word for it.”

“And when a hot spot develops…”

“All the energy in the magnet dumps into it, unless you shut it down damned fast.”

“It could explode.”

“It sure as hell can explode.”

Jake thought about it as they drove through the thickening snowfall.

After a few minutes he asked, “Then why do you use a superconducting magnet? Why not an ordinary copper magnet, like the one on the little rig?”

Rogers glanced at him, then turned his focus back to the road as he explained, “You have to keep feeding electrical power to a copper magnet. A superconductor doesn’t need any power input once it’s activated. That means a lot of megawatts that we don’t have to waste running the magnet. More net power output.”

“But if it causes this kind of trouble…”

“Besides,” Rogers went on, “a superconductor produces a much stronger magnetic field than a copper magnet can. We need the strongest magnetic field we can get to help make up for the plasma’s low conductivity.”

“But still…”

Rogers broke into a wry grin. “Tim will fix the problem. He’s boiling mad now, but once he cools down he’ll figure out what went bad with the magnet and fix it.”

“You think so?”

Nodding, Rogers said, “That’s what experimental physics is all about. You push the envelope until you run into a problem. Then you fix the problem and push some more.”

Jake nodded back at him. But in his mind he pictured Tim Younger pushing the envelope until the big rig blew up in a fiery, fatal explosion.

*   *   *

It was snowing hard by the time Rogers dropped Jake off at the campus. Dark clouds pressed low, blotting out the sunset, and a strong wind gusted between the university buildings. Bending against the wind, Jake mushed through a few inches of wet snow and slid into his Mustang. The wipers cleared most of the snow off his windshield; he let the car’s engine run for a few minutes, then turned the heater on to the defrost mode to finish the job.

By the time he got home, the university’s radio station was devoting itself completely to the impending blizzard. Jake got a vision of children all across the state leaping with glee at the thought of not going to school the next day.

Once in his apartment, Jake checked his phone machine. Nothing. He flipped open his cell phone and saw that there were no messages waiting for him there, either.

Tomlinson’s probably stranded somewhere out in the boonies, he thought. Shacked up with Amy in some roadside motel. He thought about phoning Amy again, decided against it, and went to bed, miserable and alone.