Power Play (3 page)

“And lots of money.”

“Money’s no problem,” she said. “Franklin has family money, and the family’s friends are all very well heeled.”

“I guess,” Jake said.

“What he needs is ideas, issues he can campaign on. Issues that Leeds can’t co-opt.”

“That’s what I’m supposed to do,” Jake said. “Come up with a science issue.”

“Do you have anything in mind?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “Not yet. This is all new to me. I haven’t had a chance to think much about it.”

Leaning slightly toward him, Amy said, “Please think hard about it, Jake. He needs you. I know he does.”

The bright sunlight glaring down on the patio made Jake feel uncomfortable. Or was it the situation he was being maneuvered into? he wondered. “There are other scientists in the state. Probably better ones. I’m just an assistant professor of astronomy.”

“But you’re young, Jake. Young and good-looking. You’ll look good on television.”

“Me? On TV?”

“Of course. And if Franklin wins the election, you can go to Washington with us.”

“Us?”

“We’ll be working together on the campaign. If you join the staff I’ll be your liaison with Franklin. You and I will work together, Jake.”

He felt his eyebrows rise and heard himself say, “That’d be great!”

Amy Wexler smiled warmly at him. “Yes, I think it would be great.”

And Jake heard Tomlinson’s words:
You’ll enjoy politics, Jake. Great way to meet women.

ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

The sign on the double doors said
DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS FLASHING
. And the red light was indeed flashing.

Jake stopped, his fist poised to knock on the door. It had been easy enough to locate the electrical engineering building on campus, but once inside, finding the laboratory where the MHD work was being done had been a bitch. None of the students ambling through the hallways seemed to have ever heard of the MHD lab. Jake had to contact campus security on his cell phone and even the gravel-voiced officer who answered him seemed unsure of the laboratory’s location.

“They moved it last year, after the explosion,” the security officer said.

“Explosion?” Jake yelped.

“Yeah … wait a minute, I’m scrolling through on the computer. Yeah. Here it is. EEA-105 and 106. That’s in the annex of the electrical engineering building. You go down to the building’s basement and out the tunnel that connects to the annex.”

After a few wrong turns in the basement, Jake finally stood at the double doors marked 105/106 and waited for the red light to stop flashing. The tunnel was narrow; insulated pipes ran along its low ceiling. Jake could hear water gurgling along one of them.

Dr. Cardwell had told him to look into the MHD work.

“If you want a good science-based issue for Tomlinson’s campaign,” Lev had insisted in his mild, soft-voiced way, “MHD power generation is just what you’re looking for.”

A sudden roar erupted from the other side of the closed doors, like a rocket taking off. Jake flinched with surprise. The doors rattled, and he could feel the floor vibrating beneath his feet.

Just as suddenly as it started, the howling roar cut off. And the red light went dark.

Jake rapped on the door. Nothing happened. He knocked again, harder. The door suddenly swung open and a sour-faced man frowned at him.

“Whattaya want?”

The guy was about Jake’s height, wiry build, thinning sandy hair. He wore a checkered tan work shirt, cut-off jeans, and moccasins without socks. His light brown eyes looked pugnacious, almost angry.

“I’m Jake Ross,” he explained. “I’m here to see Tim Younger.”

“That’s me.” Younger did not move from the doorway. Past his shoulder Jake glimpsed a couple of technicians fussing over what looked like a pile of copper plates. A strange, almost sweet odor wafted from the lab; it was somehow familiar, yet Jake couldn’t place it.

“Professor Sinclair told me that you’re running the MHD experiments.”

Younger’s scowl eased a little. “The prof sent you over?”

“Yes. I want to—”

“Hey, Jake! What’re you doing down here?”

Jake recognized Bob Rogers from the party at Tomlinson’s house, several days earlier. He came up beside Younger.

“Come on in,” Rogers said, pulling the door open wider. To Younger, he said, “It’s okay, Tim. This is Jake Ross. He’s in the astronomy department.”

Younger stepped back, still looking slightly suspicious. “I thought you might’ve been another one of those pissants from the safety office.”

“No,” Jake said, stepping into the laboratory. “I’m an astronomer.”

“So what are you doing down here?” Younger asked, almost truculently. “We don’t do any stargazing here.” His voice had an adenoidal twang and an accent that sounded to Jake like Boston or maybe Down Maine.

“I came to see this MHD generator you’re working on,” Jake said.

Rogers smiled boyishly and gestured. “Well, there it is.”

The MHD generator was hardly impressive. The man-tall stack of copper plates stood in the middle of the lab. A squat cone-shaped contraption that looked to Jake a little like a rocket nozzle was stuck into one side of the pile and a stainless steel tube ran out from the other. A tangle of metal pipes and plastic tubing coiled all over the apparatus like the arms of an octopus. Thick wiring festooned the whole assembly, hanging from the ceiling, snaking along the floor. Jake recognized a big green tank of liquid oxygen off in one corner, a thin whiff of white vapor seeping from its top. Beside it stood what looked like a coal hopper, blackened with soot. That’s the smell, Jake realized: burning coal.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s the rig,” Rogers said genially. Pointing, he explained, “Powdered coal and liquid oxygen in at this end, they’re burned in the combustion chamber, the plasma shoots through the channel inside the magnet there and produces a dozen kilowatts or so.”

“Fourteen, this morning,” one of the technicians called from the other side of the generator.

“You said plasma?”

“Ionized gas,” Rogers answered. “It’s hot enough for some of the atoms to have their electrons knocked off them, so the gas becomes electrically conducting.”

“I’m an astronomer. I know what plasma is,” Jake said. “The stars are plasma. Most of the universe is plasma.”

Roger chuckled good-naturedly. “Yeah, right. But the plasma we get from burning coal is only lightly ionized.”

Younger spoke up. “We add potassium to the mix in the combustion chamber to increase the ionization.”

“And the plasma gives up electrical energy as it goes through the magnetic field?” Jake asked.

Rogers said, “Right. The plasma’s our armature, like the coil of copper wire in a normal power generator.”

Jake looked from Rogers’s friendly smile to Younger’s cantankerous scowl. “An armature,” he said, questioningly.

Patiently, Rogers explained, “In a conventional power generator, you spin a bundle of copper wires in a magnetic field. The copper conducts electricity, and as it spins through the magnetic field it generates an electrical current.”

“Faraday figured that out in the eighteen-thirties,” Younger added.

“And the bundle of copper wires is the armature,” Jake said, a little uncertainly.

“Right,” Rogers agreed. “In the MHD generator, though, the stream of hot plasma is the armature.”

With growing understanding, Jake said, “I get it. But the conductivity of the plasma must be a lot lower than the conductivity of copper wire.”

“Yeah, but the plasma blows through the magnetic field at supersonic speed,” Younger said, jabbing a forefinger at Jake’s chest.

“Like the exhaust from a rocket engine,” said Rogers.

“Damned sight faster than any copper armature,” Younger emphasized.

“I see,” Jake replied.

“MHD generators are a lot more efficient than the generators that the electric utility companies run,” Rogers said.

Younger huffed. “They’re using the same technology Edison used, for crap’s sake. Forty percent efficiency. Same as Edison got, within a couple of percentage points.”

“This little baby,” Rogers said, glancing at the MHD generator, “runs between sixty and sixty-five percent. And she’s only a little experimental job. The bigger an MHD generator is, the more efficient.”

“Wait a minute,” said Jake. “You’re telling me that this experimental rig is already fifty percent more efficient than the generators our utility companies use?”

Rogers nodded, smiling. Younger’s face twitched into an expression that was as close to a smile as he could get.

“How’d you like to have your electricity bill cut in half?” Younger asked.

PROFESSOR ARLAN SINCLAIR

His head spinning from the facts and figures that the two men were throwing at him, Jake said, “Look, I’m supposed to have lunch with Professor Sinclair. Why don’t you come along?”

Younger frowned. “I bring my lunch and eat here. I’ve got no time to go out to the cafeteria and socialize.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Rogers. “I need to talk to the prof anyway.”

As they walked along the low-ceilinged tunnel that connected to the main building of the electrical engineering department, Rogers said gently, “Don’t get the wrong impression about Tim. He’s a typical Yankee sourpuss, but he’s a good man.”

“If you say so,” Jake replied.

“He was in charge of the rig when it blew up last year. Killed one of the technicians. Knocked the roof off the shed. They found pieces all over the campus.”

“Geez!”

“We were lucky nobody else got hurt. The technician was a university employee, not a student.”

Jake almost said,
Expendable,
but caught himself in time.

“Tim’s a hands-on guy, not a
theoretiker
like me,” Rogers went on.

“You’re a physicist?”

Rogers nodded. “And Tim’s an engineer. He’s not on the faculty, he’s an employee of the university. I don’t pull rank on him or anything like that, but he feels the difference all the time.”

Shrugging as they stepped through the door out into the late-morning sunshine, he added, “Then there’s the family connection. I’m descended from Major Rogers, of Rogers’s Rangers. The French and Indian War and all that.”

Jake felt awed. “Christ, I just saw an old movie on TV about that. Spencer Tracy played Major Rogers!”

Grinning, Rogers said, “Tim’s from a working-class family north of Boston. Some of the guys kid him that he’s descended from the Younger Brothers, the old frontier outlaw gang. It gets under his skin sometimes. That’s why he can be kind of prickly.”

“So I don’t make any bank robber jokes in front of him.”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

As they walked across the campus to the faculty cafeteria, Rogers explained more about the MHD generator. A power generator’s efficiency depends on three things: the conductivity of its armature, the speed with which the armature moves through the magnetic field, and the strength of the magnetic field.

“Our armature is the plasma flowing along the channel,” Rogers said. “Conductivity’s a lot lower than copper wire, but the supersonic flow speed more than makes up for that. And our big rig uses a superconducting magnet: a lot stronger field strength than the electromagnet we’ve got on the little baby.”

“Your big rig?” Jake asked.

Rogers looked slightly surprised. “You don’t know about the big rig?”

“No.”

“If you’ve got some time after lunch I’ll take you over to see it.”

“I’ve got a lecture class at two,” Jake said.

Tilting his head slightly, Rogers replied, “Okay, some other time.”

They entered the cafeteria building, already noisy with crowds of students chattering away as they lined up at the counters, dishes and silverware clattering as they loaded trays from the displays of sandwiches, pizza, and hot meals. Jake followed Rogers up the stairs to the top floor and the faculty cafeteria, much quieter and less crowded. The woman at the reception desk showed them to a private room, where a table big enough for eight was set with four places.

“I guess the prof is bringing somebody with him,” Rogers said.

“Should we go get our lunches or wait for him here?” Jake wondered.

Rogers thought it over for a few seconds, then suggested, “Whyn’t you get what you want while I wait here for him?”

“Okay. Can I bring you something?”

“Diet Coke.”

Jake nodded and left the private room. He passed several people carrying loaded trays coming the other way but didn’t turn his head to see if any of them went into the room where Rogers was waiting.

He picked up an unidentifiable sandwich and two Diet Cokes, then found that he couldn’t pass up the dessert table’s apple cobblers. By the time he returned to the room where Rogers was waiting, Professor Sinclair was sitting at the head of the table, deep in discussion with the physicist. And a good-looking young brunette was seated at the professor’s right.

Both men got to their feet as Jake put his tray on the table.

“Professor, this is Jake Ross, from the astronomy department,” said Rogers.

Professor Arlan Sinclair was a big man, several inches taller than Jake, barrel-chested and broad in the shoulders. His hair was a thick leonine mane of silver that curled down to his collar. He wore a navy blue blazer and a rep tie of the university’s red and gold. His face was fleshy, but handsome in a dramatic, movie-star way. He smiled guardedly as he took Jake’s proffered hand in a firm grip.

“And to what do we owe the honor of your presence?” Sinclair asked, in a tone that was almost imperious. His voice was deep, resonant. The kind that won arguments.

“Dr. Cardwell told me to take a look at the MHD generator work,” Jake said.

Sinclair’s smile faded. He sank into his chair; Jake and Rogers also sat. The young woman looked curious, but said nothing.

“
Doctor
Cardwell?” Sinclair asked, practically sneering. “You mean the fellow who runs the planetarium?”

“Yes,” said Jake. “Leverett Cardwell.”

“He bought his doctorate from a diploma mill,” Sinclair said, in a disgusted grumble.