Thrice upon a Time (15 page)

The lure of taming fusion, with its promise of practically unlimited amounts of energy from easily processed and abundant fuel in the form of seawater, had captured men's imaginations since around the middle of the twentieth century. The principle was straightforward: Two nuclei of the heavy isotopes of hydrogen, one of deuterium and one of tritium, could be fused together to produce a nucleus of helium and a surplus neutron. A small amount of mass would be lost in the process, appearing in an Einsteinian way as a lot of energy to be carried away mainly by the neutron and partly by the helium nucleus.

In practice the main problem to be overcome was that of finding a way to induce the nuclei to come close enough to each other for fusion to take place since they both carried positive electrical charges. In other words, how could they be confined in close enough proximity for the strong nuclear force to solemnize the marriage when the long-range electromagnetic force drove them apart before they were even on speaking terms? The answer was to cause the nuclei to rush at each other so fast that their momenta would carry them through the repulsive barrier regardless of how the laws of electrodynamics felt about it. That meant that the plasma formed by the nuclei would have to be hot. Very hot. It worked out at around fifty million degrees Celsius. This was fine for anybody who happened to live at the center of a star, where gravitational pressure sustained the necessary temperatures and densities, or in the core of a detonating hydrogen bomb, where an A-bomb trigger heated hydrogen to such temperatures before it could disperse. But human beings had long ago adapted to a more genial type of habitat and had developed a distinct preference for keeping things that way.

Through the latter half of the twentieth century, despite alarmist accusations that research was being sabotaged by political and commercial vested interests in oil, two broad approaches emerged to solving the confinement problem. The first to be investigated was magnetic confinement, in which the hydrogen plasma was trapped inside magnetic "bottles" of various shapes and then heated by the injection of electromagnetic radiation or of high-velocity particle beams. The second approach was inertial confinement, which came later. It consisted of crushing to superhigh densities small pellets of hydrogen fuel at very high speed using the inertia of the nuclei to drive them together and fuse before repulsion could stop them. This was achieved by dumping an enormous amount of energy on the surface of a pellet in a very short space of time—typically measured in thousandths of a microsecond; under such conditions the outer skin of the pellet exploded away and created an opposite, inward reaction-force that imploded the core, rather like a spherical rocket. To convey the required energy to the pellet, three technologies were developed: laser beams, electron beams, and ion beams.

The first generation of working fusion reactors went into operation in the United States and the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both nations had developed magnetic methods as their primary form of approach, but eventually supplemented them with one of the inertial alternatives, the Americans opting for lasers, the Russians for e-beams. Although they both pursued research on ion beams, neither nation gave priority to perfecting techniques involving them.

The European Fusion Consortium finally got its act together in 1990 after a spate of delays and bickerings resulting from jealousies and petty-politics that should have been forgotten generations before. The choice open to the Europeans by this time was either to buy into the technologies that had been pioneered elsewhere, which would have cost them considerably in money, prestige, and national pride, or to go for ion beams. They chose the latter. Besides the obvious reasons, the approach promised several distinct technical advantages. For one thing, ions were more massive than electrons and could carry far more energy at a given velocity; also, because of their high inertia, they could be focused onto their targets from relatively long distances, thus reducing substantially the problems of designing final-focusing equipment that would withstand the bombardment from a sustained barrage of fusion microexplosions. And on top of this the techniques for generating and controlling particle beams were well understood after decades of high-energy accelerator physics, which meant that a lot of lost time could be made up by exploiting an already mature technology. In fact the attractions of ion beams were so evident that the Europeans wondered why neither of the superpowers had concentrated on them in the first place. But that wasn't the Europeans' problem.

In a rare revival of the enterprising spirit that had inundated the world with bibles and gunboats in years gone by, the nations of the European Fusion Consortium elected to go whole hog with a project that would surpass in concept and scale any of the first-generation reactors that had been conceived by the end of the twentieth century. It would be a gigantic, heavy-ion facility designed to perform a triple role: It would produce power and deliver thousands of megawatts into the European supply grid; it would use a portion of the fast neutrons produced in the fusion process to convert abundant deuterium into tritium, thus manufacturing its own fuel; and it would breed heavy isotopes to help satisfy Europe's fission-reactor needs.

The haggling, of course, began when they tried to agree on where to build it. In the end, ironically, the issue was decided by oil. Although the long-term picture was at last beginning to look quite cheerful, oil would still be needed for many years to come to keep the wheels of Europe turning. The British had acquired the lion's share of the oilfields developed in the North Sea; they could therefore sell oil to the other Consortium nations far more cheaply than the traditional overseas suppliers could, or at least were disposed to. And in the 1990s the prospect of cheap oil for a while was not something to treat lightly. Furthermore, if British oil was going to be channeled into Europe, it was only fair exchange, surely, that European fusion power should be sited where it could sustain the industries that the availability of that same oil had engendered. And besides, the British pointed out, they would be much nicer people to do business with than those insufferable Arab chaps with their never-ending squabbles and price hikes. Breeding would tell, and all that…

It all added up to an as-near-as-made-no-difference unassailable position at the bargaining table. And so, finally, Burghead it turned out to be.

Sunday's rain had turned to snow by Monday, and then the weather had cleared once more. Murdoch and Lee's first view of Burghead was from the top of a range of low hills that lay between Elgin and the sea, from where they found themselves looking down over a narrow strip of coastal plain, standing crisp and white against the blue waters of the Moray Firth in the distant background.

The complex stretched away out of sight along the shoreline and extended for perhaps two miles inland. It was a dense sprawl of refineries, storage tanks, chemical plants, and generating stations interconnected by tangles of roadways, pipelines, and power cables. The whole resembled a sculpture of frosted concrete and steel. The reactor facility itself was located at the end of the complex nearest them, occupying a site that had obviously been developed more recently than the rest. They were able to pick it out easily.

Very easily.

It was square, and must have measured three miles along a side.

At least the area enclosed by the line of the perimeter fence looked square; the far side of the site was distorted by the perspective and its details obscured by distance, but it seemed to extend all the way to the shore. The road was high enough, however, to present a good idea of the general layout.

There were four identical clusters of buildings, one inside each corner of the perimeter square, and a compact group of larger buildings at the geometric center. In fact, as far as surface constructions went, the whole site had a distinctly barren look about it; the reason for its size was the symmetrical pattern of straight-line segments and circles that it framed, which revealed the arrangement of underground accelerator tracks and storage rings that generated, merged, and concentrated the beams before hurling them inward at the target chambers located beneath the largest of the central group of buildings. The largest and most conspicuous of the rings was centrally situated in the perimeter square. It was two miles in diameter, and marked the outer edge of a wide, circular belt made up of many identical structures of some kind; they didn't project far above the snow and could have been just the upper parts of something that went deeper. Four smaller rings, each about a fifth of a mile across, occupied the corners and encircled the four outer clusters of buildings. A web of straight-line segments, intersecting the rings at tangents and connecting the large one to the four smaller ones, completed the design.

Lee pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he took in the sight. "Ma-an!" he breathed after a few seconds. "Take a look at that."

"That's what I call engineering," Murdoch murmured in an awed voice. "Real engineering… " Burghead had received coverage from time to time by the U.S. news media, but the pictures had never been able to convey anything that approached the impact of the real thing. Murdoch sat forward in his seat to study the facility in detail while the car hummed along contentedly under the control of its own guidance system, aided by routing data transmitted from computers in Inverness or wherever. "That must be the main storage ring in the middle," he said after a while. "It's gotta be two miles across at least. The ones at the corners must be secondaries. The primary probably pumps them up in sequence."

"I guess so," Lee agreed. "With a wraparound factor of about ten, I'd guess. They look about a tenth the size. They must fire inward underneath the primary."

"They do, but not directly," Murdoch said. "I talked to Elizabeth about it. The secondaries pump up a battery of tertiary rings, and they unload onto the target. That wide belt of stuff just inside the big ring must be where the tertiaries are buried." He paused for a moment, then added, "That means the final pulses are aimed from something like a mile out."

"Jeez!"
was Lee's only reply.

The road descended from the crestline of the hills in a series of shallow, sweeping curves that eventually straightened out on the flat below to run alongside the perimeter fence for its full length. The fence was a monotony of wire, twenty or so feet high, strung between concrete posts and standing a few hundred feet back from the edge of the highway. The fence marched by endlessly on their left for a while, and then at last gave way to a huddle of low, flat buildings flanking two wide, steel-framed gates. At this point a road formed a junction with the main highway and ran along one side of a fenced-in parking area before passing through the gates and disappearing into the site. A sign by the highway at the turnoff read:

Murdoch flipped the car into manual drive to leave the controlled highway, turned into the parking lot, and found an empty space not far from the gatehouse door. They entered through double glass doors and announced themselves to a security officer, wearing a navy-blue police-style uniform complete to the black-and-white checkered cap-band also worn by the Scottish constabulary, who was sitting behind a long counter that partitioned off the rear part of the reception area. The officer checked a computer screen to confirm that they were expected, examined their ID's, and issued them lapel name-tags; then he called to somewhere to announce their arrival and asked them to wait in the gatehouse lobby, which was through another door to one side.

They passed the next ten minutes or so examining a five-foot-square model of the facility that, together with some pictures and other exhibits, formed a display in the lobby, and chatting with a couple of service engineers from Honeywell who were also awaiting a plant escort. The engineers had come to make some final adjustments to equipment before the first full-power tests of the reactors, scheduled to commence on the following Monday. Elizabeth had mentioned that the tests were imminent, but she hadn't been specific about when.

At last the door opened and a tall, lean, youngish-looking man ambled in. He looked the kind of person who had never quite got past being a student, with untidy, sandy-colored hair, a mottled brown, rolled-collar sweater, and tan corduroy trousers. He stopped and looked inquiringly from one pair of faces to the other.

"Mr. Ross and Mr. Walker?"

"Us," Murdoch informed him.

"Ah." The newcomer came across and shook hands with both of them. "Michael Stavely. I work with Elizabeth Muir. She's got herself tied up with something that won't wait, I'm afraid. I've been volunteered to look after you between now and lunch. She'll be joining us then."

"Fine," Murdoch said. "I know you've got a busy week coming up. It's nice of you to find time for tourists."

"No trouble at all. Anyhow, I gather you two belong to a rather special category of tourist." Mike led them back through into the reception area and opened another door that led to the outside, but on the inner side of the perimeter. "This way. I've got one of the firm's buggies outside. You can leave your car out front. You haven't left anything in it that you might need, have you?" They descended a few steps to a smaller parking area at the rear of the gatehouse, and Mike led them over to a heavy-duty pickup truck, painted sky blue and bearing the golden lightning-bolt insignia of the European Fusion Consortium on its doors, which was parked at the end of a short line of assorted vehicles. "Is there anything in particular you'd like to see first?" he inquired as they climbed in.

"We'll leave the tour to you," Lee said.

"Right-ho. We'll start at the beginning and end at the end then. I'll take you to have a look at one of the injectors. They're where the beams are formed and start out from. Then we can follow the whole gubbins through from there."

They followed the main road from the gate for a short distance, and then turned off into a perimeter track that brought them to one of the corner-groups of buildings. Outwardly there was nothing especially distinguishing about them. They made up a lonely huddle of fairly standard three-storey office blocks and a few bungalow huts, interspersed with open parking spaces. A somewhat larger construction stood in the middle; it was windowless, and looked squat and impregnable, vaguely blockhouselike, as if it belonged more in a space-launch facility. They parked beside the large building and entered through the single door that formed the only break in its otherwise blank and featureless walls. A few minutes later they emerged from an elevator several levels below ground and walked into a different world.