Gridlock and Other Stories Part 4

"About the fusion sphere, pressor fields, anything."

"Would you like me to start at the beginning?"

I resigned myself to a boring half-hour and nodded. "But keep it short."

He wriggled in his seat just like a little puppy. Apparently, the subject was one that was near and dear to his heart. He began his lecture with gusto: "You know that mankind tried to imitate the sun for almost forty years without success, right? Uncontrolled fusion was easy. We discovered that when Bikini Atoll was blown off the face of the Earth in the 1950s. However, controlled fusion proved to be a stubborn goal to reach. They tried compressing superhot plasma in magnetic pinch bottles, smashing fuel ions into each other at high speed in Tokamaks, and exploding fuel pellets with lasers. They got close, even made break even in the 1990s -- that is where the process generates more energy than it consumes -- but nothing ever proved to be commercially practical. In fact, it wasn't until Mendez invented stressfields that fusion power became more than a gleam in the physicists' eyes."

"Stressfields? I've heard of them," I replied, feigning more interest than I truly felt.

"I should think you have," the Kid said. "It's just the biggest thing to come along since Sir Isaac Newton got bonked on the head by the apple. Mendez invented a method for generating a force at a distance that was wildly different from anything we had ever done before. The force resembles a stress tensor in that it can be described by three compression components and six shear," the Kid said, continuing what had ceased to be a conversation and had turned into a lecture. "A stress-like forcefield - stressfield for short. It was the breakthrough that engineers had been praying for in fusion. It made fusion plants feasible in two ways. The first bit of fallout from Mendez's work was the pressor field. The inner surface of a fusion sphere acts as a sort of antenna, concentrating the pressor field at the point in s.p.a.ce where the reaction takes place. Pressure at that point rises to unbelievable levels. Professor Conrad at school thinks the density at the focus of a fusion sphere might be as high as in the center of a neutron star."

I nodded and made a mental note to find out what a neutron star was as soon as we got back to the office. "What was the second bit of fallout?"

"What?" he asked.

"You said that stressfields made fusion power possible in two ways. What was the second?"

"Oh yeah. Well the thing to remember about a pressor field is that it is very powerful. It presses inward on the fuel with a lot of force. So naturally, the field also presses outward against the fusion sphere. Equal and opposite reactions, you know. If a fusion sphere were merely concrete and steel, then the outward pressure would distort it and ruin the focus. A distorted field will not boost the pressure high enough to sustain fusion.

"A different kind of stressfield is used to overcome the problem. It is more complex and is generated in the structure of the sphere to counteract the stresses set up by the pressor field. The second field stiffens the sphere and allows the pressor field generators to hold a tight focus.""Sounds complicated," I said.

"Oh, it is! That is another reason why the fusion sphere has to be a sphere. Any other shape and the stress pattern would be too complex for even the smartest computer."

An errant memory suddenly came floating back to me. "This stressfield the widget they use in submarines to allow them to dive so deep?"

The Kid nodded. "Submarine pressure hulls and tank armor. They both use stressfield generators for extra strength. There's even talk of drilling a hole down through the Earth's crust and releasing an instrumented probe with a stressfield enhanced hull into the mantle."

"How interesting," I said, stifling a yawn.

"Yes, it is. However, one thing that is interesting is the correlation between the stress-strain equations and the stressfield-power curves. If you transpose a single term in the S-P curves, for instance..."

"Kid, would you do me a favor?"

His eyes snapped back from the blank stare they had been getting for the past several miles. "Sure thing, Mr. Tarkington."

"Let's talk about something else. My head is starting to ache."

"Pick a subject."

" Girls."

"Near and dear to my heart," he replied.

We spent the rest of the trip in enjoyable discourse concerning the proper size for a set of mammary glands. Personally, I favor them pet.i.te. Roger, on the other hand, was a "bigger is better" man.

The Marana Power Plant is situated twenty-five miles to the west of the town of Marana in the foothills of the Santa Rosa Mountains. To get there you leave I-10 at Marana and take a two-lane highway through the abandoned mining town of Silver Bell toward the old Papago Indian reservation.

We were only five miles out of Marana when we came to the roadblock. Two highway patrol cars sat astride the narrow ribbon of blacktop where it swooped through a steep sided cut in a hill. The two patrolmen stood around a small fire with a squad of khaki clad soldiers. The group had tin mess kits and were sipping coffee as we pulled into view.

I eased the car up to the roadblock and put on my most engaging grin. A cop put his cup down and walked over to the car. I rolled my window down and gave him a hearty: "Morning, Officer."

"Morning, men. Mind if I ask where you are going?"

"Sure thing, Officer. My son here is a photography student at the U of A. We are out to get some shots of the wildlife. What's going on?"

"Nothing to concern yourselves with," the patrolman said. "The National Guard is on maneuvers in the hills back there and we've been asked to detour traffic. Wouldn't want any citizens injured accidentally.""Thanks for the warning," I said. "We can snap jackrabbits and cactus wren anywhere."

"Very good, sir," the patrolman said. "If you'll just turn around, you can probably get better pictures around Picacho Peak. It is a national monument, you know. Only Civil War battle ever fought in Arizona."

"You don't say. Thanks for the advice, Officer."

I slowly backed the car down the grade until I got to a wider spot in the road. Then wheeling about, I drove off leisurely in the direction we'd come.

"I read something about the Guard being out on maneuvers," the Kid said.

I grinned and looked him in the eye for a second before turning back to my driving. "Notice those soldiers back of the police cars?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Since when is the 101st Airborne Division part of the Arizona National Guard?"

"Oh," he said. There did not seem much else to say. "What now?"

"We improvise. That cop reminded me of something when he mentioned Picacho Peak. I grew up in Phoenix. My father used to bring us south to do some hunting, doves mostly. If I remember correctly, there is an old rut of a road that runs from the Picacho National Monument to the north side of the Santa Rosas. If we could get to the end of it, we just might get ourselves into position for a telephoto shot of the power plant."

"Want to bet the Army stops us before we get within ten miles of the place?"

"No bet," I answered.

We were both a little surprised when we pulled up to the base of a mesquite-covered hill not more than three miles from the power plant. We had seen nothing on the twenty-five mile ride across the desert except a couple of cottontail rabbits and a roadrunner. It was a little unnerving when we expected a helicopter to swoop down on us any second. The power plant was still out of sight from where we parked the car in a dry wash, but a short climb would remedy that problem. I helped Roger with some of his camera junk and we started up a well-traveled path littered with organically grown cowpats.

By the time we reached the top, we were both puffing like a couple of old fashioned steam engines.

I carefully laid the big telephoto lenses I had been carrying on a handy rock and slumped down on another to catch my breath. The Kid, with the enthusiasm of youth, continued on another fifty yards to a viewpoint from which he could see the plant.

Within seconds he came galloping back up the trail to where I sat with hands on knees, head arched forward. I had nearly managed to catch my breath as he scurried back to me and pointed downhill.

"What?" I asked, mild fire still rasping in my throat from our climb upwards.

Nothing came out of his opened mouth except ragged panting.

"Slow down and catch your breath," I counseled. The trouble with these young kids was that they had no conception of their limitations. A man could get a heart attack running up a twenty-percent grade as he had just done.Finally, his breathing slowed a bit. "Come look at the plant!" he gasped.

Since his comment was notably lacking in semantic content, I decided the easiest thing to do was to force my leaden legs down the trail to the lookout point.

When we got there, I knew what he meant. Below us, spread clear across a valley nearly four miles wide, was the Marana Power Plant. The ribbon of blacktop we'd been following earlier that morning wound its way down from the purple hills to the east and ended in a sea of asphalt crosshatched with neat yellow lines. Dozens of Army and state vehicles were parked haphazardly around the lot. There were even a few cars sporting the distinctive red-white-and-blue paint job of a federal motor pool.

Immediately in front of the parking lot was the plant's main gate with its white stucco guard shacks flanking cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire.

The plant itself was spread across a hundred acres of desert landscape. A modern steel and gla.s.s administration building flanked the parking lot, its green lawn and manicured flowerbeds in sharp contrast to the dirty brown of the surrounding desert.

Behind the office building sprawled the working parts of the plant. Outbuildings tended to be low and rambling, temporary shelters or storerooms constructed of corrugated sheet steel. Building size increased radially inward, with two and three story concrete boxes occupying the middle distances. At the center of the plant stood the huge generator buildings and cooling towers.

All of these were dwarfed, however, by the giant roundness of the fusion sphere that towered over everything else in the scene except the distant mountains. Raised completely clear of the ground, it was supported every hundred feet or so around its perimeter by soaring concrete pillars that reached upwards to the sphere's equator.

It was an impressive sight made more impressive by the fact that half of it was missing.

It looked like an egg after the chicken has hatched out. The entire upper hemisphere had somehow been blown away. The evidence of the explosion lay everywhere in the form of huge jagged pieces of concrete eggsh.e.l.l. Several of the buildings showed signs of extensive damage where debris had fallen.

One entire wing of the administration building had been caved in. A jagged multi-ton projectile lay blackened in a deep crater in the tangled ruin of a transformer substation a mile south of the plant proper. Another chunk had created a small lake when it fell on the pipeline that supplied the plant with cooling water, smashing it beyond repair.

Even as my eyes surveyed the damage, my mind was writing the headline: POWER PLANT EXPLODES: RADIOACTIVE CLOUD ENDANGERS CITY! It was a lot to stuff onto the top of a newspaper, but it certainly told the story.

"Pulitzer Prize, here I come," I muttered.

"What?" Roger asked.

I quickly outlined how I planned to handle the story.

"You can't say that," he replied, his brow furrowing in distaste. Fusion plants are completely clean except for a bit of neutron-induced radiation in the inner structure. Remember?"

I wet a finger and held it up in the breeze. A light wind was blowing toward us from the remains of the plant.

Suddenly my skin started to crawl as though army ants were using my body as an invasion route. Ifthere were a cloud, I was sitting in the middle of it right now. I ruthlessly put down the feeling of panic that wanted to send my feet scurrying back up the path and down the other side of the hill to my car.

"No cloud, huh?"

"None."

"Okay, I believe you. I rubbed my hand across my scalp. I wanted to believe him. I was too young to die."

"Get me some nice arty shots of the debris."

"Right." He set to s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a two-foot long telephoto zoom lens to the body of his camera.

"How do you suppose it happened? Terrorists blow it up with dynamite?" I asked.

"No mere chemical explosive could have done that to a fusion sphere. Remember it has an internal stressfield to strengthen it. Only a fusion explosion in the reaction chamber could have breached it like that. Even so, it must have been a whopper. Those things are strong!"

He seemed to know what he was talking about, even if I did not. Therefore, my second headline -- TERRORISTS DESTROY POWER PLANT -- died a'borning. I sat for a few seconds and thought about the problem while listening to the quiet whir of the ancient Ha.s.selblad's automatic film advance interspersed with the clicking of the shutter.

"How many shots?" I asked after we returned to the car.

"About a dozen."

"Okay, get them developed and we'll shoot them back to the paper at the next phone we see. Old Greenwald will be ecstatic over this!" The logistics would have been easier if my digital camera had had a long enough lens to get the shot. We could have modemed the pictures back to the paper using my cell phone. One of the bulky machines the Kid had in the car was a portable film developer. I did not have a scanner on my computer, so we would have to get to a phone booth with a fax option.

"Pictures are already in the tank," he said, hooking his thumb toward the trunk.

"What do you think caused the explosion?" I asked, musing half to myself.

He shrugged. "It's above my level. I'll bet Professor Conrad would know."

"Who?"

"He's the Professor I was telling you about. The one who lectures on fusion power systems at ASU. Word around campus is that he was a big man with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before he was fired. It was supposed to be a big scandal. No one will talk about it."

"Too bad he isn't here."

"He lives in Casa Grande, " the Kid said. "Maybe we should stop and ask him."

I felt a surge of excitement as I considered the suggestion.

Casa Grande was on the way back to Phoenix. A short stop to pick up background might be just the thing this exclusive story of mine needed.We pulled into a gas station at the junction of I-8 with I-10 and checked the phone book.

Professor Conrad lived on the outskirts of town near the freeway. Glancing at my watch, I let my conscience fight a brief, sharp battle with itself. I had the basic story and could get it in well before the deadline. Yet, if I stopped for background data I might turn a mere bulletin into a story in depth, but only at the risk of missing the deadline. It was a cruel decision to have to make. Go with what you have or go for something better?

I decided to chance it. We could wire in the photos and the basic story from the professor's house.

I'd modem the follow up story directly into the composing computer just before the paper was due to go out to the thousands of fax subscribers and to city street corner printers. It would be a tight schedule, but I thought I could pull it off.

It was a gamble worth taking. We would be on the streets with the story while the television stations were still previewing Mrs. Roper-Johnson-Smythe and her party. It would be quite a scoop to have under my belt.

Professor Conrad lived on a two-acre ranchette in a house constructed of red slump block. Two horses cavorted in a white-painted pipe corral out back. He seemed genuinely happy to see the Kid who quickly explained what we had found and handed over the negatives, still wet from the developing tank. The Professor grabbed them with hands that trembled with excitement. I am not sure he even noticed me. I stood in the doorway with my notebook computer tucked precariously under one arm.

When it became obvious that he was not going to be polite and invite me in, I invited myself in.

The Professor was a wizened senior citizen with a wisp of whitish hair atop a freckled balding dome. At the moment, his frosty blue eyes were devouring the negatives that he held up to the light of the living room window.

"Mind if I use the phone, Professor?"

He ignored me, intent on drinking in the pictures. I picked up the telephone and began dialing the paper.

By the time I had outlined the situation to Greenwald, the professor had put down the pictures. His face was etched in deep worry lines. I wondered if he had stock in Arizona Consolidated Power. He was probably trying to figure out how to dump his shares before the story broke. I gently took the pictures from him and fed them into the fax slot of his telephone. Within a few seconds, it had gulped them down and spewed them out to the paper's master composing computer. I told Greenwald to put the paper on hold until he heard from me. He told me to go to h.e.l.l. I pleaded with him. He informed me that the deadline was less than an hour away in words of no more than four letters. I glanced at my watch and did some swearing of my own. Where did the time go?

If the telephone had had a vision attachment I would have gotten down on my knees and begged.

As it was, I put on my most convincing voice and pleaded with Greenwald to hold the paper as long as he could. There was dead silence on the other end for half a minute and then he agreed. I knew by the tone of his voice that my career was on the line.

I hung up the telephone and held out my hand to Professor Conrad. "Hi, I'm Ed Tarkington.

People call me Tark. Glad to meet you, Professor."

He seemed to snap out of his trance long enough to introduce himself.

"I understand you're quite an expert on fusion plant pressor systems.""I know something about them," he agreed.

"Mind telling us what happened to this one?"