Chapter Four
Jake didn't so much build his new concentrator as the pieces fell into his lap and it was just too easy to put it all together and see what it did. Allison helped by letting him know when interesting items were made surplus. The team was starting to accelerate production, and to do that they needed to move out old prototypes and test platforms. The most important piece of the puzzle appeared in the form of a large coil of superconductor cable in a corner of the workshop's assembly bay.
"What's going on there?" he asked Allison.
"It failed incoming inspection. A crack in the insulation a couple of hundred meters in. We're wondering what to do with it. They're sending us a new one." She meant one of the cable vendors. "May have to just junk this whole reel. A shame."
"I totally agree. Hmm. Let me take care of it." It was way longer length than he needed, but he could cut it up and splice it.
He was able to lease some space in an aged pier building in the old docklands area of the city, a mostly empty structure over the water, used now for boat storage and not many of those. But it suited his needs perfectly, a wooden structure far away from metal. He rented a truck and hauled the cable reel over there. He set up a small business checking account to buy the cable and several other obsoleted pieces from LASSO early proof-of-concept prototypes. It was remarkably simple to get a business license. If this effort actually paid off, he wanted everything he was working on clearly separate from the detector work.
# # #
"I think maybe I met someone from your country."
"Mm-mm," she mumbled. They were in his bed after a session, the first of a series he expected to take up the rest of their day together and on into the night, likely extending into tomorrow. His work, both for LASSO and on his concentrator, added up to more than full time, but for the next few days he knew he would be scheduling his work and meetings around sex. He'd been away for a few days at a plasma physics conference, and had just returned. She'd been away for several days as well, on another mysterious mission, which is why they were now in his bed and she was lying next to him, after having him fuck her again to shivering exhaustion.
He'd thought she was awake, but tried again. "He was at the conference I just went to. Had similar looks to yours, which is why I noticed him, a bit darker. He seemed to be doing a lot of networking, talking to everyone, so I heard him a few times and his accent was similar. Very skinny also, like you, a bit taller. Bald. Quite handsome, by the way."
She was suddenly alert. She raised her head from her pillow. "Did you talk to him?"
"Didn't get a chance. And I wasn't sure, you know, if you'd want me to."
"Good."
"Anyway, I think he was spending his time mostly over in the energy talks. The big European tokamak that shut down? Still generating papers if not alpha particles. I spent the day in the astronomy section, particle detectors. Only saw him at lunch."
"But he was talking to a lot of people?"
"Yeah. Quite the networker." She looked unhappy. "You don't seem pleased to hear about your countryman."
"It's complicated."
"Listen, if you're-- I don't know-- an asylum seeker or something..."
But she'd grabbed a small cylinder from her pouch, which now had a place on the bedside table next to her, and was studying it, not paying any attention to him at all. To his immense surprise-- he knew she wasn't done with him-- she got out of bed and began to dress.
"I need to do something," she said. "I'll be back." She left the bedroom. A minute later he heard his door open and close and she was gone.
# # #
The most difficult part of building the concentrator, at least physically, was winding the coil. At the LASSO workshop the engineers had built a special winding machine on a circular track to do the heavy lifting, but he didn't have that luxury. He rented a forklift, taught himself how to drive it, and worked the half-ton spool around and around the big frame in small steps, attaching it by hand. It was heavy, stiff, and thick with the insulation and cooling lines. Winding its hundreds meter length around and around the structure required extended physical effort. Then the thermal insulation, then securely cinching everything down to the big frame, left over from one of their proof-of-concept experiments. The magnetic forces involved were gigantic.
He didn't mind. His arms and legs ached at the end of each day, but the effort felt good, though it was a thin substitute for her. Whatever it meant to discover another person from wherever she was from, it was taking up all her time. His sexual frustration was nearly as great as what he imagined she must be feeling. She was addictive.
He'd inspected the crack in the electrical insulation. Allison had been right, it made the whole cable, almost a kilometer long, a total loss-- but only if you were going to put it under a few meters of lake water. In air, as he was going to use the cable, it would pose no problem. And cooling it was straightforward. The new high temperature alloys had a critical temperature high enough that common lab cryocoolers worked fine.
The frustrating part, to his surprise, was getting enough electrical power down the length of the pier to feed the coil energizer. The building nominally had the power and voltage, but it was decades since the last use and it had been sitting out in salt air the whole time. A cursory inspection showed that he was as likely to burn down the building as charge the superconducting loop. He finally just rented a construction site generator and ran it for a few hours, at a safe distance so the cast iron in its diesel engine wouldn't be affected, long enough to run the energizer. One of the beautiful things about superconductors, in his view, was that once you got the current flowing you could turn off the generator and it just kept flowing around and around on its own, forever or until you quenched it.
After energizing it to full current, he walked around it with a teslameter. Everything looked good, the B-field values at about what his simulations had predicted. Then he taped a portable dosimeter to a long wooden pole he'd found in a sailboat stored up front and poked it under the concentrator. Yes, the activity jumped more than an order of magnitude, and he'd only installed the first of the two bottom coils. When the second bottom coil and the top coil were added, the power flowing through the concentrator would be immense.
He already had the heavy water, which was easy to get online in small quantities. Now he had to wait for the moderator, which had to be shipped from a chemical supply house.
It looked like the thing was going to work. He could hardly believe it. Energy from the stars. Not really-- the energy would come from the deuterium in seawater, the particle influx was just the catalyst-- but he wouldn't let that picky bit of nerdiness squelch his pleasure. He wished he could show it to her. Allison too. Someday. A lot of work to do first to complete it and get it really going full out.
# # #
She showed up again a few days later at the University cafe he liked to use when doing design work on the concentrator, which he was spending more and more time on. He'd encountered an issue he'd never had to worry about before. The cost of materials, some of which were rare and ridiculously expensive, was eating into his savings. He was forced to redesign components using ones he could afford. Even so, he wasn't sure he would have enough in his account to cover everything. He'd put out some feelers to former colleagues in the industry, asking about surplus, but the meager response only confirmed how much the whole fusion industry had collapsed.
She was dressed in her coed costume, as he thought of it. She looked hot, her small breasts jiggling under her mascot T-shirt, ripped jeans showing golden thighs, wearing bracelets and earrings and a necklace, all gold. Every male head in the room rotated toward her. Female eyes also.
When she sat down across from him, he said, by way of greeting, "Do you even own a bra?"
"Bras are weird, aren't they? We need to talk. I've been looking for you. I asked around and nobody knows where you've been." Her expression was all business.
He closed his laptop and shrugged. "Special project."
Her attention shifted briefly to his laptop, but quickly returned to him. "But first we need to fuck. I wasn't finished last week."
"Are you ever finished?"
"You get the closest, I'll give you that. Except maybe for... just fuck me to the Mars colony and back, okay? Then we need to talk. Seriously. It's important."
He packed up and they headed for his place. "You know," he said, "there is no Mars colony."
"Oh?" She shrugged. "It's just an expression."
"On your planet."
She just smiled. She took out one of her small devices, the one with the tiny green light, checked it, and put it away again.
