The Fusion Cage

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‘Are you sure this is the place to come?’

The flight from Missouri to California had been a long one but Ethan felt certain that the best place for Amber Ryan was as far away from Clearwater as possible, and travelling to California was not something that Majestic Twelve might predict, fake ID documents provided by Jarvis further veiling their path.

‘Cecil Grant still works here,’ Amber explained from the backseat, where she was lying down on a pillow to avoid even the slightest chance of detection by road cameras or other surveillance. ‘I know that dad reached out to Cecil from time to time, that he trusted him.’

The National Ignition Facility was an enormous building, the entrance to which was emblazoned with a promising logo:

Ethan could not help but be fascinated by the sight of it as he drove past the facility’s main gates. Access to this most secure location was normally limited to employees and special invitees only, the NIF having been used as the set for the USS Enterprise’s warp core in the movie Star Trek: Into Darkness, but Amber had been able to recover from her cell phone the number of Doctor Cecil Grant, an astrophysicist employed at the NIF and a former colleague of Stanley Meyer. Dr Grant had been more than willing to meet with Amber, but he considered the NIF building to be too dangerous and too well monitored to be a safe place to meet in light of what had happened at Clearwater. Instead, he had arranged a meeting at a local cafe where he felt more likely they could talk without being observed.

Ethan drove into the cafe lot and pulled up.

‘Shades, baseball cap, collar up okay?’ Ethan asked Amber.

‘I feel like I’m in a lousy spy movie,’ Amber replied, tucking her thick black hair under the cap.

‘It’s the easiest way to break up your outline without looking too ridiculous,’ Lopez informed her as she climbed out of the car.

‘Does the government really have that kind of ability to track people?’ Amber asked as she too climbed out and slammed her door shut.

‘Oh yeah,’ Ethan replied. ‘Trust us, they can follow you anywhere if they really want to, but to do that they’ve first got to pin you down. Facial recognition software is widely used now, but I’m hoping that the extent of the surveillance won’t reach that far in your case. It’s your father they’re really after.’

Ethan led the way into the cafe, which was really more of a diner and at this hour was barely a quarter full, the air laden with the odours of coffee and fried breakfasts. Ethan stood to one side as Amber entered, letting her lead the way toward one of the tables in the back corner of the diner while Ethan and Lopez scanned the other people seated around them in search of any evidence of government agents or anything else that might make them feel uneasy. Ethan saw nothing to concern himself as he followed Amber toward where an elderly gentleman was sitting with a coffee and watching expectantly as Amber approached him.

Dr Cecil Grant stood up and embraced Amber with a warm smile, then looked her up and down as he rested his hands on her shoulders.

‘I can’t believe I once held you as a baby,’ he said appraisingly as he looked over her shoulder at Ethan and Lopez.

‘They’re with me,’ Amber said.

‘Do they know what happened?’

‘They’re working on it,’ Amber said as she sat down opposite Dr Grant and introduced Ethan and Lopez.

‘Stanley Meyer is a stubborn sonofabitch,’ Dr Grant said as Ethan sat down opposite him with Lopez. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that he’s got himself up to his neck in trouble.’

‘He done anything like this before?’ Ethan asked.

‘Has he pissed off the authorities more than once? Yes,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘Stanley is one of those guys for whom the phrase “thinking out of the box” was invented. He never liked to conform, and that often meant that sometimes his methods got him into hot water with his superiors at the NIF. They tolerated it, because that same out — of — the — box thinking helped him to make considerable strides in physics during his tenure, and to be honest the NIF wouldn’t be what it is today without Stanley’s contributions.’

‘How much do you know about what he was working on in Clearwater?’ Lopez asked.

Dr Grant humphed and shook his head as he replied. ‘He started out building cars that ran on steam.’

‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked.

‘It’s a big deal,’ Doctor Grant replied. ‘There’s even a Steam Automobile Club of America. Stanley did it as a hobby and built a vehicle that runs entirely on steam using a boiler system. He used a Ford 272 engine with a flat crank and a ninety — degree V design, which made a single — acting steam engine that’s self — starting. Each cam was actuating two opposed poppet valves and used only one cylinder casting design. It was really very clever, and showed that a steam car could run fairly normally, like an ordinary combustion engine powered vehicle, on almost any fuel at all: vegetable oil, methanol, anything. He put the damned thing in an old Chevrolet and cruised around the country showing it to people at events.’

‘He loved that old car,’ Amber reflected with a smile. ‘It cost him virtually nothing to run it for years, and the only exhaust it gave off was steam.’

‘I’d have thought that it was impossible to run a car efficiently from steam,’ Lopez said. ‘Look how much coal those old steam trains used to use, all that smoke. Environmentalists would go insane.’

‘If you’re burning coal to get energy then yes, it would be,’ Doctor Grant admitted. ‘But Stanley wasn’t, and anyway most attempts to produce pollution free engines are all to do with efficiency, and how the methods we use to produce electrical energy to heat our homes and the engines we use to drive our cars are hugely inefficient.’

‘And dad found much better ways of doing it,’ Amber enthused. ‘He loved those Sterling Engines too.’

Doctor Grant nodded in agreement.

‘What’s a Sterling Engine?’ Ethan asked.

‘A fully enclosed combustion engine,’ Grant explained, ‘with a heat exchanger and two cylinders, which can be fuelled by almost anything with huge efficiency because it uses its own exhaust gas as part of the burning process. Stanley could get hugely excited about them because the average vehicle on the road, powered by the internal combustion engine, can produce a maximum efficiency of just fifteen per cent. That means that of all the power produced, eighty five per cent goes into overcoming friction within the engine or is lost as heat. A Sterling Engine, on the other hand, can produce energy with an efficiency of as much as sixty per cent.’

‘So how come they’re not powering cars the world over then?’ Lopez asked.

‘Size, slow start times and other minor issues, but Stanley was working on improving the smaller designs he’d come up with. Sterling Engines are found aboard most ships, for instance, because the vessels are big enough to house them.’

‘So his work on these Sterling Engines led onto bigger things, I take it?’ Ethan guessed.

‘Stanley was obsessed with the idea that we were going about energy generation the wrong way,’ he said simply. ‘He’s one of those guys that felt that nature did things in the opposite direction to what we do when it comes to generating power.’

‘In what way?’ Ethan asked.

‘Well, when humans generate power we use explosive energy to do so. We heat water to power steam turbines, or burn coal in power stations to produce steam. We ignite fuel in car engines to drive them forward, which in principle is the same as letting little bombs off in the car’s engine every fraction of a second. Explosive energy is how we power our world, but nature uses the complete opposite means to generate energy. If you doubt that then simply look at the power of a hurricane or tornado.’

‘They are low — pressure systems, right?’ Lopez asked.

‘That’s correct,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘Nature uses a low — pressure system to create motion energy. We see it in weather patterns all the time, in the maelstrom of a whirlpool in the oceans and even in the immense gravity generated by black holes which pulls galaxies in around them in exactly the same symmetrical whirlpool pattern. Stanley noted this repeatedly during his tenure at the NIF, and spent many hours telling anybody with a will to listen about how it was much more efficient to create low — pressure systems than it was to produce the high — pressure systems we normally use for energy generation. Of course, nobody bothered listening to him.’

‘Why not?’ Ethan asked. ‘Surely he was onto something?’

‘Of course he was, but that’s not how the business of energy generation works,’ Dr Grant said. ‘Billions are invested every year in the search for more power, for cleaner power, for power that governments can control. If somebody suddenly turned around and created some kind of novel energy generation device that rendered all of those other expensive methods irrelevant, the existing energy industry would implode with the loss of countless jobs and livelihoods, not to mention those of the scientists involved in furthering currently accepted methods of generating energy.’

Amber nodded, clearly recalling similar things said to her by her father.

‘Dad was convinced that any attempt to publicly patent or otherwise sell any kind of advanced energy generation technology that defied the accepted laws of physics would be met with accusations of fraud, possibly arrest by the authorities, and certainly refusal by the government patent office to consider the technology.’

‘That’s illegal, surely?’ Lopez said.

‘The US Government’s Patent Office has a policy of refusing any applications for devices that contain claims of producing what is known as “perpetual motion”,’ Dr Grant explained. ‘This broad brush approach extends to any devices which are claimed to produce free energy of any kind, which is really just a clever way of making sure that nobody can actually get a Patent for such a device should they actually manage to invent one. The policy is in place within all the world’s countries — even if somebody invented such a device, they could never commercialize it.’

‘So what you’re saying is that if Stanley invented a free energy device, there’s literally nowhere to go to actually get the thing into production?’

‘At a very basic level, yes,’ Dr Grant admitted. ‘But Stanley did not invent a free energy device because there is no such thing as free energy. The conservation of energy, one of the governing laws of thermodynamics, prohibits energy gain in a closed system. It simply isn’t possible to get more energy out of a device than you put in — if such a thing were possible, we would have dispensed with fossil fuels decades or even centuries ago.’

‘And yet there is nuclear fusion,’ Ethan murmured in reply.

‘Nuclear fusion liberates the energy already contained within the atomic nucleus,’ Dr Grant replied. ‘That’s not creating energy from nowhere, it’s simply a conversion process and does not violate any of the known laws of physics.’

Ethan realised that Amber was watching Dr Grant intensely, and she nudged the old man with her elbow. Cecil looked at her for a moment and sighed as he went on.

‘However, when radiation was first discovered it was also considered to be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics because those witnessing simply didn’t understand what it was at the time. It was only with Einstein’s discoveries and the publications of his famous papers that govern the laws of energy and matter that scientists finally understood what was taking place — the decay of radioactive materials from one element to another. Once understood, there were no violations of the rules of thermodynamics and the process was thus accepted by the scientific community.’

‘So you’re saying, in effect, that what Stanley Meyer discovered may actually be real?’ Lopez pressed.

It was Amber, not Dr Grant, who replied.

‘I think that my father uncovered the solution to something known as cold fusion.’

Dr Grant winced at the mere mention of the words, shaking his head.

‘What’s cold fusion?’ Ethan asked.

‘A debacle,’ Dr Grant replied without hesitation.

‘So everybody says,’ Amber shot back, ‘but if there was nothing in it then how come my parents are on the run and three hundred people have vanished from Clearwater?’

Doctor Grant scowled but said nothing.

‘We need to know,’ Lopez said to him. ‘If there’s something about this cold fusion that’s behind why Stanley has fled then it could also lead us to him and help us protect him from whoever is behind all of this.’

Dr Grant sighed and spoke quietly.

‘In 1989 one of the world’s leading electro chemist’s, Martin Fleischmann and his partner Stanley Pons, created a device that produced what was known at the time as anomalous or excess heat in sufficient quantities that they could only be explained in terms of nuclear processes. Their work was based on the idea that if you load enough hydrogen or deuterium atoms inside a metal lattice made from nickel or palladium, they become so tightly packed together that they begin to fuse: nuclear fusion. They also reported the detection of neutrons and tritium, by — products of nuclear reactions. What was remarkable about this experiment and the device was that it occurred on a table top and involved the electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium electrode. They called the process cold fusion, because it mimicked the processes going on within stars but without the millions of degrees of temperatures and intense pressures required to fuse atoms together.’

‘What happened to this cold fusion, and why is it not powering my home and car right now?’ Lopez asked.

‘What makes science so successful is the process by which fresh claims in any discipline are tested, the process being known as peer review. If a scientist makes a great discovery, he then publishes the method of his experiments widely in journals and allows others to test it to see if they can find a flaw. Many scientists attempted to replicate cold fusion but were unable to do so. As the number of negative replications increased, suddenly the positive replications that had occurred were withdrawn and before long the entire cold fusion research community became embroiled in scandal. Cold fusion eventually gained a reputation as pathological science, and reviews by the United States Department of energy in 1989 and 2004 reached a conclusion that cold fusion was dead, although they did offer what they called a sympathetic view towards modest support for further experiments.’

‘So cold fusion was a scam then, or a mistake?’ Ethan said.

‘Yes.’

Grant winced as Amber nudged him again. Dr Grant tilted his head this way and that as he spoke.

‘Over the years certain things have happened that have caused some degree of doubt among scientists over the initial assessment of cold fusion by the Department of Energy and by the scientists employed by them to study the phenomena,’ Grant admitted. ‘You have to remember that both Fleischmann and Pons were expert scientists, leaders in their fields and not prone to coming up with spurious results or publishing papers when they were not certain of their conclusions. And yet both men were completely ostracised by the scientific community, their funding removed, their reputations tarnished and even smeared. Neither of the men ever recovered their prior scientific prowess.’

‘You think that a smear campaign was orchestrated deliberately?’ Lopez asked. ‘In order to reduce the impact of what they discovered?’

‘What nobody in the scientific community actually disputes is that they discovered something,’ Dr Grant said. ‘Yes, it’s possible that their anomalous excess heat data was the result of some other phenomena rather than nuclear reactions, but nonetheless they discovered something. That something, the anomalous heat, was surprising and encouraging enough for them to go public with the discovery. You don’t do that lightly in the scientific community, especially when what you found goes against the grain of all known physical processes. Although I’m not a supporter of cold fusion, I am a supporter of the fact that those two men must have been pretty damn sure of what they were seeing before they went wide with it. And there were also questions over the method used by the scientists who failed to replicate Fleischmann’s and Pon’s results.’

‘Such as?’ Ethan asked.

‘There are two studies that are cited by Patent Offices worldwide for refusing all applications concerning cold fusion devices, and those studies were the ones commissioned by the Department of Energy’s Energy Research Advisory Board. They were conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech, and were designed to determine federal responses to cold fusion claims and even to shape energy policy at the highest level of government. The problem is that a man named Dr Eugene Mallove wrote an article for the MIT press in which he claims that MIT actually did observe excess heat in their cells and then covered it up. Another scientist, Dr Maleeva, was so incensed at the complete disregard for proper scientific process that he resigned his position at MIT in protest. Yet another noted scientist, Dr Peter Hagelstein, noted that the MIT experiments could not have possibly seen enough excess heat because their loading was not high enough, the scientists concerned having not packed enough deuterium molecules inside their cathodes to reach the reaction range.’

‘So they fudged the results on purpose,’ Amber said, anger clear in her voice although she was staring at the table top. ‘My father said that it was not the first time that such research had been quashed by the government’s involvement in silencing creators of novel energy devices.’

‘However, times are changing,’ Dr Grant said. ‘A symposium was held at MIT in 2014 regarding cold fusion, and the scientists involved explained that according to their experiments excess heat is never seen in cold fusion devices unless a ninety per cent deuterium — to — palladium loading ratio is created. The Caltech and MIT experiments never got above eighty per cent, which is why their experiments failed to produce excess heat. More recent tests involving more modern devices have, allegedly, produced the excess heat that’s been missing from prior experiments, but of course the mainstream scientific community still denounces them and no papers are being published by respected journals because they are always refused on the basis that cold fusion is dead science.’

‘Catch Twenty Two,’ Amber said. ‘You can’t get funding to develop a device, and if you build one yourself nobody will test or review it in public journals. The science is buried.’

Ethan sat back as he thought about what Dr Grant had said.

‘So at least some people in the scientific community still accept the possibility that cold fusion is real, and as a result scientists are going out on their own.’

‘Precisely,’ Dr Grant said. ‘This is why Stanley resigned his position at the National Ignition Facility. He was determined to do something about all of this, his experience and knowledge in the field meant that he could do it on his own on a table top, just like Fleischmann and Pons claimed to have done. Although I can barely believe I’m saying it, it would appear that he achieved what he set out to do, and that the government were there waiting and ready to ensure that it never saw the light of day.’ Dr Grant sighed. ‘I don’t think I need to elaborate on what our world would look like now had cold fusion found the traction that it needed to become a fully — fledged scientific theory. Oil crises, climate change, the rising price of gas and other fossil fuels, all would be a thing of the past because the cold fusion device that Fleischmann and Pons created works on nothing more than a low electrical supply and heavy water or deuterium, which is easy to produce and cheap too. Your entire house could be powered by a cold fusion device no larger than a shoebox, and there are plenty of people out there who don’t want to ever see that happen.’

‘But I thought the government was keen to do things like that, to get rid of fossil fuels forever,’ Lopez said. ‘Even if this were just about money or corporations, surely they’re flogging a dead horse and everybody knows it?’

‘It’s not just about the money,’ Dr Grant explained. ‘It’s true that the corporations want to continue earning money from the sale of fossil fuels, but there is far more to it than just cash. The government has a vested interest in ensuring that people do not have energy security.’

‘That’s crazy?’ Ethan said. ‘Energy security is widely known to be one of people’s greatest concerns.’

‘That’s right,’ Dr Grant said with a smile. ‘And that’s why the government doesn’t want anybody else to have it. They must control the power because without power, the people are nothing. It’s the control that is important, the knowledge or belief that the people cannot have their electricity without the government and power corporations to supply it. If you put a private power supply in every home in the United States, and there are enough farms to provide food and water for everybody, then ask yourself Ethan: who needs a government?’

Lopez shot Ethan a glance. ‘More to the point, what would a government do if their authority was under such a threat?’

Ethan sat for a moment and then he asked Cecil Grant a straight — out question.

‘If you were Stanley Meyer and you had built something like that, what would you do?’

Doctor Grant sighed.

‘Truthfully? I’d do what Stanley told me he would do, and fly one of them out to Saudi Arabia to sell it to the highest bidder, then retire on my fortune.’

‘My dad wouldn’t do that,’ Amber insisted.

‘You sure about that?’ Grant challenged. ‘He even borrowed money off me to buy his tickets.’

‘He’s in Saudi Arabia?’ Ethan asked in amazement, and was rewarded with a nod from Grant.

‘If Stan really has invented a device that could render fossil fuels archaic, it would be utterly priceless.’

‘And worth killing for,’ Lopez added.

Ethan nodded in agreement as he pulled out his cell phone. ‘We need to speak to Huck Seavers, he’s the only direct link in all of this.’