Firebird

Zero-1

Zero“You know this is mad.” That’s how it began. That is how Nathaniel Machuzak remembered it began. With the wind blowing into the Texas hill country and the convoy snaking after it toward folly. With his half-incredulous, half-angry challenge to the bearded Russian sitting beside him in the jeep.

“Yes, it’s mad.” The parched gulches the procession crossed each moment were hardly drier than the Russian’s reply; his distant gaze, trained on a Brahman steer munching grass behind a barbed-wire fence, shrouded his desiccated response with fatality.

“Borisovich, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of it working. And if something f***s up…Jesus…”

“Machine is conditioned. Should be okay.”

Nathaniel scowled ferociously at Yaroslav Borisovich Archangelsky, but that one only continued to stare out the window, bearded chin resting on knuckles. Worthy of Rasputin, the great beard provided its pint-sized wearer with effective camouflage and his bedraggled hair lent Archangelsky more than a passing resemblance to the crazy monk, but Machuzak had known this Russian too long to be fooled. Slava was crazy, foxlike, and the barely perceptible purse of his lips assured Machuzak that he was far from blind.

“Y–you’ve misunderstood something, Slava,” Nathaniel persisted to the march-past of scrub and rock. “This was supposed to be the dedication. The plan was to give them the c–cook’s tour, show them a routine pulse. That’s all.”

“Plans change, moi drug.”

“I—wasn’t told.”

For an instant the conversation lapsed; then Archangelsky chuckled with an unearthly rumble an octave lower than could possibly emerge from such a shrimp. “Nat Edward’ich, you think we’ve been killing ourselves day and night for cook’s tour? Who was Cook anyway?”

Managing a faint smile at the Archangelsky-ism, Machuzak did not at once reply. He recognized that he was slow in speech, to the point of hesitation, and he flattered himself that this was because he thought before he opened his mouth. But at this moment the welling anger soon overcame hesitation. “What the hell does Rasmussen think he’s doing?” he hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, even as he knew exactly what Slava would say:

“Giving fire to the world.”

* * * *

Machuzak’s jeep insisted on its own judgment. The video was off, permanently, but no one could mistake the voice: Leonard Rasmussen himself, CFRC’s director, online from the lab. Urgency shaded the famously boisterous tenor, one that had of late grown gravelly, but even in poor health Rasmussen did all to sound confident, sanguine. “Mac,” he said, “I smell trouble brewing at the gate. Be prepared, like a good scout. What’s your ETA?”

“N–no problem, Len. Give us twenty minutes.”

“Thumbs up,” Rasmussen said, and signed off.

A long sigh escaped Machuzak’s lips. His slowness, he conceded, was not limited to speech alone.

“Be glad we don’t have implants,” Slava remarked.

Machuzak nodded grimly. With forty the next milestone, both men were too old to want to have anything to do with the Apple Brainwave, which wired you to the Internet once and for all. Auto fatalities for 24/7 chatterers already exceeded deaths by GPS distraction. Smart cars could take over the thinking, but drive-thru Texans hadn’t exactly gone into paroxysms of ecstasy at the thought of handing over the sacred wheel to a superior intellect.

The world had changed, Machuzak shook his head with the now-permanent wonder, the geography no less. As the procession trailed the buzzards west and south out of Austin, Machuzak numbered the ranches covered with solar panels, some the older silicon and copper, more with photovoltaic nanopaint. He convinced himself that the lazy whoosh of blades turning in the wind made itself heard above the road noise.

Some things are frozen in time. A beet-red farmer perched atop his tractor stared down Machuzak and Archangelsky as the motorcade passed, leveled at them imaginary shotgun sights. The locals blamed the lab for the worsening of the water, for the annual freak snowstorms and any time their TV signal got lost. St. Cecilia and her talk-show cronies insisted that CFRC scientists were space aliens.

“We’re all aliens in this place,” Slava spat out the window.

It was true. They all spoke with accents, hardly any of them Texas twangs.

The caravan snaked up and down more kilometers, past oak trees dripping with moss, clumps of prickly pears, more ranches, down, up and—suddenly it lay before them. Machuzak pulled off the road to give the dignitaries an opportunity to gaze upon it for the first time. But whether you came over this rise once in a lifetime or every morning for a decade, you remained unprepared. There below, sprawled over three or four square kilometers, the great complex—the water towers, cooling towers, the giant structures you’d mistake for aircraft hangars, the satellite dishes, the swans gliding over the artificial lake—each time it seemed less planned than dropped. From an alien planet.

The congress members and tycoons shielding their eyes in the Texas light made astonished noises. Aye they should, Machuzak nodded. The vista confronting you from this rise is so unexpected, so irreconcilable with the eyescape, that you cannot but be drawn toward it, downward, into the valley. And they descended.

* * * *

The scene at the gate was worse than Rasmussen had foreseen. “What the—?” Machuzak exclaimed, seeing the way blocked by a mass of cameramen and bots pointing headsets in every direction and, worst of all—“Slava,” he said, as he jammed on the brakes and the motorcade ground to a halt, “who the hell’s been talking to the press?”

Archangelsky didn’t need to say, “I told you so” as the journalists stampeded toward them.

Nathaniel’s perplexity was rising by the instant. On a normal day nothing much distinguished CFRC’s main gate from the entrance to the Ruby or L-Bar Ranch, nothing except the nearly invisible eyes that surmounted the modest brick fence and the buffalo roaming in the vast fields beyond. On a normal—Before him, several dozen protestors had braved the afternoon heat to prevent…what? Nathaniel shook his head; there hadn’t been a protest since the lab opened. The college students—well, that anyone could understand… The Buddhists surprised him and the hermits and dropouts of all sorts interspersed among the rest, people who had simply removed themselves from the pace of the current century. More than the numbers it was the agitation, the genuine fear written on their faces, that seized Nathaniel’s attention. As he stepped out of the jeep they pushed toward him angrily waving their placards. “No radiation!”

“No bombs!” a bearded twenty-year-old shouted silently in his face by flashing his phone screen at Machuzak. “This place is hit and we all go up!”

“Whoa,” said Machuzak, raising his hands. “No one’s building bombs here.”

“What about the tritium?” the kid insisted belligerently, punching his keys.

“I’ve got to shoot you,” Machuzak answered with a smile, which to the surprise of both of them disarmed his opponent.

At that moment, a portly businessman on the far side of fifty, shaded by a full-sized Stetson, stepped out of his long-horn-graced limo and waded into the fray. Nathaniel knew him by sight, of course, but their handshake at Bergstrom airport had been his first and only introduction to Richard Garrett, the billionaire chair of CFRC’s board of governors.

“Excuse me, sir, just what is going on here?”

Despite the confrontation unfolding about them, and that he towered over Garrett by a head, Machuzak deferred to the tone of voice of a man who not only expected to be, but was, listened to. “M–Mr. Garrett, I suspect you know better than I. Rumor has it—” he glanced at Archangelsky in the jeep—“that Leonard has decided to use Prometheus to fire up the lab’s power grid.”

“First I’ve heard about it, er…Dr.—”

“—Machuzak, Nathaniel Machuzak.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing…everything.”

Garrett looked up quizzically at the lanky, perturbed, perplexed scientist. “These people seem to think it’s dangerous. Is it?”

Nathaniel hesitated, glanced at the fevered crowd surrounding this surreal exchange. “Hmm, probably not to us, if that’s what you mean. But Mr. Garrett, believe me, that machine was not ready, is not ready—”

“Ah,” Garrett shrugged jovially, considering. “Dr. Machuzak, where’s your sense of adventure? I say we give it a go. If it fizzles, well…”

In spite of himself Machuzak was fast working up a sweat. They’d always known that the second-worst thing that could happen to the program was a fizzled demonstration and the worst thing was an accident. Today they were risking both. For what? He only dimly perceived the implications. On the verge of losing his temper altogether, Machuzak half spit out, “It’s insane!” but confronted by his own lack of imagination, he swallowed his tongue and faced the crowd. “Why don’t you come watch?” he announced to the protestors, badging open the gate.

For only an instant, shocked silence and baffled glances met the unexpected invitation, then one by one the young people nodded and moved toward the retreating fence.

“Good move,” remarked Garrett.

“Welcome to the Controlled Fusion Research Center,” Machuzak said, and the crowd streamed in.

* * * *

The motley guignol of grizzled recluses munching on home-baked pies, saffron-robed monks banging drums and Energy Star moms pushing their phone-charging strollers quickly engulfed the motorcade, and the limo-bound dignitaries might have walked the final kilometer to the guardhouse. Metalized balloons bobbed above everything.

“That boy at the gate is like my daughter,” observed Slava. “She won’t speak to me except by texting.”

Aye, the world was new. Machuzak vividly recollected that day nearly two decades ago when Americans awoke to pictures of cuddly polar bears drowning in the former Arctic ice cap. By now green had turned black. His “jeep” usually ran on algae, and long ago those fourteen-mpg Urban Assault Vehicles, which Texans believed were guaranteed them by the Second Amendment, had met the same fate as the dinosaurs, except in Crawford.

The one word you never heard amidst solar, wind and bio was fusion. The energy source of stars. If fusioneers, physicists like him and Slava, could do it, they would hand the world a new, virtually limitless supply of energy. The first problem, Machuzak conceded heavily, was that after eighty years of effort, the ultimate goal still lay just beyond their fingertips. The second problem was that to people like the kid at the gate, fusion meant bombs of the worst sort. Then there was the third problem: the future never had much of a constituency.

Leonard Rasmussen, CFRC’s director, was determined that their endeavor should succeed. Ten years after he’d rebuilt the old Austin National Fusion Research Laboratory into the Controlled Fusion Research Center, his troops had yet to produce a self-sustaining reaction, which would alter the history of the world, but if Slava was right, they were going to try today.

* * * *

Machuzak waved the crowd past the perplexed duty guard, who raised the boom in spite of himself, and everyone passed through the crumbling concrete barriers that had been ordained after 9/11. Nathaniel figured the odds of a terrorist attack on CFRC were about the same as a hit against the nearest Taco Bell, but when even university students thought they were building bombs…

The crowd passed along the wide arc of the lake until at last everyone stood before the main building, gawking, giggling at the majestic fountain that rose from the water and enveloped them all in a fine spray. Their childlike wonder prompted Machuzak to see the sculpture for the first time in years. Once, those irregular, artfully corroded bronze sheets soaring heavenward through rainbow mists had reminded him of angel wings, and now he remembered that. Afresh he contemplated the small sphere surmounting the whole, bronze, brass, intricately carved away such that inner labyrinths were suggested.

“What do you suppose that sphere means?” a guest asked.

“The sun,” Nathaniel answered and ducked inside, the crowd after him.

Each and every person was instantly transported outside again by the lobby, which had been designed with light. Once more transfixed, hermits and dignitaries stood together, smiling at the vaulting arches that touched skylights open to the heavens. For a second moment, the throng’s admiration of a visionary creation briefly rekindled in Nathaniel a cinder of boyhood wonder. In those two moments, he discovered again what his profession was about, what it should be about, and resolved to act.