Firebird

Zero-2

Setting off, he ignored the exhibits and memorabilia and mountains of food, determined to confront Rasmussen. The director was nowhere to be found, but his eyes lit on Leonard’s wife, Theresa, surrounded by admirers. Machuzak took two steps toward that charmed circle and suddenly halted, lassoed by his damned indecision, and he foolishly stood frozen in the middle of the great lobby as Slava looked on with amusement.

Luckily, Theresa herself caught sight of him and motioned him over. “What’s wrong, Mac?” she said. “You look troubled.”

He’d bypass the obligatory pleasantries: “Theresa, is Len up to anything?”

“Shh,” she smiled. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”

Christ, Slava was exactly right. For a moment Nathaniel stared blankly at Theresa. They’d known each other a decade, since he’d first set foot in this miraculous space. A handsome woman, a strong one, Theresa sometimes remarked that she read history to “be reminded of the beauty of ephemeral things,” and with her husband’s health in decline, she had well crossed the threshold where life’s transitoriness ceases to be a surprise. “Believe me, Mac,” she said, casting on Nathaniel the indulgent gaze a mother reserves for the runt of the litter, “everything will be fine. Leonard knows what he’s doing.”

Nathaniel scowled. As splendid as Theresa was, she wasn’t a scientist.

“Theresa, this isn’t the sort of thing you try in public. It’s arrogant—” He suddenly halted, seeing. “This has something to do with ITER, doesn’t it?”

Theresa’s silence instantly told Nathaniel he’d hit the mark. ITER, the colossal twenty-billion-euro device that the EU and a half dozen other countries had built in southern France, had finally completed its shakedown last week.

Leonard would never allow the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor to beat CFRC in the race for fusion. When ITER’s construction was announced, years before climate change went mainstream, the United States’ first move was to pull out of the endeavor. In, out…America’s endless vacillations handed Leonard Rasmussen his opening. With legendary charm, boundless vigor, infinite patience, he sweet-talked and cajoled. “I want ten billion dollars and fifteen years,” he leveled his gaze on high-tech magnates and secretaries of energy. Eventually he got what he wanted, the Manhattan Project for energy.

From the ashes of the decaying Austin lab rose a glittering new entity, the Controlled Fusion Research Center. Construction began immediately on the consortium’s centerpiece, christened ASSET for Advanced Steady State Experimental Tokamak. Few words, Machuzak knew, could be more meaningless to outsiders. To insiders, it meant one thing: the future, and lab hands soon christened the device Prometheus, bringer of fire. Not fully ITER’s size, ASSET’s design was—they hoped—smarter, and with luck it would trump its rival. Today the competition had stepped out of the shadows.

Nathaniel walked away from Theresa and found Archangelsky hovering over the hors d’oeuvres. “A tsar’s table,” Slava mused, only obliquely glancing at Machuzak. Then he raised his beard, grinning. “You look tortured, my friend,” he said, thrusting a sparkling glass into the other’s hand.

“You were right, friend,” Machuzak answered, glancing at the improbable, expectant crowd now milling everywhere about them. “They’re going to turn on the lights today—they’re going to try.”

“Of course I was right. I said it before. You think we’ve been busting our balls for a month now on cook’s tour?”

Nathaniel nodded, belatedly as usual, he thought. When fully operational ASSET was meant to supply electricity for the entire laboratory. When. If. It had never been connected to the turbine. They’d been slowly putting the machine through its paces when suddenly the board decreed a commissioning, apparently more, and they threw Prometheus together with sealing wax and string. Oh, it was sputtering along all right—not with a torch but a match—and they’d have to dismantle the beast and spend weeks righting what they’d made wrong. Even with ITER suddenly breathing down their necks, something here did not add up. The idiots couldn’t believe that they’d turn on the lights in front of an audience.

“Let them make fools of us all. Game isn’t worth candle. The higher-ups will get blame.”

“We all will. Tell me, Slava, weren’t scientists at one time supposed to be honest, dedicated to the truth? Wasn’t that the oath we took when we became physicists?”

Archangelsky threw a bewildered expression at Machuzak. “Nat Edward’ich, tell me on what strange and wonderful planet you grew up.”

* * * *

With a resignation to futility, Nathaniel Machuzak again resolved to stop this lunacy. He took a step toward the lobby’s center and the lab’s deputy director, Cyrus Krieg-Zuber. “Into whose hard hat were the alleged feces defecated?” Zuber snarled as if offended by his phone itself. “Yes, we shall investigate at once.”

“Cy, what are you on about?” Machuzak said the moment Krieg-Zuber had signed off. “I saw it myself this morning in the rf heating area. A tech was so stressed that he took a crap into his hard hat, that’s all. You would too if you had any idea of what was going on around here. Put an end to it.”

The blond Krieg-Zuber, accent purposely falling on the final syllable, trained his laser stare momentarily on Nathaniel, stroked his chin. Then he turned without a word, straightened the trimmed lapels of his jacket and edged toward the cameras. For a moment Machuzak stared after him, openmouthed.

Nathaniel ducked into the men’s room only to be brought up short by Leonard Rasmussen turning toward him. The director hadn’t been much visible around the lab for a year, not since the day when that terrible thing happened. Until that day, he’d been a compact, vigorous fifty-five, with silvering hair, ruddy skin and a sly grin, and then he stumbled. Machuzak hadn’t set eyes on him at all for three months and the change was almost too much to endure. Leonard Rasmussen in a wheelchair.

The moment Rasmussen caught sight of him, he struggled to his feet.

“L–Leonard,” Nathaniel stuttered simultaneously, moving to help.

Rasmussen waved him off. “It’s fine,” he said with the effort of one whose muscles refuse to obey. “I can make it. We have a demo to perform, don’t we, Mac?”

“Len,” Nathaniel pressed, “you can’t do this. How far is ITER from ignition? They can’t be close—”

“One day ahead is too close, Mac.”

“To hell with them. You know as well as I do what you’re risking. Overloads, disruptions, equipment damage—”

“ASSET was behaving during the pre-ops—”

“—reputation. What you’re planning isn’t a pre-op. Don’t do it.”

For an instant Rasmussen glanced at Nathaniel with pleading eyes and steadied himself. In that space the last piece of the day’s puzzle fell into place. ITER may be breathing down our necks, but Leonard Rasmussen is determined to see Prometheus’torch set ablaze before he dies.

Machuzak fell silent and helped Leonard into the lobby.

* * * *

Cyrus Krieg-Zuber had reappeared and already begun herding the crowd across the three hundred meters of asphalt and grass that separated the main building from the great tokamak complex at CFRC. Cyrus the Great, striving with his corporate physique for every air of an acting director, if not presidential candidate, had invited the entire planet to watch. What a spectacle it would be, he assured the press, his sartorial splendor no less than his unplaceable accent convincing them that history itself was today in the making. For an instant Machuzak caught his eye, but the adder’s glare Zuber shot at him before he turned again to the cameras said one thing: don’t.

There was nothing for it. He passed Leonard on to Theresa and filed out with Slava and a hundred others toward what they called the pentagon. Not quite “twice five miles of fertile ground,” but six stories high, the immense complex consisted of five connected subunits arrayed around a central hub. Within that hub sat Prometheus. All told, the pentagon covered the area of two or three football fields. The size of the place alone filled visitors with a certain awe, and as they approached, Nathaniel could not doubt it, each one of them was wondering what on Earth could be inside.

What is inside is not quite on Earth.

Krieg-Zuber had stationed a few smiling bots at the nearest entrance to distribute hard hats, say, “Have a wonderful day” and break-dance. Flashing his badge and teeth to the crowd, he waved it over the electronic lock, a gesture that told everyone they were about to enter forbidden domains. With nearly comical bows, he ushered in the dignitaries, then the rest, and when Machuzak and Archangelsky passed him, his expression soured.

Inside, Nathaniel and Slava found themselves shoved up against Garrett again. Soon Machuzak became conscious of a hush descending on the crowd, the same hush that descended every time visitors entered the motor-generator room and understood they are dwarfed.

“Size does matter,” Archangelsky remarked.

Garrett looked askance at the Russian, not knowing what to make of him, but Slava was right. Above the persistent whir of the flywheels, Nathaniel explained that beneath their feet spun the four huge motor-generators that power CFRC’s experiments. Without them, every time they started up Prometheus they’d be in danger of draining greater Austin of electricity. He led Garrett to a chain surrounding one of the wells and the chairman caught his breath when he gazed onto the 700-ton giant resting in a pit the size of a small house. Two generators remained idle—spares—but for short periods the primaries alone could supply 700 megawatts of power: seven million lightbulbs, 700,000 microwave ovens, enough electricity for a small city. On the other hand, the purpose of these beasts was merely to put a match to Prometheus.

“That’s hard to believe,” remarked Garrett.

Machuzak lowered his gaze at the chairman and recounted how during their installation, a great crane was lowering one of the flywheels’ outer casing into the pit. Suddenly cables began straining, snapping. Within seconds the entire crane collapsed and the stator fell into place. Four hundred tons of steel crashed down around the workmen standing atop the flywheel. A cable whipped up, smashed through the crane-cabin window and broke the operator’s arm. Seismometers in Dallas and Houston registered the tremor, but no one died of a heart attack. One of the workmen did take the week off.

“Dr. Machuzak!” exclaimed Garrett, now in outright disbelief, “surely you are making this all up.”

“In the realm of the gods, Mr. Garrett,” Machuzak replied pointedly, “even the extraordinary is ordinary.” Nathaniel regretted the words even as they escaped his lips. He was attempting to make a perhaps-too-subtle hint and was certain that Garrett would hold the remark against him as a sign of the arrogance of physicists, but the businessman appeared oblivious, shrouded by the sense of personal insignificance the motor-generators produce.

Hurrying on, Zuber led the crowd directly to the tokamak test cell. He received voice and visual authorization from the guard to enter and ordered the massive door open. Soon the onlookers were rimming the central bay, streaming videos to friends worldwide. A hush fell, more palpable than the one that had come before.

Prometheus was the ultimate plumber’s nightmare and no matter how often Machuzak tried to describe it, he failed. His failure was not a matter of words, he reassured himself; the eye is simply incapable of taking in everything that confronts it. The device, all fifty thousand tons, stands nearly four stories high, but is buried by the hundreds of cables and microwave guides feeding it from all directions, by the diagnostic equipment that sprout from every crevice, by the massive particle accelerators that heat the fuel. You glimpse a ladder here, a girder there, two flags flying from the impossibly massive crane above, but Prometheus is too complex to allow you to make it into a sensible whole.

Peel away the cables and plumbing and girders and you discover a great cylindrical vessel, the full height of the machine, which contains a vacuum nearly as perfect as you’d find in deep space. Dismantle this cryostat and you reveal sixteen superconducting magnet coils cooled to 268 degrees below zero by the liquid helium flowing through their veins. Each coil reminds you of a pearish D, except this D is eight or nine meters tall, and all sixteen are arrayed around in the form of a giant doughnut. When pulsed, the magnets attempt to lurch toward each other with a force, well, several hundred thousand times what a hefty horseshoe magnet produces—but they don’t lurch; their superalloy casings and the machine’s massive titanium superstructure hold them fast. Finally, strip away the magnets and you peer into the heart of the tokamak itself: a D-shaped superalloy chamber, three times the height of a person, wrapped around in the shape of a doughnut.