the long run. Or, even if you do generate the power you say is possible from your water impellers without the wholesale killing of sea life or severe dangers to navigation, maybe the effects on the climate will be the opposite of what you expect.”
“I’ll be happy to send you all the data we’ve collected, along with the mathematics supporting my work,” Eve said. “It’s compelling. From just one impeller three feet in diameter — which did absolutely no harm to sea life — trailed behind my research ship last year, we were able to generate all the power our research vessel needed not only for navigation and communications equipment, but for the scientific gear, the galley, the air-conditioning and lighting and the electric bow and stern thrusters, which kept us in one place over the bottom against the nearly four knot northward current of the Gulf Stream. And we had energy to spare.”
“It didn’t work,” Seward pointed out. “You had an accident in the second week when your transmission line parted and there were casualties. And that was with a three-foot impeller. What you’re proposing is to place generators more than eight times that diameter, and hang them from oil platforms in the Gulf Stream. Am I correct?”
“Yes, to a point, but—”
Seward interrupted her. “If a cable large enough to support generators of that size should break, you’ll suffer more than a couple of deaths. And putting hundreds, or as you propose, even thousands of these rigs in the Gulf Stream, would pose more than a danger to navigation, they would be a blight on the horizon.”
A number of the others around the table obviously agreed.
Eve held her temper in check. “Only one oil rig out in the Gulf Stream, twenty-five miles from here, with four impeller-generator sets that would be built by GE. It would be merely the second stage of my experiment, and my calculations imply that the power generated would amount to a significant percentage of what one of your nuclear reactors produces. When the full project comes online the impellers would be anchored to the seabed, fifty feet below the surface, where they’d pose no hazards to navigation.”
“You’re still left with a hell of a safety issue,” Strasser, the plant’s chief engineer pointed out, not unkindly. Of all those around the table he’d seemed the most interested, and the most sympathetic.
Eve wanted to say that there were safety issues in any power-generating station, and that the mandatory wearing of hard hats here would not do much if one of their reactors had a meltdown. She nodded instead. “You’re absolutely correct, sir, but for two points. The first is that the safety issue would be ours, not SSP and L’s until the experiment succeeded. And, the incident aboard my research ship was not an accident. It was sabotage.”
“That’s not been proven,” Alan Rank, the company VP, said.
“You’re right, but if you’d like I’ll send you the lab findings, which show that a massive power spike melted the cable. But that would have been impossible with the safety features built into the design. The only explanation was that someone had sabotaged those features before the impeller-generator was sent overboard.”
“Someone from your staff, or the crew of your research ship?” Rank asked.
“It’s possible, but I suspect it happened before the set got to us.”
“Didn’t you check it?” Strasser asked.
“Of course,” Eve said, making sure that she was speaking in an even tone. “We think that one of the seals may have been tampered with. Everything worked within design specs for two weeks before the spike. Time for seawater to slowly breach the system until one or more of the safety checks were affected.”
“You think,” Townsend said.
“Yes, I think. In the meantime, the reason I’m here is to offer any power that we might generate to SSP and L essentially free of charge for the first year. We would be responsible not only for the generators, but for bringing the power ashore on undersea transmission lines. Your only expenditure would be building the connection point between our cable and your transformer yard, a cost that you would certainly recoup in the first month, selling free energy to your customers at the usual rate.”
Sarah Mueller turned to the company VP. “We’d have to put this before the NNSA, to get their take.”
“I’ve already approached them,” Eve said. “In principle they see no problem.”
“Who’d you speak to?” Rank asked.
“Deputy Secretary Caldwell.” The NNSA was a division of the U.S. Department of Energy that was headed by Joseph Caldwell. “In fact it was his people who suggested I come here to speak to you.”
Still she wasn’t sure she had their interest even now, mentioning Caldwell and the DOE’s tacit approval, though it was a powerful gun. It had been Don who’d suggested that end run, and her relationship with him over the past couple of years had in some ways given her the strength to cope. He helped her to be herself, to be strong without the nuisance of being possessive or any sense of ownership.
Their relationship was vastly different than the one she’d had, briefly, with her theoretical physicist husband, whom she’d married just after graduating with her second PhD.
“Let’s think about starting a family,” he’d said out of left field one morning on their way into their offices at Princeton.
She’d been surprised, though secretly pleased, but she’d turned him down. “Not yet, Sam. Maybe in a couple of years.”
“It’s the climate thing of yours.”
“I think I might be getting close.”
He glanced over at her. “Your math is spot-on so far, but I don’t know if it supports the kind of conclusions that you’re suggesting. A little far-fetched.”
Dr. Samuel Larsen’s doctoral thesis attempted to reconcile Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics using a modified form of string theory to bridge the gap. He had his sights on the holy grail of theoretical physics — the TOE or Theory of Everything — which would explain the workings of the entire universe, large and small.
He was the only man she’d ever met who was smarter than her. But just then he’d pissed her off. “Far- fetched?”
He’d shrugged. “I didn’t mean to make you mad. It’s just that I’d like to start a family.”
“Two years.”
“Two wasted years.”
Their marriage didn’t last that long, nor did his work pan out. Two many flaws in both, too many dead ends, and out of frustration he’d practically ordered her to drop what he called her “nonsensical” work, come back to dry land, and become the mother that a beautiful woman like her was destined to be.
But for her, being a scientist was like being a Catholic nun; she was the bride not of Jesus Christ, but of her data and her concepts, stuff from which she could not simply walk away.
She’d told him the same thing that was on the tip of her tongue at this moment in the Hutchinson Island boardroom: Go screw yourself. Thank the gods for Don, because with her husband gone, her parents and siblings all still back in Birmingham and lost to her, she had no one else to turn to.
“We’d need more information, technical specifications, reliability predictions with the appropriate data sets, assuming you plan on first doing a test run for ninety days,” Strasser, possibly sensing something of her angst, suggested.
“Six months, actually. We’ll have dummy loads, and we will have the capability of controlling the actual outputs of our generator sets.”
“We’re interested in where your funding will come from,” David Wren, the company’s assistant CFO, said. He looked like a chief financial officer, his eye forever on the money trail. His implication being that if sponsors for the project were in any way competitors with SSP&L no deal with her would be possible.
And she began to calm down. She had their interest after all. “It’s the second part of the project I wanted to discuss with you today.”
FIVE
By now DeCamp was dressed in white coveralls, an employee name tag around his neck, and he stood with bin Helbawi at the door from the engineers’ locker room to the corridor across from which was the door to the control room. At this time of the day, with lunch in full swing, those personnel not on duty were over at the cafeteria and wouldn’t be expected back here for another half hour. Plenty of time to get in, accomplish the mission,
