You aren’t listening to me, Horst,” said Katie.

 He’d heard the words, could play them back verbatim if requested, but they had not registered, had not interfaced with the active regions of his brain.  He looked at her for a moment.  A pixie of a woman with flaming red hair, freckled, cream-colored skin, and a pinched little nose.  Through the unpolarized left lens of her Virtuals he could see a green eye staring up at him – a very angry looking green eye.  Irish from head to toe.  At times he thought she might actually have leprechaun blood in her.  Her small frame had fit so perfectly in his arms.  But he quickly put that thought, and any other thoughts of her, out of his head.  To her left, visible through the observation window, he could see the Sonomak.

 Beautiful.

 A two-meter-diameter vanadium alloyed stainless steel sphere, with forty-eight Pocket Accelerators protruding from it, sat in the center of the lab, draped in cabling and surrounded by rack after rack of electronics.  It was a work of art, an elegant piece of physics, an instrument to reveal the truth.  With his right hand buried in his pants pocket, he fingered the walled of DVDs.

 “Horst, we’ve got a problem,” said Katie.  She was angry now.  She poked at his too-bright tie with an index finger.  “Anthony has just about burned through another teacher.  I’ve given Alice the afternoon off, and she’ll be bringing Anthony to campus so we can take him for the rest of the day.”

 Horst looked down at his tie, where Katie had poked him, as if checking for dirty fingerprints.  Apparently finding none, he glanced at his Rolex and then looked at Katie.  “Not now,” he said, holding up his hand.

 “Goddamn it, Horst!  It’s never “now”.  There never is a good time to talk to you about anything unless it concerns that Goddamned machine!”

 Horst focused on her, looking into her green eye.  “The president has decided to fund ITER from the existing DARPA and DOE plasma budget,” he said, stressing each word.  “Unless something miraculous happens we are less than two months away from shutting this program down.”

 Katie blinked.  It took several seconds for the mental gears to engage, for images of a teacher covered in tape and construction paper to be replaced with thoughts of budgets, contracts, and just how much money it took to keep the Sonomak running.

“Shut us down,” she said in a whisper.  She could not believe it.  This lab had developed the Pocket Accelerator.

 “It’s 12:55, Katie,” he said, looking at his watch once again and then back at her.  He ran his hands down the front of his coat, smoothing out wrinkles that were not there.  “Crunch time,” he said, and then stepped past her, moving not in the direction of the control room, but down the hall.

 Katie knew where he was going, knew the ritual, the superstitions.  Before a major presentation or experiment, Horst needed some quiet time to rehearse, to focus on whatever hurdle he was about to try to jump.  She knew the route he would take, the stairwells he preferred, the labs he would pass, and the secretaries he would wink at.

 Looking over his shoulder, just before he turned the corner at the end of the hallway, he smiled, giving her his patented, 100 percent full of confidence grin.  “Let’s make a little history.”  He then turned and vanished around the corner.

 And at that moment, Katie knew just what Horst planned to do – she’d seen it in his smile.  It was the smile that at one time had been hers, but now was reserved solely for his machine.  He was going for the big breakthrough and would attempt to run the Sonomak as it had never been run before.  The Sonomak  had never been pushed past the 20 million-degree level, and she was suddenly certain that Horst would attempt to break through that temperature.

 And there was only one real way to do that.  He would try to compress the plasmon vortex to its absolute minimum.  He would run all forty-eight Pocket Accelerators at maximum power, not just the sixteen they had run in the trials.  Horst would go for maximum implosion and not worry about the outbound shock wave and what potential damage it would cause to the interior of the Sonomak.  He needed results.  Now.

 But she also knew that if all forty-eight Pocket Accelerators were run, a single accelerator that was slightly out of sync with the others would result in a burn so lopsided that the final temperature would be far lower than that achieved by sixteen balanced accelerators.

 She’d run those simulations, but had not yet shown them to Horst.

 The virtual clock hung in front of her.  12:58.

 Should she tell Horst?  Would he even listen to her?

 Katie looked first down the hallway were Horst had just gone and then to the doorway that led to the Sonomak control room.  Which way?

      #

 “Umph!” Horst back stepped, stumbled and almost fell, the only thing keeping him on his feet was that whoever had just run into him had a firm grasp around his midsection.

 He looked down, surprised.

 “What’s wrong with you, Katie?” he said, pushing her back, momentarily confused, not quite sure how she’d made it to the far end of the Van Leer Engineering Building ahead of him.

 “Nothing,” said Katie as she stepped back and looked up at Horst.

 “What’s so important that you chased me all around the building, that you couldn’t wait the few minutes for me to get back to the lab?” he asked, doing nothing to hide the sounds of annoyance in his voice.  This was his thinking time.  He glared at her, tried to make eye contact, but could not.  Both lenses of her Virtuals were fully tinted, hiding her eyes.  Horst hated talking to people when he could not see their eyes.  And he knew that Katie knew that, and was doing it just to annoy him.  He took half a step back, and for just a moment inspected her, finding something wrong with her, something that he couldn’t quite place.  Had she been wearing that lab coat a moment before?  And there was something wrong with her hair, the ends jagged, looking as if someone had just taken a pair of pruning shears to them.

 “Is there something different....”

 “I know what you plan to do, Horst,” she said, cutting him off.

 “Oh,” he said.  He raised his right eyebrow, instantly forgetting what had been puzzling him only a moment before, getting right back to business.  “And why should this concern me?”

 “Because if you run all forty-eight accelerators you will in all likelihood not get a complete burn – the alignments have tot been sufficiently checked, and the software isn’t going to be able to compensate the beam steering quickly enough.”

 “And just how do you know this?” he asked.

 “I’ve run the simulations, checked the tolerances.  Unless all beams hit dead on you’ll fall far short of the twenty million degrees.”

 Horst sighed.  He knew it was a risk, but at this point everything was a risk.

 “You can’t run all forty-eight accelerators,” she said.

 Horst reached up with his right hand and pulled at his chin, slowly pacing back and forth.  “How long do you think it would take to check out beam alignments, to run a few low-level tests with all forty-eight accelerators in order to check out the system?”

 Katie’s shoulders sagged, the relief evident to Horst.

 “I think we can do it in a week,” she said.

 Horst stopped pacing, nodded, and reached into his pocket, pulling out the DVD wallet.  Unsnapping the wallet and thumbing through it, he pulled out a DVD and held it up to her.

 “Power surge – forty-eight-accelerators,” said Katie, reading the disc’s label.

 “It will make it look as if we attempted to run all forty-eight accelerators,” said Horst, “but just as we start, the system will abort, claiming that there was an input power surge.  The Sonomak will shut down, and I’ll give a little song and dance about Tech’s power grid problems, and beg for a week’s extension for the demonstration.”  He smiled.

 “Good,” said Katie.

 “Now get to the control room,” said Horst.  “Don’t let on to the others what we are going to try to do.  I need their reactions to be genuine in response to our little power surge.”

 Katie nodded, turned, and trotted down the hallway.  Just before she got to the end, she turned, smiled, and waved to him.

 Horst blinked, surprised, not quite certain what to make of the entire encounter.  “She must be nervous,” he said to himself, and then waited, not moving until he could no longer hear her echoing footsteps.  He then looked down at the DVD in his open hand, curled his fingers around it, and didn’t stop squeezing until he felt it shatter.  “We don’t have a week,” he said in a whisper.  “And I don’t have the time to argue about it.”

      #

 “Please excuse me for my tardiness,” Horst said to the camera.  He looked down at his watch. 1:07.  Horst was always late for meetings and presentations, having learned the value of this tactic long ago.  The more important you were, the later you could be, and the longer you could make others wait for your arrival.  It showed confidence, which in many cases was far more important than technical abilities and physics breakthroughs when it came to getting money.

 Show no fear.

 The fact that Katie had actually delayed him had no bearing on his tardiness.  If she had not slowed him down, he would have simply spent a few more minutes wandering around the building.

 Horst looked around the control room.

 Five Teleprescence monitors were lit.  The first TP showed Senator Miller, while two others showed military types – Captain Rodney Harrington, on loan to the DOE from the Air Force, who had the squinty eyes of an accountant and the personality to match, while in the TP next to him, was General Alexander Martin, liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a near-retirement-age Gulf War veteran who Horst knew would never see his second star, having pissed off the UN-loving administration with his constant anti-Moslem stance.

 Having these three attend was a mere formality.  None of them had access to money or could influence any funding agencies on his behalf.  The senator had been instrumental in obtaining the initial funding for the Sonomak lab, but he was now situated on the wrong side of the ITER situation.  The general was just doing time until someone showed the mercy to pull his plug, and the captain’s only concern was that the books were balanced.

 The remaining two were another matter.

 The first was Dr. Kristoff Jorgenson, DOE contract monitor for the Sonomak program and assistant director of the Plasma Physics Directorate within DOE.

 Jorgenson smiled, his ruddy face beaming.  The smile was pure reflex.  He would have rather been anywhere but there, staring into the Sonomak lab and at Horst’s arrogant face.  Didn’t this kraut bastard know he was so much putrefying sausage? thought Jorgenson.  ITER has killed you, he wanted to say, but instead he spoke cordially.  “So good to see you, Horst.  I know that we have all been looking forward to your demonstration today, and we hope to see the twenty million-degree level reached.”

 “I’m certain we can manage that,” said Horst.  “And perhaps a bit more.”

 Perhaps.

 Katie, Aaron, and Beong each sat in front of a computer console – Katie’s the diagnostic, measuring plasma temperature, electron densities, and the plasmon diameter, comparing it all to her simulations; Aaron’s monitoring the health of the Sonomak – pressures, helium injector velocity, magnet temperatures, and powers – all those things needed to keep the Sonomak running; while Beong’s kept watch on the Titanium-Sapphire Laser and the array of Pocket Accelerators.  They said nothing in response to Horst’s boast, did not so much as twitch.  They knew the importance of presenting a united front, of never showing the slightest sign of surprise to outsiders, especially those who held the purse strings.

 Horst looked away from Jorgenson and to the last TP monitor.  “I appreciate you being able to attend out demonstration, Dr.Quinn,” he said, “especially in light of my last-minute invitation.”

 Katie had never heard of Dr. Quinn, but judging from the facial expressions of the other four in the TP monitors, they certainly had.  Jorgenson jerked back as if physically slapped, the general flared his nostrils as if he just got a whiff of something rancid, the captain smiled as if in anticipation of the punch line of some sick and disgusting joke, and Senator Miller grimaced.

 Quinn nodded.  “Certainly Dr. Wittkowski.  We are always interested in novel ways to manipulate energy and matter.”  He smiled, and the skin across his face pulled tight, the sharp angled bones beneath protruding, looking as if they were about to rupture through the skin.  To Katie, the image of a snake unhinging its jaw and swallowing an egg came to mind.

 Horst focused and stared at Quinn.

 The Slick Man – that was Quinn’s nickname in government circles.

 Horst had met him face-to-face once before, in ’98, at a DARPA meeting in Puerto Rico during the island’s statehood celebration, and had walked away from the meeting with the urge to head straight to the bathroom and scour his hands with scalding water.  Slick Man was based at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the BMDO being the mutated offspring of the long-dead Strategic Defense Initiative.  But Horst suspected that was just a front.  Allen Quinn reeked of spookdom and black projects.  Horst was certain the he was from the NSA, or even the CIA.  But Horst had moved past the point of worrying about that.  Money was money.  The word was that Quinn had money for the right type of projects.  Horst took a quick look behind him, at his three associates at their consoles, and then turned back to the TP monitors, focusing solely on Allen Quinn.

 Sell it, thought Horst.  Sell it big.

 “Gentlemen, I will be quite blunt with you.  The future of fusion power does not lie with magnetic confinement, or laser-based inertial confinement,” he said, taking deliberate swipes at both ITER and the laser boys at the National Ignition Facility in California.  “Those technologies are a brute force approach to fusion, crude and expensive attempts which do not take advantage of the more sophisticated, elegant, technologies which the twenty-first century has to offer.”

 Horst could not read the Slick Man’s face – three was no emotion, no life in it.  But Horst was not worried, at least not yet.  Slick Man had a reputation for embracing new technologies, and the Sonomak certainly met that criteria.  Slick Man wanted beyond state of the art, in order to threaten today’s world with tomorrow’s technology.

 “The Sonomak represents such a technology,” said Horst.

 Quinn’s only response was a quick blink.

 “If you will turn to page four of the briefing books, you will see the basic schematic of the Sonomak.”  He continued to focus on Quinn.  He knew that the others had seen the Sonomak schematic countless times before and were probably bored to tears with it.

 But that didn’t matter – he was selling to Quinn.

 “The heart of the Sonomak technology is the Pocket Accelerator,” said Horst, reaching down below the range of the Vid and picking up a Pocket Accelerator – the one-meter-length tube of precisely contoured stainless steel.  “What we have discovered is that when we pulse a terawatt Titanium-Sapphire Laser on and off in periods as short as twenty femtoseconds into a high-density helium plasma, that an evacuated channel, swept clear of electrons, in created by a process called electron cavication.  You can think of this process as drilling a hole right through the plasma, selectively removing the negatively charged electrons, while leaving behind the heavier charged ions, those ions helping to focus and channel the laser beam.  As a result of the cavication process, an immense electric field is generated between the negatively charged electrons that have been swept away and the positively charged ions, which remain.  This electric field in turn accelerates electrons in the direction of the laser – in essence transforming the laser beam into an extremely high-energy electron beam.”

 Horst waved the Pocket Accelerator at the Vid.

 “By way of active shaping of the internal electrical fields in order to eliminate turbulence and plasma instabilities, the Pocket Accelerator contours the plasma, allowing maximum acceleration of electrons with an electric field gradient of ten GeV per centimeter.”

 Horst paused for effect.

 “Think of that gentlemen – ten billion volts across a one-centimeter spacing.”

 Quinn’s eyes opened slightly, and the muscles at the base of his jaw quivered as he ground his teeth.  Horst nodded ever so slightly, trying to read something in those facial motions.  He felt confident that Quinn had taken the bait.  No one could resist the beauty and elegance of a ten GeV-per-centimeter field gradient.

 “This means that a one meter-long Pocket Accelerator can produce one TeV electrons – one trillion electron volts, an energy which, prior to this technology, could only be obtained after electrons had traveled one kilometer down the Stanford Linear Accelerator – a distance one thousand times greater than that required for the Pocket Accelerator.”  Again Horst paused for effect.  “This technology is unique to the Georgia Tech fusion effort.”

 Quinn leaned toward the monitor and smiled, exposing teeth that were slightly yellowed, and gums that were tinted gray.  “Very impressive, Professor,” he said with all the sincerity of a rattlesnake apologizing just before sinking its fangs into a victim, “but we should not forget that Akasaki at the University of Tokyo is reporting fifteen GeV per centimeter, and that Umstadter at Michigan is generating neutron fluxes as a result of fusion events taking place in a deuterium/tritium plasma during the collapse of an electron cavication region.”

 Horst took a half-step back.  He managed to keep smiling.  He was not aware thta Akasaki had reached the fifteen-GeV level.  The Umstadter results he was well aware of, but he had conveniently neglected to mention them in his overview.  At that moment he knew he had grossly miscalculated Quinn’s knowledge – the Slick Man appeared to be up to speed on the state-of-the-art results.

 Horst opened his mouth, but was cut off before he could speak.

 “Before you continue with your fascinating description of the Sonomak,” said Quinn, “there are a few points that I should mention.”  He held up two fingers, the middle and index finger, and then lowered the index finger.  “First, you should know that I provided key inputs which resulted in the shutdown of the SLAC at Stanford, and the Tevatron at Fermi.  I do not care for particle physics, or for those physicists who feel that the federal government should foot the bill for their high-energy fantasies.”  The middle finger curled down.  “In addition, I have no interest in fusion energy, a technology which I consider unnecessary for the foreseeable future, as long as our Middle East interests are maintained.  I represent the federal government, which in turn is entrusted with maintaining the safety of its citizens in an ever-more dangerous world, and as such, find myself solely interested in technologies that can be harnessed for the defense of this nation.”

 Horst suddenly felt nauseous.

 Beong let out an audible moan.

 Katie shook her head.  Why in the hell was this arrogant asshole even wasting the Vid time to watch this demonstration? she wondered.  He obviously had absolutely no interest in the Sonomak.

 Quinn held up his hands, palms facing the monitor, and slowly shook his head.  “But I apoligize for my little interruption, you were explaining how the Sonomak is intended to work.”  His eyelids almost closed.  “Please continue to enlighten me.”

 At that moment, Horst knew that Quinn was a complete and total dry hole – they would never see a dime from this schmuck.  He turned his head slightly and focused on Jorgenson.  As far as this demonstration was concerned, he was the only one remaining that might be able to provide any funding at all, though, in light of the ITER situation, the odds of that were extremely small.  “Yes,” said Horst, regathering himself, forcing himself back into his Sonomak monologue.  “The output of each Pocket Accelerator is focused at the center of the Sonomak, in which the intersection cavication beams create a spherical region nearly devoid of electrons – you can picture it as a bubble in a sea of electrons.  By careful manipulation of the laser pulse duration and frequency, this bubble can be made to pulse, to rapidly expand and contract with the same frequency as the laser pulse, during which the energy of the laser is coupled to the ions within the bubble, feeding them, causing them to rapidly heat.”

 Jogenson smiled at him – an embarrassed smile.  Jorgenson wanted this demonstration to be over quickly.  He wanted the whole Sonomak business to be over.  At that moment he knew that regardless of what temperature the Somomak reached, whether twenty million or even forty million degrees, it made absolutely no difference.  Even if he’d been able to squeeze a few dollars back out of the ITER allotment, the Sonomak had now fallen within Quinn’s gunsights.  He did not know why Quinn had taken such an instant dislike to both Horst and the Sonomak, but that didn’t matter.  What mattered was that Quinn obviously opposed it, and Jorgenson was not about to squander any of his limited political ammunition fighting someone like Quinn.  He knew that if Horst had been wounded and bleeding before this demonstration, he was now a corpse.

 And Jorgenson would distance himself as quickly as possible.

 Horst looked from Jorgenson to Quinn, and then back again to Jorgenson.  At that moment, he too realized the fundamental error that he’d somehow made.  The look on Jorgenson’s face said it all.

 The Sonomak was dead.

 Horst continued to talk, inertia and overall numbness keeping the words flowing from his mouth.  “When the plasmon bubble is grown to sufficient size, on the order of several millimeters, and the ions within it pumped up to temperatures of three to four million degrees, the laser intensity is ramped down, causing a controlled collapse of the plasmon, the bubble rapidly contracting as the electrons come crashing back into the region of the ions, generating a shock wave that further heats them.  Our simulations have conclusively shown that electron temperatures in excess of 200 million degrees should be obtainable with this technique – temperatures high enough to create nuclear fusion.”

 Quinn smiled.

 “I doubt that very much, Professor.  Even if you run all forty-eight of your Pocket Accelerators you will not be able to maintain the necessary spherical symmetry of the imploding shock wave to reduce the plasmon bubble to a small enough volume to achieve such a temperature.  I doubt this technology can ever break the fifty million-degree level.  At best you will fuse a handful of atoms, and perhaps after several more years of work, you may manage to reproduce the same pathetic results as those obtained at Michigan.”

 The numbness suddenly vanished.

 Something molten burned in Horst.  Until that moment, Horst had not been totally certain that he would run the Implosion DVD.  Despite the bravado he’d tried to fill  himself with, Katie’s warning had been gnawing at him, eating away at his confidence.  But when he looked up at the TP monitor and at Quinn’s smug face, at that expression of condescension and outright hostility, Horst made his decision.  He would not back down in front of the Slick Man.

 “I disagree,” said Horst, staring into the monitor, wishing that eh could punch his fist right through the screen and spread the bastard’s nose across his face.  Horst pulled the DVD wallet from out of his coat pocket, opened it, and pulled out the Implosion DVD.  “And I will demonstrate it for you right now.”  He stepped back, and reaching over Katie, pushed the DVD into her control consol without giving her the chance to see it.

 Katie listened to the DVD whir, pecked at the keyboard, and focused on the simulation quadrant of her Virtuals, seeing a see of green.  No problems.  She then looked over at Beong and Aaron.  Then both nodded, their faces expressionless, as if they were in shock.

 “Whenever you are ready, Katie,” said Horst, turning around to face Quinn.

 Katie flipped the safety latch over the fire button and held her finger above the toggle switch.  Everything was still green.  “I’m ready to fire,” she said.

 Horst nodded.

 She flipped the switch.

 The plasma in the Sonomak struck, a sharp white-blue glow pouring through its viewing ports.  Horst counted down to himself.  The Sonomak would take ten seconds for the plasma to stabilize, to equilibrate before the Pocket Accelerators fired.  Once they fired, the test would be over in nanoseconds – the plasmon formed, fed energy, and then imploded as the laser intensity ramped down over a period of a few nanoseconds.  And enough energy would be dumped to fry the inside of the machine, destroying detectors and sensors – if they were lucky.

 Katie raised her head as her count reached zero, looking through the observation widow and into the Sonomak lab.

 She blinked – a flash of light forcing her eyes shut.

 Whump!

 Katie’s eardrums popped, and her chair pushed back as a wall of air struck her in the chest.  She opened her eyes, could now see, despite a white-yellow halo afterglow that filled her eyes, and the Plexiglas window in front of her began to crack, bowing inward, then suddenly reversing itself, pushed into the lab, shattering and exploding outward.

 From within the lab came the roar and screech of metal crashing against metal.  A second shockwave hit her from behind, pushing her forward, slamming her into her console, pulling her toward the hole that only moments before had been filled with the viewing window.

 And then almost total silence, the only sounds those of rustling paper and the crackling of cooling metal.  Several blinks and she was able to focus, to look into the lab.  At first she thought the Sonomak was gone – the center of the lab seemed empty, nothing remaining except for sheared bolt stems protruding out from the concrete slab.  And then she saw the Sonomak, saw what was left of it, and saw what it had been transformed into.  It lay on its side, slammed into electronic racks that it had flattened and then pinned against the lab’s rear wall.  Only a few of the Pocket Accelerators were still attached to it, the rest were strewn around the lab, several embedded in the walls.  But she barely noticed that.

 It was the spherical chamber of the Sonomak itself that held all her attention.

 At first she thought it had been twisted, somehow flowed.  But that was not quite right.  It was distorted.  What had been a nearly perfect sphere of stainless steel had been elongated, practically turned into a tube, and then torn in half and retied back together in a complicated knot.

 Exploding objects did not tie themselves back together.

 It was impossible.

 Turning around, she saw Aaron and Beong picking themselves up off the floor.  Horst was standing.  There was a ragged cut across his forehead, blood running into his left eye.  Looking past Katie and at what the Sonomak had been transformed into, he smiled.  “We just had our miracle, Katie,” he said without looking at her.  Behind him the TP monitors were filled with snow.

 Katie turned back to look at the twisted wreckage of the Sonomak and realized there was something familiar about its transformed shape.  Then she saw the green and blue string knot that Anthony had made earlier in the day and knew that the Sonomak had been tied into the exact same carrick knot that Anthony had used in the contraption that had attacked Miss Alice.

 Identical.

Her body shuddered in a quick head-to-toe spasm.

© robert a. metzger. All rights reserved.