They went back to the lab and, without a word, the six men and women took their stations along the bank of consoles that lined two walls of the shed. There was an assortment of chairs and stools, no two of them alike, but no one sat down. Dan saw that they were nervous, intense. All except Duncan, who looked calmly confident. He cocked a brow at Dan, like a gambler about to shuffle cards from the bottom of the deck.
“Are you ready to see wee beastie in action?” Duncan asked.
Tired from traveling, Dan pulled a little wheeled typist’s chair to the middle of the floor and sat on it. Folding his arms across his chest, he nodded and said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”
The others looked slightly puzzled, wondering who Gridley might be and what his significance was. Duncan, though, bobbed his head and grinned as though he understood everything.
He turned to Vertientes and said softly, “Start it up, then.”
Dan heard a pump begin to chug and saw the readout numbers on Vertientes’s console start to climb. The other consoles came to life, display screens flickering on to show multi-colored graphs or digital readouts.
“Pressured approaching optimum,” sang out the blonde. “Density on the curve.”
“Fuel cells on line.”
“Capacitor bank ready.”
Duncan stood beside Dan, sweeping all the consoles with his eyes.
“Approaching ignition point,” said Vertientes.
Leaning slightly toward Dan, Duncan said, “It’s set to ignite automatically, although we have the manual backup ready.”
Dan got to his feet and stared out the window at the stainless steel sphere out in the scaffold. There was a crackling air of tension in the lab now; he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising.
“Ignition!” Vertientes called.
Dan saw nothing. The metal sphere outside didn’t move. There was no roar or cloud of smoke, not even a vibration. He looked at Duncan, then over to the six others, all of them standing rigidly intent at their consoles. Numbers flickered across screens, curves crawled along graphs, but as far as Dan could see or feel nothing was actually happening.
“Shutdown,” Vertientes said.
Everyone relaxed, sagged back a bit, let out their breaths.
“Thirty seconds, on the tick,” someone said.
“Power output?” Duncan asked.
“Design maximum. It reached fifty megawatts after four seconds and held it there right to cutoff.”
Vertientes was beaming. He turned and clutched Duncan by both shoulders. “Perfecto! She is a well-behaved little lady!”
“You mean that’s it?” Dan asked, incredulous.
Duncan was grinning too. They all were.
“But nothing happened,” Dan insisted.
“Oh no?” said Duncan, grasping Dan’s elbow and turning him toward the row of consoles. “Look at that power output graph.”
Frowning, Dan remembered a scientist once telling him that all of physics boiled down to reading a bloody gauge.
“But it didn’t go anywhere,” Dan said weakly.
They all laughed.
“It isn’t a rocket,” Duncan said. “Not yet. We’re only testing the fusion reactor.”
“Only!” said the Japanese woman.
“Thirty seconds isn’t much of a test,” Dan pointed out.
“Nay, thirty seconds is plenty of time,” Duncan rebutted.
“The plasma equilibrates in five seconds or less,” said Vertientes.
“But to be useful as a rocket,” Dan insisted, “the reactor’s going to have to run for hours… even weeks or months.”
“Si, yes, we know,” Vertientes said, tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand. “But in thirty seconds we get enough data to calculate the heat transfer and plasma flow parameters. We can extrapolate to hours and weeks and months.”
“I don’t trust extrapolations,” Dan muttered.
The blonde stepped between them. “Well, of course we’re going to build a full-scale model and run it for months. For sure. But what Doc Vee is saying is we’ve done enough testing to be confident that it’ll work.”
Dan looked her over. California, he decided. Maybe Swedish ancestry, but definitely California.
“We intend to mate the reactor with an MHD generator,” Vertientes said, earnestly trying to convince Dan. “That way the plasma exhaust from the reactor can provide electrical power as well as thrust.”
“Magneto…” Dan stumbled over the word.
“Magnetohydrodynamic,” Vertientes finished for him.