Fitzhugh chuckled. "No. Some problems came up with Snookums. She'll be
in session for an hour yet. She asked me to convey her apologies." He
gestured toward the coffee urn. "But the coffee's all made, so you may
as well have a cup."
Mike was thankful he had not had a dozen cups in the wardroom. "I don't
mind if I do, Doctor." He sat down while Fitzhugh poured a cup.
"Cream? Sugar?"
"Black, thanks," Mike said.
There was an awkward silence for a few seconds while Mike sipped at the
hot, black liquid. Then Mike said, "Dr. Fitzhugh, you said, at the
briefing back on Earth, that Snookums knows too much about nuclear
energy. Can you be more specific than that, or is it too hush-hush?"
Fitzhugh took out his briar and began filling it as he spoke. "We don't
want this to get out to the general public, of course," he said
thoughtfully, "but, as a ship's officer, you can be told. I believe
some of your fellow officers know already, although we'd rather it
wasn't discussed in general conversation, even among the officers."
Mike nodded wordlessly.
"Very well, then." Fitzhugh gave the tobacco a final shove with his
thumb. "As a power engineer, you should be acquainted with the 'pinch
effect,' eh?"
It was a rhetorical question. The "pinch effect" had been known for over
a century. A jet of highly ionized gas, moving through a magnetic field
of the proper structure, will tend to pinch down, to become narrower,
rather than to spread apart, as a jet of ordinary gas does. As the
science of magnetohydrodynamics had progressed, the effect had become
more and more controllable, enabling scientists to force the nuclei of
hydrogen, for instance, closer and closer together. At the end of the
last century, the Bending Converter had almost wrecked the economy of
the entire world, since it gave to the world a source of free energy.
Sam Bending's "little black box" converted ordinary water into helium
and oxygen and energy--plenty of energy. A Bending Converter could be
built relatively cheaply and for small-power uses--such as powering a
ship or automobile or manufacturing plant--could literally run on air,
since the moisture content of ordinary air was enough to power the
converter itself with plenty of power left over.
Overnight, all previous forms of power generation had become obsolete.
Who would buy electric power when he could generate his own for next to
nothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipment
were rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds of
steam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors--all useless for power
purposes. The value of the stock in those companies dropped to zero and
stayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almost
equally devastating results--for there was no longer any need for the
millions of miles of copper cable that linked the power plants with the
consumer.
The Depression of 1929-42 couldn't even begin to compare with The Great
Depression of 1986-2000. Every civilized nation on Earth had been hit
and hit hard. The resulting governmental collapses would have made the
disaster even more complete had not the then Secretary General of the
UN, Perrot of Monaco, grabbed the reins of government. Like the
Americans Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, he had forced through
unconstitutional bills and taken extra-constitutional powers. And, like
those Americans, he had not done it for personal gain, but to preserve
the society. He had not succeeded in preserving the old society, of
course, but he had built, almost single-handedly, a world government--a
new society on the foundations of the old.
All these thoughts ran through Mike the Angel's mind. He wondered if
Snookums had discovered something that would be as much a disaster to
the world economy as the Bending Converter had been.
Fitzhugh got out his miniature flame thrower and puffed his pipe alight.
"Snookums," he said, "has discovered a method of applying the pinch
effect to lithium hydride. It's a batch reaction rather than a flow
reaction such as the Bending Converter uses. But it's as simple to build
as a Bending Converter."
"Jesus," said Mike the Angel softly.
Lithium hydride. LiH. An atom of hydrogen to every atom of lithium. If a
hydrogen nucleus is driven into the lithium nucleus with sufficient
force, the results are simple: