Fiction River: How to Save the World

by Fiction River

  Willy looked at his watch. “It’s getting late—”

  “Later than you think,” said the white-haired man.

  “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “If there is a tomorrow, yes.”

  The waiter approached then, holding up a leather folder. “Excuse me? Who’s signing for the drinks?”

  They all looked at each other…and no one leapt to be first.

  Introduction to “Positive Message”

  William H. Keith is a man of many talents. He’s written more than 150 titles, including short stories, nonfiction, and novels. His work includes geopolitical technothrillers, science fiction, military fiction, and military SF. It has earned him recognition ranging from an H.G. Wells Award and a Newbery nomination to New York Times bestseller status and a Guest of Honor position at Confluence. He has been a guest lecturer in future science at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and adjunct faculty for a graduate genre writing course at Seton Hill College. He considers himself to be an overnight success…and it only took him thirty years to get there.

  His thoughts on writing “Positive Message”: “Every problem we face as a species, from climate change to overpopulation to water shortages to poverty, is connected with our increasing need for clean, cheap energy. Helium-3 fusion offers us an escape from an otherwise cold, dark future, with zero radioactive waste and not having to pave the state of Arizona with solar cells. The single best rationale for the commercialization of space is the possibility of mining large quantities of helium-3, transforming our future. I first wrote about helium-3 in an SF novel called Free Fall, and have wanted to return to the topic for a long time.”

  I’ve known and worked with Bill for years (including copy-editing the novel he mentions above—one of the best hard science fiction mysteries I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading), and can always count on him to give me a story that is exactly what I’m looking for—squarely on topic, expertly-written, and always making an impact.

  The following tale is no exception.

  Positive Message

  William H. Keith

  “Down twelve…a little to the right…five meters…four…”

  “Kicking up some dust…”

  “Copy. Two meters…contact light!”

  “Engine shutdown!”

  The bone-rattling vibration switched off, a blessed relief. Thom Pollard and Jack Resnewski, seated side-by-side in the cramped control cabin, grinned at each other like maniacs through their helmet visors.

  “Fremantle,” Resnewski said. “This is Apollo Basin Camp One. The Sundance has landed!”

  The time delay was almost three static-crackling seconds long before the reply came back through their helmet earphones. “We copy you down, Sundance. Congratulations!”

  “Good onya, mates,” a second voice added in a thick Aussie accent. “Now stop with the sillybuggers and off to work with you!”

  Pollard chuckled. “You wanna come up and make us, Dickie?”

  “Dickie” was Dr. Richard Corbell, at Fremantle Mission Control, and the CEO of Sunrisearth. It wasn’t every day you got to tell the boss to piss off, even in jest.

  “I’ll pass on that, Jack,” Corbell replied. “But do see if you can attend to a little business while you’re there, right?”

  “We’ll take that under advisement,” Resnewski said. “My God! We actually freakin’ made it!”

  “That’s right, Yank,” Corbell said, “and it only took you another…what? Sixty-five years?”

  “Sixty-two years,” the American replied, “since Apollo 17.”

  Sundance, squat and splayed-legged, had touched down dead-on target, half a kilometer from the Apollo Basin Mine. Resnewski and Pollard could see the base clearly in the bright, early-morning sun, row upon row of waiting return canisters, the four stitched-together silos of the processor plant, and the computer-perfect grid of the strip mine stretching out to the northern horizon. Three of the facility’s four ‘dozers were visible, each slowly dragging along its own cloud of dust above the lunar surface.

  “Where is everyone?” Resnewski joked. “Not a soul in sight.”

  In fact, the place was lifeless, the product of six years of teleoperated robotics by Mitsubishi.

  “Too right, mate,” Pollard said, unstrapping himself from the pilot’s station. “Let’s hop to it.”

  Resnewski was first on the surface, stepping down into harsh sunlight, and the glare of what Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, had referred to as “magnificent desolation.”

  They had a lot to do, and not much time to do it.

  ***

  The most powerful man on Earth was furious.

  “Do we know it’s helium-3?” he demanded. “Has this been confirmed?”

  A projection wall in the CEO’s darkened executive office showed a grainy, black and white photo of the lunar surface from overhead. Tractors were antlike dots, each trailing its own dust cloud.

  “Our analyses show a seventy-percent correlation,” Jonathan Michaels, the VP in charge of the company’s vast and labyrinthine Department of Public Relations, replied. “That goes up to ninety-five plus when you take in the probability that Dynospace has been acquired by Sunrisearth and is now a wholly-owned subsidiary. The structures east of Perth are definitely helium-3 reactors. There’s no question about that.”

  “And why the hell didn’t we know about this sooner?” Vincent Faulkner thundered back. “I told you to keep an eye on those bastards!”

  Frank Murdock, the corporate Technology Officer, spread his hands. “The Moon is a big place, sir. A surface area equal to all of Africa. We knew something was going on with the Japanese launches…but we didn’t know where to look.”

  “And this commercial launch that landed there today? Is it part of the construction? Or are they bringing back product?”

  “We honestly don’t know, sir,” Murdock said. “Their transmissions are tightly encrypted, and we haven’t been able to get a reliable asset inside Dynospace. Not yet.”

  “What about the other supermajors?” Faulkner asked. “Any indication that they’re…interested in this?”

  “We’re pretty sure there have been offers, Mr. Faulkner,” Michaels said. “Very lucrative offers. Apparently all rejected.”

  “We need a wedge, something to make these people see reason. Or we’ll have to go hot on their ass.”

  “Yes, Mr. Faulkner.”

  Faulkner dismissed the men and watched them walk out. There had to be a way to snap these small-time players up…especially before one of the other supermajors got to them. He wasn’t convinced that helium-3 fusion was viable, but if there was even a chance in hell…

  He touched a pressure panel on his desk, and the phonebud in his ear lit up. “Carol? Get me Stross.”

  ***

  The celebration was still going strong in the Fremantle Mission Control Center, where several dozen engineers, technicians, and corporate executives poured champagne, hugged one another, laughed, clapped, and cheered. In his glass-walled office overlooking the consoles below, Dr. Corbell scowled at his visitor. “When?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Fred Wittgenstein replied, terse and all business. “It hit North America first. It’s just started in Japan, and China will be next.”

  “What’s it saying?”

  Wittgenstein shrugged. “Same-ol’, same-ol’. All negative. Nuclear fusion is a dry well…decades of development and trillions of dollars, and nothing to show for it. An expensive boondoggle we can’t afford in today’s austere economic climate. There’s a new twist, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. If anything new does come out of fusion research, it’ll be from ExEm.”

  “Ah! So at least we know who’s behind it.”

  “Probably,” Wittgenstein agreed, “though there’s a chance that’s a false flag. It’s most probably a set-up for another takeover attempt.”

  “Count on it,” Corbell growled. He glanced out through the gla
ss at the command center and its mob of jubilant engineers below. “If we can pull this mission off, we might stand a better chance.”

  “We have a list of fresh RM salvos, sir,” Wittgenstein told him, holding out a datapad.

  Corbell accepted the pad and glanced down the list of memes. “Clean…unlimited cheap energy…zero harmful radioactive waste…” He handed the pad back. “Nothing new here.”

  “What can we say that hasn’t been said a thousand times already? But the publop polls are new.”

  “And what does big-data public opinion say today?”

  “Most people are against the oilfield wars…up five percent. Most people hate Big Oil…up two percent. Most people like the idea of clean energy…up ten percent.”

  “Strewth, this won’t cut her, mate,” Corbell said, shaking his head. “Not by five hundred K of outback! We need more. Something big. Something that will make every cobber on the planet sit up and take notice!”

  “That’s exactly what we’re doing here, Mr. Corbell,” Wittgenstein said, nodding at the control room. “All we need is a bit of positive Netplay.”

  ***

  “Cameras set up?” Pollard asked.

  “They’re rolling,” Resnewski replied. He looked up at the Sundance towering above them, pinned in the harsh morning light. “They should’ve had automatic cameras, though, catching us when we landed.”

  “Still, no worries, right? She does make for a pretty postcard.”

  The exterior of the Sundance was, indeed, a colorful sight, though Resnewski would have drawn the line at pretty. Dynospace was a commercial space corporation, not a government agency, like the last bunch to have landed men on the moon. Her glossy white hull, therefore, looked like a NASCAR racing shell, with advertising crowded everywhere. Ad space for McDonalds, Nike, Walmart, Microsoft, Sunrisearth, Mitsubishi, and a dozen other logos all together couldn’t foot the bill for landing Sundance in the Apollo Basin, but every little bit helped. The only thing better, more fitting, Resnewski thought, would have been if ExEm or some of the other big energy conglomerates had been up there, too.

  But then, that was most of the problem, wasn’t it?

  Pollard checked a monitor. “We have sat-connect,” he said. “And Fremantle acknowledges ROS. You’re good to go in three…two…”

  The final “one” was silent, as Pollard held up one gloved finger, then pointed at him. Resnewski turned to face the camera, with the landing gear assembly of the Sundance visible behind him like a huge, white spider. “Hello to the people of Earth,” he said brightly. “This is Jack Resnewski and Thom Pollard, coming to you live from the Apollo Basin on the lunar far side! A little pre-Christmas surprise for all you good people of the good, green Earth.…”

  ***

  Vincent Faulkner stared at the television monitor—one of two dozen displays occupying the projection screen on the east wall of his office. He usually had the major Net channels playing there, sound muted, so that he was aware of breaking stories. The caption Live from the Moon appeared across the bottom of several screens, which showed a space-suited figure in front of some sort of landing module. The story had broken on CNN just a few minutes earlier…though it apparently had been playing big on the Net feeds for almost thirty minutes now. He selected one of the screens and bumped up the sound.

  “…and the key to everything,” the figure was saying, “is energy. With enough energy, we can purify water and move it to the places on Earth that need it most. With enough energy, we can develop new and cleaner forms of transportation. With enough energy, we can break this vicious, desperate cycle of wars and big-corporate piracy that threatens the very survival of Humankind! We’re bringing you a new age of clean, cheap energy, the energy of the Sun itself, by way of the Moon.…”

  Faulkner snapped off the sound. He’d heard it all before. Once, he’d almost believed it.

  Now, though, even if it were true, he refused to accept it. Not with ExEm’s survival on the line.

  ***

  “Mr. Wittgenstein!”

  “Yes. There, in the back.” The pressroom was crowded with journalists.

  “You’re saying your company has cracked the fusion problem?”

  “The fusion problem has been cracked for a long time,” Wittgenstein said. “Specifically, helium-3 fusion has been well understood since the late 20th century. It was demonstrated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, oh, twenty years ago or so. The problem has been getting enough helium-3 to fuel the reaction. The stuff doesn’t occur naturally on Earth, unless you wait for radioactive tritium decay. Over there, yes?”

  “Mr. Wittgenstein…the National Fusion Initiative in the States has been promising cheap energy since…well, since forever! What’s different about you?”

  “You mean besides the fact that we’re not trying to create the temperatures and pressures that exist at the core of the Sun by stuffing large quantities of money into the thing?” There was appreciative laughter, and Wittgenstein pushed ahead.

  “Okay, there are a number of different paths to nuclear fusion,” he went on. “Unlike nuclear fission, which splits large atoms like uranium-235 to release energy, fusion takes light atoms—isotopes of hydrogen or helium—and forces them together, releasing even more energy in the process. We can use deuterium—that’s hydrogen with one neutron instead of none—or tritium—which is hydrogen with two neutrons—or we can use helium-3, a light isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron, instead of the usual two and two.

  “Now, a lot of the fusion research of the past sixty years has focused on fusing deuterium with tritium, a very efficient reaction that releases one neutron, an atom of ordinary helium-4, plus 17.6 million electron volts. That’s a lot of energy…but the problem is that high-speed neutron. It’s dangerous, hard to control, and tough to shield against. And tritium is radioactive, another problem. We’re focusing on a completely different reaction—fusing two atoms of helium-3, which results in two hydrogen atoms, an atom of helium-4, and about 12.9 million electron volts. Not quite as energetic as the other, you see… but it releases no dangerous neutron radiation, and neither the reactants nor the output are radioactive at all. Safe, clean, and extremely efficient. We do still need high plasma temperatures to effect the helium-3 reaction, higher than for deuterium-tritium fusion, in fact, but the product, the output, is easy to control with a magnetic field and converts directly into electrical energy.”

  “And helium-3 comes from the Moon?”

  “That’s right, among other places. Helium-3 is abundant in the solar wind—the Sun spits out clouds of the stuff constantly, but Earth’s magnetic field deflects most of it, and it never reaches us. There are no magnetic fields on the Moon, though, and for billions and billions of years, both helium-3 and ordinary helium-4 have been falling on the entire lunar surface, where it’s trapped in the regolith…about fifty parts per billion. We estimate there’s something like a million tons of it on the Moon’s surface…that estimate is based on studies of rocks brought back from the Apollo Moon landings sixty-some years ago. And all we have to do is shovel up dirt and process it in automated refineries. Yes…up front.”

  “And how much is a million tons in terms of energy? How many barrels of oil?”

  Wittgenstein smiled. That question had been from a plant, a Dynospace employee placed in the crowd of reporters to let him make the crucial point.

  “Remember the old Space Shuttle? The cargo bay of one of those could carry about twenty tons of cargo to low Earth orbit…though they weren’t designed to travel to the Moon and back, of course. We calculate that just forty tons of helium-3, two shuttle loads, would power the United States for a year…while eight shuttle loads would power the entire world. In terms of Barrel of Oil Equivalents…that’s roughly eighteen to twenty billion BOE per year for the United States…and something like sixty billion for the entire planet. So…a million tons of helium-3? At our present rate of usage, I’m afraid that will only last us about sixteen tho
usand years…” He waited for the laughter to subside, before adding, “In short, ladies and gentlemen, Humankind’s energy problems are solved, once and for all.…”

  ***

  Humanity’s energy problems solved? Not if Vincent M. Faulkner could help it.…

  He snapped off the sound once more, scowling. Faulkner was not an evil man, but he was practical, and he did have his skeptical eye focused on the bottom line. During the past decades, he’d seen plenty of reports on helium-3 and the 3He–3He fusion reaction. He knew the thing would work; hell, twenty years earlier he’d submitted a report to the then-CEO of the petroleum supermajor that had later reorganized as ExEm. The report had noted the fact that Earth’s petroleum industries had entered the long dreaded period of peak oil, that oil production was dwindling year to year, and at current rates would be gone—gone—long before the end of the century. The world had lost faith in fission plants in the wakes of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and no new plants had been constructed for decades. And even the most ardent environmentalist had to admit that solar, wind, and wave power would never provide more than twenty percent of the world’s energy needs at best.

  So why not fusion?

  For the simple facts that billions had been invested in Big Fusion since the 1960s with only incremental progress, and with the budget cutbacks of the Great Recession, research along those lines by the supermajors had all but stopped. Because billions had been invested in searching for new oil fields, and especially in the further exploitation of the old ones. Massive fracking programs had revitalized the all-but-dry fields beneath Romania, Indonesia, Texas, and the Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Hundreds of billions more had been allotted to synthetic fuels, to man-made hydrocarbons costing only a little more than the current benchmark of $200 per barrel. ExEm and the handful of other supermajors would provide the fuel to power human civilization…but they would still do so at a healthy profit.