Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  But the money was not being spent on Kantrowitz’s dream of a pilot plant. Every private and university laboratory engaged in MHD research lined up for a piece of the pie, and the funding was dutifully parceled out to government labs and private companies —including Avco Everett—and to universities such as Stanford, Tennessee, and the University of Montana, where a Mansfield-inspired MHD Institute and testing facility were built.

  In the words of one disgruntled researcher, “They were spending more on MHD than ever, and getting less results.” The program had no real goal, no focus.

  “By that time the estimates of the cost of a pilot plant were $200 to $300 million,” Kantrowitz says. “Nobody had the courage to undertake that risk.”

  Undaunted, Kantrowitz urged Mansfield to push for an MHD program that would produce megawatts instead of research reports.

  The senator told Kantrowitz to write out a plan of action and Kantrowitz did, on a single sheet of paper. “I said we should build a pilot plant, and that’s it,” Kantrowitz recalls. The plan was enacted by the Congress, tacked onto another bill as a rider, and in 1976 Mansfield personally presented it to President Gerald Ford for his signature.

  But even that failed to produce an MHD pilot plant. There were no teeth in the law. “I was stupid enough to think that if the Congress passed the MHD action plan, it would result in action,” says Kantrowitz ruefully. “It did absolutely nothing.” The Department of Energy has been “studying” the plan for nearly ten years.

  By 1978 it was Kantrowitz’s turn to face mandatory retirement. He left Avco Everett and accepted a professorship at Dartmouth. “It’s very painful to retire when you’ve still got things to do,” he says.

  When the Reagan Administration swept into Washington early in 1981, one of its avowed aims was to dismantle the Department of Energy and all of its programs.

  But the new head of Avco Everett, R. W. (“Dutch”) Detra, and Vincent J. Coates, director of Special Projects, began a campaign with MHD enthusiasts in Montana and elsewhere. Working with congressmen and senators who opposed dissolving the Department of Energy, they were able to keep MHD funded at about $30 million per year through the first Reagan Administration.

  “The Massachusetts congressional delegation has been very helpful,” Coates says. “Particularly Nicholas Mavroules, Silvio Conte, and Edward P. Boland.” Congressmen from Montana and Tennessee, where MHD research efforts are under way, have also staunchly supported the program. So has powerful Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who believes energy technology is vital to national defense.

  Like ancient Gaul, the Department of Energy’s MHD program is divided into three major parts. Avco Everett is concentrating on the MHD channel, the pipe at the heart of the generator that extracts electrical energy from the ultra-hot stream of gas flowing through it. TRW Corporation’s Energy Technology Division in Redondo Beach, California, is developing special coal burners. And Babcock & Wilcox is building boilers that can take the still-hot gas coming out of an MHD generator and make steam that will run a conventional generator “downstream” of the MHD system.

  Robert Kessler is Avco Everett’s vice-president for energy technology, head of the MHD effort. He sees a pilot plant being built by 1995.

  “The Department of Energy plan calls for retrofitting an existing power plant with an MHD system in the early to mid-1990s,” says Kessler.

  But privately, many scientists who have worked on MHD nearly all their lives admit that even that date—twenty—five years later than Kantrowitz’s original estimation—may not be met. William D. Jackson, the “J” of HMJ Corporation, a small Washington-based energy research and development company, says, “A pilot plant in the early 1990s is just flat optimistic.” He believes that DOE’s current program of $30 million per year is far too small; $100 million per year is needed, Jackson claims.

  Kessler says, “What we’re trying to achieve is reliable operation of MHD equipment at sizes that are practical for commercial power generation. At this stage of the game, efficiency is not so important as predictability, economics, and reliability.” He lays heavy emphasis on reliability.

  Jackson agrees. “They’ve got to build something that a utility company would allow into one of its power plants!”

  The DOE plan calls for an MHD generator to be installed in an existing power plant as a “topping unit.” That is, the MHD system will start the process of converting heat to electricity. As the hot gas leaves the MHD generator, after having surrendered as much as fifty megawatts of electrical energy, it will be fed into the special boilers that will raise steam for the plant’s conventional turbogenerators, which will then make even more electricity from the same original coal-fired heat input.

  DOE has already indicated that it expects the MHD program’s industrial participants to share the costs of the pilot plant. The government will not foot the bill on tax money alone. Joseph McElwain, chairman and chief executive officer of Montana Power Company, has offered one of his utility’s power plants as the site for the demonstration retrofit. But the other industrial partners are looking askance at the idea of cost-sharing.

  “It could take twenty years before the money invested in a demonstration plant shows any profit,” says Avco Everett chief Detra. “Can a corporation afford to tie up millions of dollars for such a long time?”

  Kantrowitz now serves as one of fifteen advisors to the MHD Industrial Forum, an organization created by the companies involved in MHD development. To him, all this should have happened twenty years ago.

  “If we had built a pilot plant in the sixties,” he insists, “it wouldn’t have worked—at first. Then we’d figure out why it didn’t work, we’d fix it, and it would have worked.” A pilot plant in the 1990s will go through the same evolution. “It won’t work. You’ll have to fix it. What you might hope for is that you have a larger background of knowledge from which to fix it.”

  Kessler almost agrees. “If they’d built the pilot plant back in the sixties, we’d be ahead of where we are today.”

  But Jackson disagrees. If a pilot plant had been built in the 1960s and failed, “it would have killed MHD,” he says. “Just absolutely killed it.”

  Some of the scientists and engineers involved in the program today are deeply pessimistic. “The only kinds of experiments we do are the kinds that entail no risks,” says one of them. “That’s no way to make progress.”

  “The MHD program has become a minor pork barrel,” says another. “Its real aim is to satisfy the political forces that exist in Massachusetts, Montana, and Tennessee.”

  “We’re no closer to a pilot plant now than we were eighteen years ago,” Kantrowitz asserts flatly.

  Perhaps the gloomiest statement came from an engineer who has worked almost his entire professional life on MHD. “I used to hope to see MHD become practical and useful in my lifetime. Now I don’t think it will. I think I’ve been wasting my time.”

  “From the technical point of view there’s no reason why MHD can’t become commercially viable,” says Richard Rosa, the man who built the first working MHD generator, at Avco Everett in 1959. Now a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Montana, at Bozeman, Rosa is still carrying out MHD research and consulting with the nearby MHD Institute at Butte.

  The annual Washington budget battle, however, “really tears up the program,” according to Rosa. “Half the year everybody’s on hold.” He believes that the utility industry’s bad experiences with technological innovations such as nuclear power is discouraging the industry from investing the money required to make a commercial success of MHD.

  So the program is totally dependent on federal funding, with “a crisis every year.”

  The fear of massive budget deficits now pervading Washington led David Stockman’s Office of Management and Budget to “zero out” MHD in the fiscal year 1986 federal budget. This was not the first time MHD has been dropped from the White House’s budget plans. Similar efforts to stop all governme
nt funding of MHD have been successfully fought before. But there is more pressure now than ever to get the government out of the MHD business.

  The House of Representatives Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy Development and Applications approved a $28-million authorization for MHD. Coates believes the pro-MHD forces in Congress may eke out a budget somewhere between $25 and $30 million. But there is pressure from the White House to drop the program, once and for all.

  “At best, we’ll be able to keep the program alive from year to year,” Coates says. “But as long as we have this polite antagonism between government and private industry, the U.S. runs the risk of losing its lead in technology to countries where government and industry work together.”

  Japan, China, and the Soviet Union are pursuing their own MHD programs, based on the work originally done in the United States, Coates points out. “We may have to buy MHD generators from them,” he says.

  In September 1983 Kantrowitz was invited to Moscow to receive the Faraday Medal, presented by UNESCO to him and Soviet scientist A. E. Sheindlin for their contributions to MHD.

  Ironically, he never went to accept the medal. As he was preparing to leave for Moscow, the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007. Kantrowitz canceled his trip. UNESCO sent the medal to his home in New Hampshire.

  “It’s the last thing of significance that I’ve had to do with MHD,” he says sadly. “A medal instead of a pilot plant.”

  But a pilot plant was built in the 1960s. Near Moscow. Based largely on the work done in Massachusetts, the Russians have pushed ahead with the kind of MHD program that Kantrowitz was looking for. The Russian U-25 MHD plant worked well enough so that the Soviet government is starting construction of a 250-megawatt MHD plant at Ryazan, a city some 130 miles southeast of Moscow. Called the U-500, this power plant is expected to be delivering electricity before the end of the decade.

  It may be that the only way the United States will get MHD power plants in the 1990s will be to buy them from the Soviet Union—if the Russians will be willing to sell our own technology back to us.

  Born Again

  Assuming the UFO believers are right, and we are being infiltrated by a generally benign race of intelligent extraterrestrials, why have they come to Earth and what do they want of us?

  In an earlier story, “A Small Kindness” (see Prometheans, published by Tor Books in 1986), we saw the first meeting between Jeremy Keating and the alien Black Saint of the Third World, Kabete Rungawa.

  Now we see the result of that meeting, and how it changes Keating’s life. Changes it? In a literal sense, it ends his life.

  Which leads to the title of the story.

  The restaurant’s sign, out on the roadside, said Gracious Country Dining. There was no indication that just across the Leesburg Pike the gray unmarked headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency lay screened behind the beautifully wooded Virginia hills.

  Jeremy Keating sat by force of old habit with his back to the wall. The restaurant was almost empty, and even if it had been bursting with customers, they would all have been agency people—almost. It was the almost that would have worried him in the old days.

  Keating looked tense, expectant, a trimly built six-footer in his late thirties, hair still dark, stomach still flat, wearing the same kind of conservative bluish-gray three-piece suit that served almost as a uniform for agency men when they were safely home.

  Only someone who had known him over the past five years would realize that the pain and the sullen, smoldering anger that had once lit his eyes were gone now. In their place was something else, equally intense but lacking the hate that had once fueled the flames within him. Keating himself did not fully understand what was happening to him. Part of what he felt now was excitement, a fluttering, almost giddy anticipation. But there was fear inside him, too, churning in his guts.

  It had been easy to get into the agency; it would not be so easy getting out.

  He was halfway finished with his fruit-juice cocktail when Jason Lyle entered the quiet dining room and threaded his way through the empty tables toward Keating. Although he had never been a field agent, Lyle moved cautiously, walking on the balls of his feet, almost on tiptoe. Watching him, Keating thought that there must be just as many booby traps in the corridors of bureaucratic power as there are in the field. You don’t get to be section chief by bulling blindly into trouble.

  Keating rose as Lyle came to his table and extended his hand. They exchanged meaningless greetings, smiling at each other and commenting on the unbelievably warm weather, predicted an early spring and lots of sunshine, a good sailing season. When their waitress came, Lyle ordered a vodka martini; Keating asked for another glass of grapefruit juice.

  The last time Keating had seen Jason Lyle, the section chief had ordered him to commit a murder. Terminate with extreme prejudice was the term used. Keating had received such orders, and obeyed them willingly, half a dozen times over the previous four years. Until this last one, a few weeks ago.

  Now Lyle sat across the small restaurant table, in this ersatz rustic dining room with its phony log walls and gingham tablecloths, and gave Keating the same measured smile he had used all those other times. But Lyle’s eyes were wary, probing, trying to see what had changed in Keating.

  Lyle was handsome in a country-club, old-money way: thick silver hair impeccably coiffed, his chiseled features tanned and taut from years of tennis and sailing. He was vain enough to wear contact lenses instead of bifocals, and tough enough to order death for his own agents, once he thought they were dangerous to the organization—or to himself.

  Keating listened to the banalities and let his gaze slide from Lyle to the nearby windows where the bright Virginia sunshine was pouring in. He knew that Lyle had carefully reviewed all the medical reports, all the debriefing sessions and psychiatric examinations that he had undergone in the past three weeks. They had wrung his brain dry with their armory of drugs and electronics. But there was one fact Keating had kept from them, simply because they had never in their deepest probes thought to ask the question. One simple fact that had turned Keating’s life upside down: the man that he had been ordered to assassinate was not a human being. He had not been born on Earth.

  Keating nodded at the right places in Lyle’s monologue and volunteered nothing. The waitress took their lunch order, went away, and came back eventually with their food.

  Finally, as he picked up his fork and stared down at what the menu had promised as sliced Virginia ham, Lyle asked as casually as a snake gliding across a meadow:

  “So tell me, Jeremy, just what happened out there in Athens?”

  Keating knew that the answers he gave over this luncheon would determine whether he lived or died.

  “I got a vision of a different world, Jason,” he answered honestly. “I’m through with killing. I want out.”

  Lyle’s eyes flashed, whether at Keating’s use of his first name or his intended resignation or his mention of a vision, it was impossible to tell.

  “It’s not that simple, you know,” he said.

  “I know.” And Keating did. Lyle had to satisfy himself that this highly trained agent had not been turned around by the Soviets. Or, worse still, by the fledgling World Government.

  “Why?” Lyle asked mildly. “Why do you want to quit?”

  Keating closed his eyes for a moment, trying to decide on the words he must use. Each syllable must be chosen with scrupulous care. His life hung in the balance.

  But in that momentary darkness, alone with only his own inner vision, Keating saw the man he had been, the life he had led. The years as an ordinary Foreign Service officer, a very minor cog in the giant bureaucratic machinery of the Department of State, moving from one embassy to another every two years. He saw Joanna, young and loving and alive, laughing with him on the bank of the Seine, dancing with him on the roof garden of the hotel that steaming-hot Fourth of July in Delhi, smiling at him through her exhaustion as she lay in the
hospital bed with their newborn son at her breast.

  And he saw her being torn apart by the raging mob attacking the embassy at Tunis. While Qaddafi’s soldiers stood aside and watched, grinning. Saw his infant son screaming his life away as typhus swept the besieged embassy. Saw himself giving his own life, his body and mind and soul—gladly—to avenge their deaths. The training, where his anger and hatred had been honed to a cutting edge. The missions to track and kill the kind of men whom he blamed for the murder of his wife and child. Missions that always began in Lyle’s office, in the calm, climate-controlled sanctuary of the section chief, and his measured reptilian smile.

  Keating opened his eyes. “You let them take me, that first mission, didn’t you?”

  The admission was clear on Lyle’s surprised face. “What are you talking about?”

  “My first mission for you, the job in Jakarta. You allowed them to find me, didn’t you? You tipped them off. Those interrogation sessions, that slimy little colonel of theirs with his razor—he was the final edge on my training, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s crazy,” Lyle snapped. “We shot our way in there and saved your butt, didn’t we?”

  Keating nodded. “At the proper moment.”

  “That was years ago.”

  But I still carry the scars, Keating replied silently. They still burn.

  Lyle fluttered a hand in the air, as if waving away the past. Leaning forward across the table slightly, he said in a lowered voice, “I need to know, Jeremy. What happened to you in Athens? Why do you suddenly want to quit?”

  Keating did not close his eyes again. He had seen enough of the past, and the shame of it seethed inside him. “Let’s just say that I experienced a religious conversion.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ve been reborn.” Keating smiled, realizing the aptness of it. “I have renounced my old life.”

  For the first time in the years Keating had known the man, Lyle made no attempt to mask his feelings. “Born again? Fat chance! I’ve heard a lot of strange stories in my time, but this one …”