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.