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“And then?” Stratt said.
He looked at his shoes. “We built a pilot plant—one square kilometer of mirror area. All of it focused on a large metal drum full of water on top of a tower. Boil the water, run a turbine, you know the drill. I had a crew checking the drum for leaks. When anyone’s in the tower, the mirrors are supposed to be angled away. But someone in the control room fired up the whole system when they thought they were starting a virtual test.”
He sighed. “Seven people. All dead in an instant. At least they didn’t suffer. Much. Someone had to pay. The victims were all New Zealanders, and so am I. So the government came after me. It was a farce of a trial.”
“And the embezzlement?” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah, that came up in the trial too. But I would have gotten away with it if the project had been successful. I’m not to blame here. I mean, yeah, stealing money, okay, I’m guilty of that. But I didn’t kill those people. Not through negligence or any other means.”
“Where were you when the accident happened?” Stratt said.
He paused.
“Where were you?” she repeated.
“I was in Monaco. On a vacation.”
“You’d been there for three months on that vacation. Gambling away your embezzled money.”
“I…have a gambling problem,” he said. “I admit that. I mean, it was gambling debt that made me embezzle in the first place. It’s a sickness.”
“And what if you had been doing your job instead of going on a bender for three months? What if you’d been there the day the accident happened? Would the accident still have happened?”
His expression was answer enough.
“Okay,” Stratt said. “Now we’re past the excuses and bullshit. You’re not going to convince me you’re an innocent scapegoat. And now you know that. So let’s move on: Tell me about blackpanels.”
“Yeah, okay.” He composed himself. “I’ve spent my whole life in the energy sector, so obviously Astrophage is really interesting to me. A storage medium like that—man, if it weren’t for what it’s doing to the sun, it would be the greatest stroke of luck for humanity in history.”
He shifted in his seat. “Nuclear reactors, coal plants, solar thermal plants…in the end they all do the same thing: Use heat to boil water, use the steam to drive a turbine. But with Astrophage, we don’t need any of that crap. It turns heatdirectlyinto stored energy. And it doesn’t even need a big heat differential. Just anything above 96.415 degrees.”
“We know that,” I said. “I’ve been using a nuclear reactor’s heat to breed up Astrophage for the last several months.”
“What’d you get? Maybe a few grams? My idea can get you a thousand kilograms per day. In a few years you’ll have enough for the wholeHail Marymission. It’ll take you longer than that to build the ship anyway.”
“All right, you have my attention,” I said. Of course, Stratt hadn’t told me anything about whatever “blackpanel” was.
“Get a square of metal foil. Pretty much any metal will do. Anodize it until it’s black. Don’t paint it—anodize it. Put clear glass over it and leave a one-centimeter gap between the glass and the foil. Seal the edges with brick, foam, or some other good insulator. Then set it out in the sun.”
“Okay, what good will that do?”
“The black foil will absorb sunlight and get hot. The glass will insulate it from outside air—any heat loss has to pass through the glass, and that’s slow. It’ll reach an equilibrium temperature well over one hundred degrees Celsius.”
I nod. “And at that temperature you can enrich Astrophage.”
“Yes.”
“But it would be ridiculously slow,” I said. “If you had a one-square-meter box and ideal weather conditions…say, one thousand watts per square meter of solar energy…”
“It’s about half a microgram per day,” he said. “Give or take.”
“That’s a far cry from ‘a thousand kilograms’ per day.”
He smiled. “It’s just a matter of how many square meters you make of it.”
“You’d need two trillion square meters to get a thousand kilograms per day.”
“The Sahara Desert isninetrillion square meters.”
