Showing Touchstone by William Walling

A more immediate threat than climate change, the mid-21st century energy dilemma inspires reclusive trillionaire Lyman Dysart ⎯ called “The Stockholder” by his privately owned company’s employees ⎯ to finance the research and development of humanity’s ultimate energy panacea: controlled nuclear fusion power generation. Plasma constituents of the patented “Omega Pinch” process are plentiful deuterium, and an ultra-scarce, fusible helium isotope found in quantity only on the Moon; this necessitates expensively strip-mining hydrogen-three from the lunar regolith. Semi-panic ensues in the minds and wallets of the OPEC/conventional energy cartel led by Vonex Chairman Belkin Reichert, who brandishes behind-the-scenes political influence to suborn fusion’s advent by promoting solar energy, and eventually nationalization of the newborn industry. The battle of wills and tactics climaxes when Dysart attempts to defeat nationalization by holding hostage his lunar mining venture, and its imperitive product, while the trillionaire's nuclear fusion propaganda campaign captures the public imagination by describing the innovative system as “. . . a plasma containment shell surrounded by huge cables, monstrous electromagnets and sophisticated ancillary equipments, at its heart a dervish of semi-vacuum burning so furiously that it emulates temperatures reigning at the center of the Sun, yet gives forth no light, but presumes to light the world in a beneficent, utopian glow.”