Trade World Saga 1: Manual Interpretation by Ken Pence Page A

you do this, since this part is really your baby?"
    Tod got up and walked over to the display board. He was grinning from ear to ear and looked more like an imbecilic football player than a physicist.
    "About a week after we started on the project, Joel figured out the mechanics of the power production and Steve figured out how power generation might be controlled but they both really didn't understand the process of the power generation. What we had, but we didn't know it, was a fusion generator that weighed about three kilograms."
    "Wait a minute," Fran interrupted, "I thought a fusion reaction took millions of degrees of heat and needed a tremendous amount of energy to start it. The first successful experiment with cold fusion wasn’t cold fusion at all but an unusual chemical reaction."
    "Well, you're right and wrong," Tod answered patiently. "What this belt has is cold fusion. It takes a highly sophisticated apparatus to produce the catalyst but once you know what the catalyst is, and we know now, you can use deuterium and produce power in tremendous amounts by varying tiny amounts of deuterium, and I mean minute amounts . It was the fact that it was a sealed system that threw us. It was like having a cathode with no anode or one side of an electrical circuit. It didn’t make sense until we threw out some of our old preconceptions. How can you have something producing tremendous energy and no heat? It was contrary to everything we thought we knew. Of course a hundred years ago they laughed at people who suggested there were regions of the earth that moved – tectonic plates.”
    “Susan, I'm going to need your help if we're going to make a copy of this; the casing is giving us a fit. To make things ultra simple, this catalyst allows the deuterium to fuse to produce helium with energy released as a directed field of energy, or in this case, a circulating cool plasma. It produces no heat. No. Before you ask…we don’t know why. We use this released energy to produce electricity with the damnedest, miniature closed, magnetohydrodynamic widget you ever saw. This thing is a combination of the slickest principles combined with the crudest control methods. We're gonna’ be able to fix the crude control methods with some of our own. The controls for the energy production prohibit us using electronic switching and limiting functions so we are going to use nano-fluidic controls with electronic controls further away," Tod said still beaming.
    "What good does all this do us if we have to produce some complicated, expensive catalyst?" Fran asked.
    "Good point," Tod said, now really grinning. "It so happens an old professor of mine works at the plasma physics research center here and a by-product of some of the older experiments can be easily gathered from existing equipment or current reactors now that we know this by-product (the catalyst) is of use."
    "I see that your discovery will mean jobs for all of us and fame for you," Ling said sardonically, "but what are we doing our work for. I don't see how our work ties in with your power supply," she said, turning her attention from Tod back to Andrew.
    Andrew decided that now was the time to bare his idea to the group.
    "What have you been doing these last few weeks?" Susan asked. "You have been flitting from lab to lab and then you've disappeared for the entire last week. What have you been working on? I have a sneaking suspicion, but I want to hear it from your mouth before I'll believe it."
    Andrew felt justified in his faith of Susan at that moment and decided to make her number two in charge of the project. She was forceful and did have a gift for administration.
    "I have been working with several of the university staff to work out technical problems but when we get that power supply completed; my work can really begin. I've made most of the preliminary calculations for what we found in the other portion of the belt. I've figured out how the belt could produce the intense