Steve Alten - Vostok

“Susan?”

“Thank God. I thought you were having a stroke.” Susan McWhite, Ming Liao’s former assistant, turned to the dangerous-looking fellow in a buzz-cut and dark suit leaning inside my open window. “Jim, tell the driver we need to skip the hearing and get Dr. Wallace to a hospital.”

I turned to my head of security. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just tired from the flight. How soon until we arrive?”

Jim Clancy checked the GPS on his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes. You sure you’re okay, boss? You look kinda pale.”

“I’m fine.”

The armed bodyguard waited until I closed the window before signaling to our motorcade over his radio. Then he climbed back into the front passenger seat, and we continued our journey through the District of Columbia.

The Subcommittee on Energy and Power falls under the auspices of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, its congressional members exercising control over the broadest jurisdiction of any congressional committee on Capitol Hill. These powers include overseeing national energy policy, energy conservation and information, energy regulation and utilization, regulation of nuclear facilities and waste, the Clean Air Act, and all related Homeland Security issues.

Democrats sat behind a stretch of elevated wood-paneled tables at the front of the assembly room. Chairing this morning’s event was Congresswoman Cassandra Boyd of Texas’s twelfth district.

I found myself seated at a small table on the assembly room floor next to my attorney, Scott Schwartzberg, whose team of litigators occupied the first row of seats behind us. Behind them were my fellow defendants — inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. The rest of the galley overflowed with private citizens, all of whom had to pass through security.

I wondered if the members of the media who were seated on the floor by my table had been subjected to similar scrutiny.

Scott pointed out the woman seated behind my research assistant. “Jaqui Billups; she’s from the New York Times . She’s been hounding me all week to set up an interview. Next to her is Dawn Warfield, a video columnist from The Huffington Post . She wants to do a podcast before we leave the building.”

“I’ll do the Post . Forget Billups. The CIA will redact anything positive in her article. What about 60 Minutes ?”

“I’m still waiting for a confirmation.”

Congressman Boyd took her place behind the dais, adjusting her microphone. “The subcommittee will come to order. This morning we’re going to hear statements from members of the science community who oppose H.R. 1691, the Alternative Energy Fraud Act, sponsored by Congressman Jaime Watkins of Kentucky, and our esteemed co-chair, Lorey Schmidt. This much-needed piece of legislation will protect investors who have lost vast sums of money to charlatans who claim to have designed clean, abundant, and non-polluting energy sources, only to learn later that they were duped.

“Our first witness is Dr. Zachary Wallace. It should be noted for the record that Dr. Wallace is not a physicist. He is, in fact, a marine biologist who earned his fifteen minutes of fame resolving the monster mystery at Loch Ness. Seven years ago, Dr. Wallace survived a manned descent into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. When the mission lost its funding, Dr. Wallace returned to his teaching position at Cambridge. At some point he left the university to work with John Searl, the British inventor who is best known for the Searl Effect Generator, a device Searl claimed could levitate like a flying saucer, though conveniently it was never filmed doing so. Dr. Wallace refined the design so that it functions as an electrical generator. He then used investor capital, most of it coming from the Tanaka Institute, to fund his own company, Wallace Energy, a privately held corporation with headquarters in Edinburgh and San Francisco.

“Dr. Wallace, you have been granted five minutes to explain to the subcommittee how this device works. Then we’ll open it up to questions.”

I waited while a large flatscreen television was rolled into position before the assembly and powered on. Using a DVD remote, I pushed PLAY.

Appearing on screen was a doughnut-shaped metal disk the size of a dinner plate. Spaced out along its surface were three one-inch-wide rotating rings.

“Energy surrounds us. The challenge is to convert it to power, defined as voltage multiplied by current to equal wattage. This is the Vostok, a closed-circuit perpetual generator. It produces a quantum vacuum flux field using zero point energy. It is powered by the electrons that perpetually surround us, producing clean and unlimited electricity. As you can see, its doughnut-shape design contains three circular ring plates. Held within these ring plates are rollers, each the size of a D battery. These rollers, along with their ring plates, possess a magnetic north and south pole. As a result, the rollers float on the magnetic field without actually touching the ring plate.

“The process of rapidly circulating these rollers around the ring plates in order to generate electricity begins when one powers up the positively charged neodymium core. Negatively charged electrons immediately rush into the device, where they join together to form boson pairs. The pairs compress and then exit through the central core to the first outer ring, where they cause the twelve rollers to accelerate to speeds averaging 250 miles an hour. From there they pass through a magnetic layer that both excites and pulls them through the second ring, where they cause these rollers to revolve at a velocity exceeding 600 miles an hour. Finally, the electrons exit to the copper emitter layer, where they join trillions of other boson pairs in ring three, spinning these rollers at over 1,500 miles an hour.

“A switch directs the generated electricity through standard coils, completing the electrical circuit. Unlike conventional generators that heat up after prolonged use, the Vostok remains cool no matter how long it runs. There’s no fuel needed and no toxins released. The unit is powered solely by electrons entering it and the unit and the internal tensions of the atoms. It is, literally, a source of endless clean energy.”

Several subcommittee members stood and applauded, irking their chairman who looked down her nose to address me. “Theories are different than working models, Dr. Wallace. Where’s your prototype?”

My blood pressure ticked upward. “In fact, Chairman Boyd, we had thirteen working models of varying sizes and outputs that were all beta-tested. Three were designed to power cars and trucks, two for trains, and two larger models for commercial jets. The rest were designed to power single-family homes and high-rise commercial structures. Our entire manufacturing plant in Edinburgh ran on a single unit no larger than this table.”

“And where are these prototypes now?”

“Perhaps you should ask the two CIA agents, posing as technicians, who stole the prototypes from our R and D safe shortly before my Edinburgh factory burned to the ground.”

“Sir, you dare to accuse the CIA? Where is your proof?”

“You mean that I was robbed, or that the thieves were CIA agents? Maybe they were MAJESTIC-12. Does it matter? Whoever they are, they’re being funded by Congress with zero oversight. These guys make their own rules and don’t care who they hurt.”

The chair held up a CD file. “The official report indicates the fire was a direct result of your invention overheating.”

“The official report, congresswoman, was prepared by the same investigative firm who cleared British Petroleum in last year’s oil rig explosion in the North Sea.”

“Why is it, Dr. Wallace, that every inventor who fails to produce a working model of their so-called ‘new energy technology’ always has a conspiracy story to tell?”