Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, too near them for comfort. Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on for about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to talking about work. There was one group doing that already, Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered over, and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: it appeared they were excited by recent developments in their lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Continuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but it took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages too big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situations. This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellets of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusion results to power things.

“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk with us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpful, this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s so damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yananda off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave a space for emission afterward.”

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides at once, but there also had to be a vent for charged particles to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the problem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of it, which they thought they had solved at last; and when someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day’s lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politics, please.”