The technician’s reply was lost in a roar like a rocket taking off. The building rattled. Jake’s hearing blanked out, the noise was so intense. Clapping his hands to his ears, he turned enough so that he could see the gauges on the wall behind them. Dials were ratcheting upward.

Rogers was grinning broadly, hands pressed to his ears. A couple of the technicians had donned earphones; the rest covered their ears against the immense, bone-jangling noise. Younger stood like a statue, though, staring at the rig as it roared with the throats of a million dragons. The seconds stretched. Jake saw that the technicians also stood frozen at their posts, gaping at the MHD generator through the quivering glass partition. He himself stood rooted, frozen, nailed to the floor by the sheer overwhelming power of the generator’s roar. The MHD generator was unchanged to his staring eyes; Jake could see no flame, no motion at all except the trembling insistent vibration that made the very air shake and rattled his eyes in their sockets. His breath caught in his throat.

Then Younger stabbed the same finger at the same red button. The noise shut off abruptly. The vibrations stopped. All the gauges ran down to zero. Jake cautiously took his hands off his ears. Everything sounded muffled; Jake felt like his head was underwater. He squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. Nothing had changed, and yet …

Younger was beaming. He turned to Rogers and they slapped a high-five.

“Forty-eight megawatts!” Jake heard Younger’s delighted shout, but it was smothered, as if his ears were swaddled in cotton.

The technicians all looked happy, big grins as they flicked switches and pecked at buttons on the control board.

Rogers had pulled out a pocket calculator. He looked up and down the controls, tapping on its keypad.

Jake’s ears were ringing. He remembered going with Louise out to a pistol range, years ago. Even with earphones clapped to his head the noise of the guns firing kept his ears ringing for days afterward. Louise had been impressed that Jake hit the target nearly dead-center with most of his shots. She punched three holes through the tin roof of their shelter when she tried to fire an automatic.

“Seventy-two percent,” Rogers yelled, showing his calculator’s tiny screen to Younger. It sounded to Jake as if the man was speaking from the bottom of an echoing well.

Younger was all smiles. “We’re getting there,” he said. “We’re definitely getting there.”

The outer door swung open, sudden sunlight flooding into the test cell. Glynis Colwyn rushed in, obviously distressed about something.

“I heard the noise from a half mile up the road,” she shouted. “Don’t tell me you’ve run the test already!”

Glynis Colwyn

GLYNIS COLWYN