‘I still head up the drilling, do the heavy lifting, don’t worry about that,’ Haut replied. ‘I am the most hands-on oil man in Australia. But the businessmen I deal with now are more impressed by the office than the holes in the dirt.’

Cavalier looked at Donnelly, who laughed and said, ‘Hey, don’t put me in that category! I’m an oil man from way back. So was my daddy, God rest his soul. I love it that Al is a real driller. Gets his hands dirty.’

‘An industry magazine wants me to do a piece on your burgeoning mine operations,’ Cavalier said to Haut, who chuckled.

‘A nice colour piece about the lunatic with visions who is making good?’

‘No, I’m like the top scientists and geologists you have working with you. I’ll write about the pragmatic real areas, not the spiritual.’

They chatted for twenty minutes about the business, Cavalier as usual running a tape and taking notes. Then he asked, ‘Could you speak about your cold fusion inventions?’

‘It will save the planet from extinction,’ Donnelly chipped in.

‘You’re talking, what? War, the environment?’ Cavalier asked, glancing at both of them.

‘Many holocausts. I am going to develop technology that uses water as energy.’

Cavalier checked his tape. Never a dull moment with the Shaman, he thought.

‘I recall Einstein said something about that.’

‘He did,’ Haut said, his enthusiasm building with Cavalier’s interest. ‘So did Nikola Tesla. More recently it has been Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.’

Cavalier looked blank.

‘You don’t know them?’ Haut asked.

‘Expound, please.’

‘Fleischmann was an electrochemist at Southampton University. Pons chaired the University of Utah’s chemistry department. They developed cold fusion where they merged two or more nuclei at near room temperature. Fusion before this had happened at high temperatures, say in the intense heat and pressure found in a cold star. The press dubbed the new method a “star in a jar”. Those two believed their discovery would solve the world’s energy problems.’

‘I do recall them now. They went public and were ridiculed.’

‘It’s been the same for more than three decades. I met Fleischmann at his home near Stonehenge in England a few months before he died in 2012. We chatted and I told him my aims and said I would succeed. He left this mortal coil content knowing that his dream of replicating the furnace of the sun at room temperature in a jar of water was going to happen.’

‘Some scientists say it can’t be done,’ Cavalier said. ‘Others say it can, but that it’s maybe a decade away.’

‘Al aims to do it in far less time than that,’ Donnelly said.