- I don't think this will work.
"I said I need it quiet!" Bill snapped at his overweight subordinate as he prepared to fire up the fusion reactor for the third time.
It had been six months since Onigumo had sailed, and in addition to working with heavy machinery during the day, Bill spent most nights working on the reactor in the vast cavern he had dug himself.
The design of the cave was developed with the help of chief engineers, but Bill dug the cave himself.
However, this was only one small part of a huge project.
The project involved installing power generators and distribution panels in solid rock, then running power cables to huge transistors that fed high-capacity batteries.
These batteries then provided power to the entire island system, which was to be connected through relay stations evenly distributed throughout the island's electrical grid.
Every aspect of this project was a real headache, and it simply would not have been possible without a competent workforce that was willing to do anything.
Plus, Bill couldn't resist trying to figure out exactly how everything worked.
On the one hand, it was a big responsibility, but on the other, he spent weeks studying the operating principles of a thermonuclear reactor.
This fusion reactor was essentially a magnetic generator of incredible design.
Using antigravity and ultra-thin lasers, plasma was created and rotated into a torus shape by four colliding laser beams.
This rotation creates a powerful magnetic field, and this magnetic field is converted into electricity when the fifth laser shoots up through the torus, creating a reverse current through the magnetic field.
This process is called magnetic induction and was one of the oldest known ways to create electricity on Earth.
However, unlike Earth, where electricity is typically generated by huge turbines spinning against magnetic fields, this world had naturally occurring antigravity particles that could be found in the clouds on the sky islands.
Thanks to this natural advantage, Vegapunk and his scientists working on energy systems did not have to worry about any solid barriers to contain the thermonuclear reaction.
Even without these physical barriers, lasers could create the induction needed to convert magnetism into electricity.
All these processes are easy to explain, but in practice it took Bill weeks to understand them, even despite his almost perfect memory.
Once he had a relative understanding of the mathematical and physical principles of operation, he realized the enormous difference between understanding it on paper and actually building the machine.
The reactor's size was impressive. It occupied a space the size of a basketball court and stood forty feet tall at its center. Its enormous size was due to the use of five ultra-thin lasers, and precisely because of this, the design was free of any unnecessary parts. Everything had to be perfectly clean and perfectly aligned.
That's why Bill reviewed the schematics again and again. This was his third attempt to start the reactor. The first two had failed due to misalignment of parts or dirty lenses.
But now was the moment of truth, and everything had to be done correctly, because there was only enough power left in the generator for two more tries.
The generator itself was also a brilliant device. It ran on crystalline hydrogen difluoride. Besides being carbon-neutral and safe in any environment, it solved one of the main problems with using hydrogen difluoride as a fuel—its instability at room temperature. These crystals were difficult to produce, but Bill only needed seawater and a lot of energy to make them.
Checking everything one last time, he hoped that today he would be able to solve his energy problem.
"Did you really wipe the lenses this time?" Nelson asked.
Bill turned around, looked at him and said:
"What did I tell you about talking when you see me at work? Do I need to return the stick?"
"Oh no, Captain, I was just trying to help!" Nelson quickly replied. "You told Jenkins and the other engineers about the fuel problems, I just don't want you to make a mistake!"
Bill doubted it, but he had to admit that Nelson seemed to have changed over the past nine months. Or, if he hadn't changed, he'd begun to see Bill as his superior and therefore obeyed him.
In general, Bill considered Nelson a man who was strong with the weak, but weak with the strong. This didn't necessarily mean Nelson was a coward—he cursed Bill more than once, even after receiving several beatings from him.
No, it was more a matter of Nelson's unhealthy relationship with authority. In a strange way, after learning about what had happened between Bill and the vice admiral, Nelson began to attribute some kind of imaginary superiority to the captain.
So, while he still complained occasionally, it happened much less frequently than before. When Bill told Nelson to behave a certain way in front of the enlisted men, he more or less complied.
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