Free Viking Bay by M. A. Lawson Page A

brainiac like her daughter and would probably end up being the next Steve Jobs. The problem was that Kay suspected Jessica was sleeping with him, or soon would be. She’d discovered birth-control pills in Jessica’s purse one day when she was short of cash and didn’t have time to go to an ATM. She hadn’t really been snooping.
    Kay had a hard time talking to Jessica about sex, because she didn’t want to come across as a hypocrite. Kay liked sex, and even after she got pregnant and had Jessica, she continued to have sex during her teenage years. But in spite of her own experience—or maybe
because
of her own experience—she didn’t want her daughter to have sex at the age of sixteen. She was terrified that Jessica might get pregnant the way she had.
    Without admitting that she’d found the birth-control pills, she’d tried a couple of times to talk to Jessica about the inadvisability of having sex at her tender age. Hoping to scare her, she even told her, truthfully, that she’d been on birth-control pills when she got pregnant so Jessica wouldn’t think that those damn pills were a hundred percent reliable. But her daughter basically blew her off when Kay broached the subject of an unwanted pregnancy; she didn’t exactly say that she wasn’t as stupid as Kay had been, but that was the implication.
    But since her daughter
was
so smart, Kay decided to ask her a question she probably shouldn’t ask.
    â€œWhat do you know about nuclear fusion?” Kay said.
    â€œNuclear fusion? Why are you asking about that?” Jessica knew that Kay had no interest in science.
    â€œOh, it sort of came up at work today. I can’t tell you exactly in what context, but I was just curious if you knew how close they are to making fusion work for providing energy.”
    â€œWho’s they?” Jessica asked.
    â€œYou know, the eggheads, the scientists, the government. WhatI heard today is that nuclear fusion is the Holy Grail of energy, and I was just curious if anyone was actually building a power plant or something.”
    â€œWell, as far as I know, nobody’s close. The other thing is, I doubt this country is really working all that hard to make it viable.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?”
    â€œBecause there’s no compelling need at this point. We’ve got tons of natural gas—more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil—and it looks like most of the effort is going into extracting the gas, no matter how dangerous fracking is to the environment.”
    Aw, jeez.
The last thing Kay wanted to hear was a speech from her daughter about the evils of the government and large corporations when it came to the environment.
    â€œAnd if the government is working on fusion,” Jessica said, “it’s probably looking at making a more effective fusion bomb.”
    â€œA fusion bomb?”
    â€œYeah. Most nuke bombs use fission and they’re really dirty, meaning if you blow something up you have to live with all the side effects of radioactive contamination. But a fusion bomb . . . You could blow up Tehran today and start rebuilding the city tomorrow.”
    â€œHuh,” Kay said.
    â€œSo if I had to bet,” her liberal daughter said, “if this country’s working on fusion at all, we’re more interested in a military application than producing clean energy.”
    â€œIs lithium used in these fusion bombs?” Kay asked.
    â€œWell, yeah. Lithium-6 deuteride is the fusion fuel in thermonuclear weapons.”
    Kay had no idea what lithium-6 deuteride was and she had no intention of asking. Instead she said, “How the hell do you know all this sh . . . stuff?”
    Jessica shrugged. “You know. Chemistry and physics classes. Why are you asking about lithium?”
    Kay figured she should stop talking about fusion and lithium. Not only shouldn’t she be talking about those things,