All That He Requires(13)

Once Johnny was gone, I whispered, “I thought you said we were going to go see something.”

“We are. Just give him a little while to go to sleep.”

“He’s not driving us?!”

“Keep your voice down. No, this is secret. Just you and me.”

“But – ”

“Stop worrying.”

“You don’t worry enough.”

“Then we can stay here, if that’s what you want. But if we go, it has to be just the two of us, alone under the stars.” He looked into my eyes. “What do you want to do?”

Secrets, intrigue, and a line like it has to be just the two of us, alone under the stars.

What girl could resist that?





17





We waited almost an hour, then left the penthouse in silence. Connor seemed preoccupied; I was just terrified Johnny would come out of his bedroom and start yelling at us.

But we made it down to the valet’s desk, and within two minutes we were in the Lamborghini. I thought at first that he was taking me to a casino, or an office building, or someplace else in the city – but then I realized we were heading out of town.

Waaaay out of town.

Into the desert.

Connor was quiet the entire way. I reached out and took his hand for assurance; he held mine in his, smiled briefly, then stared out at the road ahead as though lost in thought.

After thirty minutes on the highway, far past all the suburbs, Connor exited onto an empty side road and drove through the darkness. The lights of the city receded into a dim glow on the horizon, and the stars began to shine brighter above us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been out beyond the reach of light pollution from cities and towns, but it’s astounding when you finally go to a place where there’s no other light around for miles. I had lived in suburbs and metropolitan areas my entire life – first in Charlotte, then in Athens, Georgia during college, then in Los Angeles. I had never been outside the glow of a thousand streetlights.

Until now.

As we drove further into the desert, the stars began to assert themselves. First a few hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand, multiplying with every mile we traveled.

I’ve read somewhere that only 20% of all humanity has ever seen the Milky Way in its full glory. Most of us live too close to ‘civilization’ to see the millions of lights that make up our galaxy.

This was the first time for me.

I opened the window and just stared as the Lamborghini raced through the darkness. I lost track of time as the clouds of starlight became brighter and brighter.

Then the Lamborghini slowed and made a turn onto a dirt road.

“Where are you going?” I asked, startled.

“That’s part of the surprise.”

The wheels ground their way over the dirt road – two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes. I began to get worried – what if we break down out here? – and then I just forgot about the circumstances as the stars glowed even more beautifully overhead.

Finally we stopped.

Connor turned off the headlights, got out of the car, walked around and opened my door. Once I was out and he closed it behind me, there was nothing but darkness for miles around. That, and starlight for millions of miles overhead.

There was no sound, either, except for the tick tick tick of the Lamborghini’s engine cooling down. Not even the wind was blowing, though the air had taken a decided turn towards the chilly. I pulled my black wrap over my shoulders and looked around.

“So… this is what you wanted to show me?”

“Yes. This is it,” Connor said as he stared out into the darkness. His voice sounded excited… almost giddy.

“Um… okay…”

“What do you see?” he asked me.

I looked up at the sky. “Millions and millions of stars.”

He followed my gaze. “It really is beautiful, isn’t it? But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What do you mean?”

“Around us. Here, where we’re standing. What do you see?”

Vast plains of sand and scrub brush and low-lying plants, barely visible in the darkness.

“Uh… desert. Lots and lots of desert.”

“I see the opportunity of a lifetime.”

I looked around again. And still all I saw were miles and miles of nothing.

“I guess that’s why you’re a billionaire and I’m not,” I joked.

Connor walked about twenty feet way, then turned back to face me. “I see the equivalent of all the oil in Saudi Arabia, times a million.”

I frowned, then peered out into the darkness, wondering if maybe I had missed a couple of oil derricks.

Nope.

“You think there’s oil out here?” I asked as I edged closer to the hood of the Lamborghini. In the cold night air, the heat radiating off the hood was deliciously warm.

“Better than that. I think there’s a resource that’s virtually limitless – at least for a couple of billion years – and one that’s cleaner than any other energy resource we’ve got.”

“Solar,” I realized.

“Exactly. Did you know that all of the United States’ electricity could be supplied by a parcel of land 100 miles long by 100 miles wide?”

I looked out at the dark. “Is that what I’m looking at? Uh… 10,000 square miles?”

“Good multiplication skills.”

“I try,” I said sarcastically. Knowing his head for numbers, it felt a little like Wynton Marsalis telling you that you sure could play that kazoo.

But Connor chose to ignore the snark. “It’s close to 10,000 square miles. And that’s less than 10% of the entire surface area of the state.”

“But I thought there were tons of problems with solar. Um… do you mind?” I asked as I lowered my rear end slowly, signifying I wanted to sit on the hood of the car. “It’s warm, and the air’s kind of cold.”

“What? Oh, go ahead, I don’t care.”

I planted my booty gingerly on the metal, waiting for the horrible sound of metal dinging under my weight. None came.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Shivers of warmth spread through my entire body.

“There are tons of problems with every technology,” Connor continued. “Especially before it hits the tipping point and really takes off.”

“Yeah, but – I thought there were problems with how to store it. I mean, you can’t get solar at night, and there aren’t any battery systems that can overcome that.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see his grin as well as hear it. “That’s why I’m working with a couple of scientists from UCLA on graphene supercapacitors.”

My nerd spider-sense started tingling. “Whoa – what?”

As he continued talking, he got more and more excited. “Graphene is a form of carbon – one of the strongest materials known, and it’s completely flexible. The guys who discovered it got the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Now two scientists at UCLA have not only devised a way to manufacture it cheaply and in huge volumes, but they figured out that it can take on an immense electrical charge, and slowly release that charge over time. You can power a small light bulb for five minutes off a one-inch square piece of graphene less than a millimeter thick. Imagine an array of millions of sheets of graphene, able to take on huge amounts of electricity generated from solar – and then release it slowly over time.”

I was starting to get excited, too. “That could totally solve – ”

“ – the storage problem! Not to mention revolutionize the transfer of it, too!” he interrupted me, his voice bursting with excitement. He was like a five-year-old boy hopped up on birthday cake.

“You mentioned supercapacitors. I’ve heard of them, but…”

“Okay, you’ve got batteries, which are basically just storage devices for energy. They can be anything from the double A’s that go in your TV remote control, to car batteries, to giant industrial batteries they use now for storing solar energy. But they charge slowly, and they discharge slowly. Capacitors have high output, but horrible storage capabilities – like a flash on a camera. Big burst of energy, but that’s it. A supercapacitor combines the best of both worlds. It has high energy storage, and fast charge and discharge. That’s what these UCLA guys have created. Theoretically, you could put graphene batteries in cars that would allow you to go 200 miles on a single charge, and you could refill it in 60 seconds at a charging station. Or you could have a cell phone battery that fully charges in five seconds. Or massive electrical storage at solar power stations, using nothing but carbon to do it.”

“But I’ve read there are lots of poisons involved in solar panel construction.”

“It’s not perfect,” Connor said impatiently. “But when you average out the detrimental effects versus the life of the energy source, solar beats everything else hands down. Coal only seems like a cheap source of energy when you don’t factor in the costs of pollution, climate change, coalminers’ lives, and mercury exposure from the mining and processing.”

I looked out at the vast expanse of desert. “So… what are you planning to do, create a giant solar farm?”

“Exactly.”

“Who owns the land?”

“The federal government and the state of Nevada.”