Touchstone

A more immediate threat than climate change, the energy dilemma inspires reclusive multi-billionaire Lyman Dysart, called “The Stockholder” by his numerous employees, to aid the development of controlled nuclear fusion power generation. One plasma constituent of the patented process, ultra-scarce helium isotope found in quantity only in Luna, necessitates expensively strip-mining the lunar regolith. Semi-panic ensues in the minds and wallets of OPEC and the petroleum cartel led by Vonex International Chairman Belkin Reichert, who employs behind-the-scenes political influence to suborn the advent and wide spread advent of fusion by promoting solar energy, and then urging the U.S. to nationalize the adolescent industry. The battle of wills and tactics and counter-tactics climaxes when Dysart attempts to defeat the congressional effort to nationalize the fusion industry by holding hostage his lunar mining venture, and by propagandizing the voting public by citing fusion as, "A plasma containment shell, at its heart a dervish of semi-vacuum burning so furiously that it emulates temperatures reigning at the center of the Sun, but gives forth no light, yet presumes to light the world in a beneficent, utopian glow."