Watercolor of the electron pump from Isaac Asimov’s Sci Fi novel, “The Gods Themselves”, 1972

The first part takes place on Earth, almost a century after the “Great Crisis,” where ecological and economic collapse reduced the world’s population from six billion to two billion. The timeline alternates between the events of the 2070s, outlining the discovery of the “electron pump,” and events twenty-three years later.

Radiochemist Frederick Hallam discovers that a container’s contents have been altered. He finds out that the sample, originally tungsten, has been transformed into plutonium 186—an isotope that cannot occur naturally in our universe. As this is investigated, Hallam gets the credit for suggesting that the matter has been exchanged by beings in a parallel universe; this leads to the development of a cheap, clean, and apparently endless source of energy: the “Pump.”