“His name is Mohamed Aftar,” Kent said, a lump rising in his throat, “He’s an artifact dealer from Alexandria.”

“How did you find him?” Halliday answered.

“His name turned up in the past few days,” Kent said, burying his lie deeper, “You’ve been back for over a week now. He’s connected to someone you visited before you left Morocco.”

Halliday rose from his chair and went to the window, a twinge of failure running through him. The wind was howling against the window inches from his face, rain spattering against the glass. A flash of lightning exploded in the sky and Halliday’s mind flashed back to Tangier.

Lightning is the purest form of energy man has ever encountered. The bolts of electricity it produces shoot across the sky in wicked fashion, seemingly unable to be harnessed outside of science fiction. This may hold true for now, but there are scientists who theorize there is a way to capture one aspect of this wild, untapped resource.

The humid regions upon Earth are consistent with occurrences of lightning strikes. While it would be too unpredictable and dangerous to capture a bolt of lightning, there are changes that occur up in the clouds during a storm that do produce electricity. Scientists have discovered that water droplets suspended in the air have the capacity to pick up an electrical charge. In order to capture the stored energy in each droplet before it hits the ground, “hygroelectric panels” attached to the rooftops of homes could collect the energy and store it for later use. In areas like Singapore where it experiences the highest level of lightning activity in the world, there could be a burgeoning business in the making.

As always, no single solution will get civilization off of its need to power our daily lives with fossil fuels. By employing different methods that suit a particular region the most, we will be off on a pretty good start.