On May 14, 2004, Bow engineer and science writer Eugene Mallove was beaten to death in Norwich, Conn., by two middle-aged crack addicts. He had gone to Norwich to clean up his childhood home and died on the front lawn where he played as a kid.

Mallove was the world's biggest cheerleader for cold fusion, the room-temperature nuclear reaction that its discoverers claim can produce massive amounts of heat without generating radioactivity. He battled public scorn to campaign for money to research a scientific discovery he believed would free the earth from the deadly grip of fossil fuels.

Mallove believed cold fusion could provide an endless supply of clean, cheap energy. To promote the technology and allow researchers to share information, he founded Infinite Energymagazine.

The publication survived his demise, and we received our new copy recently. As we always do when it arrives, we looked for the ad offering readers the chance to purchase the shoebox-sized cold fusion reactor that Mallove predicted would be powering most homes by now. As always, it wasn't there.

Seventeen years after science was rocked by the chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann's announcement that they had created a safe nuclear reaction in a tabletop experiment, cold fusion remains stuck in limbo between accepted fact and futurist fantasy.

In recent years, the needle has moved slightly in the direction of acceptance that cold fusion, the alleged combination of two nuclei of hydrogen to form one helium atom and a lot of heat, is a real, if poorly understood, reaction.

Pons and Fleishmann were at first celebrated on the cover of Time magazine and then mocked as clumsy scientists fooled by their inaccurate data. But today, a half-dozen types of energy-producing reactions come under the rubric of cold fusion.

Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.

D2 Fusion, an investor-backed California cold fusion research company, is said to be planning the debut of a one-kilowatt cold fusion generator. And investors have bet $50 million on Blacklight Power, a New Jersey company working on a pollution-free device that will generate heat and electricity using ocean water as fuel.

One physicist working in the field believes cold-fusion home-heating units are no more than a decade away. Others are even more optimistic. Everyone who doesn't have stock in or work for a fossil-fuel-related company hopes they are right.

Then again, Mallove said the same thing a decade ago.

Global warming poses an immense threat. It's possible there may be a point beyond which its reversal will be impossible. Cold fusion, believers say, could be the answer.

The scientists struggling to make progress, including those helped by a foundation Mallove created in 2003, are right about one thing: Progress might come far more rapidly with government funding.

Unfortunately, the technology remains too new, mysterious and unproven. Without a reliable working model, cold fusion warrants only a slight infusion of taxpayer money, if any at all.

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