While moving into her apartment, Carolyn meets STEVEN BARTELS, a consultant chemist, and the chemistry between them begins. Steven tells Carolyn he knew Yvonne because of his academic interest in Yvonne’s controversial Institute research on "cold fusion", a cheap, environmentally safe way of generating energy from water. Steven informs Carolyn that Yvonne was denied tenure because her work on cold fusion threatened Klinger’s costly "hot" fusion empire. Carolyn also learns that Yvonne was shortly thereafter found dead in her apartment with her lover, another Institute faculty member, DAVID FRANKEL, in an apparent murder-suicide.

Carolyn meets RENA GELFANI, a tenured Institute Astronomy Professor who had tried unsuccessfully to get Carolyn a position in the Astronomy Department. She becomes Carolyn’s mentor, encouraging her to continue research on cosmic dark matter, which constitutes over ninety percent of the universe and is the most important unsolved mystery of the cosmos.

Carolyn discovers a videotape in the Institute office she’s inherited from Yvonne. On the tape are shots of Yvonne’s cold fusion experiments in her lab plus evidence that Klinger had tried to discredit cold fusion at his lab years earlier by publishing altered data.

Shortly after viewing the tape, Carolyn is attacked in her apartment by a woman who is trying to find the tape.

After a brief scuffle, the woman escapes with Carolyn in pursuit.

Carolyn is increasingly attracted to Steven, whom she confides in, and their relationship intensifies. When Rena invites Carolyn to give a major lecture on her dark matter theory at a forthcoming Boston physics convention, Carolyn decides to demonstrate publicly that Yvonne’s cold fusion apparatus actually produces energy, but that the energy comes directly from the water, not from nuclear fusion. She asks Steven to help her duplicate Yvonne’s apparatus at his lab, but he seems reluctant.

Carolyn shows up spontaneously at Steven’s lab, only to find NICOLE, late twenties, working there as Steven’s lab assistant. Carolyn learns Nicole was Steven’s graduate student before Steven was dismissed from the Institute Chemistry faculty. When Carolyn asks Nicole whether she knew Yvonne, Nicole startles Carolyn by telling her Yvonne was her (Nicole’s) sister.

Carolyn confronts Steven about Nicole and his Institute dismissal, but remains unaware that Steven has been in an intense sexual relationship with Nicole. She’s also unaware that Rena knows Nicole and has been encouraging her to continue her sister, Yvonne’s research on cold fusion, while mentoring Carolyn’s research on cosmic dark matter.

The film reaches an explosive conclusion at a rehearsal for Carolyn’s physics convention lecture. There we learn the shocking truths about Nicole’s relationship to Yvonne, Steven’s relationship with Nicole, Rena’s relationship with Nicole, Klinger’s role in suppressing cold fusion, and last but not least, the connection of the cold fusion energy to cosmic dark matter.