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pressing things to read than logos. Marcus dismissed the map to check e-mail, and Ellen had already forwarded the information he needed. But he had driven for too many years before autodrive to concentrate while cars not two feet apart joined and departed the platoon, and when to both sides, bumper to bumper, eighteen-wheelers blotted out the sky.
    With only the ride to prepare, he opaqued the windows and began skimming.
    He had also been around long enough to expect recession to reduce traffic. Not since the Crudetastrophe. Without funding for maintenance, highways crumbled faster than traffic diminished.
    Marcus began reading Ellen’s annotated meeting minutes. He stopped noticing swerves (around accidents? potholes? the chicken crossing the road? Through the opaqued windows, he could not tell) and ramps from one freeway to the next. The traffic noises faded.…
    A pop-up usurped the dashboard screen. Blinking red letters announced: Power alert. Smaller text, scrolling, gave the particulars: a high-voltage line severed from the Nantucket Sound wind farm. Terrorism neither indicated nor ruled out.
    Marcus rapped the screen to acknowledge and again to retrieve a list of related headlines. The list expanded faster than he could tap through to even a smattering of the articles. Scattered secondary outages across Massachusetts as generators, distribution stations, and power lines overloaded and shut down. Sporadic blackouts predicted throughout New England, possibly rippling down the East Coast, while the grid rebalanced, or until the wind farm’s underwater high-voltage line could be repaired. The schedule of preemptive brownouts. Talking heads blathering about unsafe, indefensible infrastructure. Resetter groups saying the same, more nastily. Predictions, into the tens of thousands, how many cars would fail to recharge overnight. The certain spike tomorrow in East Coast gas prices, a buck or more per gallon, when all those cars headed for the pumps. The stock market tanking.
    Multiple groups and causes claimed responsibility.
    Cursing them all, he went back to Ellen’s notes. Too soon, the dashboard trilled: time to disengage autodrive. He took back control and made his way to the DOE parking lot. The charger-equipped slots were all occupied.
    Sighing, Marcus got out of his car. Another damned meeting. He wondered if ever again he would get to do something.
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    Wednesday, April 12
    â€œGood afternoon,” Dillon Russo told the latest earnest entrepreneur to pass through his office that day.
    They were all earnest. It took more than earnest to set oneself apart. He had been merely earnest once. Then he had gotten savvy. And shorted a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities before the markets realized that subprimes were toxic. And so, became very rich.
    And so, here he was.…
    Who is this woman? Courtney something. One more engineer and MBA, yadda yadda yadda. Dillon had already forgotten her last name. If it mattered, he could find the name in her leave-behind or on his calendar. He did not foresee it mattering.
    Speed dating, venture capital-style was a lot like speed dating of the social kind, only even more demeaning. Dillon allotted each petitioner a half hour: fifteen minutes for the pitch, ten for Q & A, and five alone, afterward, to organize any notes he had taken. The lone note for Courtney read Not on your life, jotted down before, earnestly asserting her appreciation for his time, she all but backed out of his office.
    He dropped her leave-behind into a drawer. She had brought the day’s fifth pitch for enhanced cellulosic biofuel production. Her process involved platinum nanoparticles, lots and lots of them, employed as catalysts. As though, even in a world starved for energy, that could make any kind of economic sense.
    It hardly mattered. Fail or succeed, anything anyone could hope to accomplish with biofuel synthesis was mere tinkering at the margins. He only cared about opportunities