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“How’s it going?”
    Gordy ignored the question for just a few seconds, then hit ENTER , and looked up. “We’re in, Sarge.”
    â€œGood man,” Egan said, and patted Gordy on the shoulder.

 
    4
    BOB FORESTER’S DAUGHTER showing up here was the last thing Whitney Lipton wanted or expected. Today of all days. In the morning they were injecting the bacteria-talker into the test bore, and seventy-two hours afterward, they would know if the gadget was a success. In which case everyone would probably get drunk and stay that way for a week, or a failure, in which case everyone would probably get drunk but stay that way only for a day until they got back to work to find out where the science or technology had gone wrong.
    If they were still alive after the initial test.
    Forester was in conference at his ARPA-E office on Independence Avenue in Washington and could not be disturbed; at any rate he once admitted that since Ashley was about thirteen he’d just about lost any realistic control over her behavior.
    Whitney, Doc or the boss to her science team, and Doctor, which she’d always thought sounded a little pretentious, to just about all the government overseers on the project, was thirty-three, nearly six feet, with a pleasant face, high cheekbones, sleek black hair, and a slender, almost bony, frame that some of her friends said made her look something like the movie actor Lara Flynn Boyle. She grabbed her parka and on her way out of her office phoned Jim Cameron, chief of security at Donna Marie.
    â€œPete Magliano is bringing Forester’s daughter out to look around,” she said.
    â€œRight now?” Cameron demanded. “You can’t be serious.”
    â€œShe showed up at post one and said she was here to interview me, I didn’t know what the hell else to do with her. There’s no way I wanted her here tonight, not in the state my people are in.”
    â€œWell, it’s no better over here.”
    â€œRight,” Whitney said, chuckling. Actually she and Jim Cameron had hit it off nearly four years ago. She’d had a predisposition not to like military types, especially security people with their sometimes unreasonable lockstep SOPs, and she’d been mildly surprised at first by his laid-back nature. He was reasonably good-looking, he was bright and well read and well rounded, something her ex was not, and he made her laugh. At thirty-two he was only one year younger than her.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do with her?”
    â€œShow her around the place. Looks like a power plant.”
    â€œNo coal cars.”
    â€œWe’re going to burn methane.”
    â€œThe girl’s not stupid. There’re a lot of storage tanks and processing equipment and piping more like you’d see at a refinery. From what I’ve heard she’s bright, and maybe her father let something slip. Maybe she’s put two and two together, which is going to bump up against our security provisions.”
    Whitney was a little vexed, had been from the beginning, by the supersecrecy the White House had placed on her work. But the president had explained to her that if they announced the project—which would eventually cost taxpayers upwards of $750 billion—and it failed, heads would roll. His head would roll. In a democracy the electorate ruled, whether anybody liked it or not.
    The bigger problem, as it had been explained to her, was potentially very large trouble in the run-up to any revolution. The fact was that within U.S. borders there were enough coal deposits to satisfy its energy needs for four or five centuries—even adding in demands that were expected to rise exponentially if cheap electricity could be produced to run the increasingly electric economy—including all electrically heated and cooled homes, electric ships, electric trains, even electric airplanes and, of course, electric cars.
    But coal was dirty. Every