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coal-powered electrical-generating plant pumped thousands of tons of poisonous carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Even stations that sequestered stack gases by a dozen different processes, including olivine capture in which the gas would be converted to the stable magnesium iron silicate, which was one of the most benign and common materials on earth, or used the carbon dioxide to make a zinc-based aliphatic polycarbonate plastic that could be used in hundreds of applications—a plastic that was totally biodegradable—or even the more expensive chilled ammonia carbon capture in which supersonic shock waves compressed the carbon for storage deep underground, were polluters.
    And the biggest problem of all, the reason the president had explained to her and the others on the original committee he had called together at the White House for the intensely secret initial briefing, was big oil and the managers of the oil derivative funds who would squeeze our economy to the breaking point if they got so much as a whiff of the possibility that coal-produced electricity would be the motive power that drove the cars and trucks, putting them out of business. It would be all-out war—for survival.
    â€œAnyway I’m on my way over so you won’t have to deal with her on your own,” Whitney said. “But I’ll probably be a half hour behind.”
    â€œThank you for small favors.”
    â€œGive me a break.”
    â€œYou know what I mean,” Cameron said. “I can explain to her everything we’re doing here in four sentences. We’re going to inject three classes of microbes directly into the coal seam Donna Marie is sitting atop. One breaks down the long hydrocarbons in the deposit. The second converts those into organic acids and alcohols. And the third—methanogens—feed on the first two and convert them to methane that we pump to the surface and burn as fuel to power our turbines. The problem is what do I tell her after that spiel? That there’s a real possibility we’ll have a methane blowout that would be a million times worse in terms of atmospheric damage than a large coal-burning generating plant produces? That some of our bacteria produces a lot of oxygen that could ignite the entire coal seam, which would involve probably a fourth of the entire state? Suffocate all the cattle? Really piss off the tourists?”
    â€œYou could quit and go back to Washington.”
    â€œAnd miss all this fun?” Cameron said. “Just get over here as quickly as you can. You know this woman.”
    â€œI know her dad, and I only bumped into her once, briefly,” Whitney said. “I need to talk to my crew and I’ll be right over. In the meantime use your Irish charm. Works on me.”
    She hung up before he could reply.
    Her secretary Marney Morgan was gone for the evening, back in housing across the mall, where most of them lived most of the time, or at this hour possibly in Henry’s, which was a Upper West Side, Manhattan, transplant bar and a really good restaurant, or at the army dining hall—which had been dubbed Grunt City or Vomit Valley—but certainly not on her way into Medora. Everyone who was on base this evening was staying there. The gadget that contained the equipment to “talk” to the cocktail of microbes would be lowered into the deep injection borehole at six in the morning. And then what?
    Whitney held up in the second-floor corridor of the main administration and research-and-development building, quiet just now because just about all of her techs and postdocs were downstairs in the main control center getting ready for the event, as the injection was being called, leaving mostly the roustabouts and power plant engineers over at Donna Marie, and gave a brief thought to how she’d gotten to this point.
    It was crazy, even she could admit it to herself at the odd moment. But eight years ago she’d come up