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plastics, and no way to satisfy it.”
    “I thought that Cyrus Mobarak had solved your energy problem, with the Moby Midget fusion reactors.”
    “He did, for anything that can handle eight megawatts and up. But there’s a need all over the developing southern regions for small, portable units that generate only a few kilowatts. That’s what that provides.”
    Jan gestured to the extractor, sticking up from the middle of the GM platform, and the pipeline running away to the southwest. Dr. Bloom stared at it uncomprehendingly.
    “Methane,” Sebastian said, a split-second before Janeed felt she would be obliged to jump in again. Thank God, a word at last! But apparently that one word was all they would get. Jan finally added, “Methane down on the seabed. Trillions and trillions of tons of it.”
    “But methane is lighter than water. In fact”—Valnia Bloom was frowning, in the effort of recollection—“the atmosphere of Earth is mainly oxygen and nitrogen. Methane is a lighter gas than either one of those. It can’t possibly be found down on your ocean floor.”
    “Oh, it’s not. I mean, it is, but it’s not stored in gaseous form. It’s stored as methane clathrates—a structure that has four molecules of methane locked into a stable form with twenty-three molecules of water. At the temperatures of the deep ocean, around four Celsius, methane clathrates are solids. And they’re denser than water, so if they form on the ocean bed they won’t float up to the surface. And everything that sinks down from the surface of the sea decays and rots, and produces methane.”
    Dr. Bloom looked less than thrilled by that vision of universal rot and corruption, a phenomenon unique to Earth. Other worlds, her expression suggested, kept their decay and recycling well away from civilized life; but she nodded and Jan went on, “So with all that methane from decomposition, plus naturally upwelling primordial methane, the seabed contains enormous amounts of it. And of course there’s loads of water. So we have these enormous clathrate beds, hundreds of kilometers across and tens of meters deep. All we do—all that does”—she pointed to the extractor—“is run the spine down to the clathrate beds and warm them up a bit. The methane is released in the higher temperatures, and rises to the surface, and flows away through the pipeline.”
    Their interviewer was pleased. For the first time she was smiling. Dr. Bloom said, “So you’re miners. Yes, I guess that you are.”
    “And you know,” Jan went on, “now that I think of it, I bet the same method would work for the Europan ocean. There’s life, there’s decomposition, there’s plenty of water.”
    That was less of a success. The smile became a fixed and very starchy frown. “I thought that it was well-known, even in the Inner System”—her tone implied, the primitive Inner System—“that Europa is off-limits. Native life was discovered there five years ago. We do not care to have the only other known life form in the Universe contaminated for minor industrial gain.”
    Sebastian opened his mouth. He was going to choose this worst moment to argue with the interviewer, Janeed felt sure of it. That would cancel out any good impression they had made. She could think of no way to cut him off, until like a gift from Heaven she felt two heavy raindrops strike her on the left cheek and square on the nose.
    “Here it comes,” she said, “just the way Sebastian said it would. Let’s get below, before we’re all soaked.”
    And maybe on the way I’ll have a chance to get you to one side, you moon-faced lump, and say that talking about the wrong things is worse than not talking at all.
    * * *
    The best-laid plans …
    Dr. Valnia Bloom stuck to Sebastian, tight as a vacuum seal, all the way below until the three of them were packed into the tiny room that served as the junior crew hideaway.
    Apparently the interviewer had reached a new point on her agenda, because