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crack his tailbone. Completely worth it, though. There was always a nice long calm after one of those storms, and even better, it might have the unintended benefit of making him useless to the government.
    "All right," Reynolds said. "Tell me what's happening over there."
    "You should ask Steve Andropolous," Erin replied.
    "I have. And he told me that you're the expert. I think his exact words were that you've forgotten more about these things than anyone else knows."
    He'd remember to kick Stevie in the nuts for that one.
    "Fine. Whatever. How much do you know about this kind of problem?"
    "Why don't you assume nothing."
    Erin turned to Beamon. "Mark, you're the head of Homeland Security's energy branch, right? You must have some idea of how these things work."
    He shook his head. "Got this job entirely through nepotism."
    "Christ. Okay. Oil is a hydrocarbon and hydrocarbons are part of nature. And if something exists in nature, it's a pretty good bet that there's something out there that's evolved to use it in some way."
    "Like these bacteria," Reynolds said.
    "Exactly. If there's an oil spill in Mexico for example, I'd go there, find an indigenous oil-eating bacteria in the soil, and then figure out how to grow a whole lot of it. Then I'd throw it on the spill and let it do its work. That's an oversimplification, but it gets the point across."
    "So you're saying these types of life forms are fairly common?"
    "They're all around us. And they're in pretty wide use commercially. I mean, you can buy them by the pound to clean up the floor of your garage if you want."
    "Then why haven't we run into this problem before?"
    "Actually, oil companies deal with this kind of thing all the time, but in a much smaller way. Generally, these bacteria need a fair amount of oxygen to survive and replicate. That keeps them from destroying oil reservoirs --"
    "But this one is different."
    "Yeah, it can spread with virtually no oxygen at all, and it's really voracious. Also, the chemicals you'd normally use to kill it don't seem to faze it all that much."
    "And why is that?" Reynolds asked. "It seems odd to me that these bacteria would be resistant to chemicals that don't exist in nature. Or destructive to something like drilling equipment that isn't exactly part of the ecosystem either."
    "It's not as strange as it seems," Erin said. "For instance, if they evolved where a lot of metal ore was in the ground, the corrosive ones would be more successful and evolve toward being destructive to drilling gear. As far as resistance to chemicals goes, it's probably just an adaptation to an environmental challenge that was somehow similar. Did you know that a percentage of European descendants are immune to HIV? Not because they specifically evolved a resistance to the disease, but because the same mutation made their ancestors resistant to the plague."
    "So you aren't surprised that these bacteria exist."
    He shook his head. "Why would I be?" "Can it spread?"
    "Through a reservoir? Absolutely, depending on permeability of the rock. The bad news is that it can live without oxygen in water and oil. The good news is that, based on Stevie's research, this strain doesn't do so well out in the open elements. It dies almost immediately. So it's not like you could get it on your shoes and track it to Kuwait."
    "Where did it come from, Erin?"
    "Not a clue. Could just be Mother Nature defending herself."
    The smile that spread across Reynolds's face had more than a hint of condescension. "Ah, yes. We all have to sell our cars and take up organic farming or we're going to die, right? Isn't that what you people believe?"
    "You people?" Erin said. "Who's 'you people'? In the past few years we've had to face SARS, AIDS, Lyme disease, and bird flu. As far as I'm concerned, the environment is doing a pretty good job defending itself on its own."
    Reynolds folded his arms across his chest and stared at Erin for a full thirty seconds. "I just can't get a read on you,