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the budget they do.
    “So we’re finally going green,” Mac said as we cruised down state highway 136 in his Ford Expedition.
    “We?” Mac’s van probably sucks down gas at the rate of ten miles per gallon. “Speak for yourself, white man.”
    Mac threw me a look. “Can you spell significant business expense?”
    “You’re polluting the planet.”
    “They have these trade-offs, you know. Maybe you’ve heard about them. You get credits when you do something that conserves energy, demerits when you don’t. Linda drives a Prius, so we balance out.”
    Linda was Mac’s wife.
    “And what about your new boyfriend?” he went on. “Doesn’t he have his own plane? Now there’s a real energy saver.”
    “Don’t bring Luke into this. Everyone has to do their part. It’s people like you who...” I stopped myself. “I can’t believe this.”
    “What?”
    “You’ve done it.” I glared at him. “You’ve gone and become a conservative when I wasn’t looking.”
    Mac kept his mouth shut.
    “My father always said a person gets more conservative when they have something to lose. Are you going to register as a Republican?”
    Mac let out a long-suffering breath. “You know, it is possible to accumulate assets without losing one’s humanity. Or becoming a hypocrite.” When I didn’t answer, he added, “It might even be possible to run a business ethically. Aren’t we going to scout one right now?”
    •   •   •
    “I am delighted that such a lovely woman as you made time to visit our humble operation.”
    I knew I was in trouble as soon as the words came out of his mouth. Fred Hanover, the man who would be showing us the Voss-Peterson ethanol plant, wasn’t much to look at. He had small recessed eyes, a middle-aged paunch, and a smear of a mustache that looked painted on. What little hair he had was slicked back with something that reminded me of Bryl Crème. In fact, with his starched white shirt, striped seersucker suit, and red bowtie, he looked like a door-to-door salesman from seventy-five years ago. But his manners were impeccable, and when he opened a door for me and called me “ma’am,” I couldn’t resist a smirk at Mac.
    “Now, ma’am,” Hanover said with a rueful expression, “I am so sorry to muss up that lovely hairdo, but you’re going to have to wear this.” He handed me a yellow hard-hat. “The ladies hate these,” he said as an aside to Mac. I absently touched my hair, wondering who’d told him that—his wife? a secretary?—and put it on.
    “Does it fit all right, Ms. Foreman? Because I have another size.” He looked concerned.
    “It’s fine,” I centered it on my head. He handed another to Mac and clamped one on himself.
    “Well, then. Let’s go.” He rubbed his palms together and led us outside. We’d been in a utilitarian one-story building set back from the road. Behind it, railroad tracks ran past a series of stainless steel tanks and metal-roofed sheds, all connected with pipes of various diameters and lengths. All the equipment gleamed and looked antiseptically clean, but its unfamiliarity made me think some alien society had somehow jettisoned it from their spacecraft and plunked it down on the prairie late one night.
    “You know, you needed top secret clearance before we could let you in here,” Hanover said with a chuckle.
    Had the man been reading my mind?
    “We had to make sure you were on the up and up. Both of you.” He glanced at Mac.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “The process I’m about to show you is proprietary,” he said. “Can’t let in any industrial spies, can we now?”
    “I thought ethanol production was generic—like petroleum refining.”
    “Not at all. Our competitors are always looking to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We use a dry milling process, but there’s a wet one, too, which is very different. We have to be careful.” He grinned. “Then again, if I’d known I would be in the presence of such a