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that could make a real difference.
    Another make-us-both-a-pile-of-money pitch would come through his door in about four minutes. He used a half minute to get out from behind his desk and stretch. The rest he would spend admiring Central Park, thirty-eight stories below.
    At least the biofuel types had done enough homework to know that his interests lay in eco-friendly opportunities. Ditto Noah, the gangly, pinch-faced man pitching virtual-reality tools for high-end telecommuting and Suresh, with a new wrinkle in fuel cells. Those who had not done their homework, who wasted his time with trivial visions for the next big social network or junk food, got the hook. Fast.
    Dillon watched a line of mounted police watch a mass gathering down in the park. In theory demonstrations were legal in Central Park, but permits remained hard to come by and the crowd swirled and surged in a pretense of spontaneity. He never could judge crowd sizes, not even from his bird’s-eye view. A thousand? Two? It did not help his estimating that the crowd shifted restlessly. When, all but inevitably, the cops dispersed the demonstrators, a new flash mob would simply converge elsewhere in the park.
    Permit or no, frequent arrests notwithstanding, the Resetters demonstrated daily in the park. Applauding, if not the Crudetastrophe itself, the resulting economic slowdown—and, with it, the reduced use of fossil fuels—as benefits to the environment and the planet. Opposing new energy infrastructure as only repeating past environmental insults.
    Dillon could sympathize with their opinions. But to expect civil disobedience and petty vandalism to change anything? Such naïveté sadly amused him.
    Someone rapped firmly on his door.
    â€œCome in,” he called.
    A blond woman strode in, wearing a severely tailored dark-blue suit. She was short, compact, and very serious. “Mr. Russo,” she began, speaking quickly, not yet halfway to his desk. Very focused. Focused beat the hell out of earnest . “I’m Kayla Jorgenson, of Jorgenson Power Systems. Thanks for seeing me. You won’t be sorry.”
    I’ll be the judge of that. “Have a seat, Kayla.”
    Handing him a brochure she launched into her pitch. “What the world needs, more than anything, is clean, affordable electrical power generation. We had sporadic petroleum shortages before the Crudetastrophe. Electric cars—not that anyone can produce them fast enough—help only to the degree there is electricity to recharge their batteries. Too often, there isn’t.”
    Focused and aware. Dillon began leafing through her brochure.
    She did not let his page flipping distract her. “Why I’m here, in a phrase: ocean thermal energy conversion. OTEC is conceptually very simple—and a vast untapped resource. Any heat engine turns heat energy into mechanical work by exploiting a temperature differential. Steam engines are heat engines, the high temperature that drives them coming from fire heating a boiler.
    â€œNow consider the ocean. The tropical ocean’s surface can approach human body temperature, and yet around a half mile below, where sunlight never penetrates, the temperature is scarcely above freezing! Tremendous power-generating potential exists in the differential between the hot and cold layers of the ocean—and with no energy source involved but sunlight.
    â€œI would guess you’ve been pitched concepts for harvesting wave power. The energy OTEC can theoretically harvest is greater by an order of magnitude. The challenge is in efficiently and affordably…”
    Did Kayla ever stop for air? His wife, while playing her French horn, did something she called circular breathing. What, exactly, Crystal did eluded him—surely the windpipe worked in only one direction at a time—but somehow she could sustain a note indefinitely.
    Just as, somehow, Kayla kept up her patter. “… and while the theoretical