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happen and tended to scare the daylights out of voters and taxpayers.
    But after all, the alternative was cutting Henry, and then they’d have ended up with a worse hack, so Di just adds, “If I remember right, there’re several processes that take methane out of the atmosphere—”
    Henry nods. “Right. We might look into which ones can be accelerated or altered—”
    “Wasn’t thinking that far ahead. It matters how long the stuff stays at elevated concentrations. If it’s only a couple of days, not much will happen, but if it’s twenty years, then we’re in deep.”
    “Got you.”
    “And Henry—you really ought to see about getting everyone back from Anticipatory. Most of the people you have left are just amateurs at this.”
    Henry almost looks happy, and says, “I’m way ahead of you there, at least. Next person I talk to after you is Carla Tynan. And I intend to beg, plead, and whine until she agrees to head up the research on this—whatever it takes. Then I’ll beg, plead, and whine some more so they’ll okay hiring her.”
    Di Callare has to smile. “That’s going to take some whining. ”
    “You know it. But we don’t have anyone else who knows as much about the weird connections that might be out there.”
    “Well, I look forward to working with her again. You can learn a lot.”
    “Unh-hunh. Some of it about meteorology and global climate. All right, guess I better call Hardshaw back first, then get to Carla. You take care and we’ll talk whenever one of these sleepyheads in here comes up with any of the numbers you asked for. Get some sleep tonight … might not be another good chance for a while.”
    Henry pings off, and Di turns around to find Lori has been listening, out of sight of the phone’s camera. “You got that?”
    “Yep.” She unfastens a button and winks at him more blatantly than he’d have thought possible. “And you heard your boss. Better take your chances while you’ve got them … .”
     
     
    In the middle of the twentieth century, the phone company learned to sell the dead time on a line, if there were enough lines. That is, if people make noise into the phone line only eighty percent of the time, then if you can switch conversations off as soon as someone falls silent, reconnect them through the first available line as soon as there’s any sound, and do it all fast enough so that no one notices the brief cutting off of the beginnings of sounds—well, then, you need only four lines per five conversations.
    In the mid-1960s, to maintain communications in the event of a nuclear war, USDoD came up with ARPAnet, which begat Internet, a term you still hear old people call it in their boomtalk, instead of just “the net” it has evolved into, a system for moving e-mail in which each message knows where it is going and wanders from node to node in a network, taking every opportunity to get closer to its destination.
    By 1990, intelligence organizations were using the splitting up of messages across multiple channels to make it impossible to monitor a conversation; one split second of it went across the country from microwave tower to microwave tower, the next split second went through an unused TV channel on a satellite, the next jumped around the world on satellite-to-satellite relays, and it all got together at the phone.
    By 2028, that technique is no longer used for security; it’s simply the most efficient way to use the trillions of fibrop pathways and laser groundto-satellite links. But it has the same effect: nothing and no one can jam information as long as it’s coming from and going to enough different places at once. You can keep any one person from talking or listening … but that’s all.
    And the same trillions of channels are the ones on which the UN, the
governments, and the corporations depend. They can no more unplug than you can stop breathing; or rather the cost of doing either would be the same.
     
     
    It’s afternoon in the Western