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resolve itself into a big, boxy Land Rover, caked with road dust. It pulled up into the parking lot, dwarfing Jake’s Mustang, and out stepped Bob Rogers with a big grin on his face. He was wearing tan chinos stuffed into tooled black cowboy boots, and a splashy red and white western-cut shirt with snaps instead of buttons.
    “Welcome to Lignite!” Rogers called.
    Rogers led him into the diner for an early lunch.
    “Tim won’t start today’s run until one o’clock,” Rogers said.
    The diner was almost empty, only an overweight state highway patrol officer sitting at the counter, a heavy pistol hanging at his bulging hip, two-way radio clipped to the epaulette of his shirt. Rogers slid into the nearest booth; Jake sat across the cracked, stained table. The bleach-blond waitress was plump, too, and bosomy, but the scrambled eggs and crisp bacon were surprisingly good, Jake thought. The coffee was weak, but what the hell. Rogers talked about the town all through the meal.
    “Used to be a thriving mining town, back in my grandfather’s day. Coal trains a hundred cars long would chug up the rail line every day. But then the country started switching to oil for heating, and the environmentalists found out that high-sulfur coal causes acid rain and old Lignite just faded up and almost blew away.” Rogers didn’t seem upset by the town’s parlous history. “Great place to grow up, though. Especially if you like riding.”
    “You grew up here?”
    “Yeah. We still have a rodeo, every Fourth of July.”
    Jake nodded. A rodeo. The big event of the year in swinging downtown Lignite.
    “We’re burning high-sulfur coal right out of the old Lignite mine,” Rogers said.
    “Despite the environmentalists?” Jake asked.
    “That’s the whole point. In the MHD generator we can extract the sulfur compounds in their gaseous state before they get out of the exhaust stack. The rig is environmentally clean!”
    “So there’s no pollution coming out the stack?”
    “Nothing but some nitrogen compounds and cee-oh-two.”
    “Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.”
    Rogers shrugged. “Yeah. The EPA has a program to sequester cee-oh-two; pump it underground so it doesn’t get into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”
    “I’ve read about that.”
    “The big rig runs at almost seventy percent efficiency, calculating from the amount of fuel in and the amount of electrical power out.”
    “Seventy percent?”
    Grinning, Rogers said, “We’ll do better than that.”
    “Seventy percent is pretty damned good.”
    Rogers grabbed the check when it came, over Jake’s faint protest. Then he slid out of the booth and said, “Come on, let’s go check out the big rig.”
    Once outside again, Rogers told Jake to follow his Land Rover. “It’s a straight shot out to the test shed. You can’t miss it.”
    Jake went to his Mustang. It was baking hot inside. He thought about putting the convertible’s top down but decided against it. Instead he rolled down the windows and turned the air-conditioning on full blast.
    He watched Rogers carefully back his dust-caked Land Rover out of its parking space. Jake thought the big wagon looked as heavy as a tank. Suddenly Rogers gunned it up onto the road and took off like an Indy 500 racer. Jake pulled out of the parking lot, bounced up onto the road, and leaned on the Mustang’s accelerator pedal to catch up. All he could see of the Land Rover was a cloud of gritty dust. It was so thick that Jake started to cough; he rolled his windows up.
    They were past the town in a minute, out onto the flat, arrow-straight road. Nothing on either side but low-lying sagebrush, not even a tree. Then Jake saw in the distance a square structure; it looked something like an oversized shed made of corrugated steel.
    They pulled up at the parking lot in a screech of gravel and dust. Jake saw that the facility was indeed a big corrugated metal shed. Must get damned hot in there, he thought.
    “Here