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no,” she said. “It’s an amazing experience.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, preparing to do her job. She assembled a skeptical question involving profit and loss and marketability. “I just wonder—” she began, but as she did she found the sentence bitter on her tongue, cynical. She stopped and looked at each of them. It occurred to her that Farley and his team had created something special from all these transducers.
    “Dr. Rutherford,” she said, “this will be difficult. Venture capitalists don’t like funding academics. You’ll have to show them a clear path to profitability. I’m not taking three PhDs into the boardroom without a professional marketing and product-release road map.”
    Farley nodded slowly from his waist, and as he leaned over he bit his lip, which pulled the left side of his mustache into his mouth. The intensity of his focus was cute, in a way, this bear of a man sucking on his own mustache. He continued nodding, rocking slowly back and forth.
    He asked, “Can you help us with the business plan?”
    “We’ll see,” she said, but she already had a vision of how to present the idea to Sand Hill Ventures. “No one is going to buy all this equipment.”
    “We can implement much of the technology in a virtual reality headset and gloves. It will look like supercool motorcycle gear and should be reasonably spectacular.”
    “Reasonably spectacular?” Maybe it was the wine, but she couldn’t help giggling at the phrase, and then her giggle became a yawn.
    He laughed with her. “It’s okay; you just swam hundreds of miles. Of course you’re tired.” The warmth of his hand comforted her shoulder. He applied a tiny bit of pressure, a simple suggestion to leave the room. It too was comfortable. She caught herself looking up at him, hoping that she hadn’t preened her hair aside but certain she had.
    They walked out of the lab/garage, back through the kitchen to the family room.
    Chopper sat, strumming the guitar. A yellow tackle box was on the couch next to him. Ringo leaned against the counter that separated the kitchen from the family room. Farley guided Gloria to the couch.
    This time she tried to look professional, didn’t curl her legs under her or rest them on the coffee table. She said, “You play beautifully.” Chopper nodded toward her but kept those amber-brown eyes on his guitar. The guitar was scratched up and dull, its lacquer worn away, but it sounded bright. He switched to a long cresting wave of blues. She realized he was now staring at her.
    “You play?” he asked.
    She took the guitar from him. It was warped, too, nearly ruined, held together by packing tape along one edge. She strummed a G chord. The body felt alive with vibration. She’d never held a guitar like this.
    “I once used it as an oar on a Greenpeace Zodiac,” Farley said. “Chopper over here thinks it learned to sing from humpback whales.”
    She set the guitar aside. The list of questions in her briefcase seemed so trivial now.
    Farley sat next to her at the edge of the couch, oriented toward her.
    “Gloria, I want to be completely transparent with you about our goals. Obviously we need your help.” As usual, his initial words were loud and clear, with those that followed diminishing in volume, but then he interrupted his loud-to-soft voice modulation. “The four of us can change the world.” The way he said it, punctuated with those clear blue eyes leveled at her, it was easy to believe him.
    “It wasn’t the universe that disappointed you; it was humanity. If you fill a balloon with carbon dioxide and expose it to sunlight, it gets hot faster than if it’s filled with air, which is mostly nitrogen and oxygen. Human beings have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by forty percent in the past hundred years. The planet is heating up and ice is melting. The cause-and-effect relationship is straightforward.”
    Chopper added, “Earth is running a