And then nothing happened. As July melted into the sultry days of August, the political campaign seemed to settle down into a routine. Tomlinson raced around the state, speaking at barbeques, libraries, PTA meetings in town after town. Smiling handsomely, outwardly full of youthful vigor, he seemed tireless. But Jake saw him at home, away from the other campaign workers and aides. He knew how much energy was being drained from the candidate.

Senator Leeds ran a much more relaxed campaign, appearing at huge rallies in the state’s major cities. Mammoth crowds turned up for his appearances.

As they watched one of Leeds’s speeches on television from Tomlinson’s living room, Amy said, with grudging admiration, “His people know how to turn out a crowd.”

“Union rank and file,” murmured Tomlinson, leaning back on a big, plush sofa.

“They vote, dammit,” his father growled.

“Organized labor,” Amy said.

Organized crime, Jake thought.

Tomlinson’s numbers were inching upward, but Leeds still had a seven-point lead in most of the polls. The Fourth of July stunt at Lignite had bumped Tomlinson’s numbers higher briefly, but they settled back within a week. The debate had gone well, Jake thought. The news reports were generally favorable. But Tomlinson’s poll numbers inched upward only slightly. At least they haven’t gone down, Jake told himself thankfully.

Leeds kept hammering on his experience and derided Tomlinson’s “elitist pie-in-the-sky fantasy” based on “an unproven and possibly dangerous technology, which at best will take ten or twenty years to do anything useful.”

If Tomlinson’s people had indeed started a whispering campaign about Senator Leeds’s links to organized crime, Jake saw and heard nothing about it. No news stories, no hints in the political blogs and Web sites, no discernable whittling of the senator’s lead in the election polls.

Jake saw Bob Rogers regularly, usually on campus at their basketball exercises, and he drove up to Lignite at least once a week. Tim Younger had the big rig purring along smoothly, putting out fifty megawatts for hundreds of hours without interruption.

“We’re going for seven hundred fifty,” Younger said, over the constant roar of the generator.

Calculating mentally, Jake hollered, “That’d be more than a month.”

Younger nodded, a hint of a smile cracking his dour expression. “A month without interruption. Then we take her apart and see how she stood up to it.”

At least Tomlinson got the Fain Security Company to detail a couple of men to watch Jake and Glynis.

“You don’t have to look around for us,” said the agent who showed up in Jake’s office. “We’ll be watching you and the young lady.”

The agent looked like a wimpy little insurance salesman to Jake. Nondescript, spindly. Nothing like the tough guys he’d seen in movies and television.