She lifted her face toward his and he kissed her.

“We’ll have to do this again,” Amy breathed. “Real soon.”

“Next time I pay.”

She laughed. “You’re so serious about everything!”

“Yeah.” He kissed her again. Then she disengaged and turned to open her car door.

“Okay, next time it’s your treat,” she said, then ducked into the car.

Jake watched as she backed the car out of its parking space and turned it past him toward the exit. He waved good-bye when her headlights swung over him. Then he walked to his own beat-up Mustang convertible. He wondered where he could take Amy for dinner. Not in my neighborhood, he realized. Not in my neck of the woods.

The Big Rig

THE BIG RIG

Jake spent the weekend scrolling through every Internet source he could find for information about MHD power generation. He found it hard to concentrate on the words and data, though. His mind kept drifting back to Amy Wexler. Tomlinson had been right: Politics is a good way to meet women.

What he learned was that there had been abortive MHD generator programs in the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and even Australia. The American work dated back to the 1960s. None of the programs had amounted to much. The Russians actually fed power from their prototype MHD generator into the Moscow electrical grid—but not for long. For some reason, all of the previous MHD power generation programs had faded into failure.

Bob Rogers had invited him to see the “big rig,” as the physicist called it, which was located off campus, up in a mining town in the foothills. So Monday morning Jake drove out of town, guided by the GPS system he had bought two years earlier at Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale.

Lignite was a gray, run-down town, little more than a crossroads between two secondary state roads, with a gas station on one corner, a dreary motel across from it sporting a faded sign that proclaimed VACANCY, a cinder-block post office, and a dilapidated diner rusting away under the summer sun. Sad, empty-looking houses and shops ran for a few blocks down both streets, then abruptly ended in wind-blown sagebrush. A forlorn bird circled in the empty bright sky: a hawk or maybe a buzzard, Jake didn’t know which.

Feeling apprehensive, Jake parked in front of the diner and got out of his Mustang. The old clunker looks almost good compared to this dump, he thought. Two other cars were parked there, one of them a dust-coated highway patrol cruiser. A glance at his wristwatch showed he was almost ten minutes early for his meeting with Rogers. The sun felt warm enough for him to peel off his tan sports jacket and toss it back in the car, even though the breeze sweeping down from the hills was cool.