Jake looked around. Nothing much to see. A few buildings along the two streets, no traffic at all. The foothills rose off in the distance, turning brown from lack of rain. Beyond them were the bare granite mountains, purple-blue in the distance, shimmering with heat haze. Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles, Jake thought. He half expected to see John Wayne striding down the dusty road, heading for a shootout at high noon.

Helluva place to put a high-powered research facility. Then he grinned to himself. Rent must be pretty damned low. And if anything blows up here the news media will never hear about it.

He spotted a rooster tail of dust approaching from the direction of the foothills. Jake watched it come nearer and 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.”