“Do you have any cognac?”

He almost laughed. “No. I’ve got some wine in the fridge. California, I think.”

“That’ll be fine.” She went to the sofa and sat down. Jake saw that she was wearing a short-skirted black dress, with glittering jewelry at her wrists, her throat, and her earlobes. Her thick, dark blond hair framed her face. Her legs were long and shapely.

With an effort he turned his attention to the refrigerator and pulled out the half-gone bottle of chardonnay. He found a pair of clean wineglasses in the cabinet over the dishwasher and carried them to the coffee table in front of the sofa.

As Jake sat and yanked the plastic cork out of the wine bottle, Amy said, “Now tell me about this hot idea of yours.”

“It’s a way to produce more energy, cleanly, from the kind of coal we’ve got in this state.”

“More energy? Cleanly?”

Nodding as he poured the wine, Jake said, “It’s a better way to generate electrical power: MHD power generation.”

“MHD?” she asked. “What’s MHD?”

“Magnetohydrodynamics.”

Her jaw dropped. “Oh my god.”

Jake waggled a hand in the air. “Don’t let the term buffalo you. Just call it MHD. It could be Tomlinson’s ticket to the Senate.”

For more than an hour Jake explained the MHD generator to Amy, stressing how it was much more efficient than ordinary power generators.

“And it can burn the kind of high-sulfur coal that we have here, cleanly. They take out the sulfur before it can get out into the environment.”

Amy sipped wine and listened. She didn’t ask many questions, but whenever she looked doubtful Jake explained that point more carefully. It was a skill he had learned from years of teaching classes. Most students are too embarrassed to ask a question and show their peers that they don’t understand something. Jake had learned to recognize that hazy look of confusion or incomprehension and explain the doubtful point without the student having to raise a hand.

At last Jake finished. “That’s it,” he said, feeling excited about the idea again. He ticked off points on his fingers. “More electrical power. More efficient power generation. Lower electric bills. Clean power, no damage to the environment. Reopen the state’s coal mines. Create thousands of new jobs.”

Amy looked impressed. But she asked, “This device actually works?”

“I’ll take you up to Lignite. That’s where they have the big rig. It produced forty-eight megawatts this morning.”

“That sounds impressive,” she said.

“They’ll have to show that it can run for thousands of hours continuously, the way regular generators do,” Jake said. “That could be a big hurdle.”