“Pretty damned serious. When electrode performance degrades the generator’s power output nosedives. We haven’t been able to run for much more than a hundred hours without the damned buggers crapping out on us. And that’s at low power levels.”

Glynis, standing between them, said, “The professor is very worried about this.”

“He ought to be,” Rogers muttered.

“You’re melting the lightning rods,” Jake said, eying the blackened electrodes on the table.

A little more brightly, Rogers said, “I think if we could build them like mechanical pencils—you know, screw them into the plasma stream while they’re wearing down, like the lead in a pencil—we might be able to solve this problem.”

“Can you do that?”

“Tim’s working on it, up at the big rig. That, and moving the separator upstream of the channel.”

Glynis said, “He’s snowed in up there.”

“They’re okay, though?” Rogers asked. “Lignite hasn’t lost electrical power, has it?”

“They had an outage overnight,” she replied. “The power’s back on now. I talked with Tim over his cell phone first thing this morning.”

“Well,” Rogers said, holding his steaming Styrofoam cup in both hands, “we’re not going to solve this problem by staring at the little buggers.”

Raising his voice, he said to his grad students, “I want a survey of all the potential materials we can use for the electrodes, with their conductivities and their calculated erosion rates.”

The young men moaned a little. One of them asked, “How soon?”

“Yesterday,” said Rogers.

The young man shook his head. “I knew you’d say that.”

Rogers grinned at him. “Then why did you ask?”

He gestured toward the door, and Jake followed Glynis back into Rogers’s office. The physicist sat behind his desk; Jake and Glynis took the two plastic bucket seats in front of it.

“What’s Sinclair doing about all this?” Jake asked.

Rogers shook his head. “Not a damned thing. He seems paralyzed.”

Glynis agreed. “He’s been in something of a daze for the past several weeks. He canceled the one lecture he was supposed to give this semester. He spends most of his time cloistered in his office, all by himself.”

“He doesn’t see anybody?” Jake asked.

“Hardly anyone. His secretary, of course. And me.” She hesitated, her eyes flicking away from Jake for a moment. Then she went on, “But he hasn’t really had much to say to me lately.”

“Me, either,” Rogers said. “He used to want daily reports on how the runs are going. Last week he told me to e-mail a report to him every Friday.”

Looking uncomfortable, Glynis said, “It’s as if he’s … well, as if he’s in a stupor or something.”

“Something medical?”

“No,” Glynis said. “Psychological.”

Jake tried to sort this out in his mind. “And he doesn’t talk to anybody? Not even on the phone?”