I had left home to avoid orders like this. Mineral prospecting and exploration could be frustrating and expensive—I had started out with an old van and a dirt bike, taking samples of gravel from dry riverbeds in the Arizona desert, testing them for surface gold. I liked the freedom, and now and then I hit pay dirt. Early on, I was a one-man company, so I could do as I wished, and later with money acquired technology and dug deeper. In the years when I traveled internationally I specialized in industrial diamonds in Australia and emeralds in Colombia and Zambia. My contracts were sometimes with major conglomerates, which helped develop the claims, but even at my busiest I was never subjected to any rigorous oversight. My success rate spoke for itself, I was trusted by the companies that hired me, and if I happened to be given orders, they were tactfully phrased. No one in the extractive industry ever loomed over me and said, Be there.

As a child I was given commands by my father, and when he died, Mother was the order giver. Now that she was fading, it seemed that Frank had begun to be the dominant one in the family.

I disliked his insistence, his barking an order, so I did not reply to this lunch invitation. I was well aware that my silence would annoy him, since he was used to being listened to and, more than that, obeyed, always getting his way.

I was in my study, at my desk when Vita pushed open the door and said, “Got a minute?”

This is always for me a daunting question, but it was especially worrying that day. Vita and I had been going through a marital transition. It had begun when I formed a mining company to conduct an extensive search in Idaho for a source of cobalt—ethical cobalt as opposed to the free-for-all in the Congo, small children sitting in mud in remote Kolwezi, clawing at ore-bearing sludge. The Idaho search area was vast, the high-tech equipment others had trained on it had been expensive. This is not the place to describe nuclear magnetic resonance imagery or satellite technology in prospecting, but these had been used, without finding the coppery deposits that indicate a source of cobalt.

I knew the area, I had prospected nearby in my early dirt-bike days; the landscape had distinctive features and a morphology—a shapeliness, an attitude—I could read. More telling than that, I could sense it: some ores have a distinct taste and smell, their presence pulses in the ambient air and can be pinned down in the word geologists often use, its facies—the gestalt of complex rock formations. I was away for months and the result was a deposit that would lead in time to the most productive cobalt mine in the United States. Riches: cobalt is the essential element in the battery of every smartphone, every computer, every electric car, every gizmo.