“The problem here,” I said, “is not that I’m deaf. The problem here is that you’re talking with your mouth full.”
She rolled her eyes but swallowed hard, and I could see her running her tongue along the front and sides of her teeth to swab off the chocolate and caramel and peanuts. She swallowed again. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Is what what you think it is?” She popped me one on the shoulder, hard. “Youch,” I said. “Oh, you mean that thing I put in the back? It is if you think it’s a Stihl ‘Farm Boss’ chainsaw, model 290.” I liked the name, Stihl—German, originally, I guessed—and the fact that it was pronounced “steel.” A manly name for a manly power tool.
“Why on earth are you bringing a chainsaw to a death scene? You planning to dismember the body, just to make the case more interesting?”
“I used to be a Boy Scout,” I said. “It’s always a good idea to be prepared.”
“Yeah, well, it’s always a good idea to be sane, too,” she said, “but I don’t see you taking giant steps in that direction at the moment.”
“Watch and learn, grasshopper,” I said. “Watch and learn.”
We drove the twenty-five miles to Oak Ridge in silence. Near-silence, actually, broken only by the grinding, smacking sounds of Miranda’s molars steadily dismantling the rest of the Snickers bar.
As we topped the last rise before dropping down the four-lane into Oak Ridge, Miranda pointed at the Cumberlands, ten miles to the north. High atop Buffalo Mountain, a serpentine line of white wind turbines reared against the azure sky. The three-bladed rotors—they looked like the world’s largest airplane propellers—flashed as their tips caught the sun’s rays and whirled them back again. Judging by how far the turbines towered above nearby trees, they must have stretched nearly four hundred feet into the sky.
“Man, this place is like Energy USA,” Miranda said. “Talk about your microcosm of kilowatt production.”
She was right. The ridges around the wind farm had been carved into the sharp, right-angle benches and shelves of mountaintop strip mines. To the east, the smokestack of Bull Run Steam Plant soared eight hundred feet into the sky. Alongside the power plant, the Clinch River—still twitching from its spin through the hydroelectric turbines of Norris Dam—traced the boundaries of the city in swirls of emerald green. And then there was Oak Ridge itself, the Atomic City: birthplace of the bomb, cradle of nuclear power.
“I wonder if these Oak Ridge brainiacs will ever figure out how to harness nuclear fusion,” Miranda said. “The power of the stars. Run your car for a year on a teaspoon of water, right?”
“Right,” I said. “I think that’s next on the list, as soon as they invent the transporter beam and figure out how to turn lead into gold.”
“It’s been done,” she said.
“Done? The transporter beam?”
“No-o-o-o,” she groaned. “Lead to gold.”
“Lead to gold? Done?”
“Done,” she said. “Tiny amounts, mind you—nanograms or angiograms or some such. They can probably do it right here in Oak Ridge, with one of their particle accelerators or research reactors. All you do is smash a jillion protons or neutrons or quarks or what-have-you against an atom of lead, and presto-chango: you’ve got an atom of gold. Oh, and a boatload of deadly radioactive contamination.”
“Damn,” I said, “there’s just no such thing as a free lunch, is there? By the way, you owe me a Snickers.”
We crossed a set of railroad tracks and threaded through a series of shopping centers, then turned east on Oak Ridge Turnpike—the city’s main thoroughfare—and passed still more shopping centers and strip malls. Oak Ridge was a town without a downtown—many towns these days were, including some of Knoxville’s bedroom communities. But Oak Ridge had a better excuse for its lack of center. The city had been flung up practically overnight by the U.S. Army during World War II, and even though six decades had brought changes, the place still had a provisional, makeshift feel. Strung along the floor of a wide valley that angled from southwest to northeast, Oak Ridge’s main business district was one block wide and five miles long.