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dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere. See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it expands, like popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it back into the shaft you've taken it out of; there's too much of it. If you dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that's left is enough to make two mountains. So that's what you do. You build new mountains. And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast the next morning. Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up. All the TV shows have morale-builder commercials telling us how important our work is, how the whole world depends on us for food. It's all true. They don't have to keep reminding us. If we didn't do what we do there would be hunger in Texas and kwashiorkor among the babies in Oregon. We all know that. We contribute five trillion calories a day to the world's diet, half the protein ration for about a fifth of the global population. It all comes out of the yeasts and bacteria we grow off the Wyoming shale oil, along with parts of Utah and Colorado. The world needs that food. But so far it has cost us most of Wyoming, half of Appalachia, a big chunk of the Athabasca tar sands region. . . and what are we going to do with all those people when the last drop of hydrocarbon is converted to yeast? It's not my problem, but I still think of it. It stopped being my problem when I won the lottery, the day after Christmas, the year I turned twenty-six. The prize was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Enough to live like a king for a year. Enough to marry and keep a family on, provided we both worked and didn't live too high. Or enough for a one-way ticket to Gateway. I took the lottery ticket down to the travel office and turned it in for passage. They were glad to see me; they didn't do much of a business there, especially in that kind of commodity. I had about ten thousand dollars left over in change, give or take a little. I didn't count it. I bought drinks for my whole shift as far as it would go. With the fifty people in my shift, and all the friends and casual drop-ins who leeched on to the party, it went about twentyfour hours. Then I staggered through a Wyoming blizzard back to the travel office. Five months later, I was circling in toward the asteroid, staring out the portholes at the Brazilian cruiser that was challenging us, on my way to being a prospector at last.
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    Sigfrid never closes off a subject. He never says, "Well, Rob, I guess we've talked enough about that." But sometimes when I've been lying there on the mat for a long time, not responding much, making jokes or humming through my nose, after a while he'll say: "I think we might go back to a different area, Rob. There was something you said some time ago that we might follow up. Can you remember that time, the last time you--" "The last time I talked to Klara, right?" "Yes, Rob." "Sigfrid, I always know what you're going to say." "Doesn't matter if you do, Rob. What about it? Do you want to talk about how you felt that time?" "Why not?" I clean the nail of my right middle finger by drawing it between my two lower front teeth. I inspect it and say, "I realize that was an important time. Maybe it was the worst moment of my life, about. Even worse than when Sylvia ditched me, or when I found out my mother died." "Are you saying you'd rather talk about one of those things, Rob?" "Not at all. You say talk about Klara, we'll talk about Klara." And I settle myself on the foam mat and think for a while. I've been very interested in transcendental insight, and sometimes when I set a problem to my mind and just start saying my mantra over and over I