How To Succeed in Evil by Patrick E. McLean Page A

looking for. He tried again. “W-w-why have I been kidnapped?”
    “Because these people are very stupid. I mentioned that it might be helpful if I could speak to you and…”
    “What, you! You WHAT? Wait a minute. What in God’s name is going on here?”
    “I know,” says Edwin, “it hurts to try make sense of it. I would have been happy with a phone call.”
    “This is an OUTRAGE, I, I, I,”
    “I’m sorry for your inconvenience. Please try to calm down.”
    “INCONVENIENCE! I was at my son’s BALL GAME! He saw his FATHER get KIDNAPPED!”
    Edwin is already bored with the small talk, “Do you have a consulting fee?”
    “WHAT?”
    Edwin tries again, slower. “Do you have a consulting fee?”
    “YES!”
    “If, we were to pay you, say, five times your normal consulting rate for this conversation, would that be sufficient incentive for you to stop yelling?”
    “Uh, yeah,” he says, stroking his mustache for reassurance. “But, please, what’s going here? Who are these people?”
    “You really don’t want to know.”
    “Yes I do.”
    Edwin tries again. “As I explained, I am being held captive by an aged Francophilliac and her half-witted son. As far as I can tell, she longs to use her considerable wealth to see the antebellum South rise again in a ridiculous jihad of gracious living. And not only does she look to me for the plan through which her backward and inbred scheme can be realized, but she also demands my true love.”
    “You’re right,” says Putnam, “I really didn’t want to know that.”
    “Yes, I’m usually right. Now,” Edwin says, indicating a large map of North America that is marked with colored dots connected by an unruly matrix of fine lines, “do you recognize this?”
    “It’s the grid. Every power generation facility in North America.”
    “That is correct. Now, if my understanding is complete then this diagram means that every power generation facility is linked into the grid.”
    “Yes.”
    “Interconnected.”
    “Yes.”
    “Interdependent.” For the first time since entering the room days ago, Edwin seats himself at the piano and begins to play.
    “I wouldn’t say that exactly, but, close enough.”
    “So that a plant in New York, might actually be generating power for a home in Florida.”
    “That’s a stretch. You see the energy used in transmission, dissipated in heat and radiated magnetic charge around the lines—”
    “How do blackouts happen?”
    “Well, it’s complicated.”
    “Then tell me about the Lake Erie Loop. What happened with the Lake Erie Loop?”
    “Well nobody really knows for sure. That blackout that shut down the NorthEast and the Midwest. It was blamed on a set of transmission lines that circle Lake Erie, but... Well, I’m not sure what happened. There were investigations but...”
    “Could it be that it was more politically expedient that a cause for the blackout was never found?”
    “Yeah, that’s probably it. Look, I charge people a lot of money to consult on power grid issues. But this system is so big — it crosses so many state and even national boundaries,” he shrugged, “A lot of it is guesswork. It’s worse in Europe.”
    “Please try to explain it to me.”
    “Look, in July 1996 a tree fell into a power line in Oregon. That took down 15 states.”
    “Remarkable,” says Edwin. His fingers move faster across the keys. The music echoes beautifully through the empty room.
    “Well, it was hot. People were using a lot of power for A/C. And the load on one power plant became too great, so it shut down. Which overloaded the next one. Boom, boom, boom, boom, like dominos.”
    “Or lemmings,” Edwin says quietly.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.” Edwin lifts his fingers from the keys and turns to face Putnam. “What is it called when power is, how shall I say, in harmony?”
    “You mean, in ‘phase.’”
    “Yes, that’s it.”
    “It’s described by a sine function rotated through 180 degrees and