Free Killer Dust by Sarah Andrews Page B

and get a swim in, and then …” About there their voices faded into the distance.
    I turned to Tom.
    He shrugged and mopped his brow, all in one wilting motion. “Welcome to Florida,” he said.
     
     
    We drove south into St. Petersburg. My impression-gathering equipment was on full alert, taking in the towering, layered cloudscapes, the sultry older houses built wide and open to breathe with the breezes, the astonishing arrays and varieties of rich green foliage that hung out brash and tropical at every turn. Pedestrians strolled the sidewalks in shorts and tank tops; comely girls and some older women who should have known better wore tight, skimpy blouses and dresses that maximized all curves. I gawked in amazement. There was something subtly or not-so-subtly more sexual about this display than I was used to seeing in Utah. I rode in a state of refrigerated automotive separation, both stimulated and lulled by the display.
    The USGS occupied a two-story, Art Deco, brick building that had once been a Studebaker salesroom and was now externally ossified and internally renovated by dint of having been placed on some sort of historical register. I thought, Just perfect: Don’t know what to do with a bunch
of rock heads? Think they’re sort of miscellaneous, unimportant, or otherwise underfoot? Jam them into a space built to sell cars. All in one, you stack ’em in a warehouse and resolve the problem of what to do with that building the society ma’ams wouldn’t let you tear down.
    In fact, it was a very nice building, a lot snazzier than most places geologists get stacked. When I dodged from Nancy’s air-conditioned car through twenty feet of heat and humidity to the air-conditioned building, I found myself in a two-story foyer with hallways leading out in two directions and a modern steel staircase rising up to a balcony. The walls were covered with maps and full-color displays of technical research projects.
    There were a lot of people standing about in the foyer, which was unusual. Geologists do not like to stand around in groups. It offends their sense of individuality and makes them nervous. They are, however, inveterate observers, so many of them turned and looked at me.
    I, in turn, looked at them. Flummoxed to find myself the center of attention, I quickly turned to look at the receptionist, who sat facing me at a desk with her eyebrows raised in qualified greeting. “Are you with the press or the police?” she inquired.
    Without thinking, I said, “FBI.” I was making a joke. Sort of.
    The woman rose from her desk, gestured for me to follow, and headed down the hallway to my right. “Your meeting is right this way,” she said, leading me into a large room full of chairs arrayed in rows. “The press conference will be in here also, as soon as you all are done.”
    Being an adventuresome soul, I trotted right into that room. The good girl inside me—you know, the one who’s usually locked up in a cage with a rag stuffed in her mouth—wanted to explain to the receptionist that I had been kidding, but it was obvious that something was up, and I figured that as long as they didn’t mind giving me a leg up on finding out exactly what that was, I wasn’t going to make things difficult for them by getting particular about
who I was and why I was there. Besides, my schedule with Miles Guffey, the geologist Molly Chang knew, was casual at best, a sort of “give me a holler when you arrive” kind of arrangement, so I reasoned that I could check out this action and then go talk about dust. Okay, so I’m an old fire horse and someone rang the bell; my game plan was business first and ask forgiveness later.
    So I wandered into the room. Inside I found chairs for about one hundred people, but nobody sitting in them. There were four men standing over to one side of the room, communing by a coffee urn. Only one was in uniform, and he looked as clueless as I felt. He was young and had bad skin. One of the other