Where Echoes Live Read Online Free PDF Page A

individuals. Otherwise Transpacific has kept a very low profile and refused to enter into a dialogue with the environmentalists. Until they do, there’s nothing to confront.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œThat’s a question I don’t want to find out the answer to.”
    â€œI wonder what Hy and the Nickles woman were arguing about this afternoon.”
    Anne-Marie looked at her watch, then pushed back her chair. “We’re supposed to meet him and Ned at the trailer right about now. Why don’t you ask him?”

Three
    Ten o’clock. I stifled a yawn and tried to focus on what Ned Sanderman was saying.
    We’d been sitting on the uncomfortable office chairs in the rented trailer for close to three hours, and he’d talked almost nonstop the whole time. Right now the subject was how much Transpacific stood to lose should the environmentalists find a way to block the issuing of the final mining permits. The cost of the land, plus capital improvements, plus the cost of whatever core sampling had been done up to that point, Ripinsky said with an edge of annoyance. No, Sanderman objected, there were also administrative costs, legal expenses, plus loss of potential profit. The worth of a gold mine, he said, was equal to the value of the ore, less the aforementioned expenses. He then backed up this statement with examples that he punched out on his personal computer. (“It goes everywhere I go,” he’d informed me—not that I’d asked.) Ned Sanderman was one of the new breed of environmentalists: logical, unemotional, equipped with the latest technology, and with an eye for the bottom line. He’d told me that, too, plus most of his life story, in the first ten minutes after we’d been introduced. I now knew more about Ned Sanderman than I did about some of my own relatives, the primary fact being that he was boring.
    Slender and short, with a clean-shaven baby face and blond hair that was styled to cover a bald spot, he’d surprised me when he revealed that he was forty-six. “I had my mid-life crisis seven years ago at thirty-nine,” he said. “I was a computer engineer in Silicon Valley. Then one day I woke up to the fact that there was more to life than building a stock portfolio and acquiring expensive toys. I’d made it in my chosen career, and I needed more meaning in my life. I wanted to be connected in a basic way to the end results of my work.”
    â€œSo he ran away and joined the environmentalists the way some people join the circus,” Anne-Marie commented.
    Sanderman gave her a puzzled look. He was essentially humorless, and while he suspected the remark was supposed to be funny, it was obvious he didn’t know what to make of it. Also obvious was his intense self-absorption. The only question he’d asked me was how I liked the cabin at the lodge. When I said it seemed fine, he disdainfully cataloged the defects of his, especially of its kitchen. “I wouldn’t so much as boil water in there. God knows what germs are lying in wait,” he complained.
    Now he’d somehow gotten off on the heap leach cyanide process and was droning on about the dangers it posed to the environment. The details—poisoned fish, birds, and other wildlife, to say nothing of undrinkable water and unbreath-able air—were dismaying, but we’d been over this before. It was at least the dozenth tangent he’d lurched off onto. The first five or six times Anne-Marie and Ripinsky had tried to steer him back to the subject of our meeting. Finally they’d given up.
    I glanced at Anne-Marie; her eyes had glazed over. Ripinsky sat tilted back in his chair, feet on one of the cheap metal desks, staring up at the ceiling; from the expression on his face, I gathered that his mind was somewhere in the outer layers of the stratosphere. I shifted uncomfortably on the chair and yawned discreetly.
    Ripinsky’s gaze shifted from