Dark Rivers of the Heart

workers were motivated by a fierce desire to save the natural world. The E.P.A cooperated so successfully with the Department of Justice that a citizen who even inadvertently contaminated protected wetlands was at risk of spending more time in prison than would a doped-up gangsta dude who killed a 7-Eleven clerk, a pregnant mother, two nuns, and a kitten while he was stealing forty dollars and a Mars bar.
        Consequently, because shining success bred increased budgets and the greatest access to additional off-budget funding, the E.P.A owned the finest of hardware, from office equipment to orbital surveillance satellites. If any federal bureaucracy were to obtain independent control of nuclear weapons, it would be the E.P.A, although it was the least likely to use them-except, perhaps, in a turf dispute with the Department of the Interior.
        To find Spencer Grant and the woman, therefore, the agency was using the E.P.A surveillance satellite-Earthguard 3-which was in a geosynchronous orbit over the western United States. To seize complete and uncontested use of that asset, Mama infiltrated E.P.A computers and fed them false data to the effect that Earthguard 3 had experienced sudden, total systems failure. Scientists at E.P.A satellite-tracking facilities had immediately mounted a campaign to diagnose the ills of Earthguard 3 by long-distance telemechanical testing. However, Mama had secretly intercepted all commands sent to that eighty-million-dollar package of sophisticated electronics-and she would continue to do so until the agency no longer needed Earthguard 3, at which time she would allow it to go on-line again for the E.P.A.
        From space, the agency could now conduct a supramagnified visual inspection of a multistate area. It could focus all the way down to a squaremeter-by-square-meter search pattern if the need arose to get in that tight on a suspect vehicle or person.
        Earthguard 3 also provided two methods of highly advanced night surveillance. Using profile-guided infrared, it could differentiate between a vehicle and stationary sources of radiant heat by the very fact of the target's mobility and by its distinct thermal signature.
        The system also could employ a variation on Star Tron night-vision technology to magnify ambient light by a factor of eighteen thousand, making a night scene appear nearly as bright as an overcast day-although with a monochromatic, eerie green cast.
        All images were automatically processed through an enhancement program aboard the satellite prior to encoding and transmission. And upon receipt in the Vegas control center, an equally automated but more sophisticated enhancement program, run on the latest-generation Cray supercomputer, further clarified the high-definition video image before projecting it on the wall display. If additional clarification was desired, stills taken from the tape could be subjected to more enhancement procedures under the supervision of talented technicians.
        The effectiveness of satellite surveillance-whether infrared, night-vision, or ordinary telescopic photography-varied according to the territory under scrutiny. Generally, the more populated an area, the less successful a space-based search for anything as small as a single individual or vehicle, because there were far too many objects in motion and too many heat sources to be sorted through and analyzed either accurately or on a timely basis. Towns were easier to observe than cities, rural areas easier than towns, and open highways could be monitored better than metropolitan streets.
        If Spencer Grant and the woman had been delayed in their flight, as Roy hoped, they were still in ideal territory to be located and tracked by Earthguard 3. Barren, unpopulated desert.
        Saturday afternoon through evening, as suspect vehicles were spotted, they were either studied and eliminated or maintained on an under-observation list until a determination could be made that their occupants didn't fit the fugitive-party profile: woman, man, and dog.
        After watching the big wall display for hours, Roy was impressed by how perfect their part of the world appeared to be from orbit. All colors were soft and subdued, and all shapes appeared harmonious.
        The illusion of perfection was more convincing when Earthguard was surveying larger rather than smaller areas and was, therefore, using the lowest magnification. It was most convincing