Shadow Watch

Acceptable?”

“Sounds fair to me.”

She looked at the clock again.

“Mommee!” Linda cried from the kitchen. “Chris said I stink like a monkey’s butt!”

“See you at eight sharp,” Annie said, and hung up the telephone.

* * *

The “quirky” volunteer Annie had mentioned to Nimec was a twenty-five-year-old research scientist named Jeremy Morgenfeld, whom she was able to reach on her cellular after depositing the kids at school — and just in the nick of time, Jeremy explained over the phone, since he’d been about to set out on his catamaran and had intended to remain incommunicado for the rest of the morning, his usual habit being to work no more than four hours a day, Monday through Thursday, beginning neither a moment sooner nor later than the stroke of noon. The living definition of a prodigy, Jeremy had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a month before his sixteenth birthday with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and had later gained four master’s degrees in that and other related fields, as well as three doctorates in the physical and biological sciences. By the age of twenty-one he had started up the Spectrum Foundation, an independent think tank financed almost entirely by the sale of its own diverse technological patents, with a small percentage of additional grant money coming from MIT in exchange for participation in several joint projects, which included what he was presently describing to Nimec as magnetohydrodynamics—

“Plasma theory,” Annie said. “You’ll have to excuse Jerry. Every now and then he likes to remind people that was once the exclusive subject of a MERF study.”

“That an acronym for something?”

“The Mensa Education and Research Foundation,” she said. “They’re interested in measuring the upper levels of intelligence… identifying the cultural, physiological, and environmental determinants of people with genius IQs.”

“Nature or nurture,” Nimec said. He was seated between them on the KSC tram, crossing from the reception area to the Vehicle Assembly Building. “The eternal debate.”

“Look, I’m not into making anybody feel dumb,” Jeremy said. Nimec guessed that was an attempt at being charitable. “But getting back to MHD, Annie’s definition is much too broad. It’s kind of like how every gerbil’s a mammal, but not every mammal’s a gerbil, you know? Plasma theory covers everything from the creation of the universe to these weird electrical surges in space I call Kirby crackle — after Jack Kirby, the comic book guy who outclassed all the megabucks special effects you’ve ever seen in sci-fi movies with only a pencil, an art board, and his imagination. Talk about genius.” Jeremy paused. “Anyway, MHD’s about the behavior of plasma in a magnetic field, which can lead to majorly immense practical applications. Power from atomic fusion, for example. It’s the cleanest way known to generate energy, assuming we can figure out how to build reactors that are big and powerful enough to do the job on a mass scale without turning them and everything around them to melted slag.”

“Better stop,” Nimec said. “You’re scaring me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can’t talk about it.” Nimec kept a straight face. “Childhood trauma.”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

Pleased, Nimec sat back and regarded him with his old cop’s eye for noting standout physical characteristics: straight brown hair worn in a step cut, gold wire-framed glasses, smallish chin, teardrop-shaped whisker under his lower lip. Wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap backward on his head, a Red Sox T-shirt to match, baggy khaki shorts, and Nike sneakers sans socks.

Nimec gestured to the insignia on his shirt.

“Take it you’re a Red Sox fan,” he said, seeking a bit of common ground.

Jeremy nodded. “I have a place on Sanibel Island about an hour’s drive from where the Sox do their spring training, and fly down to watch them get primed every year.”

Nimec gave him a curious look. “Sanibel’s a couple hundred miles south and west of us, isn’t it?” he asked. “You told me that you were going out on your cat’ when Annie contacted you this morning… how’d you make it here so fast?”

“Easy,” Jeremy said. “Got a place in Orlando too. I’ve been staying there since Annie asked me to help with the investigation.” He leaned forward and gave her a wink. “My girl beckons, I come running.”

Annie smiled a little. “Jeremy and I met about three years ago when he arrived for payload specialist training in Houston.”

Nimec tried not to sound surprised. “You,” he said, “were an astronaut?”

Jeremy adjusted his glasses. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable.

“Not exactly,” Annie interjected, moving in for an obvious save. “Non-NASA payload specialists fall into a unique category and are chosen by a sponsoring organization — usually a concern that’s arranged to perform a set of low-gravity experiments or launch some orbital hardware aboard a flight. These would include chemical and pharmaceutical companies, educational institutions, military contractors, and communications outfits like your own.”

“And the Spectrum Foundation?” Nimec said.

Annie nodded.

“At the time Jeremy was doing a study on crystal formation.”

“Crystallization patterns under varying environmental, thermodynamic, and thermochemical conditions,” Jeremy said. “Here’s an example: Everybody’s heard the old saw that no two snowflakes are alike, but that’s one of those sucky oversimplifications that always gets corrupted into a popular fallacy. Way back in the nineteen-thirties Ukichira Nakaya, a brilliant professor from Hokkaido, charted all the basic forms of snow crystals, and the temperature and moisture conditions that cause them to occur. His work laid some of the groundwork for research by another high-wattage Japanese scientist named Shotaro Tobisawa, who studied and described the crystallization of various chemical substances under controlled-implosion conditions.” He ran a fingertip down over his small tuft of beard. “Another example: Drop a nuke of a specific megatonnage somewhere, you get a predictable, unvarying type of mineral and atmospheric crystal formation in equally specific zones radiating from the blast epicenter. We’ve known that since Los Alamos. But the kinds of research I’ve been talking about are just the first steps toward understanding these phenomena. It’s one thing to know what set of conditions will result in a certain kind of crystal geometry, and another to figure out why they do. That fascinates me, because it leads into a whole area of physical law that’s virtually uninvestigated. Nobody thinks much about it now, but in the future when we get to areas of deep space exploration like terraforming or genetic adaption to other planetary environments, that sort of knowledge can be applied toward—”

“Jer,” Annie said. “We’re moving off-point.”

He frowned, shrugged.

“They said I wasn’t a team player,” he said.

Nimec looked at him. “Who’s they?”

“The director of the National Space Transportation System, plus his two deputies, plus the associate administrator of the Office of Space Flight. An amorphous group of gods known to us mortals as the Lords of the Great Kibosh,” Jeremy said. “The only NASA exec who spoke up for me was Annie, but even she couldn’t duck their lightning bolts.”

“Didn’t you say payload specialists fall outside government management?”

“Subject to final approval by the agency,” Annie said. “Jeremy being somewhat unorthodox in his ways, certain people at the top came to feel he might develop personality differences with his crewmates, and that those differences could blow up out of proportion in the extended confinement of a shuttle mission.”

“They thought I was a total pain in the ass, is what Annie’s trying to tell you without offending me,” Jeremy said. “You know that payload specialists don’t even have to be American citizens? But somehow I can’t go up for a miserable ten days without driving everyone else aboard to either leap into the void or dump me out of the cabin without a spacesuit. At least according to NASA.”

Annie smiled fondly and reached over to pat his arm.