Jack said what about a video montage of melting icebergs? I said too obvious. What about a hot-air balloon slowly bursting? He wasn’t sure. A cartoon? A song? Busily he recorded all the ideas, darting glances at me now and then but keeping his eyes mostly on Miss Sedge. She was younger than she looked at first, not much older than my mother. Would I change places with her? To be sitting in some high school girl’s family room chatting about my favorite subject? To be a person for whom Jack was just another smart sixteen-year-old boy?

We went over the list. The hot-air balloon was too literal, a cartoon too glib.

“Not a song . . .” I made my goofball face. “A song would be so extra.”

“Less is more,” said Jack.

“Whatever that means.”

Miss Sedge leaned back in her chair. Unsettling as her silence could be, we could trust what she said because she never tried to flatter us.

“The structure of the benzene ring was solved by a dream. The problem had been preoccupying Kekule for a long time. Then one afternoon he fell asleep and dreamed of a snake biting its own tail.”

Were we doing a science lesson now? Jack and I exchanged a tiny shrug.

“Though there’s no proof,” she went on, “he ever had the dream. His accounts of it over the years were inconsistent.”

“Then why believe it?” said Jack.

“Consistency is overrated,” said Miss Sedge. “Einstein would listen to music when he came to a dead end in his thinking. He said that usually did the trick. Alvarez was studying something else—magnetism—in the geological record when he figured out what happened to the dinosaurs. He and his father came up with the idea that the earth was hit by an asteroid.”

“Funny,” I said. “My friend Vicky was talking about asteroids. Is it true one is going to hit us?”

“Sometime in the next two millennia. It could be a hit or a near miss.” Miss Sedge removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put the glasses back on. “There are competing theories, of course, about the dinosaurs. What I mean to say is, solutions often come from outside the domain of the problem.”

“Thinking outside the box,” said Jack. “Blue-sky thinking.”

“If you want to go for the clichés.”

“Well, what would you call it?” I asked, feeling sorry for Jack, though I agreed his cliché habit let him down.