Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.

Together they had become a team within a team.

Ketchup and Fries.

Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.

In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?

Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.

The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments at once.

Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory—and subsequent funding windfalls—for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone’s memory.

A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group’s foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators—a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders—were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.