Zachariah, or Zach to his friends, was what was affectionately known as a university ‘drop-in’. He was a brilliant young man who, with doctorates in gravitational astrophysics, particle physics and pure mathematics, and a specialisation in black holes and cosmic dark matter, could have had his choice of any number of advisory or teaching positions at Tel Aviv University or any other place of higher learning around the world. Problem was, Zach didn’t want to do anything in the real world. How could he? There was so much more to learn and never enough time. As soon as he finished one degree, he enrolled in another, and another; he had been the same since his first senior class at the age of thirteen – always moving forward and expanding his encyclopaedic knowledge of the cosmos and its strange forces.

After his parents were killed in a bomb attack, school had become his shelter and books his friends. They were always there for him, faithful and factual, and had nothing to do with war. Not like his parents, who had both been victims of this war that seemed without end. His father had died when he wrestled to the ground a man who carried a live grenade. His mother had died shielding her young son from the full force of the blast. When Uncle Mosh and Aunt Dodah had taken Zach in, they had worried about his withdrawal into a world of reading. But it soon became clear that it was just his way of dealing with his personal tragedy.

Tall and skinny, with long bony hands on the end of even longer bony arms, Zachariah was a man in perpetual motion. He always had something to do and rushed about, knuckles cracking, feet tapping, hands flying over computer keyboards or drawing things in the air for others. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles completed the image of the stereotypical uber-nerd.

Zach slurped the last drops of his chocolate, threw his mug onto the bench and switched the device on. With the OCRU, he would soon be able to detect anything from a normal daily pulse of gamma right up to a mega blast. The Earth had encountered mega-range blasts before. A prehistoric far-galaxy short burst of gamma rays had once been suggested as a possible reason for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Luckily, those types of events happened about once every 500 million years. Even luckier for Earth was that no gamma bursts had ever occurred in its galaxy. And just as well, Zach thought; a single ten-second burst from a source just 6000 light years away would strip the planet of its atmosphere and burn all life from the surface.

The computer screens flared to life, showing graphs and charts with unexpected intensities, and the crystals glowed strongly, bathing Zach and his laboratory in blue light. This can’t be right, he thought.