He carried it to the door, flung it open, and stepped through. The two paycops lolling beside the lift caught a flavor of his mood. One nudged the other, who turned to see the white-blond hair and tight-lipped smile of Petrovitch advancing toward them at a steady gait.

“Dr. Petrovitch?” asked one. “Is there a problem?”

Petrovitch held the sphere up in front of him. “Out of the way,” he said. “Science coming through.”

He ran down the stairs, two stories, sliding his hand over the banister and only taking a firm hold to let his momentum carry him through the air for the broad landings. Now was not the time to wait, foot-tapping, for a crawling lift car that gave him the creeps anyway. Everything was urgent, imminent, immanent.

Second floor: his Head had given him two graduate students, and he had had little idea what to do with them. The least he could do to make up for several months of make-work was to include them in this. He needed witnesses, anyway. And their test rig. Which may or may not be completed: Petrovitch hadn’t seen either student for a week, or it might have been two.

Either way, he was certain he could recognize them again.

He kicked the door to their lab space open. They were there, sitting in front of an open cube of wood, a cat’s cradle of thin wires stretched inside. An oscilloscope—old school cathode tube—made a pulsing green line across its gridded screen.

The woman—blonde, skin as pale as parchment, eyes gray like a ghost’s… McNeil—yes, that was her name—glanced over her shoulder, her gray eyes growing impossibly round when she saw Petrovitch’s expression and what he was carrying.

“You’ve finished it.”

“This? Yeah, about a week ago. Should have mentioned it, but that’s not what’s important now.” He advanced on a steel trolley. In time-honored fashion, new equipment was built in the center of the lab. The old was pushed to the wall to be cannibalized for parts or left to fossilize. “Do either of you need any of this?”

He pointed to the collection of fat transformers on the top shelf. When he squatted down to inspect the lower deck, he found some moving coil meters and something that might have been the heavy-duty switching gear from a power station.

McNeil and the man—as to his name, Petrovitch’s mind was too full to remember it—looked at each other. Petrovitch waited all of half a second for a reply before seizing the trolley in his free hand and trying to tip it over. Some of the transformers were big ferrite ones, and he couldn’t manage it one-handed.

“You,” and he still couldn’t remember his name, “catch.”