“As an undergraduate in your last week,” Solly said, “this is the last time in your life you’ll be able to get away with being presumptuous. I recommend you make the most of it.”

Those guys are up to something. The awareness came to her slowly over the next few days, not as a flash of insight or a flood of waters but like groundwater rising below the foundation of a home. There were various hints and traces that, taken alone, might have been ignored or explained away. But the one detail that clinched it had been the look on C-plus’s face, and the tone of his voice, at the very moment that Sophia had walked through the door into Solly’s office. Had C-plus actually been there in Princeton, it might have been different. He might have heard her footsteps approaching, might have seen the door beginning to move. Fast as thought, the muscles of his face would have adjusted. But the latency of the network had given her a head start. Solly’s connection was as good as tech could make it. But tech couldn’t do anything about the speed of light. It took time for the image of Sophia’s entering the room to make its way to wherever C-plus was and for his reaction to make its way back, and during that interval, as she stood in the doorway looking at the big screen, she was like a ghost. Not the Ghost of Christmas Past. More the other way round. It was she who was in the present, seeing C-plus and Enoch as they had been in the past: the moment before she entered. And what she saw there, at thrice life size on the big high-resolution display, was Corvallis Kawasaki looking a way she had never seen him before. He looked like a little kid. The expression “kid in a candy store” didn’t quite capture it.

She had heard, secondhand from her mother, an anecdote about how John and Dodge had, at the ages of something like ten and eight, figured out how to pick the lock on the bomb shelter that their father had built beneath the backyard of the house in Iowa during the darkest and scariest time of the Cold War, and how they had gone in there with flashlights and discovered things that fascinated and terrified them: guns and ammunition and K-rations, yes, but also trophies of war that their father had looted from the corpses of Nazis, pictures he had taken while liberating concentration camps, stashes of European pornography, phials of morphine, ancient bottles of Bordeaux and cognac, correspondence from ladies who were not his wife. Dodge and John had very carefully backed out of that bomb shelter and closed the door and locked it and never divulged to their father that they had gone in, and after the patriarch had passed away they had destroyed most of what was down there.