Over the past couple of weeks since the meeting with General Pickler, Neal had contrived to make himself unpopular again by incessantly demanding that the government look into retrieving one of the asteroids that had, without exception, landed near, but never actually on, land. Confounding what might have otherwise been a fairly reasonable proposition was the fact that they had all fucking well landed in deep water, thought Neal angrily.

But it could be done, he had said a hundred times. According to all reports from near the impact sites they had all survived the atmosphere to hit with apparently significant force, registering on seismographs around the globe, and causing minor but clearly defined shockwaves to wash up on nearby shores. This fact indicated that they were even denser than even Neal had speculated, making other theories that they must have disintegrated upon impact far from certain. Those theories were further refuted by the lack of any floating debris at the Alaskan site, which the coastguard had been dispatched to survey, or the Scottish site, which had been visited by the RAF and British Royal Navy.

But Neal’s arguments had fallen on deaf ears. The colonel, who had caught some of Neal’s enthusiasm in spite of himself, was controlled by higher powers that were more pragmatic and less curious than he, and both Neal and his theories had been brushed under the carpet.

So Neal had returned to his 1970s decorating nightmare of an office and worked his theories with his limited resources, sending his reports to any noted scientist he could find an e-mail address for. The only one who had responded was about to join him on the cheap side of the fence for a meeting.

Dr. Laurie West had found herself quietly impressed with Neal. But more than that, she felt the same shared pangs of frustration when she looked at him as she did when she remembered her own wasted shouts of protest before she had learned to play the surprisingly political game of modern scientific pursuit. Like it or not, the days of discovering life-changing breakthroughs in your basement laboratory were all but gone. The machinery necessary to explore the limits of our ever growing field of knowledge were simply too expensive to afford without navigating the bureaucracy of big business, or worse, big government. Nowhere was this truer than in astrophysics, Laurie thought as she climbed the stairs to Neal’s floor, where people like her and Neal simply must have access to big toys to see what they wanted to see.