“Why does there have to be a central mass?” the colonel said, shrugging slightly.

Neal mimicked the shrug and said, “Why would they be so close together if there wasn’t? Listen, Colonel, these objects have come a phenomenally long way from whatever orbital mishap started them on their journey, if they were all separate objects then there would need to be something larger, with enough gravitational pull,” he emphasized, “to keep them all together as they travelled. Otherwise they would have separated over time. Heck, over the kind of distances we are talking about, they would be light-years apart by now. Unless they had had some proverbial glue binding them.”

“Well there clearly is no ‘glue’ now, so your theory must be incorrect.”

Neal shook his head at the remark, but summoning up his patience, he went on, “There is that, but still, despite the apparent lack of a large mass, it is very clear that the objects are, even over the last week, pulling apart from each other. It is slow, but they are more spread out now than they were when we first spotted them. Given time I could probably extrapolate the time they separated.” Neal was aware he was almost pleading, but this was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a quite a while and he was so very desperate for anything in his life that might be termed interesting.

The colonel paused a moment, then said, “Mr. Danielson, this is all very well, but I still don’t see how this would affect the mass calculations.” In fact the colonel was wondering if he should be getting frustrated with Neal for wasting his time, or with himself for not getting it. He decided to remain passive until he found out, and by passive he meant obstinate.

The hitherto silent woman at the back of the room chose this moment to interject, stepping slowly down the steps from the balcony to the main floor and introducing herself as she went. “Neal Danielson, Laurie West, I’m an astrophysicist myself, on occasion.”

Neal whirled to her, momentarily sullen in reaction to the apparent additional assault on his expertise. But his wariness wavered when her name came to him, and he tilted his head inquisitively.

“Dr. Laurie West … of the Hubble Institute?” he said, his right hand starting to rise from his side to meet hers as she approached, but moving slowly, as if its cooperation were dependent on her response.

But she merely nodded and shrugged offhandedly, as though the title were a prank she had played in college which she hoped no one had heard about. They shook hands, Neal shaking hers with increasing enthusiasm as it sank in that he was talking to one of the premier physicists of this, or frankly any other time.