Trout sat down next to Gamay. He had already decided that the best way to end the conversation was to begin it. “Thank you for seeing us,” he said as a prelude to saying good-bye.

“My pleasure,” Froby beamed. “To be honest, I don't encounter much interest in the Kovacs Society these days. This is a big deal. Where are you folks from?”

“Washington,” Trout said.

His baby blue eyes lit up. “An even bigger deal! You'll have to sign my guest book. Now, tell me, how did you come to be interested in Lazlo Kovacs?”

“We're both scientists with the National Underwater and Marine Agency,” Camay said. “A colleague of ours at NUMA told us about Kovacs's work, and said there was a society here in Los Alamos that had the most complete files on the subject. The national lab's library has very little on Kovacs.”

“That bunch over there thinks he was a quack,” Frobisher said with disgust.

“We got that impression,” Gamay said.

“Let me tell you about the society. I used to work as a physicist with the national laboratory. I played cards with a bunch of my fellow scientists, and invariably the work of Nikola Tesla came up. Some of us used to argue that Kovacs was overshadowed by Tesla's flamboyant style and deserved more credit for his discoveries than he had been given. We named our poker group the Kovacs Society.”

Trout smiled, but he was groaning inwardly as he thought about the time being wasted. He cleared his throat.

“Your society was named after a poker group?”

“Yes. We thought about calling it Poker Flats. But some of the fellows were married and thought a discussion group would be good cover to put their wives off.”

“So you never did discuss the Kovacs Theorems?” Gamay said.

“Yes, of course we did. We were bad poker players but good scientists.” He reached over to a shelf on his desk and pulled out two booklets, which he handed to the Trouts. “We ran off these copies of the original article in which Kovacs discussed his revolutionary theories. This is an abstract of a conference on his work held here about twenty years ago. It was mostly a dump-on-Kovacs affair. They're on sale for $4.95 apiece. We've got biographies you can buy for a little more, to cover the cost of printing.”

Paul and Gamay perused one of the booklets. The dense text was written in Hungarian, and was heavy on long, incomprehensible mathematical equations. Trout gave his wife a “That's it” grin and leaned forward, preparing to launch his tall body from the chair and out the door. Sensing his impatience, Gamay touched his arm.