Jacob Ross had first come to the Van Allen museum on a mandatory class trip when he’d been in middle school. None of the guys wanted to go to a geeky science museum, Jake included. But once the teachers got the kids settled into the strange, round, domed room that housed the museum’s planetarium, the lights dimmed slowly until the place was pitch black. And then they turned on the stars. Thousands of stars sprang out of the darkness, with the faint glowing ribbon of the Milky Way arching among them. Young Jake got turned on, too. Sitting in the darkness, watching the stars wheel in stately procession overhead, he became hooked on astronomy for life.

He rode city buses to the museum every weekend. He scraped together enough money from his after-school jobs to buy a student membership. He attended the planetarium shows so often he began to learn the lectures by heart.

And he discovered that the soft, clear voice that explained the stars in the darkness belonged to Dr. Leverett Cardwell, the planetarium’s director. With some trepidation, Jake fumblingly asked Dr. Cardwell a question about his lecture one Sunday afternoon, out in the hallway under the model of Mars, while the rest of the audience streamed past after the planetarium show had ended.

“You’ve been coming pretty regularly, haven’t you?” Cardwell asked the youngster.

Surprised and pleased that the director had noticed him, Jake stuttered, “Y … yessir.”

Thus began a lifelong friendship. Cardwell took Jake under his wing, opened the planetarium’s library to him, and helped him win a scholarship to the state university.

And now Lev was talking about something called MHD.

“Magnetohydrodynamics, huh?” Jake said.

Walking slowly toward the bright yellow globe of the Sun glowing above the museum’s entrance lobby, Cardwell said, “There’s a group of people in the university’s electrical engineering department who are working on MHD power generation.”

Why’s he telling me this? Jake wondered. But he knew he wouldn’t have to ask; Lev would explain it to him in his own time.

Jake had grown into a reasonably healthy young man. Scrawny as a child, picked on by the neighborhood bullies, he’d worked hard on homemade exercise equipment to build himself up. Now he stood just short of six feet tall, still on the lean side, but solid. His hair was dark and unruly, his face too long and horsy to satisfy him. Even so he’d been fairly popular with women, and married his high school sweetheart. But since his wife’s fatal car accident he’d kept to himself.

Leverett Cardwell was a tiny man, round-faced, balding, so neat and carefully groomed that some thought him effeminate. His large, round, slightly protruding owl-gray eyes always seemed to Jake to be searching, inquisitive. Jake had never seen Lev wearing anything but a gray wool suit, winter or summer, and a jaunty little bow tie.