"Crystallization patterns under varying environmental, thermodynamic, and thermochemical conditions," Jeremy said. "Here's an example: Everybody's heard the old saw that no two snowflakes are alike, but that's one of those sucky oversimplifications that always gets corrupted into a popular fallacy. Way back in the nineteen-thirties Ukichira Nakaya, a brilliant professor from Hokkaido, charted all the basic forms of snow crystals, and the temperature and moisture conditions that cause them to occur. His work laid some of the groundwork for research by another high-wattage Japanese scientist named Shotaro Tobisawa, who studied and described the crystallization of various chemical substances under controlled-implosion conditions." He ran a fingertip down over his small tuft of beard. "Another example: Drop a nuke of a specific megatonnage somewhere, you get a predictable, unvarying type of mineral and atmospheric crystal formation in equally specific zones radiating from the blast epicenter. We've known that since Los Alamos. But the kinds of research I've been talking about are just the first steps toward understanding these phenomena. It's one thing to know what set of conditions will result in a certain kind of crystal geometry, and another to figure out why they do. That fascinates me, because it leads into a whole area of physical law that's virtually uninvestigated. Nobody thinks much about it now, but in the future when we get to areas of deep space exploration like terraforming or genetic adaption to other planetary environments, that sort of knowledge can be applied toward--"

"Jer," Annie said. "We're moving off-point."

He frowned, shrugged.

"They said I wasn't a team player," he said.

Nimec looked at him. "Who's they?"

"The director of the National Space Transportation System, plus his two deputies, plus the associate administrator of the Office of Space Flight. An amorphous group of gods known to us mortals as the Lords of the Great Kibosh," Jeremy said. "The only NASA exec who spoke up for me was Annie, but even she couldn't duck their lightning bolts."

"Didn't you say payload specialists fall outside government management?"

"Subject to final approval by the agency," Annie said. "Jeremy being somewhat unorthodox in his ways, certain people at the top came to feel he might develop personality differences with his crewmates, and that those differences could blow up out of proportion in the extended confinement of a shuttle mission."

"They thought I was a total pain in the ass, is what Annie's trying to tell you without offending me," Jeremy said. "You know that payload specialists don't even have to be American citizens? But somehow I can't go up for a miserable ten days without driving everyone else aboard to either leap into the void or dump me out of the cabin without a spacesuit. At least according to NASA."

Annie smiled fondly and reached over to pat his arm.

"Jeremy could have handled it, and the crew could've handled him," she said. "The upside to the whole affair is that he and I got acquainted, and have stayed friends ever since."