"It's the cross-section growth coefficient, isn't it?" he asks, and one of his eyebrows tries to climb even farther. "Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable. Everyone has been asking about it this week." He sighs, then backs towards his own chair, bearish on his short legs.

"I got an edited, probably garbled, version of it from Andy last week," she explains. "The original paper isn't on the intranet so I thought I'd ask you about it." She nods at the door. "In person."

"Yes . . . very wise." His expression relaxes moment by moment.

"The scholars of night have been busy."

"Word leaked." Saturnine, he rests one hand on a graph-ruled notepad. "Or so I gather from Angleton."

"That's interesting." Mo rests her violin against the side of her chair and crosses her legs. "He's missing too, you know."

"That's very interesting!" Now Ford's expression lightens. "The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things."

Mo nods. "Footwear and naval architecture I know, but I never could get my head around why you'd put wax in the ceiling. Some kind of late-Victorian loft-space insulation?"

"No, it's—" Ford stops. "Okay, you won that round. Is this about the paper, or the leak?"

"The paper." She leans forward expectantly.

"The first rule of paper is, there is no paper—well no, not exactly, but it's not the kind of result I could punt at Nature, is it?"

"Right. So who reviewed it?"

Ford nods. "That's the right question. Whose hat are you wearing?" Mo's eyes go very cold. "There's a little girl in Amsterdam whose parents don't have much time for hair-splitting right now. Not that I'm accusing you of playing games, but I need to know. See, I'm conducting some research in applied epistemology. It would be rather unfortunate if you made a mistake in your logic and the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh have gotten themselves worked up over nothing."

"The Brotherhood? I say, are they still going?" He meets her cold stare with one of his own. "That is simply not on. I rather thought we'd put a stop to their antics in Afghanistan a few years ago."

"They're a broad franchise: they've got any number of fronts." She makes a gesture of dismissal. "Whoever. I'm looking into this on my own initiative. Do you have a draft I can see?"

"I think I could manage that." He begins to hunt through the papers on his desk. "Ah, here." He passes her three pages, held together by a paper clip.

Mo peers at the top page. "Wait, I can't read—"

"Ah. Just a moment." Ford waves his left hand across the paper and mutters something unintelligible under his breath.

Mo blinks. "Was that entirely safe?"

He grins. "No."

"I, uh, see." She peers at the abstract. "That's interesting. Let me paraphrase. You've tried to quantify memetic transmission effects among a population exposed to class three abominations and find . . . belief in them spreads? And it's a power function?"