Chevie opened the folder and was dismayed to find over two hundred files lined up alphabetically inside. Chevie changed the view so that the files were listed in order of date and picked one with the title “Project Orange Overview.” She began to read, forcing herself to go slowly and absorb every word. After twenty minutes of absolute concentration, she leaned back in her office chair and covered her mouth with one hand in case a hysterical giggle leaked out.

You have got to be kidding me, she thought, then removed her hand and shouted toward the door, “You have got to be kidding me!”

Orange was downstairs in the small medical room. He had wrestled his dead father from the pod’s interior and laid him out on a steel gurney, covering all but his head with a white sheet. When Chevie entered the room, he was gently sponging the old man’s forehead.

“Why do you think that kid killed your father?” “I don’t know. The Timekey video doesn’t show much. One second the boy is not there, and the next he is. More than likely he’s a thief.”

“A thief from the past. What are we going to do with him?”

Orange wrung the sponge till his knuckles were white. “Again, I don’t know. No one has ever brought back a local before. We could shoot him—I have a gun.”

“Shoot him, good one. Are you okay, Orange? Maybe I should take over as agent in charge?”

Orange smiled wryly, and Chevie thought, not for the first time, that her partner had a wide variety of smiles, none of them very happy.

“No need for that, Agent, I am perfectly fine.”

“But that’s your father.”

“In name only. I haven’t seen this man for a long time. The Bureau is my family.”

“Wow. I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Another smile, this one rueful. “I think you may be right.”

“Do I still have to call you Agent Orange?”

“No. Professor Smart will be fine. Or just Felix.”

“Professor Felix Smart. Son of missing Scottish quantum physicist Charles Smart. You have the same nose.”

“But not the same blood, thank goodness. Yellow blood sets off the scanner at airports.”

Chevie ignored the feeble attempt at humor. “So what happened to your father? I didn’t get that far in the files.”

Felix Smart gazed at his father’s face as he spoke. “My father discovered that Einstein’s quantum theory was essentially correct and that he could stabilize a transversable wormhole through space-time using exotic matter with negative energy density.”