Professor Norman Bennett watches the verbose young man in front of him pick his nails down to the quick as he talks, a rolling expanse of words, a prolix assault that Norman can’t quite make sense of. They’re supposed to be having a meeting about scheduling participants for neuroimaging runs (Norman has surreptitiously checked his calendar twice to make sure), but instead Kierk is talking about subtle biases in the setup of neuroimaging experiments, and something about “tracing causation in reentrant chaotic systems is a mathematical impossibility.” Indeed, he’s still blathering on—“. . . I mean it’s basically a convenient happenstance that hemoglobin responds differently to magnetic fields based on whether it’s bound to oxygen. Sure, neurons in a particular brain region might increase their energy-hungry firing and therefore the vascular system initiates a hemodynamic response bringing more blood to the area with increased glucose need. In theory! So yes, presumably this hemodynamic response increases and decreases with neuronal firing. But we all know how sluggish it is. The blood takes two seconds to rush to the aid of neurons in need, and oh hey, it’s variable in its intensity and timing, meaning that fMRI has a temporal resolution that’s like averaging a symphony into a single note . . .”

The girl, Jessica, sitting next to Kierk and nodding, is looking more and more convinced. Norman holds up a hand.

“Thank you, Kierk, but just so I know, as a Crick Scholar, are you planning on actually doing any neuroimaging while you’re here at the Center?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Okay, well, let’s focus on that, not on the effectiveness of neuroimaging as such, hmm. I have a meeting in a few minutes,” Norman lies. He stands up behind his desk and begins to move toward his office door, a trick he has found which causes people to begin automatically retreating. Kierk and Jessica are ushered out, thanking him for his time. As the two of them recede down the hall, he hears them mention “Bennett” and “Nobel” and smiles as he closes his office door, goes and sits behind his desk. He leans back in his chair, reliving in his mind the handshake with the king of Sweden, that red carpet, redder than anything he’d ever seen, the flushed pride of his wife. Yes, her pride. His research on functional magnetic resonance imaging, the first real leader in the field, led to him sharing the prize in physiology with two colleagues.