“Well, actually… no,” Wix admitted. Kare drew a deep breath, but before he could deliver yet another homily on the desirability of something resembling a normal sleep schedule, the younger scientist hurried on.

“I was going to, honest. But one thing led to another, and, well—” He twitched one shoulder in impatient dismissal. “Anyway,” he went on more enthusiastically, “I was looking at that latest data run—you know, the one Argonaut pulled in last week?”

Kare recognized the futility of trying to introduce any other topic until Wix had run down about this one and resigned himself.

“Yes,” he said. “I know the data you’re talking about.”

“Well,” Wix went on, starting to bounce around the office in his excitement, “I went back and reran them, and damned if I don’t think we’ve actually hit the proper approach vector. Oh,” he waved one hand as Kare let his chair come suddenly back upright, “we still have a lot of refining to do, and I want to make at least two or three more runs to get a broader observational base to double-check my rough calculations. But unless I’m mistaken, the analysis is going to confirm that we’ve hit the target pretty much on the nose.”

“I wish,” Kare said after a moment, “that you’d stop doing this, TJ.”

“Doing what?” Wix asked, obviously confused by his superior’s tone of voice.

“Finding things ahead of schedule,” Kare told him. “After the Director and I spent days hammering home the need for us to do all of the time-consuming detail work, you turn around and find the damned approach vector a good four months early! Do you have any idea how hard this is going to make it to convince the politicos that they should listen to us the next time we tell them we need more time to complete our research?”

“Of course I do,” Wix told him in a moderately affronted tone. “That’s what I hate most about our political lords and masters, if you’ll remember the way I began this conversation. Besides, it really sours my day to start it off by literally stumbling across something which I ought to feel only pleased about finding and then realize how much it pisses me off to realize I’m going to do exactly what the idiots I work for wanted done all along. Well, that and the way the assholes are going to steal the credit for it.”

“You do realize how paranoid—if not petty—this entire conversation makes two reasonably intelligent adults sound, don’t you?” Kare asked with a wry grin, and Wix shrugged.

“I don’t feel particularly paranoid, and I don’t think we’re the petty ones. In fact, that’s why it pisses me off—I don’t like working for a prime minister who’s so damned petty. Besides, as soon as we tell them about it, that asshole Oglesby is going to be back over here for another news conference. At which you and Admiral Reynaud will be doing well to get a single word in edgewise.”