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negative one. Not that it had not done her good now and then. At NASA it had helped her through earnest committee meetings in which she was the only woman in the room. Now, thank God, all that was behind her.
    Still, she was not at all ready to enter the working bay, looking for Benjamin, and find Kingsley Dart in his uniform: slightly pouchy brown suit, white shirt, tie drawn tight in a knot of unknown style. Down-market Oxford, so utterly out of place that his attire advertised Dart’s unconcern for such trivial matters. Since she had seen him in a tux when the situation demanded, and yet he had somehow achieved the same effect of unconscious indifference, she was sure it was all quite conscious.
    She went through the clothes analysis automatically while trying to absorb the shock. She was suddenly self-conscious, and then angry about being so. He still had the power to throw her into momentary confusion. And the way he lifted his head to smile, with just a whiff of hauteur, still delighted her. Damn him .
    “Channing, how wonderful to see you,” Kingsley said smoothly.
    He looked into her face with a worried frown, much as everyone did these days, as if they could read the state of her health there. Well, maybe they could; she was past the stage of trying to hide behind cosmetics. She knew that her skinwas yellow and papery, her eyes rimmed with a dark under-layer, her once strong arms thin and showing swelling at the joints. It no longer even bothered her that people glanced at her out of the corner of their eyes, not wanting to stare but still drawn to hints of the eternal mystery—of what her mother called “passing,” as if there were a clear destination firmly in mind.
    “Thought I’d come in, see what all the excitement’s about.”
    “Is there much?” Kingsley said to Benjamin with deceptive lightness. “Have you made any announcement?”
    “Oh no, much too soon for that,” Benjamin said quickly.
    “Don’t want to just announce a mystery,” Amy put in.
    “But it’s all over the IAU Notices,” Kingsley said.
    This was the global notification system of the International Astronomical Union, used to focus workers on the newest comet or supernova or pulsar of interest. “Sure, but we’ve got to be cautious,” Benjamin said. “If this is a new class of object—”
    “Then you should enlist as many people and observing windows as possible,” Kingsley finished for him.
    Channing smiled, remembering. Kingsley had the annoying pattern of quickly disagreeing with you and often being right, plus the even worse property of agreeing with you and getting there first.
    Benjamin pursed his lips and plowed on. “I think the big issue is how this thing can repeat.”
    Kingsley said carefully, “I must admit, when I saw your Notices piece, I thought it most likely an error.”
    Amy said flatly, “It’s not an error, I can tell you that.”
    “I’m quite relieved to hear it.” Channing noted that with this phrase Kingsley was not actually agreeing with Amy, only reacting, but his choice of words avoided rankling her.
    “Look at it this way,” Benjamin put in. “At the very least, this object throws into doubt the standard picture of gamma-ray bursters.”
    Kingsley’s lips drew into a thin, skeptical line. “With many thousands observed, one exception does not disprove the model.”
    Since he had taken a major hand in building up the conventional view of gamma-ray bursters, this was predictable, Channing felt. She said amiably, “Similar appearance does not mean similar cause.”
    Kingsley nodded but Amy said, “Shouldn’t we follow Occam’s razor—prefer the simplest explanation? Then this is an odd kind of burster, but one in our galaxy.”
    Benjamin said, “Sure, but don’t throw out data just because it makes your job harder. We don’t understand the visible light data, either.”
    This led to a long discussion of the mysterious Doppler shifts. Channing had come up today mainly to see