Jill slipped into her office and leaned against the door, grateful for the privacy to vent.

Only she was not alone and couldn’t vent. Her grad student, Nate Andros, was in early. The office was so tiny that accommodating his desk and hers left barely enough room to open the door and an aisle so narrow even Jill, a size 4, had to turn sideways to get through it. In this small space Nate was a startling apparition, with wild black curly hair, olive skin, and large dark eyes. He was saved from being outright gorgeous by his unkempt mop and a slovenly dress code. Any myth of exotic origins was killed by a flat Boston accent.

“Morning. You look like you’re being chased by the undead.”

“Close.” Jill made herself pull it together. Nate was still a pup; she didn’t want to be the one to clue him in on the cannibalism of university peers.

“Did we get our time on Quey?”

“Yup.” Jill scooted past his chair.

“Cool!” Nate smiled happily.

She poured herself a cup of coffee from the community pot. “You haven’t told anyone about our work, have you? Any of the other students?”

“Only Susie Forester and Gretchen Mach. Traded it for sexual favors.” Nate took a sip of his coffee.

“Very funny.”

“Why are we keeping this so secret, Dr. Talcott?” He widened those big dark eyes, the look in them a little more astute than she liked.

Her first instinct was to evade the issue, as usual. But if things progressed, and it looked now as though they actually might, he should know the risks.

She perched on the edge of her desk, the cup warming her cold hands. “Okay. It’s like this: The theory I’m playing with is extremely unpopular. In fact, it could probably get me fired.”

“Um… I know it’s not exactly standard, but… isn’t that what science is about? Experimentation? Thinking outside the box?”

“No,” she huffed a laugh. “Science is about what’s sexy. You play with the sexiest theories because that’s where the grants and prestige are. What you don’t do is play with theories everyone else thinks are laughable. And we’re working on a real howler.”

“It would be particularly funny if we were right,” Nate said dryly.

Jill’s chest constricted with longing. It was all she had ever wanted in life, to have this career, to be famous. Grover. What a jerk. He already had the grants, the kowtowing university brass, the sidebars in scientific textbooks. But he wasn’t content with all that; he had to have her work as well.

What was really funny was that he probably played that little game with every peon who came into his office on the off chance that he might get lucky someday. He had no idea.

If she was right it would change physics forever. And damn if she didn’t think she had a good shot.

She took a drink of coffee, her legs bouncing against the desk with nervous energy. “Did I ever tell you about Dr. Ansel?”

Nate shook his head, face curious.

“I was his graduate student. The energy pool theory was his pet obsession.”

“Was this at the University of Tennessee? That’s where you graduated from, right?”

She nodded, surprised he knew her alma mater. It certainly was not a name she ever dropped.

“Ansel was brilliant. He had been at Harvard before he started to talk about ‘energy pools.’ ”

She made a face. Then she noticed that Nate wasn’t looking at her face. He was watching her legs—way too closely. He had a knack for reminding her that he was male and she was not. She stopped bouncing and pushed her way to the front of her desk, putting distance, and a good chunk of wood, between them. Annoying. When Nate first came to her she’d assumed he was gay. It was that soft, moony edge to him and the fact that he lived on Capitol Hill—the artsiest, and gayest, Seattle neighborhood. Which just went to show how little she knew, or cared, about men.

“Um, is the energy pool model in your equation the same one Ansel was working with?” Nate asked, pretending he hadn’t just been caught watching her legs.

“Basically. Ansel’s energy pool theory was that all matter exists as energy waves in a higher dimension. What looks solid and three-dimensional to us—objects, people—is really nothing but pure energy. Something in our brains translates these energy waves to 3-D, like the projection of a hologram.

“In Ansel’s model subatomic particles are energy waves. Space-time is like a huge pond and particles are like pebbles being thrown into the pond. Imagine the smooth surface of a pond being inundated by billions of pebbles. Each pebble creates ripples—that’s the energy waves. And all of those ripples intersect with each other and create interference patterns.”

“Interference patterns,” Nate intoned. “When two waves merge they create a third wave pattern. Where crest meets crest it creates a bigger crest, where trough meets trough you get a deeper trough, and when crest meets trough they subtract from one another.”

“Yes, and that process is repeated over and over as the waves ripple out and interfere with other waves. The entire pond is one huge, chaotic pattern. But it isn’t chaotic. That’s the key. Each wave is generated in a very mathematical way. What Ansel never got around to was the idea of mapping these altered waves back onto matter. That’s what my wave mechanics equation attempts to do: predict the behavior of subatomic particles based on the interaction of wave patterns in the higher dimension.”

Jill sipped at her coffee. It was bitter. She preferred lattes but was always too consumed to walk outside to one of the ubiquitous coffee stands and get one. Even now, as her tongue registered the bitterness, her mind went back to its intellectual acrobatics. The enormity of it was staggering. The idea that all changes in the physical world—the growth and decay of cells, the firing of synapses in the brain, germination of seeds, everything—could be traced back to the interaction of energy patterns and, therefore, someday be predictable, maybe even artificially manipulated… Christ. It was bigger than the discovery of DNA. It was.

“I always liked your energy pool theory.” Nate pushed his chair upright with a bang. “It reminds me of Heraclitus. Ever heard of him? He said the universe is both ‘the many’ and ‘the one’ and that ‘the one’ consists of the integrated movement of ‘the many.’ ”

Nate’s undergrad had been in philosophy, explaining why such a bright boy hadn’t gotten snatched up by a professor higher in rank than Jill Talcott.

She scowled. “That’s exactly the kind of thinking that makes this theory unpopular! It’s a perfectly logical scientific model, and any attempts to connect it to psuedomystical, wacko ideas can only hurt it!”

“So you don’t like the comparison, then,” Nate said, with a straight face.

Jill hmphed.

“What interests me is how you hooked up with Ansel. You’re pretty conventional, Dr. Talcott.”

Damn. He was a bright boy. “The important thing,” Jill countered, with a tone that firmly closed that topic, “is to get ready for our time on Quey. We’re only going to get a few hours, so the test run has to be perfect.”

Nate hoisted himself to his feet and stretched, forcing Jill to look away from the tightening expanse of T-shirt material.

“I’m up for whatever. But what numbers are you gonna feed Quey? Your equation is reiterative. In an ideal world it could account for all the particles in the universe interfering with all other particles all the time. Not even Quey could crunch that kind of data.”

Jill took a diskette from her briefcase, barely able to suppress a self-congratulatory chortle. She laid it on her desk with an exaggerated twump.