So he mountain biked, consulted with the DOD, went to national level Wah Lum Kung-Fu tournaments and, occasionally, stood in front of a white board for a few hours and then stayed up for three days writing a thirty-thousand-word paper which he sent off to the National Journal of Physics and Science serene in the knowledge that it would both pass peer review and be published.

Many of his friends, and most of his colleagues, referred to him jokingly as a rat bastard.

He’d recently considered going back to grad school to polish off another Ph.D. The only question was in what. Asshole physics, astrophysics to the uninitiated, was out. The whole field was filled with eggheads who couldn’t tell reality from fantasy and most of them put their fantasies squarely on the liberal side of the political divide. Maybe atomic level engineering, but the only school that had a department, yet, was MIT. Bleck. Among other oddities in his field, Weaver was a staunch and outspoken political conservative of a seriously military bent. A year, about what it would take despite the “recommended” three years, in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts was more than he could stand.

Maybe genetics or molecular biology, branch out a little.

But that had been yesterday, before “the event.” If there wasn’t a whole new branch of physics about to open up, he didn’t have a nose like a hound dog. And he was in, practically, on the ground floor.

The math was probably going to kick his ass, though. At certain levels even the top-flight physicists sometimes had to resort to pure math guys. Ray Chen, for example, had been a go-to man for gauge boson and multidimensional field equations but even he bowed his head a few times and consulted with a pure mathematician in Britain. What was his name? Gonzales? Something like that.