“Right,” Bill said, looking at the sergeant in surprise. “Did somebody call ahead?”

“No,” the sergeant replied, making a turn onto the Greenway. For once it was nearly empty of traffic. He took the Sunpass lane despite not having a transponder. “I was working on my masters in physics and then things went awry. Optics, actually.”

“I’ve got a Ph.D. in optics,” Bill said. “And physics for that matter.”

“Sorry, Doctor, I didn’t know that,” the sergeant said, wincing.

“I don’t make everybody call me Doctor, Sergeant,” Bill said, grinning. “I’m just an overeducated redneck, not some soi-disante academic. So how’d you end up in the National Guard?”

“Long story,” the sergeant replied. After a long moment he shrugged. “I was working on my masters, working with blue-light lasers. One of my classes I had to have a peer reviewed paper published. You know the routine.”

“Sure.”

“Didn’t have my experiments in lasers as far along as I wanted so I made the mistake of branching out. I got tired of everybody mouthing off about nuclear power so I did a comparative study of radioactive output from the Turkey Creek nuclear power plant vs. the big coal plant east of Orlando.”

“Forgone conclusion,” Weaver grunted. “Coal’s nasty stuff.”

“I knew that and you know that, but I’d done the research and there wasn’t a single peer reviewed comparative.”

“None?” Weaver said, surprised.

“Not one. So I did the tests, no detectable radiation outside of the plant itself for Turkey Creek and enough to cook a chicken in the tailings of the coal plant, which were, by the way, blowing into a nearby stream, and submitted it. To Physics. Got a response in a month. The paper was rejected for peer review and was not accepted for publication. My credentials were in optics, not nuclear physics.”