How was this possible?

Varnett was doing computations, checking against a display on a second screen that hooked him to the math sections of the lab computer. Skander stood there totally still and silent. He heard Yarnett mumble an assent to himself, as if some problem he had been running through the computer had checked out correct.

Skander stole a glance at his chronometer. Nine hours! It had been nine hours! He had slept through part of his dark thoughts and given the boy the chance to confirm his worst nightmare.

Something suddenly told Varnett he wasn’t alone. He sat still for a second, then glanced fearfully around.

“Professor!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad it’s you! This is stupendous! Why aren’t you telling everyone?”

“How—” Skander stumbled, gesturing at the screen. “How did you get that picture?”

Varnett smiled. “Oh, that’s simple. You forgot to dump the computer memory when you closed up. This is what you were looking at, which the computer held in new storage.”

Skander cursed himself for a fool. Of course, everything on every instrument was recorded by the computer as standard procedure. He had been so shook up by Varnett’s discovery of his work that he had forgotten to dump the record!

“It’s only a preliminary finding,” the professor managed at last. “I was waiting until I had something really startling to report.”

“But this is startling!” the boy exclaimed excitedly. “But you have been too close to the problem and to your own disciplines to crack it. Look, your fields are archaeology and biology, aren’t they?”

“They are,” Skander acknowledged, wondering where this conversation was leading. “I was an exobiologist for years and became an archaeologist when I started doing all my work on the Markovian brains.”

“Yes, yes, but you’re still a generalist. My world, as you know, raises specialists in every field from the point at which the brain is formed. You know my field.”