Nicholas and Isabel exchanged a furtive grin. He was elated, actually answering back to Rosette, and having Isabel approve.

Rosette gave Kitchener a roguish glance. "You've never complained before," she murmured in a husky tone.

Kitchener laughed wickedly. "What's for dessert, Isabel?" he asked.

The storm began to abate after midnight. Nicholas was back in his room watching a vermiform pattern of sparkling blue stars dance through his terminal's cube like a demented will-o'-the-wisp. The program was trying to detect the distinctive interference pattern caused by large dark-mass concentrations; if there was one directly between the emission point and Earth (a remote chance, but possible), the gamma rays should bend around it. Kitchener was always interested in the kind of localized spatial distortions such objects generated. His program was using up a good third of the Abbey's lightware cruncher capacity. The kind of interference he was looking for was incredibly hard to identify.

He had thought about making a start on the magnetosphere induction problem, but the dark mass project was much more interesting. It was worth enduring another of Kitchener's tongue-lashings to be able to see the results as they came in from orbit. Dark-mass detection was well down the priority list of CNES's in-house astronomers, it was exciting to think he might actually be ahead of them, up there at the cutting edge. Nicholas Beswick, science pioneer.

He had been in Uri's room for most of the evening after supper, along with Liz and Isabel. It had been a good evening, he reflected; they'd chatted, and the flatscreen had been tuned to Globecast's twenty-four-hour news channel with the sound muted. And it really did look like the Scottish PSP was going to be overthrown at last. There was rioting in Glasgow and Edinburgh and the assembly building had been firebombed, the flames soaring impressively into the night despite the heavy rain. They had watched the text streamers running along the bottom of the flatscreen and talked, drinking another bottle of Sussex wine. The others never seemed to mind that he didn't say as much as them, he was under no pressure to venture an opinion on everything.