Wonder of wonders, it was actually shorter than the original. Only twenty-two pages. And the type was only slightly smaller than—I crashed into someone and looked up.

It was Dr. O’Reilly, who must have been doing the same thing. “Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about this funding reapplication thing.” He raised both hands, still holding the funding form in the right one, and faced his palms out. “Tell your partner three things you don’t like about Management.”

“Can it be more than three?” I said. “I suppose this means you won’t get your macaques right away, Dr. O’Reilly.”

“Call me Bennett,” he said. “Flip’s the only one with a title. I was supposed to get them this week. Now I’ll have to wait till the twentieth. How about you? Does this affect your Hula Hoop project?”

“Hair-bobbing,” I said. “The only effect is that I won’t have any time to work on it because I’ll be filling out this stupid form. I wish Management would find something to think about besides making up new forms.”

“Shh,” someone said fiercely from the door.

We moved farther down the hall, out of range.

“Paperwork is the cornerstone of Management,” Bennett whispered. “They think reducing everything to forms is the key to scientific discovery. Unfortunately science doesn’t work that way. Look at Newton. Look at Archimedes.”

“Management would never have approved the funding for an orchard,” I agreed, “or a bathtub.”

“Or a river,” Bennett said. “Which is why we lost our chaos theory funding and I had to come to work for GRIM.”

“What were you working on?” I asked.

“The Loue. It’s a river in France. It has its source in a grotto, which means it’s a small, contained system with a comparatively limited number of variables. The systems scientists have tried to study before were huge—weather, the human body, rivers. They had thousands, even millions of variables, which made them impossible to predict, so we found…”