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make the impossible possible. He wanted you to produce gold, but he would give you plenty of straw and he’d help you redesign the spinning wheel.
    She respected him, and that surprised her.
    He seemed to respect her, but she also seemed to infuriate him. The harder she tried, the madder he became. Everyone irritated him, but with her, there was an edge that could only be personal. Sometimes she’d catch him staring at her so intensely she was amazed she hadn’t ignited. Everything she did, every effort she made, resulted in more cold, forceful looks. If things didn’t improve soon, she was going to have to ask if she’d offended him.
    Not now, of course. They had an audience.
    Parsons muttered something to himself—she couldn’t make out the words, but his tone sounded crude. The secretary sitting behind him, steno pad in hand, blanched.
    Well, Charlie might admire him, but Parsons was clearly an acquired taste.
    “Maybe someone ought to tell a joke.” Charlie hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but at the words, Parsons’s hand froze.
    “A joke?” He said it slowly, as if it was in some dead language he didn’t understand.
    “Yes, a joke. Humor. A type of verbal game to provide social lubrication or pass the time.”
    Parsons raised his brows. She’d finally caused his estimation of her to slip, but his response was so delicious she pressed on.
    “You could say something humorous, and we could all laugh. Like maybe, ‘It’s wonderful how meetings at ASD always start on time and are always so brief.’”
    Parsons blinked several times. “I’m not an expert, but that, Dr. Eason, is sarcasm, not a joke.”
    Several of the engineers and secretaries tittered.
    “Touché,” she said.
    He was attempting to get in the last word, and he was providing a challenge, so Charlie met it with, “If it’s a joke you want, what about, ‘What do you call the guy who shows up last to the meeting?’”
    A few beats passed. While the principals sat around the big conference table, the engineers, secretaries, and support staff ringed the outside. One of the younger engineers—Jefferies, maybe—finally worked up the nerve and raised a shy hand. “Boss.”
    Everyone guffawed. Even Parsons’s lips twitched. Well, if he wasn’t quite smiling—and Charlie had never seen him smile—then he was at least not attacking his memo when Hal strolled in a few moments later.
    “Ah, right on time,” Parsons said, his tone as dry as the Mojave—and he’d pretended to be unfamiliar with humor.
    Without acknowledging his lateness, Hal pulled out a chair and settled himself into it. “What’s the powwow for?”
    The atmosphere changed when Hal entered. Or rather, the atmosphere surrounding Hal ground against the atmosphere surrounding Parsons, two clouds of charge repelling each other.
    Hal and Parsons were colleagues, neither supposedly standing higher than the other. But Hal wanted this meeting to revolve around him—wanted all the meetings to do that.
    Parsons, however, was more competent, more efficient, more everything than Hal was. Hal’s posturing hardly made a dent in Parsons’s air of authority.
    Everyone knew who was really in charge of this meeting.
    Everyone except Hal, it seemed.
    “We have a problem.” Parsons paused. “We have a task ,” he amended. “So far, the computer department has been focused on helping to get the thing up there, to make sure orbit is possible, and on running the systems while it’s in flight.”
    “Yes, those little things,” Hal deadpanned. He clearly didn’t need humor explained.
    “The guys in retrieval, however, are curious about what you can do to help them.”
    Hal scoffed. “You have got to be kidding me. Help them? You mean do it for them.” He glared at Parsons. Then he gave the guys from retrieval the kind of look that would turn Jell-O to stone. Several of them shifted in their seats.
    Without allowing anyone else to speak, Hal scoffed and asked, “What did Stan