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this data, and it was strange indeed. “It’s as though some of the thing’s coming toward us, some away. A rotating disk? We’d get the red shifts from the receding edge, blue shifts from the approaching one.”
    They all looked at her. “Good idea,” Benjamin said happily, winking and grinning. She could see that they were surprised in two ways—by the proposal itself, and because she had made it. She had come into astronomy as an observing astronaut, doing yeoman labor in the last stages of the space shuttle era, then doing dutiful time on the space station. The more academically based astronomers regarded these as rather showy, unserious pursuits. She had never risen very far here at the Center and had always wondered if that bias held her back. In the slightly startled expressions of Dart and Amy—but not, bless him, Benjamin—she saw confirmation.
    Kingsley said incisively, “I rather like that.”
    “But a disk?” Amy frowned doubtfully. “I’d say these are kinda large, but I’ll have to check…”
    “Good,” Kingsley said quickly. “At the moment we have no other hypothesis to test. I wish we did.”
    Channing was not the only one to notice that his use of we included Kingsley in the team. Benjamin’s eyes narrowed in a way she understood and he said, “Just wait. Theorists will jump on this like it was candy.”
    “They can theorize all they like,” Amy said. “We have all the data.”
    “Which we should make quick use of,” Kingsley said. “Let’s do some preliminary calculations, shall we?”
    Channing went with them to a seminar room and they reviewed the data. Some fresh observations came in over the satellite links as they worked, providing fresh fodder. She kept up with the discussions, but to her this branch of astrophysics was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow: suggestive, artful maybe, but some things never looked quite right and it was in the end not a reliable source of nourishing milk. Plus, she was woefully out of date on current theory. Still she found pleasure in watching Benjamin and Kingsley spar, using quickly jotted equations as weapons. Amy joined in, too, her tone a bit less canny and insidious, but holding her own.
    Kingsley jabbed verbally, challenging others’ ideas while seeming at first to be going along with them, inserting doubt slyly as he carried the discussion forward, ferret-eyed in his intensity. Just as decades before, he saw this as a delightful game played with chalk and sliding tones of voice.
    Channing found her attention drifting. Looking back, she could remember liking contests like this from decades past. Benjamin would always see Kingsley as a rival; that was set in his mind like a fossil print of their first meeting. Benjamin was a perfectly respectable theorist, but not in Kingsley’s class. That was simply a fact, but she knew quite well that Benjamin would never fully accept it. After all, who did not need a little illusion to get through life?
    Having bested Kingsley in a colloquium encounter set their relationship, as far as Benjamin was concerned. Never mind that Kingsley had done better work on bigger problems, and on top of it displayed remarkable skills in the political circus that science had become. She could barelyrecall that incident, but knew that it burned in Benjamin’s mind whenever he crossed Kingsley’s path. Probably Kingsley had forgotten it entirely. This seemingly small difference was precisely why they seldom saw each other. Too bad, really, because she had always found Kingsley more amusing than the usual run of academic astronomers. In their bull moose rivalries, men missed a lot.
    Would her own career at NASA have gone better, she mused, if she had been a man? Nobody in passing conversation would glance at your chest. You wouldn’t have to pretend to be “freshening up” to go to the goddamn john. Nobody cared if you didn’t remember their birthday. You could rationalize any behavior error with the