When he checked on his e-mail that afternoon, he found he had one less reason to be loyal to the Center and MIT. He’d been fired.

Technically, the funding for his appointment had not been renewed. So there would be no paycheck after January 1. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The message had come from the Center’s administrative assistant, not Professor Marsh. But it was Marsh who had done it, who hadn’t renewed the funding.

Matt picked up the phone and put it back down. Go talk to him in person.

On the clattering ride down to Cambridge, he considered and rejected various strategies. He knew better than to appeal to the old man’s mercy. He couldn’t claim outstanding job performance; the job hadn’t been that demanding recently. More puttering than math. He was reasonably well caught up on the literature, though most of his energy of late had gone into time-travel theory, of course.

Could he use that as a trump card? Instinct said no: Hire me back for my penny-ante job and I promise to rewrite the laws of physics. On the other hand, when he did want to publish his results, the connection with the Center and MIT would be valuable.

But not essential. He could take his evidence to Harvard, for instance. That made him smile. The rivalry between the two schools went back to the nineteenth century. Maybe Marsh would be fired for firing him.

The sky was the color of aluminum. Snow piled up in waist-high drifts, but the sidewalks were clear. The students were so bundled up you couldn’t tell their gender.

There was no wind as he approached the Green Building, which was so unusual it seemed ominous. Usually it whipped across the quad from the frozen Charles and chilled you to the core.

He showed his card to the scanner at the entrance to the Green Building, and it let him in. So he still existed, at least until the end of the month.

He got off the elevator on the sixth floor to a pleasant shock: Kara, standing in the foyer.

“Kara? Were you looking for me?”

“Matt!” She looked surprised. “Um . . . this is Strom Lewis.”

Matt took his hand, dry and strong. He was younger and better-looking. “I graded your papers in 299. Marsh.”

“That’s right; I thought you looked familiar. I’ll be working for him, starting next year.” The elevator door started to close, and Kara caught it and slipped in. “Maybe I’ll see you?”

“Maybe.” Kara held up a hand in good-bye, and so did Matt.

Lose your job and your girl to the same punk kid. It just couldn’t get much better.

Marsh wasn’t in the laboratory. Matt went through to the man’s office. He had a journal and a book open in front of him, making notes in a paper notebook. Matt knocked on the open door.

Marsh put a finger down to mark his place in the journal. “Matthew. What can I do for you?”

“Well, for starters, you could give me my job back. Then you could tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.” He set his pencil down but didn’t pick up his finger. “You’ve had the same job for four years. It’s time for you to move on. For your own good.”

“Move on where?”

“You could finish your dissertation,” he said, “for starters. Then I could give you a good recommendation anywhere.”

“You think that kid Lewis can do what I do?”

“Nobody’s better than you as a technician, Matthew. But you can’t be a lab tech all your life, not with your education.”

He didn’t have a good argument against that, since it was true. He enjoyed the work, but he couldn’t deny that it was underemployment. “So I have to leave at the end of December?”

He shrugged. “You finished the calibrator. I don’t have any short-term work for you. Might as well go on home and work on your dissertation.” He picked up the pencil and turned his attention back to the journal.

Matt went back into the lab, suddenly a stranger there. He opened his drawer, but there was almost nothing of value there that didn’t belong to MIT.

Except a pair of earrings. Kara had taken them off when they went skating on Boston Common a couple of weeks ago. Her skimpy outfit, otherwise perfect, hadn’t had a pocket.

Might as well take them. Send her a note.

He went over to the campus pub, the Muddy Charles, and had a beer, and then another. That fortified him enough to walk the cold mile to the nearest liquor store. He got a bottle of cheap bourbon and a bottle of red vermouth. The road to Hell would be paved with Manhattans.

When he got home, he was slightly intimidated by the silent witness to history in the living room. He took a tray of ice and a glass into the bedroom and quietly made a big drink, and found a mystery novel he didn’t remember reading. He took both into the bathroom and slid into a tub of hot water.

By the third chapter he remembered he’d read the book before, and was pretty sure the murderer was not the beautiful ex-wife, but rather the lawyer who had hired the private eye. He grimly read on, though, rather than get out of the tub and try to find another book.

There’s more than one way to read a book, though. You can make a template out of the edge of the page, holding it in such a way that it reveals only the first letter of each line of the page underneath. In this way you can search for hidden messages from God. On the third try he found the word "sQwat.” Then the phone rang.

It was his mother. “You’re in the bathroom again.”

“Taking a bath. I should take a bath in the living room?”

“You weren’t home earlier.”

“No, I went down to school.” Might as well. “I got an e-mail that my appointment isn’t being renewed. So I went down to talk to my boss.”

“What, you’re being fired? What did you do?”

Well, my boss thinks I’m crazy because I see boxes disappear. “He said it was for my own good. Like I have too much education for the job. I should finish my dissertation and move up in the world.”

“So what have I been telling you?”

“Okay, fine. Can you loan me about twenty grand for rent and groceries while I sit around and think?”

Wrong thing to say. There was a long pause and a sniff. “You know I would if I could. It’s hard enough to make ends meet. . . .”

“Just kidding, Mother. I’m gonna start looking tomorrow. For a job.”

“Have you been drinking? At three in the afternoon?”

He didn’t say, “Haven’t you?” He rattled the ice in the glass. “In fact, I am. It seemed like the right occasion.”

“Well, you call me when you’re sober.”

"I amsober.” Loud click. “But not for long,” he said to the dead phone.

5

Tuesday disappeared, and so did part of Wednesday. By noon, he was sufficiently recovered to dress up and go out for a decent lunch, two hamburgers and fries. He looked through the MIT freebie newspaper, the Tech, for job openings, and found two possibilities, one in Cambridge and the other at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Cambridge didn’t answer the phone and Geneva had already found someone.

He was carrying his notebook, so he went on down to the MIT main library, plugged in, and started rereading the notes for his dissertation on patterns of local asymmetries in gravity wave induction associated with two recent supernovae.

His data stank. The inductions were so weak they were almost lost in the background noise. Saying they actually existed was as much an act of faith as one of observation.

It felt like the cable on his personal elevator had snapped. The set of mathematical models that could contain his wobbly data was so large as to make any one solution actually indefensible.

At some level, he’d known that for a long time. He’d been hiding the truth from himself in the complexity and false elegance of the argument. Coming to it fresh after months away made it clear that he’d been building a house of cards.