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on.”
    “No,” Thomas said. “Not yet.”
    He heard Lisa sigh. It was one of her disappointed sighs, the ones he’d gotten to know so well before she had broken off their relationship at Caltech. So he did the same thing he had done then: focus completely on the technical. “Unfeeling,” she had called him then.
    “Why does it look like a spider web?” he asked no one in particular.
    No one answered for a few moments.
    Then Lisa, her professional voice back, said, “Think of those filaments as creases formed in the universe. They’re caused by the growing gravitational impact of these…clusters of matter. Well, really it’s hydrogen.” She paused. She sounded tired. “Anyway, what we are seeing is hydrogen being drawn in by the gravitational fields of the denser clusters. Imagine you are camping and you string up a tarp because it looks like it’s going to rain. The universe is like the tarp. The filaments are like rivulets on a tarp when it’s raining. The small drops of water quickly flow down the tarp, causing tiny rivers to form on the tarp. The more rain that falls, the more pronounced these small rivers become and the more the water is drawn to them. Eventually, the rivulets lead the water to the lowest areas, causing small pools, or perhaps puddles, to form—the protogalaxies. As more water pools in those areas, the tarp sinks and the flow of rivulets goes there, making the pool even larger. There you have it, gravity explained with gravity.”
    “And a camping metaphor,” Ajay added.
    Lisa shrugged. “Hey, you got it, didn’t you?”
    “I didn’t say it was bad.”
    Thomas recalled Lisa telling him, at Caltech, about her camping trips as a girl. She was the only one on the team who had grown up in Texas, and she had spent much of her youth camping and hunting on her family’s ranch with her father. She hadn’t been back to the ranch, or camping for that matter, since her father had passed away while she was at Harvard completing her undergraduate degree. After that, she had poured herself into physics—the common thread that had pulled them all together. He wondered how much IACP’s location at UT might have influenced her decision to join the team. He also wondered how much she may have influenced his choosing UT.
    He returned to studying the interconnected protogalaxies spread through space, a strange image to see rendered like this. It really did appear more like a dew-covered spider web one might see in the early morning while out camping than it did the beginnings of a universe.
    It’s fragile like a spider web as well, he thought. It was still young though, and another hundred million years would pass before the galaxies fully blossomed and stars formed. Their baby was growing up.

Chapter 9
    Year 3
     
    Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
    —Les Brown
     
     
    The retinal scanner at the server room’s entrance parsed Larry’s eye and chirped its approval. He punched in his access code and scanned his card. The door’s locking mechanism clicked, and its seal broke with a hiss. He then swung the door open and stepped inside.
    Already excessively paranoid, Larry had really ratcheted up the security in the data center since they had started using diamonds for storage.
    Thomas followed, shivering from the blast of cold air through the doorway.
    Larry was clearly excited as he led Thomas through the maze of computer racks that made up the data center. Larry walked faster than his normal laid-back gait, repeatedly glancing back at Thomas with an expectant grin and continually pausing to let him catch up. Even his pauses weren’t actual halts but were jittering, antsy sways leaning more toward where he was going than where he had been.
    Finally, they reached another, thicker door. Larry put his eye up against another retinal scanner and punched in a code about three times longer than the one before. For whatever reason, he had not installed a card