Romolo confessed. “Just when the Rule of Two was starting to look plausible, we checked it against the second set of spectra and it fell apart.” Carla glanced at Patrizia, but she appeared equally dispirited. They had been toiling over the spectra from the optical solid for more than a stint, but the last time they’d reported to her they had seemed to be close to a breakthrough. “Don’t give up now!” Carla urged them. “It’s almost making sense.” She had hoped that the problem would yield to a mixture of focus, persistence and brute-force arithmetic—and it was easier to free her two best students from other commitments than to achieve that state herself. Someone had to supervise the experiments the Council had actually approved. “Making sense?” Patrizia hummed softly and pressed a fist into her gut, giving Carla a pang of empathetic hunger. When things were going well there was no better distraction than work, but the frustration of reaching an impasse had the opposite effect.
