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above its edge. 'I'm bringing that bottle of Chateau La Tour '82 tonight. It cost me too much so I wanted to have something to celebrate.'
    ' But instead,' she said, 'it looks as if Vickie Fix-It has some work to do while you're gone. We've gotta find this bug before we can make any more progress.' Her eyes unfocused. ' Hmmm. Maybe if I hooked a 'scope to the vacuum meter drive circuit I might zero in on the problem
    David nodded. 'Sam Weston was down in the electronics shop about half an hour ago. I think he's working late on something tonight. Perhaps you could persuade him to help.'
    There's an idea,' said Victoria. 'Sam's super at debugging electronics. If I can just keep the topic of conversation away from sex and survivalism, he should be a big help.'
    'Just kick in his kneecaps if he gets out of line,' said David. Although he'd never seen any evidence of it, Vickie had a reputation among the graduate students as a martial arts expert.
    She smiled. 'You're coming back tonight?' she asked.
    'Yeah,' said David, 'I should be back by about midnight. As we both know too well, "Physics is what physicists do late at night.” At least it's when
I
seem to get the most done. If you can fix this RF glitch, maybe I can accomplish something on the owl shift. I should be good 'til about three A.M. Allan's still in D.C. smooth-talking the NSF, so I have the honor of teaching his Physics 122 class again tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. Guess I can't stay up too late; I haven't made any notes for the lecture yet.' He grinned.
    'I was under the impression that you real physicists didn't need lecture notes,' said Vickie, grinning back. 'They did give you a Ph.D. in physics at Illinois, didn't they? Doesn't that mean you know everything in the 122 textbook, at least?'
    'Oh sure,' said David, 'only the students get kinda upset when I start using partial differential equations and Riemann tensors to demonstrate that water runs downhill. It's real work to get it on the right level. But there are compensations. It's just amazing how much you learn when you want to explain what you already know to somebody else . . . ' He shook his head, musing. 'Particularly to the articulate, socially adjusted algebra-illiterates that are admitted to our institutions of higher learning these days. This morning I had to spend ten minutes to get across the idea that when you divide by a number smaller than one, the result gets
bigger.
I guess they couldn't do that one on their fingers and toes.'
    She laughed, a rich contralto.
    'Anyhow, Vickie, I gotta go,' he said, reaching for the wrapped wined bottle. 'If the food's overdone because I'm late, I may not be invited back. If you can bring some modicum of order to this chaos by the time I get back, it will be sincerely appreciated.'
    'OK,' said Vickie, 'but you go easy on that Chateau La Tour. I can't have you staggering back and falling into my apparatus. I need a Ph.D. too, you know.'
    As David turned down the long hill toward the university's east gatehouse, Lake Washington appeared on his right. The water shimmered with the reflected lights of the lakefront houses of nearby Laurelhurst and the longer reflections from posh Hunt's Point across the lake. A row of stationary red taillights punctuated the long low silhouette of the Evergreen Point Bridge, indicating to David that there was another jam-up there, on that well-known 'car-strangled spanner.' It was nice that Paul lived on this side of the lake.
    David thought about Vickie. She was a remarkable young woman. He'd never before worked with anyone so capable, so smart, and at the same time so nice to have around. The traffic light at Twenty-fifth Avenue Northeast turned green, and he accelerated.
    He was going to have to watch himself. Romance at the workplace is generally a bad idea. Particularly the physics workplace. He could think of a few cases where scientific coworkers had become romantically involved. Almost never had it ended well. If the