The dance-off had spread far enough across the Fourth-Floor Conference Room that a weekend game-day sweep of the premises was required. The interns were enthusiastic. The Boomers were exercising judgment about knees, balance, and how much enthusiasm could safely be demonstrated before lunch.

Deirdre was moving between the dancers and the Galley, where the stainless steel was beginning to make her proposal look dangerously reasonable.

That was where we found Bones.

Bald, bespectacled, and sporting a tidy goatee, the ascetic intellectual from Socotra Finance stood with a pen poised over his clipboard. He could do numbers the way he had once managed depth beneath the ocean, at speed or holding reactors steady. There had been practical reasons for getting the calculations right.

A bone lesion had brought his submarine career suddenly ashore. Business accounting followed, eventually placing him in charge of the figures behind Chairman Willie’s publishing enterprise and Boomer relaxation facility.

Now, the place appeared to be developing a further purpose: helping young people learn useful trades, earn a living, and perhaps afford houses in which to raise children.

Bones still carries a small nuclear chip on his shoulder. He also understands exactly how much useful work can be accomplished in a confined space.

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