It had been a long job—and a tiring one—but it was almost over. Neel allowed himself the luxury of a long yawn, then shuffled over to the case of rations they had brought. He stripped the seal from something optimistically labeled Chicken Dinner —it tasted just like the algae it had been made from—and boiled some coffee while it was heating.
And all the time he was doing these prosaic tasks his mind was turning an indigestible fact over and over. It wasn’t a conscious process, but it was nevertheless going on. The automatic mechanism of his brain ran it back and forth like a half heard tune, searching for its name. Neel was tired, or he would have reacted sooner. The idea finally penetrated. One fact he had taken for granted was an obvious impossibility.
The coffee splashed to the floor as he jumped to his feet.
“It’s wrong … it has to be wrong!” he said aloud, grabbing up the papers. Computations and graphs dropped and were