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“I want you to come with me to the airport, Dr. Lejeune,” Dr. Young said. “I’ve got to pick up Andrew Simons. ”

It was the first time he’d spoken to Dr. Lejeune since she’d told him his project proposal was idiotic, and during the intervening three weeks she’d thought quite a bit about what she would say to him when he did speak to her, but now he sounded so much like the old sensible, sane Max Young that she picked up her purse and said, “Who’s Andrew Simons?”

“He’s coming from Tibet,” Dr. Young said, leading the way out of the physics building and over to the parking lot. “He’s with Duke University. Been studying the cultural aspects of time perception in a lamasery in the Himalayas. He’s perfect, I read a monograph of his on déjà vu three months ago and got in touch with Duke. ” He stopped next to a red Porsche.

“When did you get a Porsche?” Dr. Lejeune said, looking at the license plates. They spelled WITHIT1, which was a bad sign. So was the Porsche. “And why exactly is this Simons person coming here?”

“He’s going to work on the time displacement project,” Dr. Young said as if it were obvious, and squeezed himself into the Porsche. “Come on. Get in. His plane gets in at four-nineteen. ”

She attempted to get into the Porsche. She had hoped he’d given up on the time-displacement project. She had attempted to argue him out of it, with the result that he hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks, and she had hoped he had come to his senses, but apparently he hadn’t.

The project was idiotic. He had decided that time was a quantum object like space and leaped from there to the idea that it could be separated into pieces called hodiechrons, shaken up, and moved around. Quantum time travel. Only he was calling it hodiechron displacement and the silly gadget that was supposed to do all this a temporal oscillator instead of a time machine.

She had decided he was having some kind of midlife crisis, and now the Porsche confirmed it.

Dr. Young reached across her to the glove compartment and pulled out a tweed cap and a pair of leather driving gloves.

“Simons is extremely enthusiastic about the project. He accepted the job before I even had a chance to fully explain it to him. ”

Which, considering what the project involves, is probably a good thing, Dr. Lejeune thought, clutching the dashboard as the Porsche shot out of the parking lot, down College Avenue, and onto the highway.

“How old is he?” she shouted over the roar of the wind.

“Forty-two,” Dr. Young shouted back.

“Is he married?”

“Of course not. He’s been in a lamasery in Tibet for five years. ”

“No wonder he accepted,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I should fix him up with Bev Frantz. She’s forty. You know her, she’s teaching Intro to Nursing this semester. She’d be perfect for him. ”

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Young shouted. “I will not have you endangering this project. ” He swooped into the airport parking lot. He took off his cap and gloves, shoved them into the glove compartment, and got out. “Are you aware that matchmaking is a substitute for sex? It’s one of the classic symptoms of a midlife crisis. ”