“You want to let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?” Professor Brewster asked. “I mean, he’s what? Ten?”
“I’m thirteen,” Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster’s age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.
“Well, I’m forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs”—he looked around the room pointedly, but no one moved—“and now, apparently a thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead.”
He seemed like a man who didn’t like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a disadvantage in his job.
“Kevin’s here because of the signal,” Dr. Levin said. “He… well, he predicted that it would occur.”
“Impossible,” Professor Brewster said. “Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in completely the opposite direction. It’s obviously a trick.”