Flavio had returned to the Air Force Command without much hope of finding anyone there. He did not regret his decision to skip the meeting with the IUPITER commission. If he was there, it was because he wanted to apologize to Clelia. As for his actual involvement in the project, he didn't care much. Even though that had been the topic Flavia discussed with him, Flavio's mind was elsewhere.

«I'm so glad you're here!» Cristina greeted him. «What made you decide to leave today? Don't you realize how big your new responsibility is?»

«Flavia needed to talk to me about something important.»

«You could have waited; we're all meeting at Giuseppe's tomorrow!»

«She said it was urgent...» added Flavio, indifferent.

«And you took her seriously?» Cristina laughed. «You know she's nuts! I'll see her in the gym in a bit and she'll hear me... Now move, go to the meeting room, they are all still there»

Flavio was surprised. «They've never stayed this late!»

«I know, Paradisi must have come up with something. All the more reason for you to hurry up and show your face.»

Cristina pushed him to the meeting room's door. Without knocking, she swiftly turned the door handle and whispered a hasty farewell into Flavio's ear. «Break a leg!» Smooth and unseen like a draft, she turned on her heels and disappeared as the door opened before him.

With knees like rusty hinges, he held the two little books Flavia had given him tightly in his hand. He saw a line of about ten officers seated at the table, giving him a polite barrage of glances that, like blades from a knife-thrower, cut through the stifling silence.

The air conditioning hadn't prevented the atmosphere from becoming weary and heavy due to the lengthy meeting. At one end of the table, a projector screen was lowered over a blackboard that took up most of the wall. On its surface, the beam from the projector connected to Clelia's computer was reflected. At the moment, the presentation was showing a comparison of graphs, accompanied by data and calculations obtained with formulas that Flavio instantly recognized as those from his own social predictability theory. Near the projector, he saw Clelia sigh in relief and soften the rigid look she held behind her thick glasses.

At the other end of the table were the officers from the IUPITER commission. Among them, a gruff colonel addressed him.

«Mr. Mancini, your decision to neglect your duties today was not appropriate at all. The gentlemen from the research department,» he said, pointing to the officers seated near Clelia, «have perplexities about this collaborative work between you and Dr. Paradisi, which she seems unable to dispel.»

Flavio took a cautious step into the room and quietly closed the door behind him. It took him no more than an instant to scan the people around the table, then he fixed his gaze on the younger group of officers from the research department. Among their uniforms, Clelia, the only one in civilian clothes, stood out like a blonde rabbit in a field of tall poppies. Seeing Flavio, she made room next to her and gestured for him to take a seat by the computer and projector.

«Perplexities?» Flavio asked, remaining near the door. With a restrained smile and raised eyebrows, he looked at his colleagues from the research department, unintentionally challenging their intelligence.

«Dr. Paradisi has run some small-scale computer simulations and...» one of the officers from the research department began to say.

«Did they err in predicting demographic evolution, Captain?» Flavio interrupted.

Though feigning confidence bordering on arrogance, the military officer had to hide his embarrassment behind a smile. «No, on the contrary... we found the idea interesting or we wouldn't have stayed so long, but...»

«Ah, so you must have seen quite a few simulations, unless understanding the calculations took too much of your time.»

«We didn't stop to analyze them. Verifying them on the doctor's spreadsheet seemed sufficient to us.»

Without even looking at the captain, Flavio walked over to the seat next to Clelia to sit down.

«Mancini,» the captain called, deliberately omitting the courtesy title, «if you had been punctual, you'd know that issues have come up during the proposal presentation that require more attention from you, if you wish to collaborate in the research direction.»

«Captain, you have my full attention,» said Flavio, placing the two books he was holding on the table, next to the projector. «You don't need to explain the checks you've done; I've done some myself and I know better than you how they work, I swear on my honor. Please tell me directly about your own perplexities.»

«Our concerns,» the captain specified, «relate to the use of different correction coefficients to reconcile various groups of simulations. For some of them, the doctor used an ad hoc coefficient, or even more than one. Do you really think you know more than the doctor?»

«Yes, of course,» Flavio replied indifferently.

As the officers threw up their arms and shook their heads, giving in to smirks of disbelief, Flavio scrolled the presentation to stop on one of the first slides. Then he turned away from the computer and addressed the table.

«I assume Dr. Paradisi has already explained to you that the approach proposed here starts from the hypothesis of the constancy of something we refer to as social initiative,» Flavio said, vaguely gesturing toward the equation projected on the screen. «We hypothesize, that is, that a society is more inclined to manifest itself the more it is dissatisfied. In other terms, this equation says that, in a community, the sum of the level of satisfaction and the level of propensity to collectively manifest is constant. For an absolute level of satisfaction, we thus define a null collective initiative and vice versa. If Dr. Paradisi has inserted coefficients in the calculations to reconcile some of the simulations, it's because the terms of this equation could reasonably have coefficients that we a priori do not know and that vary according to the demographic framework we want to operate in. And it is precisely to discover what these coefficients are that Dr. Paradisi and I have devised a research plan.»

«We're talking about hundreds of parameters! Saying that you don't know them is the same as saying you have nothing to make generalized predictions. We don't even have a clue about possible dependencies between the coefficients of the various terms!»

«You, Captain, don't have a clue about the dependencies. It's possible that by adding a probable factor to multiply one of the terms in the equation, it could be generalized.» As Flavio took an imperceptible moment to reflect, his eyes fell on the books that he had received as gifts from Flavia. «I have reason to believe that by imposing non-identically zero solutions for the derivative with respect to social initiative, we can identify some interesting functions.»

Clelia jerked, perked up her ears towards Flavio, and blinked a couple of times. «Really?» she murmured.

«You have reason to believe, Mr. Mancini?» the colonel repeated in a clear voice and well-articulated words. «Could you share that reason with us?»

Flavio nodded calmly. «An intuition.»

As the captain sharpened a sardonic smile, the colonel chewed dryly with a grimace of displeasure. «Mancini,» the colonel concluded, «you need to present a better argument if you want to convince us of your theories.»

Flavio let out a listless sigh and shrugged. «Listen, Colonel, I'm not here to convince you that my theory is valid.»

«Oh, you're not?»

«No,» Flavio reaffirmed sharply.

Clelia's face visibly paled.

After bringing one of Clelia's simulations back on screen, which she had presented in his absence, Flavio picked up the two books and stood next to the screen. «I'm here to show you that with these formulas of mine...»

«I wasn't aware those formulas were yours...» the colonel interrupted, turning his gaze to Clelia to insinuate that she might contradict him.

«Well, Colonel, now you know,» Flavio resumed before Clelia had a chance to confirm. «By applying my formulas, Dr. Paradisi has shown you that results can be obtained—results that, as far as I understand, IUPITER has not been able to achieve after six years of research.»

There was a long moment of silence in the meeting room, during which the officers of the commission looked at those from the research department with accusatory eyes, exhaling too loudly for their dissatisfaction to go unnoticed. Indifferent to the hostility that the captain was holding back with gritted teeth, Flavio sat back down and lightly drummed a finger on the edge of the computer, his eyes lost in space, beyond the screen he was making no effort to focus on.

«We could give it a try,» the captain conceded. «At the very least, it's a mathematical model to start from. We can correct it later.»

Before moving on to the discussion of the research plan devised by the two civilians, the captain made a final attempt to undermine Flavio's credibility with his questions. He took every chance to ask for explanations on the mathematical concepts that Clelia had presented somewhat uncertainly during the meeting. One after another, Flavio tackled the captain's questions and those of other officers from the department. One after another, his explanations came out solid, confident, and so swift that even Clelia needed to concentrate to follow them. Silently, she harbored the absolute certainty that the research officers were grasping only half of Flavio's formally impeccable discourses.

As for the commission's officers, who were older and had marginal scientific preparation, Clelia knew they understood nothing of the arguments they were forced to listen to. Yet they didn't seem bored, being engaged in evaluating every second of the great mastery displayed by this student who, somehow, had become a research director without having a military rank, without even having a degree yet, and without even a quarter's experience in the project. But this was his domain, his playing field and, judging by the attentive expressions she saw around the table, Clelia understood that this reality was becoming unmistakably clear to their eyes.

When even the last of the researchers had been silenced by Flavio, it was clear to both newly-promoted researchers that the officers could not deny them their support. They would allocate substantial resources just to try exploring the new path being presented to them,.

Clelia then outlined the research plan she had scheduled with Flavio. She emphasized that the first goal was to start isolating the parameters that would complete and generalize the mathematical model but, for the benefit of the commissioners, she limited herself to giving only a qualitative and superficial description of the activity. As for the details, they would have time to discuss them starting from the next workday with the department's officers.

As selected and exclusive as this handful of uniformed scientists was, Flavio and Clelia were now undeniably part of this elite.