Page 21 of Thin Ice

"Ward. Michael says you're touring the clinic today."

"In an hour."

"Good. Go be a professor." A pause. "How's your guy sleeping?"

I'd sent Seattle a one-page assessment on Nolan and buried one line about the early wake-ups in the middle of it. Mac had gone straight to it and pulled it out like a splinter.

"Not much," I said. "He's up before five most days. Spends most of the first hour coaxing the body into movement."

"Yeah." A short exhale. "They all do. The good ones, especially. Are you keeping your head, Elias?"

Mac was a former baseball star with multiple All-star appearances. He knew firsthand the toll professional sports took on both bodies and minds.

"Head's fine," I said.

"Call me after the tour," he said. "Not Michael. Me."

The line went back to Michael, then dead. Down the hall, the espresso machine had gone quiet.

I pocketed the phone and walked back to the kitchen, where Nolan was waiting with his coffee.

"Boring?" he asked.

"Boring," I said. It was the easy answer.

***

The building was brick and glass, with nothing on the facade but a street number. Inside, the lobby smelled of eucalyptus. A receptionist sat at the front desk, directing me to sign in.

A door opened, and a man appeared with his hand out. "Dr. Ward. I'm Colin Frey. When Reis said you were coming, I pulled your paper back up to make sure my memory was correct." He grinned. "It was better than I thought. The force-decay curves are impressive."

His handshake was brief and firm. He was fifty or close to it, wearing khakis and running shoes. A laminated badge hung off a Tarn lanyard.

"You didn't cry, though," I said. "Reis told me the paper made one of his fellows cry."

"That's Katie. Everything makes her cry." He waved me through the door to the back. "Come with me. He said show you everything. We don't aim to look impressive, but we get a lot done."

Inside, the place was bigger than I expected. I saw float tanks, a force-plate lab better than the one I'd fought a dean two years to fund, and an isokinetic rig I'd only seen in journals. Frey spoke from experience, discussing how he read the data for each piece of equipment.

"We met, by the way," he said. "Denver. It was the ACSM year they had us all in that Hyatt off the convention center, the one built around the big atrium. You gave the asymmetry talk, and about nine of us closed down the lobby bar arguing about it that night."

"I remember the atrium," I said. "The bar's a blur."

"It was a blur at the time." He said it easily and moved on, and I liked him for not making me pretend I remembered any of it.

Near the back of the suite, we passed a door he didn't open. It had a badge reader and no windows. I asked a casual question.

"How far back does your outcome data run? Longitudinally, I mean. If you've been at this since the nineties, somebody's sitting on a beautiful dataset."

He sighed.

"Ordinarily, we might. Current system goes back six years," he said. "Clean, standardized, I'd put it up against anybody's. Before that predates me."

He said current system. At my old university, that hedge meant a botched database migration and a decade of records rotting in a format nobody could open. I'd lived through two of those.

Frey led me back up the corridor the way we'd come and out through the lobby's eucalyptus-scented stillness. He opened the door for me.

"So," he said, pushing it open into the humid heat outside. "You headed back toward the park? I'll walk you out. I've been inside since six."