One minute passed. Maybe more.
When Isaac returned, Eleanor remained beside the truck without checking her phone or glancing toward the vehicles.
He opened the folder.
The first page was a telemetry printout. Pressure measurements, thermal values, actuator responses, and orbital event markers had been reduced to columns and time stamps. The kind of document that meant almost nothing until someone understood which relationships mattered.
Isaac looked at the first column for four seconds.
He looked at the second for six.
By the time he reached the third, he no longer noticed Dale at the fence, Raymond's unfinished truck, or the coffee cooling in his hand.
He sat on a metal stool with one missing rubber foot.
"How long?" he asked.
Eleanor answered immediately. "Our current estimate is thirty-one days before the attitude-control margin degrades below the threshold required for a controlled orbital correction sequence. After that, the probability of an uncontrolled descent rises quickly."
"Where is it now?"
"Roughly two hundred forty miles above Earth in a polar orbit."
"And deorbit command?"
"Not cleanly available under the present fault profile."
He turned another page.
The pressure deviation was not random. Every ninety-three minutes, the same small drift appeared. Then a correction. Then a slightly larger drift.
"You thought sensor noise."
"Initially."
"It's not."
"I know that now."
He looked at her. "What exactly did you find in my report?"
"A cumulative tolerance failure in the secondary pressure-regulation assembly under repeated sub-thermal cycling. You predicted progressive loss of pressure authority after long-duration orbital exposure."
"That's what the executive summary said."
Eleanor paused.
That was the first moment Isaac knew she had not merely skimmed the archive.
"The body of the report went further," she said. "You wrote that the thermal cycle alone could not explain the projected degradation and that a coupled mechanical response needed additional modeling."
Isaac looked back at the page.
"I didn't have enough orbital-equivalent data."
"We do now."
"Then why are you in Harlow?"
"Because my team can reproduce the failure. We cannot yet stop it without sacrificing too much pressure-control authority, and the contractor solution costs more time than we have."
"Nexora's solution?"
Eleanor did not answer directly. "A software workaround has been proposed."
"By Cameron Ashford?"
Her silence was enough.
Isaac closed the folder.
He had imagined many versions of this day during the first year after Nexora fired him. In some, someone called to apologize. In others, a launch failed and people appeared at his door too late. In the angriest versions, Cameron Ashford sat across from him and admitted that schedules and contracts had mattered more than engineering.
None of those fantasies had included a retired teacher's truck, a faded garage sign, three black Suburbans, and a woman from NASA standing patiently in Texas heat.
"Let me finish what I'm working on," Isaac said.
Eleanor glanced at Raymond's truck. "You're serious."
"He needs it by tomorrow to take his wife to an appointment in San Marcos."
"We have thirty-one days."
"Then two hours won't kill your satellite."
Something almost like a smile moved at one corner of her mouth. "Two hours."
"Come back at noon."
She picked up the folder.
"Leave it," Isaac said.
Eleanor placed it back on the hood.
The Suburbans reversed from the lot as smoothly as they had entered. Dale remained at the fence until the last one disappeared around the bend.
Then he called across, "Government trouble, Merritt?"
Isaac slid beneath Raymond's truck again.
"Nope."
"What'd they want?"
Isaac fitted the socket over the final stud.