Isaac paid him anyway.
Dale noticed and shouted from across the fence, "Thought you didn't do employees."
Isaac shouted back, "Thought you didn't do opinions for free."
Dale laughed.
It was the first fence-line exchange in six years that did not feel like an attack.
One Friday evening, Noah found the professional certification in the filing cabinet while searching for a vehicle title.
"What's this?"
Isaac took it from him.
"Wrong drawer."
"It says propulsion systems."
"Can you read?"
"Apparently better than you hide stuff."
Isaac closed the drawer.
Noah stared.
"You build rockets?"
"No."
"Satellites?"
"No."
"What do you do?"
Isaac thought about the question.
"Same thing I do here."
Noah looked around at the broken truck, the bicycle wheel, the old tools.
"Fix junk?"
Isaac smiled.
"Sometimes."
Isaac's first official week back in Houston began with a meeting he nearly walked out of.
The conference room was larger than the Nexora boardroom where his career had ended and less impressive in every decorative sense. No glass wall overlooked the city. The table had scratches. One chair squeaked. Someone had left dry-erase marker dust on the tray beneath the whiteboard.
Isaac liked it immediately.
Eleanor opened the planning session for the next-generation propulsion architecture program by introducing him in exactly twelve words.
"Isaac Merritt will lead independent systems failure analysis and dissent review."
No biography.
No mention of OBSIDIAN-7.
No heroic language.
Isaac looked at her and nodded once.
Adrian sat three seats away and gave him a look that said he knew exactly how deliberately Eleanor had chosen the introduction.
The program itself was years from flight. That was another change Isaac had to adjust to. For weeks he had lived inside a countdown measured in days and hours. Now the team argued about material architecture for hardware that might not exist in final form for three years.
Urgency had been replaced by discipline.
He found it harder.
In emergencies, priorities became honest. Normal programs created room for vanity, convenience, territory, and the soft politics of whose model was used in which presentation.
By the second day, Isaac saw the same organizational pressures that had existed at Nexora, only smaller and earlier.
A thermal analyst named Priya had one set of assumptions. A controls group had another. Materials had generated a third. Each set was defensible within its own subsystem.
Isaac asked one question.
"Where's the integrated environment model?"
Silence.
Adrian smiled at the table.
"We haven't built it yet."
"Why?"
A program manager answered. "We're still maturing component baselines."
"So?"
"The coupled model would be premature."
Isaac looked around the room.
"That's how it starts."
Nobody needed him to explain.