That felt right.
The clearest proof that Isaac had changed came during a design review in Houston six weeks later.
The team was evaluating a pressure-control architecture for an early lunar surface access concept, nowhere near flight hardware and still flexible enough that mistakes were cheap if people were willing to admit them. Isaac had spent two days arguing that a proposed accumulator geometry would create an unacceptable thermal lag during rapid cycling. His analysis was careful, conservative, and persuasive enough that most of the room had begun treating the redesign as inevitable.
A twenty-four-year-old thermal analyst named Jonah Patel raised his hand from the far end of the table.
"I think your boundary condition is wrong," he said.
The room went quiet for a reason Isaac recognized immediately. Jonah had been on the team for four months. Isaac had been hired partly because a satellite nearly failed after people ignored him. Everyone knew the story, even if nobody discussed it directly. Challenging Isaac Merritt about a thermal-coupling problem now carried a social weight no engineering chart should have possessed.
Isaac looked at Jonah.
"Which boundary?"
Jonah swallowed.
"The external rejection coefficient in the transient case. You're carrying the worst-case value across the whole cycle. But the surface state changes after the first phase. If you let the coefficient transition with the actual geometry, the lag drops below the limit."
Someone near the whiteboard shifted in a chair.
Isaac turned to Adrian.
"Did you check that?"
Adrian shook his head.
"Not with a phase-dependent boundary."
Isaac looked back at Jonah.
"Show me."
Jonah connected his laptop. His hands shook enough that he missed the display cable on the first attempt. Nobody laughed. Grace, joining remotely, waited without filling the silence.
The new plot appeared.
Isaac stood and moved closer.
Jonah had not disproved the existence of the lag. He had shown that Isaac's model overstated it because Isaac had held one conservative condition constant after the physical system would have changed states.
"Run the uncertainty wider," Isaac said.
Jonah did.
The result remained below the concern threshold.
"Material scatter?"
"Included."
"Timing offset?"
"Plus and minus twelve percent."
"Sensor delay?"
"Doesn't affect this case materially."
Isaac stared at the screen.
Then he looked around the room.
"My conclusion was wrong."
The sentence was simple. It still altered the atmosphere.
Jonah blinked.
Isaac pointed at the display.
"The concern was reasonable. The model wasn't. Keep the current geometry and document the phase-dependent boundary assumption so nobody has to rediscover this next year."
The program manager exhaled.
"That saves us about two weeks."
Isaac shook his head.
"Jonah saves you two weeks. Put his name on the analysis."
After the meeting, Jonah caught Isaac in the hallway.
"I thought you were going to destroy me."
Isaac stopped.
"Why?"
"Because everybody knows what happened to you. I figured thermal coupling is kind of your territory."
Isaac's expression hardened, though not at Jonah.
"That's exactly the wrong lesson from what happened to me."
Jonah looked uncertain.
Isaac continued.
"If my history makes it harder to tell me I'm wrong, then my history becomes another version of the same problem. I don't get permanent authority because I was ignored once."
"You weren't just ignored."
"Doesn't matter. Evidence doesn't owe me loyalty."