Isaac shook his head.
"Not unless I'm formally covered."
"We can arrange temporary consultancy."
"And clearance?"
"Pending review."
"Pending means no."
"Then what do you want?"
He looked at her.
"I want the rules written before I touch the work. Scope, access, ownership of new analysis, liability, and who gets to stop the project if the numbers say stop."
Eleanor's eyes narrowed with something close to approval.
"You learned to read contracts."
"I learned what happens when engineers don't."
She held out her hand.
"Give me twenty-four hours."
Isaac looked at it, then shook it once.
"You have twelve."
Eleanor delivered the paperwork in ten hours and forty-three minutes.
Isaac knew because she arrived at 10:43 that night carrying a laptop, two printed agreements, and a paper bag from the diner on Calhoun Street. The garage had been closed for three hours, but the lights remained on. Isaac was at the workbench rebuilding a carburetor for a generator used by a rancher outside town.
"You didn't eat," Eleanor said.
"You don't know that."
"The diner owner said you forget when you're working."
"Small town."
"Apparently."
She set the food beside the carburetor and opened the first agreement.
NASA would engage Isaac as a temporary technical consultant under Eleanor's direct program authority. The scope covered independent analysis of the OBSIDIAN-7 propulsion anomaly and development of potential remediation approaches. Work product created during the engagement would belong to the government program, but Isaac retained attribution rights and could preserve a sealed copy for professional-record purposes subject to classification rules.
The liability clause protected him for good-faith technical recommendations made within scope. The stop-work language allowed him to document a safety objection directly to the oversight board without routing it through Nexora.
Isaac read every page.
Eleanor waited.
"This paragraph," he said, tapping page seven. "It says access may be revoked if a contractor objects."
"It says operational access may be restricted for security reasons."
"Same weapon, different handle."
She read it again.
"What language do you want?"
He told her.
She called counsel from the garage at 11:18 p.m. and revised the clause.
That mattered more to Isaac than the speed.
People who intended to use authority against him argued when he asked for clarity. Eleanor changed the sentence.
He signed at midnight.
The clearance process could not move as quickly, so NASA established a compartmented access arrangement. Isaac would receive only the data necessary for the propulsion problem. Mission purpose, payload details, and unrelated systems remained masked.
"Fine by me," he said. "Satellites fail the same whether they're looking at weather or secrets."
Eleanor did not confirm what OBSIDIAN-7 carried.
"Good answer."
The next morning, two cargo vans joined the Suburbans.
By afternoon, one side of Merritt Repair looked less like a rural garage and more like a field engineering station assembled by people with government purchase authority and no appreciation for how much dust lived in Texas.
Three monitors appeared on a steel worktable. A portable secure communications terminal stood on a tripod outside. Network equipment occupied the shelf where Isaac normally stored alternators. Locked cases arrived containing calibrated instruments, secure drives, and printed material that had to be returned to numbered envelopes when not in use.
Isaac watched a technician cover one of his father's old parts cabinets with an antistatic mat.
"Don't move the drawer marked carburetors," he said.
The technician paused. "Why?"
"Because it weighs two hundred pounds and the bottom falls out."
The technician stopped touching it.
At 8:10 the following morning, Adrian Cole arrived from Houston.
He was twenty-six, lean, careful, and visibly trying not to react to the environment. His backpack was organized by compartment. His laptop looked new enough to have been removed from packaging on the flight. He had a master's degree from MIT, a previous internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and four years of high-level simulation work behind him.
He also had the particular expression of a young engineer who had been told that a man in an oil-stained garage shirt had solved a problem several highly credentialed teams could not.
Isaac recognized the expression because he had once worn versions of it himself.