Five anomalies.

We arrive at the Tallahassee Regional Airport nervous.

Packed in our carry-on bag is a tile grinder and a microscope.

What devices of mass destruction might they resemble when viewed on the ghostly black-and-white TSA screen?

We take off shoes, empty pockets. We enter the new futuristic scanning tube one at a time and stand, arms raised. It takes a good twenty minutes to move fifty feet, but our carry-on luggage makes it through; we must be entering the national transportation system at one of its soft spots–or else the screener is an out-of-work biologist who knows a microscope when he sees one.

Either way, we’re in.