2.3. Jill Talcott

There was a video camera rigged up on a tripod nearby. It was a grandiose gesture and Jill tried to underplay it. But Nate had seen enough of her ambitious streak to smell a Historical Moment a mile away. He dropped his hands from the keyboard and rubbed them against his thighs like an athlete shaking out his legs between sprints. “I finished downloading the results from Quey. Wanna wait until morning to see how we did?”

He might have been a lover deep into heavy foreplay, pausing to ask his girl, “Should we wait?” It was tempting in its sheer masochism.

Jill looked at her watch. It was 3:00 A.M. “No, I’d never be able to get to sleep. Besides, it’s kind of dramatic—middle of the night.” Jill felt uncharacteristically girlish. Her small fingers kept twisting themselves together and she had to keep pulling them apart.

“Well… if you’re sure.” He was teasing now.

“Everything’s in? No numbers transposed? No dropped data?”

“Just that power surge when I was transferring the files.”

Her heart stopped beating. “What!”

“Kidding.”

She glared at him.

Nate nibbled away a smile. “Seriously, all I have to do is push this wee button here and my program will compare the numbers your equation generated on Quey with the carbon atom data. We’ll know if your equation was able to predict real-life behavior in about ten seconds.”

Ten seconds. That’s what it boiled down to after seven years of plotting and effort. She was hyperventilating.

She paced around behind the camera and checked it again. She messed with her hair, put on some Chap Stick. At the sight of the clear balm, Nate made a shocked face, as if to say, This must be important if you deign to put on any cosmetic whatsoever. She ignored him.

“Ready?” she asked.

Nate raised one eyebrow warily, moved the cursor over the button on the screen that would run the comparison. “Ready.”

“Wait!”

She turned on the camera, squared her shoulders. Stepping in front of the lens, she gave a short introduction: date, time, and the nature of the experiment. She adjusted the camera to look at the computer screen, taking her time to focus it in for a good close-up. Then she sat primly in the chair beside Nate.

“Proceed, Mr. Andros,” she said, for the record.

Nate clicked the button. After a few seconds, two columns of data appeared on the screen with a box that said:

Correlation in data above the error factor by 31%

With the uncaring blink of those spiteful words, Jill’s heart sank through her legs to puddle somewhere on the floor. Her equation hadn’t worked. She couldn’t believe it. She had been convinced—convinced…

She cursed vibrantly, then remembered the camera and turned it off. She stood in the narrow aisle, looking at her shoes and breathing hard. A scientist observed results coolly, impersonally, she reminded herself. You don’t get angry at data.

“Damn!” Nate exclaimed. “I really thought it was gonna fly.”

Jill was too wrapped up in her own frustration to care about his. She sat down at the computer again. “Bring up the grisly remains.”

He expanded the boxes that contained the complete set of numbers.

“Your velocity predictions are off by thirty percent,” he commented. “Position, twenty-eight percent.”

“I see it,” Jill muttered.

After several minutes she sat back, pressing icy fingers to her forehead. It would take a long time to pore over the results, not a task to be undertaken tonight. And she could already see that it wouldn’t tell them what they really needed to know. It wouldn’t tell them where she’d gone wrong.

She felt like crying. Stupid, stupid data.

Nate glanced at her sympathetically. “Even a small error in the equation could cause this, if it was in the right place.”

“No. Position, velocity—those are in completely different ends of the equation. The whole underlying theory has to be wrong. I don’t know why I should be surprised. We knew the energy pool model was crap.”

Nate looked uncomfortable. “But that’s what an interference pattern does, Jill. I mean, Dr. Talcott. It makes everything completely interconnected. One little change in a ripple over here means a cascading response on the other side of the—”

“Just… leave it.”

She was angry and disappointed and snappish. Nate started to say something, then closed his mouth. He looked hurt at her taking it out on him.

“It’s late,” Jill said. “I’m going home.”

The next morning she couldn’t face a day of classes or Nate, so she called in sick. Seven years of work were down the tube, and she had no idea how to start again. She lounged around at home for half the day, her mind a miserable blank. She tried to do some stretching exercises, but her body was so used to being utterly ignored that it wouldn’t cooperate.

Jill Talcott’s physique was small but not particularly fit. The same could be said of her house. The tiny 1920s bungalow was situated in an urban Seattle neighborhood called Wallingford that had once been low-income housing but now came with heavy mortgages as well as no closet space. Her neighbors were high-salaried technocrats, couples, and young families. Jill lived alone. Not even pets disturbed the domestic order. The great scientists filled one narrow bookcase in the living room, and a ten-inch TV gave her the national news if she became conscious enough to show an interest, which was roughly never. The house was orderly, if not cozy; functional, unadorned, like its owner. And thanks to flawed insulation, it was frequently cold.

After lunch she drove to a beach on Lake Washington. It was a weekday, and she had the place to herself. Looking at the water, she thought about the energy pool model of the universe, all those particles making ripples in the gigantic pond of space-time. Dr. Ansel used to say that the refusal to accept the theory represented fear in the scientific community. Physicists knew that if it were taken seriously they’d never be able to pin anything down again. All their wonderful divisions and categorizations would dissolve like ice cubes in warm water. Chaos theory mathematicians might nod their heads in sympathy at the thought, but physicists turned green in the gills.

She had rejected Ansel, too. She’d resigned as his graduate student once she’d figured out how off the beaten track his work was. He and his wife had been kind to her, a rube from the sticks, but ultimately Jill had considered him a hindrance to her career, didn’t want the sly looks and chuckles of his peers to rub off on her. Bye-bye, Dr. Ansel. So why, then, had she returned to his theory, like Oedipus, who ran away from his fate only to fall right into its lap? She didn’t miss the irony. What would Ansel think if he knew of her equation? Would he laugh? Would he think her a two-faced bitch?

He wouldn’t be the first.

Jill Talcott had been born and raised in the South—not the South of the Clintons or of Thomas Wolfe but of Loretta Lynn and black lung disease. Her childhood in the seventies had boasted dirty, puffy polyester clothing that never wore out, making the most lurid hand-me-downs live forever.

Her mother’s family had not been wealthy, but they’d had a piano, new clothes for school, pot roast on Sundays. That was the story Jill’s mother told. She talked wistfully about that world. No white picket fences for Jill’s mother, not even chipped ones. Her downfall had been a man, what else? Jill’s father, slim and wiry. He’d aged to old leather, but he’d been irresistible when young, so the story went, with a pencil-thin mustache, slicked back blond hair, and flashy clothes. He was a gambler, always out for the easy buck. He had a great deal of charm, but Jill learned early on to discount it, for his promises were pretty puffs of air and nothing more. Jill’s mother worked as a waitress, worked harder at home trying to hide the money from his grasp. They lived in a rented shack. There was no pot roast, no new clothes for school, only what Jill’s mother pulled from the charity box. And there never was, never would be, a piano.