“It’s so regular,” he offered. “Like a binary message or something: one, negative one, one, negative one, one, negative one. Like Morse. Only it’s not saying anything.”
Jill touched the screen lightly with outspread fingertips. “Oh, it’s saying something all right. We just don’t know what yet.”
She turned back to the camera with a dazzling sense of the monumental. She felt like man taking his first step on the moon.
“The wave is called the Talcott-Andros one-minus-one.”
Nate entered Jill’s office three days later to find her on the phone. She was scribbling furiously on a pad.
“Right. I saw the schematics on the Web actually. So you’re running at about three-point-oh megawatts right now?”
Nate raised his eyebrows at her curiously and poured himself a cup of coffee.
The person on the other end of the phone was obviously going on in great detail, but Jill looked only partially interested. She was perfecting her type A worried look. She tapped her pen on her collarbone. Her rust-colored scoop-necked top emphasized her lightly freckled skin, fragile collarbones, and the gentle swell of her small, high breasts. Nate watched the pen tap tap and a tendril of heat bloomed in his stomach. He looked away.
He had the hots for his professor. How pitiful was that? On the Bill Clinton scale of 1 to 10: 10. He couldn’t help it. Jill was so… intense, so sharp and focused, her mind like a supernova at times, bursting in all directions at once and at a million miles an hour. All of the other women he met seemed dull as dirty socks in comparison. And physically… she had that tiny southern Holly Hunter look. He’d had way too many fantasies about how her small body would feel fitted to his. How perv was that? It wasn’t as if she asked to be cast in his lustful fantasies. The only signal she projected was NO TRESPASSING. But that only made it worse. She had that librarian thing, the thing that made a man want to rip off her glasses (metaphorically, in this case), unpin her hair (also metaphorically), and make her howl (literally).
Yeah. And someday he wanted to climb Mount Everest, too.
“That sounds fascinating. I was wondering… have you detected any unusual results when you’re running at full peak? Any side effects of the broadcast—visual abnormalities, audio abnormalities? A high number of equipment breakdowns, anything like that?” Pause. “No, Dr. Serin, I can assure you I have nothing to do with environmentalists.”
Jill wrote some more on her pad and motioned Nate to fill up her cup. He brought the pot over and poured some for her. He was definitely curious now.
“Okay. Well, thank you very much. I do appreciate—what? Oh… of course. It’s Dr. Alkin, University of Washington. Yes, thank you.”
She put down the receiver and picked up her cup.
“Careful, it’s hot… Dr. Alkin.” Nate peaked an eyebrow at her.
“You must have heard me wrong. What a shame.” Jill took a delicate sip. She had the superior look of a woman with a secret.
Nate dropped into his chair and spun to face her. He had to do it carefully, because otherwise his knees would bang into the base of her desk. He knew because his knees had been black-and-blue for the first six weeks he’d been in this rat cage.
“You gonna tell me?”
“Mmmm. That was the HAARP program in Alaska. HAARP uses high-energy radio pulses to manipulate the ionosphere. Something to do with improving radar signals.”
“HAARP? They’re military, aren’t they? Do you think it’s smart giving a false name?”
“Are you my mother?” Jill quipped, face blank.
“Um, is that a trick question?”
“I asked him a couple of things on the phone. I didn’t go in and steal government secrets or anything, god!”
“Okay. So why did you call the HAARP program?”
In the back of his mind it occurred to him, with more than a tinge of disappointment, that she must have heard about someone else who was on to the one-minus-one, like, say, HAARP. Since he’d first seen the wave on his computer three days ago, he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It blew his mind to think that they honestly could have discovered—well, her more than him, really—that she could have discovered what they thought she’d discovered. In fact, he hadn’t completely bought it, though he knew she’d bought it, decorated it, and taken out a second mortgage.
Jill was slow in answering. She had a storm-clouds-gathering look on her face that told him he’d better get his thinking cap on.
“I’ve decided not to publish on my equation. Not right away.”
“Why not?”
She tapped her chin with the pen. “Because they’d line up to refute me. They’d say there must have been some other factor in the carbon atom data that made the one-minus-one—interference from the walls of the accelerator or hum in the machinery, anything but admit that we might have stumbled onto something this big.” Jill tossed down her pen, looking very determined. “We need more proof.”
“But they can’t argue with the equation itself—it worked. The numbers prove it worked.”
“I know. There is that. My wave mechanics equation is news in its own right, but…”
She hesitated and Nate knew exactly what she was thinking. Up until a few weeks ago, they had both thought solving wave mechanics would be the biggest thing since sliced bread. But.
“The one-minus-one is bigger,” Nate said.
Jill nodded, biting her lip. “Yes. And I don’t want to go out of the gate with anything less than that.”
He could have argued with her, debated the pros and cons just for the heck of it. But she was inspirational when she got like this. She saw heights of glory he’d never dare, and sometimes she made him see them, too.
“So what do we need to publish the one-minus-one?”
“Independent confirmation.”
“How can we get independent confirmation when no one else has even heard of it?”
“We look for things that were perhaps unexplained in other experiments—indicators that make no sense if you don’t know about the one-minus-one, but if you do…”
Nate smiled. “So that’s why you were calling HAARP?”
Jill shook her head impatiently. No, it appeared they weren’t at the actual point yet. Nate leaned back in his chair, happily content to follow the thread through to its end. He loved the labyrinthine twists of her mind, how you could go down and down her line of reasoning, like climbing down a rope into darkness, and every time you thought you had reached the end it turned out there was always more down there.
“Go on, Herr Professor.”
Jill got up and shifted into the aisle where she could pace a foot or two in either direction, a tight little bundle of energy. Nate had to move his legs farther out of the way to avoid getting trampled. Not that he would mind.
“I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of experiments we could do to measure the one-minus-one—to prove it exists. Anything that would show a quantifiable result.” She tapped her chin with one finger as she paced. “So I was thinking: what if we could alter the one-minus-one?”
“Alter it? How could we alter the pattern of space-time?”
Jill waved in the air as if scattering his remark. “We couldn’t alter it permanently, no. But think about it. The one-minus-one is a wave like any other wave. Say you drop a wrecking ball in the ocean,” she said, smashing a fist into her palm. “It would affect the wave pattern of the sea, right? It would disturb the waves, creating all kinds of new interference patterns. It’s just that it would only affect the sea in a limited area and for a short period of time. Pretty soon the pattern of the sea waves would return to normal. See what I mean?”
Nate’s red tennis shoes bounced nervously as he visualized it. “Yeah. But that would take a ton of energy, right? Is that what that phone call was about?”