Her eyes widened at him appreciatively. “Not bad for a philosophy major.”

Nate sniffed. “Aristotle was no slouch. So if anyone has ever altered the one-minus-one, even accidentally, it would be someone like HAARP.”

Jill smiled. Damn. Her smiles were so rare they always broke his heart. And it looked like they’d finally reached the point.

“Yup. HAARP uses high-energy radio pulses. The highest.”

“But… didn’t I hear you say on the phone that they hadn’t noticed any weird effects? Does that mean they haven’t altered the one-minus-one?”

“That’s right,” Jill agreed. “But I’m not really surprised.”

Big news flash: they hadn’t reached the end of the ladder after all. “I’m sure you’ll explain that to me.”

“Even at high energy, I don’t think radio waves would affect the one-minus-one much. Except maybe randomly, as a fluke. Do you know why?”

Nate sighed and tilted back his head, concentrating. His legs extended thoughtlessly, tangling momentarily with Jill’s. They both jumped as if shocked. Nate gave her a sheepish look in apology and struggled to pull his mind out of the gutter.

He remembered Socrates’ analogy about how man’s soul was like a chariot pulled by two horses. One of the horses was a noble sort, representing man’s higher nature. The other was a wild, unruly beast that represented man’s animal lusts. Man’s rational mind was the charioteer whose duty it was to keep the wild horse in check. But Socrates failed to mention how damn fun it was to just let that bad boy rip.

“Nate?”

“Huh? Oh. Radio waves. Well, they’re sine waves which have a gentle rolling pattern. So there’d probably only be random instances where a sine would collide in just the right way with the one-minus-one to alter it by much. And you’d have to alter it quite a bit to notice anything unusual out here in the material world, because matter waves are interacting with the one-minus-one in subtle ways all the time.”

“Exactly!” Jill looked at him with such a triumphant, resolved expression that he was sure he was supposed to have gotten more out of what he’d just said than he actually did.

“So…”

“So I know how we can conduct our experiment!”

Nate waited, squinting at her.

“If we used a wave pulse that wasn’t a rolling sine wave,” she explained energetically, “but was instead a steady pulse—a full one pulse or a full minus one pulse—”

Nate whistled in appreciation. “It would have the maximum possible impact on the one-minus-one!”

“Exactly!”

She smiled at him, looking about as happy as Jill Talcott ever looked, which meant to say that she looked unpreoccupied, present in the moment, and enormously pleased with herself.

“Yeah, but… do you think that’s smart?” Nate asked.

Jill’s smile vanished. Her eyes sparked with annoyance. “You said yourself, there’s no way we can permanently alter anything.”

Nate wasn’t sure that made him feel any better. “What do you think it would do, Dr. Talcott? I mean, say we figured out the power requirements, set up our equipment, sent out our pulse… what would the results of altering the one-minus-one be out here in the physical world?”

Jill went around her desk and sank back in her chair, a curl of anticipation on her lips. “Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?”

4.2. Aharon Handalman

A month after his visit to Yad Vashem, Aharon had mostly recovered. It was like digesting a bad meal—when enough time has passed you get an occasional belch, which brings with it a puff of bad air and a smell that reminds you of things you would rather forget, but other than that you don’t feel so sick.

But Yad Vashem had left a dis-ease that transferred itself from the Holocaust museum to the Kobinski array project in general. Aharon could shake the dust of Yad Vashem from his shoes, but from his heart? Not so easy. Besides, he didn’t know what to make of the pages he had copied from Yad Vashem. He didn’t care for Kobinski’s ideas, period, but especially he didn’t care for that business about a rabbi being like Nazis. Ridiculous! What could Kobinski mean by making such a comparison? Still, he was willing to admit that what he’d read was brief and that Kobinski could not have been at his best when he wrote it. As for all the mathematical notations in the margins? Aharon neither knew nor cared.

If that wasn’t enough, if you had to be greedy about it, as Rosa used to say, the whole Yad Vashem excursion had not even bought him anything. Aharon had made a list of new keywords: Isaac Kobinski, Anna Kobinski, gevorah, binah, Nazi, and so on. The results? Precious little. He found a number of instances of gevorah in the Kobinski arrays, but it wasn’t such a rare word in Hebrew ELS, and in any case, what did it mean? Nothing.

On the other hand… There were still 400 Torah arrays with the name Yosef Kobinski in them. Like an overbearing mother-in-law, this fact could not be avoided. So he and Binyamin continued to pore over them. Only Aharon had begun to think of other things again, his students (god forbid). If they were lackluster, if they were behind in their studies, whose fault was that? They say, “If the baby is ugly, don’t expect a beautiful mother.” It was time to knock a few heads together, get the brains working in a few young men, get them filled with fire about Torah.

And perhaps because he no longer cared so much, he finally had a breakthrough.

It was an unusually rainy June morning in Jerusalem. The soft drops on his face as he said his morning prayers at the wall were like God’s own tears. Afterward, comfortable and dry in his office, he picked up the binder and flipped to a random array… and saw it.

He had stared at this sequence over many months, and it had not clicked in his brain. This morning it did: נשק

It was such a small word. Perhaps that’s why his eye had always skimmed over it: נשק. Weapon.

He stroked his beard, made a clicking noise with his tongue that was the equivalent of a cat switching its tail. He turned the page. The thing about it was he thought… yes, it was in the array on the next page also, the same word. He began to search in earnest, circling each instance with a pencil as he found it. When Binyamin knocked, an hour later, Aharon had gone through five arrays—and had found the word right next to the name Yosef Kobinski in every single one.

“Do you believe in miracles?” was what he greeted the boy with. “Because wonder of wonders, I found something.”

“What is it?”

“Look for yourself.”

Binyamin looked at the binder, blinked at him blearily. “Weapon?”

“I found it in four other arrays also.” Aharon showed the boy his circled words with growing authority. “Listen, we’ll do a computer search later. For now have a seat and start from the front; I’ve already started from the back.”

It seemed appropriate that they should dig this treasure by hand. It was a communion with the text, the way Aharon might put his fingers on the Scripture as he read it, as if his touch would earn him additional insight and blessings. Binyamin was not so readily harnessed.

“What do you think it means, ‘weapon’? Why would that be in Rabbi Kobinski’s arrays?”

“It’s obvious. He was a physics professor in Warsaw in the early nineteen-twenties. Maybe he did some work which led to nuclear fission; did you ever think of that?”

Binyamin admitted that he hadn’t.

“So?” Aharon continued, eyes alight. “Who invented atomic bombs? Wasn’t it Eastern European scientists? Born when?”

“I don’t know.”