It hurt her to say it. Really, it bugged the crap out of her. Grover would have the news all over the department within hours. Yet something within her felt confident enough today to take the inevitable heat. In fact, she was almost enjoying this confrontation. She felt strong, invincible.
“Can I see your results, Jill?”
“Of course, Chuck.” She went over to Nate’s computer, feigning calm. Was the old data still in place? Could she remember how to run the program that showed the original error? She booted up Nate’s machine and looked around his C Drive.
While she was searching, Chuck picked up something off Nate’s desk. It was an operations manual for their new radio generator. He stared at it with a frown, flicked its cover with his fingers thoughtfully.
Her mouth went dry. “Here we go.” She double-clicked on the program she thought was the right one and stood back. She glanced at her watch as though this were routine and she had better things to do. Inside, she was screaming.
The two columns of data and the box that read: DATA OFF BY 31% came up. Hot damn.
“There you go, Chuck. Just like I said. Now I’m very sorry, but I do have a class starting in five minutes.”
Grover would not be rushed. He put the generator manual down and looked at the screen for a good long time, like it might change in front of him from a pile of garbage to a pot of gold. Jill folded her arms, tapped her fingers on her collarbone, and bit her cheeks to keep back an evil smile.
“Why didn’t you tell me this two months ago? And what’ve you been doing since then? I know you’re working on something. I gave you two more slots on Quey and you never—”
“I realized we needed to do a lot more groundwork before we bothered you again. Then… well, to be honest, we’re on a completely different track now. But I do appreciate your interest, Chuck.” She turned off Nate’s machine. “Can I walk you out?”
Walk him out. Yeah, all one and a half steps to the door.
Grover stood up slowly, his face uncertain. “Even if the equation was wrong, you couldn’t have known that without Quey, so whatever—”
“Excuse me?” She had a flash of temper. “Yes, Quey showed me that my approach was in error, and for that I’m grateful. But now I’m on to new things. Are you seriously going to claim my work for the rest of my life? How many people have you done this to, Chuck?”
Grover paled to the color of Swiss cheese. He pointed a finger at her chest. “You’d better hope you never need anything from me again… Jill. Because I don’t like being jerked around. If I see anything in your work which points to Quey being even a factor, anything, I will have what we agreed on.”
Jill’s confidence faltered. Grover had a lot of weight in the department. Hell, he had a lot of weight just about everywhere. And she had agreed to a partnership, even if he’d had no right to ask her in the first place.
But the sun was streaming in through the window and she felt remarkably buoyant, like, well, like he couldn’t touch her. “Gosh, I’m sorry you feel that way. As for me, it’s been a pleasure working with you, and I hope someday we can work together again.”
She held out her hand. He stared at it wordlessly and walked out.
After her morning class, Jill hurried down to the basement lab and donned their protective gear—lead aprons of the sort X-ray technicians used. She didn’t know if the aprons did anything or not, but the precaution soothed her conscience. Nate was seated at the radio transmitter table where they had a computer set up. He was wrangling data.
“How’s it going?” Jill went over to the test subjects and eyeballed them for any change.
Their experiment was quite silly. Silly enough that she would feel idiotic should anyone—Chalmers, for example—get wind of it. Then again, playing with mold must have seemed equally silly in its time. Besides, she’d be damned if it wasn’t working.
Nate joined her. “They still look really good.” He peered at a plate of fruit.
The experiment: bombard the room with a solid one pulse. They didn’t need the power of a HAARP station because they weren’t trying to reach the ionosphere. In fact, they worked very hard to keep the waves right inside this room. They’d chosen the basement room because it was unused, but more important, it was underground. A heavy rubber curtain hung in front of the door, and they’d covered the walls and ceiling with soundproofing. On a few of the walls Nate had hung up vast sheets of papers, charts of equation matrices they’d worked on months ago. She thought he meant the charts for inspiration—or perhaps he just wanted to clear them out of their crowded office in the physics building.
Jill had purchased a transmitter with her own money and had scavenged the rest of their equipment. They could produce a total of three kilowatts of power, which was modest. But even now, running at 50 percent of their capacity, something was happening.
“Ready to record today’s numbers?” Jill asked.
“Sure.”
Nate went over to a grid on an enormous old white board. Down the left side of the grid was a detailed list of their three subject groups; each banana, apple, mouse, and virus culture was listed. Along the top of the board were three months’ worth of days. Only the first weeks had been filled in.
“Go ahead.”
Jill began, with infinite care, to study each of their subjects. “Banana one gets a four. Banana two: four.”
Nate recorded the numbers in the grid.
“Apple one: three; apple two: three.”
Fruit was judged on the amount of its surface area that was bruised, sunken, or dried; the virus dishes, by the amount of growth and activity in the culture. The mice were harder, but the amount of food they ate was measured; their general appearance, health, and activity were also quantified on a 1–10 scale.
Jill found her excitement kindling as she went through each group. Silly or not, they were seeing results. The control group was at her house in Wallingford. She and Nate made trips to the market, taking care to put together pairs of fruit in exactly the same condition, bringing one of each pair to the lab and placing the other in Jill’s spare bedroom. They had mice from the same litters at her house also and virus dishes carefully prepared to match their twins in the basement lab. The basic idea: to determine if altering the one-minus-one in the lab made any discernible difference in their subjects.
“Remarkable,” she said, straightening up from the fruit. “All the fruit at my house are in stages six or seven at least. They’re lasting much longer here.”
Nate came over and squatted down, peering at a banana. “It’s cooler here than at your place. That might slow the decay.”
Jill shrugged, knowing it was a valid point and knowing, also, that there wasn’t much they could do about it—not on their budget. But that was why they had a variety of subjects. None of them would respond favorably or negatively to exactly the same conditions.
“Virus one-point-one gets a six,” she reported, peering down at the culture through a microscope.
The virus cultures, too, were doing noticeably better here than at Jill’s house. The growth rate was up almost a third over the control group. And the mice were distinctly more active, waiting in line for a turn at the wheel and the males sniffing aggressively around the females, copulating often.
When they were done, Jill poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down. Nate got a glass of water from the sink.
“No coffee?”
“Nah. I’m already on full pilot. Don’t wanna blow a fuse.”
Jill watched him surreptitiously. Before, she might spend entire days with Nate in the office and not have the faintest idea what he was wearing or if he’d been tired or ill or what. But it had dawned on her recently that he was as much a subject as the mice in the room, as she was herself. It had given her a whole new interest in him. At the moment, for example, he looked jumpy. She felt that way, too, energized and hyper. She was filled with such eager anticipation, such optimism about their work, that she could hardly sleep at night. Analyzing, hypothesizing, planning—she couldn’t shut her brain off. And today she’d even had the nerve to face down Chuck Grover.