Nate nodded, his eyes shining. “Right. And we’ve seen that when there are fewer troughs things thrive, burgeon forth, feel good, hump like bunnies.”
Jill smirked but nodded, granting her assent.
“And now it seems we’ve proven the flip side of the coin. The negative one pulse affects the one side of the one-minus-one wave. In other words, it lowers the crests, right? And it appears that when there are fewer crests things slow down, even die, like the virus.”
“We’re a long way from proving that.”
Nate made a face. “I’m not worried about the damned fruit, Jill. I’m not even worried about myself. Though you’re really the worse for wear. You do know that, don’t you?”
She stopped pacing to glare at him. “I’m fine!”
“You’re very irritable.”
“Uh! How would you feel with Chalmers and Grover on your case! Besides which, there’s no proof that the one-minus-one affects a person’s moods or chemistry or whatever.”
Nate challenged her with a raised eyebrow. “Why not? Our brains are matter. So are the chemicals in them. Of course the one-minus-one affects our moods—we’ve both felt it. Just look at the mice.”
“I can’t,” she pointed out dryly.
Nate went into the hall and came back with the two cages. She locked the door again behind him. He put the cages on the table. One white male sniffed halfheartedly at the treadmill. The others lay and watched him lethargically.
Jill growled a hmmm. She needed so badly to justify what she was doing that she argued almost without thought. Only later, lying in bed, would she contemplate the possibility that Nate might have a glimmer of a point. Now she went up to him and put a tired hand on his sleeve as if touching him were a kind of consolation prize for what she was about to say.
“Nate, you know we’ve got a very modest radio transmitter. We’ve been seeing results here, yes, but nothing catastrophic or particularly dangerous-looking. You know this has nothing to do with that car accident or any other of those other things you mentioned. That’s just dumb.”
“I’m not saying our experiments pushed that truck off the bridge.” Nate closed his eyes, concentrating. “But I also think we’re dreaming if we expect to keep the results of our experiment localized to this room. The insulation keeps in the pulse we’re generating, but that’s about it. We’re manipulating the fabric of space-time, Jill. Besides, that’s not how the energy pool theory works.” There was a tremor in his lips that made her feel emotionally shaky herself. Her hand fell back to her side.
She was weary of the argument, weary in general. She hadn’t been feeling at all well. And she still had another class today; then they had to go over to her place this afternoon to check the control group.
“What if…” Nate began, “what if there are probabilities?”
Jill shook her head. “Totally lost.”
“What if there is free will? But what if ‘free will’ or ‘no predestiny’ only means that there’s some kind of probability curve that one thing will happen versus another? Say this kid who was driving the truck, for example.” He waved his hand toward the newspaper. “Say his lifetime is fifty percent determined by pure genetics and maybe another thirty percent by environmental conditioning. Then there’s this last twenty percent that’s dumb luck. Maybe he could die at five from diving off a swing set because he’s got a recklessness gene, or at nineteen from an overdose because he’s predisposed to addiction. Or maybe there was always a chance he would have an accident while driving drunk.”
Jill rubbed her forehead tiredly.
“I’m not saying the pulse pushed him off. But what if it upped the probability of that particular event coming to pass? What if some random lucky thing, like a favorite song coming on the radio to keep him alert, could have happened last night—if a full crest had been there in his wave pattern—and didn’t, because that crest wasn’t there?”
She stared at him dumbly. “Nate, how do I respond to something like that?”
Nate shrugged sadly. “I don’t expect you to. I’m not even sure I believe it. I just think—I think we have no idea what we’re playing with.”
She leaned back against a table and hugged herself, feeling cold. She studied him for a moment. “You should take some time off.”
“No.”
“Just a few weeks. You can work on the data over in my office. For the report.”
From having been afraid of losing him a few minutes ago Jill realized that she was now pushing him out. She wanted him to go. Because there was something she was even more afraid of losing than Nate Andros: her own faith in the work or even the work itself.
But Nate slumped in surrender. He went back over to his computer and picked up his coffee cup. “Christ, I don’t want time off. I just want to talk about it, for god’s sake. I mean, sometimes this thing blows my mind.”
She heard a quiver in his voice and watched his face darken as he stared down into his cup. She felt a lump in her own throat in response but quelled it. A heartbeat later, she was mentally logging his increase of instability, of emotionalism, of paranoia for her journal entry later that night.
“That’s all the more reason to finish quickly,” she said crisply. “Let’s try to get the data up to fifty percent differential between our lab group and our control group on the negative one pulse. That’s good enough for publication. We can stop there.”
Nate didn’t answer or even glance at her.
“So… what happened with Linda?”
The words were out before she realized they were coming, and she immediately felt as though she’d just done something particularly humiliating. She compensated by looking supremely uninterested in the answer, checking her fingernails. She could feel him watching her.
“We didn’t have much in common when it came right down to it.”
“Huh.” She turned away, perversely pleased. “Are you sure you don’t want some time off? I would like to bump it up. But if you’re not comfortable with that you don’t have to be down here. Just say the word.”
His mouth twisted wryly. “No.” Then, harder, “And leave you to hog all the glory? Not unless you have a team of wild horses I don’t know about.”
Jill smiled.
8.3. Aharon Handalman
It was Friday afternoon, and Hannah was rushing to get everything ready for the Sabbath. In the oven a brisket baked on a timer. The two younger children had had baths that morning and Yehuda was in there now, his clothes laid out on the bed. She set the table with silver candlesticks that had belonged to her grandmother, stirred the vegetable soup, and put the large skillet on the range for an unusual treat—latkes. She looked at the extra place at the table anxiously.
It was growing dark when Aharon arrived, their guest in tow. Hannah had already lit the candles and blessed them. The men had walked from the yeshiva, and the exercise made the recent paleness of Aharon’s face, the looseness of his skin, more apparent. Hannah glanced at him worriedly and welcomed Binyamin, taking his coat, trying not to wince at the smell that wafted from the folds of wool.