Footprints of Thunder (46 page)

“I hope you make it, little one,” Ron whispered. “I really hope you make it.”

45. Contribution

The Bible, and other authorities, record that God made the sun stand still in the sky, so that Joshua could defeat his enemies. Astronomically this is impossible. It is no more difficult to believe Joshua and his men were somehow sent back a day in time.

—
William Renfro,
Space, Ti
me,
and History

Honolulu, Hawaii

PostQuilt: Tuesday, 11:07
P.M.
AHT

A
ssistant Professor Emmett Puglisi was sitting in Professor Wang’s executive chair brooding. Since he and Carrollee encountered the plesiosaur, he hadn’t seen the botanist again. She had been busy organizing people to protect the buried plesiosaur eggs and with other activities she wouldn’t tell him about. Emmett had been just as busy. At first he spent his time answering the many questions about the plesiosaur on the PresNet. He’d gotten his fifteen minutes of fame, but then other reports of dinosaurs began to appear on the network. Emmett wanted the attention back, but he wasn’t a biologist, and he had little to offer. He felt like a bystander once more.

Emmett found himself both frightened by and drawn to the network, especially to models proposed to explain what had happened. Hour by hour, day by day, he sat there, downloading the complex data and models, spreading them across Dr. Wang’s desk and struggling to understand them. Slowly the equations came into focus, and Emmett began to see how the models evolved. Still, he remained a spectator. He longed to play in the big leagues but could see nothing original to add. His frustration only grew as other scientists proposed new models, richer, more detailed, or unique in structure, models just out of the reach of his comprehension.

Creativity came only when he stopped struggling toward it.

Emmett reconstructed the latest variation of what was being called the Gomez model using the equations provided on the PresNet. He was looking for some variation that hadn’t occurred to others, working diligently until he realized he had extended the model too far, projecting it into the space/time future. He was about to quit when he noticed something about his solutions. The time displacement varied with the distance from the mass. Near the mass of the earth the time distortion was clearly affected in a proportional way, but, at least mathematically, the temporal displacement decreased with distance from the earth.

It was at that point Emmett had his insight. He knew the effect was hypothesized to weaken with distance from the source, but he wondered what a significant mass besides the earth would do to the effect? Specifically, what effect would the moon have on the space/time disruption?

Although only a sixth of the earth, he calculated that the moon was of sufficient mass to influence the time distortions. What he hadn’t anticipated was the inversion of the effect. He knew his model was speculative, and none of the respected names was theorizing in this direction. So he hesitated at sharing them on PresNet.

He hadn’t originated the theory, or the model he had used. He merely extended it. He wasn’t sure it was a contribution sufficient enough to put on the PresNet with his name on it. Besides, the problem was here on earth, now; what happened to the moon paled in comparison.

In the end, the insignificance of his speculation overcame his fears of charges of plagiarism. He believed those on the network would pay scant attention to his model, so he sent it. Emmett was soon shocked to find that not only someone had noticed it, but someone at the top.

46. Operation Mend

It happened as we were boarding the coach. Benjamin went to check the horses and never came back. The coachman says he never saw my husband, and we have not seen him since. Ifs as if God lifted him off the face of the earth.

—
Lucy Bathurst, November 29, 1809

Washington, D.C.

PostQuilt: Tuesday, 5:00
P.M.
EST

N
ick had to admit that Gogh had a better grasp than he did of the mathematics that physics required, Gogh had been exchanging ideas with a physicist at the Fermi particle accelerator complex in Illinois over the PresNet—but the physicist, Dr. Gomez, had almost immediately rejected Nick’s model and substituted one of her own, which involved complex equations. He could only follow the math to a point, but to Nick it seemed both to confirm and disconfirm his theory.

He considered another factor: Maria Gomez had somewhat of a reputation in physics. She wasn’t known for her contributions to the field as much as for her ability to show the weaknesses in the contributions of others.

Nick admitted to himself that the Oregon model, as it was now being called, was inadequate. It had good predictive validity but it lacked proper theoretical underpinnings. Like Zorastrus, Kenny Randall and his friends had observed peculiar phenomena, detected a pattern, and used the pattern to predict a future event. He would receive well-deserved recognition for his accomplishment. But also like Zorastrus, Kenny, and whoever the others were, had not really understood what caused the effect. Kenny had correctly traced it to the nuclear detonations, but that was not the same as explaining it. Nick had been influenced by Kenny’s ripples-in-a-pond idea, attracted to its predictive power and its theoretical simplicity. Gomez, however, had shredded the idea mathematically and substituted her own.

The Oregon model assumed the time displacement occurred sequentially and was a function of time and distance from the source. It was an assumption rooted in the human experience of linear time. The Gomez model assumed that all time displacement events occurred simultaneously, in all the affected times and locations.

Because four-dimensional thought did not come easily to Nick, he struggled with Gomez’s idea. However, when Gomez also hypothesized the existence of transient superdense matter as the root of the phenomena, Nick felt some satisfaction in having his contribution to the Oregon model supported. It was the coexistence of these dense strings of matter that created the time/space disruption, the black ripples. Apparently Gogh was hypothesizing that the effects radiate out from the source much like a field around a magnet, except, in this case, the field radiates four dimensionally. The fields are created at the moment of detonation, but Nick, and the rest of the people on the planet who must experience time sequentially, have to live through the effect. The major time displacement they had just experienced had been there since the explosions in the sixties, waiting for the human inhabitants to live through the event.

As the exchanges between Gomez and Gogh continued, Nick became uneasy. Gomez continued to talk about the original detonations and the time displacement as concurrent events. Gomez was supplying equations to support her theory but cautioning Gogh that the theory was little more than speculation at this point. Gogh, however, ignored the cautions and pushed Gomez to speculate further. Nick did not like the direction of Gogh’s pushes, but knew that intruding would only make Gogh more protective of his convictions.

Other physicists tried to break in on the discussion, but Gogh only responded to those who seemed supportive of the model. Nick corresponded with some of the others but lacked the expertise to follow the arguments.

He was about to turn off the network when he noticed a new flag. The name E. Puglisi was unfamiliar to him, but what caught his attention was the description of his model variation: “Projects temporal disruption to near space, and hypothesizes a temporal inversion.” Nick called up the file and was pleased to see the sophisticated mathematics were represented with a model. Nick skipped right to it and was impressed with the graphics. The model showed a ball labeled as the earth surrounded by an ovoid made up of a tangled web of lines, labeled with a mathematical equation Nick recognized as the time waves. After another page of graphics Nick scrolled on. This following graphic showed a slice of the previous page, with the earth apparently in a cone. On top of that cone sat another cone with a smaller sphere sitting in it. The two cones were point to point. The second sphere was labeled the moon. Nick stared at the model for a minute and then scrolled back to the equations. It couldn’t be right, could it? The model projected the time disruption into the space around earth; that was the first cone. Then Puglisi’s model showed another cone indicating a reversal of the time flow, and the moon was in the second cone. If this Puglisi was right, any time disruption on the moon would be in the opposite direction of that on the earth. On the moon the future came to the past, not the past to the future. Nick checked his list of PresNet advisors, but there was no Puglisi. He checked the access code of Puglisi’s computer, and it showed it was coming from the computer of Dr. Connie Wang, of the University of Hawaii. Whoever Puglisi was, he was not authorized to use the system. Nick realized he was beginning to judge the worth of Puglisi’s model on the unknown person’s credentials, yet Kenny Randall’s own lack of credentials had kept his warnings from being heeded in the first place. Nick vowed not to repeat that mistake. Instead, he typed in a message to Puglisi and sent it.

Elizabeth appeared in Nick’s office again, just before he was about to leave for the Security Council meeting. She didn’t try to look casual this time but came right to the point.

“The President’s not himself.” ,

“In what way?”

“When he makes a decision, he normally listens to all points of view, and even solicits dissenting opinion. Ever since I’ve known him, he has insisted on having all alternatives before him before he makes a decision. But he isn’t listening now—”

“To you?” Nick was sure that part of Elizabeth’s concern involved her personal loss of influence with the President.

Elizabeth looked stung by Nick’s suggestion but didn’t deny it.

“Not to me, not to any of his advisors. Even Samuel Cannon, who’s been a friend for years, can’t get through to him. He only listens to one person, Dr. Gogh.”

Nick’s stomach knotted at the mention of Gogh’s name, remembering the messages exchanged on the PresNet system-He didn’t like the direction of Gogh’s reasoning—even less so now that the man had direct access to the President.

“The President respects you, Nick. He and the others were impressed by the way you figured out what happened.”

Nick swallowed back a protest. A college kid from Oregon and a mysterious group of others had seen what scientists with multiple degrees and decades of grant-supported research had overlooked. Nick had no intention of taking credit for the discovery.

“I know what Gogh has in mind, Elizabeth, and I’m going to argue against it,”

“You should know that Sandy McIntyre is in Atlanta—was in Atlanta. The Secret Service can’t contact or locate her. She apparently was in the part of the city that is gone. The President isn’t thinking clearly, Nick. He only wants to get her back, nothing else matters.”

Now Nick understood: The President’s rapport with his wife was legendary, and a big part of his success in politics was due to his wife. Sandy McIntyre was witty, attractive in a motherly way, and the warmest person Nick had ever met. So wide was her appeal there had been half-serious talk of putting
her
on the ticket.

Nick realized he felt more of a loss for Sandy McIntyre than for the millions lost across the country. He understood why: partly because for the first time he had thought about the loss of a particular individual. But mostly he grieved at losing the first lady’s personal magnetism. If Nick mourned, the President must be devastated.

The agenda had undergone radical change. At its top was a plan of action from Dr. Arnold Gogh. As Gogh began, Elizabeth leaned forward to whisper to the President, but uncharacteristically he dismissed her with a sharp wave of his hand.

“As the President directed we have been working on a solution based on the time displacement theory,” Gogh stated.