Eric Flint - Time spike

"Oh." After a moment, she smiled up at him. It was a great big smile.

"Thank you for thinking of that, James. I knew I could count on you.

Sweetheart." He wondered if a throat lump could be surgically removed.

Probably not, as fast as it seemed to be growing. He'd just have to get used to it.

Chapter 34 Margo Glenn-Lewis sat at the large conference table in the center of the underground site's main chamber and silently berated herself for being an idiot. Worse still, a confused idiot. That she was an idiot, was now a given. It was the confusion that annoyed her this afternoon. She was fifty-two years old, for Pete's sake, a highly respected and well established physicist. So you'd think that if she found it damn near impossible to concentrate on the discussion in a critical meeting because she kept finding herself thinking about one of the men around the table, she'd at least know the reasonwhy. Did she really find Nicholas Brisebois that attractive? Answer: shestill didn't know. Well… That was nonsense. Twaddle produced by a confused and befuddled brain, such as had no business residing inside the skull of a teenage pom-pom girl, much less a woman who'd been able to make a successful career-no, even a quite distinguished career-in a notoriously male-dominated branch of science. Of courseshe found Nick attractive. Very attractive, in fact. If she didn't, she wouldn't be fidgeting like this in the first place. The problem was that in the course of the week he'd spent in the research facility in Minnesota, she'd gotten to know him well enough to understand that any relationship with Brisebois would not be a casual one. Assuming any relationship got started at all, of course. She still had no idea if he found her attractive. The man was very self-contained, in some ways. To start with, he was a devout Catholic. Not ostentatious about it, but he was. Margo was a devout atheist. True, not ostentatious about it, either. She'd never do something like sue a school board or a city because their Christmas pageantry included scenes from the Nativity. Who cared? If the dolts wanted to wallow in their tribal superstitions, let them. Any kid who wanted to figure out things for herself could do it easily enough, when she got a little older. It wasn't as if you had to pry lose anything from the government using the Freedom of Information Act to figure out that any creed which thought that a Being capable of creating an entire universe gave a rat's ass whether you ate fish with scales or lobsters was no more sophisticated than hunters and gatherers somewhere who refused to eat rats because rats were their totem. That'd be a problem. On the other hand… She also knew Nick well enough by now to know that he was extremely good in the mind-my-own-business department. For that matter, so was she. If they had kids, the religious thing would become an issue-and she couldn't believe she was scatter-brained enough to even be thinking about stuff like this at a critical professional meeting-but that was a moot point. She'd never wanted kids, was too old now to have them anyway, and Nick already had plenty of his own.

Five, no less. Besides, he'd said once, in that slightly sardonic way of his that she found very attractive, that it would take a direct intervention by God with the divine finger pointing right at him to get him to go through child-rearing again. That brought up problem number two. "-what we've tentatively concluded," said Leo Dingley.

He turned away from the display on the far wall. "The time spike isn't simply stuttering and wobbling, as it keeps driving back in time, it's reverberating. That's what we've decided to call the effect, anyway, for lack of a better term. If you want the math, Malcolm can give it to you, but prepare to have your eyes glaze over. Me, I like to think of it in acoustical terms. The spike is emitting time bongs like a bell every time it stutters-and every time it does so, the time effect sends an echo ahead of it." "Excuse me, Leo," said Esther Hu. She was one of the paleontologists who'd come to the conference. She wasn't connected with the museum in Montana, though, as most of them were.

She had a faculty position with SUNY and worked on the side as the expert adviser for the man she was sitting next to at the table. That was Alexander Cohen, a New York financier who'd nurtured a lifelong interest in paleontology through a foundation he'd sent up that dispensed grants. "Yes, Esther?" "Is this stillhappening? You keep speaking in the present tense. What I mean is-" "I understand what you mean. And it's a good question, too." Leo looked at the display on the wall and puffed out his cheeks, then blew the air out and said: "The answer-yes, I know you're probably getting sick of it-is that we simply don't know." "Leo's fudging," said Malcolm O'Connell. "It's true that we don'tknow, but the math really only allows for one solution that I can see." He pointed to the display. "What we're facing here is the chronoletic version of the uncertainty principle that's been bedeviling particle physicists for over half a century. We can analyze the raw data that comes in across only one axis, so to speak. We can tell youwhen it is-where it stopped, so to speak-or we can tell you where it's reverberating, or we can tell you where it's stuttering, or where it's wobbling. But we can't put all four of them together without removing the first axis." Cohen had a trim beard much like the one Morgan-Ash favored. And, like Richard, he had a habit of stroking it. He was doing that now. "Yes, I can understand that. But what would it look like from the viewpoint of someone inside the phenomenon?" He nodded toward Tim. "Let's posit, for the moment, that I'm Officer Harshbarger's friend Joe Schuler. What would I be seeing?

Or have seen?" Leo looked uncertain. Margo leaned forward a bit and said: "Again, we're not positive. But the likelihood-the great likelihood-is that for anyone caught in the radius of the time spike's effects, everything would happen simultaneously. And, for all practical purposes, instantaneously." She gave O'Connell and Morgan-Ash a gleaming smile. "I will leave it to these two mathematicians-later, gentlemen, later-to debate the issue of whether the word 'instantaneous' has any real meaning. For a lowly physicist like myself, it means way faster than I can flag down a cab in Manhattan, and if that were an Olympic event, I'd have a real shot at the gold medal." Nick Brisebois took advantage of the round of laughter to study Margo, rather than having to pretend he wasn't. And, as had now happened many times over the past week, his resolve to let the matter slide because it obviously wouldn't work flew south for the winter. And, as so often, it was the smile that did it. That quick gleaming smile with the crinkled and intelligent eyes above it that that made telling himself he could just walk away seem utterly ridiculous. As the conference returned to business, he chewed on his thoughts. He had to leave the day after tomorrow, since he'd almost used up the week he'd taken from his vacation time. So he'd better start nailing down whatever conclusions he could. Conclusion number one. He could live with her political attitudes, even if some of them set his teeth on edge a little. Like almost all military officers, active duty or retired, Nick was politically conservative. In his case, as with many if not all, that was not due to any attachment to any particular political party. He simply had a deep skepticism about the human race's ability to do more than muddle through, and was generally of the opinion that the old maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applied in politics just as much as it did anywhere else. On the other hand, he wasn't oblivious to the fact that whether something was broken or not was often in the eye of the beholder-and the beholder's viewpoint was heavily influenced by where they stood. From the standpoint of many people at the time, Jim Crow worked just fine.