to be working on the physics—turns a blind eye to the supposed application. Magic. There are Powers That Be who take the Magic premise seriously enough to buy Tristan a building and send him tanker trucks of liquid helium without any paperwork. Hard to reconcile this with common sense. Frank heedless.
Also, Mel is concerned about a woman who contacted her claiming she can do magic. T&M’s rendezvous with this woman has been delayed several times, and the woman is becoming verbally abusive. This does not stop them from intending to meet her, which will possibly happen tomorrow after the next ODEC go-round.
Diachronicle
DAY 294
In which we become even more decoherent
TWO DAYS LATER, WHEN THE liquid helium showed up in the unmarked stainless steel tanker truck, Tristan velcroed and zipped himself into a snowmobile suit, gave us the thumbs-up, and stepped up into the ODEC, where, just for safety’s sake, he pulled on an oxygen mask. Apparently liquid helium was adept at finding and seeping through the tiniest leaks, so the cavity might fill up with helium and asphyxiate him before he knew it was happening. Once again, Oda walked around the building going through his checklist, and took his place before the console. By now, our expectancy was tempered by experience.
Liquid helium, as I now knew, was fifty times as expensive as the liquid nitrogen we had been using, and a lot colder. Nitrogen became a liquid at 77 degrees above absolute zero (the point at which atoms would stop moving, if such a state could be reached), but to do the same trick with helium you had to chill it all the way down to a mere 4 degrees. By the standards of the normal human world, it was a distinction without a difference—both were very, very cold. But to scientists like Oda, there was a world of difference between 4 degrees and 77. The liquid helium jacketing the ODEC would have radically different properties from LN2—properties explainable in terms of Bose-Einstein statistics, an advanced concept in quantum mechanics that Tristan barely understood and I couldn’t make sense of at all. The gist of it seemed to be that the liquid helium would cloak the inner cavity of the ODEC inside a seamless jacket of matter, all of which was in the same quantum state. This was supposed to have some effect of isolating the cavity from the rest of the universe quantum-mechanically, and greatly intensifying its effects.
Cold as they were, the plumbing and the vessels were still boiling hot by liquid helium standards, and so after the LN2 had been pumped out we had to go through another cycle of “atmospheric exchange augmentation” out the “exterior vent ports” before the system settled down. The digital thermometers began to read dramatically lower temperatures.
Once the system had stabilized at 4 degrees above absolute zero—negative 269 degrees Celsius—Oda flipped the switch. This time he let the system run for only five seconds before turning it back off.
Tristan stumbled out of the ODEC, tugging convulsively at the oxygen mask. The balaclava came off with it. He was ashen-faced, and looked as if he might be sick. He stumbled dizzily and then collapsed to his knees barely beyond the threshold of the chamber.
“Tristan!” I cried, as Oda knelt down to help him, but Tristan pushed him away and looked around at us all, dazed and yet wild-eyed.
“Where am I?” he asked. “Is this a dream or are we really here?”
“We’re really here,” said Oda gently.
“Are we in Boston?” asked Tristan, and groaned. “God, what a terrible headache. Where’s Mom?”
I looked at Oda in alarm. “Give him a moment,” he said reassuringly.
“What just happened to him?” I demanded, not reassured.
“I think he’s just very disoriented.”
“Isn’t it five minutes ago?” said Tristan. “Don’t I have to go into the ODEC before we can have this conversation?”
“Somebody get him a glass of water,” said Oda to the room in general. And then gently: “Tristan, close your eyes for a few moments, you’ll be fine.”
Oda gestured me to step away, and I followed him, but my concern and attention remained on Tristan. He was now very still, glancing around at his surroundings with eyes only, as if trying to avoid vertigo. It seemed horribly wrong for Tristan Lyons to be so vulnerable.
“Is this what happened to the cat?” I demanded of Oda.
“Well, you can’t have a conversation with a cat. When I’d open the cavity, he would leap out in full Halloween mode. But I’d leave him, come back down an hour later, and he’d be fast asleep. When he woke up, you’d think nothing had happened. I repeated the experiment a few times, and the cat never seemed to remember what he was about to be subjected to. But then Rebecca saw and made me stop.”
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
MAY 18
Temperature about 64F, moist, no breeze. Barometer rising.
Flowers and vegetables fending for themselves due to ODEC activity.
To begin, this morning the new ODEC was “successful,” insofar as Tristan came out of it in the same state the cat once used to come out of the old ODEC. Melisande kept her head better than I did when I first saw the cat, but was clearly concerned. The following conversation, more or less:
FRANK: I predict Tristan will be fine shortly. But I don’t think we should allow anyone to go into the ODEC until we have figured out how to protect them from that effect.
MEL: What is the effect? Why is it happening?
FRANK: He is teetering on the edge of becoming non-local.
MEL: Non-what?
FRANK: His brain was suddenly not sure which precise reality it was operating in—and perhaps his body too. So much to discover still! (NB: sounding like an eager child. Sounding as if none of it happened thirty years ago.)
Five minutes pass
TRISTAN (fully recovered): Why didn’t you take notes of what I said when I first came out?
MEL: Trust me, you said absolutely nothing noteworthy.
TRISTAN : That just sounds like your usual lip. I need corroboration.
FRANK: We were all here. She’s right.
TRISTAN : You do it, Stokes, so I can see what happens when you come out.
MEL: I don’t think so. Seriously, it was as if you’d gotten plastered at a frat party.
TRISTAN : Sounds like fun. Give it a go.
FRANK: I really don’t think that you should push her— (interrupted by)
TRISTAN : She could use a little loosening up. Come on, Stokes, it’s a hazard of the job.
MEL: I fail to see how “becoming non-local” falls within the parameters of my contractual obligations as a translator of dead languages.
TRISTAN : It falls within the parameters of your wanting to know what it’s like.
MEL: Apparently it’s like being drunk. Been there, done that.
TRISTAN : Y’know, you could be stuck in your tiny little office right now, grading papers about Aramaic declensions. Get your butt in there. Somebody get her a snowsuit. With a balaclava. And an oxygen mask.
I wish that had been the end of the nonsense. It was barely the beginning.
Diachronicle
DAY 294 (CONTD.)
NINETY MINUTES LATER, DESPITE MY own best judgment, I was geared up and ready to begin the most ill-considered experiment of my life (to that point, I mean. Clearly I have engaged