She was spending the day in the 'dimple observatory' as usual when I brought her sandwiches one late autumn afternoon. We had the park to ourselves again for a change, for what little it was worth. The leaves of the maple around her were brilliant with shades of orange and red and yellow, but Kelly only had eyes for that damn dimple.
'Look at the way it's steaming,' she said, hardly glancing at me as she took a peanut butter and jelly. 'Things are getting even warmer down there.'
'Hm.' I stared across the water, at the steam rising above the lake. It wasn't that hot, but there was enough temperature differential with the air to build miniature fog banks that rolled down inside the dimple and occasionally crept out. The first snow had not yet fallen, but the days were near freezing now. 'You expecting anything?'
'Entropic progression is speeding up,' she said instead of answering my question. 'Coming up on the sixth anniversary of Nick's return.'
Perhaps it was an answer.
By the time the snow started melting again in late March, the dimple was so wide and shallow it spilled onto the shores of Emerald Lake and it was developing a noticeable bulge in the middle. The water was quite warm.
The research teams had mostly disappeared over the winter. Alone again, Kelly and I had settled into a routine a lot like an old marriage -subdued acrimony, half-secrets, and mutual celibacy-so I was surprised when she came looking for me in my room in the lodge one day 7 with that huge smile I hadn't seen in a year.
I fell in love all over again.
'Bruce, can you help me with something?'
I tossed aside the tablet computer with the report I was writing. 'Sure.'
She led me down to the tree fort. In front of the trunk stood a big plastic shipping crate with rusted catches. I had never seen it before, although I recognized the chain saw and the plastic gas can next to it. There was fresh dirt clinging to the crate.
'What's this?'
'Something I buried a long time ago,' Kelly said. 'When I first got here.'
Almost six years in the middle of nowhere together, and she starts pulling crates out of the ground? Entropic progression, my ass.
She was undoing the latches of the crate. 'I need to get this up to the observatory. Do you think we can construct some kind of pulley system?'
'Okay. But what is it?'
'See for yourself,' she said, throwing open the top. As I watched, she drew out a nice Celestron G-8 Schmidt- Cassegrain telescope.
'What are we waiting for?' It was cold as hell in the tree fort in the middle of the night, and Emerald Lake sounded like it was bubbling in the dark.
'April 8, 2:30 a.m.' Kelly trained the flashlight on her watch. 'Which is in about twenty minutes.'
I stared up at the stars. 'He told you something in that phone call, didn't he?'
Her nod was little more than a shifting shadow. 'There was more of a mission profile than we admitted.'
I didn't miss the we. 'You were part of it all along.'
Kelly turned away from the Celestron, trained on Ophiuchus, low in the southern sky this time of year. 'We had contingency plans.'
Mission or no mission, she was finally showing me the core of her, the part she had kept hidden all these years. 'So tell me.'
She sighed, one hand trailing down the barrel of the telescope. 'Obviously, we couldn't test his drive in advance. Nick was pretty sure he'd get a simultaneous translation to Barnard's Star, but he couldn't predict when he'd come out. One analysis said he'd just show up, the other that he had to wait out a lightspeed lag in a state of reduced entropy. Nothing's for free in nature, right? When he didn't come back right away, I knew he was waiting out the lag.'
Assuming he hadn't just croaked out there in the depths of space in the violent spray of energy with which his homebuilt starship had departed. I shook my head. 'How did he make the phone call from Barnard's Star?'
She laughed, her real laugh. And then I understood -the thing out there in the lake, the dimple, the mascon- that wasn't just a symbol of a man, someone I could compete with. No, that was her dream, the dream she shared with Nick Maclnnes.
'The same paired-quantum effects that allow the drive to function can be used to open an electromagnetic channel,' she lectured me. 'We tested that here on earth. Once he got to Barnard's, Nick used a satellite phone with a virtual antenna that could hit the orbital network he'd built years earlier in our telecomm days. It totally blows Einsteinian simultaneity.'
It dawned on me how ridiculous it was that a man went to the stars and called home on a cell phone. 'You can say that again.'
'It's how I knew we got the math right.' In the dark, a ghost of a smile. 'He didn't blow up when he got there. He called, promised to come home.' Kelly leaned over, handing me what appeared to be a fat manila envelope. 'Here.'
'What is it?'
'Schematics, mission profile, the data about the cost-effective drive none of you believed in. Just in case things don't work out.'
Things don't work out? What things? Her very slow entropic progression, presumably. I squeezed the envelope, checking the thickness of the paper, then slipped it inside my shirt. 'Why me? Why now? I'm the enemy.'
She put her face back against the eyepiece of the telescope. 'Yeah, you are the enemy. You and all your government kind. But I also know you're an honorable guy. I've been hanging out here all these years to keep someone like you from messing things up. But you turned out okay, Bruce.'
I swallowed. That was more than she had ever given me before.
She went on. 'You're also a survivor. If it turns out we're wrong about something important, you'll get the data to the Canadian people for us.'
I had questions, dozens, hundreds of questions about the documents in the envelope, but the warm, rotten reek from the lake bothered me too much to ask them. The Canadian Rockies in April are not supposed to smell like a Louisiana summer. After years of just sitting around, it was all coming together, too fast.
'Ophiuchus. You're looking for Barnard's Star. It's about six light years, right?'
'Five point nine seven,' she said without moving her head. She had her telescope where she wanted it and was staring intently. 'Five years and three hundred and fifty-five days. Plus a few hours.'
Emerald Lake was definitely bubbling now, like a pot on to boil. 'Which is now, right?'
'Five minutes, give or take a slight margin of error.'
'And you expect…'
Her smile gleamed at me briefly in the darkness before she turned her face back to the eyepiece. 'A sign set in the heavens.'
I suddenly remembered the bomb-pumped lasers. Below us, Emerald Lake was in full boil. Literally. The reeking steam was the mud bottom being cooked.
'Christ,' I whispered. 'You're watching for the laser light. He set off the Russian nukes, then hit his drive and came home.'
'Got it. You Americans aren't all dumb after all. He'll be home a few seconds after we see the laser light.'
I finally understood the slowly growing heat rise in the lake -it was energy leakage from whatever that mascon really was, some very exotic bloc of matter, a giant quark, something. Nick had been back for the last six years, wrapped in an indeterminate envelope of arrested entropy, sitting out reality in his lightspeed lag. Traveling through space and time, waiting for the equations to balance out and spit him out.
Kelly's husband was down in the bottom of the lake-literally waiting for his time to come.
The lake bottom. 'He came out in hard vacuum, somewhere near Barnard's Star, right?'
'Yeah… cometary orbit…' She wasn't really listening.
'Why not come back to vacuum here?'
'Reentry,' she said absently. 'Added an entire layer of complexity and design requirements. Throw weight for the launch, all kinds of issues. We figured on translating straight home.'
