Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [212]
She snorted. “Sagan was an optimist. The ability to cross space doesn’t make anyone more ethical, any more than the ability to cross the ocean made the Europeans more ethical than the Indians.” That page was Tom’s, and that page. This page was hers. She put each into its proper folder. “I remember what he said would be convincing proof of alien visitors. It was in that book he wrote with Schlovski.”
“What was that?”
“A set of plans for some sort of high-tech hardware.” And that page was Tom’s. And that was hers … No, wait. That wasn’t a circuit diagram; it was Tom’s illuminated capital. She froze suddenly, her throat tight. “Oh, my God!”
“What?” He jumped away from the wall. “What is it?”
“I don’t believe it!” She grabbed the copy of the treatise and waved the illuminated capital in his face. “Look at it! Vines and leaves and trinities? That is a circuit diagram! Those are Josephson junctions! Tom … Hernando and I built this circuit only last week.”
SHARON LEAFED through the papers until she found the diagram she wanted. She laid it side-by-side with the manuscript and studied the two together. Were they the same? The illumination was all twisted, like a real vine; not laid out geometrically. She tried to match the leaves and knots and grape clusters with the arcane nucleonic symbols. Only the connections in the drawing mattered, she told herself; not the length or shape of the vine-wires. Almost, it seemed to her. The two almost matched. Not quite, though.
“Garbled in transmission,” she told Tom. Garbled, or was she the one now seeing things that she wanted to see? “That linkage is impossible—” She pointed to the capital. “And that is a shorted circuit. And those two components should be reversed. Or should they …? Wait a minute.” She traced the vines carefully with her fingers. “Not all the differences are garbled. This is a generator, not a detector. See there? And there? It’s part of a generating circuit. It has to be. Part of their stargate. Damn!”
She had reached the bottom of the page.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Part is right. It’s not complete.” She frowned and left the kitchen, deep in thought. She reached her pillow sofa and dropped into it. She closed her eyes and began swinging through the jungle-gym lattice of her hypospace like an ur-hominid not yet out of the trees.
“This may sound weird,” Tom announced, “but I feel oddly disappointed.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He was studying the medieval circuit diagram. “Disappointed?” She couldn’t believe he had said that. Disappointed? When they had just been given the stars?
“I mean, that they didn’t leave a complete set of plans. Then you’d know what to do.”
She stared back at him where he stood framed in the kitchen doorway. “But I already know the only thing that matters.”
“What’s that?”
“I know it can be done.”
10
NOW
Anton
I MET Tom and Judy at the Hauptbahnhof in Bismarckallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurtam-Main. We took the Bertholdstrasse streetcar to Kaiser Josef Strasse and walked from there to the hotel on Gerberau. I pointed out the sights like the worst of tourist guides. Tom had seen it all before, of course; but it was new to Judy.
When we walked through the Schwaben Tor, she commented on its storybook appearance. This gate had been standing a century in the walls of the Old Town when Pastor Dietrich had befriended certain strangers. Nearby stood the Red Bear, which had been an inn already in that same era. The wind from the Höllental was cool, a sign that summer’s end was near.
After settling them in their rooms, I took them to lunch at the Römischer Kaiser. We gave our full attention to the meal. To do otherwise in the Schwarzwald would have been a cardinal sin. No one on earth cooks like the Schwarzwälder; even our department store mannequins are portly. Not until the waiter had delivered our streussel did I allow the conversation to turn to business.
Tom wanted to leave for the Forest immediately. I could see the eagerness in him, but I told him