Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [67]
Yet so accustomed was she to having him underfoot that his newly recurrent absences had not yet registered as fact. She had not thought to warn him. Consequently, he was late for a dinner that he had not known would be waiting.
Subtlety was lost on Tom, but subtlety was not in it. The food had gone cold and, worse, had been warmed in the microwave. So despite the reheating, there was a chill in the room.
“Nice of you to come,” Sharon said, placing the serving dishes emphatically on their trivets. She had often used that same phrase in more intimate moments, but Tom knew that this was not one of them. The complaining trivets had made that clear.
Tom was sorry. He was always sorry. Sharon suspected that contrition was a strategy he had consciously adopted, and this fed her irritation. There was something patronizing about being continually apologized to.
“Some old manorial records on loan from Harvard,” he said. “Originals. We had to finish them up today and ship them back. You know how easy it is to forget the time when you’re engrossed in something.”
She took two salad plates from the refrigerator and put them on the table, though more gently than the serving dishes. She did, in fact, know how easy it was. “‘We’,” was all she said.
“The librarian and me. I told you she’s helping out with the research.”
Sharon said nothing.
“Besides,” he added, “it was you who talked me into trolling original manuscripts.”
“I know that. I didn’t think it would be every day.”
“Every couple of days.” He was deploying reason and fact, to no avail. Quantity was not the issue. “Say, I told you about Eifelheim, didn’t I? I mean, why I couldn’t find any data on it?”
“This makes the thousand and first time.”
“Oh. I guess. I do repeat myself. It seems so obvious, now. Oh, well. Lúchshye pózdno chem nikogdá.”
“Why can’t you just say ‘Better late than never’?”
He looked baffled and Sharon let it pass. He really didn’t know when he was doing it. She hesitated a moment after they had seated themselves. She had intended the dinner to be a celebration and was determined that it would be so. “I’ve cracked the geometry of Janatpour space,” she said. She had imagined crying it out, proclaiming it from the rooftops. She had not imagined a surly comment, dropped into an awkward silence.
Tom may have saved his life with what he did next. He lifted his wineglass and saluted her, crying, “Sauwohl!” And his delight was so obviously heartfelt that Sharon remembered that she had in fact been in love with him for many years. They touched glasses and drank the toast.
“Tell me about it,” Tom said. He felt aggrieved over the surprise dinner. He hated guessing wrong questions never asked. Yet he was genuinely pleased at her success and his request was not entirely meant to divert the conversation from his own tardiness.
“Well, it all suddenly clicked,” Sharon began slowly, almost grudgingly, but gathered enthusiasm as she went. “The polyverse and the universe. The inside of the balloon. And light speed. That’s why I’m so grateful to you, even if your help was unwitting.”
Tom was two or three phrases behind. “Ah … The ‘inside of the balloon’?”
She didn’t hear him. “Do you know how it feels when two unrelated bits of information come together? When suddenly a lot of different things make sense? It’s … It’s …”
“Beatific?”
“Yes. Beatific. That business about light speed getting lower? Well, I checked it out and you were right.”
Tom set his glass down on the table and stared at her. “I wasn’t serious. I was just blowing off steam.”
“I know; but sometimes steam performs work. Gheury de Bray saw a trend in 1931, and Sten von Friesen mentioned it in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1937. A few years later, a statistician named Shewhart showed that test results from 1874 through 1932 were statistically incompatible with a constant. Halliday and Resnick found that still true in 1974.”
“I assumed it was measurement imprecision.”
“So did I, at first. Look at the spread in the Michelson-Morley data! But precision is random,