Jill knew what Nate was going to say, and her defenses went up at once, like a castle pulling up the gate at the first sign of attackers. She gave him a cool and level whatever gaze and walked away. She began taking the chart off the white board.

He was going to tell her he couldn’t work with her anymore. Between the risks she knew she’d taken in their research—exposing both of them to the altered one-minus-one—and now the evidence, right in front of his eyes, that Chalmers and Grover were against her, what else could she expect? The kid wasn’t stupid. He had his own future to worry about.

Nate went over to his backpack and pulled out a newspaper. She glanced at him and did not see what she expected to see in his eyes: guilt. Instead, his eyes had a lot of deep questions in them. She noticed that they were puffy and those bruised circles were back.

“You look sick,” she said stiffly.

“I feel like shit, especially after reading this.”

He held out the newspaper. When she didn’t cross to take it, he sighed and came to her, held it out.

“What is it?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m concerned about continuing with the negative one pulse experiment. You’re moving it up to seventy-five percent—that scares me.”

Because of what she’d expected to hear from him and because she really did care about whether he left her, she was uncharacteristically receptive to his body language. She saw that he didn’t like what he just said, that he felt cowardly about it, about saying, “That scares me.” But he had enough conviction to say it anyway, and that made her recall that he’d been expressing doubt for some time now and she’d completely filtered it out.

Her fingers tripped over her collarbone. “Nate, if you want to take a break, focus on your class work…”

“It’s been raining for three solid weeks.”

“It’s October. In Seattle.”

“Usually some nice weather in October.”

“What are you trying to say?” She looked down at the newspaper, more confused than agitated.

He sighed. “In the past three weeks I’ve broken up with my girlfriend, gotten two parking tickets, narrowly escaped a semi making a hubcap out of me and my bike, had an altercation in a video store, and a friend of mine at the restaurant nearly cut a finger off slicing vegetables. The guy’s a professional chef. Now there’s this stuff with Chalmers and Grover.”

Despite wanting to understand, a deep stain of irritation blossomed inside Jill. She didn’t have time for this nonsense, with the stupid report she had to write and everyone breathing down her back. On the other hand, he’d broken up with his girlfriend.

“Nate…” she began slowly. “I’m sorry you’ve been having problems, but if you think—”

He tapped an article on the front page. She scanned it briefly. Four Udub students were killed the night before when a pickup truck plowed over the rail on the nearby 520 bridge and plunged into Lake Washington.

Jill grabbed the paper, looking for names. The University of Washington was a huge campus, and she didn’t recognize any of the victims. Drinking was thought to be involved. “That’s terrible.”

Nate was staring at her.

“What? You can’t seriously think this has anything to do with the negative one pulse.”

Nate looked down at his black leather boots, hands on his hips. His face was determined. “I think we should stop.”

Jill tossed the paper down and strode across the room, surged into motion by a wave of anger. Everyone was against her! The gate on the castle went back up.

“That is totally unfair! You’re creating phantoms, Nate. I expect more from you. I expect science.” She stalked back to the grid on the white board and jabbed a finger at it. “We’re only at, what, thirty percent differential between our lab group and our control group on the negative one pulse? Mice, bananas, and virus, all right next to the wave transmitter? Think about it! Even if the negative one pulse does have a detrimental effect, how could it have only a thirty percent impact here, on small objects with few cells, while across campus at the 520 bridge… God, that doesn’t even make sense!”

She was breathing hard, felt a stress headache pounding. She told herself to calm down. There was no reason that this couldn’t be a rational, scientific discussion, if Nate would only get his head out of his ass.

Nate raked a hand through his blond-tipped hair. “Look. I know I’m not thinking straight. That’s part of the problem. But just listen for a second, okay? How is it that these pulses affect our fruit and mice and virus? Have you really thought about that?”

“Of course.” Jill was too worked up to keep still. She marched back and forth in front of the grid like an ant on guard duty. “Our hypothesis is that the full one and full negative one pulses impact the one-minus-one wave, which is the underlying energy pattern of space-time. In turn, matter is affected.”

“How?”

“Well, the particles of the banana, for instance…”

“Go on.”

She had thought about this, a lot, though it was all just theory for now. “Well, the one pulse merges with the one-minus-one the way any two waves merge and create an intelligence pattern. It doesn’t have any effect on the ‘crests’ of the one-minus-one since they’re already at peak ‘one’ value. But it does affect the ‘troughs,’ the negative one side of the wave. The net result is fewer or gentler troughs. The particles of the banana, which have their own energy waves, intersect with the altered one-minus-one and end up having fewer or gentler troughs also.”

Nate nodded, his eyes shining. “Right. And we’ve seen that when there are fewer troughs things thrive, burgeon forth, feel good, hump like bunnies.”

Jill smirked but nodded, granting her assent.

“And now it seems we’ve proven the flip side of the coin. The negative one pulse affects the one side of the one-minus-one wave. In other words, it lowers the crests, right? And it appears that when there are fewer crests things slow down, even die, like the virus.”

“We’re a long way from proving that.”

Nate made a face. “I’m not worried about the damned fruit, Jill. I’m not even worried about myself. Though you’re really the worse for wear. You do know that, don’t you?”

She stopped pacing to glare at him. “I’m fine!”

“You’re very irritable.”

“Uh! How would you feel with Chalmers and Grover on your case! Besides which, there’s no proof that the one-minus-one affects a person’s moods or chemistry or whatever.”

Nate challenged her with a raised eyebrow. “Why not? Our brains are matter. So are the chemicals in them. Of course the one-minus-one affects our moods—we’ve both felt it. Just look at the mice.”

“I can’t,” she pointed out dryly.

Nate went into the hall and came back with the two cages. She locked the door again behind him. He put the cages on the table. One white male sniffed halfheartedly at the treadmill. The others lay and watched him lethargically.

Jill growled a hmmm. She needed so badly to justify what she was doing that she argued almost without thought. Only later, lying in bed, would she contemplate the possibility that Nate might have a glimmer of a point. Now she went up to him and put a tired hand on his sleeve as if touching him were a kind of consolation prize for what she was about to say.

“Nate, you know we’ve got a very modest radio transmitter. We’ve been seeing results here, yes, but nothing catastrophic or particularly dangerous-looking. You know this has nothing to do with that car accident or any other of those other things you mentioned. That’s just dumb.”

“I’m not saying our experiments pushed that truck off the bridge.” Nate closed his eyes, concentrating. “But I also think we’re dreaming if we expect to keep the results of our experiment localized to this room. The insulation keeps in the pulse we’re generating, but that’s about it. We’re manipulating the fabric of space-time, Jill. Besides, that’s not how the energy pool theory works.” There was a tremor in his lips that made her feel emotionally shaky herself. Her hand fell back to her side.