most of my life has been lived in my imagination. For some reason my imagination doesn't like many of the theories of physics."
"Any of the important theories?" Milly asked.
"Well, sure," Sam replied. "But even if I wanted to just make a fool of myself, I think I still lack enough data and the math expertise to do a good job of that."
/
Milly was a little perturbed at Sam's show of modesty. She wanted to believe he was more than he appeared to be. She was perplexed at herself that she had such high hopes for Sam, as though she needed him to be the one to rescue her from this nightmare of crippled body and dimmed future. She took a deep breath and tried to calm her emotions. "I'm sorry," she said. "I feel like I'm pushing you to try to impress me. But I am impressed that you play the piano. I wish I was not so one-dimensional. I wanted to be a race car driver but I guess we can rule that out now."
Sam chuckled. "Thanks. That takes some of the pressure off me, like I needed to cut down the gods of physics to make you like me."
Milly laughed. It was the first time since before the accident that paralyzed her that she laughed purely in pleasure. She knew Sam liked her. She knew she had a chance for... what? Whatever! "So, your dad and my dad were both in the Korean War," she said. "We have something in common."
"Papa wasn't in the war long," Sam said. "I was born in Seattle in 1951. Neither of my parents has ever told me how they got to America but I have to believe they got here by way of hell. Where did you get that scar on your forehead? It looks new to me."
"Crashed my Mustang on the DC beltway." Milly tried not to say too much or say it the wrong way. She deserved to be crippled, and was lucky she wasn't dead. "I was in a coma for three days. I hope it knocked some sense into me. I'm still trying to find out if I kept all my math marbles."
"I wondered what you meant about trading a Mustang for a wheelchair. Was it a permanent...?"
"Afraid so." She bit her lip to keep from slipping over the edge into the self-pity pit. She blinked the threat of tears away and concentrated on reading the expressions of Samuel Lee. Did the wheelchair make too much difference to him? Would he give her a chance to prove she could be worth his attention and capable of... God, she was too serious!
"I've heard that you're a good teacher," Sam commented. "There are plenty of instructors around here but not many teachers. Of course, that might not be a compliment if you see the undergrads as the enemy, as do many of us postdocs."
"I'll take that as a compliment, Sam! Thank you! It could be that I was not so sympathetic toward my students before the accident."
"I had a friend in high school," Sam said. "George was hit by a car while riding his bike. He lost one of his legs and spent time in a wheelchair until he got a prosthetic. He became a better student after that, after he got through feeling sorry for himself. I like to think I helped him. It was a friendship that helped me. Gave me some perspective. Life isn't fair."
She let herself imagine that Sam was accepting of her disability. She dared to forge ahead and to assume they had a real relationship. "Another connection we have." Milly placed her hand on top of his, where it rested on his thigh. She felt him twitch but keep his hand under hers. "I didn't mean to..." she started to apologize, then saw the distracted look on his face. Even as he sat there thinking, Sam turned his hand over under hers, making her raise her hand, then he took her hand by letting his fingers move between hers, lacing their hands together. And still he thought, oblivious to their hands, hands that wanted to be together. She was content to sit beside Sam and enjoy this simple pleasure. She could study his face without him noticing. She liked what she saw, she liked it very much: a kind and thoughtful face, with a mind behind it that thought hard. "What is it, Sam?"
/
Sam opened his eyes, or maybe his eyes were already open, just not seeing anything. He saw he was holding Milly's hand. He was shocked and embarrassed and tried to turn loose, but she wouldn't relax her grip. "I'm sorry." He lifted their hands to indicate his indiscretion. She still wouldn't release her grip: a way of saying it was what she wanted.
"Tell me what you were thinking," she said. "You looked intense."
"Connections. You said we had connections. I think we are all connected, everyone and everything in the universe."
"Of course we are. By gravity."
"Nobody knows what gravity is, and you can't see it. How about light, starlight?"
"Light pushes," Milly said. "It doesn't pull us together."
"But it connects us," Sam said. "Quasars are staggeringly distant in the cosmos but we still see them, we see the information of their existence; therefore, we are connected to them, by the pathway of light. The pathway is the connection. That same pathway..." Sam paused to consider the ideas popping into his mind. Even though he was acutely aware of Milly and of holding her hand, he couldn't stop his brain from charging into a field of ideas that seemed familiar yet now fresh, as if seen from a different angle.
"Now what?" Milly inquired.
Sam shook his head. "Crazy stuff. I thought I had something there for a few moments but it can't be. It's too simple."
"What?"
"No, no, I'll embarrass myself," Sam said softly. "Engineers shouldn't tread where physicists lurk with sacred equations."
"So, you would rather watch TV?" Milly asked.
"What TV?" Sam queried, looking about the small apartment.
"Exactly. So, entertain me. Call it science fiction. I won't report you to the Physics Department."
"OK. This is a mechanical engineer speaking. Did you ever do the experiment in grade school where you sprinkled iron powder on a piece of paper with a bar magnet under it? You could very easily trace the shape of the magnetic lines of force from the way the iron conformed to them. The lines obviously came out one end of the magnet and went around and into the other end, north to south or south to north."
"So?" Milly prompted.
"I know," he said slowly, "that every young student thinks there is an actual physical magnetic line, too small to be seen, but surely a real line."
"But modern physics denies a material existence for magnetic lines of force," Milly said. "They may as well be nothing more than mathematical constructs."
"Yes. Which means we know what they do and we can describe what they do, but we really don't know what they are or how they do what they do. But I say they connect, at least with themselves, to form a kind of circuit. They're electromagnetic, as is light, so light must also have circuits. Electromagnetic energy forms circuits, which connect to the farthest phenomena we can see. That's my first great postulate. One more great postulate and I can join the pantheon of immortal physicists." Sam shook his head, smiling, his darker skin even blushing a bit.
/
Milly didn't quite see what he was pointing toward as the important implication of his postulate. They talked on into the night, with Sam maintaining his distance from serious physics theory while still trying to explain his ideas. Interspersed with the science "fiction" was an exchange of personal histories and verbal portraits of relatives and friends. While the words were expressed casually and freely, Milly sensed that the intent was serious from both of their perspectives. She also began to feel that Sam was at least her intellectual equal, albeit of a different type. Imagination was his specialty. Her own imagination was flowing in a direction she had never before allowed. Her brush with death and her paralysis were causing her to imagine an impossible romantic relationship with Samuel Lee. She almost wept with joy after Sam went home.
1-27 In the Emerald City
Instantaneous transference: darkness to blinding light. Fidelity's military augments measured the unmeasurable transfer interval and made her know it was a gate they had again passed through. She felt gravity change but forgot the telltale sensation when the blinding light no longer blinded her. What she saw could not be found on Earth - if it was real.
The others gasped, and so did she. Then Fidelity did note the slight decrease
in gravity, which was more evidence they were not on Earth. She tried to rein in her military augments long enough to decide if they had been sent to a habitat in near-Earth space. She instinctively disallowed that possibility, based on what she saw.
Fidelity's view had blinked from the false pale hues of augmented vision in an abandoned Asian city at night to a vast image of startling depth and detail. This caused a chemical and nervous-system reaction to provoke her visual tactical augment to try to affix alphanumerical and graphical tokens for every feature on which her eyes focused.
For Rafael and the others the light must have exploded out of the darkness, stunning them, until the scene forced its saturated hues upon the new pattern of reality and dared them to believe in it.
A band of light glowed from beneath and from above, framing the impossible view, but they ignored its relevance until the colors could make sense to overwhelmed eyes.
At first it seemed like some catastrophe had thrown all the pieces of earthly landscape and architecture upward into mad disarray - and the pieces were still hanging in the air. Bright green grass and trees, shining blue snakes of naked water, multicolored houses with yellow apron lawns, a spectrum of colors along a helix of piping passing through a great naked river, arcing and twisting ribbons of shining silver connecting things in the air, and all of this seeming to continue farther than they could see