“What would be the point of that?” Dryden asked. “What would they gain by capturing these things?”
“Who knows? Usually discoveries come first, and applications follow. People always think of some use for a new toy. I know they weren’t expecting this outcome, though.” She indicated the machine.
Dryden stared at the thing again. “But how could it do what you’re talking about? How could it pick up radio signals that don’t even exist yet?”
“I can only explain it the way I heard it, and all I heard were educated guesses.”
“Like what?”
“Did you ever read Stephen Hawking? A Brief History of Time?”
“I gave it a shot. That was probably twenty years ago. I don’t remember any of it now.”
“I’m probably going to mangle some of this,” Claire said, “but the main parts are about time itself. What time actually is. It’s a physical thing; it’s not just some human construct to measure hours and years. Time is something tangible, like gravity and light. And it’s not just like those things—it’s tied to those things. People like Einstein and Lorentz worked out the basics a hundred years ago. Things like time dilation—how the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you. That’s a nailed-down fact. No one disputes it.”
“Okay,” Dryden said.
“The guys at Bayliss came to believe neutrinos—some of them, at least—really do travel faster than light, and when they do, they actually move against the direction of time.”
Dryden stared at her. “You mean back in time.”
Claire nodded. “And it’s possible they can carry information with them. It’s possible they’re absorbing the energy of radio waves in the future, and releasing that same energy when this machine picks them up in the present. If they absorbed enough of it—a pattern of it, the kind of pattern that makes up a radio signal—then that pattern could show up when this machine absorbs the neutrinos. Those particles would just be acting like a relay. Like a booster.”
Dryden let the idea sink into him. His eyes dropped to the black box, the ghostly light from inside it seeming to ripple with the deep hum.
“I told you,” Claire said, “those are guesses. It’s the best they could come up with. Maybe it doesn’t work like that at all, but it does work. And once the people at Bayliss realized what they had, it scared the shit out of them.”
She was looking his way. Dryden raised his eyes and met her gaze, and when she spoke again, her exhaustion was palpable. “I need you to believe me.”
Dryden was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke, almost surprising himself.
“Alright. Jesus … alright.”
He saw relief rise in Claire’s expression.
“They hired your firm to handle their security?” Dryden asked. “When they got scared?”
Claire shook her head. “Not my firm. Me personally. They hired me to be their internal security chief. The executive in charge at Bayliss was a friend of mine, Dale Whitcomb. He and I met a few years ago, when I did home security for him—I saved his life, probably his family’s lives, too. He asked me to come on board at Bayliss last month because he trusted me, and because I was an outsider to the company. He wanted someone like that. Someone he could be sure didn’t have hidden loyalties to anyone else there.”
Dryden thought he saw where she was going. He waited for her to continue.
For a moment it looked like she wouldn’t be able to. Another wave of fatigue seemed to pass through her—not so much tiredness as simply emptiness. Then she blinked and took a breath and made herself continue the story.
“Dale said he was terrified from the moment they realized what this thing did. That very first afternoon, he and a few of the techs in the lab, listening to the first signals coming through, putting it all together. He said you could see the goosebumps on their arms. He said the moment that finally broke the spell for him was just a weather report. That night’s weather—ten and a half hours in the future, but not a prediction of it. Just a present-tense rundown. He said just like that, it finally hit him in full. The power of the thing, and what it meant, and everyone who would come out of the woodwork to claim it, if he and the others weren’t careful. He said he felt like he was in that Steinbeck book, The Pearl.”
After a moment, Claire went on.
Dale Whitcomb had seen the machine’s potential for good right away, she said. It was so obvious: ten hours’ notice about airline crashes, say, or any kind of disaster that came without warning. It would change the world.
Its potential for bad was every bit as clear. The wrong people could create all kinds of misery with a machine like this. What they could do with financial markets was easy to imagine, but that was probably just scratching the surface.