25
Two ABB 977’s landed at Gatwick within ten minutes of each other, one in Emirates livery having carried Min-seo Lee from New Delhi, the other sporting BA colours having carried Rafael Acosta from Rio. Both passengers took a ride on the Reading. And so it was that the two scientists found themselves together again, just a week after parting, and with three hours to prepare notes before their next conference. They observed all the appropriate formalities, of course, but they were soon discussing their childhoods and school years rather than antenna theory and manufacturing techniques. Both had been bored, mediocre students in their early years, their brilliance being recognized only when they had begun to study geometry and calculus. Rafael had liked to build things. Min-seo had liked to take things apart. Both had appreciated anime, not just the most famous such as Miyazaki, who had been standard fare of their bedtime videos, or Makoto Shinkai and his blockbusters, but more exploratory and scattered works like those that had come out of Masaali Yuasa’s Science Suru Studio. They had both been intrigued by the description of the future in Mobile Army Riot Police and happy that future, a time in which they now lived, had not happened.
Their conversation wandered to how unlike their lives had been so far to anything that anyone had predicted when they were in school. Although they were barely into their thirties, they had witnessed changes greater than any previous generation, and their own work was contributing to the changes. When Acosta had first begun to be interested in manufacturing, factories were still huge buildings often covering acres under one roof. Now nearly anyone could manufacture anything in one’s garage if the garage were big enough to hold what was being manufactured. When Lee had started work at Kenstel, the big news in antennae really were big antennae. Very large arrays. It had been thought that quantum computers would allow telescopes as large as planets. Now it seemed that one of the most sophisticated antenna yet had indeed been built in a garage in Pilton.
26
Yanto Owens did not share his wife’s tendency to worry. He would say, if pressed, that neither did he share his wife’s tendency to meddle. He thought Nora’s trips to Pilton with Marcus Rutschman were as much about match-making as anything. There were many reasons Kenneth might have missed calling her one Sunday, and he could have simply have turned off all of his connections to the outside world. Maybe he was just on a hike in Snowdonia, or off on some country lane exploring the myths of sleeping heroes with which his grandmother had filled his head. He certainly did not accept her claim that he had gone off on some sort of time-travel. At any rate, he declined the invitation to join her as she went to meet Marcus at Paddington for the train west. He preferred to tinkering in his shop to vacations at Glastonbury, with all its New Age Arthurians.
And so it was that Nora and Marcus met at one of the Paddington Starbucks as they waited to board the Great Western. Marcus was glad for a bit of extra brekkers. He had left Sheffield at the ungodly hour of 5:00 am. He had driven down before, and met Nora at Castle Cary. But his car was a very antique Mazda Miata, not allowed in London with its antique gasoline engine, and since there would be four of them on this trip, he had decided to take the train and rent a car in Somerset. He was grateful at least that there was now a direct East Midland through schedule. For years there had been a long wait in Derby. One of the disadvantages of having been among the first countries to have rail travel was that Britain had a lot of dowager routes and stations that made travel a bit quaint and slow.
Nora was anxious to hear if he had made any progress in understanding just how the bits of gold and quartz he had printed on the roof of Kenneth’s Hyundai might work. Marcus explained that the idea was that they would resonate with a very wide range of wavelengths, and that the analyzing software Kenneth had installed in the car would allow him to determine if any met the criteria he expected for time waves. A big problem being that no one really knew if there were time waves. A bigger problem being that if there were time waves, it was very uncertain that anyone could ‘surf’ them to travel in time. The biggest problem being that all of the evidence suggested that Kenneth might have solved the first two problems and now was off somewhere in time. The so far unspoken problem was whether there were two-way tickets for time travel. They had round-trip tickets to Castle Cary. Kenneth may have found a ticket ride, but Marcus had no way to tell what might be the destination.
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