Dryden stared at her, waiting for more. Between them, the play-by-play continued.
“Fastball, Almodovar gets a piece of it, pop-up foul left, still three and two.”
Claire touched the clock display on the Land Rover’s instrument panel. Ran her fingertip across the glowing numbers: 4:27.
“Give or take a minute,” she said, “I’m gonna say Almodovar hits that pop-up around two fifty-one this afternoon.”
Dryden understood and didn’t. The thumbtacks were still stuck to nothing. He shook his head again.
Claire countered by nodding.
“You’re listening to something that hasn’t happened yet,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dryden had stopped shaking his head. He was only staring now. At Claire, then at the black box, then at the tablet computer. From its speakers the announcer was still talking. Almodovar got a fourth ball and walked.
“Ten hours, twenty-four minutes,” Claire said. She rested her hand on the black box, the green light through the slats silhouetting her fingers. “It picks up radio signals ten hours and twenty-four minutes before they’re transmitted.”
Dryden stared and tried to see how it could be a joke. The trailer had been real. The man he’d killed there had been real. This part, though—no. It had to be some kind of joke, hard as it was to imagine Claire Dunham doing that. It was a hundred eighty degrees from her character.
“You’re reacting the same way I did,” Claire said, “when I first saw it. Anyone would.”
“What you’re talking about isn’t possible,” Dryden said.
“You said it yourself in the trailer: How could I have known? No one in the world, outside that metal cage, could have expected that 9-1-1 call.”
Dryden’s mind went back to the recorded news broadcast. He said, “That audio clip, the reporters talking about the girls being dead—”
“I recorded it last night at nine forty-seven,” Claire said, “when this machine received it.”
“And you’re saying that report will actually be on the radio at eight eleven this morning?”
Dark amusement crossed Claire’s face. “Not now it won’t be.”
Dryden looked away into the night. The red edge of the horizon was brighter than before, but the faint light smudge of Barstow was still visible to the south of it.
Static crept back in over the baseball game, washing it out to nothing. Dryden’s thoughts seemed to go with it. Out into the ether.
“I don’t know how it works,” Claire said. “No one does, exactly—not even the people who built it. The way I understand it, they stumbled onto this effect.”
“What people?”
“A company I started working for, just over a month ago. It’s called Bayliss Labs. They’re a spin-off from a big defense contractor, up in the Valley. They were separated off for security reasons—Bayliss works on really sensitive technology. Bleeding-edge stuff.”
Dryden realized most of her words were going right past him. He was stuck on what she’d already said. He was stuck on the machine.
Claire opened her mouth to go on, but Dryden shook his head. “It’s just not possible,” he said. “What you’re saying this thing can do … it’s not possible. This isn’t something you stumble onto.”
“It is. They did.”
Dryden could only shake his head again.
Claire started to say something, then stopped. She seemed to be marshaling what she wanted to tell him. Finally she looked up. “Do you remember a story in the news, a few years ago, about a kind of particle called a neutrino?”
“I’ve heard that word. I don’t remember any news about it.”
“There was a big dustup in the scientific community, all over the world. There was an experiment that seemed to suggest neutrinos can travel faster than light. Remember now?”
Dryden thought about it. He nodded. “Vaguely.”
“It wasn’t exactly front-page stuff, but it was kind of everywhere. It would have been a very big deal if later experiments proved it was true, but there was no slam dunk in either direction. A lot of people wrote it off. A lot of other people kept working on it. Bayliss had a few minor projects devoted to the concept, using novel materials to try interacting with neutrinos—that in itself was tricky; neutrinos are strange, even to physicists who are used to strange things, like quantum mechanics. Neutrinos barely interact with most other matter; they’re emitted by the sun, and the ones that hit the earth usually pass through it without striking so much as an atom. Think about that—they slip right through the planet without touching it. The projects at Bayliss were aimed at finding materials that would capture neutrinos like an antenna. They were using sheets of graphene layered with other materials I couldn’t name now if I tried. They started seeing results after about a year of working at it.”