Luckily she did not explicitly request us to do so. Tristan explained that we were here to talk to the professor about an old project of his from his MIT days. She pursed her lips uncertainly. “It’s important,” said Tristan.
“Frank does not like to talk shop much in his retirement,” she said.
“We won’t take long, and he’ll be glad we came,” said Tristan.
She gave him a wary look. “He’s napping at present, why don’t you come back tomorrow.”
Tristan opened his mouth again, but I clutched his arm, dug my fingernails into his wrist, and spoke over him:
“Please pardon our rudeness, but we would be deeply indebted to you if Oda-sensei would consider giving us a moment of his time.”
She studied me with guarded amusement. Then her eyes flicked meaningfully at Tristan—as if making sure he noticed that I was the one she was responding to—before looking at me again to say, “I will see if he’s awake.”
When she was gone I glanced up at Tristan. “When speaking Japanese,” I said, “it is impossible to grovel too much or too often.”
“She’s not Japanese,” he grunted dismissively.
“I just demonstrated to her that I understand her husband’s culture,” I said. Goodness how I appreciated being the more informed one, for a change. “Which suggests we will be respectful, which is obviously important to her or she wouldn’t have deflected you to start with.”
“Women make everything so complicated,” Tristan said in mock dismay.
“If you’re going to get sexist on me, this won’t work,” I said. “The first thing you learned about me is that I am a woman. Eighty-six that attitude.”
“You’re all right, Stokes,” he said, and roughed up my hair as if I were his kid sister. I smacked his hand away. Before the roughhousing could progress any further, we heard Rebecca East-Oda’s clogs clunking back down the stairway.
Diachronicle
DAY 221 (EARLY MARCH, YEAR 1)
In which we meet Dr. Oda. And his wife.
SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.
But to our story: Rebecca diverted us immediately to the front room on the right, which had been a formal dining room back in the day but was now her husband’s study. The double-hung windows let in plenty of light; the two inner walls were lined with bookshelves (except where the fireplace was), most of them packed with piles of papers, journals, and folders in no discernible order. Dr. Frank Oda, seated at a desk that faced toward the street, was a slender, cheerful, absentminded-looking Japanese-American gentleman. Rebecca introduced us and offered to serve us tea, in a tone suggesting she’d be perfectly happy if we weren’t staying long enough to drink it. Tristan, socially tone-deaf, accepted her offer.
The professor, smiling, invited us to sit on a couple of Harvard chairs that faced his desk, hastening to remove tattered copies of Anna Karenina and Geometric Perspectives on Gauge Theories (Dr. Frank Oda, ed.) from one of them. We sat, and Tristan immediately launched into an explanation of what we were trying to do (although not why we were trying to do it) and how we had encountered his rejected patent application online. Professor Oda’s expression settled into thoughtfulness.
“Rather than inventing the wheel, we thought we’d ask you if you could explain your work to us, and why it did or didn’t work,” said Tristan.
Oda gave him a considering look. “You’re not with DARPA, are you?”
“No,” I said quickly, reassuringly. “This is a different kind of project altogether. I’m a linguist,” I offered, as proof of how benign we were.
He shook his head, frowning. “I do not understand the point of your research, then,” he said.
Tristan smiled that Boy Scout smile of his. “I’d need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement before I can tell you any more about what we’re doing. I was hoping this could just be a casual conversation about what you were doing.”
Oda smiled back. “I should share information with somebody who won’t share information with me?”
Tristan upped his smile to Eagle Scout. “You’re not willing to talk physics with a fellow physicist in the name of science?”
“If it is applied physics, he would like to know what it’s being applied to,” said Rebecca East-Oda from the study door.
The professor smiled at her. It was such a sweet smile. “It’s all right, Rebecca,” he said. “They’re kids. They’re curious. I like curious. And if you’re here to ask, let’s make it Darjeeling.” She nodded and left; he returned his gaze to Tristan. “As you must have read in the patent application, I was trying to interrupt the collapse of the wave function—specifically in living neurological tissue.”
“Brains,” Tristan translated.
“Cat brains,” I added.
Oda got a here we go again look, and drew breath.
“We’re not from PETA,” I assured him.
Tristan threw me a look.
“We totally get it that you weren’t killing the cats,” I went on.
“The cats that you saved from the kill shelter,” Tristan concluded.
Right on cue, a black cat jumped up into Oda’s lap and settled in for a long purr.
“I was wondering,” I ventured, “why cats? Could you have done the experiment on worm brains, for example?”
“Yes,” Oda said, “but it would have been difficult to gauge the outcome, because it’s hard to know what a worm is thinking. With a cat, you are rarely in doubt.”
“Ah. Well, in that case, why not just use a human subject?”
“Because of the Helsinki Declaration!” Tristan scoffed.
Oda nodded. “Partly that. But even if there were no regulations on use of human subjects, I would have been stymied by physical limitations.”
For the first time since Tristan had become energized about the solar eclipse photographs, he looked a little deflated. “The ODEC won’t work on a human?” he asked almost plaintively.
“Oh, it would work,” Oda said, “if you could fit a human into it.”
The relief in Tristan’s voice was obvious. “So you would just need to make a bigger one.”
Oda held back before answering, giving Tristan’s face a careful study, with occasional glances at me. “If you wanted to use it on a human,” he said, “then yes. But this was impossible at the time.”
“Your lab space wasn’t big enough?” I asked.
“It was plenty big,” Oda returned, “but that wasn’t the problem.”
My colleague was back to being Sad Tristan. “What was the problem, Dr. Oda?”
“Maybe it’s easy if I just show you,” Oda said, standing up abruptly and spilling the cat onto the rug. He was a slight man, hardly taller than I. “I have it in the basement.”
“You have what in the basement?” I asked.
“The ODEC. Rebecca wanted me to throw it out, but I have a . . . bittersweet sentimental attachment to it, and it doesn’t take up much space.”
He began leading us toward a narrow door beneath the stairway. “Rebecca,” he called out. “I’m taking them down to see the ODEC.”