Eifelheim

Tom scowled. “Give me credit for a little sense,” he said. “I’m saying this theory explains the facts very neatly. And, if it’s true…” His voice trailed off.

If it’s true… Sharon felt her heart quicken.

“I dragged Nagy space into the picture because neither Dietrich, nor anyone else, described a spaceship.”

“How could they,” she pointed out. “They had no concept of spaceships.”

“Medieval people weren’t stupid. They were having a technological revolution themselves. Camshafts and waterwheels and mechanical clocks… They would have recognized a spaceship as a vehicle of some sort, even if they called it Elijah’s chariot. But, no. Dietrich and Joachim and the Bull of 1377 all state that the aliens ‘appeared.’ Isn’t that how you described hypospace travel the other day? A single stride covers great distances, was how you put it. No wonder Dietrich was so interested in seven league boots. And that’s what Joha

“Appeared. That’s a lot to read into a single verb.”

He slapped his stack of computer printouts with the flat of his hand. “It all ties together, though. Consilience, not deduction. No single strand of reasoning is enough to support the conclusion; but taken together… A prayer attributed to Joha

“Eight.” The word came out reluctantly. Her blood hammered in her ears. What if?

“And the religious treatise attributed at third hand to Dietrich: to travel to other worlds you have to travel inside. You used almost those exact words. Your twelve-dimensional geometry became a ‘trinity of Trinities.’ The writer mentioned ‘times and places we ca

“But, that really was a religious treatise, wasn’t it? I mean, the ‘other worlds’ were Heaven, Hell, and Earth, and ‘traveling inside’ meant searching one’s soul.”

“Ja doch. But the ideas weren’t written down for seventy-five years. The writers took something they had heard at third or fourth hand and interpreted it according to some familiar paradigm. The rationalism of the Middle Ages was already giving way to the romantic mysticism of the Renaissance. Who knows what Dietrich himself understood when Joha

She looked him in the eyes as she took the folder from him. He really is serious, she thought. Which, knowing Tom, could mean that he was unable to deal with the original problem’s insolubility.

Or else, maybe his idea was not as crazy as it sounded.

Give him a fair chance. He deserves that much before I call the men in the white suits.

She went to her beanbag chair and slumped into it. She read the items slowly and carefully, relying on his English translations. Middle German was too hard to follow, and Latin was Greek to her. From the edge of her eye she could see Tom fidgeting.

Crazy, disco

When she finished, she closed her eyes and tried to see her way clear to the answer. She tried putting the puzzle pieces together as he had. If this went with that… Finally, she shook her head, seeing the trap that he had fallen into. “It’s all circumstantial,” she said at last. “No one comes right out and says anything about aliens or other planets.” The tea kettle began to whistle and she went to the kitchen to turn it off. She laid Tom’s papers on the kitchen table, where she had dumped her own papers last night. She opened the cabinet above the sink and searched for a morning tea.

“Yes, they did,” Tom insisted. He had followed her into the kitchen. “They did come right out and say so. In medieval terms and concepts. Oh, we can talk easily enough of planets orbiting stars; but they were just begi

“People are people,” she said. “I’m not convinced.” It occurred to her that she was not playing Devil’s Advocate. It was Tom who was advocating devils. She wanted to share this Tom-like joke with him, but decided that it was not the right time for it. He was too deadly serious.

“Everything you have,” she told him, “could be read another way. It’s only when you put them all together that they seem to form a pattern. But have you put them together right? Do all your pieces even come from the same jig-saw puzzle? Why should there be any co

“What about the descriptions of the hidden, i

She shrugged. “Or it sounds like medieval theology. Physics and religion both sound like gibberish if you don’t know the basic axioms.” She poured the hot water into a tea pot and let the brew steep. There was no room on the kitchen table, however. It was littered with papers. When she had dropped the folder there, some of the contents had skidded out. Tom’s printouts were mixed with her own from the lab. Medieval manuscripts and circuit diagrams for chronon detectors. She tsk’ed at the mess and began to straighten it up. Tom stood in the doorway.

“Do you know what I find significant?” Tom said. “The way Dietrich referred to the aliens.”

“If they were aliens, and not hallucinations.”

“All right. If they were aliens. He always called them ‘beings,’ or ‘creatures,’ or ‘my guests,’ or ‘travelers.’ Never anything supernatural. Didn’t Sagan once say that alien visitors would be careful not to be mistaken for gods or demons?”

She snorted. “Sagan was an optimist. The ability to cross Space doesn’t make anyone more ethical, any more than the ability to cross Ocean made the Europeans more ethical than the Indians.” That page was Tom’s and that page. This page was hers. She put each into its proper folder. “I remember what he said would be convincing proof of alien visitors. It was in that book he wrote with Schlovski.”