The Chronology Protection Case

Part 2

I was in my car 40 minutes later on my way to her house, when I should have been home with pizza and the cat. No contest: a physicist in distress always wins. Her Bronxville address wasn't too far from mine in Yonkers.

"Dr. D'Amato?" she opened the door.

I nodded. "Phil."

"Thank you so much for coming," she said, and ushered me in. Her eyes looked red, like she suffered from allergies or had been crying. But few people have allergies in March.

The house had a quiet appealing beauty. As did she.

"I know the usual expectations in these things," she said. "He has another woman, we've been fighting. And I'm sure that most women whose vanished husbands have been having affairs are quick to profess their certainty that that's not what's going on in their cases."

I smiled. "Ok, I'm willing to start with the assumption that your case is different. Tell me how."

"Would you like a drink, some wine?" she walked over to a cabinet, must've been turn of the century.

"Just ginger ale, if you have it," I said, leaning back in the plush Morris chair she'd shown me into.

She returned with the ginger ale, and some sort of sparkling water for herself. "Well, as I told you on the phone, Ian and I are physicists--"

"Is his last name Goldring, like yours?"

Lauren nodded. "And, well, I'm sure this has something to do with his project."

"You two don't do the same work?" I asked.

"No," she said. "My area's the cosmos at large -- big bang theory, blackholes in space, the big picture. Ian's was, is, on the other end of the spectrum. Literally. His area's quantum mechanics." She started to sob.

"It's ok," I said. I got up and put my hand on her shoulder. Quantum mechanics could be frustrating, I knew, but not that bad.

"No," she said. "It isn't ok. Why am I using the past tense for Ian?"

"You think some harm's come to him?"

"I don't know," her lips quivered. She did know, or thought she knew.

"And you feel this has something to do with his work with tiny particles? Was he exposed to dangerous radiation?"

"No," she said. "That's not it. He was working on something called quantum signalling. He always told me everything about his work -- and I told him everything about mine -- we had that kind of relationship. And then a few months ago, he suddenly got silent. At first I thought maybe he was having an affair--"

And the thought popped into my head: if I had a woman with your class, an affair with someone else would be the last thing on my mind.

"But then I realized it was deeper than that. It was something, something that frightened him, in his work. Something that I think he wanted to shield me from."

"I'm pretty much of an amiable amateur when it comes to quantum mechanics," I said, "but I know something about it. Suppose you tell me all you know about Ian's work, and why it could be dangerous."