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about it, huh?"
    Gordon frowned. "Found out what?"

    "I know you're a stickler for carrying an experiment through, A to Z, with no delays, Dr. Bernstein. I know that." Cooper shrugged apologetically. "But I couldn't finish the whole thing last night. So I went out and had a few beers with the guys. Then I came back and did it all over."
    Gordon wrinkled his brow. "There's nothing wrong with that. You can always take a break. Just so you keep everything steady, don't let the preamps or the scopes go off their zero adjustments."
    "No, they were still okay."
    "Then–" Gordon spread his hands, exasperated "–you've screwed up somewhere. It's not the beer-drinking I care about, it's the experiment.
    Look, the conventional wisdom is that it takes four years minimum to get out. Do you want to make it that fast?"
    "Sure."
    "'Then do what I say and don't slack off."
    "But I haven't."
    "You must've. You just haven't looked. I can—"
    "The noise is still there," Cooper said with a certainty that stopped Gordon in mid-sentence. Gordon abruptly realized that he had been browbeating this man, only three years younger, for no reason whatever, aside from frustration.
    "Look, I–" Gordon began, but found the next word catching in his throat. He felt suddenly embarrassed. "Okay, I believe you," he said, making his voice brisk and businesslike. "Let's see the chart recordings you took."
    Cooper had been leaning against the blocky magnet that enclosed the kernel of their experiment. He turned and threaded his way through the lanes of cables and microwave guides. The experiment was still running.
    The silvery flask, suspended between the poles of the magnet and all but obscured by cable lead-ins, had grown a coat of ice. Inside it liquid helium frothed and bubbled, boiling away at temperatures only a few degrees above absolute zero. The ice was water frozen out from the air around the jacket, and it made an occasional snap as the equipment expanded and contracted to relieve stress. The brilliantly lit laboratory hummed with electronic life. A few meters away the sheer heat of the banks upon banks of transistorized diagnostics made a warming wall of air. From the helium, though, Gordon could feel a gentle, chilling draft. Despite the coolness Cooper wore a torn T-shirt and blue jeans. Gordon preferred a blue long-sleeve button-down shirt, Oxford broadcloth, with corduroy slacks that belted in the back, and a tweed jacket. He had not yet adjusted to the informality of laboratories here. If it meant going as far downhill as Cooper, he was certain he never would.
    "I took a lot of data," Cooper said conversationally, ignoring the tension that had hung in the air only moments before. Gordon moved through the assembly of scopes and wheeled cabinets to where Cooper was methodically laying out the automatically recorded graphs. The paper was gridded in bright red, so that the green jiggling lines of the signal stood out, making the page almost three-dimensional from contrast.
    "See?" Cooper's thick fingers traced the green peaks and valleys. "Here's where the indium nuclear resonance should be."
    Gordon nodded. "A nice fat peak, that's what we should find," he said.
    But there was only a chaos of narrow vertical lines, made as the recorder pen had rocked back and forth across the paper, under the action of random nudges.
    "Just hash," Cooper murmured.
    "Yes," Gordon admitted, feeling the air wheeze out of him as he said it, his shoulders sagging.
    "I got these, though." Cooper laid out another green rectangle. It showed a mixed pattern. At the right was a clean peak, its sides smooth and untroubled. But the center and left of the page was a meaningless jumble of scratchings.
    "Damn," Gordon whispered to himself. On these graphs the frequency of emissions from the indium antimonide sample increased from left to right. "The noise wipes out the high frequencies."
    "Not always."
    "Huh?"
    "Here's another try. I took it just a few minutes after that