Roger stood, walked to the conference room door, and opened it. “Becca!” he shouted into the maze of cubicles.
There was a noise like a mouse clattering from a desktop to a thinly-carpeted floor. A moment later, a head of layered ash-brown hair appeared over a cubicle wall. “What?” the woman shouted. “I’m busy!”
“We need you!” Roger shouted back.
“Why?”
“The cats!”
There was no reply, but a few moments later, they heard a frustrated grunting noise, followed by the muted thud of footsteps. A woman strode through the doorway, blew past Noble like a subway car gone express, and sat at the table.
“Hi, Becca,” Noble said. She replied with another noncommittal grunt. Roger closed the door and returned to his seat.
“So why, specifically, do you need me?” Becca asked. “You know the grant request for the ‘one hand clapping’ thing is due Monday,” she added.
Roger turned to Noble. “Bring her up to speed.”
Becca’s relationship with the term “patience” was uncomplicated: she simply didn’t have any. She made up for it with an overflowing bounty of pure, unfiltered intelligence. More importantly, she’d been part of the team that came up with the quantum cats/trees experiment in the first place, as well as the team that had spent several years trying to sort out the aftermath. She would be useful—she knew it, they all knew it—but she wasn’t going to tolerate much dillydallying.
Noble, unfortunately, had never met a long story he couldn’t make longer. In his opinion, the fine details were where problems actually got solved. He found little wit in brevity, so he usually didn’t bother trying. Consequently, he was terrible at it, which never went over well with Becca.
Noble looked up at Roger, helplessly. “Well…this morning, I was getting ready for work, and I had forgotten what day it was, and at first, I thought I—“
“He saw the cats and the trees,” Roger said, interrupting him before Becca could, “and yes, we’re sure it was them. One of them was Eloise. She can talk now. She said the word ‘calculus’ and we don’t know what it means.”
“QC-17 can talk?” Becca had never liked giving names to the subjects of experiments, no matter how adorable they were.
“At least a little,” Noble said. “She said—“
“Calculus, right,” Becca said. “What’s it mean?”
“As Roger said, we don’t know,” Noble said. “But—”
“Did anybody see them? Any incidents, accidents? Cat or a tree or a tree full of cats shows up in the middle of Storrow during the morning rush, that’s a big problem on all kinds of levels,” she said. “Obviously.”
Noble looked annoyed. Roger was as patient as a monk, compared to Becca. He knew that his chances of finishing a sentence without interruption were slim, but he didn’t have to be happy about it. “Can I talk now?”
Becca waved magnanimously. “Please, enlighten us. Briefly, if possible. Or as briefly as you can manage.”
Noble finally finished pulling out a chair. He sat, leaned forward, and pressed his fingers together, collecting his thoughts for as long as he dared before opening his mouth again. “As far as I know, no, nobody else noticed them but me. One appearance was in front of the 57 bus; the driver stopped in time and didn’t seem to think too much of it. One was on the sidewalk, one was in the back of a tow truck. The last time was in the back of the 57 bus, but again, nobody noticed.”
Becca furrowed her brow and started to retort, but Noble cut her off. “I don’t know how you don’t notice a tree full of cats appearing in the back of a bus, but that’s what happened. And that’s where Eloise talked to me. She said ‘calculus’. I’m one-hundred percent sure that’s what she said; Roger and I have been over it and I’m not debating it any more. She said it, and we need to figure out what it means.”
Becca was silent for an unusually long moment; Noble guessed she was processing the new information. “Ok,” she said at last, “I won’t question what’s settled.” She stood up. “Let’s go,” she said.
Noble looked at her in surprise. “Where?” he said. “We have—“
“—to figure this out, yes, I know, and that means reviewing the records,” she said. “Can you remember off the top of your head exactly what happened and when, over the course of what, the last seven, eight years? I can’t, so we need to look it up.” She didn’t wait for his reply, but opened the door and left the room in the same abrupt manner as when she came in.
Noble looked at Roger. “She’s right,” Roger said. “Let’s head to the Archives.” He stood and followed Becca, leaving Noble sitting alone.
He stood. “Ok,” he said, to nobody in particular. He wondered if somehow, somewhere, the cat could hear him. He liked the idea.
“Let’s figure this out, then, Eloise,” he said as he looked around the empty room, willing his words to transcend time and space. “What are you trying to tell us?”
He wasn’t sure if he really heard a faint meow, but he liked the idea of that, too.
