The aurora suddenly flashed.
“Crash.”
The sound of glass flying everywhere tore open the silent night. An Zhe turned to look at the laboratory.
Pauli also looked at the window in that direction. "Rum?"
Mist clung to the window glass, blurring everything inside so that all that was visible was a faint human silhouette.
"Sir!" Rum's voice was rarely so excited. He smacked the window with a hand, making banging noises. After opening the window lock, his voice became clear as well, but it carried a tremor. "The screen, the screen…"
Pauli shot a sudden look into the room. Just as before, the messy lines were dancing on the big screen.
But Rum said, "Just now—"
An Zhe coughed a few times, then said, "I'm all right."
After confirming that he was still clearheaded, Pauli strode toward the laboratory. An Zhe surreptitiously swallowed a mouthful of blood and followed. His body was in a strange state, weakened and in pain to the breaking point, but it was precisely because he'd reached those limits that it seemed like he was now completely relaxed.
In the laboratory, Rum had broken a glass bottle containing antibiotic granules. Glittering shards of glass lay all over the ground, but nobody thought to sweep it up.
Pauli came over to the big screen, and as the lines fluctuated like a ball of wriggling worms, he asked, "What is it?"
Rum's lips opened and closed. "It was clear… Just now, it was clear."
It was difficult for An Zhe to describe Pauli's expression in that moment, for it was like all sorts of excessively fierce emotions had mixed together but changed into blankness instead. Pauli's hands trembled, and he placed his right hand on the instrument's operating lever. "Are you certain?"
The expression in Rum's eyes seemed hesitant, or perhaps he was striving to remember—Pauli stared hard at him, and three second later, he said, "I'm certain."
Pauli Jones looked at the screen, An Zhe standing behind him. The research facility humans had used to study the artificial magnetic poles during the period when technology was at its peak—even if much of its equipment had been lost due to many years of neglect, it was still a functioning physics laboratory. Within the breathless silence, Pauli pulled the operating lever and adjusted the fluctuating lines backward.
He asked, "Around what time frame?"
Rum said, "Just now."
He went silent for a while, weighed his words, and said, "It was just the blink of an eye."
Pauli took a deep breath, adjusted the instrument's recording to three minutes ago, and began playing it back frame by frame on the small screen.
Those dancing and wriggling black lines varied in appearance. Some formed curves, while others were star-like scattered black dots. They tangled together in that manner, just like destiny. In every frame, their shapes changed, but these changes were irregular. After staying in the laboratory for almost half a month, An Zhe knew that what the Simpson cage captured was the interaction frequency between elementary particles—Pauli always used "frequency" to describe it.
But the complexity and disorderliness of this frequency were beyond the scope of what humankind's existing scientific knowledge could handle. Pauli strove to find a way to receive and process them so that they'd clear up, just like a person hearing a piece of music and trying to write a score for it or perhaps continuously adjusting the radio frequency in anticipation of receiving a clear signal. But for a long time, there had not been the slightest progress in this work. Facing those disorderly lines, Pauli once said that he was like a mortal wishing to hear God's decrees yet also like an ant trying to decipher human language.
As An Zhe looked at the still-pulsing big screen, he occasionally turned his worried gaze toward Pauli, and he discovered that Rum was doing likewise. In this drawn-out experiment, there had already been too many failures. If it wasn't possible to replicate the moment of clarity Rum spoke of, he would rather that Pauli had never received the information in the first place.
One frame, followed by another frame. The fire in the fireplace burned with vigor, making the "crackle-pop" sounds of firewood splitting apart from time to time. In the silent laboratory, the sound was particularly dramatic.
A ghostly image suddenly leaped out onto the screen.
Even An Zhe could not help but hold his breath.
On the dark gray background, all the lines suddenly disappeared—then what appeared were countless faint white dots that were packed together, translucent, and gradually fading into the background. It was difficult to describe what sort of shape it was with human language. There seemed to be no pattern to them at all, gathering in certain parts and dispersing in others. There were no white dots scattered in the center of the diagram, but a circle like a volcanic crater had formed around it, and the irregular dark gray circle was reminiscent of a sinister and menacing eye. It was like—like humans in the civilized age had taken a picture of an incomparably grand nebula and then converted it into lifeless grayscale.
"I-it's this one," Rum said. "Did the machine break?"
"No…" Pauli slowly shook his head. Perhaps because his mood was excessively tense, his pupils were slightly dilated. "Such a pattern wouldn't appear for no reason. Something must have happened."
When Tang Lan pushed open the laboratory door, there were faint shadows under his eyes. He was clearly somewhat listless.
"Sir," he said. "Did you need something from me?"
Pauli said, "Were you asleep? I'm very sorry to have woken you."
Tang Lan shook his head. "I was already awake when Rum shouted for me."
Pauli asked, "Were you not sleeping well?"
"I was just thinking of coming to find you," Tang Lan said. "The wave suddenly amplified—for a second, I felt a sharp spike, and then I woke up."
Pauli asked, "What about now?"
"It's okay now."
Pauli didn’t speak for a long time, not until Tang Lan asked, "What's wrong, sir?"
"There's nothing wrong with our methods. Right when you felt the wave's amplification, an abnormality occurred in the images captured by the Simpson cage as well." Pauli's expression was grave.
Tang Lan frowned. "Isn't this good news?"
"No." Pauli said. "I thought of a problem."
In the laboratory, nobody made a sound save for Pauli. His gaze turned from the small screen that displayed the captured image to the big screen where the complex lines surged. "We wanted to capture the wave's frequency and analyze the cause of the distortion, but what if what it's currently showing is the contest between the earth's artificial magnetic field and the unknown wave coming from the universe?"
"I understand what you mean." Tang Lan jerked his head up. "The magnetic field can resist the wave, but what the Simpson cage received at the same time was both of their frequencies. They're interfering with each other."
"Yes." Pauli said. "I've always been thinking, if the magnetic field could completely resist the wave, why would genetic infection still occur here on the earth? If they've always been in a deadlock, it would make sense. The wave has always affected the earth, but the magnetic field was also putting up resistance, so we hadn't yet reached the point where matter would be utterly distorted. The frequencies of the two have always been tangled together."
"If that's the case…" Tang Lan furrowed his brows. "Sir, if you wish to analyze the wave with the Simpson cage, you'd have to wait for the wave to triumph over the magnetic field or for the artificial magnetic poles to no longer work."
"That's right," Pauli said slowly.
"But as soon as the wave gains the upper hand, matter will distort, and the Simpson cage's equipment will be affected as well."
"No," Pauli said. "There is a way."
Everyone looked at Pauli, not saying a word. In the quiet laboratory, Pauli continued, "The Highland Research Institute has multiple portable independent magnetic poles that can generate small magnetic fields with limited ranges, which is the fruit of past research. It was only because of those that we were able to survive the calamitous failure of the artificial magnetic poles a month prior."
"Supposing the artificial magnetic pole covering the earth disappears… We'll adjust the positions of the independent magnetic poles to protect the Simpson cage's core equipment and simultaneously expose the receiving area to the maximum extent—" Pauli narrowed his gray-blue eyes slightly as he looked at the raging sea of flames downstairs.
Tang Lan said, "Then we can analyze the pure wave frequency."
"That's right, that's right…" Pauli took a deep breath. The light of hope had just lit up in his eyes, but then it was promptly extinguished. "However—"
He stopped himself before he finished speaking, and the room suddenly quieted. Nobody made a sound.
At last, Tang Lan asked, "Can the wave only be seen… after distortion triumphs over the artificial magnetic field?"
He looked at the night sky outside, his voice bitter.
Pauli sat down slowly in front of the computer. Facing the communication channel linked to the base, he did not move for a long while.
"Only at our dying moment can we glimpse the truth," he muttered. "Is this what God wanted to show us?"