Dr. Kip Wolverton, his hands on the sally of bell eight’s rope, glanced at the other ringers. They stood in a ten-foot-diameter circle, hands on the ropes that hung down from the belfry through holes in the chamber’s ceiling. With faces alert, expressions eager and expectant, their eyes were fixed on old Caruthers, the tower captain.

  “Treble’s gone.”

  The captain gave a nod and the ringers began in sequence to pull their ropes.

  Bell one sounded first. At a mere 500 pounds, this bell, the treble, led the rest of the bells in playing a descending scale. Every two seconds, eight bells rippled down the scale, over and over, pouring a torrent of sound out into the English countryside. Each repetition of the scale ended with a strike from the huge tenor, Great Peter. This was Kip’s bell, the lowest-pitched of the ring of eight.

  The tower trembled under the motion of the bells in the belfry above. Though Kip couldn’t see it, he knew his bell: 22 hundredweight, 52-inch diameter with the inscription Vigilate et orate, watch and pray, engraved on its rim.

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  But these rounds were just a warm up. The captain gave the signal and the band of ringers began a quarter peal of Stedman Triples, permutations of the ringing order of the first seven bells, with Kip’s tenor following each row of changes.

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  Like clockwork, they worked their ropes, their faces rapt in concentration. But Kip didn’t need to concentrate; his bell, Great Peter, wasn’t involved in the permutations so, even through the roaring of the bells, he was able to think and to observe. Vigilate et orate.

  He hadn’t rung a bell in twenty-five years, and he wouldn’t be ringing now if one of the band hadn’t been sick. Kip looked up the length of his rope and thought of Malvyn, his boyhood best friend. Twenty-five years ago, Kip had seen a trickle of red snaking down from the rope hole, striping the yellow hemp and changing the light blue sally to glistening crimson. Malvyn had been hiding out in the belfry. The bells were set for ringing and something, an accidental kick perhaps, had set the bell in motion. The ton of iron swung down and . . .

  Kip blinked his eyes, trying to blot out the event, trying to expunge the image of the bell’s inscription embossed in reverse on Malvyn’s crushed flesh. Even through the harmony of a ring of eight in full voice, he remembered the teller with clapper muffled, tolling fifteen strikes, Malvyn’s age, at the funeral. For the first and only time, the teller was not Great Peter but the next heaviest bell in the ring.

  Poor Malvyn. They’d been a unit: he, Malvyn, and Neville. The Three Musketeers out to conquer the world. One for all and all for one. Kip smiled, sadly. Malvyn had been almost a year older than he, and Neville half a year older than Malvyn. Young, opinionated innocents, we were. More like the Three Blind Mice.

  Cocooned in the blanket of sound, Kip reminisced. Malvyn the moderator. With Malvyn gone, the age difference was too large. Kip and Neville had drifted apart—this despite both going on to get doctorates in theoretical physics at the same university.

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  Kip looked across the ringing chamber at Audrey. He couldn’t help but admire how she handled her bell: grace, efficiency, elegance, beauty—although no longer ravishing beauty; she’d put on some weight in the last quarter century. He used to think of her as his girl back then. In fact, she’d been the reason he’d taken up tower ringing. But he’d been too shy to ever ask her out. That was when he was fourteen. Kip smiled. As he’d done frequently so long ago, he gazed at “his girl” handling a bell, although now perhaps he watched with less lust.

  Kip decided that at the end of the peal, he’d make amends for his decades of shyness—meaningless now as the damage had long been done. When he was off on a postdoc in America, the country of his parents’ birth, he got the letter saying that she’d married Neville. And Kip, possibly from regret, had chosen to remain single for life.

  Now, a full professor of physics at Syracuse University in the States, he was back in England on a grant to do an experiment on the very edge of physics: an experiment that needed bells—three towers of bells. It was too bad Neville thought it was nonsense. It would have been great if two of the Three Musketeers could still conquer the world together—at least the world of physics.

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  In the thunder of the bells both heard and felt, Kip turned his mind to the experiment. If it worked, it would relate the structure of time to processes in the human mind. What more appropriate place to run it than among a ring of bells sounding in a church tower?

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  About forty-five minutes after it had started, the quarter peal ended with a touch of rounds.

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  Old Caruthers motioned that the bells be rung down—ever since Malvyn’s death, the bells were not set upside-down between ringings. The full-throated striking grew soft as the bells came to their positions favored by gravity, and finally went silent.

  Flushed from the exertion, Kip coiled his bell rope and, when his breathing had slowed to normal, walked over to Audrey. He took a couple of quick swallows to clear his ears, trying to silence the phantom bells he’d always heard after a long session of tower ringing. “Can I perhaps interest you in a milkshake?” he said, his voice sounding hollow and empty in the tower.

  As she hung up her rope, Audrey laughed. “No. Not a milkshake. But a cup of tea would be nice.”

  “How ‘bout at Beowulfie’s?”

  “Wonderful.”

  Kip followed Audrey down the narrow, circular staircase from the ringing chamber to the chapel, and then outside for the five-minute walk to the coffeehouse. Although it was warm for early November, yellow and gold leaves swirled on the sidewalk and many inhabitants of the old university town were already enshrouded in scarves displaying their college colors.

  “I still hear bells,” said Audrey as they walked along.

  “Not phantom bells, I think,” said Kip, looking off into the distance. “Tower West is also rehearsing the experiment today.”

  Audrey laughed. “Tower West? Still fighting religion, are you?”

  Kip answered seriously, even though he knew he was being teased. “Not at all. I have three towers to coordinate. It’s much less confusing to call them Tower North, East, and West instead of the Church of the holy whatever, or Saint what’s-his-face.”

  “Dearest Kip,” she said, patting him on the arm. “Don’t ever change.” She glanced sideways and examined him like a specimen. “Actually, you haven’t changed. Not really.”

  Kip returned the glance. “Neither have you,” he said, hoping she couldn’t tell he was giving a ritual answer in lieu of the truth. She wasn’t the bright young thing he’d cherished in his memory.

  University towns being what they were, everyone knew everything about everyone else and Kip had heard the talk: Audrey’s marriage lacked passion. Neville’s first, and apparently only, love was theoretical physics. It showed clearly on Audrey’s face.

  At Beowulfie’s, they found a table near the window and ordered tea.

  “You know,” said Kip, his hands enveloping a hot fragrant cup of Lapsang Suchong, “when we were teenagers, I always thought of you as my girl.”

  Audrey looked down at her cup of Darjeeling. “Things might have been very different had you thought to tell me that at the time.” She looked up, meeting Kip’s eyes. “Your girl? You always took me for granted, never asked me out, never even really talked to me.”

  Kip averted his eyes. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how many times I’d fantasized about asking you to go to a movie with me. But I never could bring myself . . .” He covered his awkwardness by stirring his tea, even though he drank it black. “I was almost clinically shy,” he said softly, as if to himself.

  “I’m very glad you’re back with us now,” she said, cheerfully, clearly trying to redirect his mood. “So tell me. What is this experiment of yours about?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. Neville thinks it’s . . .” She bit her lower lip.

  “Absolute nonsense,” Kip supplied. “Yes. He’s expressed his views to me as well. As far as belfries are concerned, he rather thinks I have bats in mine.”

  “In any case”—Audrey took a sip of her tea—“he’s refused to tell me anything about it.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you.” Kip gave a mirthless smile. “You’ll likely think it nonsense also. And indeed it might well be.”

  Kip picked up the saltshaker. “First the how, and then the why.” Plopping it down at the center of the table, he said, “This is our tower, Tower North.” He picked up the peppershaker and then snagged another from an adjacent table. He set both shakers down, making them into vertices of an equilateral triangle. “And these are Tower West and Tower East.”

  “Holy whatever and Saint what’s-his-face,” said Audrey.

  “Precisely. And these are not just any towers. All three have a ring of eight bells tuned in D.” Kip placed a forefinger at the center of the imaginary triangle. “And Tuesday, I’ll be here—in radio contact with the three tower captains.” He glanced at Audrey. “You know this much, yes?”

  Audrey nodded. “We’ll all be ringing a peal of Stedman Triples.”

  “A synchronized peal,” said Kip. “I’ll be giving instructions to the individual captains to speed up or slow down—to keep them together.”

  “I don’t think Old Caruthers likes the idea.”

  “Oh?”

  “Even though no one’s ever done a multi-tower ring and it will certainly be in the record books”—Audrey picked up the Tower North salt shaker—“he likes being the captain, likes being in control.”

  “He will be in control.” Gently, Kip retrieved the shaker and returned it to the table. “He’s still tower captain, but . . . “Kip laughed. “But, for the day, I’m sort of the tower field marshal.” He stared at the Tower North shaker as if he were contemplating Hamlet’s Yorick. “Funny,” he said. “Old Caruthers. Hard to think of him as old. It’s been twenty-five years since I’d seen him last. Back then, he was ‘Mister Caruthers, sir.’ ”

  “And you were just one of the little tower brats.” Smiling, Audrey tapped the top of Tower North. “I never understood why you spent so much time here, considering your opinions on religion. Playing violin at Christmas concerts, playing with the youth hand bell choir, tower ringing.”

  “I loved the old place,” said Kip. “Still do. I really wanted to be an organist, but that would have required more of a church affiliation than I was willing to put up with. So instead, I took up the violin.”

  Audrey chuckled. “The devil’s instrument.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Oh, I’m just teasing you.” She smiled, softly. “In fact, if I remember, you almost got a violin scholarship to study at the Royal Conservatory.”

  “Almost.” Kip took a sip of his tea, lukewarm from neglect. “Physics was my default plan. Had I won the scholarship, well . . . I’d intended to become a concert violinist. But of course, you know that.”

  “I didn’t want you to win it,” said Audrey. “I didn’t want you to run off to London to study. I would have missed you terribly.”

  Kip knew he was blushing and sipped at his tea to try to conceal it. “Back to the experiment,” he said. “The why of it.”

  Audrey crossed her hands on the table and gazed expectantly at him. She looked like a little girl at school.

  Kip knew it would be tricky—explaining the physics without talking down to her, or at least without her detecting she was being talked down to.

  “There are forces in nature,” he said. “There’s the force of gravity, the electroweak force, the strong nuclear force.” Already he could see he was losing her, so he backed up. “The electroweak force, for example, is why an electron and proton attract each other. And the strong force is what keeps an atomic nucleus from ripping apart.”

  Audrey nodded.

  “We think,” said Kip, “that there might be another force.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Me.”

  “Oh.” Audrey smiled. “All right, then. What would this other force do?”

  “We . . . I think it keeps the dimensions from ripping apart. It’s related to entropy and it determines the arrow of time.” Despite the baffled look on her face, he plunged ahead. “And since life seems to violate the law of increasing entropy, it looks like this force is important in living creatures.”

  “You do know,” said Audrey, “that I’ve not the vaguest clue what you are talking about?”

  “Yes, I know.” Kip shrugged. “Sorry.”

  Audrey gave a tight-lipped smile.

  “Anyway,” said Kip, “an oscillating mass makes gravity waves, and an oscillating charge makes electromagnetic waves—”

  “You mean radio waves?”

  “Yes, exactly. And I think oscillating extended compressible matter makes dimension waves. D-waves, I call them.”

  “Oscillating extended compressible matter?” Audrey laughed. “What language is that, please?”

  Kip felt himself blush. “I guess I should have just said ‘sound waves in air.’ ”

  “I see,” said Audrey, smiling. “And you’re looking for D-Waves, which is why the bells must be tuned to the key of D.”

  “No. You don’t understand. It has nothing to do with . . .” Then Kip noticed her smile. “You’re teasing me again, aren’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Perhaps.” Kip picked up Tower West. “Perhaps we’ve talked enough science for the day.” He returned the shaker to its proper table.

  As Kip slid the other shakers together, Audrey put a hand on his. “But you haven’t told me,” she said, “what bell ringing has to do with all this.”

  Kip started from her touch and drew back his hand, then extended it and placed it over hers. “Well, here’s where it gets strange,” he said.

  Audrey gave a short chuckle. “Here is where it gets strange?”

  “Okay, more strange.” He took a breath, and plunged on. “I’m trying to establish a standing D-wave pattern over a small area in the middle of the triangle defined by the towers.”

  “Using tower bells.”

  “Unlikely as it seems, yes.”

  Audrey, gazing down at her tea, tapped the side of her cup and watched wavelets form on the surface of the liquid. She looked up. “Maybe not all that unlikely,” she said. “I’ve always felt that the sound of tower bells in the air creates a kind of collective consciousness in those that hear them.” Again, she toyed with the teacup. “If there is such a thing as a collective consciousness, I shouldn’t be too surprised if a clever scientist managed to detect it.”

  “Collective consciousness.” Kip played with the words, and then with the idea. “That’s wonderful.” He gazed in admiration; Audrey had heard his theory for the first time and already had augmented it.

  Feeling almost as if he were speaking with a colleague now, Kip went on. “Since the D-waves should make nodes where living creatures are, in some sense, synchronized and a band of ringers engaged in the exercise is about as synchronized as it gets, the ringers should help create a stable resonance pattern.” He took a quick breath and concluded, “The tenor ringing D at the end of each row of changes should establish the resonance and the changes themselves, being permutations, should dampen any unwanted harmonics.”

  “Assuming that I understood all that,” said Audrey, “tell me. What does your experiment actually do?”

  “At the center of the triangle, I hope to detect a very tiny variation in the flow of time.”

  “And?”

  “And?” Kip laughed. “And nothing. That’s the experiment.”

  Audrey seemed disappointed. “I’d have thought there’d be something more impressive.”

  “Not strange enough, huh?”

  “Well, it’s just that . . . Perhaps I’ve just seen too many movies of energetic scientists and big machines.”

  “Ah. That reminds me.” Kip glanced at his watch. “Oh dear! I really must apologize, but I’ve got to run up to the university to check on a not-so-big machine—my time variation meter. I told my technician I’d be there ten minutes ago.” He waved for the bill and took out his wallet. “Can I drop you off somewhere?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll just dawdle here over my tea a while.” She stared at him for a moment. “But you should go on being the energetic scientist. It suits you.”

  Kip paid the bill and, looking back as he left Beowulfie’s, saw Audrey smiling at him. He felt fifteen again.

  In the Physics Department electronics shop late that afternoon, Kip finished calibrating the time variation meter. Housed in an aluminum tube about four feet long by three quarters of an inch thick, the device had a hand grip, an on/off switch, and a small meter calibrated in nanoseconds. Inside were atomic clocks at each end, a solid-state memory module, and a cell-tower triangulation module to give position data. The TVM was designed to measure the difference of time flow between the ends of the device.

  Kip lifted the unit at the grip end and, wielding it like a sword, made passes in the air with it.

  In mid-pass, the door opened, and Neville ambled into the shop.

  “Still a Musketeer, I see,” said Neville, a coolness evident in his voice.

  “Oh.” Kip felt both surprised and sheepish, the way he had when, long ago, Neville had found him playing with a toy he was too old for—in Neville’s unalterable opinion. Kip placed the TVM onto a lab bench. “Tuesday,” he said, “I’ll be using this a lot. I just wanted to get the feel of it.”

  “Yes, of course you did,” said Neville, displaying the characteristic disdain that Malvyn had always managed to keep in check. “Look,” he said from the doorway. “I’m glad to see you back in England, of course. But let’s try not to give the university a bad name, shall we?”

 

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