_Changing the subject_, he thought to himself. _What's she afraid of?_
Aloud, he answered, "It's Childe's results from the Big Brain ... the
machine's wave patterns extrapolated over a million years." He turned
the graph around so she could see it better.
Elaine studied it for a moment, then shook her head. "Childe was right,
wasn't he? It doesn't make any sense at all. No pattern, no rhyme, no
reason."
"I don't know," Lee said. "There's something ... well, something
strange about these waves. They don't follow a regular pattern, and
yet...."
"What?"
He frowned. "They're just too damned irregular to be really random.
That doesn't make much sense, does it? Well, anyway, I've got the
feeling that I've seen this pattern--or lack of pattern--before.
Somewhere I've seen something that looks a lot like this ... but I
can't remember where."
Elaine looked at the graph again, at the multiple curves swinging back
and forth across the paper, intertwining in seeming confusion. "It
looks like some of the graphs I drew when I was an undergrad."