"I see."
She looked at the graph. "What's that? Something new?"
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."
He laughed. "Maybe that's where I saw it."