"I know," she said. "I thought about it all afternoon. I didn't want to say it to Norty, but when I was giving him all those numbers, there came times when it was a little fuzzy, and I wasn't so sure."
"And what did you do?"
"I guessed—because it would clear up right after that, and I'd be sure again."
"Can you explain the fuzziness?" I prodded.
She shrugged. "It's like a fork in the road," she said, holding her two index fingers next to each other. "And there are two pictures for a while."
You may not have noticed it, but your index finger is not straight. It curves in toward your middle finger so that you can hold all the tips together if you want to. And when Pheola laid her two index fingers together, they curved away from each other at their tips. I got a flash and went immediately to my phone.
"Hello," I said to the O-operator cartoon. "Get Norty Baskins. If he's asleep, wake him."
Norty was quite upset about being awakened.
"I have a suggestion for your machine," I said to him. "Try it in three dimensions. Instead of sine waves, visualize it as two coil springs that are all snarled up in each other. Each has a different pitch, perhaps different diameter. But at certain points the coils touch each other, and at those times she is right."
"In the morning?" he said weakly, rubbing his eyes.