Written in Time by Jerry Ahern Page B

herself was able to judge, and—unless they were incredibly polite—everyone with whom she interacted seemed to concur, was as sharp as when she’d been the first woman in her alma mater’s history to take a PhD in physics. Her judgment, Jane Rogers flattered herself, was appreciably better.  
    And her eyes—despite a lifelong and insatiable appetite for the written word—were just as keen, if a little less brighter blue. Ever so slightly, Jane Rogers re-aligned the anode plate once again.  
    The hardware was ready.  
    She had been born in the wrong era, that conviction and the death of her husband twenty years, two months and twenty-seven days before the only things which marred her contentment—if one discounted the tantalizing yet incomplete degree of success of her experiments in plasma electricity.  
    As a graduate student, and later as a degreed physicist, because of her sex she had always been someone’s assistant rather than a project leader in her own right. Some things, admittedly, were determined by sex. When she was introduced to Albert Einstein, Jane Rogers found herself speechless and very nearly collapsed into a faint—and she was not a fainter, never had been. When she met and married the man of her dreams, she had aided him in his work in particle physics, abandoning her passion for electricity, no matter how much the work and its potential intrigued her and her own calculations confounded her.  
    Dr. Einstein had almost certainly thought her to be a ninny with an empty head. But her Frank had never thought that, she knew. All of the time before meeting Frank, she had worked with men who didn’t do science nearly as well as she; Frank did it better, and she found this as irresistible as the curly hair he tried to beat into straightness with his military brushes, as the shy gray eyes he shielded behind rimless glasses he didn’t really need to wear for anything but the most exacting detail work.  
    To have remarried—she was only fifty-two when Frank, ten years her senior, died—would have been unthinkable, was something she never once considered. But with Frank’s death, Jane Rogers’ attitude toward herself changed quite radically.  
    She concluded the series of experiments at which Frank had been laboring for the past eighteen months, perhaps more rapidly than Frank himself could have achieved the same results. Then she donated his notes and equipment to the graduate school of the university with which Frank had been affiliated since his own grad school days.  
    When Jane Rogers returned to the study of plasma and how it could be used to achieve the dreamer’s dream, the transmission of electricity through thin air, her decades of work with Frank in particle physics had proven to be of greater help to her than she had ever realized they would.  
    At the time of Frank’s death, they were far from his beloved university, plying their background in particle physics for the United States government as part of what well over a decade later would become the Strategic Defense Initiative. Then, as in the present, her notion reinforced by the continuation of SDI after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she had believed that there was more to particle physics weapons research than just the means by which to get a leg up on the Russians. But if so, she was out of that line of work and no one would have volunteered information to her in any event.  
    Jane Rogers had come to be known as “strange” because of the common wisdom that anyone who labored in her particular corner of physics research had to be a poor scientist or have her bubble more than a little bit off plumb. No one had ever accused Jane Rogers of being a poor scientist.  
    After Frank’s death, Jane made the decision—one she had never regretted—to remain in Nevada, but quite a bit more to the north, in order to escape the heat. Remaining in Nevada enabled her to be within relatively easy driving distance of the smallish