Breathless

effect.”
    “Well, of course,” O’Malley said, and rolled his eyes.
    “Einstein destroyed Newton’s illusion of absolute space and time. Quantum theory put an end to the notion of a controllable measurement process.”
    “How many beers have you had, Ed?”
    “This all relates to something good that’s soon going to happen to you, O’Malley. You know Galileo?”
    “Not personally.”
    “Galileo was a great scientist, too, and one of his theories, related to the oscillation of a pendulum—that its period remains independent of its amplitude—is still taught in most high-school physics classes more than three hundred years later. But it’s wrong.”
    “I’ll bet you know what’s wrong with it,” O’Malley said, as if he was humoring an eccentric.
    “Everyone doing physics for the last thirty years knows it’s wrong, but it’s taught anyway. Galileo used linear equations. But turbulence is present in the system, so it requires a nonlinear approach. Chaos, O’Malley. Underlying even the simple system of a pendulum is chaos, potential for complex and unexpected behavior. Now, I’m going to give you something.”
    “What I need are the magic words to make Lianne forgive me.”
    “Life can sometimes seem hopelessly complex, unpredictable, chaotic. Then a strange order makes itself known. You tell Lianne what you’ve done and what I’ve done, so she’ll know there’s order in the chaos. But first, cash these and take the money home to her.”
    From a pocket of his white sport coat, Lamar extracted seventeen chips worth seventeen thousand dollars and put them on the bar.

Seventeen

T he snowy pair glided across the moon-chilled yard: clearly seen but not in detail, catlike, wolflike, yet little resembling either cats or wolves, both familiar and strange, dreamlike.
    When the animals arced toward the house, disappearing around the north end of the porch, Grady hurried from the kitchen, navigating by the LED numbers in the oven clock and by the hum of the refrigerator.
    Blind in the windowless hallway, he felt along the left wall until he found a door.
    In his study, two pale rectangles silvered the darkness directly opposite the entrance. His familiarity with the furniture arrangement allowed him to make his way quickly toward those undraped windows.
    Halfway across the room, he gasped as a figure loomed against one of the framed panels of moonlight. But at once he realized that it was Merlin, on this side of the glass, paws on the sill. Grady went to the other window.
    The night remained for a moment as night had been for millennia: full of myth, mystery, and threat, but in fact less dangerous than the day, if only because more men were sleeping now than would be sleeping after dawn. The venerable stars. The ancient moon. The old Earth, its timeworn beauty under wraps until sunrise …
    Then suddenly the night was new, as the white enigmas appeared. Having been out of sight, tight against the house, directly under the windows, they raced away from the building, past the trunk of the birch, north across the lawn. They halted at the limit of visibility, faint featureless presences, huddling together as if conferring.
    Panting agitatedly, beating his forepaws against the windowsill, the wolfhound wanted to be in the night and in pursuit.
    “Settle,” Grady said, and again, “settle.” A third issuance of the command was required when always before one had calmed the dog.
    Out of the darkness, the visitors returned, not directly but obliquely, angling east toward the front of the house.
    Dropping to the floor, beyond the rays of the moonlamp, Merlin became a disembodied presence, a canine poltergeist, knocking across the floorboards, rapping the furniture and the doorjamb with an ectoplasmic tail, abandoning the study for a different haunt.
    With the windows at his back, Grady was a blind man all the way across the room, reaching with both hands for the doorway. In the hall, he slid one palm along a wall until he reached the living room.
    Already Merlin had materialized at a front window to the right of the door, paws on the sill.
    Making his way toward the window to the left of the door, Grady bumped an end table. He heard a lamp wobbling, found it, steadied it.
    Earlier, when he opened all the draperies and shades, he hadn’t imagined chasing around the house in pursuit of circling visitors. He merely wanted to have immediate access to any window that gave a view of an area where a noise