The Start of Eternity/0

Noÿs Lambent sat on the windowsill of the large bedroom window that looked out over and the Menai Strait and the Isle of Anglesey. For eight years Noÿs and Andrew Harlan had lived at the north end of Bangor in Gwynedd county, Wales. This was a favorite time of day for Noÿs, with her two children asleep and the warm summer evening slowly giving way to night.

The tranquility of the evening was shattered when a large cumulus cloud to the northwest glowed orange in the light of the setting sun. Noÿs could not stop herself from thinking about mushroom clouds and atomic bombs. It had been Noÿs and Andrew who ten years earlier artificially stimulated the study of nuclear fission and ultimately made it possible for the atomic bomb to be developed in this decade and used before the end of the war with Japan.

Noÿs and Andrew did not want to attract attention by trying to get information about progress in secret atomic weapons programs, so it had been rather agonizing while they waited for evidence that they had successfully stimulated research into nuclear fission. When civilian nuclear research was quietly absorbed into government weapons projects during the war it was clear that something was in the works, but the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been the first public notice that nuclear fission had been understood and achieved. Noÿs and Andrew were now waiting for the other shoe to drop...inevitably, nuclear fusion would come next.

The problem was that in other Realities nuclear power had not been unleashed on Earth until after nationalism was in decline, the world was linked by global communications and trade and fossil fuels had been depleted and nuclear power was welcomed and there was no need for nuclear weapons. Having unnaturally accelerated the development of nuclear science, Noÿs and Andrew then turned their interests towards Earth's development of other technologies such as genetics and computing. Noÿs was particularly concerned that she and her descendants would become recognizable as genetic aberrations as soon as the technology for gene analysis was developed. Andrew was concerned with the need to assure that electronic computing technology was developed...it would be needed in order to allow fusion energy to be harnessed on Earth as a safe and cheap source of energy. Andrew was away from home on a visit with Alan Turing. Turing was part of one of the three research projects in England that were starting to work towards an understanding of how to build electronic computers with programs held in rapid and efficient electronic memory banks.

Before becoming pregnant with their first child, Noÿs had worked for a time with William Astbury. Posing as a research technician, Noÿs had made possible the first successful x-ray crystallographic analysis of DNA. Now that the war was over, biophysicists were rushing towards success in their attempt to understand the molecular structure of DNA. But for eight years now Noÿs had stayed close to home and devoted all of her efforts to raising her two children. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the front door knocker.