Rolf hadn’t slept in days. Not really. He’d spent every moment he could deconstructing the faulty fix. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as close to an answer as he felt he should be. He was on to something, but it would mean that he’d have to start reconfiguring from scratch, and even then he’d have to test it. And for the first time in his brilliant life, the last thing he wanted to do was run numbers.
He sat in front of the computer, the parallel lines of the couple lost in time following the longest path he’d seen for them yet. He could predict based on the numbers the computer was spitting out when they’d be jumping away from this time to the next point in the slipstream, but big deal. What he needed was a way to harness where they jumped to instead of the random landings, not to mention the unpredictable gap between the out-of-sync arrivals.
“Round and round and round you go. Where you’ll stop … nobody knows.” Rolf recited the rhyme miserably, closed his beady little eyes, and finally let himself sleep.