Bob Wrenchel Looked Away from the....

Thousand+ Words for Dec 23, 2025

Bob Wrenchel looked away from the screen for a moment and caught the eye of Johnnyangel Frost, who was seated across the corner of the conference table at his right. “Didn’t somebody important say that everything which is not forbidden is compulsory?”

Frost nodded. “That was T.H. White, sir.” she said.

“Ah,” Wrenchel said. “Never heard of him.”

The briefer saw that the general was engaged in conversation, so she discreetly paused until his attention returned to her. “He was a novelist in the forties and fifties,” Frost said. “Wrote Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, among others.”

Despite the fact that Frost was speaking sotto voce to him, Wrenchel saw that the young briefer had paused so as not to interrupt. “Go ahead, Captain,” he said, returning his attention to the presentation.

“Ah, yes, sir.” She pressed a button on the podium and the screen flashed to the next slide. It was a diagram, yellow figures on a navy-blue field, three spheres with ellipses describing their complicated paths in and around each other. “This diagram presents the relative positions of the three stars at Time C, which is the point at which the magnetic field tops out along the Z axis, as you can see,” she said. She took a couple of steps away from the podium and used a laser pointer to throw a red spot onto one of the figures on the screen. “This star rotates retrograde around the central two, and that’s the key to the magnetic-field reversal. The period of the outer star is a whole-number multiple of the period of the two inner ones around each other, and that’s certainly no accident,” she said.

“So, you’re prepared to say that this system was tailored in this way?” Wrenchel asked.

“Not exactly, sir,” she said. “It probably settled down to this configuration based on harmonics dictated by the masses of the stars. It’s the relative masses between Giesel A, B, and C that are the unusual factor.”

“So the mass drives the rotation pattern and period,” Wrenchel said.

“That’s correct, sir.” “Go ahead,” he said. The briefer returned to the screen, moving her laser dot to the next figure. “This star, Giesel B, is 14.325 times as massive as its partner, Giesel C. They are only 38,000 miles apart, with a rotational period of 22 minutes. The center of that rotation is only 7,200 miles above the Giesel B surface.”

“Excuse me,” Frost interrupted. “They’re tidally locked, right?”

“B is locked to A,” the captain said, “but C is rotating relative to B. Not very fast, though—about seven times a minute.”

“So the fields from A and B are braiding together as they move relative to the local system, is that right?”

“Yes. The braided field is then influenced by the rotation of Giesel C around the pair.”

“Dave, what can you tell us about the magnetic effects here?” Wrenchel said to one of the officers seated at the table.

“Sir, the whole thing is very unusual, and—” He stopped talking and suddenly stood up, moving to the front of the room. The captain stepped aside wordlessly and Dave Henry stepped up on the low stage and extended his arm, finger pointed, and touched a spot near where the circle representing Giesel C was. “Here, this is the critical factor. The braided fields produced by the inner pair are spinning around, and then they get flipped back and forth by this sucker as it rotates,” he said. “The whole thing is tuned just right to create the effect on the planet, although we can’t say exactly how it is happening.”

“Now, the planet,” Wrenchel said. The briefer stepped back to the podium as Dave was moving back to his seat at the table.

“The planet,” she said, forwarding the presentation to the next slide. It showed the Giesel A, B, and C as much smaller dots crowded together and the path of the one planet that rotated around the triplet. Its orbit was highly elliptical, coming very close to Giesel C’s ellipse on the low end and far away from the triplet on the high end. “Here we see the eccentricity of the orbit, and this contributes to the effect,” she said. “On the low end here, the planet moves through tightly spaced magnetic lines, and then here, on the high end, the lines are less dense.”

“The intensity of the field at the lower end is really incredible, sir,” another of the officers seated at the table offered. “We estimate at least 820 megateslas on each pass. We just don’t have any theory on magnetic densities of this magnitude.”

“But the planet’s loop is related to this field?” Wrenchel said.

The officer looked down at his legal pad; he appeared to be struggling for words. “We’re not prepared to say that, sir,” he said finally. “We’re definitely measuring an asymmetrical flow of time on the surface. Something screwy is going on down there, that’s for sure, and I’m not entirely sure it’s a natural phenomenon.”

The captain, still at the podium, looked up from her papers in surprise. That fact was not a part of the briefing.

“Asymmetrical flow? And that’s not just relativistic dilation?” Wrenchel asked. A long time ago, he had been a physicist. The field had progressed beyond him, but he still had a grasp of the basics of relativistic theory.

“Definitely not,” the officer at the table responded. “There’s a reversal of time flow that starts a little after the perigee and continues until well into the second quadrant of the orbit,” he said. “Now, that’s on the surface. The effect is diluted the farther away from the surface you go. It doesn’t seem to exist except where the flux density is above about 630 megateslas.”

“How long does the reversal last?” Wrenchel asked.

“It’s about sixteen days, as far as we can figure.”

“Sixteen days?” Wrenchel looked up at the briefer. “The whole orbit is only, what? Twenty-eight or so days?”

“Twenty-seven days, fourteen hours, sir,” the captain responded. The room was silent, but everyone in it was performing the same math in their head: twenty-seven minus sixteen. And they all got eleven days as their result. “That’s where we’re at now, sir. Members are reminded that this briefing is classified and compartmented D7, Yankee Tango. This concludes the briefing.”

“Okay, thanks, everybody,” Wrenchel said, pushing back his chair. “Dave, you stick around a minute, okay?” Dave nodded. “Billy, you too,” he said to the officer who had given him the duration of the time reversal on the planet’s surface as it passed through the intense twisted and churning magnetic field produced by Giesel A, B, and C’s odd dance with each other.

The other officers cleared the room, leaving only Wrenchel and Frost at the one end and Dave and Billy at the other. Once they were all gone, Wrenchel spoke. “Okay, have I got this straight? The planet moves forward in time as normal until it comes down to perigee, then time reverses and it flows backward for sixteen days, then it reverses again and goes forward until the next perigee?”

Dave and Billy looked at each other nervously. “That’s about it, sir,” Billy said. “That’s what our instruments are telling us.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal,” Frost said. “Twenty-seven steps forward and sixteen back, that’s a net eleven forward on every orbit.”

“And we’re sure this is not a relativistic effect?”

“Doesn’t seem to be, sir,” Dave said. “Relativity doesn’t work this way. The reversal is sudden and absolute—the flow seems to be going from full forward to full backward, no dilation or transition at all.”

“Whom have we got in the area?” Wrenchel said to Frost.

She shrugged. “It’s a long way off the beaten path.”

“Yeah,” Wrenchel frowned. “Okay, thanks, guys.” The officers took the hint, rose, and departed the briefing room. Frost still sat in her seat as did the general.

“Walk with me over to the center,” he said to her as he rose from his seat and started gathering the papers in front of him. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“Sure,” she said. “You hungry? Let’s get some lunch.”

The two of them departed the briefing room and strolled down the long hallway toward the double keypass doors that led to the building’s front atrium and the main entrance beyond.