“In your case, you don’t have to. It’s already present, but if your speech spins the context…” His eyes brightened. “Researchers at the Hado Institute Australia have shown how words can affect the physical world. Spoken words create vibrations. Each word has its own unique resonance—its own pattern of vibration. They spoke different words, both positive and negative, to water before freezing it, transforming it into its crystalline state. Water exposed to the words ‘angel,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘life’ formed dazzling, symmetrical crystals. Water exposed to words such as ‘dirty,’ ‘devil,’ and ‘death’ became malformed, cracked, and burst, almost like something had exploded from within.

“A sound wave is, in essence, a disturbance moving through a medium, shifting energy from a starting point to an ending point. And where there is energy, there is information. We detect sound waves through our ears, which transfers the information to our brain, where it is translated into sound. But there is more information in sound than our brains can decipher.”

“If sounds are affecting the physical world around us, why are we not noticing?” King asked.

“We are limited by what we can sense. In the same way that our ears cannot hear the information conveyed in every sound, our other senses might miss the results. Take steganography for instance.”

King nodded. He was familiar with the use of steganography in military applications. World War II microdots, Morse code in fabric patterns, and sign language hidden in photographs had all been used in military history. In more modern applications, terrorists had used the technology to communicate through coded message board avatars.

Davidson opened his laptop, tapped the keys, and brought up a Web site. He showed them a photo on the screen.

“Though this looks like an ordinary photo of an oceanside park, it is much more. By adjusting the pixels minutely, you can encode text or other photos within an image and it is imperceptible to the human eye. Decoded, this picture reads…”

He clicked on the image, which opened a page of text:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

“Poe,” Alexander said. “Part of his sonnet to science. Cute.”

Davidson waggled his finger. “Perhaps even more applicable to your query is the spectrogram.”

King sat up straighter. Much of what the professor had said either sounded like bunk, or he already knew. But spectrograms were new to him and he suspected the man was about to uncover a nugget of truth.