Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  "Oh, he has a few sources of income—and a good lawyer in Kingussie, who's worked for the family for years. On top of that, my father in Chicago channels some of the profits from his business into keeping the estate intact." Murdoch could have added that it was a problem that he would almost certainly inherit one day, but he never broached that issue in his conversations with Anne. It was something that she had never touched upon or hinted at either. Murdoch was glad of that.

  "He told me you'll be opening up the Guest Wing again next month," Anne said. "Won't that make things impossible? I mean, you've got more than enough to do without worrying about looking after visitors, and conferences going on and things, surely."

  "He's got an agent in Edinburgh who takes care of all that," Murdoch informed her. "They supply their own people, who live in and handle contractors for decorating, catering, and all that stuff, so the whole thing runs itself… kind of self-contained." He paused and sipped his drink. "Say, I was meaning to tell you, Grandpa's been thinking about that suggestion of yours for extending the visitors' parking area behind the summerhouse and putting some shrubs there. He likes it. Robert's getting the agent in Edinburgh to look into it."

  "I'm glad," Anne said. "It looked too cramped and bare by the wall there."

  "Grandpa also wanted to know when you're coming down again," Murdoch said. "We thought maybe we could fix something for Saturday… dinner maybe."

  "I thought Dr. Muir was going down there on Saturday. Won't it be all business talk?"

  Murdoch shook his head. "She had to cancel out. She's still tied up with the reactor problem they're having at your place. Have you heard anything about how it's going?"

  "I'm afraid I haven't. I don't get to hear very much about that side of things. I do know it's causing a lot of concern though. We've had all kinds of people coming up from London, and over from Brussels and places."

  "I see." Murdoch shrugged. "So, how about Saturday?" he asked again. "Is it okay?"

  "Fine. I'll probably turn up around midafternoon because I've got to go into Inverness for something in the morning," Anne replied. She smiled suddenly. "I can say hello to Maxwell again. How is Maxwell?"

  "In disgrace. He's discovered that swinging on drapes is great fun. Unfortunately it breaks vases."

  Anne laughed and stretched herself out more comfortably along the sofa. After a few moments of silence she nodded her head in the direction of the vi-set screen, standing on the cabinet. "Do you want to watch the news?" she asked. "It'll be on in about three minutes."

  "Not especially. It'll just be the usual garbage."

  "I thought you might be curious to see if any more bugophants had turned up anywhere," Anne said. "You're always talking about them with Lee."

  "Bugophant" was the name that the media had given to the still unidentified objects that had been drilling holes through people and things in various widely scattered parts of the world ever since late January. The term had been coined after an American scientist had described the properties of whatever was responsible as being comparable to "something like a bug with the weight of an elephant." Eleven incidents involving these strange objects had been reported in the three months that had elapsed since January. The most recent had occurred in Scotland itself, and involved a housewife in Glasgow who had fallen down some stairs when a sudden stabbing and burning pain caused a convulsion of her leg. Subsequent examination had revealed a "bugophant burrow" through her knee.

  "Oh, I'm not interested in hearing any more inarticulate eyewitnesses and their inane accounts," Murdoch said. "When somebody finds out what's doing it, I guess we'll know anyhow. How about some music instead?"

  Anne reached out and picked up the carry-around communicator pad that controlled the apartment's electronics. She used its miniature screen to pick out a prespecified medley, and the strain of a popular orchestral piece began issuing from the built-in sound system.

  "What are your latest ideas on them?" Anne asked as she replaced the pad. "Have you had any brain waves? They seem to be baffling all the experts."

  "Not really," Murdoch confessed. "The only thing I can think of is that they have to be extraterrestrial, like some astronomers are saying."

  "A shower of high-density particles from some other part of the galaxy?"

  "Or even some other galaxy," Murdoch said. "That's where the highest-energy cosmic rays come from. Who knows? It makes about as much sense as anything else."

  "But if that's true, why do they move horizontally?" Anne queried.

  Murdoch shrugged. "Maybe it's just a probability effect. It could be that there's more chance of something or somebody getting hit by one that just grazes the surface of the Earth. Maybe most of them do come straight down, but we don't hear about those because they don't hit anything."

  "It could be, I suppose," Anne mused. She thought for a second, and an impish smile formed on her face. "I take it that you don't exactly subscribe to the explanation in the Herald last week, then," she said.

  "What explanation?"

  "They're parts of debris from an orbiting UFO that was powered by some revolutionary kind of drive based on neutronium. The Americans or the Russians mistook it for a MIRV-satellite that the other one had put up despite the treaty, fired a nuke at it, and now they're hushing it up."

  Murdoch snorted. "Garbage! That's even crazier than some of Ted's satellite stories."

  "Oh, how is Ted?" Anne inquired. "I was meaning to ask."

  "He's as well as ever. Did you know, he spent some time once at one of the places that had a bugophant? It was the place in Australia… Skycom Corporation's launch site. That was where the telescope mirror was wrecked just before it was supposed to be put up into orbit for assembly."

  "They fired a couple of people, didn't they?" Anne said. "Then they had to reinstate them with lots of apologies and compensation when more bugophants began turning up in other places."

  "That's right. In fact Ted once knew the guy who fired them. He used to handle the contracts that Skycom had for the RAF when Ted was out there. He sounded like a real mean bastard, from what Ted said."

  "Maybe he won't be so mean in such a hurry in future," Anne said. "People should keep their words soft and sweet; they may have to eat them later." She relaxed against the end of the sofa and lapsed into silence while she listened to the music and tasted her wine. Then she went on absently, "We had a doctor at university in London who was perpetually mean. He was a neurophysiologist who taught programming. Later on they found out that he had an incipient brain tumor, which was what was making him behave like that. Rather funny in a way… like having a dentist with bad teeth."

  "Did he get fixed okay?"

  "Oh, yes. He's fine now, as far as I know."

  Murdoch thought for a moment. "Was that where you learned to program real-time… the image-processing and things you talked about once?"

  "Yes. That was where I started getting interested in it anyway."

  "What kinds of other things did you program?" Murdoch asked.

  "Oh… " Anne sighed. "I tried to program computers to compose music once, but it never really worked. The programs did what they were supposed to, all right, but… oh, I don't know… the result never sounded what I would have called right."

  Murdoch smirked to himself. He couldn't resist it. "Maybe it was because your Bach was worse than your byte," he suggested.

  Anne squealed and threw a cushion. Murdoch laughed and caught it a foot in front of his head. "Ooh… That was simply awful," she moaned. She leaned back and watched despairingly while Murdoch tossed the cushion back onto the sofa, then said, "Try being serious instead. What's the latest news with your grandfather's machine? I've been hoping you'd have something exciting to tell me."

  "There is," Murdoch told her. "I was saving it until after dinner." Anne pulled herself up into a more attentive position and raised her eyebrows expectantly. Murdoch hunched forward in the chair to prop his elbows on his knees, and paused for a moment to collect his
thoughts.

  Although the machine was not, strictly speaking, secret, there was an unvoiced agreement among the members of the team that the time was not yet ripe for outsiders to be aware of the nature of the experiments. But Anne, being Anne, had been naturally curious about the work Murdoch was involved with, and as time went by he had found himself letting slip odd hints that he hoped might suffice as answers to her questions without giving too much away. In no time, however, she had fitted the pieces together for herself, and bit by bit led him to fill in the rest of the story. At first she had thought the whole thing to be an elaborate joke on Murdoch's part. However, as it became clear that he was being absolutely serious, her incredulity had given way to a rational, though astounded, acceptance of the whole thing.

  Although Charles had taken well to Anne, Murdoch had not as yet mentioned anything to him about how much she knew of what was happening at Storbannon. Although Murdoch himself had no qualms about Anne's discretion, he did have mild apprehensions regarding Charles's possible reaction. Later, Murdoch was sure, when Charles had had a chance to get to know her even better, would be a more suitable time. It was one of those things that would always sound better tomorrow.

  "We think we've more or less got the model figured out," Murdoch said. "Qualitatively, at least… A rigorous, quantitative theory will probably take years to come together. The model is dynamic in the way that we figured it had to be, but the latest indications are that it's far more stable than we'd expected."

  "How do you mean, stable?" Anne asked.

  "The particle threads that are woven together to form the timeline are not static," Murdoch replied. "They vibrate within limits defined by quantum uncertainty. In fact we're beginning to suspect that the Uncertainty Principle of classical physics might be nothing more than a manifestation of the fluctuations in threads passing through a particular universe."

  "Yes, I remember that," Anne said. "What we call chance events have their roots down at that level. That was how it was possible for the timeloops not to be permanent fixtures."

  "Right. Sometimes a quantum-level event can have effects at the macroscopic level. When that happens, the timeline can reconfigure itself spontaneously such that the part of the total pattern affected by the event can alter itself macroscopically all the way through from that point on."

  "Let's just get this straight," Anne said, raising a hand. "While you were talking, I just happened, for no reason at all, to brush my hair out of my eyes with my right hand."

  "Okay."

  "And from what you've said before, there's another 'me,' who exists ten seconds back along the timeline we're on, who hasn't done that yet."

  "Right."

  "Now you're saying that in her universe, random quantum events could be taking place differently to the way they did in ours. For instance, something at the atomic level could perhaps decide the difference between a finely balanced neuron firing or not firing, and that neuron could be enough to trigger a different behavior pattern. So she might do the same thing as I did, only with her left hand." Anne paused and looked inquiringly at Murdoch. He nodded. She continued, "That action would reconfigure the part of the timeline that contains me so that a new me would exist, right at this instant, whose memory and everything would be consistent with the new thread pattern: I'd have used my left hand, remembered that I'd used my left hand, and I wouldn't know anything about it ever having been any other way."

  "That's right," Murdoch confirmed. "And for all we could ever know, it might have happened in exactly that way, except you'd have switched from left to right."

  "And that kind of thing could be going on spontaneously all the time?"

  "Yes."

  "Sounds spooky."

  "Don't worry about it. You've been living with it all your life."

  Anne pulled a face. "Very well, I won't. So where does the stability part come in?"

  "That's where it gets interesting," Murdoch told her. "You see, at first we had this vision of the whole pattern being in a state of tremendous agitation all the time… with the threads coming together and bouncing apart, and reconfiguring all kinds of events at the macroscopic level from instant to instant. But in fact it doesn't happen like that; the timeline doesn't change macroscopically at anything like the rate at which quantum events take place. At the large-scale level, the system is amazingly stable."

  "So there aren't millions of me's spaced microseconds apart over the last couple of minutes, all deciding to brush their hair with different hands."

  "Exactly. The overwhelming probability is that the situation will stay stable… in other words, the way you remember it. It's as if there were some kind of noise-filtering process that operates as you go up from the smaller, unpredictable level up through to the larger, more stable level. Only very, very rarely does a quantum event avalanche upward in scale and produce significant changes that are tangible. So at the everyday level things become more determinate, but chance still gets its innings."

  "I see." Anne leaned back and drummed her fingertips lightly on the back of the sofa while she digested what Murdoch had said. After a while, a puzzled frown formed on her brow. She looked back at him. "How could you possibly test something like that experimentally?"

  "By realizing that we'd never thought of something obvious."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Here's a paradox," Murdoch said. "We program the computer to do a very simple thing. We program it to examine its record for some point in the past and decide whether or not a signal was received at that point. If one wasn't, the computer sends one there; if one was, the computer doesn't send anything. Now let that program run continually. What happens?" He sat back and waited while Anne frowned with concentration as she stepped mentally through the tortuous logic of visualizing timeloops.

  "It's absurd," she said slowly at last. Murdoch nodded in satisfaction. She went on, "You'd keep going round the same loop forever. There wouldn't be any way out of it." Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as she remembered what Murdoch had said a few moments previously. "It's obvious, isn't it… the first thing that you'd imagine anyone would think of. So what are you saying—that you never thought of trying it?" She paused as a new light of understanding flowed into her eyes. "Or should I say that if you did try it, you've no recollection that you did?"

  "You've hit it right on the head," Murdoch told her. "We're nearly at the end of April now, and we've been running the machine since January. And in all that time something that should have been first on the list of things to try never occurred to us. But if we had tried it, the machine would have gone into an infinite loop. What does that say to you?"

  "There must have been timelines on which you did try it."

  "Yes," Murdoch agreed, nodding. "That loop would have sustained itself permanently, unless some quantum fluctuation got us out of it. For example, somebody who existed on the timeline inside the loop might have made a decision for no particular reason to discontinue the experiment, or maybe somebody ahead of the loop decided not to commence it in the first place… or, maybe… never thought of it in the first place! It would have to be something with billions-to-one odds against, but it would happen sooner or later if the loop iterated indefinitely. When it did happen, the loop would disappear, and on the final timeline we'd end up right where we are now in April, with no record preserved that any experiment like that was ever performed."

  "And having acted very much out of character," Anne remarked.

  "Which is just what you'd expect from those odds," Murdoch said.

  "So how did you test it?" Anne asked again. "Or did you have to infer that indirectly?"

  "No, we found a way," Murdoch replied. "We set up a program just like I said, but in such a way that it incremented a count every time it went around the loop. When the count reached a preset number, the program discontinued the test. So there was a mechanism to break out of the loop built in. The loop couldn't become infinite. Tests like that gave us enough data to f
igure out how the loops are structured. Later on we included random factors, which was how we managed to measure the stability. That was the part that was really unexpected. You have to run tens of millions of numbers to get a handful that don't match."

  Anne subsided into silence for a while, and then picked up the communicator pad again. "Would you like a coffee?" she asked.

  "Good idea."

  She tapped a brief code into the pad, and in the kitchen the percolator began filling itself. "So where do you go next?" she asked. "Has your grandfather lifted the ban on ad hoc dialogues with the future yet? I'm dying to find out what happens then. Just think how we could clean up at the races."

  Murdoch shook his head. "Not yet. There are still a few more things that he wants to find out about first. The model seems to imply some dimension of 'supertime' that the patterns can reconfigure in. He wants to know what the relationship is between time and supertime. There are reasons for believing that causal influences can only propagate along the threads at a finite rate in supertime. What's the rate? What's the rate at which tau waves propagate? He wants to know a lot more about things like that."

  "It certainly sounds as if there's still a lot more to do," Anne said. She sighed. "Oh, I do wish you'd clear up this business about my knowing what you're doing down there. I'm sure your grandfather wouldn't mind as much as you think. I'd love to be able to help in some way, even if it was only by debugging a few programs or something. Are you going to talk to him about it?"

  "Okay," Murdoch said. "I'll talk to him tomorrow. Maybe you're right."

  "Do… please."

  "I will. I already said I would."

  "Oh, dear, aren't I getting to be an old nag. Okay." Anne smiled, got up from the sofa, and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back a minute or so later, carrying two steaming mugs and some mints on a tray.

  "There was something else I remembered while you were gone," Murdoch said as she set the tray down. "Grandpa has figured out another interesting thing: The quantum-level vibrations of basic particles can absorb energy from tau waves."