Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  "If such things ever existed, which to say the least is very unlikely in my opinion, then most of them will already have extinguished themselves," Max Wehrbaum declared. "After all, weren't there supposed to have been two million of them? Perhaps a few statistically extreme cases have survived for this long. If so, then in a few more days they will have disappeared too."

  "So there's really no problem," Vickers said. "If we did manufacture them here, which I very much doubt, all we have to do is turn the wick down a bit when we get the reactors fixed." He paused and reconsidered his words for a moment, then looked up at Elizabeth. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound flippant. Obviously if it did turn out that you were right, we'd all have some very serious problems to think about. It's just that… well, I can't see it… never in a million years." He shrugged, spread his hands, and left it at that. Elizabeth looked appealingly at Courtney.

  "I'm sorry, Elizabeth," Courtney said in a regretful voice. "But I think we all agree with Simon. I must say, I wish you'd given me a better idea of what this was going to be about before we called this meeting. If you could show us something tangible to suggest even that what you've said is possible, let alone fact, then of course that would put an entirely different light on things. We'd have to reappraise the whole world fusion program from basics." He sighed and waved toward the map. "But we need something more convincing than that, I'm afraid. Until I've seen something that's more specific, I'm certainly not going to lose any sleep over it."

  "Och, don't worry yourself about it," Charles said from the screen in Elizabeth's office a half hour later. "You did your best, and I appreciate it."

  "So where do we go from here?" Elizabeth asked with a heavy sigh. "Are we going to have to tell them the whole story?"

  "It looks like it, I'm afraid," Charles said. "I'll talk to Ralph Courtney myself and see if I can come up and talk to him at Burghead. I'll probably bring Ted along with me as well."

  Elizabeth bit her lip and looked unhappy at the idea. "Is it absolutely necessary?" she asked. "You know, I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps we're overreacting a little bit. If the holes are going to disappear before much longer, what's the point in you coming up to Burghead to tell Ralph and the rest something that they'll find out eventually in their own time anyway? Why can't you simply stay out of it and leave them to it?"

  Charles shook his head gravely.

  "If I were certain that the holes will just go away, I'd do exactly that," he replied. "But I'm far from certain. I've been running the accretion functions all morning here with Murdoch. We're not sure yet whether or not some of the expressions are convergent so we can't be absolutely sure, but I'm beginning to suspect that the holes won't just go away. If the tau losses extend the lifetimes sufficiently for the accretion rate to overtake the Hawking depletion rate, the holes will become permanent. After that, they'll only be able to get bigger."

  Chapter 21

  The results of Charles and Murdoch's attempt to calculate what would ultimately become of the miniature black holes were inconclusive. The two of them spent the rest of the day examining an alternative method, working through the evening and into the night with Lee to set up the equations in a form that could be submitted to the datagrid for analysis on the network computers. The task was long and arduous. At three o'clock in the morning, by which time the job was still a long way from being completed, they called a halt for the night. There was, after all, a limit.

  Murdoch was just finishing a late breakfast in the kitchen the next morning, when Cartland ambled in holding a single sheet of glossy paper. Murdoch recognized it as hardcopy from one of the datagrid terminals, either the one in the lab or the one in Charles's study. Cartland looked around in mild surprise. "Where's Lee this morning?" he inquired.

  "Still in bed," Murdoch answered. "I guess he overdid things a bit last night. He'll show up later. What's that you've got there?"

  "Something I copied from the News about an hour ago. Thought you might know something about it. Even if you didn't, I presumed you'd be interested." Cartland slid the sheet across the table and watched while Murdoch took in the headline over a slice of toast and marmalade: MINISTER DENIES COVER-UP OF HEALTH HAZARD AT SCOTTISH FUSION PLANT. Murdoch moved his coffee cup to one side and drew the sheet nearer to him to scan the text. It read:

  In answer to a question raised in the House yesterday, the Minister of Energy Utilisation and Power, Mr Stanley Newell, emphatically denied recent allegations that a hitherto unsuspected and hazardous form of radiation has been discovered, which originates in the process of nuclear fusion. The questioner, Mr Francis Booth, Conservative Member for Tyneside South, where a new fusion reactor is planned for completion in 2015, was referring to the claim made earlier this week by a spokesman for the anti-nuclear action-group 'Pandora' concerning the sudden outbreak of an as yet unidentified sickness among technical personnel at the Burghead plant, on the Solway Firth.

  The EFC's Heavy-Ion Fusion Facility at Burghead, the world's largest project to date of its type, was completed last year. Since completion of the construction phase, trials have been continuing in preparation for the plant's scheduled commencement of full commercial operation in July. Within the last seven days, eight employees of the plant, all of them technical personnel who normally work in close proximity to the reactor vessels at the center of the facility, have been admitted to hospital suffering from the sudden onset of symptoms that have so far defied diagnosis. They appear to be associated with a malfunctioning of the central nervous system, the precise nature of which remains obscure. According to Pandora, a new type of hazardous radiation, originating in the fusion process, is responsible for the outbreak, details of which are being deliberately withheld following Government intervention.

  In part of his statement in reply to these claims, Mr Newell said, "It is true that eight members of the Burghead technical staff have, within approximately the last week, become victims of an affliction which has not yet been positively identified. The suggestion, however, of this being a result of a form of radiation attributable to the fusion process and hitherto unknown to science, is utterly without foundation of any kind. This being so, the further suggestion, that information pertaining to such mythical radiation is being withheld from the public domain as part of a conspiracy of silence between certain unnamed departments of His Majesty's Government and the governments of other Consortium nations, is ludicrous in the extreme."

  Dr M. J. Waring, Head of the Burghead facility's Medical Department, told our reporter during a video-call interview, "Nothing that we have observed is even remotely suggestive of the effects of radiation-induced phenomena. Thank you. That is all I have to say."

  Dr Elizabeth Muir, Principal Physicist at Burghead, was stated as being in conference yesterday afternoon and unavailable for comment.

  The report went on to give a canned history of the Burghead plant and a few details of its planned schedule for the coming months. Interestingly, Murdoch noted, there was no mention of the erosion problem, which had already made nonsense of the planned schedule.

  "No, I hadn't heard about this," Murdoch said when he had finished reading. "That place must have a jinx on it. As if they didn't have enough problems already."

  "I'm surprised Anne never mentioned anything about it," Cartland remarked. "What's the matter with you two? Don't you talk to each other these days?"

  "Oh, sure we do," Murdoch told him, missing the tone of voice. "I guess it's just doctors' professional ethics: They don't like talking about things like that." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Unless of course there is something funny going on that she's been told not to talk about."

  "That's what I was wondering," Cartland said. "Do you think it could have anything to do with these bugger-whatsits? You know—possible focusing of the orbits at the point of origin or something like that."

  Murdoch thought for a moment while he finished the last of his toast. "I can't see it," he said. "The doctors would have known if they were b
ugophants, but from what it says here, it sounds like something completely different. More likely somebody shipped Burghead a case of lousy salmon."

  "Unless somebody somewhere didn't want people connecting bugophants with Burghead," Cartland suggested. "Maybe they took Elizabeth more seriously than she thought."

  "That's a thought." Murdoch frowned and drummed his fingers on the table. "I wonder… " He glanced across at the newssheet again and then looked up. "Do you think Anne might say something about it if I called her? She's bound to know more about what's going on than whoever wrote this. Now it's in the news, she might be in more of a mind to talk about it."

  "You tell me, old boy," Cartland answered.

  Murdoch downed the last of his coffee and got up from the table. "I'll call her right away," he said as he headed for the door.

  "Oh, don't tell me!" Anne exclaimed from the vi-set in the sitting room a few minutes later. "We've had every neurotic and freak in the country calling us. Just now I had a little old lady from somewhere saying it was caused by breathing in neutrons. She'd read all about them. She was sure that if we all wore surgical masks soaked in lemon juice, it wouldn't happen again. Just trying to help, I suppose, but we really could do without it. Dr. Waring has refused to talk to any more of them, so guess who's getting it all."

  "But what is it?" Murdoch asked. "All I've seen is what Ted just showed me. Has it got anything to do with the reactors?"

  Anne glanced off-screen and lowered her voice instinctively. "I can't really say very much right now. I'll talk to you about it when I see you at Storbannon tomorrow. We don't know what it is, but it's almost certainly viral so you can forget all this nonsense that's being talked about it having anything to do with fusion. In some ways it resembles a highly virulent and extraordinarily accelerated form of multiple sclerosis. None of the experts we've talked to have heard of anything like it before."

  "So how come all the people who've got it just happen to work in the central reactor complex?" Murdoch asked. "That sounds like too much of a coincidence… Or isn't it true?"

  Anne sighed. "Yes, it's true. But there must be some other factor they all have in common that's less obvious. The records are being processed to see what else there is that correlates with what; also we're doing a check through London to find out if anything similar has been identified anywhere else. But at the moment, it's still a mystery. There's—" She glanced away again. Her expression changed, and she turned back apologetically. "Oh dear, something's just cropped up. Murdoch, I'll have to go. Sorry. I'll call you back later when it's not so busy." At that moment a flashing red caption appeared across the screen, superposed on Anne's face, to announce: URGENT CALL HOLDING.

  "Something's waiting to come in here too," Murdoch said. "Talk to you later, okay?"

  "As soon as I can." Anne's face vanished in a blaze of colors that promptly reassembled themselves into the features of a well-groomed woman, neatly dressed, and somewhere in her mid-forties.

  "Hello," she said. "This is Mr. Courtney's assistant calling from EFC, Burghead. Could I speak to Sir Charles Ross, please?"

  "Sure," Murdoch replied. "Hold on a moment. I'll have to transfer you." He tapped in a code to route the call to Charles's study, waited for the Accepted indicator to light up at the bottom of the screen, and cleared down. If the call meant what he thought it meant, Charles would probably be going up to Burghead to see Courtney later that day. That meant there would no doubt be a panic to get the analysis up and running on the datagrid before Charles went. Murdoch sighed. It was going to be another one of those days. He walked out of the sitting room and went upstairs to pull Lee out of bed.

  It was approaching lunchtime when Murdoch entered the lab with the latest set of numbers that Charles had produced upstairs in the study. He found Lee slumped back in the chair at the desk, screwing his face into knots and rubbing his eyelids with his thumb and fingers. Lee stopped and blinked uncertainly over his hands at the piles of hardcopy and flowcharts strewn around him.

  "Seeing code on the walls?" Murdoch said with a grin. "I'm not surprised."

  "Huh?" Lee looked up, aware of Murdoch's presence for the first time. "Oh, hi, Doc. Yeah… I guess I've been hitting it a bit hard. Maybe I need lenses. It all went hazy for a while."

  "Are you okay?" The grin vanished abruptly from Murdoch's face.

  "Oh, sure… Seems to have cleared itself up now."

  "How are we doing?"

  "Just about there. All I need now are some boundary parameters that Charles was working on upstairs, and it should be all set to run."

  "I've got 'em here," Murdoch said. "Grandpa and Ted are taking off for Burghead now. They're leaving us to get the analysis running. How long do you figure from now?"

  "Aw… say an hour or two to check through the program… allow a little bit for bugs… I think we should have it into the network and running by mid-afternoon."

  "And how long to run?"

  "Oh… " Lee thought for a second. "If the network loading is about what it usually is on Friday afternoons, I'd say six, maybe seven hours."

  "We should know by tonight then, huh?"

  "Guess so."

  A short silence followed. Murdoch put the sheet of figures down on the desk and sat back on the edge of the main console. "And what if the eta derivative comes out positive?" he asked at last.

  "Then there won't be a darn thing anybody can do about it," Lee said slowly.

  There were more errors in the program than they had expected, which was unusual for Lee, but by five o'clock the job was at last loaded into the datagrid via the terminal in the lab. Lee was feeling fatigued by this time and went upstairs to lie down for a few hours to catch up on the sleep he had lost the previous night.

  Shortly afterward, Murdoch was walking past the door of Charles's room when Robert came out, evidently in a hurry, carrying some of Charles's shirts in one hand and a brown leather traveling bag in the other.

  "What gives?" Murdoch inquired.

  "Och, I wish I knew," Robert replied. "There's an awful fuss suddenly broken out about something. Your grandfather called about ten minutes ago from Burghead. Himself and Mr. Cartland are going to Brussels tonight with some of the directors on the seven-fifteen flight from Edinburgh. I don't know what's going on, I'm sure."

  "They'll never make it," Murdoch said flatly. "It's almost six now."

  "Burghead are flying them to the airport in one of their airbuses. They're on their way here now to pick up some things."

  "Want a hand with that stuff?"

  "Ah, it's good of you to offer, but you've work enough of your own to be worrying about today," Robert said.

  "We're through," Murdoch told him. "I'm on free time now. Here, I'll take those things. How long have we got?"

  Twenty minutes later, Murdoch and Robert were standing in one corner of the tennis court with a small pile of bags, watching a black dot grow in the sky above the crestline of Ben Moroch's southwest ridge. The dot gradually took on the shape of a short-haul VTOL transporter, slowed to a halt two hundred feet over their heads, and then descended smoothly to land in the center of the court. Before the last whines of its engines had died away, a door opened and Cartland jumped out. He ran over to help with the luggage as Murdoch and Robert approached, and at the same time Charles appeared in the frame of the doorway.

  "They're convinced," Charles yelled down before Murdoch could ask anything. "We're meeting some of the EFC people in Brussels tomorrow morning. It should be quite a party. They're flying in from all over Europe tonight."

  "On Saturday morning?" Murdoch said, surprised.

  "That's the only time you'll get them all together at this kind of short notice," Charles told him. "How did it go this afternoon?"

  "Okay. It's running now. There were a couple of bugs though, so it won't complete until sometime late tonight."

  "Call us in the morning with the results," Charles said. "We'll be at EFC Headquarters from ten o'clock onward. Ask for Claude
Montassier. Got that?"

  "Where will you be staying tonight?" Murdoch asked. "I could call you there."

  "I don't know. Somebody will be meeting us off the plane. They're arranging all that."

  The pilot appeared from somewhere at the nose end and took the last of the bags from Robert to hoist it aboard. "That the lot?" Cartland said, getting ready to climb back inside. "Good show. Thanks for the effort, chaps. Well, I suppose we'd better be toddling along. No time for tea and all that."

  Elizabeth squeezed into the doorway from behind Charles. "Hello, Murdoch," she said. "Hello, Robert. It looks as if the cat's really among the pigeons now."

  "Glad it worked out," Murdoch said. "I guess they're not so mad now about having their time wasted yesterday, huh?"

  "No. They see things a bit differently now. Well, we'll see you when we see you."

  "Sure. Have a good trip. I'll call you tomorrow."

  "Aye, thanks a lot, Murdoch," Charles called out as he moved back inside to make room for Cartland. "I don't know when we'll be back. It all depends on how it goes." Cartland climbed in. The pilot closed the door and disappeared in the direction of the nose. A minute later the engine started, its sound swelled to a loud note, and the VTOL lifted off. Murdoch and Robert watched as it climbed and turned southward across the glen, and then they turned and began walking back to the house.

  As soon as they got inside, Morna informed Murdoch that Anne was holding on the vi-set in the sitting room. Murdoch went on through and saw that Anne was wearing a white coat and was framed by the familiar background of her office at Burghead.

  "Still working?" he asked in surprise.

  "It's been absolutely hectic all day. That's why I didn't call back earlier," she told him. "I'm just about to leave. Is everything still okay for tomorrow?"

  "It's all changed. Things have been hectic here too. Grandpa and Ted have had to make a rush trip to Belgium. In fact they just left here a few minutes ago in an EFC jet. I guess dinner tomorrow's off. There's no reason why you shouldn't still come down though."