Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  "Very good, Dr. Patterson. They'll be leaving immediately."

  "Thank you." Anne cut the call and turned to Murdoch, who was still watching speechlessly. Her face was grave. "Has he been drowsy for the last day or two?" she asked. "Lack of energy, sleeping a lot… temporary blurrings of vision?"

  "Yes… he has," Murdoch mumbled. "I thought he'd been working too hard."

  "Fits of giddiness? Difficulty in coordinating movements?"

  "He never mentioned anything like that, but then he isn't the kind of guy who would." He swallowed hard. "You've seen this before, haven't you? It's the same thing you've been getting at the plant."

  Before Anne could reply, the call-tone sounded again. This time the call was put straight through, and showed a swarthy, gray-bearded man dressed in what looked like a surgical smock. "Dr. Patterson," he said at once. "Surely you're not still working at this time on a Friday."

  "Hello, Dr. Ellis. No, I'm not, but we have an emergency that I'm arranging to be sent straight to you. His name is Lee Walker. You'll be getting all the details soon via computer from Inverness. An ambulance is on its way here to collect him."

  Ellis's expression became more serious. "How positive is it?" he asked. "Has voluntary motor deterioration set in yet?"

  "Possibly incipient. The diagnosis is tentative at this stage, but I don't want to take any chances. Listlessness and lethargy for the last two days, temporary visual disturbances, and suspected giddiness. Right now we have complete loss of vision, extreme dilation of pupils, and no stimulus responses; involuntary contractions of right arm and partial loss of control of lower limbs; pulse fifty-four; skin cold and moist; stiffening of hands and arms under sedation."

  Ellis listened and nodded his head slowly.

  "It could be another one, right enough," he said. "Very well. I'll have them prepare for reception right away."

  Chapter 23

  It was one-thirty in the morning when Murdoch and Anne came out of a side door of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and trudged across the almost empty parking lot to his car. A wind was beginning to blow from the west, and it was just starting to rain. Anne had flown to Glasgow with Lee in the ambulance; Murdoch had driven, leaving Anne's car at the restaurant in Tomatin to be collected later.

  In the Intensive Care Unit of the Infirmary, Ellis had confirmed Anne's suspicions and admitted Lee to the Special Isolation section, where the other cases from Burghead were interned. Ellis had also mentioned to them in confidence that the most recent reports from London had revealed a flood of identical cases appearing in many parts of the world, but especially in the West Coast region of the United States. The victims were from all walks of life, and it seemed safe to conclude that whatever the cause of the sickness was, it had nothing to do with working around fusion reactors. If anything, the common link seemed to be that all of the victims had been in the western United States around eight months previously; Lee, for example, had been living there, and the eight from Burghead had all been members of a party that had spent some time in California in early September as part of an exchange program of European and American fusion scientists. From what had been learned so far from the earlier cases, Lee's condition could be expected to deteriorate rapidly toward total disruption of the central nervous system. To date there had been no fatalities, but all the signs pointed inevitably in that direction, probably within several weeks. As far as Ellis knew, the cause had still not been identified, and no cure was even remotely in sight. There was nothing more that anybody could do.

  Murdoch was still shaky from the shock when he climbed into the car next to Anne and closed the door. He sat for a long time, staring out at the streetlamps through the streaky patterns of rain and dust on the windshield. The occasional lights from traffic passing by outside the Infirmary grounds added to the bleakness and emptiness of the scene. And the emptiness of Storbannon would be even worse to return to. Tonight of all nights, he didn't want to be alone. Even as he thought it, he felt Anne's hand close around his in the darkness of the car. He turned his head and saw that she was watching him.

  "We can pick my car up tomorrow," she whispered simply. Murdoch barely nodded by way of reply. There was no need to say anything.

  They arrived at Storbannon, tired and exhausted, in the early hours of the morning. Despite the events that had taken place that night, one thing couldn't be allowed to wait. When they walked in, Murdoch told Anne that there was something of crucial importance that he would have to check in the lab.

  "You look as if you could do with a strong coffee," Anne said as they hung their coats on the pegs inside the main entrance. "Would you like me to make some?"

  "Good idea," Murdoch told her. "Black with plenty of sugar."

  "You go on down to the lab. I'll bring it when it's ready." Anne disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and Murdoch hurried downstairs.

  As he switched on the lights in the lab, a sleepy-eyed Maxwell detached himself from the shadows in the doorway and followed him in. "Getting lonely, huh, little fella?" Murdoch grunted as he sat down at the datagrid terminal to access the results file of the analysis. Maxwell rubbed himself against Murdoch's ankle and began purring. Murdoch smiled faintly and turned his eyes away as the screen in front of him filled with mathematical expressions. He scanned down them, and then pulled over a pile of hardcopy that Charles and he had used earlier to set up the equations. He began following through the sheets to interpret the results being presented on the screen.

  How does a man feel when he finds the end of the world staring him in the face?

  Murdoch just stared numbly at the screen, unable to think, unable to move, unable to feel anything. But for him the shock was not total; he had been half prepared for it all along.

  The black holes were not going to evaporate.

  The loss of energy through tau radiation would sustain them until they became permanent. Then they would grow. As they lost orbital momentum, they would spiral toward the Earth's core, eventually coalescing into larger black holes… which would continue to draw in matter and grow even faster. There was insufficient information to determine exactly how quickly the process would accelerate or how long it would go on—maybe months, years, tens of years, or perhaps even longer—but the final result at the end of it would be inevitable:

  Eventually they would consume the whole planet.

  It was unstoppable, and irreversible. There was no other way it could end.

  "Murdoch, what's the matter?" Anne's voice came suddenly from the doorway. She sounded worried. Murdoch looked up slowly and turned his head toward her, but his eyes seemed to be staring straight through.

  "Sit down, Anne," he said in a dull, heavy voice. "I guess it's time I told you about what else has been happening at Burghead."

  Chapter 24

  "There isn't any way they can be stopped," Murdoch said wearily. "At least, assuming these calculations are correct. We didn't spend time double-checking everything, and we had to make a few assumptions that might be suspect, but right now that's the way it looks."

  "You can't be absolutely certain, then," Anne said. She had recovered somewhat from the impact of Murdoch's revelation, although her face was still pale and her voice shaky.

  "No," Murdoch admitted. "Not absolutely." His tone said that he was convinced in his own mind nevertheless. A silence descended. Murdoch returned his attention to the curves and numbers that he had been manipulating on the main screen of the machine's console throughout the hour or so that he and Anne had been talking. At intervals he had lapsed into long periods of staring silently and thoughtfully at the displays, but so far he had not told Anne anything of the idea that was beginning to form in his mind.

  Anne sat back in her chair with a long, despairing sigh, and tried again to grasp the enormity of what Murdoch had told her. The whole history of the human species was nothing but the tail-end of the saga of the birth and shaping of the Earth itself. Even the story of life was but the final page to be added to t
he book that had been written so far. It was as if the whole, intricate, billions-of-years-long process had been simply preparation for the story that would begin when mankind at last appeared upon the stage. And now, with the first few lines of the opening act barely completed, the story would never be told. All that would be left to mark that it had ever begun would be a knot of deformed spacetime orbiting the sun.

  She looked at Murdoch, still working silently and intently at the console, not knowing what to make of the strange change that she had sensed coming over him in the course of the last hour. An hour ago he had been resigned to the hopelessness of everything; now his mood seemed determined and purposeful. Anne sensed that it was not a time to press him with questions. She waited.

  At last Murdoch sat back in the chair and stared for a long time at the data being displayed on the main screen. Then, without turning his head to look at her, he asked, "Anne, can you program one of these computers?"

  Anne's forehead creased in bewilderment. "I've worked with DEC 22/40s and 435," she replied. "Software-wise they're the same as a 30. Why?" Murdoch did not answer directly. Instead he swiveled his chair around to face where she was sitting. There was a strange, distant look in his eyes, one that Anne had never seen before.

  "There's no way that a black hole can be destroyed once it's grown large enough to be stable," he said. "From that point on, nothing you do can get rid of it."

  Anne shrugged. "I know. So there's nothing anybody can do to change things now."

  "There is," Murdoch said. "The phrase I used was: ' ... from that point on ... ' " For a few seconds Anne was completely mystified. Then her expression changed slowly to one of disbelief. She gasped, and moved her eyes involuntarily from Murdoch to the machine beside him.

  Murdoch nodded. "Exactly!" he told her. "There is something we can do. We can change what happened before those damn holes were ever created in the first place!"

  Anne shook her head as she tried to understand what Murdoch was saying. After everything he had said in the last hour, this was too much.

  "It's the only way," Murdoch said. "Nothing else could make any difference now."

  "The machine?" she whispered. "You think we could use the machine to change what's happened?"

  "Why not?"

  "But… but to do that, you'd have to have the reactor tests stopped right at the beginning."

  "Yes."

  Anne rested her face in her hands while she reached through her mind for something she might have missed. At last she looked up. "But how?" she asked. "The machine only has a range of one day."

  "I know."

  "The tests were run in January. How can we possibly do anything that will change that?" Anne protested.

  "By using the machine as a relay," Murdoch said.

  Anne sank back and waved her hand in front of her face. "I don't know what you're talking about, Murdoch. What are you talking about?"

  "The machine that's here today can send a message back to itself yesterday," Murdoch said. "That one could relay the same message back to the machine that existed the day before that. It could chain back like that for as far as we wanted it to go." Anne's mind began spinning. She stared from Murdoch to the machine and back again, but could find nothing wrong with what he had said. In fact it now seemed obvious.

  Murdoch started speaking again, this time more rapidly and with a note of urgency in his voice. "To get in all the information needed about the black holes, we'd have to send a succession of screens full of data that would all arrive in sequence and remain imprinted on the restructured timeline. That means they'd have to be sent simultaneously in supertime from a series of points along the timeline we're on now. Fortunately we know from the shortening-loop tests how to set up a transmission-control program that will accomplish that.

  "Another snag is that the machines that exist on the present timeline yesterday and the days before all the way back to January don't have a program in them that will read in an incoming message and retransmit it back down the line. So what we need to do is set up a bootstrap: a set of machine instructions that can be sent on ahead as the first signal to read in the main program. Then the whole package will copy itself all the way through in one-day jumps to January. All we can do after that is hope to God that somebody back there takes notice of it."

  Anne's expression had been changing while Murdoch was talking. His scheme was feasible, she realized. In terms of technique, it was identical to the method of down-line-loading used for sending a program out to another part of a computer network and starting it running in a remote machine; the only difference was that, in the case that Murdoch had described, the program would be bootstrapped through a time-link rather than over a conventional optical cable or a laser beam.

  "I think you've got something, Murdoch," she whispered, nodding slowly at last. "It could just work, couldn't it… " Her voice rose to a normal level. "It might work. We'll have to put it to Charles and Ted when they get back. I'm sure that—" She broke off as she saw the look on Murdoch's face. Her face became puzzled. "Why not? Surely we've got to tell them about it."

  Murdoch half turned and gestured toward the screen on the console. "We can't wait for them to get back," he said. "We don't have any time."

  Anne was nonplussed. "What do you mean? I thought you said there was no immediate hazard."

  "There isn't," Murdoch said. "But it's got nothing to do with that. We've only got something like twelve hours left in which we can use the machine. If we don't do it in that time, we'll never be able to do it at all." Anne threw out her hands and shook her head in noncomprehension.

  "I've been monitoring the noise background here," Murdoch explained. "There are something like two million black holes down there, consuming mass and radiating tau waves all the time. The machine is picking up the radiation from a few days ahead of now as background noise." He took a deep breath. His voice was sounding hoarse. "The holes are getting bigger, and the noise is getting stronger. If my estimates are right, somewhere around twelve hours from now it'll be strong enough to swamp the signal. The machine will be unusable… permanently. After that it will only be able to get worse."

  "You're not suggesting that we do this right now… without any reference to anybody," Anne said in a shocked voice. "That's unthinkable, surely."

  "We don't have any choice," Murdoch pointed out. "We have to do it now, or do it never. If the machine is going to get us all out of this mess, it has to be inside the next twelve hours. We don't have time to convene any committees."

  "But, Murdoch, you're talking about changing the whole timeline back to January," Anne protested. "All kinds of people's lives could be affected in ways you can't even imagine. How can we go tinkering with something like that? We've no way of telling what the consequences might be."

  "You're right," Murdoch agreed. "But we know what the consequences of the alternative will be."

  "We don't know… not for certain. You said yourself that the results of the analysis might be wrong."

  "They might, but it could take years to verify every detail of the theory rigorously," Murdoch said. "We haven't got years, Anne; we've got twelve hours."

  "How sure can you be about that?"

  Murdoch shrugged. "It's an estimate. I could be wrong about that too, but that's the way it looks right now. You want to just wait around, do nothing, and find out that way?"

  Anne fell silent and thought about the things Murdoch had said. Murdoch watched and read from the changing look in her eyes that she was coming around to accept the irrefutable logic of the situation confronting them. It was as he had said: They had no choice.

  "Very well," Anne said eventually in a resigned voice. "What do you want me to do?"

  At once Murdoch's manner became more brisk. "I'll need you to write the retransmit program and the bootstrap," he said. "The references you'll need are all over there. I'll use Grandpa's latest calculations and the information that Elizabeth brought on the reactor design to put together a
message. I'll keep it short and to the point."

  "How long have we got?" Anne asked.

  "It's four-fifteen now. The background interference could build up faster than I estimated. I think that to play safe, we ought to aim at being ready to go by noon. What do you think?"

  "We should make it okay. That kind of programming is really quite straightforward."

  "Just remember that it will have to run right first time," Murdoch said. "If that means you have to take longer, take longer."

  Murdoch got up and began rummaging through the notebooks and papers lying on the desk. Anne sat down at the console and activated the machine's program-development system. "I'll have to get some things from the study," Murdoch said, and turned for the door. "I'll be back down in a minute."

  "Are we still going out for dinner tonight?" Anne called after him. He stopped for a moment and frowned, unable to decide whether or not she realized what she had said, or if she was being serious. Finally he shook his head, ignored the question, and walked out into the corridor.

  By five-thirty Murdoch had explained in detail what he wanted the program to do, and Anne had flow-charted an interpretation that he had agreed should work. She began coding the routine, and he commenced selecting the items of information to go into the message. They worked mainly in silence, each fighting off the fatigue of the hours immediately preceding dawn. Maxwell burrowed into a pile of discarded printout and went to sleep.

  At seven-thirty-five Anne ran a test of the program by using a separate area of the computer's memory to simulate the machine that would be functioning as the receiver. She found an error and began tracing it back through the coding that she had generated. Murdoch completed the message and loaded it into the computer ready to be accessed and transmitted by Anne's program. He went to make some coffee while she worked on.

  Eight-fifteen. Anne had fixed the error but then had found another one. Murdoch ran an analysis of the background interference and found that it was building up faster than he had estimated. He revised the deadline to ten A.M. instead of noon.