Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  While Anne was tracing the second error, Murdoch checked back through the machine's log to find a good point in the past at which to aim the message. Obviously the recipients should have as much time as possible to grasp the significance of the message and take appropriate action, which meant that the message ought to be sent back as far as possible. The farthest back it could be sent was to the time at which Cartland had increased the message capacity of the machine and extended its range to twenty-four hours; Anne's program would not work correctly with the ten-minute range and the six-character limit that the machine had possessed prior to then.

  To get that far back, the message would have to be "hopped" through the two-day period in which the machine had been temporarily disabled by interference coming back from the Burghead tests in January. Luckily the tests had not involved continuous operation of the reactors for the thirty-six hours they had run, but had included several gaps of an hour or two at a time, which were caused by the engineers shutting down the reactors to assess intermediate results and alter the test parameters. The interference pattern obtained at Storbannon had corresponding gaps, during which the machine had been operable. Anne's program would cause the message to materialize in, and be retransmitted from, one of those gaps.

  These considerations eventually led Murdoch to select a point midway through a Saturday afternoon shortly after he and Lee had arrived in Scotland. He tried to remember what had taken place on that day so many months before, but too much had happened since, and he was too tired to think about it.

  At nine-twenty Anne announced that the program appeared clean. "We can check out the whole system now," she said. "Is your file ready?"

  "All set," Murdoch told her. "Vector in at thirty-six thousand. Access levels are zero-five and zero-four. Use mode three."

  "Are you using a trap symbolic?"

  "Default."

  Anne nodded and ran her fingers deftly over the touchboard. Her screen went blank for an instant, and then the first few lines of Murdoch's message appeared at the top, accompanied by a duplicate of itself halfway down; each copy was tagged with a set of numbers and symbols.

  From where he was standing behind her chair, Murdoch grinned feebly through eyes that had become red-rimmed. The screen told him that the program, along with the message, had bootstrapped itself into an area of memory that simulated a second machine, and from there repeated the process into a third area. It had stopped there because Anne had inserted a single test-instruction into the program telling it to. For the real thing, she would simply have to delete that test instruction and substitute the target-date data that Murdoch had selected. The program would then relay itself back up the timeline in one-day hops. After each hop it would compare the date that it carried with it against the actual date supplied by the machine that it materialized in. When the two dates matched, the program would stop retransmitting itself, activate the printer, and output Murdoch's message.

  "It's all right," Anne said, scanning down the screen. "We're ready to go. It just needs a couple of simple changes now. You'd better bring the transmitter on-line." Murdoch was already flipping the switches beside her to make the system fully operational. He ran through a few switch checks and noted the readings on an auxiliary readout: The interference level was high, but not yet critical.

  Murdoch looked down at the long, dark hair falling over Anne's shoulders as she leaned forward toward the console, at her slender arm stretching out over the touchboard, and thought that she had never seemed more beautiful than at this moment. He bit his lip silently and gripped the back of the chair with whitening knuckles.

  She had forgotten.

  She was so intent on her task that she had forgotten what it would mean to restructure a whole timeline. Events would shape themselves into completely new universes along the new timeline that would result. Everything connected with Storbannon and Burghead, and eventually places far removed from these, would be changed. Everything that he and Anne remembered doing together would be changed—for better or worse. There was no way of telling.

  There was no way of being sure even that they would still be together.

  Or even know that such a universe had ever been, or could have been.

  That was what frightened him.

  "The linkages are complete," Anne said quietly, turning her head to look up at him. "It's ready." Something vast and hollow opened up somewhere in the pit of Murdoch's stomach. He felt his body shiver but was unable to control it. There was nothing to decide, he told himself. Everything was already decided. If he didn't do it now, he'd never be able to do it. He leaned forward and stretched out an arm for the Transmit key; at the same time his other hand slid onto Anne's shoulder and brushed against the softness of her hair and her cheek. He froze as his finger touched the cold surface of the key; conflicting emotions tore at each other inside him. Anne's hand came up to her shoulder, found his, and squeezed it reassuringly. He swallowed hard and pressed the key firmly.

  Somewhere back in time, binary digits were already materializing out of an intangible realm of existence and assembling themselves together before consolidating, and hurling themselves back yet further again a hundred times over. At the end of the chain, causes had already come into being whose effects were rushing back down the timeline toward the present moment, demolishing the universes that lay in between and reforming new ones from the same elements like the patterns in a kaleidoscope.

  How long… ?

  Anne got up from the chair and turned to slip inside Murdoch's arm. He could feel the warm curves of her body flattening against him as she pressed herself close. His arm tightened, and she looked up into his face. His mouth fell open as he saw that her eyes were brimming with tears that she had been holding back for a long time, and he read what was written in them. He shook his head in mute protest.

  "I hadn't forgotten," she said.

  Chapter 25

  "It looks pretty busy," Lee observed as he looked out of the car at the crowds of shoppers threading their way along the snow-cleared sidewalk of the town's main street. He looked along the line of parked vehicles beside them. "You're gonna have problems finding a space here."

  "It just needs patience," Murdoch said, slowing the car to a crawl. "Ah, what did I tell you—there's one." He brought the vehicle to a halt just ahead of an empty space, checked behind them, and reversed into it.

  "They don't exactly have a surplus of parking lots in this town," Lee observed, looking around.

  "What would you pull down to make some more?" Murdoch asked him.

  "Mmm, okay, point taken. Where to first?"

  "Well, if you still want a beer, why don't we do that now. Then we won't have to carry lots of junk all over town. There's a place you'd like just around the corner, all oak beams and stuff. Must be three hundred years old."

  "Sounds fine."

  Murdoch climbed out into the road and closed the car door, Lee opened the door on the other side, then paused for a moment to check his pockets for the list of things he needed to buy, and got out.

  Inside a volume of space that extended for millions of miles around, a whispering disturbance materialized out of another realm, perturbing quantum states of energy and juggling with the interactions of a billion submicroscopic uncertainties.

  As Murdoch came around the car and climbed over a pile of snow onto the sidewalk, he caught the eye of a girl who was coming out of one of the stores, carrying an armful of packages. She had long, dark hair, and was wearing an expensive-looking sheepskin coat with knee-length suede boots. For an instant he found himself staring. Then he realized that she had stopped, and was looking at him curiously with a faint half-smile playing on her lips. She nodded her head toward the rear end of his car.

  "Is that your kitten down there?" she asked. Her voice was precisely cultivated and melodious, sending a strange tingle of excitement down his spine. He and Lee both turned together and looked back. A familiar black-and-white, whiskered nose was peering out from
behind the rear wheel of the car, transfixed by a crumpled ball of paper that was fluttering against the base of a lamppost, pinned there by the breeze.

  "Christ, it's Maxwell!" Lee exclaimed. "How in hell did he get here?"

  "Must have hitched a ride," Murdoch said. He moved back to the car and stooped to reach behind the wheel. Maxwell's head promptly withdrew itself and proceeded to glare balefully out at him from the shadows beneath the car. "Get around the other side," Murdoch called. "Make sure he doesn't run out across the street." Cursing beneath his breath, Lee stamped through the snow piled in the gutter and squatted down to block the line of escape. Murdoch made a few futile attempts to reach the kitten, but succeeded only in getting his sleeve plastered with slush from the wheel arch. Finally he scooped up a handful of snow, crushed it into a hard ball, and threw it hard at the road inches in front of Maxwell's nose. Maxwell recoiled from the exploding snowball, straight into Lee's waiting hand. Murdoch opened the car door again while Lee carried the kitten around and dumped him inside.

  "In you go, fella," Lee said. "I never saw him. He must have been under the seat or somewhere all the time. How'd he get out of the house in the first place anyway?"

  "I don't know," Murdoch said as he slammed the door. "If it hadn't been for—" He turned toward where the girl had been standing, but she was gone. He looked along the sidewalk and saw her closing the trunk of a silver-blue car parked a few spaces ahead of theirs. She walked around to the driver's side, opened the door, and started to get in.

  "Hey… " Murdoch called. She stopped and looked up. "Thanks." The girl smiled, gave him a cheerful wave, and climbed into her car. A few seconds later the car pulled smoothly out into the traffic lane and headed away along the street.

  Murdoch watched it for a moment with silently admiring eyes. "Say… " he murmured. "Wasn't she something. What's the matter with us today, Lee? Why didn't we give her a hand with the parcels?"

  "Because we've got things to do," Lee said. "Anyhow, the good-looking ones are always married before you find 'em. How about that beer? I could sure use it."

  "Yeah… I guess you're right. Come on. The pub's this way."

  They turned and walked away along the sidewalk. Behind them, the ball of paper broke free and tumbled along into one of the doorways.

  They arrived back at Storbannon early in the evening to find the team in Charles's study, wild with excitement over something. Charles handed them some hardcopy sheets from the lab computer, then stood back to await their reactions. Elizabeth and Cartland watched expectantly. Murdoch ran his eyes quickly over the heading of the first sheet while Lee read over his shoulder. After a few seconds, Murdoch looked up, his face creased in bewilderment.

  "Is this some kind of joke?" he demanded.

  "It most certainly is not," Charles told him gruffly.

  "The machine just started spewing it out," Cartland said. "It was about halfway through the afternoon… less than an hour after you left."

  "But… I don't understand," Murdoch protested. "What the hell is this?"

  "You should know," Elizabeth said. "It appears that you sent it."

  Murdoch sat down and began studying the sheets more carefully. Exactly how the physics of time communication worked was still unclear, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that a team that existed somewhere in the future would have discovered more about it; presumably that future team had discovered a method of sending multiscreen messages in sequence, which was something they hadn't looked into as yet. From the model of the process that was just beginning to emerge, the team that had sent this message would no longer exist, since they would have existed on a timeline that no longer existed as it had been. Provided that the model was correct in this respect, the team that had sent the message would have known at least as much too. And still they had sent it. That was a sobering thought.

  From odd pieces of text here and there Murdoch could see that the message had something to do with miniature black holes and the plant at Burghead where Elizabeth worked, although most of the data and mathematical expressions included with the text meant nothing at all to him. But the thing that staggered him was that the message purported to have come from a date in May. How could that be possible when the machine had a range of only one day? Perhaps they would be able to analyze what had come into the computer and obtain a few clues about that later, but for the moment Murdoch was more intrigued by the contents of the message itself. He passed the first sheet to Lee and proceeded to examine the next.

  "We've been going through it all afternoon," Charles told them. "Some of the formulas in there are obviously from my work because they use my own symbology, but I must confess that I've never seen most of those expressions before. Elizabeth says that other parts of it are to do with the physics of the reactors at Burghead. It seems there's a connection between the two that we never dreamed of."

  "Have you made any sense out of it yet?" Murdoch asked. "I don't understand a tenth of this stuff, whether I'm supposed to have sent it or not."

  "We can follow the gist of it," Elizabeth replied. Her face was grave and her voice unusually serious. "It appears that at high energy-densities and full power, a positive-feedback mechanism can generate a miniature black hole at the core of a fusion target pellet. At this moment I can't explain why conventional design procedures give different answers. That's something that Charles and I are going to have to spend some time looking into."

  "Black holes?" Murdoch stared at her incredulously. "But inertial systems don't go anywhere near that kind of density."

  "That's what current theory says," Elizabeth sighed. "But current theory doesn't take any account of Charles's tau phenomena. There seems to be an implication that we don't know about, but which whoever sent that did."

  "You haven't got to the end yet," Cartland came in. "It's telling us to have next week's full-power tests at Burghead stopped… and in no uncertain terms. Apparently they managed to make two million of the bloody things."

  "Two million black holes?" Murdoch gasped.

  "Aye," Charles said grimly.

  "What happened?"

  "We don't know," Charles replied. "It doesn't go into details. We've been discussing it here for hours and can think of all kinds of possibilities. But we'd need to run a full computer simulation before we could be sure of anything."

  "Whatever the result was, it was serious enough for whoever sent this to do something extremely drastic to change it," Elizabeth said.

  "Surely not," Lee objected, looking up from his reading. "Holes that small wouldn't last long enough to do any harm."

  "If there's a connection with tau phenomena that we don't understand, anything might be possible," Charles said. "From some of the math in there, it's clear that they had a far better understanding of the whole thing than I could offer now. We're going to have to do a lot of work on the physical basis of plasma theory and see where tau physics comes into it."

  "That could take some time," Murdoch pointed out. "The tests at Burghead are due to start a week from Monday. What do we do about that?"

  "I'll call the senior directors over the weekend and see if we can go and talk to them first thing Monday morning," Elizabeth said. "If they won't accept this message at face value, then I suppose we'll have to bring them here and show them the machine. If that doesn't convince them, nothing will." She looked inquiringly at Charles.

  "I suppose so," Charles agreed reluctantly. "It'll be a pity to have to bring outsiders into it so soon, but from the look of things those tests have to be stopped whatever the cost."

  "This is neat." Lee pushed himself back from the main console in the lab and nodded approvingly at the list of code being displayed on the screen. It was late on Sunday morning. Elizabeth and Charles were talking physics in the study; Cartland was upstairs showering and shaving. Murdoch looked up from the datagrid terminal, at which he was running a calculation to verify one of the expressions contained in the message received the previous day.

  "W
hat?" he asked.

  "The program that read in the message," Lee replied. "It used the machine as a relay and bootstrapped itself back in one-day jumps. There's a test built in to terminate it at yesterday's date."

  "I had a feeling it might be something like that," Murdoch said.

  Lee turned away from the console and looked at him. "Did you ever learn real-time programming anyplace, Doc? You never said anything about it to me if you did."

  "No, never. Why?"

  Lee waved a hand at the screen. "Whoever did that knew some neat tricks. I was just curious as to who it might have been."

  "Aren't there any clues in there?" Murdoch asked.

  "Nope," Lee said; "But I know it wasn't me."

  "I guess we'll never know then." Murdoch thought for a moment about the strangeness of the whole situation, and then returned his attention to the terminal.

  Charles returned with Elizabeth to meet the Burghead directors on Monday morning. The reactions to what they had to say ranged from open-minded skepticism to downright disbelief. It was all too extraordinary to be assimilated in so short a time and on the say-so of just two people, whoever they might be. Charles had not had sufficient time, nor was he yet sufficiently familiar with the way the machine worked, to be able to substantiate all his claims, so he invited the directors to come to Storbannon to see for themselves. The matter was clearly too serious to be dismissed, however improbable the whole business sounded, and the Board agreed to send a delegation to make the visit on Wednesday morning. The Board agreed also to meet again on the Thursday to debate the outcome.

  Chapter 26

  "We are agreed then," Courtney summarized for the Board on Thursday morning. "For the time being at least, we are obliged to accept this message as genuine. In view of the extreme gravity of its content, there can be no question of the proposed tests going ahead until the situation has been fully investigated." Heads nodded in assent from around the conference table. He continued, "I propose therefore that the schedule for the tests be suspended until further notice, and that the reasons for the decision be conveyed to the EFC Presidential Committee immediately. The question of where we go next must obviously wait until we obtain a response from there. Are there any dissenters?" There were none. "Very good. Passed unanimously." He paused for a second.