Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  Chapter 6

  Edward Cartland returned shortly after lunch. Murdoch, Lee, and Charles were discussing further thoughts on the previous night's developments when a squeal of brakes sounded from the forecourt outside the window, and was followed by a clattering of running footsteps, first on gravel then on stone stairs, which terminated in the booming of the front doors being thrown open. Blurred snatches of a man's excited voice came from inside the house and were answered by a few high-pitched syllables that could only have been uttered by Morna. The hurried footsteps sounded again, became suddenly hollow as they moved from carpet to wooden floor, and grew louder. A second later the library door burst open, and Cartland hurtled through.

  "What's happened?" he demanded at once, apparently speaking to nobody in particular. "What's it done?" He jerked his head around to take in the room and singled out Charles. "You said it works, Charles. What? What works? Is it still working now?"

  Charles stood up and made vague slapping motions in the air with his hand until the stream of words stopped. "Och, calm down, Ted, for God's sake," he said. "Aye, it works. We'll show it to you right away. Now say hello to Murdoch and Lee."

  Cartland's manner changed abruptly. He turned toward where Murdoch was rising to his feet, seized his hand, and began pumping it vigorously. "Murdoch! How are you, old boy? Delighted to see you again. Sorry about my appalling manners and all that. We don't get to see time machines working every day, you know."

  "Hi, Ted," Murdoch said, grinning. "You haven't changed. This is Lee, my partner from California."

  Lee stuck out a hand, and Cartland repeated the performance.

  "Lee Walker, isn't it? I've heard all about you. Delighted. I've worked with all kinds of Americans in my time. Great bunch! Where are you from originally?"

  "Japan."

  "Good Lord!" Cartland blinked in surprise, then shifted his gaze back to Charles. "Charles, what's happened then? I've driven all the way from bloody Manchester on manual. Nearly broke my neck a dozen times. What's it done?"

  Charles sighed. "Oh dear, it's obvious that we're not going to get any sense out o' you until you've seen for yourself," he said. "Come on then. Let's go down to the lab and get on with the demonstration." With that he led the way out of the library with Cartland tagging immediately behind. Lee caught Murdoch's eye for an instant as they turned to follow and frowned quizzically. Murdoch shrugged and returned a faint grin.

  Cartland was in his early forties, athletically built, and had dark, slightly wavy hair that was just beginning to recede at the temples. He wore open-necked shirts around the house, usually with a sweater or a sports jacket, but never went out without a necktie. With his distinctive upper-crust English accent, neatly clipped moustache, and unfailing—at times almost schoolboyish—exuberance the man could never, Murdoch thought, have been anything but a former British military officer. He was the kind of person that Murdoch sometimes imagined Colonel James having been when at a comparable age in the 1920s. That had been almost a century before; however some traditions still changed only slowly.

  In the lab, Charles began with a repeat-performance of the previous night's demonstration and obtained a similar result, this time with Cartland as the operator. Cartland was almost as amazed as Murdoch had been, despite his having virtually built the machine, and soon followed the same line of thought as Murdoch had by trying to fool the system with paradoxes. After about half an hour, a pattern essentially the same as that of the previous evening had established itself. At that point Cartland declared himself to be completely baffled. A discussion followed in which Murdoch and Lee expounded again the thoughts they had been developing since breakfast. Charles said little, evidently reserving an opinion until more hard data had been gathered. Eventually they ended up with Cartland shaking his head at the screen and looking nonplussed, Charles sitting at the desk beside him, and the other two standing behind.

  "Well, this won't do," Cartland said. "We could talk about it all day, but it won't tell us any more. We're still no nearer getting to the bottom of it."

  "What do you suggest?" Murdoch asked.

  "I'm not sure really." Cartland frowned and rubbed his moustache pensively. "It's the human element that's causing all the trouble, isn't it? If we could eliminate that… " He lapsed into silence, then sat up. "I know. Let's do the same thing as we started with, but this time let's automate the process. Then there won't be any possibility of anybody getting clever ideas halfway through and upsetting everything. We'll have the computer handle the whole thing, without any intervention from any of us at all."

  "What are you trying to prove?" Murdoch asked.

  Cartland had already keyed the system into program-development mode and begun tapping in a header reference. "I don't really know," he replied candidly. "But it's different, isn't it?" The others watched in silence while he set up a simple program that would activate the time transceiver system and run after a delay of two minutes to transmit a random number back thirty seconds.

  "Now," Cartland said airily as he added in the final commands. "It's simply not possible for us not to receive anything. The program is running. In two-minutes' time, it will generate a random number and it will send that number back thirty seconds. Does everybody agree? That much is programmed in, running, and unchangeable." Charles grunted affirmatively from the chair by the desk. Cartland turned in his seat and glanced up at Murdoch and Lee, standing behind him. They nodded. "Good. Therefore we will receive it. And now I'll tell you what I intend to do. After we have received the number, I will enter a command to abort the program. The program will then be unable to generate any number, or transmit it, when the time comes for it to do so." He clapped his hands together and sat back in his chair to wait.

  "What's the point?" Lee drawled. "I can tell you right here and now what'll happen: You'll wind up with a number coming in anyhow, despite the fact that you don't send it later. We've already seen it."

  "I know," Cartland agreed. "And we keep asking who sent it. Well, we know jolly well we never did, so it's no good asking each other, is it? So what I'm going to do is ask the people who did, or at least who look as if they did."

  "Who do you mean?" Murdoch asked.

  "Ourselves two minutes ahead in time, of course," Cartland answered. "I shall use the machine to ask them whether or not they sent it. Depending on the answer we get, assuming we get one, we may or may not learn something."

  Charles sat back heavily in his chair with a sigh and tugged at his beard. Murdoch and Lee looked at each other despairingly. They had been talking about nothing else all morning and neither of them had seen the solution staring them in the face. Why did it always take somebody else to point out the obvious? Before either of them could say anything, something happened on the screen in front of Cartland, who leaned forward to peer at it for a moment, and then announced briskly, "Here's our number, 419725. Jolly good. As things stand right now, this number will be transmitted in just under thirty-seconds' time. Everyone agreed? Right." He rubbed his hands together like a concert pianist about to begin playing and then leaned back over the touchboard. "Now let's tell this fellow to abort its program." He hammered in a rapid sequence of symbols, glanced up at the screen, and sat back with a satisfied nod. "There," he announced. "The program's on its back with all four legs sticking in the air, dead as a dodo. How long have we got to go? About twenty seconds. Okay, we'll see if you were right, Lee."

  They waited in silence while the twenty seconds passed. At the end of that period nothing had changed; no signal had been sent.

  "There," Cartland said. "Just as we expected. Now when that number came in two minutes ago, it was tagged as having been sent from two minutes ahead of where we were then, which is right now. But clearly we're not sending anything. So what I want to do now is send a signal to two minutes ahead of where we are right now, and ask whoever picks up the phone if they know anything about it." He turned back to the console and rubbed his hands together again. "At least it might
give us some idea of how all these bloody universes of yours are connected together, Murdoch," he added as an afterthought.

  "Maybe we shouldn't have to ask the question at all," Murdoch mused half to himself.

  "What?" Cartland looked up, puzzled. "Why not?"

  "If they were us two minutes before, they'd remember it. They'd already know what question they wanted to ask."

  "That's a thought," Cartland agreed. "I wonder—" He broke off suddenly as something happened on the screen. "Just a sec, something else is coming in. It's two frames, one behind the other. They say… " His voice faltered as he stared hard, seemingly having trouble believing his eyes. He blinked and shook his head. "They say, 419725 and, NOT US." Cartland slumped back in his chair and finished weakly, "My God, how extraordinary!"

  Charles was already on his feet and bending forward to peer at the screen. Murdoch and Lee stared incredulously over Cartland's shoulder.

  "You were right, Murdoch," Charles breathed. "They remember thinking exactly what we are thinking at this very moment. They must exist on the timeline that extends forward from where we are now."

  "Or one of them," Lee commented.

  "They received the same number," Murdoch said in an awed voice. "That was why they sent it as the first frame: to identify themselves as existing in this universe and not in some other one where some other number might have got sent. But they didn't send it either. They knew the question we were asking, and they've answered it."

  Cartland sat hunched at the console, drumming his fingers on the edge of the panel in vexation and exasperation. "So who did send the f… f… faffing thing?" he demanded. "This is getting ridiculous. It's insane. It… What?… " More frames appeared in rapid succession on the screen below the two that were already being displayed. They read:

  WEJUST

  BROKE

  JAR

  CAREFL

  "What the blazes?" Cartland said, and then threw up his hands in helplessness. Charles shook his head slowly from side to side and sank back into his chair, while Murdoch's mind took a short vacation from the effort of trying to think.

  Lee froze.

  The words on the screen had triggered something. They meant something to some deep-down part of his mind, a part of his mind that knew something that hadn't yet filtered through to conscious awareness. Without moving a muscle, he scanned methodically through the information being registered by his senses.

  He was half-leaning over Cartland's shoulder with his left hand gripping the backrest of the chair. His right arm was draped loosely across the top of the metal cubicle beside him, resting on a couple of plastic binders and some assorted papers. His hand was open with the fingers loose and relaxed.

  Fingers… Fingers… Fingertips!

  He started to tense involuntarily, but at the same instant summoned up an effort of will to force his hand to remain motionless. Then he became aware for the first time that his fingertips were just touching something smooth and cold. He turned his eyes and, very slowly, inched his head round.

  His fingers were resting against a glass jar half filled with cleaning fluid. Unknowingly he had been pushing the jar away from him, and already its base was partly off the top of the cubicle and protruding into thin air. It was so delicately balanced that a settling fly would have been enough to send it to the floor. Lee didn't dare even to pull his hand back for fear of the vibration such a movement might cause.

  "Doc," he whispered, "turn around, slo-owly." Murdoch frowned and moved his head; Lee moved his eyes to indicate his predicament. Murdoch nodded, reached out carefully with his arm, and lifted the jar out of harm's way. Lee emitted a long sigh of relief and pulled his hand back. Charles, who had seen the whole thing, was staring wide-eyed with astonishment.

  "What's going on?" Cartland was looking from side to side and behind with rapid, inquisitive movements of his head. "What are you lot doing back there?"

  "Where did those frames come from?" Charles asked him, ignoring the question.

  "Four minutes ahead," Cartland replied. "They seem to be saying something about somebody breaking a jar or something. Why? What's going on?"

  "It almost happened," Charles whispered. "Lee was on the verge of knocking a jar off the cabinet, which I shouldn't have left up there in the first place." He swallowed hard as the meaning of what had happened began to sink in, and then went on in a halting voice, "There was a universe, four minutes ahead of ours, in which it did get broken. Whoever sent that message back was trying to find out if he could alter his past. And he did!"

  Cartland blinked and thought for a few seconds. "Good grief," he conceded. Only an Englishman could have uttered the remark with that preciseness of tone that qualified it as a suitable response to any event from the whole spectrum of the unexpected; said in just that way, it could equally have attended the discovery of a fly in one's soup or have greeted the news that the Moon had just fallen into the Atlantic.

  "Not necessarily," Lee said in reply to Charles. "He might have altered our present and our future. That doesn't prove anything about his past. He might still be standing there looking at a heap of broken glass."

  "You're right," Charles admitted. "It could still be serial. I don't think we've done enough to be able to dismiss that possibility entirely."

  "There's one easy way to find out," Murdoch suggested. "Call up four minutes ahead of now and ask him."

  Cartland looked up sharply, seemed about to say something, then shrugged and turned back to the console. There was nothing more to say. While the others watched, he composed the signal, DIDJAR, followed by a second, BREAK. Then he set the transmission routine to aim the first four minutes ahead and the second to come in an instant later, and pressed a key to execute it. He had barely finished when three new frames came in: NO, followed by, CANTBE, and SERIAL.

  "It's from four minutes ahead," Cartland told them. His voice was almost matter-of-fact; he was by now beyond being able to express surprise at anything.

  "He knew what we were thinking again," Murdoch said. "Our signal didn't say anything about serial. And the first frame says, NO. The jar in the universe four minutes ahead of us isn't broken. So whose jar did get broken?"

  "This is absurd," Cartland declared. "It could only have been in whatever universe is four minutes ahead of us, yet somebody in that universe has just told us that it wasn't."

  "Not quite," Lee said, glancing at the clock-readout on the console panel. "A universe that's now one minute behind us asked one that's now three minutes ahead. We're partway between changing from one into the other… if you see what I mean. Maybe that affects it somehow."

  "Oh, Christ," Cartland moaned miserably.

  "In that case, three minutes from now we'll be at the point where the broken jar is supposed to have existed," Charles said. "I'm going to assume that it will still be intact, because it looks fairly safe to me up there where Murdoch put it. Anyhow, we'll know for sure if I'm right in a few minutes' time. So what will that tell us?" He looked from one to the other to invite a reply. Nobody offered anything. "It will mean that the event has not taken place in our universe at the time it was said to have taken place, and we already know that it never took place in the only other universe it could have occurred in—the one that is four minutes ahead of us. That seems to me to say that it never took place anywhere!"

  "But it did," Murdoch protested. "Look, it's right there on the screen. It happened… unless that message is false, but why should it be? Why would we want to mislead ourselves? Where are the pieces, right now, of that jar that got broken?"

  "I don't know," Charles said slowly. "But the only conclusion I can draw from what I've seen is that they no longer exist anywhere." He paused. A complete silence enveloped the room as three stunned faces stared back at him. "The event," he went on, "appears to have been completely eradicated in some way. Have you considered the possibility that whoever sent that message succeeded in changing his own past, and in doing so, he somehow erased the universe
in which he existed?" He paused again to allow what he was saying time to sink in, and then nodded soberly at the others. "Aye. There's a thought to keep you all sleepless for a few nights. Perhaps he does not exist anywhere at all, and that's why you're not having much luck in trying to talk to him."

  Nobody spoke for a while. Then Murdoch turned his head toward Lee. "You did say it would sound crazy once we started getting into it."

  Lee took a long breath. "Yeah, but I never meant as crazy as this. In fact it's so crazy, it just might be true."

  At that instant two signal-frames appeared on the screen. They were Cartland's own questions from four minutes ago. "Somebody back there has just received a warning about a jar," Cartland announced shakily. "He wants to know if ours broke."

  "Tell him," Charles advised. "Play it straight. Let's have no more fooling around with this until we've a far better idea of what we're doing." Cartland typed in NO as a reply, and followed it with CANTBE, and SERIAL. Then he entered the appropriate timing commands and sent the three signals.

  "You're right," Cartland said. "Let's leave the mucking around with paradoxes until later."

  "Then switch the machine off now," Charles said. "Before we get too clever and manage to erase ourselves. And let's have no more meddling with it at all until we've given ourselves plenty of time to think about what we've seen today, and where we go from here."