Thrice upon a Time

by James P. Hogan

  "Very personal," Nick agreed. "Quite uncalled for, I'd say."

  "Listen, Yank," Trevor said, looking back round abruptly and speaking in a harsher, and now openly derisive, voice. "I happen to be at Burghead because I qualified to work at Burghead. I'm here because I'm a bloody good engineer, and I've got a degree from European Energy Community's university to say so. Why are you here?"

  "You know why he's here," Sam said, making little effort to disguise the sneer. "He's traveling tourist-class. His grandad knows Lizzie Muir."

  "You mean they're not qualified?" Nick asked in mock surprise.

  "I think they dropped out," Sam replied.

  "God knows what business it is of yours," Sheila said, sounding exasperated. "But if you must know, Murdoch's grandfather happens to be a Nobel Prize winner… for physics."

  "So?" Trevor demanded, gesturing toward Murdoch. "What's that supposed to make him? My father was a surgeon. That doesn't make me a member of the BMA."

  "It means I don't need pieces of paper and boy-scout badges on my coat to remind me who I am," Murdoch said, allowing his tone to become sarcastic. "What's left in there when you peel it all off?"

  "Wrong. They stand for something that matters," Trevor shot back.

  "That's what people who wrap boxes in plastic and tinsel say."

  Trevor's face darkened. "Are you trying to make a fool of me, Yank?"

  "There's no need. You manage okay on your own."

  Trevor stood up from his chair, lurching against the table in the process and slopping some of the drinks. His jowls had inflated, and his expression was ugly. Lee was on his feet in the same instant, facing him from a few feet away. His movement had been smooth and catlike; his face was expressionless, but his muscular frame stood poised on a hairspring. Murdoch gripped the arms of his chair and forced himself to stay put. Lee could probably have taken all four of them even without Murdoch's help, but that wasn't the way.

  "Lee, cool it," he said. "It's not worth breaking up a nice pub over."

  Lee kept his eyes fixed unwaveringly on Trevor. "I've had enough of all this double-talk," he grated. "If you're trying to say something, let me hear it to my face straight-out. We don't have to mess up the pub. The parking lot outside'll do fine."

  "Sit down, you silly sod," Nick hissed at Trevor from the corner of his mouth. "He'll take you apart after the amount you've had." Trevor obviously wasn't going to be able to count on any backup from that quarter. Suddenly he looked less certain of himself.

  Murdoch relaxed, moving back in his chair, in an attempt to defuse the situation. "Okay, Trevor, we agree with you," he said. "Rugby's a tough sport. So why don't we leave it out on the field where it belongs, huh? This is getting crazy. The way we're going on, a guy's gonna need a spacesuit soon to have a drink."

  "Oh, thank God," Jerry said, sounding relieved. "Come on, Trev. Knock it off. The man's talking sense."

  "Now let's see a bit more," Sheila suggested.

  Trevor hesitated for a moment longer. Lee remained motionless, watching him. Then Trevor lowered himself slowly and heavily back into his seat, and made an awkward pushing motion with his hand. "If that's what you want… What's the point anyhow?" He sounded surly, but underneath grateful to let the matter go at that. Lee said nothing as he uncoiled back into his chair, shedding tension like a spring being unwound. An uncomfortable silence followed.

  At last Tom turned to look across at Murdoch. "I didn't know about your grandfather. When did he get a Nobel?"

  "Back in the eighties," Murdoch said, keeping his eyes on Trevor for a moment longer before shifting them toward Tom. "It was for some work he was involved in at Stanford."

  "What kind of work?" Sheila asked.

  "The first isolation of free quarks. He moved there from Princeton to work on the big Stanford accelerator."

  The conversation gradually picked up again. Trevor and his three pals talked among themselves about other things until a respectable time had passed, then got up and left together with a few perfunctory good-nights to the rest of the company. At once a more relaxed atmosphere descended.

  "Whew, that feels better," Jerry said. "For a moment I thought we were going to have a real barney. What on earth's got into Trev tonight?"

  "I think he thought he had territorial rights," Tom murmured, nodding toward Anne.

  "Gee, I didn't mean to start anything like that," Murdoch said. "As far as I was concerned, we were just talking."

  "Shut up!" Anne exclaimed indignantly. "You're sounding as if you're apologizing for something. If Trevor had any thoughts like that, he should have asked me first. If anybody needs to apologize, it ought to be me… for calling you cowboys earlier on today. You handled the whole thing very well."

  "Cowboys are from Texas," Murdoch told her, grinning. "Californians are different."

  "You mean Californians don't wear their hats and smoke cigars in the bathtub?"

  "Certainly not," Murdoch replied. "We take showers."

  "With hats and cigars," Jerry threw in.

  "Of course."

  Sheila laughed and sipped her drink, then looked at Lee. "Were you bluffing?" she asked. "For a moment you really looked as if you'd have had a go at all four of them, never mind Trevor."

  "He would have," Murdoch said. "Don't worry about it. Lee can handle himself if he needs to."

  "Ah, what the hell," Lee grunted. "It's over. Forget it."

  "He's right," Jerry declared. "Look, we've got a nice-sized crowd for a party now. How about going on somewhere? We could go into town and try one of the clubs. I could use a bite to eat too. What's the vote?"

  "Sounds good," Tom said. The others nodded.

  "Right then," Jerry declared. "Unanimous it is. One more round before we go. This one's mine. Same again for everybody?"

  Midnight had come and gone and been forgotten. Murdoch and Anne were sitting with their heads close together, talking across a corner of the table in a dimly lit alcove of the nightclub. Tom and Sheila were together on the dance floor, while Lee and Jerry were at the bar talking with a couple of girls who had come in about an hour before. The band had burned off its surplus energy and was slowing down in preparation for calling it a night.

  "Know something?" Murdoch said. "You smell nice. What is it?"

  Anne smiled and shrugged without looking up. "Nothing special. I've been at work all day. Maybe it's just something that exists in the nose of the… oh, I don't know. What's a word like 'beholder' that means smell?"

  "Hell, how should I know? I don't write dictionaries." He thought for a second. "How about 'philodorer'? That ought to mean 'liker of nice scents.' "

  Anne giggled and placed her hand on his arm. "You really are crazy. What would a Texan have said?"

  "I can't imagine."

  "Where did you get black hair like that? I like men with thick, black hair."

  "Grandpa's used to be the same. You'll have to meet him sometime."

  "I'd like to. He sounds fascinating."

  "You know," Murdoch said, leaning closer, "a guy could get really fond of somebody like you, given enough time." He traced his fingertip lightly along her arm. "Why don't we do something like this again soon… just the two of us?"

  Anne appeared to think about it for a second or two, then answered, "Yes, I think I'd like that. Is it a promise? I'll hold you to it, you know."

  "You'd better believe it."

  Anne slid her fingers over the back of his hand and entwined them loosely with his. They felt cool, smooth, and exhilarating. "Are you going to be over here for very long?" she asked.

  "Who knows?" Murdoch replied. "I guess it depends on how things go. We're not really sure yet how much work there is to do at Storbannon."

  "Then I hope you run into all kinds of problems that you didn't bargain for," Anne told him. She smiled, and Murdoch could see that the one-way mirrors had been switched off.

  Chapter 14

  The time-communication model that had been tentatively propose
d held that a signal transmitted back from the future would remain imprinted on the new timeline established in the process. The whole of the timeline that lay after the event of the signal being received, however, which included the event of its being sent, would be altered according to the new circumstances. One of the purposes of the tests that had been run throughout that week was to test this hypothesis more thoroughly.

  In one set of tests, the machine had been programmed to send a signal back to a point in time advanced one second from the point at which the machine had last received a signal in the past. On the new timeline thus established, the receipt of the time-advanced signal would itself become the most recently received one; therefore the process would repeat to give a series of loops back into the past. Every loop would be one second shorter than the previous one. Hence the previously received signal would remain imprinted upon the part of the timeline that lay ahead of, and therefore outside, a loop executed later. This would happen with every loop, and every signal transmitted in the series would remain on the final timeline left at the end of it all.

  According to the model this would not be observed when the converse procedure was applied, that is, when the loop was lengthened by one second with each iteration instead of shortened. In this case a later loop would fully enclose an earlier one. The whole of the earlier loop, including the events of both its being sent and received, would lie on the section of timeline that the later signal would reconfigure. Therefore no trace of any loop except the final one should remain at the conclusion of tests of this type.

  By Friday morning the first phase of tests, which involved signals derived from determinate computer algorithms, was complete. The team eagerly inspected the results and found to their elation that they were as the model predicted. Accordingly, in a great flurry of excitement they began to prepare the system for the first part of the second phase of test, which would use random data, intending to allow the system to run automatically once more while they got down to the task of analyzing the phase-one results in more detail.

  But when they went down to the lab to set up the second phase, they ran into an unexpected difficulty: The receiver was registering continuous activity, but the computer was unable to extract anything intelligible from whatever it was receiving. In the early afternoon the problem suddenly disappeared for about two hours, then reappeared, continuing until late evening. At ten o'clock that night all was well again, but shortly after midnight the trouble began once more. By Saturday morning the situation was still the same. Cartland concluded that there had to be a fault somewhere in the system. He announced to the impatient team that there was no choice but to strip the machine down and put off the intended tests until the trouble could be located and cured.

  Cartland rested his elbows on the edge of the bench and peered intently at the waveforms being displayed on the screen of the signal analyzer connected to the exposed electronics inside one of the system cabinets. He consulted a chart draped over the bench beside him, frowned, clicked his tongue several times, and shook his head.

  "There isn't a bloody thing wrong with the phase decoder or the array generator," he pronounced. "This is preposterous. Run the output diagnostic for the Bragg coupler and see what that says."

  "I just did," Lee told him from the main console. "It checks out okay. No faults."

  "Preposterous," Cartland muttered again. "That's twice through the whole ruddy system from end to end, and not a thing. There has to be something in here that's doing it. What about that vector address dump, Murdoch? Found anything?"

  Murdoch shook his head without looking up from the desk behind Lee, where he was poring over a sheet of densely printed hardcopy. "I haven't got through all of it yet, but it looks clean so far."

  "Well, get a move on then, there's a good chap," Cartland said. "We can't make a start on the discriminators until you've finished that."

  "Sorry. I guess I'm not thinking too fast today."

  "He's in love," Lee remarked casually as he keyed another block of code onto the screen in front of him.

  "Oh, God help us," Cartland muttered.

  At the desk, Murdoch smiled to himself but said nothing. Yesterday he had called her twice, once in her office at Burghead to ask if she had a hangover too, and once at home in the evening for no reason in particular. That morning she had called him, ostensibly to ask if he had found out who Pamela McKenzie was. They had arranged a dinner date in Inverness for Sunday evening. Sunday was only tomorrow, but Sunday evening seemed a long way away.

  Early on Saturday evening the problem suddenly disappeared again. By ten o'clock that night it hadn't returned, and Cartland began to suspect that it wouldn't.

  "That's a strange thing you seem to be telling us, Ted," Charles said from his chair in the library late that night as they sat talking about it. "You mean the machine has been working perfectly all evening? What did you do to it?"

  "Nothing." Cartland shrugged and showed his palms for emphasis. "All I've done is take bits out, test them, and put them back. But I tell you there's nothing wrong with it."

  "How about some kind of intermittent fault?" Charles suggested.

  "Possible, I suppose. But if so, there isn't a trace of it now. I've tried all kinds of things to reproduce it, but the whole machine is as clean as a whistle."

  "So we can carry on from where we left off?"

  "I don't see why not."

  Lee turned around to face the room from where he had been standing deep in thought for the last few minutes. "How do we know it was any kind of fault?" he asked. "The problem didn't show any signs of being intermittent while it was there. And if it wasn't intermittent, why isn't it there now?"

  "What else could it have been?" Murdoch asked.

  "I'm not sure," Lee replied slowly. "But I've been thinking about those raw detector waveforms we looked at while it was going on. I'd have said it looked more like some kind of interference."

  "Interference?" Charles looked puzzled. "From where? How could it be? It would have to be something propagating through tau space to affect pair production. What else is there that produces tau waves?"

  "I don't know," Lee replied. "But we could go back over everything and have a look. We've got portions of the waveforms stored. Maybe if we played them back through the analyzers, they'd show up something."

  "We could," Cartland agreed. His tone was dubious, as if he saw little point to such an exercise.

  Charles said the rest for him. "Och, why should we be bothering with stuff like that? We've lost enough time as it is. If the machine's working now, let's just be thankful for that and stop messing around with it. If we get any more trouble, we can worry some more about what's causing it then."

  "I agree," Cartland said.

  "Me too," Murdoch declared. "Sorry, Lee, but you just lost the vote. We're a strictly democratic institution."

  Lee shrugged and left the matter at that.

  A few minutes later Charles bade the others good night and went to bed. Cartland suggested to the other two that it wouldn't take the three of them long to tidy the machine up in readiness to commence the phase-two tests first thing in the morning. Murdoch and Lee agreed, and they all proceeded on down to the lab.

  Cartland reassembled the subunits strewn across the top of the bench, rapidly ran through a series of checks, nodded his head in satisfaction, and slid the assembly back into the equipment rack from which he had taken it. Then he began reattaching wires and connectors, his hands moving swiftly and deftly with practiced ease. Lee leaned with his elbows resting on one of the low cubicles and watched with the unspoken respect of one professional for another.

  "Doc says that you spent a lot of time in the British Air Force," Lee said after a while. "Was that where you studied electronics?"

  "Royal Air Force, old boy," Cartland said without looking up. "Yes, I suppose I did pick most of it up there. I was mixed up with military types and gadgets long before I joined the jolly old RAF though… ever since I was a boy
, in fact."

  "Charles once said that you were born in Malaya. Is that right?"

  "Yes… born into an Army family. My father was an instructor in a school of jungle warfare that the Australians ran in Malaya in the 1960s… mainly for U.S. Rangers and Special Forces, actually. He was with the British Army, of course, but attached to the Aussies. When the war in Vietnam fell apart in 1970 whenever-it-was, he moved to Australia, so that was where I grew up." Cartland shrugged as he tightened the restraining clips of a bus microconnector. "You know how it is—the town wasn't much more than a glorified Army camp and air base. I got interested in electronics and flying and that kind of thing, and when we moved back to England I went to Cambridge for a while, then joined up."

  "The RAF?" Lee said.

  "That's right. After a while they sent me to the U.S.A. for shuttle training in Nevada. Spent a year there. Then went to Germany to work with the people who were designing the E.S.A. shuttle, then to the Sahara to fly it."

  "You sure got around."

  "That's not all of it either," Murdoch threw in from where he was tidying up the cables at the rear of one of the racks. "Tell him the rest, Ted."

  "Well," Cartland said, "to cut a long story short, I suppose I became a sort of Air Force consultant on designing orbital vehicles. I did that in the U.K. for a while, then went back to Australia to do testing at the missile range at Woomera. Then when the Americans and the Europeans merged their space programs, I went to Washington to do technical liaison."

  "So how did you wind up at Cornell?" Lee asked. "That was where you met Charles, wasn't it?"

  "That's right. I got to know him fairly well while working in Washington. They were doing some interesting things for NASA on orbiting observatories. Charles was with NASA at the time, and that was how we bumped into each other."

  "I can see why you never got married, Ted," Lee remarked.

  "Good heavens! No time for anything like that." Cartland looked positively shaken by the idea, as if the possibility had occurred to him for the first time in his life. "Mind you, there's no shortage of popsy on that kind of circuit, so there's no reason to miss out on anything. I mean… just because a chap likes a drink now and then, it doesn't mean he has to go mad and buy himself a whole bloody pub, does it?" He straightened up and placed the tools that he had been using back on the bench, where Maxwell was pawing frantically at a CRT screen in a futile attempt to trap the flickering trace. Then he moved over to the console and ran quickly through a sequence of system checks. "There," he announced. "That seems to be it. I'll leave it running in monitor mode in case anything comes in. Talking about drinks, I wouldn't say no to a quick noggin before turning in. How about you chaps?"