Thrice upon a Time (19 page)

"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.

The time-communication model that had been tentatively proposed 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.