Thrice upon a Time by James P. Hogan Read Free Book Online

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."
    The others agreed that Charles was right. They also decided to force adherence to his ruling by taking the machine out of service for a while. Cartland had been to Manchester to supervise final testing of components he had ordered some months previously, designed to enhance the machine's performance. First, they would enable larger blocks of information to be transmitted than the current limit of six characters at a time; second, they would increase the range from ten minutes to something on the order of a day. Cartland estimated that he would need seven to ten days to install them and test the modifications. The best time to do all this would be at once, which everybody accepted somewhat reluctantly. Then there would be no opportunity for yielding to flashes of inspiration or trying out premature ideas for probably over a week. By that time, they hoped, they would have recovered sufficiently from their initial intoxication to think rationally.
    As they were leaving the lab at the end of the afternoon, Murdoch turned to Charles and said jokingly, "What we ought to do is take the range up to a day right now. Then we'd be able to ask ourselves tomorrow what we'd decided to do. It'd save us all the hassle of having to figure it out from scratch."
    "That's precisely the kind of monkeying around I want to make damn certain we steer clear of until we know what the hell we're doing," Charles told him darkly.

Chapter 8
Prologue
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Epilogue
    By the time they sat down to dinner, early in the evening of the Friday just over a week later, Elizabeth Muir appeared to have recovered from the shock of having a lifetime's unquestioned beliefs demolished before her eyes. The notion of being able to send information or any type of causal influence backward through time was something that she, as a physicist, had always dismissed out of hand. The whole of physics was based on the observation that causes never worked backward. If causality reversal was allowed, physics couldn't work. That physics did work said causality reversal was a myth. Therefore it could never be demonstrated. In the course of the afternoon, she had been obliged to rethink a lot of her convictions. She was still a long