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

spacecraft designs and so on. I got to know Otto through somebody at Farben who worked on propellants. Amazing, isn't it."
    "The world gets tinier," Elizabeth agreed. "Anyway, where was I? To cut a long story short, we ended up by deriving a set of mathematical expressions that interrelated entropy functions, quantum energy-states, and spacetime coordinates of quantum events. In particular, certain variables that could be interpreted as time and energy turned out to be covariant."
    "You mean there was some kind of equivalence relationship?" Lee asked, sounding surprised.
    "Not quite," Elizabeth answered. "But you could almost think of it that way. It meant that the universe could be represented by an ensemble of 'events,' each characterized by a set of energy states and spacetime numbers; nothing more. And in such a representation of the universe, conservation of mass-energy did not hold; it was replaced by a conservation of the product of that quantity with spacetime. By means of mathematical transforms, it was possible to transform one universe into another in which either quantity varied inversely with the other. If you made all the spatial variables constant, the spacetime functions reduced to pure time; so you could transform energy to time or vice versa. We had no idea what that meant, but it was fun playing games with the equations."
    "You're kidding," Lee said. "I've never heard of anything like that. They don't seem similar in any respect at all. There just isn't anything in common."
    "That was why I said it wasn't really correct to call it an equivalence relationship," Elizabeth said. "What it seemed to say was that energy could be extracted from the universe, which is where conventional conservation breaks down, and injected into another version of that universe in which the time coordinates of all the 'events' were shifted by some amount. The more energy you transformed, the greater the time-shift would be." She looked around the table and shook her head in wonder. "If that was interpreted as taking place within the same universe, it seemed to say that energy could be transferred through time. We couldn't see any physical significance in it at all, and dismissed the whole thing as a theoretical curiosity like tachyons and negative mass. And that's what I've always believed—until I saw the machine downstairs."
    "Elizabeth showed me some of the mathematics a while ago," Charles commented. "I realized then that some of the expressions could be identified with parts of my own work. That was why I thought she'd be rather interested in what we're doing."
    "Rather interested?"
Elizabeth echoed. "Charles, that must be the biggest understatement to date in this century. I'm overwhelmed, fascinated… completely hooked, to use our guests' parlance. In fact I'm even presumptuous enough to assume that I'm part of the team now. I am, aren't I, Charles? You wouldn't keep me in the dark about what happens next now that you've shown me this much. You wouldn't dare."
    "Och, you don't have to tell me that at all," Charles replied, raising his eyebrows. "It would be more than my life's worth and I know it." He stopped eating and placed his knife and fork down. His expression at once became more serious. "Of course you're part of the team now, Liz. I'm certain you could be a big help in making sense out of this whole thing. I'm assuming we'll be seeing a lot more of you down here now, whenever you can find some free time."
    "Well, I'm glad we see eye to eye on that, Charlie Ross. You'd have been in trouble if you'd said anything else." Elizabeth paused to give her mood a second or two to adjust to Charles's tone, then went on, "Very well, where do we go from here? What are your thoughts, Charles? Don't tell me you haven't been turning a few speculations over in your head in the last week."
    Charles took a sip from his wine glass and nodded at once as if he had been waiting for the question. The others watched him and waited