Thrice upon a Time (10 page)

"What does Herman do?" Lee asked Murdoch.

"I don't know," Murdoch said. "I've never met him."

"He used to develop computer algorithms," Cartland said. "Now he writes books about it. You'd get along fine with him, Lee."

"Will he be coming here too?" Lee asked.

Cartland shook his head. "Shouldn't think so. He was in the middle of another book last time I spoke to him. He gets a bit antisocial at times like that. Elizabeth told me once she thinks he's going to write a book one day called
How to Lose Friends and Not Be Influenced by People."
Then Charles began talking into the phone again.

"It's all right, is it? Good… glad to get rid of you, is he? I see… " He chuckled at something. "You tell him from me that I'm way past being interested in any o' that nonsense… Disappointed be damned! Oh, and there's something else. We've got a couple of visitors here with us. Do you remember my grandson who I introduced you to in Edinburgh once?… Aye, Murdoch. He's over again. He's got a friend with him this time, the one I told you about… Yes." Charles looked up at Lee unconsciously as he listened to something. "Oh, a big chappie with red hair… " He frowned suddenly and raised his voice. "He's just another American. God damn it woman, what else do you want me to say? He's sitting right here… I know you're only teasing… I am
not
getting huffy… Nonsense… Very good. So we'll see you next Friday. Around noon it is then, for lunch."

"Regards," Cartland sang out.

"Ted sends his regards," Charles repeated. "Aye, to Herman too. Tell him he's welcome if he changes his mind and feels like a break… Well, you never know… You too, Lizzie. Bye now." He replaced the telephone on the bookshelf with a sigh.

"Some woman," Lee commented.

"Oh, that's just her way," Charles said. "She likes to tease a little now and then, but she's not so bad at all really. She has a good head on her shoulders, and that's what matters."

Suddenly the stand, coal tongs, shovel, brush, and poker that formed the hearth set collapsed with a loud metallic crash. Maxwell streaked out from underneath the heap of wreckage, dashed under the nearest armchair, and about-faced to survey his latest accomplishment. Charles looked on dourly as Murdoch leaned forward to pick up the pieces. After a few seconds he stroked his beard thoughtfully and said, "Do you think, Ted, that when you've got the machine up and running, we could find a way of erasing that animal into some other poor, unsuspecting universe?"

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 way from having answers to the things she had seen, but at least it no longer showed so much.

The meal was served in what had once been part of the banquet hall of the original manor house, which had since been partitioned off to form the less spacious but more serviceable formal dining room. It was a high-ceilinged, stately room with walls paneled in dark oak that extended to its hammer-beam roof, affording a suitably dignified setting for the cut glass and gleaming silver that had been laid out for the occasion. Forty-odd years of living in America had made not one scrap of difference to the habits that Charles had formed in his youth, and he appeared in a dinner jacket with black tie; the others conceded as far as dark, conventional ties with white shirts. Elizabeth, knowing Charles's whims, wore a long, satiny, purple dress that she had brought for evening wear.

Murdoch had met her only briefly during his last visit to Scotland, and his recollection of her had been vague, but in the course of the afternoon he had come to appreciate what Charles had meant when he described her as attractive for her age. Her hair was neatly styled in waves that held just a hint of orange, and her figure, though thickening slightly at the hips and bust, would not have dismayed a girl twenty years her junior. But what made her attractive had nothing to do with things physical; it was more her composure, and the elegant way in which she managed to speak and carry herself. Many women try vainly to cling to youth and glamor until long past the years when the effort becomes self-defeating; others, like Elizabeth, draw more from life than life can draw from them and learn how to work with nature, allowing girlish good looks to give way to something more subtle and far more enduring. Such women mature gracefully, but they never grow old. If he ever did get married, Murdoch couldn't help thinking as he watched Elizabeth across the dinner table, he hoped it would be to a wife about whom he would be able to think the same things when she was about to enter her second half-century.

For propriety's sake the conversation made token reference to such things as where Lee was from and what he had done, the progress of the trials at Burghead, and Charles's experiences in America; but the events of the afternoon were bubbling too near the surface to be contained for long. Soon Elizabeth was describing the aspect of her own work that had led Charles to suppose that she might have something of value to contribute to the task ahead.

"When I was working in France, I was part of a group looking into theories of entropy states and the general thermodynamics of plasmas. The natural rate of entropy increase in a closed system defines the flow of what is perceived as time. We were trying to develop a better insight to the synchronization between apparently uncoupled systems, in other words to explain how time manages to flow at the same rate in different parts of the universe; for example, how does a nuclear reaction inside a star 'know' how fast the same reaction is taking place inside another star or perhaps in a laboratory? Why do they all keep in step? It seemed to us that there was something that had simply been accepted as fact and taken for granted for too long." She paused to pick up her knife and fork to resume eating.

Cartland nodded from the other side of the table. "I met a couple of chaps when I was in Hamburg a few years ago who said they were mixed up in something very similar," he said. "They were from the big physics research institute there. Otto… Gauerlick, or something like that, one of them was. Can't remember the other. Ever hear of him?"

"Otto Gauerlicht!" Elizabeth exclaimed delightedly. "Yes, from the Wien Institute. He worked with us for a while before the Consortium was formed. How on earth did you come to meet him?"

"It was just before I left the RAF," Cartland replied. "I did quite a bit of touring around Europe… liaison on 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 expectantly.

"We must conclude that past and present versions of the universe in which we live exist and are equally real," Charles told them. "We thus have a continuum of some kind. I think we're all agreed that it can't be of the popular infinitely branching, parallel variety; that would introduce too many impossible complications. In any case, it isn't supported by the data we've seen." He looked around to invite comment, but the others just nodded silently. "Neither can it be of the simple serial variety that we considered initially; in such a model it would be impossible to affect the present by manipulating a past, and again our results seem to indicate that this is not the case. The only model I can think of that could be consistent with what we've seen is a more complex serial one in which altering the events in a past universe does affect not only the future of that particular universe as it evolves in time, but also the presents of all the other universes that lie ahead of it. In other words there is some mechanism of causal connection through the continuum that the simple serial model doesn't take account of."

"You mean like with the jar," Lee said. "That one message changed what happened in all the universes involved, not just in the one universe where the message was received."

"Precisely that," Charles confirmed. "To be anywhere near the reality at all, the model will have to possess a mechanism that explains such evident facts." Those at the table became quiet.

After a while Cartland asked, "Any ideas?"

"I think maybe I have," Charles replied. The others looked at him with suddenly renewed interest. "Everything we have discovered so far," he continued, "seems to add up to two things: First, the universe that we see around us and form part of is simply one of many, equally real universes that appear to be strung sequentially along a single timeline; second, events that happen in this universe affect not only its future, but the situations in all the other universes that lie ahead of it. That, of course, suggests a continuity throughout the system; the future universes ahead of us form a progression of states that are evolving from the present state. We need to ask ourselves what the mechanism is that provides that continuity. That same mechanism will turn out to be, unless I'm very much mistaken, the same mechanism that enables events in one universe to alter what happens in another. Obviously we're talking about a causal influence that must be propagated by some means."