Thrice upon a Time (31 page)

"We don't know," Charles replied. "It doesn't go into details. We've been discussing it here for hours and can think of all kinds of possibilities. But we'd need to run a full computer simulation before we could be sure of anything."

"Whatever the result was, it was serious enough for whoever sent this to do something extremely drastic to change it," Elizabeth said.

"Surely not," Lee objected, looking up from his reading. "Holes that small wouldn't last long enough to do any harm."

"If there's a connection with tau phenomena that we don't understand, anything might be possible," Charles said. "From some of the math in there, it's clear that they had a far better understanding of the whole thing than I could offer now. We're going to have to do a lot of work on the physical basis of plasma theory and see where tau physics comes into it."

"That could take some time," Murdoch pointed out. "The tests at Burghead are due to start a week from Monday. What do we do about that?"

"I'll call the senior directors over the weekend and see if we can go and talk to them first thing Monday morning," Elizabeth said. "If they won't accept this message at face value, then I suppose we'll have to bring them here and show them the machine. If that doesn't convince them, nothing will." She looked inquiringly at Charles.

"I suppose so," Charles agreed reluctantly. "It'll be a pity to have to bring outsiders into it so soon, but from the look of things those tests have to be stopped whatever the cost."

"This is neat." Lee pushed himself back from the main console in the lab and nodded approvingly at the list of code being displayed on the screen. It was late on Sunday morning. Elizabeth and Charles were talking physics in the study; Cartland was upstairs showering and shaving. Murdoch looked up from the datagrid terminal, at which he was running a calculation to verify one of the expressions contained in the message received the previous day.

"What?" he asked.

"The program that read in the message," Lee replied. "It used the machine as a relay and bootstrapped itself back in one-day jumps. There's a test built in to terminate it at yesterday's date."

"I had a feeling it might be something like that," Murdoch said.

Lee turned away from the console and looked at him. "Did you ever learn real-time programming anyplace, Doc? You never said anything about it to me if you did."

"No, never. Why?"

Lee waved a hand at the screen. "Whoever did that knew some neat tricks. I was just curious as to who it might have been."

"Aren't there any clues in there?" Murdoch asked.

"Nope," Lee said; "But I know it wasn't me."

"I guess we'll never know then." Murdoch thought for a moment about the strangeness of the whole situation, and then returned his attention to the terminal.

Charles returned with Elizabeth to meet the Burghead directors on Monday morning. The reactions to what they had to say ranged from open-minded skepticism to downright disbelief. It was all too extraordinary to be assimilated in so short a time and on the say-so of just two people, whoever they might be. Charles had not had sufficient time, nor was he yet sufficiently familiar with the way the machine worked, to be able to substantiate all his claims, so he invited the directors to come to Storbannon to see for themselves. The matter was clearly too serious to be dismissed, however improbable the whole business sounded, and the Board agreed to send a delegation to make the visit on Wednesday morning. The Board agreed also to meet again on the Thursday to debate the outcome.

"We are agreed then," Courtney summarized for the Board on Thursday morning. "For the time being at least, we are obliged to accept this message as genuine. In view of the extreme gravity of its content, there can be no question of the proposed tests going ahead until the situation has been fully investigated." Heads nodded in assent from around the conference table. He continued, "I propose therefore that the schedule for the tests be suspended until further notice, and that the reasons for the decision be conveyed to the EFC Presidential Committee immediately. The question of where we go next must obviously wait until we obtain a response from there. Are there any dissenters?" There were none. "Very good. Passed unanimously." He paused for a second.

"Obviously the things we have heard this morning are not for publication or for discussion outside this room for the time being, to insure Sir Charles's peace and privacy if for nothing else." He glanced at Charles, who was sitting next to him, as he spoke. Charles acknowledged his words with a slight nod of his head. Courtney concluded, "We will have to leave that side of things with Brussels as a policy issue. Yes, Simon?" He looked at Vickers, who was moving to speak.

"I agree with you that we should keep the whole thing quiet for the time being," Vickers said. "But we'll need an official story to explain the postponement. I mean, with all the publicity that this place has had, we can hardly just refuse to say anything at all. And the people who work here will want an answer as much as anybody else."

"Any suggestions?" Courtney invited, casting his eyes around the table.

"I'll talk to a couple of people in my department who can be relied upon to cooperate without asking questions," Elizabeth said from the far end. "We should be able to put together a story about some piece of equipment needing to be redesigned and modified, or something like that. I'll see if I can get a statement circulated by this afternoon."

"Very well. We'll leave that one with you, Elizabeth. Thanks." Courtney raised his voice slightly to address the whole meeting again. "There is another item that I would like to propose. As you have heard, the physical theory that underlies our work here appears to have converged with the remarkable line of research that Sir Charles Ross has described to us. As soon as the appropriate people within EFC have been made aware of these developments, the next step will almost certainly be a call for a detailed reexamination of the theoretical foundations of high-energy plasmas by our senior physicists. After that, I don't know who might get involved.

"From the purely practical point of view, the first goal must be to determine if, and if so how, the heavy-ion system can be modified to avoid the kind of hazard that appears to have afflicted some"—he frowned for a moment as he sought for words appropriate to a formal meeting of the Board, to express what he still couldn't help feeling was something out of fairyland—"some future universe. Clearly it would be of great help to our scientists if they had access to the knowledge which at present only Sir Charles and his colleagues possess. My proposal is, therefore, that we instigate at once a program of collaboration between a selected group of our research people at Burghead whose discretion can be trusted and Sir Charles's team, acting, for want of a better word, as consultants. There's no reason why we shouldn't begin that straight away on our own initiative without waiting to hear from Brussels. I have already discussed such an arrangement with Sir Charles, and he has stated that he is more than willing to help us in any way he can. Could I have your views on that, please?"

"Good idea. Do it," Vickers murmured.

"Have we any idea how long this could go on?" somebody asked. "It could become rather embarrassing. I mean, here we are with this whole ruddy shooting-match ready to go after damn near fifteen years of designing it and building it, and now we don't even know when it's going to work."

"Or
if
it will
ever
work," somebody else tossed in. A murmur of endorsement rippled round the table.

Elizabeth leaned forward to answer. "I don't want to play down the seriousness of the situation," she told them. "But let's be thankful that we've only an embarrassing delay to worry about, and not the catastrophe we would have had if we'd gone ahead in complete ignorance. From what Sir Charles and I have been able to work out so far, the problem seems to lie in the energy-balance equations that describe the plasma phase at the implosion core. To put it simply, the equations as they stand fail to take account of an additional energy-transfer mode, which Sir Charles's theory describes, but conventional theory does not.

"Putting it all in perspective, my opinion at this point is that it should be possible to guarantee hazard-free operation of the reactors as they exist now simply by altering the intensity profiles of the beams, and perhaps by using a redesigned pellet. There's no question of our having to tear the whole plant down and rebuild it from scratch, or anything like that."

"That sounds very reassuring, Elizabeth," one of the former questioners said. "But how can you be so sure of that so soon?"

"I said it was simply my opinion at this stage," she reminded him. "We won't be in a position to make definitive statements until we've done a lot more work."

"And that's exactly why I'm saying we should get Sir Charles and his people involved as soon as possible," Courtney said. "The sooner we make a start, the sooner we'll have some answers."

Colin Harding, Director of Engineering, had been looking thoughtful throughout the exchange. When a lull occurred, he sat forward, cleared his throat, and frowned uncertainly for a moment.

"Look," he said, turning his head from one side to the other to address everybody present. "This may sound a bit ridiculous because I don't pretend to understand very much about this… this 'time machine' yet, but it seems to me it could save us a lot of trouble. If somebody in May could use it to send a message back, why couldn't we use it to send questions
forward
? After all, it must be reasonable to assume that months from now we'll know a hell of a lot more about this business than we do at the moment." He shrugged. "So why can't we simply ask 'us' months from now what the answers are, instead of spending lots of time finding out the hard way?"

"That's got to be preposterous," Vickers said, but the confused expression on his face added that he wasn't exactly sure why.

Charles answered the suggestion. "That may not be as daft as it sounds," he said. "There are probably all kinds of strange possibilities that we can't even imagine yet. There's a whole new realm of physical phenomena to be investigated, and at this stage we're not even in a position to describe their effects, let alone explain them. I would prefer us not to go meddling with things that we are still a long way from understanding fully. At the moment we are in the process of preparing a schedule of rigid tests for the machine at Storbannon, designed to provide more data on what these effects are. For now and for the foreseeable future, I would like to use the machine for that purpose and for nothing else."

"A very wise precaution," Courtney declared. He looked up and around the table. "So we've got a lot of work to do, and we'll do it in the way we already know how. The proposal is for Sir Charles and his team to begin working with us as soon as is mutually convenient. Those for?" One by one the hands around the table went up. "Those against?" Courtney asked. There were no hands. "Passed," he announced.

During the weeks that followed, Charles spent a lot of time at Burghead and made several visits to the EFC Headquarters in Brussels, sometimes with Cartland, to discuss the new physics with a selected circle of EFC executives and senior scientists. The media carried an official version of why the much-publicized Burghead tests were being postponed; a brief flurry of cynicism and criticism from some sectors of the public greeted the news, but soon died away.

Murdoch and Lee were left to take charge of the extensive schedule of tests that had been drawn up for the machine at Storbannon. This turned out to be a tedious job involving days spent running variations of the same routines of complex computer algorithms and random-number-generator routines, most of which could be programmed to execute automatically. The two Americans thus found themselves with a lot of spare time. They used the opportunity to visit Burghead in order to look over the plant and meet some of the people with whom they would be working when Elizabeth and Charles had finished the groundwork. One of these was Mike Stavely, a physicist who worked with Elizabeth in the Mathematics and Physics Department of the facility, and one of the few who was aware of the real reasons for abandoning the plans to go full-power with the reactors. On a day in early February, they found themselves with Mike and Elizabeth in the Burghead cafeteria, finishing lunch after their first comprehensive tour of the plant.