Thrice upon a Time (32 page)

"So," Elizabeth asked them. "What do you think of it?"

Lee turned his hands palms-up and shrugged. "Impressed. What else do I say? Anything would be an understatement."

"Grandpa and Ted were pretty excited after they'd been taken around it the other week," Murdoch said. "Now I can see why."

"Where are they today?" Mike asked as he stirred cream into his coffee. "Back at the castle or traveling again?"

"Traveling," Murdoch told him.

"Where to this time? Another Brussels trip?"

Murdoch shook his head. "No, London. They'll be back sometime tonight."

"What are they doing there?" Mike asked, surprised.

"They've gone to talk to a Government advisory committee on technology and science. It looks as if everybody's getting in on the act."

"Government committee?" Mike looked puzzled. "Burghead's got nothing to do with them, surely. Why are they getting their oar in?"

"You're right, Mike," Elizabeth said. "The reactor problem is an EFC matter. But the chaps in Brussels are becoming concerned about the greater significance of the whole thing as a separate issue. They've more or less insisted that the Government get involved with the pure physics aspects."

"They may be a competitive corporation, but the idea of being the only outfit around that knows about messing with timelines is making them nervous," Lee explained. "This one's too hot to be holding."

"Mmm… I think I see what you mean," Mike agreed. Elizabeth leaned back to cast a wary eye around the tables in their vicinity

"We shouldn't really be talking about this here," she said, lowering her voice. "Save it until later."

"Sure;" Lee said. He sat back and fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

Murdoch propped his chin on his knuckles and gazed absently around. Suddenly his eyes came to rest on a girl who was setting a tray down and just about to join a group of people at a table on the far side of the cafeteria. There was something about the way she walked and about the long sweep of dark hair over her shoulders that seemed familiar. Then he remembered.

"Say," he said to Lee after a second. "Guess who I've just seen here."

Lee turned in his seat to follow Murdoch's gaze. "Where?"

"Over there by the window… just sitting down."

Lee spotted her and frowned as he tried to recall where he had seen her before.

"Kingussie," Murdoch supplied. "The day Maxwell took a walk. Remember?"

"Ah, yeah… " Lee said, nodding slowly.

"You know her?" Elizabeth asked, sounding surprised.

"Not really," Murdoch said. "We bumped into her briefly in Kingussie a few weeks ago. It's just that I didn't know she worked here. Any idea what she does?"

"She's from the Medical Department, isn't she?" Mike said to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth nodded. "She's Dr. Waring's assistant, I think." She glanced at Murdoch and Lee, and explained, "Dr. Waring is in charge of the medical facilities here. I'm not sure what her name is, though. Do you know, Mike?"

"No, I'm afraid not. Wouldn't mind finding out."

"We could no doubt find out for you if you wanted to say hello sometime," Elizabeth offered. "I wouldn't make it during office hours though. Waring can be a bit touchy."

"Oh, hell no," Murdoch said. "It's nothing important. I was just surprised to see her here, that's all."

While the others carried on talking, Murdoch's eyes strayed back to where the girl was sitting. Something about the way she sat with her body erect, about the way she laughed, and about the way she used her hands so expressively while she spoke mesmerized him. Never in his life had he found anybody so instantly fascinating. And he didn't even know her name.

Murdoch and Lee spent the rest of the day in the Mathematics and Physics Department with Mike. It was well after six o'clock when Mike suggested a drink for the three of them to finish off the afternoon. The other two agreed without much argument, and Mike suggested a place called the Aberdeen Angus, which, he said, was a popular place among Burghead people, just off the main road about three miles west of the plant and practically on their way home.

Fifteen minutes later, Murdoch was following Mike's somewhat battered VW wagon westward in manual-drive mode at one hundred and ten miles per hour despite the posted limit. Eventually they slowed down to something approaching sanity and turned off at a sign that said
Achnabackie
onto a narrow road that wound its way between stone walls in among wooded hillsides. After about half a mile, they came to a small village nestled in a fold in the hills and found the Aberdeen Angus right in the center. They parked next to Mike's wagon and joined him a few moments later outside the front door of the pub.

"What's up?" Mike asked cheerfully. "Leave your brakes on?"

"Does everybody drive like a maniac around here?" Murdoch asked. "That was a controlled highway. Why not relax a little and let the system take care of it?"

"Too old a model," Mike said, waving toward the wagon as they reached the door. "It hasn't got full auto. Anyhow, it saves on drinking time." They drew up at the Public Bar just inside the front door. "My round," Mike told them. "What's it to be, pints?" Murdoch and Lee accepted the offer. Mike called out the order, and the barman began drawing off three foaming mugs of dark ale.

"So, what were you saying just before we left the office, Mike?" Murdoch asked. "The next phase at Burghead will be to build a steel plant over the reactor site or something."

"That's right," Mike said. "And other things after that. It'll have a separate reactor system of its own that'll use the same beams. Steelmaking's already going nuclear in Japan and the U.S.S.R. It's about time we caught up."

They talked for a while about the attractions of using the high temperatures of nuclear plasmas as the basis for metal extraction and processing in the industries of the coming decades. Such a trend would render the whole cumbersome and relatively costly technology of traditional ore reduction and smelting methods obsolete, since the intense heat of a plasma torch would reduce everything—low-grade ores, desert sand and rock, scrap materials, construction debris—down to the atoms of its constituent elements, which would be ionized and could be separated, and concentrated magnetically. Cost-effective metal extraction would no longer depend on the availability of concentrated geographical deposits.

"And moonrock as well," Lee said. "Didn't they reckon once it'd never be any good for anything?"

"Absolutely," Mike agreed. "Once we've got the technology developed down here, we ship it up there. Then we'll really be able to start building things. I bet they'll start the space colonies inside twenty years. You wait and see."

While they were talking, a group of people had come through from the Lounge Bar and were trickling by in ones and twos to leave via the front door. Mike seemed to know most of them, which meant they were also from the plant. The last two of the group were a sandy-haired youth and a dark-haired girl, following a few paces behind the rest and talking together about something. Murdoch swept a casual eye over them as they passed, and suddenly something convulsed inside his chest. It was
she
!

For a moment his mind froze up. She was only a few feet away from him, and for some reason his idiotic brain couldn't put together anything to say. And then he realized that she had stopped and was looking at him curiously with a faint flicker of recognition on her face.

Suddenly she smiled. "Hello there," she said. "How's the kitten?"

Murdoch gasped in surprise. "I don't believe it!" he exclaimed. "You can't remember that."

"Why not? I don't see kittens under cars very often."

"That's incredible."

"I detect an American," she remarked. "Is your friend one too?"

"That's right… from California… both of us. We're over here for a while."

"With EFC?"

"No. As a matter of fact we're—"

"Hey, Anne," a voice called from the doorway out to the street. "Come on. We're all waiting. Some of us are getting hungry." Murdoch looked around and saw that it belonged to a tall, broad-shouldered, athletic-looking character with a reddish face who was wearing a dark blazer.

"Stay on and have one with us," Murdoch suggested. "You can talk to that bunch any day of the week."

"It's nice of you to offer, but we're all together," she replied with a laugh. "I've got to go, I'm afraid." She turned her head and called to the door, "All right. Patience, Trevor. I'm on my way now." To Murdoch she said, "Take care of the kitten," and then she was gone.

Murdoch turned back toward the bar to find Lee and Mike sporting derisive smirks.

"She remembered me," Murdoch said defensively. "Didn't you see? She's in love already."

"Like hell," Lee told him. "She remembered Maxwell."

"At least I've got her name now," Murdoch said defiantly.

"Fast operator," Lee murmured. "I'd better go buy some flowers for the wedding."

They ate out with Mike and arrived back at Storbannon well after midnight to find Charles and Cartland back from London, and still up talking in the library.

"You two scoundrels look a little the worse for wear, if I'm not mistaken," Charles observed as they came in. "You've tracked down the local lassies already, I'll be bound."

"Wrong Grandpa," Murdoch said. "We had a night out with one of Elizabeth's physicists. Nice guy."

"Did you get the tour round the plant?" Cartland asked.

"Yes, we did," Lee told him. "Quite a place."

"How'd it go down south?" Murdoch asked, looking at Charles.

"Oh… we had a busy day, right enough." Charles replied. "What about the tests here? Have we got a complete set of preliminary data ready for analysis yet?"

"Well, the final group has been running all day," Murdoch said. "We should have the output by morning. Why?"

"I want to aim at getting some kind of a tentative interpretation by this time next week, if we can," Charles told him. "A week from tomorrow, the Minister himself is coming up here with a couple of his scientific chappies. They want to see it for themselves." He sighed and rubbed his beard resignedly. "It looks as if we've really started something now, I'm afraid."

The Honorable Graham Cuthrie, His Majesty's Minister for Advanced Technology and Science, stared over Murdoch's shoulder at the screen and went over in his mind the things that Charles had said. Then he took a sheet of blank paper off the top of the desk beside him and drew a large cross from corner to corner with a red broad-tipped pen. Slowly and deliberately he folded the paper in two and tore it across, then placed the pieces on top of each other and tore them again.

"There is an event," he declared. "The paper with the red X on it has been torn up." He looked dubiously across the lab at where Charles was standing by the workbench. On the other side of the room with Lee and Cartland, Professor Norman Payne, Chairman of the Minister's Advisory Committee on Advanced Research, and Dr. Catherine Hazeltine from the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington stood silently watching with interest. Cuthrie continued, "The event of my tearing this sheet of paper is now established as part of the past. It's fact. Are you suggesting that it can now be changed?"

Charles made no reply, but simply nodded at Murdoch. Murdoch composed a simple line of text on the screen: "Do not tear the sheet that has the red X drawn on it."

"You tore it at exactly ten seconds after eleven-seven," Murdoch said, glancing back at Cuthrie. "I'm setting this message to arrive at a point in time five seconds before that. Whether or not anything changes will depend on whether or not the 'you' that exists at that moment decides to take any notice of it." Cuthrie sniffed suspiciously. Without further ado, Murdoch turned back to the console and pressed the
Transmit
key.

Cuthrie took a sheet of blank paper off the top of the desk beside him and drew a large cross from corner to corner with a red broad-tipped pen. As he raised the sheet for everybody in the room to see, a line of text appeared suddenly on the screen in front of Murdoch and caught Cuthrie's eye. Cuthrie jerked his head up sharply in surprise and found Charles watching him with a faint expression of amusement.

"Where the devil did that come from?" Cuthrie asked uncertainly.

Murdoch leaned forward to read the numerical data that had appeared along with the text. "From a point in time that was in the future when this appeared on the screen," he said. "In fact, from just about now."

"But… how could anybody know that I was intending to tear it up?" Cuthrie asked in a bewildered voice. "I never mentioned it in any way at all."

"I think that perhaps you're missing the point, Graham," Catherine Hazeltine suggested. "From what Sir Charles said earlier, you
did
tear it up… on a timeline that has been reconfigured to the one we're all on now as a result of what is now on the screen. Am I right, Sir Charles?" Charles nodded but said nothing. Lee and Cartland looked as if they were enjoying themselves as they watched.

"My God!" Cuthrie breathed, staring at the screen again with a new light of sudden respect in his eyes. Professor Payne thought for a moment, and then stepped a pace forward. "May I have that for a moment?" he asked. Cuthrie passed him the sheet. Payne produced a pen from his pocket and scrawled a large black circle on top of the red cross.