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came in: NO, followed by, CANTBE, and SERIAL.
"It's from four minutes ahead," Cartland told them. His voice was almost
matter-of-fact;
he was by now beyond being able to express surprise at anything.
"He knew what we were thinking again," Murdoch said. "Our signal didn't say
anything about serial. And the first frame says, NO. The jar in the universe
four minutes ahead of us isn't broken. So whose jar did get broken?"
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"This is absurd," Cartland declared. "It could only have been in whatever
universe is four minutes ahead of us, yet somebody in that universe has just
told us that it wasn't."
"Not quite," Lee said, glancing at the clock-readout on the console panel. "A
universe that's now one minute behind us asked one that's now three minutes
ahead. We're partway between changing from one into the other...if you see
what I mean. Maybe that affects it somehow."
"Oh, Christ," Cartland moaned miserably.
"In that case, three minutes from now we'll be at the point where the broken
jar is supposed to have existed," Charles said. "I'm going to assume that it
will still be intact, because it looks fairly safe to me up there where
Murdoch put it. Anyhow, we'll know for sure if
I'm right in a few minutes' time. So what will that tell us?" He looked from
one to the other to invite a reply. Nobody offered anything. "It will mean
that the event has not taken place in our universe at the time it was said to
have taken place, and we already know that it never took place in the only
other universe it could have occurred in -- the one that is four minutes ahead
of us.
That seems to me to say that it never took place anywhere!"
"But it did," Murdoch protested. "Look, it's right there on the screen. It
happened...unless that message is false, but why should it be? Why would we
want to mislead ourselves? Where are the pieces, right now, of that jar that
got broken?"
"I don't know," Charles said slowly. "But the only conclusion I can draw from
what I've seen is that they no longer exist anywhere." He paused. A complete
silence enveloped the room as three stunned faces stared back at 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
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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
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0Time.txt 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 SEVEN
"Do you remember Lizzie Muir, Murdoch?" Charles asked. "We said hello to her
in Edinburgh last time you were over...at that conference on plasma dynamics
or whatever it was. Quite an attractive woman for her age...getting on for
around fifty or so."
"The physicist?" Murdoch said. "Something to do with the big fusion plant up
on the coast.
Burg-something...Burghead, wasn't it?"
"Aye, Burghead. That's her. I think I'd like to bring her in on what we're
doing here.
She's done a lot of work on the kinds of things we were talking about this
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