Thrice upon a Time (21 page)

Erased? Murdoch had been about to erase himself? Something cold and slithery was turning somersaults along his spine at the thought of it. He sat back slowly in the chair and shook his head.

And then suddenly, he heard the door leading down to the lab being opened. Footsteps began descending the stairs, and the voices of Charles and Cartland came floating in from the passage outside. Murdoch was seized by an irrational panic; his finger shot out instinctively to delete the words that were glowing on the screen. But for a long time while he had been sitting there thinking, his mind had been subconsciously fixating on the
Send
key with a morbid fascination.

He hit the wrong button.

His eyes widened with disbelief as they stared stupefied at his hand. But nothing had happened. He didn't know what should have, but something was surely wrong… like the feeling he always had in the dentist's chair when he wanted to tell them that the anesthetic they had just given him wasn't going to work.…

"He's fallen into the leg and cannot get back up," Robert grumbled blackly. "I'll have to be takin' the whole damn thing to pieces now to get him back out."

"Grilled cat for dinner today, huh?" Murdoch said with a laugh, and walked away in the direction of the kitchen.

After breakfast he went down to the lab just for the hell of it and checked his mailbox. A second later he had sunk into the operator's chair in front of the console and was staring in astonishment at the screen.

It was saying something about the theta-field integral connected with the work he had promised to do that day with Charles. He swallowed hard and shook his head in disbelief as he leaned forward to study the message more closely. It seemed to be nothing more than a detail of a trivial error. The whole thing was ridiculous. What could possibly have been so important about something like that that it justified breaking all the team's rules? He had no way of telling; the message didn't go into any detail. He shrugged to himself, noted the information on a scrap of paper, deleted the record from the system and, still mystified, sauntered back upstairs to join Charles.

The dinner had been superb and the wine pleasantly mellowing. The music was soft and slow, and Anne's body swayed like warm, liquid velvet as she danced close to him.

And she smelled nice.

"I don't want to go home," she murmured into his shoulder.

"You shouldn't even be thinking about that," he told her. "There's lots of time left yet."

"Not enough. It's been a nice evening."

"Mmm… "

"You wouldn't believe how much I've been looking forward to tonight. I had an awful premonition you were going to call at the last minute and put it off." She giggled softly. "There, doesn't that sound terribly schoolgirlish?"

"Nope. It sounds crazy. Why would I go and do something like that?"

"Oh, I don't know… You might have got too wrapped up in that work you're doing to tear yourself away. Something like that."

"Now that's really crazy. You don't think I'd have called it off just over a few lousy sums."

"You never know with scientists."

"No way in the world."

A week later Murdoch was still puzzling from time to time over what could have been so important about a trivial third integral that it was worth breaking the rules and jeopardizing the whole experiment.

Dr. Ahmul Shajawnpur stood frowning thoughtfully out of the window of his office in the Casualty Department of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Calcutta, absently fingering the tie cord of the surgical mask dangling below his chin. In over twenty years of medicine he had never come across anything like this. He turned away from the window after a while and looked again at the computer-generated body-scan still being displayed on the large wall-screen opposite his desk.

The body from which the scan had been generated belonged to an insurance broker who had been admitted a few hours earlier that day, and who was still recovering under sedation. The man had collapsed suddenly on the deck of a boat on the river, in the course of a day's sailing with some friends. Heart attack, everybody had said.

The thin line, enhanced by computer to stand out clearly on the image, entered the lumbar region above the waist and to the right of the spine; from there it traced a smooth, shallow curve through muscle, arteries, lung, and bones to exit through the left shoulder an inch behind the clavicle. Analysis had shown it to comprise a microscopically thin hairline of devastated cells, seemingly torn apart by some agency and, from the lab tests performed on tiny samples of the cell debris, subjected to considerable heat. The line reminded Shajawnpur of a track from a bubble-chamber picture, as if something had passed right through the broker's body from lower-right back to upper-left front. Something such as what? What was small enough to pass through a man's body without killing him, dense enough to drill through bone, and hot enough to ionize sodium, potassium, and carbon?

He leaned forward and touched a pad on the panel by his desk to switch to another view. The new image showed the broker's body positioned on the scanning table bent at the waist with the left arm extended forward and the right arm flexed and drawn back. According to the friends who had seen the incident, the broker had been hauling in a rope just before he collapsed, and to the best of their recollection had been stooped in that kind of posture. It was interesting. Allowing for the approximations involved, with the body in that position, the mysterious track became a straight line. What moved more or less horizontally over water and passed through a man's body as if it wasn't there? Shajawnpur shook his head. He would have to bring a specialist in on this, he decided.

A specialist in what?

He sighed, sat down at the desk, and entered a note into the terminal to bring the case to the attention of the staff surgeon when be made his rounds the next morning. His patient seemed to be in no immediate danger. He closed the file.

Professor Ferdinand Chaurrez, from the Geophysics Department of the University of Bogota, Colombia, stared suspiciously at the data-plot pinned to the wall before him in the cramped laboratory trailer. The trailer was one of two parked amid a small jumble of portable cabins, tents, oil drums, crates, and a few miscellaneous vehicles at the upper end of an arid valley in the rocky foothills of the Cordillera Orvental, a northern extension of the Andes. The plot showed the computer's interpretation of the latest data relayed from equipment that was measuring cosmic-ray intensities at the bottom of an unused mine about twenty miles to the west. Behind the professor, José Calliano, one of his graduate students, perched on the edge of an analysis bench and watched curiously.

"That one doesn't make sense," Chaurrez said at last. "According to the readings, a single particle occurred there"—he pointed with a pen—"that sent everything off-scale. That would mean an energy at least four orders of magnitude greater than anything that has ever been recorded. And it could even have been much greater than that; from this there's no way of telling."

"I thought the same thing," José told him. "I've never heard of anything like it either, but I thought you ought to see it. Another strange thing is the associated trajectory coordinates. Look at them. According to those figures, the particle would have been moving practically horizontally. I've never heard of a cosmic-ray particle that traveled through a mineshaft sideways, have you?"

"Was this the only one?" Chaurrez asked.

"Just that one."

"That's not a cosmic-ray particle at all," the professor declared. "You've got a fault in the equipment somewhere. I'd forget this batch of data if I were you; it's probably all corrupt. Make sure the computer's okay. If anything like it happens again, take a jeep up to the mine and check the equipment there. Otherwise forget about it."

"You don't think it could be something else?"

"Yes, it could. If you can think of something that flies through solid rock horizontally with at least a hundred thousand times more energy than the most energetic cosmic-ray particle ever detected and probably a lot more, then yes, I suppose it could be that. Alternatively it could be the result of an intermittent equipment fault. Now, which of those two hypotheses do you think best accounts for the facts and requires the minimum of assumptions?"

"Okay," José said, grinning. "Point taken. I'll go and check over the computer."

In a structural analysis laboratory of the Instrumentation Commissioning section of the Skycom Corporation's space-launch facility on the edge of the Western Australian desert, John Skelly, Director of Quality Control, gazed grimly at the 3-D color hologram being presented at medium-to-high magnification.

"Somebody's head will roll for this," he growled in a bass-baritone rumble that was barely above a whisper. A few of the other men standing around the display table shuffled their feet uncomfortably.

The hologram, generated from the output of a scanning electron microscope, reproduced a small part of the surface of the mirror for an astronomical telescope being assembled in orbit; the mirror had been scheduled to be lifted into orbit for mounting in the telescope in two months' time. For over a year the mirror surface had been ground, polished, measured with laser interferometers, and then polished some more until it was accurate to within a small fraction of a wavelength of light. And now, after all that painstaking care, this.

Whatever it was had gouged a microscopic furrow for a short distance along what had yesterday been a flawless surface. The furrow was shallow at one end, but deepened rapidly toward the other, where it terminated in a hole that continued on into the glass. X-ray images had shown that the hole continued on in a straight line right through the body of the mirror, making a slight descending angle with the surface. The far end of the hole had been located a small distance down the mirror's edge on the opposite side. The furrow was undetectable by the naked eye, but it was enough to make the mirror useless for the delicate measurements for which it had been designed.

"Do we know yet what did it?" Skelly demanded, looking up at the circle of faces. The heads shook wordlessly from side to side. Somebody shrugged and showed his hands. "But bloody hell, don't we even have a clue?" Skelly raged. "There was nothing wrong with it yesterday. We must know what's been going on around it since then, for Christ's sake!"

"We've checked all the records and logs," one of the technicians told him, not for the first time. "Everything has been kept well inside spec. There hasn't been anything unusual in any way. No accidents reported, no faults on anything, no—"

"Something bloody unusual has happened all right!" Skelly exploded. "Look at that, man. Are you telling me something just came out of nowhere and drilled its way through five feet of solid glass?" He straightened up from the image, and his face darkened even further. "By the end of today I want an answer," he told them. "I want to know what did it, and who was responsible. The salary of whoever it was can go toward paying the penalty clause in the contract." With that he turned on his heel and stamped out of the lab.

An uneasy silence descended.

"So, what next?" somebody asked at last. "Where do we go from here? I'm not even sure what we're supposed to be looking for."

"Whatever did that," somebody else replied, waving toward the hologram.

The first speaker pulled a face and stared glumly at the image.

"The only thing that could have done that would be an armor-plated bacterium with a rocket motor up its ass," he said. "Now you tell me, where do you start looking for something like that?"

January turned to February, and the Scottish Highlands remained frozen in the grip of winter. At Storbannon the results of the second phase of tests, which used randomly generated data as the content of the signals sent back through time, were analyzed and revealed a strange phenomenon: On a few occasions the number received was different from the number that was later sent.

Many of the tests involved programming the system to record an incoming number from the future, waiting until the time came to send it, then, at that point, generating a random number and sending it back to the point at which it had been received. In tests of this type where the whole process ran automatically, the pair of numbers always matched; there were no anomalies in the thousands of numbers recorded.