Thrice upon a Time Read Free

didn't send anything one minute ago. You were both watching me. Nobody sent anything one minute ago. There has to be something screwy with the system. How could— What the… ?" He sat forward abruptly and stared wide-eyed at the screen. A solid green bar had appeared right on the zero-point of the scale, indicating that another signal had been received at that very instant. At the same time a dotted green bar had appeared sixty seconds ahead of it—sixty seconds in the future. The hardcopy slot disgorged another sheet.
    "It says 'CRAZY,' " Lee told them in a bewildered voice. "What in hell's going on?"
    A solid yellow bar appeared at zero to the right of the green one, which had already moved a few seconds leftward into the past. Its dotted yellow companion was well over to the right of the white area, denoting that something had come in from about eight minutes in the future. Charles touched a pad to deactivate the hardcopy unit.
    "We can look at what the signals actually say later," he said. "I don't think it matters all that much for now." It was almost as if he knew what was going to happen next. The display suddenly went wild. Bars of every shade and color added themselves at the zero-point as fast as the ones already there could shuffle out of the way, producing a solid, rectangular, rainbow spectrum that steadily extended itself relentlessly toward the left. At the same time the right-hand half of the white area, representing the future ten minutes of the machine's range, filled haphazardly with matching dotted bars to complete each pair.
    Murdoch slumped back in the chair, shaking his head as his mind abandoned the struggle of trying to find reason in what his eyes told him was happening. The solid bars merged into a block of color that grew until it covered the full ten minutes of the past. By that time the isolated red and blue bars with which the whole thing had begun had been pushed out of the white area completely, and were now standing alone in the left-hand gray zone, beyond the ten minutes of the machine's range; almost twenty minutes had elapsed since Charles's initial demonstration.
    And then Murdoch noticed something. He sat forward and peered closely at the block of colors denoting incoming signals. The block was not completely solid; there were a few thin, scattered gaps, indicating points in time during the previous ten minutes at which no transmissions had been received. That much was fact—already recorded and firmly sealed in what was now the past. A thought occurred to him. He pointed toward the screen and looked up at Charles.
    "Those small gaps there," he said. "Could we set up the machine to send a signal back into one of them?"
    "We could," Charles answered. "Which one?"
    "How about that one?" Murdoch pointed. Charles went quickly through the routine of initiating the system to transmit and set the time-shift to select the gap that Murdoch had indicated.
    "It's all yours," he announced.
    Murdoch studied the display for a moment and paused with his fingers an inch from the touchboard while he thought about exactly what he wanted to do. He licked his lips and mentally composed a message. Anything would do—any nonsense word sufficiently distinct to be identifiable, such as MURDOC or CRAZY or…
    And then it slowly dawned on him. He was not going to prove anything or uncover anything sensational. What else did all the bars crowded together across the screen tell him but that somebody—some where, some time—had already asked the same question as he, and was trying to do the same thing. And that somebody wasn't getting any answers. If he were, why did he keep trying the same thing over and over again? Doing so obviously wasn't getting that somebody anywhere; there was no reason to suppose it would get Murdoch anywhere either. He drew his hands back from the touchboard and sank back with a sigh to find Charles nodding slowly, as if Charles had already read his mind.
    "You were thinking of