Thrice upon a Time Read Online Free PDF

door.
    "Okay then, let's go back to the me that was me," Murdoch said. "I was getting fed up waiting, and I was thinking of sending a signal back anyway, but I hadn't got to the point of actually doing it. Then suddenly the signal that said MURDOC came in, which changed everything. At that point I forgot all about what I'd been thinking, and went back to what I'd made my mind up about in the first place: not to send any signal that came in, when the time came to send it. A signal had come in; I wasn't going to send it."
    "And sure enough, you didn't."
    "And we couldn't understand it."
    "And a little while later, others started coming in. What were you thinking then?"
    "I'm not sure," Murdoch confessed. "I think I was too confused to think of anything. Then the garbage started coming out of the sky. The next thing I remember is noticing the gaps, and wondering what would happen if I sent a signal back into one of them." An intrigued look appeared on his face. He pulled himself upright in the chair suddenly. "Say… that's the same situation that we've just been through. In another minute or less I'd have been at the point of trying it."
    "Which is precisely where all the garbage was coming from," Lee pointed out.
    Murdoch became visibly excited. "And it did look as if whoever sent all that stuff had thought exactly that. Think of some of the signals that came in—GAPFIL, FILGAP—things like that. See, they're just the sort of mnemonics you'd pick if you were trying to do what I'd started thinking of doing. Whoever sent those signals must have seen gaps just like I did, and had the same idea."
    "And they succeeded," Lee said, nodding. "But they couldn't have known they were succeeding. If they'd known, they wouldn't have kept on doing it over and over."
    "And that means none of them could ever have been me," Murdoch said. "Otherwise they'd have remembered seeing what I saw." He slumped back in the chair again and threw out his empty palms. "Which gets us back to the original question: Who were they and where are they right now?"
    Another silence ensued.
    "I don't know," Lee said at last. "But it has to have something to do with trying to set up paradox situations, which is what you were doing. When you played it straight, everything worked okay; when you, or somebody somewhere, started trying to fool the system, that was when weird things started happening. That was the only thing that could have made a difference."
    "We got results though," Murdoch said. "The problem is they don't make sense."
    Lee unfolded his arms and walked back to the console. He stared at the empty screen for a while. "Then perhaps it's our ideas of what makes sense that need revising. After all, what we call common sense is based on the obvious fact that causes always come first and effects later. But this machine says that things no longer have to be that way. Therefore they can violate what we call common sense. We've always called anything that did that crazy." He clamped his hand around the top corner of the console panel and wheeled to face Murdoch. "Which seems, Doc, to lead us to the conclusion that, whatever the explanation turns out to be when we get to the bottom of it, it's gonna have to seem pretty crazy."

Chapter 6
Prologue
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Epilogue
    Edward Cartland returned shortly after lunch. Murdoch, Lee, and Charles were discussing further thoughts on the previous night's developments when a squeal of brakes sounded from the forecourt outside the window, and was followed by a clattering of running footsteps, first on gravel then on stone stairs, which terminated in the booming of the front doors being thrown open. Blurred snatches of a man's excited voice came from inside the house and were answered by a few high-pitched syllables that could only have been uttered by Morna. The hurried footsteps sounded again, became suddenly hollow as they moved