Overview
The Third Machine is a short story in No Return. It follows the last scientists in an underground Project Remus facility as a dimensional contact experiment connects them to alternate versions of themselves in another dead world.
Publication History
The story appears in No Return. The official Askari listing describes the stories other than “Presence” and “The Palisade” as previously unpublished before the collection.
Plot
In an underground Project Remus bunker, Dr. Helen Rice detects a spacetime disturbance and brings engineer John Fenton to the third machine, where physicist Raymond Hayworth has discovered a signal from another world. Raymond insists on sending a return transmission before the alignment disappears. The signal collides with a matching transmission from another universe, vaporizing Raymond and irradiating the chamber.
A decade later, John and Helen are married and live as the only known survivors in the facility. John maintains the power systems and the Spectromat computer, while Helen Fenton continues the Project Remus mission and works from the legacy of the second machine, a system intended for consciousness work.
The third machine activates again. Helen enters the damaged chamber and makes contact with Helen Hayworth, her counterpart from a parallel Project Remus facility. The two groups label their worlds alpha and beta. In the beta facility, Raymond survives the original event but is dying from radiation exposure after years of further experiments.
The two Helens rebuild the alpha third machine into a physical bridge. Beta John Fenton attempts the first crossing, but the process fails and kills him. Alpha Helen wants to continue helping beta Helen save Raymond, while John argues that the alpha facility’s duty is to preserve itself and its remaining survivors.
The Helens complete a working second machine in the beta facility, but the bridge destabilizes before beta Raymond can cross or be carried safely as a stored mind. Alpha Helen cuts power to the connection, leaving beta Helen and Raymond in their failing world. Afterward, John withdraws and Helen becomes increasingly preoccupied with the counterpart she abandoned.
Helen secretly reopens the bridge twenty alpha days later, discovering that two years have passed in the beta facility. Beta Raymond has died, and his consciousness survives only on datatape. Beta Helen attacks alpha Helen, traps her in the beta facility, and takes her place in the alpha world.
Pretending to be Helen Fenton, Helen Hayworth tells John that her counterpart has found a living world. John believes her and prepares for transfer. In the second machine, he realizes the deception too late. Helen Hayworth uses Raymond’s stored mind to overwrite John, destroying John’s consciousness and reviving Raymond in his body, while Helen Fenton remains marooned in darkness as the bridge closes.