The Probability Man Read online

  THE PROBABILITY MAN

  Brian Ball

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Website

  Also by Brian Ball

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  “MINE?”

  “Me—my—mine? Mine!!”

  “Private Spingarn!” snarled Corporal Tillyard.

  Mine!

  The brawny man with the haunted eyes stared at the small section of raw red earth before him. It was all he could see in the swirling, flaring light of the tallow dips. Then he swung the pick at the rock below the earth—not a full swing, but a practiced, easy movement which would not send a warning tremble to the besiegers. That much he managed through instinct. But the rest of it? How reason with any of it! The stench, the blinding sweat pouring over his face, the raw handle of the pick? And Corporal Tillyard, third in the line behind him, waiting for the faint and deadly sound of other picks swung by other sweating Pioneers?

  He swung again, bewildered. The man next to him swore as a sharp piece of rock fell onto his thigh, gashing it. The man was a stranger, a replacement for Berry, who had taken four bullets in the back as he returned from a foraging trip with two old cannonballs. Berry claimed he filled his belly with cannonballs. They brought sixpence apiece from the gunners. Now, fat Berry was dead. He had been the fattest miner at the Siege of Tournai. A stranger had taken his place in the chain of men removing the debris which Spingarn dislodged. Berry would never see the completion of the grandest mine of the whole Siege.

  Spingarn smiled at the thought of the sudden vast flowering which would shoot rock, soil, timbers, worms, and mangled Frenchmen into the air. How many barrels of gunpowder was it?

  He struck again, comforted.

  “Have a care!”

  Corporal Tillyard spat the words with a contained venom.

  They brought Spingarn to a halt again.

  Mine!

  His mind somersaulted. He was down a mine? Digging for what? Gold? Coal? No!! Circuits sprang together. He was not far underground. There was rock and soil in this stinking pit. Siege? Mine? Gunpowder!

  Then he heard the delicate tap-tapping of the enemies’ picks. He drew back. As he did so, he brushed the tallow dip in the witless light-boy’s hand. The burning fit splashed onto the stranger’s gashed thigh. He yelled aloud, and every one of the small detachment froze into terrified silence. Then Corporal Tillyard drew his fusil dagger and let its point rest by the stranger’s kidneys. The thin whip of steel from oiled leather brought the danger home to Spingarn as nothing else had done, not even the menace of those quiet taps. He knew he might die in this stinking darkness.

  “They’re near,” he whispered.

  He had no need to explain. Tillyard and the rest had heard the thin noise. At any moment the French pioneers would burst into the tunnel, and another of those stormy, brief, and deadly contests which had marked the progress of the undermining of the walls of Tournai would break out. The horror of war above was nothing to this sullen, desperate series of underground encounters. Men fought and died more afraid of the dark than of their enemies, and, most of them, still more afraid of the suffocating rock and earth which suddenly poured in as timbers gave way or a bomb shook the strata into overwhelming activity.

  There were six of them in the tunnel. Spingarn, chosen for his short stature and sheer physical strength to drive the tunnel beneath the massive walls of the citadel; the stranger, a foreigner, some kind of Hollander, Spingarn guessed; then the witless Derbyshire youth who held the tallow dip; and, with Tillyard, two experienced pioneers ready to shore up the tunnel or chop down the French as the need arose.

  “I shouldn’t be down here,” Spingarn said aloud.

  “No more should any of us!”

  Now that danger threatened, Tillyard could joke. This was why he had become a Corporal of Pioneers. There was plenty of opportunity to fight in the regular siege above, but only down amongst the honeycombed tunnels was there a chance to meet the Frenchies man to man. Advancing shoulder to shoulder in a line against a resolute enemy behind stone walls did not appeal to the corporal. He was a desperate and coldly murderous man.

  The tapping sound. Now was the moment of decision.

  It’s so realistic!

  “They do the tunnel so well,” murmured Spingarn in a voice that was not that of the half-educated soldier of Queen Anne.

  “What was that?” hissed the corporal.

  Two hundred barrels of gunpowder?

  Here!

  Down this stinking hole in the red earth?

  The man who had taken Berry’s place shook him.

  “Corporal say what you hear.”

  Spingarn fought for recognition of the distant words that would relate his predicament to the ghost of an existence wildly divorced from this hideous and dangerous present.

  “What did you hear, Spingarn?” repeated Tillyard.

  Spingarn, as the man nearest the advancing French counterminers, would have heard the enemy most clearly.

  “Picks,” he said. “And steel on steel.”

  The decision was made for them. There was no time for the corporal to order a withdrawal along the narrow, muddy hole to the large gallery. The light-boy lifted the suddenly flaring
dip as high as he could: then Spingarn saw the pebbled earth bulge near his head.

  “Use the pick, Spingarn!”

  The corporal yelled something else, to the two pioneers behind him. Spingarn, in a daze of indecision, watched the bulging earth crumble inwards onto him, behind it the bright steel point of a pick. Then the French miner’s face appeared, a face as full of excited rage as Tillyard’s.

  “How do they do it?” asked Spingarn. “So factual!”

  He jabbed firmly at the Frenchman’s face and saw it burst.

  “Advance the petard!” bawled Tillyard. “Take it, Spingarn!”

  Mine?

  Fortifications? Mining, here in the stinking dark, with the dying Frenchman screaming curses and insults and his mates behind him crying out in rage?

  Spingarn took the conical metal affair in his powerful arms. He needed all his strength to push the primitive charge of explosive into place.

  “We’ll destroy them, Spingarn! Good man—what an arm you have—now the saucisse!”

  “Aside!”

  The two pioneers pushed Spingarn back as they carefully joined the canvas tube of powder to the conical petard. A pike grated on the point of the cast-iron mine.

  “Make haste, you two—the Frenchies press!”

  Tillyard clipped the half-witted youth soundly to keep him attentive and the drips from the tallow dip away from the long tube of powder. The Hollander had already quietly moved away.

  “I shouldn’t be here?” Spingarn said again.

  He was clutching at mud on the ground.

  “Run, Private Spingarn! To me, Spingarn!”

  Discipline won. He edged his way in the darkness: along the low, narrow tunnel, feet slipping and sliding in the soft mud. He wondered if Tillyard had fired the saucisse already. It would be near him in the darkness, a canvas tube, greased against the underground vapors, a serpentlike coiled thing packed with sulphurous black powder; the sputtering white and yellow flames would rush headlong through the tube, throwing out burning canvas, reddish-yellow fumes, and a stench of the pit. There was nothing to equal the thrill of that remorseless onrush: Spingarn stopped for perhaps three seconds to wait for the distant white-yellow flame.

  Then he knew he was a dead man if he did not reach the main gallery before the flame blew up the petard. He ran like a mad spider, clawing speed from the tunnel with hands and feet. Smoke advanced to meet him, and, through the thick, swirling smoke, he saw the bright blast of the burning powder-train. The saucisse was afire; the petard would blow; and the discharge of the mine would shatter his bones and rend his lungs, as so many others had been utterly destroyed in this violent and furious siege.

  “Really,” grunted Spingarn, “really, I could have avoided this!”

  A huge thunderclap drove the words back against his skull. In the stink of powder and the complete and horrifying darkness, Spingarn felt arms yank him free from the enveloping soil.

  “Such attention to detail,” murmured Spingarn.

  “Bring grenades!” bawled Tillyard. “Pioneers! To me! Spingarn—take the fusil!”

  The little corporal was in an ecstasy of prepared rage. Not only had he blown the Frenchies’ countertunnel in on them, he had also opened a further, secret, countermine, so that the dazed and milling enemy were before them. Their main gallery must have lain alongside the Allies’ main gallery—and while Tillyard had worked like a deadly mole toward the foundations of the citadel’s western wall, the Frenchies had contrived a wide gallery with the utmost skill and quietness parallel with that of the Allies. Clearly they had intended to burst in on the Englishmen and the Dutch. But by wrecking one part of the French gallery, the petard had opened up a hole between Allied and enemy main galleries. Such things were not unknown in this kind of siege warfare: the huge blasts from the big charges were barely controllable.

  “Fusil!” bawled Tillyard again.

  Already the corporal was priming a pair of grenades.

  “Poise your firelock!”

  Tillyard had a moment to spare for Spingarn, who, the corporal assumed, had suffered damage in the blast. He nodded as discipline won again and Spingarn moved into action. Spingarn was a good pioneer, but over talkative. Maybe his brainpan had suffered a dent in the action.

  It was a mine. But this?

  Spingarn looked in the poor light at the contraption in his hands. A weapon of steel and wood. Clumsy; heavy; it used a simple expansion principle.

  It seemed that he could operate it.

  Spingarn watched his hands operate the device: words screamed from the eighteenth-century parade ground where he had learned his trade urged him on. Half bend your Firelock! Clean your Pan! Open your Cartridge Box! Handle your Primer! Prime! Return your Primer! Shut your Pan! Blow off your loose Corns! Handle your Cartridge! Open it with your teeth! Charge with Powder and Ball.

  The deftness must have come through training. But how had they managed to obtain that kind of detail? Surely the records for Terra had disappeared in the first holocaust?

  The drill was complete; the weapon charged and primed; Tillyard had placed the two pioneers alongside the half-witted youth and the Hollander. In his hands, Corporal Tillyard held two smoking grenades; before him, in the mud, was his long fusil dagger. He was delighted.

  He tossed a grenade into the still-unmoving French.

  The grenade burst raggedly amongst them.

  They sprang into the air and against the sides of the gallery like so many dolls. All the tallow dips in the two galleries were snuffed out.

  “Boy!” bawled Tillyard to the stunned light-boy.

  Only the light in Tillyard’s grenade, and the sullen fire in Spingarn’s match, cast any light on the mad scene. There was noise, though. Vast reverberations echoed about the galleries; shrill screams told of horrible wounds; boyish voices called in French. Orders.

  There was soon enough light to make out the form of the advancing Frenchman. Tillyard gestured to Spingarn. And Spingarn shot the man through and through with the three bullets he had packed into the wide mouth of the heavy weapon. He saw the bullets strike and the blue-and-gold uniform sag under the weight of the leaden shot. He saw the snarling face and the whirling blade as it flashed into the air, to embed itself in the roof of the gallery. There were more men.

  “I must have been mad,” said Spingarn.

  The Hollander pitched a pike through a young officer.

  Their officers joined them in these frightful regions? Not ours! Not our gilded youths—for them it was the gallop to the front of the battle and take a chance among the sudden thunder of the guns! They left this war of sullen murder to the lower ranks.

  The two pioneers fought with their usual briskness; Tillyard pitched his other grenade behind the row of Frenchies. It pushed the forward in confusion, where they were butchered by the pioneers and the Hollander. It seemed the light-boy lived. As he began to sing a ditty about sheep, Tillyard roared back an antiphonic shout of vile abuse.

  “I knew it,” said Spingarn.

  He saw bright armor.

  “It’s anachronistic.”

  A huge man in bright armor.

  “Fusil!” yelled Tillyard, spotting the apparition. “Armor, Spingarn! A man in armor!”

  Spingarn complied. He admired the swift dexterity with which his hands carried out the absurdly complicated routine for recharging the primitive weapon. Again he treble-shotted the weapon; he poured in far more than the regulation amount of powder. It might burst the gun, but how else stop the huge steel-cased figure which had brought Tillyard to such a pitch of exulted terror and rage? For the French had found a suit of armor and sent in a giant to destroy the English.

  The armored man trod his shattered countrymen into the mud, as before Spingarn had been trodden down by the feet of his fellows. More brave than the Englishmen, or perhaps blinded by the latest grenade explosion, the Hollander threw himself at the steel-cased Frenchman. He drew sparks from the breastplate with his monstrous slash, but
he died on the instant as the Frenchman casually poniarded him with a left-handed thrust. Then he trod down the Hollander.

  “Present your fusil!”

  Tillyard had summed up Spingarn’s trouble. He had been battered about the pate. Spingarn was not the man he had been, for was he not now gazing at the armored apparition as if he had seen a boggart?

  “Aim your fusil!”

  “Of course!”

  How could they have got the detail right? How could he have got to know that the musket must lie upon the Left Shoulder, and the Left Hand upon the Butt-end, the Thumb in the Hollow thereof, pressing the Guard hard against the Breast, that the Muzzle be mounted?

  “Aim!” screamed Tillyard.

  Arms clashed as the two pioneers tried to find a chink in the monstrous figure’s armor. The half-wit filled the gallery with a yelp of nonny-noes.

  “Sorry,” said Spingarn. “My mistake!”

  No. That was the general exercise for the parade ground!

  Cock your Firelocks—this was right!—Present—Give Fire!

  Three leaden bullets flattened themselves against the tough steel. For seconds the Frenchman hung poised, as if he would permit the entry of the bullets. In those seconds, the pioneers thrashed about him with sword and fusil dagger. Tillyard, sensing victory, hurled himself at the Frenchman’s feet.

  Spingarn roared with laughter.

  “We couldn’t have invented that!” he shouted. “It’s a classical touch!”

  For Tillyard was hacking at the Frenchman’s heels.

  Spingarn let the whole crazy scene evaporate; he closed his eyes and laughed as the grim struggle proceeded to the yelps of the half-wit. Tears began to flood down his face.

  “It’s overdone—it’s too much! Petard—saucisse—and now the armor! Who thought this one up!”

  Who?

  Someone had. Someone had dreamt this Plot up.

  “ ’Ware the mine!” a bull voice bellowed behind him. “ ’Ware the mine—Corporal, are ye there? We’m springing her! The Frogs be upon us with their cannon, and we’re to fire the mine! D’ye hear, Corporal—come away, if ye’re alive still! They’s two hundred barrels of gunpowder below ye, and a battery of Frogs above—answer now, Corporal!”