The Probability Man Read online

  Spingarn hesitated. It had been a difficult choice, but he was sure that he had made the right decision.

  “Why?”

  “The robot has to be limited. We accept the Director’s instructions that you may take in what companions you wish; but the robot can’t be allowed to alter the probabilities in the Frames of Talisker. So we’ve had to build certain strategies into him. He can’t go beyond them.”

  It was only to be expected, thought Spingarn. They couldn’t allow an enormous potential like the robot’s in, not unless it were controlled.

  He felt a powerful sense of excitement surging through his whole being. Why delay longer?

  “Get on with it,” he ordered.

  The messy part. The insidious injection of one single cell that gobbled up old memories and supplanted them by others. The lightning flash that could change physical characteristics in so many frightful ways!

  How much of a semblance of human shape would they all retain? The girl?

  “And myself?” he said aloud as the glittering arm lifted his head.

  But he didn’t care.

  It was enough that the waiting was at an end.

  All the personae which had gone into him seemed to give a shout of acclaim. The endless descents into reenactments were at an end. No more escapes, no more contrived rescues! Nothing now but the incredible vortex of Frames and cosmic events that made up Talisker!

  And the other thing.

  The Alien!

  Four robots raised grim claws in salute.

  The cell smashed through the tissues of the base of Spingarn’s skull, racing with lightning speed to the vital areas of control, speeding with the powerful knowledge of a sperm, that if it lingered it died but if it drove home it would renew itself a million million million times!

  Spingarn shook and shivered. The blast of agony began.

  He was thrown, roaring and bellowing in pain and terror, into the conveyors, through the winding tunnels far below the sunlit offices of Frames Control, into the shuttle that linked with the enormous interstellar ship looming like a cliff in the harsh surface glare, and then into the clinging, comforting gray ooze with the other members of his party.

  The great vessel shimmered, paused, and vanished.

  It blasted its way through blossoming suns, plunged in and out of mad vortices of warped space and time, guided by robots who knew that this was as desperate a mission as had ever been undertaken in the history of the race.

  Spingarn knew nothing of the journey.

  He didn’t see the blank and terrifying reaches of the outer Gulf, where tiny shards of new matter occasionally spilled over through a gap in the Galaxy. The robots expertly spun the ship around the areas of danger, preserving their human cargo for the frightfulness beyond.

  They set the little party down at the preordained spot: where the math of the big comps had forecast the conjunction of violent events.

  The ship shimmered into another series of dimensions as the four visitors took stock of the planet beyond the Gulf.

  13

  The four of them stared at the road that rose sheer into the black sky. It dominated the terrain, though in the far distance a chain of pyramidal structures competed for attention. The road appeared to live. It oscillated gently in the heavy wind, dripping a somehow living wetness onto the shale and rock all about them. One dim sun hung inconclusively behind them, its light throwing no shadows. The planet was neither hostile nor accommodating, neither frightening nor inviting; it was quite deserted, or at least the portion they had been ejected onto was. But the road! A highway held up by nothing more than a few swirling mists. A great structure of heavy materials—Spingarn recognized rock and steel—that had been heaped up in the insubstantial winds and mists, to pose an immediate problem in the difficult matter of orientation.

  “It must lead somewhere,” said one of the group.

  A woman. Ethel, Spingarn registered. Ethel, who relates to me as a mistress and admirer. Ugly Ethel, one of the events of another life. He looked at her.

  She looked at him.

  Both froze in shock. Then they turned to the other two members of the silent group who had stared in awe at the immense dominating structure that was wholly and eerily wrong. It still worried them all, for they glanced back at its towering menace even as they jumped or quivered in incredulous amazement at the sight of one another.

  “Ethel?” said Spingarn to the diaphanous creature.

  “Spingarn!!” shrieked the girl.

  “Private Spingarn?” growled another voice.

  “What have they done to you, Spingarn!”

  “You’re Ethel?” Spingarn repeated stupidly.

  “Make your report, Private Spingarn!” ordered the Sergeant of Pioneers.

  Spingarn tried to reach out for the girl that had only those brilliant eyes which had been Ethel’s. The rest was changed. Then he took in the fact that Hawk’s long, lanky body had changed too. The Sergeant was reaching behind him for the familiar clay pipe, but he was having trouble with the straps of his knapsack. The robot was unchanged: its red-gold fur was shining dully in the cold sunlight.

  Ethel shivered not with cold, but with disgust.

  Why! Spingarn searched for a reason.

  I’m myself, he thought with satisfaction. The girl’s distraught. It’s Hawk that’s troubling her. Or maybe the Time-Out Umpire. But as for myself, why, I’ve been lucky—

  “God’s bloody boots!” roared the Sergeant distractedly. “God’s bloody boots, Spingarn, why d’ye dress like that! I’ll have you flogged, man! Why ye’re a mountebank! You’re a damned—a damned Italian! You’re in a strolling player’s suit—where’s your uniform, Spingarn!”

  “Me?” Spingarn said. “Me?”

  He was still dazedly taking in the effects of the cell mutation processes. The Sergeant rocked on a solid metal base; where his feet had been, there was—against all that was sane—a great, grotesque whorled chunk of metal. And Ethel was almost unrecognizable.

  She was exquisite. Slim, big-breasted, those wide blue eyes now set in a face of brilliant beauty. Ethel, who had refused to undergo body-restructuring, had undergone a magical transformation. The surplus weight had gone into the production of the elegant, well-muscled curves, into the swelling, ripe breasts; and, some of it into—into—a thin tracery of membrane at her back!

  “Wings?” said Spingarn in confusion.

  Hawk bellowed:

  “D’ye hear, Private Spingarn?”

  Spingarn almost laughed at Hawk’s dismay. There was a lunatic rightness about the Sergeant of Pioneers. But Ethel—transformed into a winged thing of ethereal beauty! And himself, Spingarn, the sole more or less orthodox human shape!

  The furred robot waved claws, ready with suggestions and explanations. But Spingarn saw the road again, and once more his mind somersaulted. It was that the planet represented not a fragmented series of time and place discrepancies, but a grim and impossible highway into nowhere. He began to lose his grip on the situation. He laughed again.

  “Sir—sir—Spingarn, sir—if I might point out—I know it’s presumptuous, sir, but I think you should know that your companions have a point—sir.”

  “Look!” shouted Ethel, pointing to the ground below Spingarn.

  “What d’ye mean, bawling with laughter?” said Hawk. “You’ve had an order, and it’s your duty to—”

  He stopped and looked down. He began to realize the unutterable strangeness of what had occurred.

  “Iron? A screw? Is this some of the Frenchies’ doings? I’ve been in the Spital—it was the mine, Spingarn! They’ve blown an old soldier’s pins away!”

  “If you yourself looked down, sir,” suggested the robot.

  With an acute feeling of dread, Spingarn did so.

  Hawk tried to find his bearings. He mopped his brow and reached for the canteen in his knapsack. “I was shouting a Huzzah——”

  Between his feet, neatly coiled on the shale, was a whiplike
tail. Spingarn jumped away from it, for the slender black thing was the sinuous shape of a reptile.

  It followed him. And when he stood still, it coiled itself without any conscious action on his part; but Spingarn felt the subtle movements of the base of his spine and knew what it was. It was barbed too.

  “And if you felt your head—sir!”

  “Ugghhh!” shivered the girl.

  She seemed to sense, for the first time, the appendages at her back; without effort, she was hovering a few feet above the place she had lately stood on. Spingarn caught sight of her face. The great straining nasal prominence had vanished; in its place was a perfectly formed and regular-shaped little nose. But wings! Beating slowly and with swanlike grace to Ethel’s astonishment. She was staring at them from those wide-set and haunting eyes, as if she were emerging from a dream.

  “Wings!” she whispered.

  They beat faster and she dipped and swayed as a stray gust of wind took her a few yards from the silent group.

  “It’s the wine,” announced Sergeant Hawk. “I should have stuck to ale. Spingarn—back to your duties. And you, madame, curse you for a French witch. I’ll say no more.”

  He glanced at the splendidly accoutred robot and turned his back on it unbelievingly. Spingarn put his hands to his head, knowing by now what he would find.

  “I can see how it happened, sir—those random chromosomes act through the specialized cells—they form a highly efficient culture medium—and when they’re projected against the psyche—well, they’re affected by the subconscious images of what a man believes to be his true nature—sir!”

  “I can fly,” announced Ethel. “Spingarn, you bastard, what have you let us in for! I’m a bloody fairy, Spingarn. And you—”

  She choked down hysterical laughter.

  They were about three inches long. Cartilaginous, probably. They would grow from buds and ossify by maturity. Certainly the tips were hard and sharp, quite hard enough, for instance, to penetrate flesh. There was a slight curve away from the base, backward. They would protrude from the mass of dense black curls for about a third of their length.

  “It’s a joke,” said Spingarn. “It’s some form of genetic joke they’ve played on us—those robots—they’ve done it to me!”

  Horns.

  A slender, whiplike tail.

  Spingarn flashed the sharp tip of the tail upward and outward with a slight motion of his spine. It lashed out terribly.

  “Mind that thing!” called Ethel. She rose gracefully perhaps twenty feet into the air, where an air current caught her. Somewhat clumsily she brought herself to face the wind and the others.

  “No,” said Spingarn, watching as the tail seemed to coil itself. “No,” he said again, as Ethel, out of breath and apparently enjoying herself, glided down beside him. “No,” he murmured, as Sergeant Hawk spun away on iron claws, found a patch of soft rock, and began experimenting.

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” said the furred robot. Hawk turned slowly, his metallic base biting into the rock. “You see, no one could predict what would happen to your bodily structure with cell fusion working at random.”

  Was it preening itself on its humanoid appearance? Was it demonstrating its elegant shape, still more or less that of a man? Spingarn stared at it with hatred.

  It noticed, and resumed its former humble tones:

  “Oh, no sir! We couldn’t change. After all, sir, I’m only a collection of parts. A mere robot, sir!”

  “I think I like it, Spingarn,” said Ethel. She was investigating the other bodily changes that had turned her into a creature of strange beauty. “Look at me, Spingarn! I’d never have gone in for restructuring—but now it’s happened! It’s a terrible thing to say, but I think it’s an improvement!”

  She spread her wings against the sullen radiance of the dying sun. Then Spingarn took stock of his own transmogrification.

  His lower limbs were covered with mossy black fur. His feet were more or less those he was accustomed to. Ethel waited for him to approve of her.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s an improvement.”

  “But you’re hideous,” she shuddered. “How could you turn yourself into a devil? To think I wanted to be a function of you!”

  Latent memories stirred again.

  Spingarn remembered the strange things that had been thrust into the fragmented Frames of Talisker.

  “It could be worse,” he said. “But now what do we do?”

  “Yes, sir, what are your instructions?”

  Spingarn saw that Hawk was neatly burrowing a tunnel into the ground. Rock fragments spewed upward from his busy iron feet.

  “Hawk!”

  “Sergeant Hawk, to you, lad!”

  Spingarn realized that Hawk was still in the grip of his conditioning more relevant to the eighteenth century than to this lonely and eerie place.

  “Come out, Hawk—we’re comrades, aren’t we?”

  “Comrades! Vagabonds and Frenchies! Leave poor old Hawk alone—he wants none of your madcap ways!”

  “Where do you think it leads?”

  Ethel was staring at the mammoth structure in the black sky.

  “What instructions, sir?”

  “We’ll mine the Frenchies’ redoubts,” announced Hawk; whose shoulders were slowly disappearing. “Spingarn—I’ll hold you responsible for the safety of the gallery. Get your fusil and attend me here!”

  Hawk had taken refuge in his old persona. He was still fighting for his sanity and trying to find it in the customs of an ancient reenactment.

  Spingarn tried to control his own jangled thoughts. He attempted to accept the frightful transition which had made him into a caricature of a human being—into something from the earliest nightmares of mankind; he tried to relate Ethel and Hawk to this present reality; and he looked in desperation at the robot for help. It cocked its head on one side learnedly and said, “I wonder if my little anecdote about the Steam Age would amuse you, sir? I began to tell you about it during your wonderful handling of the Time-Out blip. Masterly! Well, sir, I said that there were two contending tribes, the French and the Britons. It appeared that, owing to the emergence of a primitive but extremely powerful form of explosive weapon, one of these tribes could, given the right geopolitical strategies, gain control of a large area of the continent they inhabited. Now, sir, we were in a crisis. Not a Disaster, of course, but a crisis of some magnitude. I saw, for example, that should the right genius in warfare emerge, there would be a severe imbalance in the Frame. I was right! There was a high degree of probability that such a man would not be a native of the Briton’s tribes. And again I was right! So, sir, what do you think I—”

  Spingarn saw Ethel floating upward again. She was performing simple aerobatics. On droned the robot. Hawk’s head remained above the surface.

  “Now that’s odd,” said Ethel.

  “What?” asked Spingarn.

  Ethel pointed, but he could see nothing. Sergeant Hawk, hearing the note of alarm in Ethel’s voice, had paused. The robot too became silent.

  “Coming this way,” Ethel said. “It looks like—”

  Then, from a distance, the others heard a thin, lonely screaming, a high-pitched noise of terror and warning.

  “Well?” Spingarn said to the robot.

  “Human, sir.”

  “It’s being chased!” Ethel gasped. Her wings dipped and she swayed into the wind to gain a vantage point. “It’s a wolf—no, a man. But it’s on all fours!”

  “Gawd!” said Hawk.

  “Definitely human, sir,” said the robot.

  Ethel sailed higher.

  The screaming yell echoed again and again around the bare ground, a noise which was pure terror now. Then the noise was repeated, closer.

  Spingarn heard Ethel join in the appalling and horrific screaming.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Ethel!”

  She sank slowly to the ground and would have collapsed in a heap of trembling flesh and delicate membrane
, had not Hawk spun himself neatly from the pit he was making and caught her in his lean arms.

  “Chasing the wolfman,” she whispered, blue eyes wide open in pure horror.

  “What, Ethel?”

  “Ghosts!”

  Spingarn felt the ancient, stored memories of other lives walk with alien feet across his disturbed mind. Ghosts! Insubstantial wraiths, more mist than bone and blood! He caught a whisper of night and infinite space from the memories that had almost been eroded from his brain.

  Alien!

  “Ghosts?” demanded the Sergeant “Ghosts, d’ye say, missy? Boggarts? Jack-o’-lanterns?”

  “You saw ghosts?” Spingarn demanded.

  “Coming this way,” shuddered the girl. “Like a wall of nightmares. Like death itself!”

  Spingarn looked from the girl to Hawk; and then to the robot. “What are they!” he snapped.

  “This is my first trip, sir. You should know more about it than I.”

  “What should we do!”

  The robot shrugged red-gold furred shoulders.

  “Come along, Private Spingarn!” bellowed Hawk. “Retreat!”

  “Where!”

  “If I might suggest it, sir,” put in the robot, “there.”

  It pointed to the road.

  Another shriek rang out in the distance; and something else. A quiet and subdued grunting, as of rooting animals which have found a delicacy. One last howl rang out, clear and loud:

  “The barrier!”

  Then the noises ceased.

  “The road?” Spingarn whispered, taking in, like the others, the meaning of that ghastly cessation of noise. “Why?”

  “To me, the Pioneers!” roared Hawk.

  “I believe they won’t follow, sir.”

  Hawk propelled the half-flying girl along in his peculiar gyrating movement.

  The strange road loomed nearer as the sun went down.

  And then they broke into a run as the vague grunting recommenced, a satisfied and hideous noise. The little party raced through the broken rocks, knowing that something of nightmarish danger was close.

  Spingarn looked back and saw a wall of savage horror.

  In a clouded outline, there was what might have been a vast mouth.