The Probability Man Read online

  Mine! Ah! That would be Sergeant Hawk.

  “No,” said Spingarn. “Don’t fire the mine yet, Sergeant.”

  Spingarn saw one pioneer falling redly away. Tillyard had lost his fusil dagger, and he was worrying the Frenchman’s ankle with his teeth.

  Spingarn could visualize the scene on the surface. It had been raining twenty-four hours before, when he had gone down into the ground. Now, the fields around the city of Tournai would be sodden; the cannon would find the going hard, though the gunners would be glad of the water on the ground to mark the fall of their shot. Sergeant Hawk, some hundred yards away from the Frenchies’ battery, would be smiling into his long, gray mustaches. And, in a few seconds, he would light the long black snake which led below the ground to the other, deeper gallery, a dozen feet below this one. To a stack of tar-dipped barrels. Two hundred of them.

  There would be a single, majestic gushing of earth and fire and smoke—a vast upheaval of men and guns and fire—and then the ground would settle over what was left of French gunners, dead French pioneers, this huge giant who was slashing at Tillyard; over French horses and French cannon; over the half-wit, stifling his song at last; and over bewildered Spingarn, who could not find the words that would unlock the strange anachronistic puzzle and bring him back to a present where blood and mud had no place.

  Words?

  “Save yourself!” bawled Tillyard as the Frenchman struck home.

  A Corporal of Pioneers to the last.

  The French giant advanced.

  Spingarn had reloaded.

  Words? Words could end it. For him. Spingarn!

  It wasn’t enough simply to say that you found the whole horrific affair something of a bore; not when you saw four comrades’ blood on an enemy’s blade; not even when you knew it was quite wrong for him to be in this out-of-period gear. However much you could argue that meticulous scholarship had fallen down in recreating the Siege of Tournai, you couldn’t just wave your fusil and say that’s enough. Or could you?

  No.

  “No!”

  French curses. Translation: stinking whoreson dog of an Englishman! I’ll cut your manhood free and throw it to the rats and——Spingarn remembered what to do. The fusil.

  Present your fusil—Take aim!—Fire!

  This time the bullets dented the breastplate. One may even have penetrated the steel. The Frenchman, shocked and badly bruised, swayed backward and took a step away from Spingarn. Spingarn ran. Discipline made him throw his fusil at the Frenchman, however.

  Without waiting to see the effects of the blow, he plodded heavily through the mud toward the light. He saw, in the distance, the rough timbers of the shoring he had helped to put in place some three weeks before. Then he saw the yellow-white smoke. It wreathed upward through a slim vent in the floor. Smoke from the long snake below, the deadly coiled length of the saucisse.

  French curses followed him. The Frenchman clanked along like some dying beast from nightmare pasts. Spingarn thought he could hear the vicious spluttering of the powder train.

  “It’s laughable,” he said aloud.

  It wasn’t.

  “Someone must have got the plot mixed up—”

  He saw, for a half-second, a brighter light than ever came from a tallow dip or a powder train. Plot! He sensed that he was near to some kind of salvation.

  Maybe Sergeant Hawk would know what to do.

  But Sergeant Hawk had set fire to the saucisse. And soon Sergeant Hawk would give a grim smile of satisfaction as several scores of Frenchies, their cannon, horses and pioneers, together with assorted supplies, powder wagons, and mercenaries, went up in one colossal heavy explosion.

  It was left to Private Spingarn to find out what to do.

  Spingarn jumped as the Frenchman’s sword whistled near him. The giant was nearing the end of his strength; it was quite wonderful how even the most powerful of men lost their power when they worked in the galleries and tunnels. Short men, like Spingarn himself, suffered least.

  “I suppose that’s why I opted for this Plot?”

  The giant promised viler deeds.

  The gallery was full of smoke.

  Spingarn grinned. Plot.

  “I want out of this Plot!”

  2

  He had been excised. Gently knifed away from the Siege of Tournai, extracted with delicate skill from the tunnel, lifted by invisible hands and placed where? Heaven!

  “Private Spingarn reporting, sir!”

  Was God an officer? Preacher MacAdam had spoken of the Great General who Guides our Destinies, though he may have been talking of Marlborough, the great Duke. Spingarn squared his blackened shoulders and saluted. And that was wrong too. For this was no fleecy cloud, no anteroom to the preacher’s heaven. It had a look of the inside of Corporal Tillyard’s looted French watch: shiny, efficient, mechanical.

  He was standing on a carpet of white fur that stretched outward to stark black walls. A row of unwinking glass eyes stared at him, skeletal frames holding them in place; a quiet murmur of noise, like the sound of the corporal’s watch being wound up, came from the eyes. Spingarn put a name to the battery of eyes:

  “Umpire?”

  Not God. Not anything remotely related to the world of Private Spingarn either: God wouldn’t stare, multi-eyed, from whirring contrivances of metal and glass; God wouldn’t inhabit a cube of a room decorated in luminous black and empty white; and He wouldn’t keep a soldier of Queen Anne so long as this before He made His mind up about what to do with him.

  Whatever an Umpire was, it waited for him to move.

  “It was so realistic,” Spingarn heard himself mumbling. “I don’t think I’d have called out of the Plot if it hadn’t been for the armor—it isn’t right, you know. Sir.”

  He took a step backward at the memory of that advancing tower of metal with the sharp, blood-reeking sword pointing before it like a terrible question. A flutter of panic began to grip him. The stark room was horribly familiar. Even the staring eyes, now flickering in a thousand broken colors, were less than strange. They were remote and bleakly terrifying, but he had met them before.

  He had stood in this room before. Had he been Spingarn?

  The feeling of panic intensified.

  Spingarn moved away again from the array of skeletal machinery. It followed him, scanning, observing, questioning.

  “I know I’m not Spingarn,” he said to the scanners.

  The thing should answer. Return his confidence.

  Another faint memory came skittering through his head: it wouldn’t. It couldn’t! Not until he knew why—the why of the probabilities—in the Plot. Not until he knew why he had been able to cry out that he wanted to be away from the stinking tunnel, with its cold and murder and terror.

  “I’m not Spingarn,” he said again. “But I know about the probabilities.”

  The reasons lay, almost submerged. The whats and the whens struggled for recognition.

  Aloud, Spingarn heard himself saying:

  “I’m not Spingarn. I’m the Probability Man.”

  He didn’t know what that meant, either, no more than he knew what the scanners were.

  He was quite sure now that he was not Private Spingarn, however. Not Private Spingarn, who had been a seaman, and who had been fascinated by the terrible great guns the big ships carried. Transfixed by the thrill of the cannon, exhilarated beyond measure by the bursting into black and yellow fury of the charges of gunpowder, one kind of Spingarn had seized an opportunity to enlist in Her Britannic Majesty’s Seventh Regiment of Fusiliers, for the chance of working among gunpowder and massive diabolical engines of destruction: “Not me,” said Spingarn. He recalled other Plots, in other Frames.

  Plots?

  “Yes,” murmured Spingarn aloud, pleased with himself in a laughably simple way. Pleased to have eliminated a hundred of the alternatives among which lay only complete disorientation and madness. “Oh yes! I called Time-Out from a Plot. A Plot in a Frame.”

>   Frames were easy, for unquestionable memories of an early training in the history of the evolution of the Frames hung somewhere among the recesses of his mind; Spingarn knew that he was not in any celestial refuge. He was out of the recreations of reality which were known as the Frames, which ever since the Disinvention of Work, had been the refuge of a human race utterly disenchanted with the bitter struggle for survival which had finally been won. Machines worked. Men played. In the Frames.

  He, not Private Spingarn, but someone possessed of flickering memories and dim awarenesses, was a man who had been in the Frames. In a desperate Plot. And he called Time-Out so that he could have a chance to return to his own context. What sort of a time was that?

  Then the other Plots came crowding back. Always the dangerous moments, when he, ex-Private Spingarn, had called for a fresh start among the hundreds of Frames which humanity had constructed to keep itself from extinction by boredom. It came to Spingarn that he had been on a long treadmill of events, each one utterly dangerous, each worse than the last. It had nearly finished in the Siege of Tournai.

  He remembered some of the other Plots and shuddered.

  There was a way out, though.

  You had to remember that you could call Time-Out.

  Time-Out, when you got the words out, took you to the Time-Out blip.

  This was a Time-Out blip!

  And in it was the one simple lever which would allow him to control—no, not control, not yet—appeal?—not quite that either—manipulate? Yes!—the one simple lever which, when he found it, would allow him to begin to manipulate the probabilities in the Frame!

  How do I know that?

  Spingarn distrusted his new-found knowledge.

  “Spingarn?” he said aloud. “How do I know about the Frames?”

  He recognized that he still called himself Spingarn. But any identity was better than none. “Now, Spingarn,” he said quietly, “work it out from here. You’re perceptive enough to follow the clues you’ve been given—they’ve made it easy for you, so far. I mean, they could have played it very craftily and put you on a woolly cloud and given forth with celestial music. You’d have believed you were in a Primitive Heaven. They could have made the Umpire something utterly anachronistic—they could have done something with trick projections. Or maybe put a couple of humanoid robots into nightshirts and convinced you that you were up before a pair of Greek philosophers: they’ve tried to make it easy for you, Spingarn, whatever you are!”

  Spingarn had the feeling that his time was running out.

  It was a feeling that had been with him ever since he had heard that first faint tap-tapping of the Frenchies’ picks. Then the answer to one unasked question came to him. Someone had written a Write-Off into the Plot. There had been one too many complications in the Frame, and the only way to resolve it was to set up a situation where a few loose ends could be snipped away. He was a loose end.

  If he hadn’t begun to question the accuracy of the Plot, he would have been ejected from the tunnel mouth, blown clear of the red earth, and then interred, broken-boned and stone dead, in the shattered ground; someone had got the periods slightly mixed up—Spingarn felt himself laughing now. If the huge Frenchie had not worn that giveaway medieval armor, he would have perished with him.

  He stared at the Umpire. Umpire?

  It whirred disagreeably, and the feeling of time running clear away from him on coiled springs brought him back to his immediate predicament. The one simple lever!

  It had to be some demand, some command perhaps. Clearly this room was no room, but a little blip in the Frame, a thing of force-waves and energy that could be slipped unnoticed into the recreated landscape of a former age. It was an anteroom into his present, another tunnel, though not of the kind in which he had spent the past two or three months. And the scanners were no more than that: machines which reported back—to the Time-Out Umpire! He backtracked. His yelp of fear had taken him this far—had done so before! He began to remember the imprinted memories of other forms of existence: Spingarn as a naked slave, condemned and alone in a sanded arena, facing a grinning pair of pygmies; Spingarn washed overboard from a shot-torn deck as a gale hit the archaic vessel; Spingarn in Sybaritic robes, inspecting a Chinese girl’s bosom, yellow and soft as butter, and then the harsh beating of the war gong as the Mongols launched their attack. And always he was able to remember the formula to drop out of the dangerous situation: I want out of the Plot!

  And into another.

  Unless he could remember the what!

  “The scanners!”

  Spingarn leaped sideways, avoiding the soft brightly colored eyes. He hurled himself behind the battery of equipment before the stalks could realign themselves in focus on him. And he was quicker than the eyes.

  He saw then what had eluded him maybe a score of times before, in this same blip of space-time. He had made the conceptual leap as well as the physical jump.

  The scanners were not there to look at him.

  They were for looking with!

  Spingarn—the name remained, though the rest of the identity had almost left him—knew why he had been pitched from one Plot to another, always finding himself in the most extreme of difficulties, always spiraling downward into deeper and deadlier Frames. He knew why he had come to the end of the series of headlong adventures.

  He shuddered. He had almost been Written-Out of the Frames. He looked into the scanners and saw what he had to do.

  Another Spingarn had taken his place in the Plot.

  There could be no break in the continuity of this antique Frame. All the participants must play their part.

  And the new man would be Private Spingarn.

  For a while.

  Until Spingarn knew why he was the Probability Man.

  3

  The saucisse flared. The huge Frenchman in his ominous suit of steel still advanced toward a blackened and crab-like Spingarn. Both were covered in soot and grime, the armored man redly daubed with blood—Tillyard’s, the pioneers’, and some of his own where the dead corporal’s dagger had hacked away at an ankle.

  “It isn’t me!”

  It wasn’t. Another poor wretch had been hurtled into the tunnel, along another quite different kind of tunnel which had reared up in the interstices of space and time and shot the fleeing and terrified man into the red earth of Tournai: how was the change managed so neatly, with so little loss of time? The flying lit fuse had advanced no more than ten feet during the time that Spingarn had watched in curious horror as the eyes of the scanner had followed him. It was the same fuse; the same tunnel; the same atmosphere of urine, grime, flame, mud, bad air, and stark terror; the same tired giant with his terrible sword reaching out for the unprotected flesh of the desperate pioneer: “But not me!”

  Before Spingarn acted, he arrived at another answer. The blip he now controlled was a little anomalous kink in space-time. Time-Out meant just that. Time filletted out of time. A little trick of his own age. It was up to him to prove now that he could perform some of that trickery himself. In the moments when he had been staring into the scanners, more memories had writhed their way into his mind, half-heard phrases, subtle discussions he had taken no part in, nuggets of information he had made no use of before, whole sections of drills he had never examined: information he had stored for years in another existence had suddenly fallen into place. And he had realized where he was and what the blip was for.

  If he could prove his control of the Plot, he could leave it.

  Not before.

  He had to manipulate the future of this new Private Spingarn.

  And the consequence of failure?

  He knew that too.

  The sputtering flare passed the struggling figure which was so much like himself. It illuminated the terrified man’s whole frame—the wide, strong shoulders, the long arms, the short trunk, the white uniform trousers stained a uniform red by the mud and perhaps too by the blood of his dead comrades. And by the light of that pr
imitive engine of destruction, Spingarn could see the haunted olive face of the murderous giant. Both men were involved in a terrible confrontation; both full of hate and both utterly terrified by what the flaring fuse represented. Spingarn could see in their soot-ringed eyes that they knew their appalling danger: the new Private Spingarn had been spared nothing when the little memory-cassette had been injected at the base of his skull.

  Spingarn took in the serried row of controls.

  The scanners were his eyes now. They brought to him all that the scene contained, all that could possibly impinge on the scene, all that had happened up to that moment, and all the thoughts, actions, impulses, feelings, and hopes of the two actors; if he wished, Spingarn could also flip a sensor and bring in the larger scene—he could spread before him as on a pulsating map the entire Siege of Tournai, with its tens of thousands of actors, its generals, thieves, whores, and dead. Or he could monitor one man’s total being—say, Sergeant Hawk. Hawk, who would be watching from behind a grain wagon or an abutment, quite safe, with empty pipe in mouth and still-glowing match in hand. The match he had used to fire the fuse. Contented and expectant Hawk, who would yell “Huzzah!” as a few hundred of the enemy were ejected thirty feet into the air, together with their picks and shovels, their fusils and grenades, their green long-dead and, quite possibly, the man who had been thrown in to take Spingarn’s place.

  He could see anything. But he could not reverse the Sergeant’s action. Nothing could do that. The fuse was ash, the planet on which the Siege had been recreated had turned on its axis a fraction of a revolution, Hawk had begun his slow grin, the giant below the earth had seen the fuse: and to reverse all these was beyond the creators of the Frames. Certainly beyond Spingarn.

  What could he do?

  He had—how long?

  Enough of Private Spingarn remained. He could do the elementary arithmetic. The fat saucisse burned slower in the damp air of the tunnel than outside. Not much, however. For this type, say three seconds the yard, give or take a second or two for powder that was too tightly packed, or for the brimstone and verdigris admixtures to burn through. So there was time enough for either of the frightened men to jam the flaring fuse into the thick, stinking red mud. But would they think of it?