The Probability Man Read online

  “Look!” repeated Spingarn’s own voice. Almost. “He was over, with his sword flung away from him—and me trapped under one of his legs—why, Sergeant, one of his legs was as heavy as your whole body! Fanciful! A wound like this one fanciful! Gods blood, Sergeant, did you think I burned myself because I wanted an excuse! I’m obliged, Sergeant You’ll excuse the passions of the moment I defer to your rank, Sergeant, but I’ll not have the lie put upon me. Proceed, is it, Sergeant? Very well. Between the mud and my naked chest, the flame extinguished itself of its own accord; I then dispatched my enemy with his own sword. And, Sergeant, I realized that more of the Frogs would follow their valorous and victorious armored man, so I paused to relight the fuse. No, Sergeant. Not with my own tinderbox. My dead giant was a Pioneer, Sergeant, and in his pouch I found not only the means of making fire, but also an additional length of slow match. Being of a handy nature—I’ve shipped aboard Her Majesty’s sloop Arcturus, Sergeant—I’ll not be much longer!—I was quite accustomed to the use of such devices. I attached the slow match to the saucisse and made my way out of the tunnel until I came here to make my report, Sergeant.”

  The Sergeant was struggling with disbelief.

  Spingarn grinned at the bottle-nosed, blotched face.

  Sergeant Hawk had heard a tale of ghastly underground murder, of vicious valor and sudden frenzy, all in the low, narrow galleries and tunnels under the fields of Tournai; such a tale of daring and devotion to duty as had not come from the Pioneers in the whole of the history of the wars against the French.

  “Such a bore to go over old ground,” said the furred automaton. It stared at Spingarn, but he barely noticed its pique.

  To the Umpire, this was just another chore; but to Spingarn it was his own personal survival. The new Private Spingarn had taken his place.

  He felt a comradely sense of pride in the new Spingarn’s stand against Sergeant Hawk. The man, whatever Frame he had been ripped from, had strength of character. Now, he bristled with anger as his Sergeant stood undecided.

  “And you have made your report,” got out Sergeant Hawk.

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “And I suppose I’d better take you to the Captain?”

  “In due course, Sergeant.”

  “But first, I’d best take a look at this armored paladin of yours—in all his gore and steel!”

  “It’s not advisable, Sergeant Hawk.”

  “No?”

  “I’d respectfully suggest we retire behind this earthwork, Sergeant.”

  “You would?”

  The robot, watching the sensors with no interest whatsoever, was becoming disagreeable. In the functional interior of the Time-Out blip, the events that unfolded themselves in the Primitive Frame seemed remote. But not to Spingarn. The sensors picked out the Sergeant’s suspicions one by one and laid them out starkly. Spingarn watched the grim old warrior’s bottle-nosed face. Weatherbeaten, scarred, and sweat-grimed; the eyes were alert, though.

  The automaton interrupted petulantly:

  “Such a bore when we could talk over a simply marvelous stratagem I used to avert a Disaster in one of the Steam Age wars—a positive finesse!”

  To Spingarn, it was the twenty-ninth century robot and the mass of humming machines that seemed remote.

  “Later.”

  Sergeant Hawk. Spingarn recalled the old soldier’s single obsession: to blow up Frenchmen. The robot noticed that he was not listening.

  “I detect a continuing degree of personal involvement that is definitely contrary to a strict interpretation of the Time-Out regulations. I’m not sure that you’re ready to return to Frames Control.”

  “Later!”

  He disregarded the threat. It was unlikely that any report of the robot’s could harm him now. He had accomplished the tricky probability maneuver.

  The new Private of Pioneers had reacted immediately to the subtle urgings of the sensors. Do so and filter the man’s directional impulses so, the robot had suggested; and then when he’s got the idea of springing at the Frenchman and acted on it, suggest he grab the fuse; and then the probabilities built up into a Probability Curve, and the man could make his decision.

  And it had worked!

  But now Spingarn wanted to watch the end of it all. He wanted to see the new Private of Pioneers convince the Sergeant that the French had been beaten at their own game.

  Hawk reached clumsily for the canteen of local wine which he kept in his knapsack.

  It could go wrong!

  If the Sergeant took time off to drink….

  Hawk dived for the earthwork as the new Private Spingarn hurled himself out of the way of the rising earth.

  A vast and heavy coagulation of red mud ascended into the warm air. It hung, watched by a grinning Private Spingarn. Hawk’s face was blotched with wet, red mud.

  The heavy cloud hung for a moment. In it, Spingarn could see clearly the broken bodies of a hundred Frenchmen still struggling against an appalling fate. Hawk roared “Huzzah! Huzzah!” in his alcoholic’s croak.

  “There!” screamed an elated Private of Pioneers from behind the earthwork. “There, Sergeant! Do you see him!”

  From the Time-Out blip, Spingarn could see it too.

  The sensors obediently brought the eerie sight into closer focus.

  Like a fish revealed for a half-second in the mud of a pool, the steel-cased Frenchman soared upward and then tumbled from sight.

  Hawk reached for the wine. He passed a hand over the mud on his face.

  “Gawd!” he said. “Gawd’s bloody boots, Private Spingarn!”

  He handed the flask to the Private.

  “Gawd,” he said again.

  Spingarn allowed the scene to fade away.

  The robot was irate by this time.

  “A pity some of those asking for Time-Out haven’t got the instincts of civilized beings,” it sniffed.

  “I made it,” whispered Spingarn. “But for what?”

  Then, to the robot, he said:

  “You’re right, of course. We become too much attached to the parts we play in the Frames.” He needed the robot, for it would now forward a report on his handling of the situation. He put aside his own doubts about an unsure future and sought a way to soothe the robot’s disturbed electronic feelings. Then he found it. Vain. Conceited. And—but he would have to endure it—garrulous. “I expect you’ve had one or two interesting little problems of this kind yourself?”

  “Ah!” said the robot. “If only you Plot Directors”—Spingarn felt a surge of excitement, for he knew that his faint memories had been confirmed—“if only you knew our problems! Why, only a month ago I had to intervene in a nasty little squabble in the early Steam Age. It appeared that a tribe of humans called French coveted the territory of a neighboring tribe. Now, at the same time, on an island called Corsica …”

  6

  The transition from Time-Out blip was managed with such deftness that Spingarn barely noticed the journey. The blip itself was hooked into one of the big ships supplying new recruits to the Frame, and taking from it the personnel who had opted for only a short stay. Once in the belly of the ship, the blip was hooked into one of a series of coma-cells, and Spingarn was gently pushed into the gray ooze of a high-velocity couch. He spent the next hundred hours in a deep sleep, his dreams regulated by an automatic sensor above the bath of gray, oozing porridgelike liquid in which he swam. He knew nothing of the intricate journeying through Frames Control Center.

  He came to his senses on a chaise longue in his own office.

  An astonishingly ugly beautiful girl with wide-set deep eyes of a violent blue and a dumpy figure that had somehow failed to respond to body restructuring was staring down at him, in an attitude of love and rage.

  “Bastard!” she spat. “Stinking treacherous no-good bastard!”

  “Well,” said Spingarn, completely disoriented. “Me?”

  “You!”

  “Oh, leave him, Ethel,” another woman’s v
oice said. “He doesn’t know you—nor me—nor where he is.”

  “Nor who,” pointed out Spingarn.

  “He left me!” Ethel moaned. “Left me and went alone! You promised, you lying swine! You said it was Written-In!”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Ethel,” said the other woman. Spingarn saw a tall, middle-aged woman of some elegance. She was dressed extravagantly in blue paint and a thousand shimmering pinpoints of light which clashed and rang as she walked toward them. “You don’t know us, do you, darling?”

  “My assistants,” guessed Spingarn.

  “Good!” the elegant woman said. “Our wandering boy hasn’t quite lost the use of his wits. Have you, dear?”

  “You said you’d get me into the Primitive Frame—you said we could work it out together so that you could get away—you said—”

  “Quiet!” bawled Spingarn suddenly.

  “You haven’t changed,” said the elegant woman. “Now you’ll ask who you are.”

  Spingarn watched her. And the other woman, who was still in a state of shocked hostility. Her dumpy body was poised, as if she were about to launch herself at him. What, he asked himself, had he done to her?

  There was no such animosity from the older woman; she accepted his presence. In fact, she appeared to enjoy baiting him.

  “I’ll ask,” he said. “Who?”

  “You’re the Probability Man,” she said. “Isn’t he, Ethel?”

  “And he doesn’t even know me!” wailed Ethel. “He doesn’t even know me!”

  “I told you,” the other woman said. “Anyway, how could he? He doesn’t even know who he is. Do you?”

  “A Plot Director,” said Spingarn.

  Stray memories came skittering through his skill. The girl. The ugly girl, with the great beak of a nose and the figure which should have been sliced into shape years before. She was a factor in his life. And in the events leading up to his entry into the Frames.

  “Well, well,” said the older woman. “And where are you?”

  Spingarn looked about him. There was a certainty about his thoughts now. Maybe it had something to do with the long hours which he had spent in the coma-ooze. He knew where he was.

  “This is my office.”

  “Then you know me, don’t you?” pleaded the girl. “And you promised! I had to report sick! I couldn’t work with any of the other Plot Directors! I had to go on a three-month trip to one of those ghastly Centauran Wars Frames—they made me a ritual handmaiden to a Warlord! Those thugs of guards! The comps said I had to go and that was all they could offer me at short notice!”

  “Tell me why I’m the Probability Man,” said Spingarn.

  “Don’t!” said the older woman firmly. “The Director was very clear about that. ‘When Spingarn gets back’—that’s what we’re to call you by the way, Spingarn—‘let it all come as a surprise.’ So keep quiet, Ethel.”

  “Can’t we even warn him about the Director’s chromosome variables?”

  “No! Not a word!”

  “But he’ll be sent to Talisker without any——”

  “Ethel!”

  “Oh,” said Ethel. “I said it. Spingarn—I told you! You’ll know about the Probability thing! And you shouldn’t, not yet!”

  “You, girl, are in trouble,” said the older woman. She smiled at Spingarn. “Our job is to keep you quiet until the Director wants you. If you try to get away, the security net picks you up. We can tell you some things, not others. If you like, we’ll leave you alone. But this is all you get until tomorrow. Me and Ethel.” A thought struck her. “They said you should be amid familiar surroundings, and with people you knew. Does it help?”

  Spingarn had been in a state of shock for the previous two or three minutes. Ever since that one word had been uttered, he had known an acute awareness of anxiety. Dread, even. Talisker!

  It meant something in his past so big and important that it had altered the foundations of his life. But no memories came with that one word. It was an empty word: as much an empty word as he was an empty person.

  A null person, with a null, but terrifying, past!

  The two women watched him as he examined what had been his office; a low-grade robotic servitor scurried in and out of a heap of records. They had been clearing out his files. Cutting him off from the past.

  He was a nameless Plot Director. And he had rated the attentions of two assistants, not bad when you thought of the shortage of persons willing—and capable—of working on the Plots that were the lifeblood of the Frames. Someone had given him a free hand in the furnishing of this office, too, for its slightly lunatic splendor was far too unsophisticated for twenty-ninth century tastes.

  “I did this?”

  He had, of course. In another life—before he had entered the Frames, he had put together the outlook which made up the walls of this room. Cold glittering sensory projections made up an uncannily accurate representation of the hypnotic Crystalline Worlds. He saw into the dim nebula at whose center lay the ancient Worlds. He could see tiny suns throwing themselves into flaring supernovae; he watched the weird fragments of artifacts from the Worlds which were a part of the furnishings call an incredibly remote series of memories into renewed existence. It was like looking down the racial memories of time itself, into the beginnings of life.

  What sort of a man had he been to create this!

  This vast office—this strange mausoleum of other worlds, with its gilded chaise longues, its array of Plotting machinery, its bank of blank-faced robots waiting for him to order them into life.

  “At least tell me who I am,” said Spingarn to the women.

  “Tell you that, darling, and you know all,” the older woman said. “Ask Ethel what happened to her when she helped you last time!”

  “Last time?”

  “When you made yourself the Probability Man,” said Ethel.

  Spingarn found himself close to anger. So much had happened since he had called that one vital phrase to escape from the darkness of the tunnel that he had been bewildered—almost resigned to what fate his own age had determined for him. But now he felt an accession of a suffocating anger at the two women.

  “Steady!” said the older woman. “They said you’d blow up about now—but, don’t you see, it isn’t any use? You’ll know soon enough, Spingarn. Relax and enjoy yourself while you can!”

  There was an implied threat in her manner. Spingarn remembered hints of the types of security arrangements he had once known. He looked about him. They would be in the roof, on the fittings, in the floor: coiled mind-freezers, anesthetizing sprays, little gravity-sinks, the whole apparatus of the security section. He sank back onto the couch.

  “I’ll tell you what they did to me, then,” said the older woman. “It’ll help to pass the time. You know we all admired you, of course, and when you came to your final comeuppance, I tipped Ethel off. That’s all I did—just gave Ethel the word. But I was chucked out of Frames Center for six months.” She began to laugh quietly. “I suppose it’s funny when you look back, but at the time it wasn’t. They pushed me into a Second Glacial Age slot. My god, how I suffered! I got caught up by a man called Ooogle or something of the kind—he had the idea of trekking through the passes to what was left of North Africa. They had no idea how to treat women in those days. I had to carry about a ton of stinking dried meat clear across a thousand miles of the worst country I’ve ever seen! And when I got back, they stuck me with that madman Marvell—but you won’t remember him, either, will you?”

  “No.”

  The woman was unsympathetic. “That’s the trouble with the kind of trip you’ve been taking. After you’ve been through a dozen or so Frames in quick succession, your old persona begins to break up. And you’re just not the man you were!”

  Spingarn was almost amused. She was so right. He told her so. “And you’re not going to tell me what sort of a man I was, are you?” he said afterward.

  “A bastard,” said Ethel, with conviction. “A bright compe
tent, heartless bastard.”

  “Ethel’s quite right,” the other woman added. “But I must say it was interesting while it lasted—we never had a dull moment with you. It was either leaping about with the Plot Simulators or whizzing off to some obscure stellar system to verify background details.”

  Ethel was staring at him in a kind of awed fascination.

  “Until you came to this random thing——”

  “Ethel!”

  “I wasn’t going to tell him!”

  “Then be careful. Say any more, and it’s back to the Warlord for you and probably Ooogle for me!”

  “All right. Until you started dabbling with this probability thing, you were the up-and-coming Plot Director. Everyone wanted to get into the Frames you built up. But you wanted to try something new—always something new, you insecure bastard!”

  “If only you’d stuck to the regular Frames!” the other woman said.

  “I didn’t?”

  “No,” the older woman said. “And I’m not saying any more. Nor is Ethel. Come on, girl. You’ll find nothing but trouble here.”

  Spingarn tried again.

  “Talisker,” he said. “What is Talisker?”

  Both women blanched.

  “You shouldn’t have let it out,” the older woman said.

  “But he’s only got today! They shouldn’t send him in without some kind of warning!”

  “They won’t,” the other woman said. “But the Director wants to do it his way.”

  It made no sense to Spingarn, but the very real sense of dread remained. Talisker. He was sure now that it was the focal point of the situation he was now in. A hint of a strange planetary surface swam slowly beneath the surface of his mind. Gaunt, lonely, ancient.

  And then two things came together.

  “I’m the Probability Man,” Spingarn said. “On Talisker?”

  “No!” shouted the older woman. “I didn’t say anything!”

  A sharply stinging jet hit Spingarn between the eyes. For a few seconds he remained conscious. In the few moments of time that remained to him before the security apparatus enfolded him in sleep, he saw that Ethel was pointing to the row of servitor robots. It made no sense though.