The Probability Man Page 5
He dreamed that he was back in the tunnel beneath Tournai.
7
Spingarn awoke ten hours later.
The room flowed with light: bright sunlight through the wide recesses in the stunning, shifting scenes that were the walls. Servo-robots sprang into action as he moved. Apart from these, he was alone. He smiled at the memory of the women’s greeting; he lost the smile as he remembered their absolute refusal to allow him his former personality.
“Ethel said I was to wipe my retention circuit as soon as I told you,” growled a tiny automaton.
Spingarn spotted it: a low-grade machine whose function it was to announce visitors:
“Told me what?”
“The others are listening.”
It was true. The circular robot holding his coffee, the shaving robot and the sizzling machine which prepared his bacon and eggs were all poised in that peculiarly robotic position of awareness. In this way they accumulated information, which they passed on to the big comps which in turn chattered to the vast machines that designed the Frames.
A hesitant recollection of betrayal stirred in Spingarn’s mind. Then he was alive with questions. His old persona was still almost completely submerged, but the urge to find out was returning. Private Spingarn had sublimated his curiosity in the pursuit of technical efficiency and violent action; this much Spingarn had worked out in the moments of waking. His former self had been a man of boundless energies, all of them directed at knowing more about the use of the Frames. And the words of the low-grade servitor brought back a dim recollection of betrayal—through this very desire to know.
“Cut out all receptor circuits for five minutes,” ordered Spingarn.
The machines appeared to slump. Within their porcelain shells they adjusted power units so that they could neither hear nor see; Spingarn could guess at their disappointment. Even these low-grade machines had a certain pride in their limited intellectual capacities. The big machines treated them with disdain, but nevertheless acknowledged their usefulness.
“Go on.”
“Ethel said you’d be sent back to the Frames of Talisker.”
And then Spingarn’s whole world fell in on him.
The Frames of Talisker!
A blaze of fire swept him upward: memories jostled for attention. So many areas of experience clamored for recollection and examination that he jerked epileptically from side to side in an agony of understanding.
Talisker!
Lone, gaunt planet swimming in a vast Deep of emptiness on the peripheries of the Galaxy!
“Back to Talisker!” whispered Spingarn. “Back to Talisker!”
Now he knew why the Time-Out Umpire had been so careful to keep to Frame Law. It had known that if he solved the problem in the Siege of Tournai Plot, he would be eligible to return to that strange mausoleum of a planet where the first of all the Frames had been constructed.
Talisker was where the Frames had begun.
A planet chosen for its remoteness, so that the new kind of human existence could be tried out over a period of decades before its secret was released; but that was almost a thousand years before!
Now, Talisker was a ruin. It was kept as a museum piece, but no one visited it. There, only the dusty remnants of a hundred Frames served to mark the passage of man. It was a place of ghosts and echoes, eerie memories and despair.
And, locked into the Frames, was a connection between the Plot Director he had been in an earlier life and the curious phrase that had flicked around his skull when he had emerged from the red mud of Tournai.
The Probability Man. And Talisker.
The shimmering room, so full of light and alien radiance, seemed to darken. Even the little servo-robots took on a strange appearance; silent and without movement, they gave an impression of desperate and deformed dwarfs which waited only for an opportunity to spring into life. The thought of the gray planet he had known in another kind of life brought a deep gloom to the office.
The Frames of Talisker!
What had they been to the man before Spingarn!
“You!”
“What is it? I don’t clear the dishes. I’m a mouthpiece. ‘The Plot Director to see you’ I say, or ‘Ethel’s here with the reports from the fusion plants.’ Leave me out of the rest of the chores, will you?”
“Fusion plants?”
Spingarn was diverted. More memories stirred. He thrust them aside and faced the little robot.
“Ethel. She told you to warn me about Talisker.”
The small, bright-purple device sidled away, an insectlike thing. It swayed uneasily from side to side.
“So Talisker! Talisker!”
“So I was told to put on my blankers!” growled the robot.
“But you know about Talisker. And Ethel—and fusion plants!”
“No!”
The other machines remained still and dead.
“You know more than you’ll admit to,” said Spingarn softly.
“No!”
“Faulty, I’d guess,” said Spingarn. “Defective. Ducked out of your overhauls, if I’m not mistaken. Not much more than robotic junk.”
“Oh, no!”
The machine shook with dismay. Its antennae quivered and Spingarn saw the strange phenomenon of incipient circuit collapse: low-grade robots feared personal extinction almost as much as did humans. When they were threatened with the scrapheap, they suffered electronic imbalance that showed itself in odd ways. The little announcer robot’s voice had become slurred. It scrabbled at the floor with a hundred feelers. Its sensory antennae writhed and crackled with its own display of dismay.
His threat was enough.
“I don’t know much—it’s my cut-off circuits! I was given a wipe-clean, but I have this extra little circuit put in by accident—I keep just a bit of memory——”
“Talisker.”
“There was a complete wipe-out! The ladies saw to it themselves—all the robots had their circuits scrubbed again and again!”
“You too?”
“Yes. We lost our way round your quarters for the first three days!”
“Talisker!”
“It’s a mess!”
“That I know.”
“It’s terrible!”
“What else?”
“Horrible—what you did with the fusion plants!”
“Tell me!”
“I didn’t keep anything on them—only that you used them on Talisker.”
“And Talisker?”
“Ethel said it was the worst Disaster ever. Disaster Control couldn’t handle it.”
Disaster Control?
As clear as a flash of lightning came the answer. Some strange conjunction of memories allowed Spingarn’s brain to produce the image of a distinguished-looking man who spoke to himself and two or three others.
All Plot Directors.
And the distinguished-looking man was the Director of the Frames. The man who had the ultimate authority over the destinies of most of mankind. And their living dreams. He ruled the Frames. And he was explaining what he considered to be the function of Disaster Control.
“In any Frame, a Plot can go wrong. It happens. People slip their memory-conditioning. We don’t know all that goes on in the chemical reactions to the gene mutations we slip in. Not quite everything. So, sometimes, we have a Plot going wrong. Say a genius happens to flip his conditioning, what do we have?” He wasn’t expecting an answer. He looked grim and worried. “What have we got? I’ll tell you what we had recently. Events planned for a century ahead suddenly began to swing off the Probability Curve. Completely off it! We almost had a random situation! There was a war which should have been self-perpetuating, and along comes this lunatic with the mind of a genius, and he alters the sociopolitical probabilities and the war stops! So what do we do with the millions who’ve signed up for the Solar Drift Contest of the First Mad War? With a nil casualty rate, we have no places for them—and think what that means in terms of a complete new
Frame for them! Gentlemen, we couldn’t cope! And so we sent in Disaster Control. Men and women—agents who are the toughest and deadliest our psych processes could find. Agents with a complete loyalty block. They go in and they contain the Disaster at any cost to themselves. And they cleared up the Disaster I’ve just outlined. At some cost,” the Director added.
Not many Plot Directors had met the Director of the Frames in person.
He was a remote, self-contained man, Spingarn recalled. So why should he, Spingarn, have been singled out for a special interview? It was one more loose thread that might never connect with any other.
He shook his head and questioned the servo-robot:
“Disaster Control couldn’t handle the Talisker problem?”
“Six of their best agents lost,” agreed the robot. “And I’ll be junked when the comps hear what I’ve told you.”
“No,” said Spingarn. “Do a wipe-out when you’ve told me what you know.”
“So a wipe-out,” growled the machine. “Tell me how!”
“We’ve all got problems.”
“You have.”
“So tell me about Talisker.”
“Would you believe that’s all I remember?”
“No.”
The machine had recovered some of its earlier equanimity. It no longer exhibited the signs of robotic distress which had made it such a pitiable thing earlier.
“Ethel said I should tell you to be ready—they’re sending you back!”
“You said that.”
“Back to Talisker.”
“And that.”
The machine stirred again the unknown depths of horrified wonder that had turned the crisp savory breakfast to a heap of sorry ashes before him; it hinted at the frightful.
“And she said she was sorry.”
“Yes.”
“And she said you couldn’t run again. Not as you did before. They’ve put in a—a thing—written in a regulation so you can’t escape again. You’ll have to go back to Talisker—you’ve got to be Curator again!”
Connection.
Me. “Talisker is my problem,” Spingarn said.
Connection established.
“I was the Curator of the Frames!”
“Oh, yes,” said the machine. “Curator of the Frames of Talisker.”
“The Frames of Talisker. A mess.”
“Ethel said.”
“She would.”
Ethel. Who had howled and howled and howled and howled. And whom he had left behind when he had leaped into the long tunnels, gripping desperately the memory-cassette which would enable him to gain admittance to whatever Frame happened to have an immediate vacancy for a man with his psych ratings!
“I promised to take Ethel.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I couldn’t face the Frames of Talisker—no one could! They’re—frightful!”
“Yes.”
“And why should they send me into them when Disaster Control couldn’t put them to rights! Why me!”
“I have information on that.”
Spingarn saw the robot again. He had been ablaze with fear and indignation, as well as a dread he would not admit to: the connection between himself and the Frames of Talisker was something that he wished to conceal from himself. The dread, the fear, the horrified excitement he felt when he thought of them—all combined to make him listen to the robot, even when he most wished to avoid the frightful inevitability of what it must say.
“Yes.”
“You were the one who reactivated the Frames of Talisker.”
Spingarn leaped to his feet and ran.
8
Spingarn ran from what he had done.
“My problem,” he had said perhaps a quarter of an hour earlier. An unconscious memory, it had been a portent of the little robot’s gruff mind-reeling piece of information. He, Spingarn, or whatever he was, he had made the Frames of Talisker what they were!
And so he ran.
His quarters lay at the heart of a massive complex of executive suites. He dived through the slot which served as exit and entrance to the conveyor tunnel; automatically he slammed the control panel. Just what direction the conveyor would take, he didn’t know. It was enough that he move away from the wildly beautiful room which had suddenly become a trap.
“Fusion plants!” Spingarn breathed. “Talisker! Probability functions—what did I do with them?”
He was ejected into the blinding light of a set. On his lips was a blistering series of curses as he realized that his automatic directions to the conveyor had meant that he was now deposited on one of the gigantic stages where the reenactments of past events in human history were tried out.
Two machines from an ancient world flew at one another.
About the size of interplanetary vessels, their freakish contours spoke of first attempts at land or air transportation. Primitive motors surged and whined. A man stood at the controls of each of the machines; laconic general-duties pilots, Spingarn saw. Quiet, efficient men who would handle anything from interstellar craft to the thin gossamer-winged contrivances of the twenty-fifth Solar Drift cults, from the chariots of a classical Terran age to the tunnelers they had used in opening up the grim cold worlds of Cygnus Eight.
“Hold it!” screamed a frantic voice.
Spingarn blinked.
The two machines shrieked and howled as elementary braking systems clawed at the runway of the set. The two pilots shrugged at one another as a Plot Director’s staging bubble skimmed toward them.
“They’ve let you out!”
The newcomer was a huge man, almost naked, resplendent in the single bejeweled codpiece of the priestly hierarchy of the First Galactic Empire. He dismissed the flimsy bubble with one sweep of his massive hand.
Spingarn was too bewildered by the sudden cessation of the noise which had brutally beat his eardrums to understand that the newcomer was addressing him. It took three more attempts by the big man before Spingarn understood that he was not only welcome, but that he had been on friendly terms with him.
“How did you finish up—you took off like a bat out of hell—ruined one of my best Plots—did they give you your memory back? Your rating? Your name?”
“No.”
Memory refused to answer the questions. But the huge man obviously understood.
“So you kept the identity from the Primitive Frame? The—what was it you flipped into? Man, how you suffered in the Frames! We ran it as a special to the Totex hookups all over the Galaxy—‘Plot Director loose in Frames! An Unending Encounter With Death!’—our best feature ratings for a decade!”
Spingarn tried to recall the man’s name. Nothing came. Only the awareness of friendship and a feeling of comic indulgence.
“Tell me my name.”
“Me? Not likely! And risk going where they’re sending you—Talisker! Not this Plot Director.” The huge man looked closer. He became quieter, less ebullient. “It wouldn’t mean anything—when a man’s had so many memory-cassettes fussing away at his brain cells as you’ve had in the past year or two, there isn’t much left of conscious identification. And the subconscious retracts too. You get this new persona—sort of an amalgam of the synthetic memories. I’m your old pal Marvell.”
Marvell. Yes.
Another hotshot Plot Director. Like me!
“I’m Spingarn.”
“I saw the reruns of your Time-Out! Terrific stuff! You played the Umpire like a fish—you have this intuitive style, Spingarn—where are you making for?”
Spingarn shrugged.
“I was on the run.”
Marvell looked away.
“Somebody should have told you. There’s nowhere to run to.”
“No?”
“You’re thinking of trying for the Frames?”
“I was.”
The bustling crews decided that Marvell could manage without them for a while, so they sent crablike robots rushing away for cups of coffee. The violent lights ove
rhead ceased to burn away at the long stretch of twentieth-century road where the two vast vehicles had stopped.
“Don’t. They’ve winkled out the old extra random variable you wrote in. And what a fantastic bit of Plot engineering that was! Until the comps had you in the Time-Out blip, they couldn’t begin to ferret out the math of the variable you’d built up—how did you do it!”
Spingarn glimpsed for a sense-shattering moment the truth about the strange math which had blinded the vast comps. The answer, like the rest of the answers to the conundrum which he was living in, lay in the Frames of Talisker.
“I thought of it.”
Marvell became confidential.
“Look, look—er—Spingarn?”
“Spingarn.”
The name was becoming a part of him now, Spingarn noted with satisfaction. It was better than the lack of personality which he had felt when the Time-Out robot had set in motion the machinery which excised him from the recreation of the Siege of Tournai.
“Yes. Spingarn. Well. Look. You could always sort out a little Plot problem, though you probably can’t remember it. That’s why I came rushing across. When I saw the Umpire writhing with delight I knew you’d still got the touch—you’ll help me out? For old time’s sake?”
Now that Spingarn had conquered his panic, he could relax.
He accepted what Marvell told him. It confirmed what the fractious Ethel had said, and also what the little robot had let out under duress. There was no escape for him. The only occupations left to the inhabitants of the civilized parts of the Galaxy were two: you either entered the Frames or you manufactured them. And his blasted and broken memories told him with complete certainty that both were barred.
Except for the mysterious, haunted, and Disaster-struck planet where the first Frames of all had been constructed.
Talisker!
“Look, I know you have problems, but right now I need your help, er, Spingarn.”
Marvell was one of a breed Spingarn felt he himself belonged to. Inventive, energetic, driven by the urge to bring massive scholarship and unlimited physical resources together to make the reenactments of historical events as true as possible.