The Probability Man Read online

“I have this twentieth-century thing going.”

  “It’s a blank period.”

  “You’re so right! The way they treated that planet! What did they burn it with!”

  “So how make a Frame?”

  Almost against his will, Spingarn recognized a flicker of professional interest. Only minutes after he had run from his office in sheer terror, he was listening to a former colleague with a yen for one of the Nuclear Ages. And that in spite of the near-impossibility of recreating an acceptable Frame of those ancient days.

  “Land transport! It’s a sure thing for maximum ratings—we’ll get all the short-stay business in a dozen star-systems!”

  “Those things! Not those!”

  Spingarn stared at the mammoth engines. Brass and iron shone back at him. The great chimneys of the steam engines flooded the laconic pilots with black, gritty smoke.

  “Yes! We work it out that they used these things as personal flivvers—everyone had a thing like this. Great little goers, aren’t they?”

  “Personal transport?”

  “Sure! Comp says they were a sort of fetish in the twentieth century.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! Look at this.”

  Marvell waved and a robot was at his elbow with a charred piece of paper and an ancient medallion.

  “We got evidence—all we could find on the planet Earth.”

  Spingarn fingered the charred bronze disc. The inscription was barely decipherable: “Presented to Albert George Ross in Commemoration of Fifty Years’ Service at the Old Warwick Steam Traction Plant, 1937.”

  It was the picture, not the words that had Marvell excited.

  “We worked out most of the mechanical details from this!”

  Spingarn nodded. A simple steam engine, probably archaic even for the twentieth century. The machine shown would be a more or less formal representation of the most noteworthy achievement of the engineering of the period.

  “You built it from this!”

  “Sure! We knew it ran on fossil fuel. Wood, maybe, in an emergency, but probably coal. Isn’t it beautiful!”

  The engraving had its own weird and antique charm.

  Spingarn found himself almost amused at the way he had been diverted from his earlier terror. Marvell had touched a chord that had rung out in the Time-Out blip. He knew himself to be an obsessive about the subtleties of Plot engineering. He found unremembered skills flexing at his call, and the years of training began to flood back through his body, so that, as in the blip, he became an inert figure which exerted only a passive control over the man who called himself Spingarn.

  “And the paper?”

  Marvell began to talk about Probability Functions and the customs of the Mechanical Dynasty of the Twentieth Century, but Spingarn didn’t listen. He was fascinated by the touch of the fragment of history in his hands.

  It was a part of what had obviously been an ancient form of persuasive advertising: a forerunner of the insistent mind beamers which kept the population of the Galaxy aware of what was happening in the Frames between visits. The frail material had survived the destruction of the planetary surface. How?

  Marvell brought him back to the present.

  “Well? Isn’t it obvious? See—‘Barker’s Bumper Cars—the thrill of a lifetime! Bump your neighbor! Hours of fun!’ ”

  “And comp says they used the traction engines like this?”

  “Sure! The engines in the picture don’t correspond exactly with the traction engine which they gave to Albert George Ross, but that may be just the artist’s license!”

  “And you have these machines running into one another?”

  “Sure! We had to fit a couple of smallish force-shields to save them from excessive damage, but I don’t think that’s too much of a liberty to take. Not at this experimental stage. The thing is to find out how fast they can go at one another, then we’ll progressively diminish the force shields.

  “So all you have is this engraving and the bit of paper?”

  “You tell me where I can get more evidence of the period.”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “It may be, but isn’t it terrific? Like to see?”

  “You’re using this in the Early Nuclear Age Frames?”

  “This is the last bit of Plotting for them.”

  “It won’t do.”

  “Watch!”

  Marvell snapped commands and the two monstrous traction engines screamed into life. The pilots adjusted their personal survival suits. Four hundred yards apart, the brightly painted metal flanks of each machine quivered under the stress of the violently pounding steam engines. Black smoke roared and belched, spark-ridden from the brass funnels. Yellow trailers full of glistening coal pulsated under the thrust of the thumping machines. A combined mass of metal of some forty or fifty tons ground forward on the road, iron wheels gouging deep ruts in the surface.

  “Never,” said Spingarn.

  “We dug all over Terra!”

  “Not like this,” Spingarn said, as the pilots stared at Marvell. “Not like this at all!”

  “And didn’t I run the vehicles on Terra itself just to get the mass-weight ratios right!”

  “It’s crazy!”

  “Go!” bawled Marvell. “Go go go!”

  The pilots liked this part.

  “We’ll feed it to a thousand networks!” bellowed Marvell. “Watch this!”

  The traction engines set up such an insistent howling and mechanical clamoring that Spingarn had to move into the protective shell of Marvell’s staging bubble. Then the monstrous engines flew along the road, oscillating wildly about the painted patterns, each test pilot concentrating with fierce intent on the gyrations of his craft. In and out of complex squares they hauled the immense machines, controlling them like some elemental demons directing the forces of thunder and lightning about the contours of the sky. The red, blue, and yellow machines laid a pall of thick, greasy smoke over the vast Plot set; coal showered brilliantly over the smooth, white runway, to be ground into shimmering dust as vast wheels cut again and again into the rutted surface. And, above the chaotic scene, the mind beamers hammered out their message: “Bump your neighbor! Hours of fun! Bump your neighbor! Hours of fun!”

  “Great—isn’t it great!”

  “Wrong!”

  “Watch this—they’ve lost the line—they’ll crash!”

  The pilots could not keep up the insane dance any longer; closer and closer their vast machines had veered together as they struggled with systems never designed for the speeds they had built up; and then Spingarn saw the two pilots exchange the greetings of their kind. A grim exchange of nods; a slight smile; and then resignation and the hope that the survival units were adequate.

  The two machines met at something over four hundred miles an hour. Metal fused. Boilers burst with a sudden flowering of white steam and red flame. The noise was the meeting of elemental forces.

  “So it’s wrong!” said the huge man. “So I didn’t do a first-class reenactment on it—but wasn’t it great!”

  One man staggered from the wreckage. A rescue crew was already dousing the fires and burrowing into the heap of rent metals. The surviving pilot looked once at the debris, shrugged, and turned away. Marvell watched him go. Then he turned to Spingarn:

  “I like it—the Director likes it—we’ve got the comps to say the probability function has a high value so far as the evidence goes—so you tell me, Spingarn!”

  Spingarn waited for the familiar onrush of certainty, the sudden blazing clarity of vision which would enable him to say, “Here! That’s where it’s wrong—try doing—what?” Nothing came. He knew with a tremendous confidence that Marvell was absolutely wrong, but how he could not say.

  “I think you’re getting two functions mixed,” he began. “Transportation’s one thing. These crazy runs with steam locomotives building up speeds like that, though. That’s another.”

  “I was relying on you. When I heard you’d left your quarte
rs—Ethel must have told you you’d be sent back?”

  “She did.”

  “Always mixed up, that kid!”

  “Yes.”

  “I was saying—when I heard you’d tried to skip again, I knew you’d head for here—first thing you’d have thought of, to make for your old stomping grounds.”

  “Mine?”

  “You certainly have had a blackout! Complete erasure! Oh, yes, this was your set! Best on the planet! I was saying, Spingarn—couldn’t you put the old intuitive digit on the traffic bit?”

  “No. But comp’s got it wrong. You’ll never get a convincing set if you’re combining vehicles like that with a sort of collision contest.”

  Marvell was undismayed. “It was worth a try.” He made a slight gesture to a group of men who had that indefinable air that spoke of authority. “Well, Spingarn, old buddy, I wish you luck on Talisker—take my advice, though, when you get the parting briefing from the Director. This time, make sure you take Ethel with you!”

  There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

  And, monstrously, Talisker beckoned with an insistent and insidious attractiveness, like the sheen on a snake’s skin, like the sweetness of death, like the glutinous stench of the underground galleries beneath the walls of Tournai, like the strange glamour of the office he had returned to from the archaic battle. And, Take Ethel?

  “Make it easy for yourself!” bawled the huge man. His bejeweled navel winked like a great eye. “Listen to the Director—he needs you for Talisker!”

  “This way, Spingarn.”

  Pleasant enough, these men. Four of them. None particularly big. Spingarn felt the brutish accession of rage which was a legacy of the memory-cassette of Private Spingarn, and, perhaps, of a dozen shadowy and desperate men before him. But there was an air of quiet competence about the four guards: a suggestion of ruthless efficiency that told Spingarn he would be subdued with a minimum of damage should he attempt to escape; but subdued he would be.

  A messenger robot scuttled after the party:

  “Director Marvell has a message for Spingarn!” it bubbled importantly. The guards walked on stolidly. The robot kept up with them, repeating the formula. It gave up and called from a distance: “You were wrong about the Frenchman in medieval armor, Spingarn! Director Marvell said it wasn’t outside the acceptable probabilities for the period.”

  “Wrong again,” said Spingarn.

  One of the guards regarded him with an almost human look:

  “I heard about you. Talisker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  They marched on.

  9

  The terrain was unfamiliar but not novel.

  They had passed through a network of tunnels, each one wider and more luxurious as the four guards and their bewildered prisoner neared the center of the colossal installation which controlled the unbelievably vast apparatus of the Frames. The tunnels ejected them smoothly into an anteroom.

  “Sit down, Spingarn,” ordered the guard who had spoken to him. It was the second time words had been addressed to him since leaving Marvell’s Plot. Then the guard advanced stolidly to a desk where a thin wraith of a man stared ahead at nothing in particular.

  Spingarn had the curious sensation that he was taking leave of the whole of humanity as he waited; he felt an almost agreeable emptiness of emotion. The flicker of curiosity that had been aroused by the surely wrong Plot he had just observed had quite gone; the hints concerning the unhappy Ethel and the rest of the life he had once lived now left him unmoved. He waited as guard and attendant exchanged information about him. And he watched the glittering show about him, just as did the other guards. This was something he had never become accustomed to: the ceaseless chatter of the compound of sensory impressions put out by the mind beamers. LIVE!!! they screamed. LIVE IN ANY ONE OF A THOUSAND DISTANT ERAS!!! And they showed you how. FUTURES FOR YOU!!!

  Spingarn saw the wonder in the guards’ eyes as they took in the incredible spectacle of million upon million of cosmic-dust riders soaring between the planets in vast waves like summer swarms of swallows. TAKE GOSSAMER WINGS AND GAZE FACE TO FACE UPON THE SUPERNOVA OF TWENTY-THREE EIGHTY-ONE!!!! THE MOST COLOSSAL SPECTACLE OF STELLAR HISTORY JUST AS IT HAPPENED IN THOSE FAR-OFF DAYS!!! Ride with the horsemen of the Seventh Asiatic Confederation; slide into the delicate world of nineteenth-century vicarage life in an England where zippy diseases like tuberculosis and gout spiced the lives of so many; fight man to man in the sanded arenas of one of the great classical empires; dig underground like a mole and see whole cities sacked by fire and rapine. BE THERE!!!

  Spingarn caught a glimpse of one of the wars in which he himself had participated. Fine if you chose the winning side! He thought of the French miners hanging briefly in the red mud outlined against a pink sky; and then Sergeant Hawk’s merry, grim smile.

  “You ever been in the Frames?” Spingarn asked the guards.

  Two ignored him but a third nodded:

  “Secret police. Early Nuclear Age. Fun! Oh, that Lubianka place! But the comps said I’d had enough to restore my psyche and back I came!”

  “Comp. Yes.”

  Spingarn wondered whether it was worth the effort of searching his memories when, unbidden, the functions of the biggest comps blazed out in his mind. They investigated historical evidence: they suggested the framework for the reenactments of those historical events which could just conceivably have taken place. Then they allocated you a part. With complete certainty, they measured your mind, your skills, your potential. Then they fed you into the Frames. Spingarn fingered a point at the base of his skull where a vague haziness impinged, rather like an unidentifiable humming noise, among the short hairs of his neck. The memory-cassettes.

  Before you were channeled into the Frame comp had selected for you, you were injected with the infinitesimally small memory cells. They grew among the brain’s own complex of memory banks. Spingarn looked at the self-satisfied face of the guard who had taken part in some nameless horror in a recreation of the twentieth-century police state. It came to him that he himself had done worse. How, he couldn’t remember. But the sense of enormous guilt and a toadlike squeamishness gripped him.

  “And now, my dear ex-Director?”

  The wisp of a man had taken charge. He was staring at Spingarn with unconcealed curiosity. He knew! Spingarn could see in the pale blue eyes that the man knew what Talisker was, what Spingarn had done to that curious museum-piece, even what his connection with that other enigmatic piece of information Marvell had passed on was about—fusion plants. The guards motioned him to go forward; the thin man ushered him to the vast bronze door; and, for a moment, the mind beamers ceased their insistent whining.

  “Before you go in, Spingarn,” the thin man said, “I want you to remember that this is a total security establishment. I don’t go in. The guards don’t. But we’re very, very secure. Will you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  Spingarn had decided by now that he wouldn’t make any move that could be construed as an attempt to evade his fate; in a way, he had accepted the rightness of the proceedings, baffling as they were. And now it was all to be explained.

  The doors swung inward to reveal a hole in space.

  Total darkness. Unrelieved emptiness.

  It was as though a hole had opened in the fabric of the Universe.

  The wisp of a man gently urged him forward, an arm about his shoulders. Spingarn glanced sideways. The thin man was sweating profusely. Fear. And a delicious sense of danger: the man would report to his colleagues that he had touched—yes, actually touched!—the most dangerous man in the Galaxy.

  Doors clanged behind him.

  Light came slowly.

  It was a room, huge, low, black-edged, bare, stone-floored, reaching out like the vast lower decks of the big interstellar ships; but, recognizably, a room.

  In the middle, radiant yellow mud.

  The light increa
sed in intensity, but it was the violence of the glaring mud that held Spingarn’s attention in a shock of pure horror. He held back memories. He took a step backward. He looked about wildly for a place to hide.

  Something stared at him from the mud.

  “Oh, yes, Spingarn,” a struggling, gurgling more croaked than spoken, “Oh, I see you now, Spingarn, and you see me, don’t you, and you remember, don’t you, Spingarn, and it’s coming back from among the overlaid memories, and you begin to realize what you’ve done to me and to others like me, and you think ‘It’s all a big mistake and I’ll accept what they say and I’ll clear it up, because, after all, I’m Spingarn, Spingarn who can call for a Time-Out when things get too rough, Spingarn who took a fancy to the extremities of the probability function and did a little bit of adjusting here and a touch of fractional selecting there and found a way to do a complete recycling of people and then of himself and then of parts of people and then of cells—’ Oh, yes, you’re certain a touch of your particular kind of genius can work it all out and then that you’ll be able to come back and receive a batch of kudos and who knows even my job—me! This!”

  The thing in the mud began to raise its snake’s head with the barely human mouth and the iridescent steel-like hair; it waved skeletal arms at Spingarn and gibbered furiously; it spat gobbets of yellow mud toward him, showering him with the stinking detritus. Spingarn instinctively cowered away. Fascinated, filled with vast and undying horror at the dreadful apparition, as well as with a strange pity for the thing, he still retained some measure of self-control. Still he wished to know why—why he, Spingarn, should be the focus of such dire animosity, why everything the ghastly thing had said should only confirm the hints and shreds of hints that robots and humans had given him since his call to the Time-Out Umpire.

  “Me!” the thing said again, human mouth wide open in frenzy.

  “Me!”

  And yet it had an aura of authority! Pitiable, horrific, possessed by a cosmic hate, it still radiated an air of command that was undeniable!

  “Me—the Director of the Frames!”

  “Cell fusion,” whispered Spingarn. “I didn’t—” The words meant something to him. Plant fusion. Fusion plants. Cell fusion. “Cell fusion!”