The Probability Man Read online

  “Oh, yes!” croaked the thing from the slime. “Now you see it, don’t you, Spingarn! And I went to the Frames of Talisker to see how you were using them—and I was processed just as the rest of the poor devils you sent down were! Me! The man—man!—who first gave you an assignment of the best Plot we ever had from comp! Oh, Spingarn, you’ll suffer! I promise you, you’ll suffer!”

  Spingarn had become accustomed to the noxious stench; the yellow radiance from the mud troubled him; but his sense of horror had turned almost completely to pity by now. It was the thing in the mud that was the victim. He, Spingarn, had been the perpetrator of wrong.

  “Tell me what I can do.”

  “Do!!” screamed the frightful thing. “Do?”

  “Yes! Why am I here? Why not give me back my memories—can’t you work out a way of restoring me to what I was?”

  No. Spingarn knew that. Too much had altered in the complex cell structures of his brain. Twenty-ninth century cell surgery was a delicate and powerful instrument; but it was, nevertheless, surgery. Cutting. Replacing. Growing new cell-cultures in the brain—excising old cells and allowing favorable conditions for the new memory-bearing cells; and, once cut out, the old cells were quite destroyed.

  “If only I could have that done!” sighed the monster.

  It stared at him unwinkingly, head weaving malignantly from side to side. Beneath the mud, Spingarn sensed rather than saw the rest of what had once been the all-powerful Director of the Frames, perhaps the most powerful man in the Galaxy. It was this man who finally decided the fates of billions of billions of human beings on thousands of settled worlds; this snakelike creature still ruled the Frames. And, in the mud, churning it slightly, was the rest of its reptilian body. Poised. Ready to lash out in a scrofulous rage at him, Spingarn.

  “If only I could bring you back, Spingarn!”

  The chill of death was in the fetid room. Its low ceiling breathed the stench of the grave. The glistening human mouth promised evil. Spingarn strove against the horror of the moment. It passed.

  “But we can’t, Spingarn. No, there’s nothing of you left—nothing of the consciousness that reactivated the cursed Frames of Talisker—nothing of the man who toyed with cell fusion—nothing of the dilettante hobbyist who accepted the post of Curator of the Frames of Talisker so that he could gratify a devil’s impulse to use humans as things!” The voice rose higher. The snake’s head waved from side to side and now the yellow mud was churned by the creature’s writhings. “So we can’t have you destroyed for the devil you were, Spingarn! You were cunning—too cunning for all of us—you, you hellbane, you thing from outer darkness!”

  Me?

  Private Spingarn?

  Spingarn reeled away from the ultimate hatred.

  And the thing controlled itself by a supreme effort.

  “Comp says—I’ve checked, doublechecked, I’ve called in every last Probability expert in the Galaxy, don’t you fear, Spingarn—oh, yes, I’ve checked! If there were any way of working this thing out on Talisker that human ingenuity or mechanical skills could contrive, we’d use it—anything in preference to letting you live for one moment, Spingarn! Anything!”

  Commuted. He was safe. As he knew without being told that he was so. Safe, but for what? Talisker took on new, realized, forms of horror. Talisker was what the Director had become. For what had been a man had been fused—by cell fusion?—into an exquisite horror. By him?

  “Oh, Spingarn, if we could bring you back! But it’s not humanly possible. You’ve gone, Spingarn, just as you expected. Shall I tell you how?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bravely spoken. I hope you suffer, since you’re my old Director in form if not in mind. I’ll tell you. Then you go out into the void, Spingarn. And may you rot out there! For go you must, Spingarn—I’ve a duty to the rest of the human race! We can’t let the canker on Talisker spread, and, do you know, Spingarn—oh, you’ve guessed, I can tell that—all your old intuitive cunning is still there—you’re cerebrating—the mind’s still revolving possibilities and uncertainties and the statistical functions of chance, Spingarn!—so, do you not see, I can’t flay you—I can’t turn your own cell plants on you—I can’t for instance make a living thing as I am out of you—I’ve no revenge, Spingarn—comp says so. No way out for any of us. Compulsion. I have to let you go! I have to let you go! FREE!!! Unharmed! And with the companions you choose! Loose on Talisker! Comp says that only you—you of the entire human race, Spingarn, think of that, now!—only you, YOU!!! can reverse the procedures you’ve begun on Talisker!”

  The reptilian head shook with impotent human rage.

  It swayed, and Spingarn saw bright tears of frustration dripping from lidless eyes. And then he glimpsed the security circuits set in the low roof. Beamers. Needle darts. Instant oblivion if he attempted attack or escape.

  But he had conquered fear.

  “You said you’d tell me how I contrived to escape.”

  It might bring the thing that had been the Director out of his spell of impotent rage. Referring him back to his promised revelation of how Spingarn’s old self had contrived to escape retribution for what he had done on Talisker might just force a return to sanity. There were more important considerations, of course. It shook Spingarn when he told off the catalogue of the crimes he had committed, even though their nature was not nearly explicit enough for him to understand them properly. As the coils beneath the yellow mud gradually writhed into stillness, he reviewed momentarily what he had learned so far: Talisker was becoming clearer. He—he, the Plot Director—had reactivated an ancient museum-piece. And this was against the rules. But the enormity lay in how. It wasn’t that he had sent in human beings—though this was in itself bad enough, for Talisker was obsolete, for hundreds of years a silent planet, a place of ruins and dust; no. It was what he had done to those human beings.

  He had done to them—to some of them—a fearful enormity of the kind that had produced a snake man.

  Other memories jostled for attention. They had to wait.

  “I’ll tell you, Spingarn,” the thing said. “It’s so simple we never found it. We had to wait till you called Time-Out’—and not just that. You had to call ‘Time-Out’ and then you had to master the blip. All of this, against all reason, before we could pull you back. Yes, I’ll tell you, devil.”

  And Spingarn gathered in the sibilants and grew more and more afraid of the man he had been. Who was—what was—the man responsible for the sickening horror in the yellow mud? What brain had conceived the use of chromosome interference to produce mixtures of man and reptile like the one before him? And what eerie horrors faced him on the planet circling a solitary orbit around a lost sun on the rim of the Galaxy?

  Talisker!

  Then Spingarn heard how he had contrived his escape from the justice of the twenty-ninth century after Blow-Up.

  “I said it was the simplicity that defeated us all,” breathed the monster. “It was. You lost us all, Spingarn! You used the complexity of the comps against them. Against us all!! You became, Spingarn, a random variable guiding the probability function! Easy—easy, Spingarn! Ineradicable! Ineluctable, in a word, Spingarn! You—spawn of a nameless hellthing!—you, Spingarn, became a part of the fabric of every Frame ever conceived by the comps! You wrote yourself into every Plot—every Frame—every last detail of the whole structure of the Frames of the Galaxy! You were the Probability Man! Always there was a position for Spingarn—always there was a hole for you to crawl into when you called for a Time-Out! Always other men were shunted from Plot to Plot and from Frame to Frame to accommodate you! Brilliant—so simple! You directed the comps to make you an integral part of the total structure of the Frames.”

  There was a kind of helpless admiration in the thing’s voice. Snake head weaved; long coils shuddered in an ecstasy of hate and regret; trailing steely hairs shook and trembled in despair. Then Spingarn summoned up a hazy fractional memory of other beasts like this: inventions of h
is own! Things from a series of eerie nightmares! Talisker, they pointed to—Talisker, home of the realized horror of a million suppressed phantasmagorical shapes! Talisker, a place where battles echoed and rolled among icy hills, and a thousand thousand monsters reeled and struggled for possession of the machines which might release them!

  “No!”

  The snake’s head moved closer.

  It brought with it the blast of a fearful halitosis and the face of death once more; but it was not threatening. A smile of satisfaction disfigured the glistening skin. Human teeth, blackened and broken, ground together with malicious glee.

  “Afraid, Spingarn—fear, Spingarn! Fear! Dread, Spingarn—feel the fear of what I am, Spingarn—please, Spingarn—fear the power of the cells you implanted in the memory-cassettes you designed for Talisker—do, Spingarn!”

  The wretched, hostile creature implored him again and again to savor the impact of the truth about himself and the coming quintessence of horror. It shrieked and howled, begging him to crawl and abase himself at the thought of the monstrosities to come, to shake with the ultimate despair, so that it might feel some kind of peace.

  It became calm at last. And then it explained, lucidly and with barely a tremor of emotion, how Spingarn’s former persona had ensured the survival of the body of Spingarn.

  “You see, Spingarn, the Frames aren’t completely a human manufacture any more. I doubt if they ever were, even in the days of experimentation on the earliest Frames—on Talisker. We use the comps, don’t we, Spingarn. But you won’t remember. No. You can use the comps—and how exquisitely you handled the Time-Out blip, Spingarn!—but your former excellent knowledge is erased. So I’ll tell you. The comps find the material and suggest how a Frame could be set up. What planets we’ll need—what star systems we’ll have to investigate to find new territory. Whether or not we’re able to squeeze another Frame into the existing settled areas. And our Plot Directors—you were the best, of course!—fill in the details. Human conduct. So, the Frames are largely worked out in their overall scope by elegant and extremely powerful computers. They tell us what it’s possible to do.”

  Steel hairs clashed as the thing once more became violently excited.

  “WE COULD DO NOTHING ABOUT YOU!!!”

  Spingarn stood his ground, even though the thing slashed toward him with one swift movement. It veered away.

  “No, Spingarn,” it resumed, in the same lucid way, “no, you see, you’d incorporated a Spingarn Random Principle into every Plot of every Frame! So simple! Take that little excursion of yours to the Siege of Tournai, for instance. You slipped into that one because your neck was under the foot of a gladiator. You and he were the last of a batch of mutineers from one of the Gallic provinces of the Later Classical Frame. Now. If he’d killed you—it was his duty, mind you!—the complete fabric of that particular Frame would have collapsed. Just how, we don’t know. We’ve never had a Disaster of those dimensions. But comp suggested that we’d have had to do a complete Write-Off. A complete Write-Off! And how could we ever have justified Writing-Off a couple of hundred thousand people? So, the Random Principle you’d built in took care of the gladiator. Can you see how?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Spingarn. “Oh, yes!”

  “Your Principle meant that comp could do anything—anything, no matter how unlikely—to let you slide out of the Frame and into another Frame where a vacancy had occurred.”

  “And?”

  The emptiness that Spingarn had felt before the dreadful interview was completely dispelled; so was his bewilderment at the strangeness of the sights and scenes which had greeted his return to his own day. He was no longer afraid of the frightful product of cell fusion before him. He casually accepted that the Frames ruled the destinies of every human being in a settled Galaxy. And he began to feel wonder. It was not the kind of horrified expectancy of personal doom, however, which had gripped him from time to time as faint echoes of a lost past sang out in his mind; nor was it an intellectual curiosity. For the first time since he had emerged from the reenactment of the Siege of Tournai, he felt at one with his surroundings. He sensed an excitement foreign to the Plot Director he had once been. Growing rapidly in the corners of his brain and spreading to the tiniest nerve centers was an awareness of a new, composite personality. One that desired urgently to go to this horrific Talisker! One that felt a tense and almost happy expectancy at the prospect!

  “And,” said the snake man. “And, you ask. Oh, yes. Comp had an answer. Your head under a heel. A sword at your throat and one slight thrust—three inches of steel, Spingarn!—and you were dead. And down would come the Frame. And the next Frame, where you were already Written-In. And the next! and the next! AND ALL OF THEM!!! TUMBLING LIKE A SET OF CHILD’S BRICKS!!! All because you insisted on the simple little Principle. And? Easy. Darkness, Spingarn! Darkness!”

  Spingarn checked a hated memory. He recalled now, with an extraordinary sensuous agony, the pressure of that hard-skinned blackened heel in the big muscles of his throat. He saw, winking brightly in the brilliant sunlight, the silvery sword. And, as the Director had hissed, darkness. The sun, high in a clear blue sky, suddenly blotted out! With no prior warning, the sunshine was obliterated and the whole arena was in deepest blackness.

  “Yes, Spingarn! Can you imagine the work that had to be done? And on the instant? Comp had to build a total eclipse in thirty seconds! They had to summon up the biggest dimensional engines available and project a kink in space with sufficient verisimilitude to ensure its acceptance as a complete eclipse by the astronomers of the Frame! For one man, Spingarn!”

  “Yes,” said Spingarn. “That’s how it worked.”

  He wasn’t thinking of the eclipse. He had already dismissed the clammy memory of death. Math had suddenly become meaningful. He was moving on from a consideration of the Random Probability Function to a vague and confusing memory of the problem on Talisker.

  “Cerebrating, Spingarn?” the thing asked.

  “Talisker.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, Spingarn—there’s no evading Talisker! Into the sausage machine you go—in you go, with your cassette and the companions you choose—comp’s instructions, Spingarn: we’re to give you a free hand!—in you go, processed and conditioned. And with a bunch of your own cell-fusion procedures rattling away inside your chromosomes, Spingarn!”

  “Tell me about the random variable factor. Why am I the Probability Man?”

  The mud spattered him once more. Spingarn watched as coil after coil of thick, patterned reptilian skin emerged from the yellow radiance. The thing towered above him, a column of glistening hatred, its steely hair jangling furiously.

  “I’LL TELL YOU NO MORE, SPINGARN!!! I’ve told you enough—and more than I was advised to tell you! No, Spingarn, go out to Talisker without knowing the worst—go out to your welded men and your ice wolves—let the thyroid giants tear you apart, Spingarn—die where you sent me without knowing more, you hell-maggot, Spingarn!”

  It lunged at him.

  Spingarn screamed. High, loud, and long. The coils flashed in the radiance of the mud; the wide, flat head jerked once and thrust with the speed of an arrow. Lidless eyes blazed with the wildness of eternal hate.

  Spingarn saw the thing coming closer and though the thing moved at a colossal speed he had an impression of time slowing as it came, so that he could take in every last detail of the inhuman head. He saw a forked tongue, but red lips; snake’s eyes, but human lashes; reptilian skin, but steely hair jangling about the carapace.

  He tried to move, but he could only watch helpless.

  “Talisker!” he yelled in an inspired moment of self-preservation.

  Something hit him softly with a whumping noise.

  A blow took him simultaneously back and front, head and torso, arms and legs. Then he was conscious of movement.

  Briefly.

  10

  He found himself placed without gentleness on a firm floor. Then someone screamed in his ear. />
  “Darling!”

  Ethel was with the wraith of a man.

  “Oh dear,” said the attendant. “You needn’t do that. I told you he’d be safe.”

  Spingarn was still in a daze of shock and terror.

  The enormous body still writhed before him. The slow approach of the head continued, in his frenzied imagination.

  “Darling!” Ethel yelled again.

  “I told you it was a total security establishment,” the wraith whimpered pettishly. “Do be quiet, dear!”

  The thin man looked at the yellow mud that clung to Spingarn’s body. He half-turned away. Then he noticed Spingarn’s confusion. He seemed to enjoy it.

  “Oh! Oh! Ah, I see! Oh, no, it wasn’t our security we were worried about—it was yours. The Director can be a little gruesome when he gets worked up, can’t he?”

  Ethel tried to absorb herself around Spingarn. He felt as trapped by her clinging softness as earlier he had been fearful of the snake man’s coils. But he breathed naturally now.

  “All right, Spingarn?” asked the attendant.

  Spingarn noticed that the attendants had gone.

  “The guards?”

  “Oh, we won’t be needing those any more, will we? I mean, comp said once you’d met our dear Director—that reminds me, it’s time for his meal! The things he has to eat! But I’ll not shock you any more, not just now—I mean to say, once you’d met him you’d be hooked on the idea of sorting out that dreary Talisker.”

  “And I’m coming, aren’t I, darling!”

  “Now then,” said the attendant, “can you look after him, duckie? An hour, the comps said. ‘Give him an hour once he’s made the decision.’ Then it’s hey-ho! for frightfulness! Do excuse me!”

  LIVE!!! screamed the beamers. SWELL INTO TIME AMONG THE GAPS IN THE UNIVERSE LEFT BY THE AGE-OLD CRYSTALLINE WORLDS’ MAKERS!! Do you want to be liberated in the fullest sense? Do you want to travel down the eras until you arrive at the beginnings of Universal Life? AND HAVE YOU THOUGHT OF THE EXQUISITE JOYS OF PLANET HOPPING IN A ROCKET POWERED BY CHEMICALS? WHAT THRILLS OUR ASTRONAUTS ENJOYED BEFORE THE INVENTION OF THE WARP-SHIFT!!! Built-in accidents guaranteed! A life expectancy of not more than seven years! And that’s just one of the additional attractions of the Later Nuclear Age Frames!! Don’t miss this for your next——