The Probability Man Read online

  “It worked. And I can be wrong. But Marvell hasn’t begun to understand the Frames as they’ve been put out!”

  “We go alone?”

  Spingarn sensed the girl’s excitement. How could he have been so wrong about her when he had met her? He had mistaken her sexual disappointment for a disagreeable sullenness; and he had thought her a miserable bitch when she was waiting for this moment with a blazing wonder!

  They were interrupted. No one had troubled them as they talked to one another in the anteroom where the guards had brought him; the delicate attendant had not returned; even the beamers had wilted into silence. But now a self-important robot yelped at them. It was Marvell’s messenger robot. Bubbling with eagerness, it gabbled its message:

  “Plot Director Marvell says you were right and he was wrong and he’s put in a correction to the Plot and he thinks he’ll try giving the engines a rudimentary device to make them airborne and he’s trying to get enough power to make them fly and what do you think about that?”

  Both the girl and Spingarn stared at the robot for a moment. Then Spingarn caught the wry grin on her face and he began to smile too.

  “Not Marvell,” she said. “Not flying steam traction engines!”

  “Not Marvell.”

  “Then who?”

  It was ineluctable, as the snake-bodied Director had said already. Almost ordained to come to pass. Spingarn caught his breath at the insidious and ironic worm of a thought that came and went almost unidentified for what it was. For a moment he had caught the ghost of a glimpse of a plan in the weird and chance-filled series of encounters. He put it down firmly. No. There was no plan. None.

  “Who goes with us?”

  Spingarn said firmly:

  “Two old friends.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ll meet them on Talisker.”

  “You always were uncommunicative! You’re a baffling bastard at times, Spingarn!”

  “Now the memory-cassettes.”

  The girl held her breath:

  “Yes. This is the part I don’t like.”

  11

  The hour was almost gone, and they had returned to Spingarn’s office; it seemed to both of them an appropriate starting point for the adventure. Now, they were looking at the gray, shapeless entry to the conveyor—the swirling entrance to the complex of tunnels, chambers, and laboratories which the Director of the Frames had called the sausage machine. It was not an inapt comparison. Physically, a new entrant to the Frames emerged after the process unchanged: mentally, he had been analyzed, graded, and treated with various injections of memory cells so that he would be acclimatized to the new worlds he had to face. His old memories ground into shreds, he would have grafted onto the old personality those skills and abilities which would enable him to survive and play his designed part. Both Spingarn and Ethel stared uncertainly at the grayness.

  They were afraid.

  More to divert her own thoughts from the coming encounters with the subtle machines beyond the gray mist than to learn more, the girl said,

  “These others, Spingarn—who are they?”

  “Old friends,” he told her. “They join us on Talisker.”

  “What’s this machine going to do to us!”

  Now she voiced her fears.

  “It’s going to rip our chromosomes apart—we’ll turn into monsters—look what it did to the Director!”

  Spingarn had allowed a patina of fatalism to obscure the future. There was no way into Talisker but through the coffinlike conveyor. And to Talisker he was committed. He tried to comfort her:

  “This process we’re going through. I don’t expect they’ll allow the random kind of cell fusion that changed the others.”

  “But what if they do! And why shouldn’t comp keep to your instructions!”

  Spingarn reached for her. It was almost time. She looked from shocked blue eyes into his stonelike face. Holding her seemed to restore her determination. Then Spingarn said:

  “Cell fusion may not be so appalling. And I don’t believe it’s such a hit-and-miss affair as the Director said. What I think I wanted—the other man wanted, the one you knew—was to have developed in each new persona only those latent characteristics which would make him most successful in a fragmented temporal situation like that on Talisker. Each man and woman rebuilt in the way that best suited their psyche.”

  “Oh, I know that! But suppose I’m assessed as a latent werewolf—suppose you’re to turn into something like the Director! Where do we go from there!”

  “Yes.” Spingarn had refused to think about it. “Where?”

  “And these others you’re bringing into the Frames of Talisker—what will they turn into!”

  “I wonder.”

  “But you don’t care!!”

  “I care.”

  “I can’t face it!”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “She does,” said a somber voice that rang hollowly about the office. “And now.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Spingarn.

  For a moment he thought that she would make a run for it. But she walked over to the grayness and through it without a backward glance. Spingarn adjusted the controls with an assured professional flick. He wanted to remain conscious for as long as possible; although he was firmly resolved to undergo the worst that comp could devise, he would not willingly allow any kind of cell-fusion abomination to be perpetrated on the girl. Almost certainly there was nothing whatsoever that he could do to help her, should the frightful instructions still hold good; but he refused to abandon her completely. He wondered if that other man would have done the same. No answer came when he put the question: the other man was gone.

  They went, as the somber robotic voice had ordered.

  12

  Ethel had said this was the part she didn’t like. Spingarn had been through the business of memory-cassette injection so many times that the first part of the faintly disgusting procedure did not disturb him; but the jangling, head-bursting sensation of brain expansion was another thing altogether. He could control himself sufficiently to evade the hypnotherapy which was designed to lull the new entrant into an acquiescent semiconsciousness. As Spingarn’s body was gently shunted from one battery of analyzers to another, he tried to remain alert. He was successful until he was lifted on a vacuum cushion into the glittering operating-theater where the cassettes were injected. He had seen such places before.

  They were simple enough: a tracery of skeletal limbs depending from the directing machine. There was enough light from the banks of luminescent cassettes to illuminate the big operating machine and Spingarn could see beyond, into the recesses of the theater: he was aware of a subdued interest in the dimness, as of spectators, though the thought was fanciful. Humans never penetrated into the remote fastnesses of the comps. Silently and with absolute competence, the big machines took control of a human being and managed the whole apparatus of redesigning him. And yet there were presences behind in the dimness. Spingarn watched the shimmering limbs waving uncertainly among the banks of cassettes: was there to be, at last, robotic inefficiency? And those metallic forms—what were they? Observers?

  Spingarn called loudly to them:

  “Identify yourselves! Spingarn orders it!”

  The only answer was the controlled and muted breathing of the air vents. In absolute silence the machines—robotic figures, Spingarn saw—hovered just too far for him to be able to discover precisely what kind of automata they were. The thin, delicate limbs had at last selected a memory-cassette. If he was to change the coding of the comps, it had to be here and now:

  “I am a function of the Frames! I am an integral part of each and every Frame—I cannot be the subject of cell mutation! Nor can any member of my party! You must keep me in complete human condition! I order you to suspend random cell fusion, as of now!”

  The terror of the head-bursting injection gripped him. He tried to gain his feet, but the soft, clinging suckers in the coffinli
ke container made his efforts futile.

  “Time-Out!”

  This threw the machine.

  In the act of jerking Spingarn’s head forward so that the one single cell could be spun into the soft base of the skull immediately above the spinal column, it stopped.

  “Time-Out doesn’t apply,” suggested a robotic voice from the shadows. “We had instructions about that from the Director.”

  Yet the operation had been halted. Spingarn fought for time.

  “You’re not part of the memory-banks comp!” he called. “Who are you!”

  They came out of the shadows then: four independent robots of the highest of all grades. Higher even than the Time-Out Umpire. Troubleshooters! The comps’ own guardians. Spingarn sensed that he had encountered them before, in another life.

  “Aides of the Director,” one said. “The Guardians.”

  They were the robots’ equivalent of God.

  It stared at him from almost-human eyes with an expression of quizzical sympathy. Humanoid, but without the rococo extravagances of the furred creature which had maintained the Time-Out blip at the Siege of Tournai. It went on:

  “Forget about the Frames, Spingarn. We’ve managed to extract the Random Principle you had inserted—you don’t have any control now over your own destiny.”

  Spingarn’s mind raced. He had no lever now—but, then, why were they here! Why not, unless he had some continuing power over the entire structure of the Frames? He had to know more! And, in gaining information, he had to give away nothing—most of all the precious moments of this encounter!

  “Then the cell fusion Random Principle is gone too?”

  Another of the robots spoke:

  “That was a different matter. You see, you’re going into a series of fragmented Frames. And you’ll encounter people who’ve been processed at random. Now, if you’re to go in without first undergoing the process of cell selection at random, we have a different situation from that obtaining at present.”

  It seemed to be enjoying itself in a detached and pedantic way: it was patronizing him! Spingarn estimated the distance between himself and the skeletal arm of the robotic surgeon. He flexed the big muscles in his back.

  “I don’t think so,” said the robot which had first spoken. “I don’t think so, Spingarn.”

  It was right. The suckers gripped him with a massive insistence, making light of the flexion of the deltoids. He was committed. Anyway, what could result from wrecking the machine, supposing the coffinlike container did relax its grip? And yet the robots were hesitating over something! Why couldn’t they allow the operation to go forward? Why shouldn’t the necessary chemical engineering proceed? What did they want? Some last message, perhaps? Some explanation of what had motivated that devious other man?

  Then the first robot spoke again:

  “We thought you should be warned.”

  “Against Talisker? Against the things I sent there?”

  “No.”

  What else could there be on that remote and hostile planet? What impelled these guardian robots to assemble here with their unwinking eyepieces and their granite carapaces? A warning?

  Spingarn’s returning confidence was shredding away.

  “Spingarn,” the automaton said formally, “we’re guessing about you and about Talisker. We’re guessing about the man whose body you inhabit and who is now eroded away under the gene mutations.”

  Spingarn stared at the tiny cassette in the glittering claw. In it was a genetic time-bomb which would soon explode appalling violence among the chemical chains of his brain.

  “Well?”

  “The Director assumed he acted maliciously.”

  Spingarn choked down a laugh. “Yes.”

  “We put his actions through all the usual Probability runs.”

  There was something here if he had the wit to find it! But, as so many times before in the brief life he had emerged into, Spingarn had the sensation of wandering deeper and deeper into a profound maze of events, a feeling that the truth about Talisker and its Curator was just beyond his vision; and yet that he could tear the veils aside if he could slow down and work it out!

  “Go on,” said Spingarn from the operating table.

  “One of my colleagues tried an unusual Possibility Space—we can’t explain how it came into the math. Maybe he had an original idea, though I can hardly see how robotic brains like ours can perform in this way.”

  The robot almost came to an instant of amusement.

  “And?”

  “Maybe the man you were wasn’t working alone.”

  “Who! Who helped him!”

  It was easy to see how it had happened. This was it! This was how the Frames of Talisker had sprung into existence! The former Plot Director had had assistance—possibly other Directors were in on it. Rebels, people like Marvell. Say two or three of them, pooling resources, leaking off people who were Written-Out. Trying some new form of reenactment as a change from the utterly predictable Frames they had become tired of. Ignoring the advice of the comps, setting out their own ideas in huge sweeping disorganized Frames! Marvell?

  “Not who.”

  Spingarn missed the inflection. His mind was busy working out the scheme which the strange man whose body he wore had projected. Then he caught the faint emphasis. Not who.

  Who was people. Humans.

  If the robots said no human had helped the Plot Director, then none had. Not humans.

  Boxes opening and slamming shut: an emptiness contained in oblivion. It was like looking down a long tunnel into blank and unborn space. Spingarn was suddenly lost and afraid.

  “Then he had robotic help,” he said. Unsurely. “He built the Frames of Talisker with your help.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Quite positive. It was said with no attempt at dramatizing the unexpected and necessary conclusion. The robot thought an explanation necessary, and he produced a familiar formula. Spingarn mastered his dismay and stared at the truth.

  “We couldn’t give illegal assistance for that kind of project,” said the Guardian. “We serve humanity. We can contribute no ideas. We can only interpret your own ideas and put them into the form of a Frame. And only then if by doing so we serve humanity through the Disinvention of Work.”

  “Yes,” said Spingarn.

  “We machines release humanity from work. We give you leisure. We fill your leisure time.” It was said with a depth of conviction that left no room for doubt. “We manufacture the Frames at your command. But we could not make the Frames of Talisker.”

  “No.” They had not assisted in the reactivation of the ancient Frames on that lonely planet. If not them, then who? Not people. Not robots.

  “Well? What?”

  “I see you understand, Spingarn,” said the robot. “You have to be told before you go. We plotted the most extreme of probability variables from the information sent back by the Disaster Control agents. It wasn’t much. And almost certainly it gives a wrong conclusion.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Extra-humans. Extra-Universals. An extra-Universal agency at work in the Frames of Talisker.”

  Spingarn rocked on the smooth couch.

  He was overcome by the vastness of the Guardians’ statement. Shadowy and vague thoughts, long overgrown by the thick cluster of personalities he had swum through in so many Frames, began to take shape.

  Alien!

  On that eerie planet from some distant galaxy, there could be some strange, inhuman questing intelligence! In the mad Frames of Talisker, some Alien force strolled through the fragmented Plots, surveying the derelicts who were imprisoned there and working out what terrible scheme!

  “Alien?” whispered Spingarn.

  They showed him the probability variables then, but it meant little. A whirlwind of cosmic events so inextricably interwoven with planetary motions and chains of human growth—and with that strange man he had once been—that it would take months to begin
to follow its convolutions. Through it, the Planet which housed the Frames of Talisker swam like a black beacon. And, always, a random progression of events, tortuous, eerie, spasmodic, with endings and beginnings snaking into one another in a maelstrom of fantastic Plots.

  “You think I worked with this thing on Talisker?”

  Another of the Guardians spoke:

  “I repeat, it’s an extreme possibility. What we had before we lost contact with the Disaster Control agents might fit into the areas of possibility open to our math.”

  Spingarn knew that the robots pitied him. In a weird way, they had reversed the roles of human and humanoid. Now, it was the robots who were sending a human into the extremes of danger. They were telling him that he alone could begin to resolve the problem.

  Another one spoke:

  “We worked on the assumption that you would be recovered from the Siege of Tournai. Before we lost touch finally with the agents still in the Talisker Frames, we set up emergency procedures. We still have agents there, but they had to submerge.”

  “Submerge?”

  “They had to accept random cell-conditioning. Like the Director.”

  Spingarn shuddered, but he still asked:

  “And that means?”

  “They may not be in human form.”

  The robots watched him, stone-faced.

  Spingarn realized something else, now that the warped future had been spelled out.

  “The girl—don’t allow her in! It’s not too late! She doesn’t have to go through random cell fusion, does she?”

  He knew it was too late.

  “She is a part of the probabilities in your future now. It’s not possible to Write her Out. And she has her part to play, Spingarn. You’ll find that she is an integral thread in the various futures that are open to you.”

  “You arranged for the others?”

  “As you requested.”

  The fourth Guardian interrupted:

  “The robotic help you asked for, Spingarn.”

  “Well?”

  “You’re sure you want that particular robot?”