by Jack Vance
“Still a very large number,” said Duray.
“Indeed yes. But again the sheer unmanageable bulk is swept away by a self-normalizing property of the machine. In what I call floating neutral, the machine reaches the closest cognate - which is to say, that infinite class of perfect cognates. In practice, because of infinitesimal inaccuracies,
‘floating neutral’ reaches cognates more or less imperfect, perhaps by no more than the shape of a single grain of sand. Still, ‘floating neutral’
provides a natural base, and by adjusting the controls, we reach cycles at an ever greater departure from base. In practice I search out a good cycle and strike a large number of passways, as many as a hundred thousand.
So now to our business.” He went to a porthole at the side. “Your code number, what was it now?”
Duray brought forth the card and read the numbers: “Four: eighteen/
six:thirteen:twenty-nine.”
“Very good. I give the code to the computer, which searches the files and automatically adjusts the machine. Now then, step over here; the process releases dangerous radiation.”
The two stood behind lead slabs. Alan Robertson touched a button; watching through a periscope, Duray saw a spark of purple light and heard a small groaning, gasping sound seeming to come from the air itself.
Alan Robertson stepped forth and walked to the machine. In the delivery tray rested an extensible ring. He picked up the ring and looked through the hole. “This seems to be right.” He handed the ring to Duray.
“Do you see anything you recognize?”
Duray put the ring to his eye. “That’s Home.”
“Very good. Do you want me to come with you?” Duray considered. “The time is now?”
“Yes. This is a time-neutral setting.”
“I think I’ll go alone.”
Alan Robertson nodded. “Whatever you like. Return as soon as you can, so I’ll know you’re safe.”
Duray frowned at him sidewise. “Why shouldn’t I be safe? No one is there but my family.”
“Not your family. The family of a cognate Gilbert Duray. The family may not be absolutely identical. The cognate Duray may not be identical.
You can’t be sure exactly what you will find - so be careful.”
• • •
VII
From Memoirs and Reflections:
When I think of my machine and my little forays in and out of infinity, and idea keeps recurring to me which is so rather terrible that I close it out of my mind, and I will not even mention it here.
• • •
Duray stepped out upon the soil of Home and stood praising the familiar landscape. A vast meadow drenched in sunlight rolled down to wide Silver River. Above the opposite shore rose a line of low bluffs, with copses of trees in the hollows. To the left, the landscape seemed to extend indefinitely and at last become indistinct in the blue haze of distance. To the right, the Robber Woods ended a quarter mile from where Duray stood. On a flat beside the forest, on the bank of a small stream, stood a house of stone and timber: a sight that seemed to Duray the most beautiful one he had ever seen. Polished glass windows sparkled in the sunlight; banks of geraniums glowed green and red. From the chimney rose a wisp of smoke.
The air smelled cool and sweet but seemed - so Duray imagined - to carry a strange tang, different –s o he imagined - from the meadow-scent of his own Home. Duray started forward, then halted. The world was his own, yet not his own. If he had been conscious of the fact, would he have recognized the strangeness? Nearby rose an outcrop of weathered gray field-rock: a rounded mossy pad on which he had sat only two days before, contemplating the building of a dock. He walked over and looked down at the stone. Here he had sat; here were the impressions of his heels in the soil; here was the pattern of moss from which he had absently scratched a fragment. Duray bent close. The moss was whole. The man who had sat here, the cognate Duray, had not scratched at the moss. So then: The world was perceptibly different from his own.
Duray was relieved and yet vaguely disturbed. If the world had been the exact simulacrum of his own, he might have been subjected to unmanageable emotions - which still might be the case. He walked toward the house, along the path that led down to the river. He stepped up to the porch. On a deck chair was a book: Down There: A Study of Satanism, by J. K. Huysmans. Elizabeth’s tastes were eclectic. Duray had not previously seen the book; was it perhaps that Bob Robertson had put through the parcel delivery?
Duray went into the house. Elizabeth stood across the room. She had evidently watched him coming up the path. She said nothing; her face showed no expression.
Duray halted, somewhat at a loss as to how to address this familiar-strange woman. “Good afternoon,” he said at last.
Elizabeth allowed a wisp of a smile to show. “Hello, Gilbert.” At least, thought Duray, on cognate worlds the same language was spoken. He studied Elizabeth. Lacking prior knowledge, would he have perceived her to be someone different from his own Elizabeth? Both were beautiful women: tall and slender, with curling black shoulder-length hair, worn without artifice. Their skin was pale, with a dusky undertone; their mouths were wide, passionate, stubborn. Duray knew his Elizabeth to be a woman of explicable moods, and this Elizabeth was doubtless no different -
yet somehow a difference existed that Duray could not define, deriving perhaps from the strangeness of her atoms, the stuff of a different universe. He wondered if she sensed the same difference in him.
He asked, “Did you close off the passways?”
Elizabeth nodded, without change of expression.
“Why?”
“I thought it the best thing to do,” said Elizabeth in a soft voice.
“That’s no answer.”
“I suppose not. How did you get here?”
“Alan made an opening.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “I thought that was impossible.”
“True. This is a different world to my own. Another Gilbert Duray built this house. I’m not your husband.”
Elizabeth’s mouth dropped in astonishment. She swayed back a step and put her hand up to her neck: a mannerism Duray could not recall in his own Elizabeth. The sense of strangeness came ever more strongly upon him. He felt an intruder. Elizabeth was watching him with a wide-eyed fascination. She said in a hurried mutter: “I wish you’d leave, go back to your own world; do!”
“If you’ve closed off all the passways, you’ll be isolated,” growled Duray. “Marooned, probably forever.”
“Whatever I do,” said Elizabeth, “it’s not your affair.”
“It is my affair, if only for the sake of the girls. I won’t allow them to live and die alone out here.”
“The girls aren’t here.” said Elizabeth in a flat voice. “They are where neither you nor any other Gilbert Duray will find them. So now go back to your own world, and leave me in whatever peace my soul allows me.” Duray stood glowering at the fiercely beautiful woman. He had never heard his own Elizabeth speak so wildly. He wondered if on his own world another Gilbert Duray similarly confronted his own Elizabeth, and as he analyzed his feelings toward this woman before him, he felt a throb of annoyance. A curious situation. He said in a quiet voice, “Very well. You and my own Elizabeth have decided to isolate yourselves. I can’t imagine your reasons.”
Elizabeth gave a wild laugh. “They’re real enough.”
“They may be real now, but ten years from now or forty years from now they may seem unreal. I can’t give you access to your own Earth, but if you wish, you can use the-”
Elizabeth turned away and went to look out over the passway to the Earth from which I’ve just come, and you need never see me again.” Duray spoke to her back. “We’ve never had secrets between us, you and I - or I mean, Elizabeth and I. Why now? Are you in love with some other man?”
Elizabeth gave a snort of sardonic amusement. “Certainly not… I’m disgusted with the entire human race.”
“Which pres
umably includes me.”
“It does indeed, and myself as well.”
“And you won’t tell me why?”
Elizabeth, still looking out the window, wordlessly shook her head.
“Very well,” said Duray in a cold voice. “Will you tell me where you’ve sent the girls? They’re mine as much as yours, remember.”
“These particular girls aren’t yours at all.”
“That may be, but the effect is the same.”
Elizabeth said tonelessly: “If you want to find your own particular girls, you’d better find your own particular Elizabeth and ask her. I can only speak for myself… To tell you the truth, I don’t like being part of a composite person, and I don’t intend to act like one. I’m just me. You’re you, a stranger, whom I’ve never seen before in my life. So I wish you’d leave.” Duray strode from the house, out into the sunlight. He looked once around the wide landscape, then gave his head a surely shake and marched off along the path.
• • •
VIII
From Memoirs and Reflections:
The past is exposed for our scrutiny; we can wander the epochs like lords through a garden, serene in our purview. We argue with the noble sages, refuting their laborious concepts, should we be so unkind.
Remember (at least) two things. First: The more distant from now, the less precise our conjunctures, the less our ability to strike to any given instant. We can break in upon yesterday at a stipulated second; duringthe Eocene, plus or minus ten years is the limit of our accuracy; as for the Cretaceous or earlier, an impingement with three hundred years of a given date can be considered satisfactory. Secondly: The past webroach is never our own past but at best the past of a cognate world, so that any illumination cast upon historical problems is questionable and perhaps deceptive. We cannot plumb the future; the process involves anegative flow of energy, which is inherently impractical. An instrument constructed of antimatter has been jocularly recommended but would yield no benefit to us. The future, thankfully, remains forever shrouded.
• • •
“Aha, you’re back!” exclaimed Alan Robertson. “What did you learn?” Duray described the encounter with Elizabeth. “She makes no excuse for what she’s done; she shows hostility, which doesn’t seem real, especially since I can’t imagine a reason for it.” Alan Robertson had no comment to make.
“The woman isn’t my wife, but their motivations must be the same. I can’t think of one sensible explanation for conduct so strange, let alone two.”
“Elizabeth seemed normal this morning?” asked Alan Robertson.
“I noticed nothing unusual.”
Alan Robertson went to the control panel of his machine. He looked over his shoulder at Duray. “What time do you leave for work?”
“About nine.”
Alan Robertson set one dial and turned two others until a ball of green light balanced, wavering, precisely halfway along a glass tube. He signaled Duray behind the lead slab and touched the button. From the center of the machine came the impact of 167 colliding nodules of force and the groan of rending dimensional fabric.
Alan Robertson brought forth the new passway. “The time is morning.
You’ll have to decide for yourself how to handle the situation. You can try to watch without being seen; you can say that you have paperwork to catch up on, that Elizabeth should ignore you and go about her normal routine, while you unobtrusively see what happens.”
Duray frowned. “Presumably for each of these worlds there is a Gilbert Duray who finds himself in my fix. Suppose each tries to slip inconspicuously into someone else’s world to learn what is happening.
Suppose each Elizabeth catches him in the act and furiously accuses the man she believes to be her husband of spying on her - this in itself might be the source of Elizabeth’s anger.”
“Well, be as discreet as you can. Presumably you’ll be several hours, so I’ll go back to the boat and putter about. Locker five in my private hub yonder; I’ll leave the door open.”
• • •
Once again Duray stood on the hillside above the river, with the rambling stone house built by still another Gilbert Duray two hundred yards along the slope. From the height of the sun, Duray judged local time to be about nine o’clock - somewhat earlier than necessary. From the chimney of the stone house rose a wisp of smoke; Elizabeth had built a fire in the kitchen fireplace. Duray stood reflecting. This morning in his own house Elizabeth had built no fire. She had been on the point of striking a match and then had decided that the morning was already warm. Duray waited ten minutes, to make sure that the local Gilbert Duray had departed, then set forth toward the house. He paused by the big flat stone to inspect the pattern of moss.
The crevice seemed narrower than he remembered, and the moss was dry and discolored. Duray took a deep breath. The air, rich with the odor of grasses and herbs, again seemed to carry an odd, unfamiliar scent. Duray proceeded slowly to the house, uncertain whether, after all, he was engaged in a sensible course of action.
He approached the house. The front door was open. Elizabeth came to look out at him in surprise. “That was a quick day’s work!” Duray said lamely. “The rig is down for repairs. I thought I’d catch up on some paper work. You go ahead with whatever you were doing.” Elizabeth looked at him curiously. “I wasn’t doing anything in particular.”
He followed Elizabeth into the house. She wore soft black slacks and an old gray jacket; Duray tried to remember what his own Elizabeth had worn, but the garments had been so familiar that he could summon no recollection.
Elizabeth poured coffee into a pair of stoneware mugs, and Duray took a seat at the kitchen table, trying to decide how this Elizabeth differed from his own - if she did. This Elizabeth seemed more subdued and meditative; her mouth might have been a trifle softer. “Why are you looking at me so strangely?” she asked suddenly.
Duray laughed. “I was merely thinking what a beautiful girl you are.” Elizabeth came to sit in his lap and kissed him, and Duray’s blood began to flow warm. He restrained himself; this was not his wife; he wanted no complications. And if he yielded to temptations of the moment, might not another Gilbert Duray visiting his own Elizabeth do the same… He scowled.
Elizabeth, finding no surge of ardor, went to sit in the chair opposite.
For a moment she sipped her coffee in silence. Then she said, “Just as soon as you left, Bob called through.”
“Oh?” Duray was at once attentive. “What did he want?”
“That foolish party of his - the Rubble-menders or some such thing.
He wants us to come.”
“I’ve already told him no three times.”
“I told him no again. His parties are always so peculiar. He said he wanted us to come for a very special reason, but he wouldn’t tell me the reason. I told him. ‘Thank you but no.’ “
Duray looked around the room. “Did he leave any books?”
“No. Why should he leave me books?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Gilbert,” said Elizabeth, “you’re acting rather oddly.”
“Yes, I suppose I am.” For a fact Duray’s mind was whirling. Suppose now he went to the school passway, brought the girls home from school, then closed off all the passways, so that once again he had an Elizabeth and three daughters, more or less his own; then the conditions he had encountered would be satisfied. And another Gilbert Duray, now happily destroying the tract houses of Cupertino, would find himself bereft… Duray recalled the hostile conduct of the previous Elizabeth. The passways in that particular world had certainly not been closed off by an intruding Duray… A startling possibility came to his mind. Suppose a Duray had come to the house and, succumbing to temptation, had closed off all passways except that one communicating with his own world; suppose then that Elizabeth, discovering the imposture, had killed him… The theory had a grim plausibility and totally extinguished whatever inclination Duray might have had for making the world his ho
me.
Elizabeth said, “Gilbert, why are you looking at me with that strange expression?”
Duray managed a feeble grin. “I guess I’m just in a bad mood this morning. Don’t mind me. I’ll go make out my report.” He went into the wide cool living room, at once familiar and strange, and brought out the work-records of the other Gilbert Duray… He studied the handwriting: like his own, firm and decisive, but in some indefinable wav different - perhaps a trifle more harsh and angular. The three Elizabeths were not identical, nor were the Gilbert Durays.