Worlds of Maybe

by Robert Silverberg

  “No thanks necessary, I assure you, Mr. Rimbro. This is our job.”

  Rimbro was ushered out and Berg turned to Mishnoff, who had remained a quiet spectator of this completion of the Rimbro affair.

  Berg said, “The Germans were nice about it, anyway. They admitted we had priority and got off. Room for everybody, they said. Of course, as it turned out, they build any number of dwellings on each unoccupied world.—And now there’s the project of surveying our other worlds and making similar agreements with whomever we find. It’s all strictly confidential, too. It can’t be made known to the populace without plenty of preparation.—Still, none of this is what I want to speak to you about.”

  “Oh?” said Mishnoff. Developments had not noticeably cheered him; his own bogey still concerned him.

  Berg smiled at the younger man. “You understand, Mishnoff, that we in the Bureau—and in the Planetary Government, too—are very appreciative of your quick thinking, of your understanding of the situation. This could have developed into something very tragic, had it not been for you. This appreciation will take some tangible form.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But as I said once before, this is something many of us should have thought of. How is it you did?—Now we’ve gone into your background a little. Your coworker, Ching, tells us you have hinted in the past at some serious danger involved in our probability pattern setup, and that you insisted on going out to meet the Germans—although you were obviously frightened. You were anticipating what you actually found, were you not? How did you do it?”

  Mishnoff said, confusedly “No, no. That was not in my mind at all; it came as a surprise. I—”

  Suddenly, he stiffened. Why not now? They were grateful to him. He had proved that he was a man to be taken into account; one unexpected thing had already happened.

  He said, firmly, “There’s something else.”

  “Yes?”

  (How did one begin?) “There’s no life in the Solar System other than the life on Earth.”

  “That’s right,” said Berg benevolently.

  “And computation has it that the probability of developing any form of interstellar travel is so low as to be infinitesimal.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “That all this is so in this probability/ But there must be some probability patterns in which other life does exist in the Solar System, or in which interstellar drives are developed by dwellers in other star systems.” Berg frowned. “Theoretically.”

  “In one of these probabilities, Earth may be visited by such intelligences. If it is a probability pattern in which Earth is inhabited, it won’t affect us; they’ll have no connection with us in Earth-proper. But if it is a probability pattern in which Earth is uninhabited, and they set up some sort of base, they may find, by happenstance, one of our dwelling places.” “Why ours?” demanded Berg, drily. “Why not a dwelling place of the Germans, for instance?”

  “Because we spot our dwellings one to a world. The German Earth doesn’t, and probably very few others do. The odds are in favor of us by billions to one. And if extra-terrestrials do find such a dwelling, they’ll investigate and find the route to Earth-proper—a highly-developed, rich world.”

  “Not if we turn off the twisting-place,” said Berg.

  “Once they know that twisting-places exist, they can construct their own,” said Mishnoff. “A race intelligent enough to travel through space could do that; and from the equipment in the dwelling they would take over, they could easily spot our particular probability.—And then how would we handle extra-terrestrials? They’re not Germans, or other Earths; they would have alien psychologies and motivations. And were not even on our guard. We just keep setting up more and more worlds and increasing the chance every day that—”

  His voice had risen in excitement and Berg shouted at him, “Nonsense. This is all ridiculous—”

  The buzzer sounded and the communiplate brightened, and showed the face of Ching. Ching’s voice said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—”

  “What is it?” demanded Berg, savagely.

  “There’s a man here I don’t know what to do with. He’s drunk or crazy; he complains that his home is surrounded, and that there are things staring through the glass-roof of his garden.”

  “Things?” cried Mishnoff.

  “Purple things with big red veins, three eyes, and some sort of tentacles instead of hair. They have—” But Mishnoff and Berg didn’t hear the rest; they were staring at each other in sick horror.

  Translation Error by Robert Silverberg

  The being from Hethivar had come back to Earth to check on the progress of his meddling. But was this the same Earth he had visited fifty years before?

  Several strange objects were glittering in the amber depths of his detector plate, and Karn felt a gnawing uneasiness. It was only a few minutes after the ship’s conversion out of the null-continuum onto the world-line of Earth, after the long nullspace voyage from Karn’s distant home world.

  Absent-mindedly Karn let his body cells flow into the Earther shape he had worn on his last visit, almost fifty years earlier, while he brooded over the rapidly moving objects in the detector plate. They seemed to be small bodies locked in orbit round the blue-green world below. They made no sense at all. The obvious explanation was that they were artificial planetary satellites, but surely that was impossible! Nine tiny metal moons, each in its own elliptical orbit—implications of that made Karn feel sick. Earth could not have reached this stage along the technological scale yet, he told himself flatly. His computations could not have erred.

  Or could they?

  Karn felt a chill invading his limbs. He went about the routine business of setting up his one-man ship for a landing, and tried to forget the annoying existence of those nine artificial satellites. Rapidly he converted to planetary drive, switching off the nullspace translator that had brought him along the mega-parsec wide gulf between his home world and Earth, and headed into the descending series of spiraling orbits that would land him.

  Artificial satellites, he thought dismally. How could such a thing be?

  Karn checked the flow of despair that threatened to overwhelm him. What had been done could be undone again; if Earth somehow had reached the threshold of space despite all his careful work in 1916, he would simply have to take steps to correct that trend. He wondered who it was that had put the satellites up. The Germans, obviously. Scientifically and politically, they would be dominating the Earth in the year—what was it?—1959.

  Yes, it had to be the Germans. America had the technologically-inclined minds, but America, slumber-mg behind its hundred eighty years of isolation, would hardly have any interest in conquering space. The Americans hardly knew there were other nations on their own world, let alone whole other worlds.

  And no other nations seemed likely candidates for ownership of the accursed satellites. Certainly not France or Britain, crushed under the Kaiser’s heel in 1916. Nor old medieval Russia, comfortably vegetating beneath the Czar. Italy? Austro-Hungary?

  Possibly Japan, he thought. The Japanese might have put the things up.

  But, Karn realized drearily, neither Germany nor Japan had as much as developed efficient airpower in 1916; it was incredible that in a bare forty-odd years they could have hurled orbiting satellites into space. Such a technological advance could have been stimulated only by war.

  And, thought Karn, unless his computations were wrong for the first time in centuries, there had been no war on Earth since 1916, since the Treaty of Dusseldorf. He had carefully arranged things the last time. By keeping America out of the war, he had ensured German triumph, German dominion over all Western Europe. His computations had predicted at least seventy years of peace before the broken revolutionary movement in Russia at last recovered its strength, hurled the Czar from his throne, and challenged Germany’s dominance. On his last visit he had removed the stimuli of immediate war. Yet space satellites circled the Ear
th.

  Something had gone wrong, Karn thought bleakly. But given time he could put things to rights again.

  His ship sliced down into the upper layers of the atmosphere. To his surprise, he discovered that the radioactivity of Earth’s atmosphere had increased remarkably in the last forty years. Did that mean that the Earthers had unleashed nuclear energy too?

  Something was very wrong. Karn feared he had plenty of work on his hands.

  His original plans had called for him to make a landing in America, and for the moment he did not intend to alter those plans. He made the landing under cover of scramblers; forty years ago such pains had been unnecessary, but who knew now what sort of technology these Earthers had developed? For all he knew they had developed a detector system, too. It would be ignominious for him to be blasted out of the sky as a possible attacker. And until he had found out what the state of things was on Earth, it was madness to take risks. He landed under scramblers, totally impervious to detection. A neutrino-detector might have spotted him successfully—but, thought Karn, if they had invented neutrino-detectors, too, he might just as well turn around and go back to Hethivar with the doleful news that Terran invaders would be on their way sooner than anyone had dreamed. The neutrino screen came much later in a planet’s development. Normal races didn’t go from animal-drawn buggies to neutrino screens in fifty years, Karn thought.

  Normal races didn’t go from buggies to atomics and orbital satellites in fifty years either, Karn reflected. But who said these Earthers were normal?

  He landed the ship in a pleasantly green meadow in the state across the river from New York. He could remember New York, all right, but the other state’s name eluded him for the moment. New Guernsey? New Calais? Ah! New Jersey. That was it. He left the ship parked in New Jersey, having first keyed in the external scrambler that rotated the ship one-quarter turn out of the world line. It wavered and vanished. No one would find it where it was now, though Karn could restore it to the continuum with a minimal outlay of energy whenever he pleased.

  His first step was to transport himself autokinetically across the river into New York City. The city had grown somewhat since 1916, but he had expected that. His extrapolation had foretold a building boom trending toward giantism. It was relieving to find one aspect of Earth following expectation.

  The Hethivarian hovered invisibly over a Manhattan street long enough to pick out a likely entity for duplication. He would need a working identity while he was here.

  He chose a man almost at random from a group of identically-clad humans in gray suits, and entered his mind long enough to duplicate the information he needed. Withdrawing, Karn made the necessary transformation and allowed himself to materialize.

  Now he wore contemporary American clothes and the contemporary close-cropped hair style. In the trouser pocket of his flannel suit was a wallet duplicating in every respect that of the unsuspecting individual walking ahead. Karn had an ample supply of currency now—the paper money was smaller in size than it had been, Karn noted—as well as the necessary documents for survival and a ready-made familiarity with current events and contemporary slang.

  He had no desire to encroach on the identity of the man he had momentarily entered, and so as he walked along he made minor alterations in the body he wore, thickening the ears, adding a mustache, deepening the facial lines. He increased the body weight by about a fifth. No one would mistake him for the other now.

  All right, he thought. He could bluff the rest of the way. Now to catch up on news events since 1916, and see just how I could have been so wrong.

  Karn already had a picture of the way Earth should have looked. He had spent several years on the planet already, rushing there in 1914 at the outbreak of war and rapidly healing the breaches until peace became possible two years later.

  From his own extrapolations and from the computed results, he had expected the German Empire to be the world’s dominant state, fat with its network of global colonies, replete with conquest and sanely satiated. Germany had all the territory it wanted or needed; it would embark on no campaign of world conquest. The status would remain quo. America, having been kept out of the Great War by Karn’s careful intervention, would have clasped the Monroe Doctrine to itself even more firmly and would have shut itself away from the troublesome world out across the oceans. Russia would be drowning under the yoke of the Czar. Peace would pervade the Earth.

  A pleasant peace, an era of good feelings.

  Karn’s motive was simple. The first scouts visiting

  Earth, more than a century before, had reported a vigorous and appallingly inventive race, just entering its mechanical age. The computed extrapolations had given the Hethivari Network its biggest jolt in a millennium. They showed that Earth would be twice convulsed by war in the next century, each time taking a giant stride up the technological ladder. Without external meddling, the Earthers would leap right into the space age with frightening speed. Probabilities showed a .32 chance that the quarrelsome Earthers would destroy themselves in a hundred years—and a .68 chance that they would not, but instead would channel their dynamic forces and leap outward.

  Extrapolations showed that in a mere five centuries the Earthers would be, unless they managed to destroy themselves meanwhile, colonizing the stars—challenging the might of the age-old Hethivari Network itself!

  It was a frightening thought indeed. In five centuries the Earthers would accomplish what it had taken Hethivar untold millennia to do. They had to be stopped, for the sake of the galactic balance.

  A little study showed that there were two ways to stop the Earthers—and since one, the immediate obliteration of Earth by ultrabomb, was utterly repugnant to the highly civilized Hethivarians, there actually was only one way open. Internal intervention was called for. A trained Hethivarian agent would have to go to Earth and ease the pressures, turn down the flame under the kettle, pull back on the reins.

  All that needed to be done was to remove the stimulus of war, which led to technological upspurts. A placid and untroubled Earth might sink into an amiably slothful way of life; the fierce spark that burned there might die down. So Karn was sent, and Karn engineered a peace. Not a lasting peace, of course— Earth would not be ready for that for a long time—but a stopgap, good for sixty or seventy years. When the next crisis arrived, it could be dealt with the same way. And the next, and the next, and the next—and so on into the distant future, if necessary. It was a sound plan. It would keep the Earthers from barking at the gates of the Network for centuries. It would maintain the calm balance of peace that had existed in the universe for so many thousands of years.

  But, thought Karn, something had slipped up.

  What?

  He would have to find a library and check up on recent history. But first, he decided to purchase a newspaper. Entering his borrowed memory, he learned that newspapers could be bought with small silver coins. They were sold along the streets.

  Karn pulled change from his pocket, selected a dime, and bought a Times. He scanned the front page rapidly.

  Cold terror rippled through him.

  Monstrous! he thought in baffled shock.

  The headlines screamed incomprehensible things at him.

  PRESIDENT CALLS FOR

  INCREASE IN FOREIGN AID

  RUSSIA TURNS DOWN

  NEW PARLEY OFFER

  SATELLITE LAUNCHING

  POSTPONED ONE WEEK

  H-BOMB TEST A SUCCESS,

  WHITE HOUSE SAYS

  GERMANS COOL TO

  REUNIFICATION HINTS

  After the first instant of disorientation was over, Karn made the necessary adjustments in his metabolism to calm himself. The newspaper was a journal of a world of nightmares. He found himself near a small park breaking up the busy streets, and on uncertain legs he made his way to a bench and sat heavily down.

  Next to him a stubblefaced man said, “You look sick, buddy. Everything O.K.?”

  Karn had enough control of h
imself to find the right words. “My horse didn’t make it, that’s all. Stay away from sure things.”

  “A-men, pal!”

  Karn smiled to himself. It was good to know he could handle a Terran colloquial conversation so skillfully. But the smile vanished as he returned his attention to the newspaper. He read it carefully and in detail, memorizing blocks of information as he went, and within fifteen minutes he had read his way through from end to end and could begin shaping the scattered data into a pattern.

  Everything had gone completely haywire.

  Germany was a fifth-rate country now, not the kingpin. Apparently there had been some sort of second Great War in the past few decades. Germany had been beaten and now lay helplessly divided. The powers on Earth today were the United States and Russia, glaring at each other menacingly in an uneasy stalemate.

  Technological development had been catastrophically rapid. The infernal creatures had not only developed fission weapons but fusion ones as well, and evidently fission-fusion-fission bombs to boot. Work was progressing on control of thermonuclear energy.

  And, spurred on by the threat of atomic war, a vast missile program was under way, and almost as a byproduct of the arms race space was being conquered. The unbelievable Earthers had hoisted more than a dozen space satellites into orbit, and work was advancing on the problem of reaching the Moon by rocket.

  Karn’s mind automatically supplied the gloomy extrapolation. The Moon in five years or less, the other planets by the end of the century, then a lull while a nullspace drive is invented, and then the conquest of the stars. Exactly as the first scouts had foreseen a century ago, only faster. How could this be possible? All his work of 1914-16 had gone completely to waste. If anything, things were worse than they would have been if he hadn’t meddled.