The Chalice of Death

by Robert Silverberg

  It was late afternoon. The street-glow was beginning to come up. A bulletin transmitted via telestat had informed the hotel patrons that eighteen minutes of light rain was scheduled for 1400 that Fiveday, and Ewing had delayed his departure accordingly. Now the streets were fresh and sweet-smelling.

  Ewing boarded the limousine that the hotel used for transporting its patrons to and from the nearby spaceport, and looked around for his final glance at the Grand Valloin Hotel. He felt tired and a little sad at leaving Earth; there were so many reminders of past glories here, so many signs of present decay. It had been an eventful day for him, but yet curiously eventless; he was returning to Corwin with nothing concrete gained, nothing learned but the fact that there was no help to be had.

  He pondered the time-travel question for a moment. Obviously the Earther machine—along with other paradoxical qualities—was able to create matter where none had existed before. It had drawn from somewhere the various Ewing bodies, of which at least two and possibly more had existed simultaneously. And it seemed that once a new body was drawn from the fabric of time, it remained in existence, conterminous with his fellows. Otherwise, Ewing thought, my refusal to go back and carry out the rescue would have snuffed me out. It didn’t. It merely ended the life of that “Ewing” in the torture-chamber on Twoday.

  “Spaceport,” a robot voice announced.

  Ewing followed the line into the Departures shed. He noticed there were few Earthers in Departures; only some Sirians and a few non-humanoid aliens were leaving Earth. He joined a line that inched up slowly to a robot clerk.

  When it was Ewing’s turn, he presented his papers. The robot scanned them quickly.

  “You are Baird Ewing of the Free World of Corwin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You arrived on Earth on Fiveday, seventh of Fifthmonth of this year?”

  Ewing nodded.

  “Your papers are in order. Your ship has been stored in Hangar 107-B. Sign this, please.”

  It was a permission-grant allowing the spaceport attendants to get his ship from drydock, service it for departure, store his belongings on board, and place the vessel on the blasting field. Ewing read the form through quickly, signed it, and handed it back.

  “Please go to Waiting Room Y and remain there until your name is called. Your ship should be ready for you in less than an hour.”

  Ewing moistened his lips. “Does that mean you’ll page me over the public address system?”

  “Yes.”

  The idea of having his name called out, with so many Sirians in the spaceport, did not appeal to him. He said, “I’d prefer not to be paged by name. Can some sort of code word be used?”

  The robot hesitated. “Is there some reason—”

  “Yes.” Ewing’s tone was flat. “Suppose you have me paged under the name of … ah … Blade. That’s it. Mr. Blade. All right?”

  Doubtfully the robot said, “It’s irregular.”

  “Is there anything in the regulations specifically prohibiting such a pseudonym?”

  “No, but—”

  “If regulations say nothing about it, how can it be irregular? Blade it is, then.”

  It was easy to baffle robots. The sleek metal face would probably be contorted in bewilderment, if that were possible. At length the robot assented; Ewing grinned cheerfully at it and made his way to Waiting Room Y.

  Waiting Room Y was a majestic vault of a room, with a glittering spangled ceiling a hundred feet above his head, veined with glowing rafters of structural beryllium. Freeform blobs of light, hovering suspended at about the eight-foot level, provided most of the illumination. At one end of the room a vast loud-speaker had been erected; at the other, a screen thirty feet high provided changing kaleidoscopic patterns of light for bored waiters.

  Ewing stared without interest at the whirling light-patterns for a while. He had found a seat in the corner of the waiting room, where he was not likely to be noticed. There was hardly an Earther in the place. Earthers stayed put, on Earth. And this great spaceport, this monument to an era a thousand years dead, was in use solely for the benefit of tourists from Sirius IV and the alien worlds.

  A bubble-headed creature with scaly purple skin passed by, each of its claw-like arms clutching a smaller version of itself. Mr. XXX from Xfiz V, Ewing thought bitterly. Returning from a family outing. He’s taken the kiddies to Earth to give them an instructive view of dying civilization.

  The three aliens paused not far from where Ewing sat and exchanged foamy, sibilant sentences. Now he’s telling them to take a good look round, Ewing thought. None of this may be here the next time they come.

  For a moment despair overwhelmed him, as he realized once again that both Earth and Corwin were doomed, and there seemed no way of holding back the inexorable jaws of the pincer. His head drooped forward; he cradled it tiredly with his fingertips.

  “Mr. Blade to the departure desk, please. Mr. Blade, please report to the departure desk. Mr. Blade …”

  Dimly, Ewing remembered that they were paging him. He elbowed himself from the seat.

  “Mr. Blade to the departure desk, please …”

  “All right,” he murmured. “I’m coming.”

  He followed a stream of bright violet lights down the center of the waiting room, turned left, and headed for the departure desk. Just as he reached it, the loud-speaker barked once more, “Mr. Blade to the departure desk …”

  “I’m Blade,” he said to the robot he had spoken with an hour before. He presented his identity card. The robot scanned it.

  “According to this your name is Baird Ewing,” the robot announced after some study.

  Ewing sighed in exasperation. “Check your memory banks! Sure, my name is Ewing—but I arranged to have you page me under the name of Blade. Remember?”

  The robot’s optic lenses swiveled agitatedly as the mechanical filtered back through its memory bank. Ewing waited impatiently, fidgeting and shifting his weight from foot to foot. After what seemed to be a fifteen-minute wait the robot brightened again and declared, “The statement is correct. You are Baird Ewing, pseudonym Blade. Your ship is waiting in Blast Area Eleven.”

  Gratefully, Ewing accepted the glowing identity planchet and made his way through the areaway into the departure track. There he surrendered the planchet to a waiting robot attendant who ferried him across the broad field to his ship.

  It stood alone, isolated by the required hundred-meter clearance, a slim, graceful needle, golden-green, still bright in the late-afternoon sunlight. He climbed up the catwalk, sprang the hatch, and entered.

  The ship smelled faintly musty after its week in storage. Ewing looked around. Everything seemed in order: the somnotank in which he would sleep during the eleven-month journey back to Corwin, the radio equipment along the opposite wall, the vision-plate. He spun the dial on the storage compartment and opened it. His few belongings were aboard. He was ready to leave.

  But first, a message.

  He set up the contacts on the subetheric generator, preparatory to beaming a message via subspace toward Corwin. He knew that his earlier message, announcing arrival, had not yet arrived; it would ride the subetheric carrier wave for another week yet, before reaching the receptors on his home world.

  And, he thought unhappily, the second message, announcing departure, would follow it by only a few days. He twisted the contact dial. The go-ahead light came on.

  He faced the pickup grid. “Baird Ewing speaking, and I’ll be brief. This is my second and final message. I’m returning to Corwin. The mission was an absolute failure—repeat, absolute failure. Earth is unable to help us. It faces immediate domination by Terrestrial-descended inhabitants of Sirius IV, and culturally they’re in worse shape than we are. Sorry to be delivering bad news. I hope you’re all still there when I get back. No reports will follow. I’m signing off right now.”

  He stared reflectively at the dying lights of the generator a moment, then shook his head and rose. Acti
vating the in-system communicator, he requested and got the central coordination tower of the spaceport.

  “This is Baird Ewing, in the one-man ship on Blasting Area Eleven. I plan to depart under automatic control in fifteen minutes. Can I have a time check?”

  The inevitable robotic voice replied, “The time now is sixteen fifty-eight and thirteen seconds.”

  “Good. Can I have clearance for departure at seventeen thirteen and thirteen?”

  “Clearance granted,” the robot said, after a brief pause.

  Grunting acknowledgment, Ewing fed the data to his autopilot and threw the master switch. In fourteen-plus minutes, the ship would blast off from Earth, whether or not he happened to be in the protective tank at the time. But there was no rush; it would take only a moment or two to enter the freeze.

  He stripped off his clothes, stored them away, and activated the tap that drew the nutrient bath. The autopilot ticked away; eleven minutes to departure.

  So long, Earth.

  He climbed into the tank. Now his subliminal instructions took over; he knew the procedure thoroughly. All he had to do was nudge those levers with his feet to enter the state of suspension; needles would jab upward into him and the thermostat would begin to function. At the end of the journey, with the ship in orbit around Corwin, he would automatically be awakened to make the landing manually.

  The communicator chimed just as he was about to trip the footlevers. Irritated, Ewing glanced up. What could be the trouble?

  “Calling Baird Ewing … Calling Baird Ewing …”

  It was central control. Ewing glanced at the clock. Eight minutes to blast off. And there’d be nothing left of him but a pool of jelly if blasting time caught him still wandering around the ship.

  Sourly he climbed from the tank and acknowledged the call. “Ewing here. What is it?”

  “An urgent call from the terminal, Mr. Ewing. The party says he must reach you before you blast off.”

  Ewing considered that. Firnik, pursuing him? Or Byra Clork? No. They had seen him die on Twoday. Myreck? Maybe. Who else could it be? He said, “Very well. Switch over the call.”

  A new voice said, “Ewing?”

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter just now. Listen—can you come to the spaceport terminal right away?”

  The voice sounded tantalizing familiar. Ewing scowled angrily. “No. I can’t! My autopilot’s on and I’m due for blasting in seven minutes. If you can’t tell me who you are, I’m afraid I can’t bother to alter flight plans.”

  Ewing heard a sigh. “I could tell you who I am. You wouldn’t believe me, that’s all. But you mustn’t depart yet. Come to the terminal.”

  “No.”

  “I warn you,” the voice said. “I can take steps to prevent you from blasting off—but it’ll be damaging to both of us if I do so. Can’t you trust me?”

  “I’m not leaving this ship on account of any anonymous warnings,” Ewing said hotly. “Tell me who you are. Otherwise I’m going to break contact and enter suspension.”

  Six minutes to blast.

  “All right,” came the reluctant reply. “I’ll tell you. My name is Baird Ewing, of Corwin. I’m you. Now will you get out of that ship?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  With tense fingers Ewing disconnected the autopilot and reversed the suspension unit. He called the control tower and in an unsteady voice told them he was temporarily canceling his blasting plans and was returning to the terminal. He dressed again, and was ready when the robocar came shuttling out across the field to pick him up.

  He had arranged to meet the other Ewing in the refreshment room where he had had his first meeting with Rollun Firnik after landing on Earth. A soft conversational hum droned in the background as Ewing entered. His eyes, as if magnetically drawn, fastened on the tall, conservatively-dressed figure at the table near the rear.

  He walked over and sat down, without being asked. The man at the table favored him with a smile—cold, precise, the very sort of smile Ewing himself would have used in this situation. Ewing moistened his lips. He felt dizzy.

  He said, “I don’t know quite where to begin. Who are you?”

  “I told you. Yourself. I’m Baird Ewing.”

  The accent, the tone, the sardonic smile—they all fitted. Ewing felt the room swirl crazily around him. He stared levelly at the mirror image on the other side of the table.

  “I thought you were dead,” Ewing said. “The note you left me—”

  “I didn’t leave any notes,” the other interrupted immediately.

  “Hold on there.” It was a conversation taking place in a world of nightmare. Ewing felt as if he were stifling. “You rescued me from Firnik, didn’t you?”

  The other nodded.

  “And you took me to the hotel, put me to bed, and wrote me a note explaining things; you finished off by saying you were going downstairs to blow yourself up in an energitron booth—”

  Eyes wide in surprise, the other said, “No, not at all! I took you to the hotel and left. I didn’t write any notes, or threaten to commit suicide.”

  “You didn’t leave me money? Or a blaster?”

  The man across the table shook his head vehemently. Ewing closed his eyes for a moment. “If you didn’t leave me that note, who did?”

  “Tell me about this note,” the other said.

  Briefly Ewing summarized the contents of the note as well as he could from memory. The other listened, tapping his finger against the table as each point was made. When Ewing was through, the other remained deep in thought, brow furrowed. Finally he said:

  “I see it. There were four of us.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll put it slowly: I’m the first one of us to go through all this. It begins with a closed-circle paradox, the way any time distortion would have to: me, in the torture chamber, and a future me coming back to rescue me. There were four separate splits in the continuum—creating a Ewing who died in Firnik’s torture chamber, a Ewing who rescued the tortured Ewing and left a note and committed suicide, a Ewing who rescued the tortured Ewing and did not commit suicide, and a Ewing who was rescued and did not himself go back to become the rescuer, thereby breaking the chain. Two of these are still alive—the third and the fourth. You and me.”

  Very quietly Ewing said, “I guess that makes sense, in an impossible sort of way. But that leaves an extra Baird Ewing, doesn’t it? After you carried out the rescue, why did you decide to stay alive?”

  The other shrugged. “I couldn’t risk killing myself. I didn’t know what would happen.”

  “You did,” Ewing said accusingly. “You knew that the next man in sequence would stay alive. You could have left him a note, but you didn’t. So he went through the chain, left me a note, and removed himself.”

  The other scowled unhappily. “Perhaps he represented a braver facet of us than I do.”

  “How could that be? We’re all the same?”

  “True.” The other smiled sadly. “But a human being is made of complex stuff. Life isn’t a procession of clear-cut events; it’s a progression from one tough decision to the next. The seeds of my decision were in the proto-Ewing; so were the bases for the suicide. I picked things one way; he picked them the other. And I’m here.”

  Ewing realized it was impossible to be angry. The man he faced was himself, and he knew only too well the bundle of inner contradictions, of strengths and weaknesses, that was Baird Ewing—or any human being. This was no time to condemn. But he foresaw grave problems arising.

  He said, “What do we do now—both of us?”

  “There was a reason why I called you off the ship. And it wasn’t simply that I didn’t want to be left behind on Earth.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “The time machine Myreck has can save Corwin from the Klodni,” the other Ewing said flatly.

  Ewing sat back and let that soak in. “How?”

  “I went to see Myreck this morni
ng and he greeted me with open arms. Said he was so glad I had come back for a look at the time machine. That was when I realized you’d been there yesterday and hadn’t gone back on the merry-go-round.” He shook his head. “I was counting on that, you see—on being the only Ewing that actually went forward on the time-track, while all the others went round and round between Fourday and Twoday, chasing themselves. But you broke the sequence and fouled things up.”

  “You fouled things up,” Ewing snapped. “You aren’t supposed to be alive.”

  “And you aren’t supposed to be existing in Fiveday.”

  “This isn’t helping things,” Ewing said more calmly. “You say the Earther time machine can save Corwin. How?”

  “I was getting to that. This morning Myreck showed me all the applications of the machine. It can be converted into an exterior-operating scanner—a beam that can be used to hurl objects of any size backward into time.”

  “The Klodni fleet,” Ewing said instantly.

  “Exactly! We set up the projector on Corwin and wait for the Klodni to arrive—and shoot them back five billion years or so, with no return-trip ticket!”

  Ewing smiled. “And I was running away. I was on my way home, while you were finding all this out.”

  The other shrugged. “You had no reason to suspect it. You never had a firsthand demonstration of the way the time machine functioned. I did—and I guessed this might be possible. You guessed so, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Right after Myreck told you he had temporal control, the thought came to you that something like this might be worked out. But you forgot about it. I didn’t.”

  It was eerie, Ewing thought, to sit across a table from a man who knew every thought of his, every secret deed, from childhood up to a point three days ago in Absolute Time. After that, of course, their lives diverged as if they were different people.

  “What do you suggest we do now?” Ewing asked.

  “Go back to Myreck. Team up to get the plans for the device away from him. Then high-tail it back here, get aboard …”

  His voice trailed off. Ewing stared blankly at his alter ego and said, “Yes? What then? I’m waiting.”