by Fritz Leiber
“The world and its emotions have corrupted you,” thought Prim.
“And that brings me to the second and major point of our complaint.”
Oktav felt the seven minds converge hostilely upon him. Careful to mask his ideational processes, Oktav probed the others for possible sympathy or weakness. Lack of a talisman put him at a great disadvantage. His hopes fell.
Prim thought, “It has come to our attention that you have been telling secrets. Moved by some corrupt emotionality, and under the astounding primitive guise of fortunetelling, you have been disbursing forbidden knowledge—cloudily perhaps, but none the less unequivocally—to earthlings of the main-trunk world.”
“I do not deny it,” thought Oktav, crossing his Rubicon. “The main-trunk world needs to know more. It has been your spoiled brat. And as often happens to a spoiled brat, you now push it, unprepared and unaided, into a dubious future.”
Prim’s answering thought, amplified by his talisman, thundered in the measureless dark. “We are the best judges of what is good for the world. Our minds are dedicated far more selflessly than yours to the world’s welfare, and we have chosen the only sound scientific method for insuring its continued and ultimate happiness. One of the unalterable conditions of that method is that no Earthling have the slightest concrete hint of our activities. Has your mind departed so far from scientific clarity—influenced perhaps by bodily decay due to injudicious exposure to spacers time—that f must recount to you our purpose and our rules?”
The darkness pulsed. Oktav projected no answering thought. Prim continued, thinking in a careful step-by-step way, as if for a child.
“No scientific experiment is possible without controls—set-ups in which the conditions are unaltered, as a comparison, in order to gauge the exact effects of the alteration. There is, under natural conditions, only one world. Hence no experiments can be performed upon it. One can never test scientifically which form of social organization, government, and so forth, is best for it. But the creation of alternate worlds by the Probability Engine changes all that.”
Prim’s thought beat at Oktav.
“Can it be that the underlying logic of our procedure has somehow always escaped you? From our vantage point we observe the world as it rides into the cone of the future—a cone that always narrows towards the present, because in the remote future there are many major possibilities still realizable, in the near future only a relative few. We note the approach of crucial epochs, when the world must make some great choice, as between democracy and totalitarianism, managerialism and servcism, benevolent elitism and enforced equalism and so on. Then, carefully choosing the right moment and focusing the Probability Engine chiefly upon the minds of the world’s leaders, we widen the cone of the future. Two or more major possibilities are then realized instead of just one. Time is bifurcated, or trifurcated. We have alternate worlds, at first containing many objects and people in common, but diverging more and more—bifurcating more and more completely.—as the consequences of the alternate decisions make themselves felt.”
“I criticize,” thought Oktav, plunging into uncharted waters. “You are thinking in generalities. You are personifying the world, and forgetting that major possibilities are merely an accumulation of minor ones. I do not believe that the distinction between the two major alternate possibilities in a bifurcation is at all clear-cut.”
The idea was too novel to make any immediate impression, except that Oktav’s mind was indeed being hazy and disordered. As if Oktav had not thought, Prim continued, “For example, we last split the time-stream thirty Earth-years ago. Discovery of subtronic power had provided the world with a practically unlimited source of space-time energy. The benevolent elite governing the world was faced with three clear-cut alternatives: It could suppress the discovery completely, killing its inventors. It could keep it a Party secret, make it a Party asset. It could impart it to the world at large, which would destroy the authority of the Party and be tantamount to dissolving it, since it would put into the hands of any person, or at least any small group of persons, the power to destroy the world. In a natural state, only one of these possibilities could be realized. Earth would only have one chance in three of guessing right. As we arranged it, all three possibilities were realized. A few years’ continued observation sufficed to show us that the third alternative—that of making subtronic power common property—was the right one. The other two had already resulted in untold unendurable miseries and horrors.”
“Yes, the botched worlds,” Oktav interrupted bitterly. “How many of them have there been, Prim? How many, since the beginning?”
“In creating the best of all possible worlds, we of necessity also created the worst,” Prim replied with a strained patience.
“Yes—worlds of horror that might have never been, had you not insisted on materializing all the possibilities, good and evil lurking in men’s minds. If you had not interfered, man still might have achieved that best world—suppressing the evil possibilities.”
“Do you suggest that we should leave all to chance?” Prim exploded angrily. “Become fatalists? We, who are masters of fate?”
“And then,” Oktav continued, brushing aside the interruption, “having created those worst or near-worlds—but still human, living ones, with happiness as well as horror in them, populated by individuals honestly striving to make the best of bad guesses—-you destroy them.”
“Of course! Prim thought back in righteous indignation. “As soon as we were sure they were the less desirable alternatives, we put them out of their misery.”
“Yes.” Oktav’s bitterness was like an acid drench. “Drowning the unwanted kittens. While you lavish affection on one, putting the rest in the sack.”
“It was the most merciful thing to do,” Prim retorted. “There was no pain—only instantaneous obliteration.”
Oktav reacted. All his earlier doubts and flashes of rebellion were suddenly consolidated into a burning desire to shake the complacency of the others. He gave his ironic thoughts their head, sent them whipping through the dark.
“Who are you to tell whether or not there’s pain in instantaneous obliteration? Oh yes, the botched worlds, the controls, the experiments that failed—they don’t matter, let’s put them out of their misery, let’s get rid of the evidence of our mistakes, let’s obliterate them because we can’t stand their mute accusations. As if the Earthlings of the botched worlds didn’t have as much right to their future, no matter how sorry and troubled, as the Earthlings of the main trunk. What crime have they committed save that of guessing wrong, when, by your admission, all was guesswork? What difference is there between the main trunk and the lopped branches, except your judgment that the former seems happier, more successful? Let me tell you something. You’ve coddled the main-trunk world for so long, you’ve tied your limited human affections to it so tightly, that you’ve gotten to believing that it’s the only real world, the only world that counts—that the others are merely ghosts, object lessons, hypothetics. But in actuality they’re just as throbbingly alive, just as deserving of consideration, just as real.”
“They no longer exist,” thought Prim crushingly. “It is obvious that your mind, tainted by Earthbound emotions, has become hopelessly disordered. You are pleading the cause of that which no longer is.”
“Are you so sure?” Oktav could feel his questioning thought hang in the dark, like a great black bubble, coercing attention. “What if the botched worlds still live? What if, in thinking to obliterate them, you have merely put them beyond the reach of your observation, cut them loose from the main-trunk time-stream, set them adrift in the oceans of eternity? I’ve told you that you ought to visit the world more often in the flesh. You’d find out that your beloved main-trunkers are becoming conscious of a shadowy, overhanging danger, that they’re uncovering evidences of an infiltration, a silent and mystery-shrouded invasion across mental boundaries. Here and there in your main-trunk world, minds are being displaced by mi
nds from somewhere else. What if that invasion comes from one of the botched worlds—say from one of the worlds of the last trifurcation? That split occurred so recently that the alternate worlds would still contain many duplicate individuals, and between duplicate individuals there may be subtle bonds that reach even across the intertime void—on your admission, time-splits are never at first complete, and there may be unchanging shared deeps in the subconscious minds of duplicate individuals, opening the way for forced interchanges of consciousness. What if the botched worlds have continued to develop in the everlasting dark, outside the range of your knowledge, spawning who knows what abnormalities and horrors, like mutant monsters confined in caves? What if, with a tortured genius resulting from their misery, they’ve discovered things about time that even you do not know? What if they’re out there—waiting, watching, devoured by resentment, preparing to leap upon your pet?” Oktav paused and probed the darkness. Faint, but unmistakable, came the pulse of fear. He had shaken their complacency all right—but not to his advantage.
“You’re thinking nonsense,” Prim thundered at him coldly, in thought-tones in which there was no longer any hope of mercy or reprieve. “It is laughable even to consider that we could be guilty of such a glaring error as you suggest. We know every crevice of space-time, every twig and leaflet. We are the masters of the Probability Engine.”
“Are you?” Reckless now of all consequences, Oktav asked the unprecedented, forbidden, ultimate question. “I know when I was initiated, and presumably when the rest of you were initiated, it was always assumed and strongly suggested, though never stated with absolute definiteness, that Prim, the first of us, a mental mutant and supergenius of the nineteenth century, invented the Probability Engine. I, an awestruck neophyte, accepted this attitude. But now I know that I never really believed it. No human mind could ever have conceived the Probability Engine. Prim did not invent it. He merely found it, probably by chancing on a lost talisman. Thereafter some peculiarity of the Engine permitted him to take it out of reach of its true owners, hide it from them. Then he took us in with him, one by one, because a single mind was insufficient to operate the Engine in all its phases and potentialities. But Prim never invented it. He stole it.”
With a sense of exultation, Oktav realized that he had touched their primal vulnerability—though at the same time insuring his own doom. He felt the seven resentful, frightened minds converge upon him suffocatingly. He probed now for one thing only—any relaxing of watchfulness, any faltering of awareness, on the part of any one of them. And as he probed, he kept choking out additional insults against the resistance.
“‘Is there any one of you, Prim included, who even understands the Probability Engine, let alone having the capacity to devise it?
“You prate of science, but do you understand even the science of modern Earthlings? Can any one of you outline to me the theoretic background of subtronic physics? Even your puppets have outstripped you. You’re atavisms, relics of the Dawn Civilization, mental mummies, apes crept into a factory at night and monkeying with the machinery.
“You’re sorcerer’s apprentices—and what will happen when the sorcerer comes back? What if I should stop this eternal whispering and send a call winging clear and unhampered through eternity: ‘Oh sorcerer, True Owners, here is your stolen Engine’ ?”
They pressed on him frantically, frightenedly, as if by sheer mental weight to prevent any such call being sent. He felt that he would go down under the pressure, cease to be. But at the same time his probing uncovered a certain muddiness in Kart’s thinking, a certain wandering due to doubt and fear, and he clutched at it, desperately but subtly.
Prim finished reading sentence. “—and so Ters and Septem will escort Oktav back to the world, and when he is in the flesh, make disposition of him.” He paused, continued. “Meanwhile, Sikst will make an expedition to recover the lost talisman, calling for aid if not immediately successful. At the same time, since the functioning of the Probability Engine is seriously hampered so long as there is an empty station, Sekond, Kart and Kant will visit the world in order to select a suitable successor for Oktav, I will remain here and—”
He was interrupted by a flurry of startled thought from Kart, which rose swiftly to a peak of dismay.
“My talisman! Oktav has stolen it! He is gone!”
VI.
By her battened hatch I leaned and
caught
Sounds from the noisome hold—
Cursing and sighing of souls
distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.
Thorn teetered on the dark edge. His footgear made sudden grating noises against it as he fought for balance. He was vaguely conscious of shouts and of a needle of green light swinging down at him.
Unavailingly he wrenched the muscles of his calves, flailed the air with his arms.
Yet as he lurched over, as the edge receded upward—so slowly at first!—he became glad that he had fallen, for the down-chopping green needle made a red-hot splash of the place where he had been standing.
He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of flying togs he was not wearing.
There was time for a futile, spasmodic effort to get clear in his mind how, plunging through the forest, he should find himself on that dark edge.
Indistinct funnel-mouths shot past, so close he almost brushed them. Then lie was into something tangly that impeded his fall—slowly at first, then swiftly, as pressines ahead were built up. His motion was sickeningly reversed. He was flung upward and to one side, and came down with a hone-shaking jolt.
He was knee-deep in the stuff that had broken his fall. It made a rustling, faintly skirring noise as he ploughed his way out of it.
He stumbled around what must have been a corner of the dark building from whose roof he had fallen. The shouts from above were shut off.
He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.
He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself—a feeling of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean toughness of muscular fiber—both disturbingly unfamiliar.
He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.
He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging to him. He automatically started to brush it off. and noted that it consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal—identical with the shavings from an old-style, pre-subtronic hyperlathe. Presumably a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths be had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.
His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and clothing. They seemed strange—the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed, almost clawlike.
Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came memories of the evening’s events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.
There was something clenched in his left hand—so tightly that the fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn’t have changed. And yet—
His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.
Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into his pocket—a pocket that wasn’t quite where it
should be and that contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd surging along the blue-litten avenue.
The foreboding became a tightening ball of fear, exploded into realization.
That other Thorn had changed places with him. He was wearing that other Thorn’s clothing—drab, servile, workaday. He was inhabiting that other Thorn’s body—his own but strangely altered and ill-cared-for, aquiver with unfamiliar tensions and emotions.
He was in the world of his nightmares.
He stood stock-still, staring, the crowd flowing around him, jostling him wearily.
His first reaction, after a giant buffet of amazement and awe that left him intoxicatedly weak, was one of deep-seated moral satisfaction. The balanced had at last been righted. Now that other Thorn could enjoy the good fortunes of utopia, while he endured that other Thorn’s lot. There was no longer the stifling sense of being dominated by another personality, to whom misfortune and suffering had given the whiphand.
He was filled with an almost demoniac exhilaration—a desire to explore and familiarize himself with this world which he had long studied through the slits of nightmare, to drag from the drifting crowd around him an explanation as to its whys and wherefores.
But that would not be so easy.
An atmosphere of weary secrecy and suspicion pervaded the avenue. The voices of the people who jostled him dropped to mumbles as they went by. Heads were bowed or averted—but eyes glanced sharply.
He let himself move forward with the crowd, meanwhile studying it closely.
The misery and boredom and thwarted yearning for escape bluely shadowed in almost all the faces, was so much like that he remembered from his nightmares that he could easily pretend that he was dreaming—but only pretend.