by Fritz Leiber
For the Probability Engine in no way increased your mental stature. Indeed, it had just the opposite effect, for it gave you powers which enabled you to escape the consequences of your bad. judgments—and it truckled to your delusions by only showing you what you wanted to see. Understand, it is just a machine. A perfect servant—not an educator. And perfect servants are the worst educators. True, you could have used it to educate yourselves. But you preferred to play at being gods, under the guise of performing scientific experiments on a world that you didn’t faintly understand. Godlike, you presumed to judge and bless and damn. Finally, in trying to make good on your damnations, you came perilously close to destroying much more than you intended to—there might even have been unpleasant repercussions in our own cosmos.
And now, small things, what shall we do with you and your worlds? Obviously we cannot permit you to retain the Probability Engine or any of the powers that go with it or the talismans. Also, we cannot for a moment consider destroying any of the alternate worlds, with a view to simplification. That which has been given life must be allowed to use life, and that which has been faced with problems must be given an opportunity of solving them. If the time-splits were of more recent origin, we might consider healing them; but deviation has proceeded so far that that is out of the question.
We might stay here and supervise your worlds, delivering judgments, preventing destructive conflicts, and gradually lifting you to a higher mental and spiritual level. But we do not relish playing god. All our experiences in that direction have been unpleasant, making us conclude that, just as with an individual, no species can achieve a full and satisfactory maturity except by its own efforts.
Again, we might remain here and perform various experiments, using the set-ups which you have created. But that would be abhorrent.
So, small things, there being no better alternative, we will take away our engine, leaving the situation you have created to develop as it will—with transtime invasions and interworld wars no longer an immediate prospect, though looming as a strong future possibility. With such sufferings and miseries and misunderstandings as exist, but with the future wide open and no unnatural constraints put on individuals sufficiently clear-headed and strong-willed to seek to avoid unpleasant consequences. And with the promise of rich and unusual developments lying ahead, since, so far as we know, your many-branched time-stream is unique among the cosmoses. We will watch your future with interest, hoping some day to welcome you into the commonwealth of mature beings.
You may say that we are at fault for allowing the Probability Engine to fall into your hands—and indeed, we shall make even stronger efforts to safeguard it from accident or tinkering in the future. But remember this. Young and primitive as you are, you are not children, but responsible and awakened beings, holding in your hands the key to your future, and with only yourselves to blame if you want, only go astray.
As for you individuals who are responsible for all this botchwork, I sympathize with your ignorance and am willing to admit that your intentions were in part good. But you chose to play at being gods, and even ignorant and well-intentioned gods must suffer the consequences of their creations. And that shall be your fate.
With regard to you, Thorn, your case is of course very different. You responded to our blindly broadcast influencings, stole a talisman, and finally summoned us in time to prevent catastrophe. We are grateful. But there is no reward we can give you. To remove you from your environment to ours would be a meaningless gesture, find one which you would regret in the end. We cannot permit you to retain any talismanic powers, for in the long run you would be no better able to use them wisely than these others. We would like to continue your satisfying state of triplicated personality—it presents many interesting features—but even that may not be, since you have three destinies to fulfill in three worlds. However, a certain compromise solution, retaining some of the best features of the triplication, is possible.
And so, small things, we leave you.
From hastily chosen places of concealment and half-scooped foxholes around the Opal Cross, a little improvised army stood up. A few scattered fliers swooped down and silently joined them. The only uniforms were those of a few members of the Extraterrestrial Service. Among the civilians were perhaps a score of Recalcitrant Infiltrants from World II, won over to last-minute co-operation by Thorn II.
The air still reeked acridly. White smoke and fumes came from a dozen areas where earth and vegetation had been blasted by subtronic weapons. And there were those who did not stand up, whose bodies lay charred or had vanished in disintegration.
The ground between them and the Opal Cross was still freshly scored by the tracks of great vehicles. There were still wide swathes of crushed vegetation. At one point a group of low buildings had been mashed flat. And it seemed that the air above still shook with the aftermath of the passage of mighty warcraft.
But of the great mechanized army that had been fanning out toward and above them, not one black-uniformed soldier remained.
They continued to stare.
In the Sky Room of the Opal Cross, the members of the World Executive Committee looked around at a similar emptiness. Only the tatters of Clawly’s body remained as concrete evidence of what had happened. It was blown almost in two, but the face was untouched. This no longer showed the triumphant smile which had been apparent a moment before death. Instead, there was a look of horrified surprise.
Clawly’s duplicate had vanished with the other black-uniformed figures.
The first to recover a little from the frozenness of shock was Shielding. He turned toward Conjerly and Tempelmar.
But the expression on the faces of those two was no longer that of conquerors, even thwarted and trapped conquerors. Instead there was a dawning, dazed amazement, and a long-missed familiarity that told Shielding that the masquerading minds were gone and the old Conjerly and Tempelmar returned.
Firemoor began to laugh hysterically.
Shielding sat down.
At the World II end of the broken transtime bridgehead, where moments before the Opal Cross had risen, now yawned a vast smoking pit, half-filled with an indescribable wreckage of war machines and men, into which others were still falling from the vanished skylon—like some vision of Hell. To one side, huge even in comparison with that pit, loomed the fantastically twisted metal of the transtime machine. Ear-splitting sounds still echoed. Hurricane gusts still blew.
Above it all, like an escaping black hawk above an erupting volcano, Clawly flew. Not even the titanic confusion around him, nor the shock of the time-streams’ split, nor his horror at his own predicament, could restrain his ironic mirth at the thought of how that other Clawly, in trying to kill him, had insured the change of minds and his own death.
Now he was forever marooned on World II, in Clawly II’s body. But the memory chambers of Clawly II’s brain were open to him, since Clawly II’s mind no longer existed to keep them closed, and so at one bound he had become a half-inhabitant of World II. He knew where he stood. He knew what he must do. He had no time for regrets.
A few minutes’ flying brought him to the Opal Cross and it was not long before he was admitted to the Servants Hall. There eleven shaken old men looked up vengefully at him from reports of disaster. Their chairman’s puckered lips writhed as he accused: “Clawly, I have warned you before that your lack of care and caution would be your finish. We hold you to a considerable degree responsible for this calamity. It is possible that your inexcusably lax handling of the prisoner Thorn was what permitted word of our invasion to slip through to the enemy. We have decided to eliminate you.” He paused, then added, a little haltingly, “Before sentence is carried out, however, do you have anything to say in extenuation of your actions?”
Clawly almost laughed. He knew this scene—from myth. The Dawn Gods blaming Loki for their failures, trying to frighten him—in hopes that he would think up a way to get them out of their predicament. The Servants were bluffing. The
y weren’t even looking for a scapegoat. They were looking for help.
This was his world, he realized. The dangerous, treacherous world of which he had always dreamed. The world for which his character had been shaped. The world in which he could play the traitor’s role as secret ally of the Recalcitrants in the Servants’ camp, and prevent or wreck future invasions of World I. The world in which his fingers could twitch the cords of destiny.
Confidently, a gargoyle’s smile upon his lips, he stepped forward to answer the Servants.
Briefly Thorn lingered in the extra-cosmic dark, before his tripled personality and consciousness should again be split. He knew that the True Owners of the Probability Engine had granted him this respite in order that he would be able to hit upon the best solution of his problem. And he had found that solution.
Henceforward, the three Thorns would exchange bodies at intervals, thus distributing the fortunes and misfortunes of their lives. It was the strangest of existences to look forward to—for each, a week of the freedoms and pleasures of World I, a week of the tyrannies and hates of World II, a week of the hardships and dangers of World III.
Difficulties might arise. Now, being one, the Thorns agreed. Separate, they might rebel and try to hog good fortune. But each of them would have the memory of this moment and its pledge.
The strangest of, existences, he thought again, hazily, as he felt his mind beginning to dissolve, felt a three-way tug. But was it really stranger than any life? One week in heaven—one week in hell—one week in a frosty ghost-world—
And in seven different worlds of shockingly different cultures, seven men clad in the awkward and antique garments of the Late Middle Dawn Civilization, began to look around, in horror and dismay, at the consequences of their creations.
THE END.