The Probability Man

by Brian Ball

  Spingarn contrived to disentangle himself from Ethel’s embrace. He dismissed the girl from his mind as he had earlier dismissed his premonitions of doom. Ethel and her particular part in his life could wait. He wished to put a question to the mind beamers which were waiting, poised to hand out information, as he punched a demand into their circuits.

  “Give me a run-down on the Frames of Talisker,” he ordered.

  The delicate tendrils that were the only visible manifestation of the mind beamers became still. Somewhere, in a remote and aseptic corner of the caverns that housed the memory circuits of the beamers, a small crisis occurred. The beamers, Spingarn saw, were at a loss. The slender pattern of phosphorescent pinpoints of light died away. He realized there was no answer for him. Talisker had been deleted from their catalogue. Like Spingarn himself, they had been erased.

  “They said I could tell you,” murmured Ethel. “They said you could have an hour and in that time I could say what I liked.”

  Spingarn regarded the clinging woman with more interest. He examined her face and figure: why hadn’t she gone to the bodybuilders? And yet she had her own disfigured attractiveness, especially to one accustomed to eighteenth-century women. Spingarn recalled a peasant woman he had known, a Flanders woman who had suffered badly from the lesser pox.

  This twenty-ninth century woman had something of the same asymmetrical ugliness. She had wide blue eyes, hair the color of bleached grain, and a body that might be interesting if she could only remove the surplus weight. She waited under his scrutiny.

  “An hour,” said Spingarn.

  “Less now.”

  And then, Talisker!

  He was still puzzled by the girl’s haunted subservience, by her abject manner, but he could not put together her present air with his earlier vague memories of that other life. She had been important then: why?

  “Tell me what you think I should know,” he tried. What she had been in his past could be of interest.

  “I gave you away,” she said.

  Her big eyes followed him, and Spingarn understood: she was terrified of what he would do.

  But he could find no reason in his memories for her fears. Whatever she had done was quite lost.

  “You don’t know!” she said wonderingly. “You don’t know, do you!”

  “No. And whatever it was, it doesn’t matter. Tell me only if you want to.”

  “I betrayed you,” she said. “Accidentally I keyed the readings of the Talisker sets into the Frame you were working on—the awful Early Nuclear Age thing that Marvell’s just finishing off now!—if I hadn’t got the material mixed up, no one would have known that you had reactivated Talisker! I was such a fool! And you only had a few minutes warning!”

  Spingarn allowed memory to hold back the door, but nothing emerged. A suddenly blaze of hectic excitement? No. A cold determination to remain alive in one form or another? Nothing. And yet the man he had been must have felt something when his dabbling in forbidden areas had been discovered. And what about the funk holes the Plot Director had set up? Had they already been established, even before Ethel revealed his secrets? Had the resourceful and subtle master of the Frames already woven his Random Principle into their fabric? Or had it been a lightning calculation of the laws of computer programming?

  The girl answered for him:

  “I didn’t have much time to work on the Frames for you, but we managed it between us——”

  “You!”

  The girl! This woman who had greeted him with misery and rapture? Ethel!!

  “It was the only thing I could think of—you were heading for the Early Classical Frames and you said you’d take me, but I had to wait for a while so that you’d be safe—I tried to work myself into the Random thing, but comp wouldn’t accept it. Things were complex enough with one perpetual recycling of a character throughout the whole of the Frames.”

  “You thought of the Random Principle—you keyed me into the Frames—into every one of them!”

  “It was all I could think of—and how you suffered, you poor darling!”

  “I didn’t do it. You did!”

  Of all the shocks he had received, this was the most stunning. Spingarn had been building up an image of himself—or, rather, of the man who had created Spingarn—as an utterly resourceful and masterly figure, one who toyed with the apparatus of the Frames as a child used the unsophisticated circuits of the mind beamers. It was the girl who was the master! She had made the Frames a haven for him!

  “I know I might have thought of something better, but there was no time!”

  “Marvell!” said Spingarn.

  “Marvell?”

  “He said I should take you—does he know it was you who fixed the Frames?”

  “Well—I’m not sure. He suspects, but he isn’t positive. He doesn’t like the idea of your going into Talisker again.”

  “Who does!”

  “And he said you’re to make your own terms with comp about going in—and is there anything else you have to know, because there isn’t much time!”

  “The Director—that thing!—he doesn’t know.”

  “No.”

  “Comp?”

  “Oh, no! It would spoil everything!”

  “So,” said Spingarn. “So. We have this. Talisker’s in a mess. I’ve to sort it out. Disaster Control failed—presumably I can succeed. And comp says I have a chance of clearing things up largely because of my previous skill with the coefficients of the probability generating function. Comp believes I’ve demonstrated my abilities by fixing it!”

  “Yes.”

  “But you did the fixing.”

  “It was all I could think of!”

  “So you’re the one who could fix Talisker?”

  “Oh, no! I’m just a third-rate assistant—I’m poor ugly Ethel who fell for the big Plot Director—I did, darling!”

  “It’s a mess,” announced Spingarn.

  It was. He, Spingarn, had been declared a factor in an equation. It ran like this: Spingarn fixed the comps. So Spingarn, who had made an as yet unknown and unholy mess of the Frames of Talisker, could somehow come up with a solution. The very obvious flaw was that he was not the factor comp believed him to be.

  “How else can I help?”

  For the first time, Spingarn grinned. “I wish I knew. But Marvell’s right—you come, my dear!”

  The girl beamed her gratitude. “And the others?”

  “You’d better tell me.”

  “You can choose to take whomever you wish. It’s all part of the recommendation. But you have to make the choice—it’s all tied in with your original conception for the Frames of Talisker.”

  Boxes within boxes. An hour to understand the whole complex edifice he had been responsible for. Spingarn was sure that more unpleasant surprises were ready to spring from the girl’s full red lips. “Go on.”

  “You should have heard this first, I suppose. It must all sound a bit bewildering, especially as you’ve still got the remnants of those overlaid personae.”

  “Make it easy for me.”

  “I’ll try.”

  She did, and the huge, crazed conception gradually took on meaning.

  “You were our best Plot Director,” she said simply. “You were working on the Early Nuclear Frames. We hadn’t tried to do that period before because there’s so little information. There was a holdup while a few parties went to what’s left of Old Terra—they thought they might dig something up, or at least get the scale right for the big continental battles of the period. So you waited around. Bored, I suppose. And you took on the job of Curator of the Frames of Talisker—you remember this, don’t you?”

  “Parts of it.”

  Not all. The clash of bronze on iron. Gallipots of boiling oil flung from towering basalt battlements; men no bigger than dogs emerging from the soil and seizing the thyroid giants in packs; the things that bred in trees—

  “You remember anything about Plotting? I don’t mean the
bit you did instinctively in the Time-Out blip. I mean the details of things. Like the bit Marvell’s working on. Those furnace vehicles he has bumping one another around the set at 2 or 3G.”

  “No.”

  “And nothing of what the raw material looks like when we get it from comp—the Frames?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But you remember your own experiments with randomness?”

  Spingarn felt confused now. “Your experiments, surely?”

  The girl registered bewilderment. Then her face cleared.

  “Oh! You mean the business with your being tied into the Frames? Oh, that was mine, I suppose. But it was only a logical, local extension of what you’d been doing on a planetary scale. You made yourself into the Probability Man.”

  “Ah.”

  Spingarn wondered about it for a few moments. The girl let him absorb the new information, then she went on:

  “Yes. You got the old Frames working again. At random.”

  Reenactments of old reality. That was what the Frames were. All right, thought Spingarn. So we reenact the past. We get comp to develop the framework of the period and tell us what we need to establish it; then we fill it with Plots. With people, too. He said aloud:

  “We send people into the Frames. We put them through a process that evaluates the kind of life they’d be suitable for, we allow for the little idiosyncrasies of the human psyche, we get the comps to send them where they’ve a reasonable chance of working out a viable life for themselves. There’s nothing random about it!”

  “You found how.”

  Spingarn was still readjusting to the new aspect of the relationship between himself and Ethel that was being shown to him; he had assumed that she was the violently brilliant creator of the Spingarn Random Principle which the snake-man Director had admired through his loathing. But no. It seemed that the man whose body he used had created the math of the probability function after all.

  “I had this feeling that I know how to manipulate the laws of chance in human affairs,” Spingarn said slowly. “First I half-recalled a knowledge of how events functioned—then I thought you were the prime mover in the business—but now I feel nothing at all.”

  Ethel was fascinated by the renaissance of the human being she obviously had worshiped. She stared at him as if she would penetrate into his skull and writhe into his brain in an ecstasy of understanding. Spingarn gestured to her. She went on:

  “You found how to change the comp selective processes. You sent people into the Frames of Talisker completely at random.”

  “The Frames were just a museum piece.” And the answer came pat. “That’s why I used them.”

  “You diverted thousands of people from other Frames. You used those who should have been Written-Off. No one suspected you. They’d have been killed anyway, those you sent in. You put a simple overrider into the major Frames, so that where there was a chance of personal survival, the subject was shot off into Talisker.”

  “Yes.”

  In fact there were hazy memories of a godlike feeling. The sense of intervening as an arbiter of life and death in human affairs: nothing more than the lost echoes of a feeling of such swelling and majestic importance that Spingarn was shocked afresh by the sheer impudence of the other man. No man should be God.

  “You miscalculated, though,” said Ethel.

  “How?”

  Spingarn was still under the spell of the moment of insight into the character of the Plot Director who had made his own rules of the Universe.

  “Cell fusion. You forgot about the despecialized cells.”

  It took Spingarn a minute or two to understand. But the girl’s concise explanation left him in no doubt as to the cosmic frightfulness of what had happened on Talisker. At last he understood the nature of the helpless hate which had blasted at him in the weird mud-filled cavern!

  “You wanted a Frame where there was a random growth of life,” said Ethel quietly. She understood that the other man had not deliberately cultivated things like the snake man. Spingarn shivered at what was to come. “You didn’t properly understand what random chromosome fusion meant.”

  “No!!”

  “I’m afraid, yes,” Ethel said. “Talisker is a number of Frames which themselves intermix at random. Time levels impinging on one another in a way that no math could follow—the various cultures don’t keep to their own boundaries.”

  “Bad.”

  “And their equipment, their way of life, their levels of civilization. That’s all in a state of flux.”

  “I did this?”

  “And the people themselves. They were processed at random. And they developed fused cells at random. You put in a total possibility variable—you left everything to blind chance. So comp left memory-cassettes in their skulls which weren’t even human!”

  “The snake man!”

  Ethel nodded. “The Director of the Frames. He wondered what you were up to. He put himself through your processing. He was brought back the way you saw him.”

  “And there’s a planetful of creatures like that!”

  Ethel was very serious.

  “No one knows. Disaster Control lost six. They wouldn’t send in any more.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  Spingarn remembered something. “Not you. Not you, Ethel! You don’t come!”

  “I do.”

  But among unthinkable things like the writhing monstrosity which had called so eloquently for Spingarn’s death—things like that appalling snake man! Take this girl into that!

  “No!!”

  “It’s one of the conditions. Made by the comps. If you go, I go.”

  “But why!”

  The girl smiled. “I’m part of the Random Principle too.”

  “Comp says so?”

  “Yes. I wrote myself in when I recycled you into the Frames. There’s no what or who or why for you that doesn’t include me.”

  “And there’s no alternative?”

  “Where else could we go?”

  “But into Talisker!”

  Into that!

  “You want to go.” The girl was quite sure about that. “You’re still the devious man you always were.” She looked closer. “But you’ve changed. You are hard now. Hard and cunning—and still with that rage to tinker with events!”

  Spingarn was stirred by the dancing lights in the girl’s eyes; he knew then that she was a match for him. Whatever the coming adventure would be, it would certainly provide that sharing of an exquisite sense of realized mythology that had driven him into the experiments on Talisker.

  “I think you made yourself,” Ethel said, again staring as if she were seeing the whole Spingarn for the first time. “I think you’re probably as much your own creation as the Frames of Talisker!”

  “I wonder,” said Spingarn slowly. He knew he would never properly understand the motives of the man whose body he inhabited. “I wonder if that’s what he did!”

  “Comp made it clear that your chances are only marginal,” the girl went on. “It’s important that you know, they said. It could be worse than what you recall of it—we had nothing at all from the Disaster Control people. They went in and they lost contact at once.”

  “They would,” Spingarn said with sureness. In that wildness, nothing could be safe, nothing could take its customary form. Where, in conventional Frames, a Disaster Control expert would have a series of Time-Out blips set up at strategic points, so that he could withdraw when things got hot, or through which he could summon help, on Talisker there was nothing. Just the man and the tools he took in with him.

  Spingarn thought about what he had heard. The picture was incomplete, but the outlines were clear enough. He had been selected to do a job which he would have elected to do anyway. Someone had to do the job of putting the Frames to rights; he knew that the comps were right about his suitability for the task. And there was a basic and inherent justice about that too. He thought about the strange Random Principle
which his other self had injected into the age-old Frame’s selection procedures.

  Cell fusion? Toying with chromosome patterns?

  The production of creatures like the Director of the Frames?

  Spingarn dismissed the train of thought. There was nothing he could do in the short time left to him; it was clear enough that he had committed a wild folly on a vast scale. Whatever fearful results had come of his dabbling with the modal numbers of the powerful links of the human genetic chain, whatever things had been produced by altering the cell-selection procedures which conditioned the people who were sent into the Frames, nothing could be done now and here.

  The girl was waiting for him to come to a decision. When she saw that he was lost in thought, she prompted him:

  “There was this thing about choosing help. Comp said you and me and anyone else you chose.”

  “Take someone else? Who could I take?”

  “Marvell?”

  “Not Marvell.”

  “He was your friend. He’s a superb Plot Director.”

  “Not Marvell. I don’t trust his judgment. That twentieth-century Plot was wrong!”

  “You’ve been wrong.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Marvell told me about the Siege of Tournai Plot. You asked for Time-Out.”

  “I was wrong?”

  “The suit of armor—we were highly scientific about it. You thought it was an anachronism. It wasn’t. Marvell put it through a statistical test of significance. They could have used an ancient suit of armor specifically for the purpose of fighting at close quarters in that particular context. It was right for close combat conditions. And it worked, didn’t it?”

  Spingarn was momentarily reloading the cumbersome weapon: black-gray powder rammed firmly into its wide barrel; the advance of that blood-streaked figure in the flickering torchlight; the stench and the taste of bile; Hawk’s bellowed warning echoing and reechoing through the underground galleries.