The Probability Man

by Brian Ball

  It was too late.

  The Sergeant’s eyes sought Spingarn’s. Spingarn could not hold that mute look that showed an agony beyond his own. Then the two giants placed the Sergeant’s iron base in the hottest part of the fire.

  Hawk screamed. High, loud, and long.

  He screamed through the babble of disputes, the roarings of encouragement from the watchers, and through Ethel’s shrill pleas for mercy. As his strange appendages began to glow with the heat of the fire, the giants thrust the heavy mass of iron from the platform and into the same roaring flames. Spingarn identified it in a casual, dreamlike way, as a mass of meteorite metal, probably the tribe’s thunder-fetish.

  The rough mass of iron began to glow.

  Hawk’s iron base was dull red.

  The giants watched. Then they moved.

  Grunting with exertion, they pushed the red-hot meteorite from the flames. They dragged Hawk, thinly shrieking, from the fire.

  They raised Hawk up and placed him on the meteorite.

  16

  Spingarn watched in horror as Hawk was fused to the metal.

  Hawk looked back, still conscious. The Sergeant’s bottle-nosed face was black in the evil light of the fires. Soundlessly the man writhed in the grip of the grinning giants. His body strained in a tortured mass of screaming nerves which passed the undiluted agony of the glowing metal through his trunk and to all parts of his body.

  Spingarn thought Hawk would die of shock.

  Then the man gave in to the pain, and he collapsed in an untidy heap of corded muscle. Hawk sagged from the cooling meteorite pedestal like some dying sea creature stranded on a rock. For the moment he would have some relief.

  There was none for Spingarn and the girl.

  “B——llloooooooo——aaaaaa ddd!” bellowed the tribe.

  Even the dying thyroid giant tried to join in the deep baying. Then, like Spingarn, he sagged and lay back, eyes open to the black night sky. Spingarn began to explore the wickerwork cage, knowing instinctively that the ceremony was coming to its unknown but frightful climax.

  “Baaa——looooooooo——ddd!” screamed the giants.

  “No!!!”

  At first Spingarn thought it was his own voice. He wondered if he had lost control of his speech organs, and if he were babbling in fear. It wasn’t Ethel. She was petrified with shock—perhaps she was unconscious—because of what the giants had made of Sergeant Hawk. Then Spingarn caught a hint of movement in the filth and rubbish at the far side of his rough cage. In the stench something stirred. It groaned. The giants increased their bellowing. Some pointed the slender lances toward the three captives, flickering diamond points of sharpness. There was something in the cage. Another captive.

  Spingarn crawled in a haze of pain over the slimy floor of the cage. He saw a hand. Broken, black, and limp. Then the rest of a body. He saw a head projecting from a thin body. Whatever it was had something to tell him:

  “Disaster Control! When they—” the man, for a man it was, cowered back from a lance point thrust through the latticework. A bawled order and the eager young giant outside was pushed back by ponderous elbows. The rest of the giants became quiet. Spingarn tried to understand what he was seeing and hearing.

  Disaster Control?

  An agent here, in this evil place?

  This whispering and gravely wounded wreck, lying in the rubbish of the cage, one of those dynamic agents from Disaster Control? Then Spingarn remembered the words of the Guardian robots, and the warning shrieks of the wolfman at the road. Somehow, this man had managed to remain alive at this critical juncture of events in the Frames of Talisker. And he had a message.

  “Time,” whispered the man. “It’s time. They know a Frame-Shift factor is building up. They come—soon!”

  Blood seeped from his mouth. He let Spingarn see the blood so that they should both know that he was dying.

  “What happens—what do they want us for?”

  But the giants had radiated the answer to his question; everything they had done so far spoke of one inevitable conclusion. In the level eyes of the wrecked agent he read a confirmation. Primitive cultures produced the same pattern of action. Always, at moments of crisis, there was the urge to propitiate.

  To satisfy the local gods.

  “They know there’s a Frame-Shift due.” Spingarn was horrified at the ice in the agent’s dying voice. It was like a message from the coldness of the grave. “I go first”

  He let blood dribble from his mouth, and the watching giants exulted.

  “You know?” asked the man.

  “Yes,” said Spingarn. “They look for the future in our entrails.”

  “Spingarn!” breathed Ethel. “What is it!”

  The giants watched them.

  They were waiting for the moment, and it was not yet.

  They watched in silent glee as Ethel’s diaphanous cloak trembled in pure horror. They saw her peering into the depths of the amphitheater at the masses of human bones. They watched her take in the significance of the raised dais, of the fabric of the gallowslike structure behind the cages, and of the cold promise in their own grotesque faces

  When she began to scream they grinned at Spingarn.

  “Soon,” whispered the torn wreck beside Spingarn “The Frames change soon. When the two moons go down—they know!”

  Spingarn watched the girl slide over the edge of sanity He could do nothing for her.

  “Yes?” The dying man in the cage knew enough “You said when they came!”

  “They gut prisoners just before the Frames move on”

  “The Frames change?”

  “An irregular cycle of change. But they know it’s coming—they have implanted racial memories.” The dying man spat more blood into the filth of the cage’s floor. There was so much to ask him and so little time to learn what he knew. Spingarn let the man speak without burdening him with questions. The only important matter now was to escape from the frightful menace of the gallows which was also an altar, and on which blood would flow when the twin moons sank over the peaks of the far mountains.

  The Disaster Control man talked again under the screen of the giants’ delight in Ethel’s shrieking.

  “The bastard who fixed these Frames put in a random Frame-Shift factor. Soon the giants move on. They try to beat the other tribes to it—” There was a sudden rush of blood.

  Spingarn’s mind raced. Didn’t the agent know he was talking to the man who had reactivated the Frames? He looked closer. The man was in a delirium of pain, but his eyes burned with life and intelligence.

  “—so get to the Key first! Anything, but keep the ghosts away from the Key!”

  Spingarn knew he had missed something. The man had spluttered through his wrecked chest, but the words had been lost.

  “What Key?” Spingarn snapped. “What Key is this?”

  “The bastard that put in the gene-mutation factor!” the man said slowly, enunciating each word with care. His eyes still burned, but it was clear that he was dying. “The bastard that fixed the Frames! He made sure that no one would ever find the Genekey!”

  “Genekey?”

  More echoes from the past sounded in the caves of memory. Genekey! The Key to the random flow of cells! The word came easily to his lips “I put in the Genekey?”

  No! Surely that was wrong?

  Spingarn had no more time to search his eroded memories, for the dying man was trying to reach him. He moved closer, sure that the agent was trying to help him in this crazed and horrifying predicament.

  The dying man tried to clutch at his throat.

  “You!” he muttered. “You! You did this to Talisker—you’re the bastard who wrecked our lives!”

  The agent writhed in fury, striving to summon up his strength for an assault. His hands were dead claws, but they tried to reach Spingarn’s eyes. When he saw that he was finished, he glared at Spingarn and spat out a last message.

  “They’ll gut you!” he croaked. “They�
�ll look into your belly when they’ve torn you open with lances! They’ll tear your lights out to see the future! They’ll throw your carcass on the heap, bastard!” Blood gushed, but he continued. “I’m not the last agent—we put up a network at all the Shift points—but I’ll not tell you how to reach—you’ll die here!”

  He was almost happy as his life ebbed away. The claws sank back.

  Spingarn shuddered. The agent had turned against his own loyalties. The thought of this Key—Genekey?—had obsessed the dying man. Why!

  The two bright moons still twinkled through the sulphurous smoke of the fires. Spingarn looked away from the dead man and saw that the giants were still waiting with increasing impatience; nothing had changed. There was no escape for them.

  “Horace!” he bellowed into the night. “Horace!”

  “Horace?” called back a young giant. “Horace?”

  The others hurriedly pushed him away. The sense of a great religious occasion returned to the fear-filled night.

  Horace wouldn’t come.

  There was the matter of the Frame-Shift factor.

  It had to be altered.

  Spingarn contemplated the corpse.

  Genekey?

  The man had had a mission.

  He had known what the giants waited for.

  He had come to this place with a knowledge of the workings of the Frames of Talisker.

  With knowledge.

  Forearmed.

  Armed.

  Ethel saw the corpse. She was beyond shrieking. She looked from poor Hawk to the dead man, from Spingarn to the twin moons. Then back to the ring of vast grotesques.

  “Armed?” said Spingarn aloud.

  He reached for the corpse.

  17

  Disappointment welled up in Spingarn’s mind as he ripped aside the Disaster Control man’s rags. The Frames were a deadly maze of confused events, a frightful cycle of unknown mysteries. For a moment, he had been given a glimpse of the functioning of one small part of the strange planetary puzzle: the man had spoken of a Genekey; and there had been that half-explanation of an irregular, but still a cycle, of events. The giants were waiting for an expected something to begin to happen—and when it did, they would try to foretell the immediate future in the most primitive of all ways, by looking for portents in the torn body of a sacrificial victim. But how did the giants know! What was the racial memory with which they were implanted! All this spun through Spingarn’s mind as he looked for what must be somewhere among the poor corpse’s rags. A weapon? A piece of Disaster Control equipment—Spingarn dredged memories from a dozen pasts, memories of times when he had himself taken the powerful tools of the twenty-ninth century into one or another of the Frames.

  He felt the eyes of the giants on him. They were a massive blanket of expectant hostility. Soon, the dead man had said. Spingarn’s hands trembled. The corpse was exposed in the red light of the fires: scarred, flayed in parts, with one leg crooked as if it had been set badly after a break. And no weapon. No sign of twenty-ninth century technology. No phaser beam cunningly disguised as a primitive ornament; no warp bomb concealed in the fabric of the rags; no communicator to summon up the little blips available at Disaster Control on normal missions. But there wouldn’t be any here. Not on this terrifying place. Spingarn saw the dead man’s eyes on him still. Hate filled them even in death. The man must have suffered most terribly before he found a last peace in the filthy cage. But he had been preparing a plan—he had something in mind—

  The broken leg. The angle was wrong! Spingarn heaved at what he had to do. The next two minutes were the worst he had ever spent, but the socket at last gave up its secret. The little container lay in the palm of his hand. It must have been the man’s last hope, that before he was murdered by the giants he could saturate the area with a temporary molecular-dispersal field. A forlorn hope, for the man must have known he was near death. The field would last for perhaps ten minutes, however much power had been packed into the little container.

  The giants shuffled ponderous bare feet. Sweat stank appallingly as they radiated a mass excitement; the moons had burst into a display of pyrotechnics as if they too shared in the celebrations. The whole planet seemed agog with tense expectancy, though Spingarn saw that it was the swaying movements of the giants that made the ground heave. He noticed the cold once more. Before he threw the little container into the faces of the giants, he took one last look at his two companions. Ethel was staring at him; Hawk groaned in a dream of torture. The fires roared into new life as a keen wind whipped across the amphitheater, rattling the heaps of bones and freezing the sweat on the enormous bodies of the thryoid giants.

  The container spread its load of time-bending seeds.

  The nearer giants reacted with a heavy speed. They flung huge arms into the air to try to catch the unseen missiles; they began to summon up the first roar of astonishment; and then they were in the grip of the zany dance of the particles. Spingarn watched as the violet haze spread in a ring around the blood-blackened altar. It enveloped the giants, one by one; and, as it did so, they bayed once and succumbed in falling mountains of brawn and bone. The ground shook with their fall. The fires winked out. Then the twin moons showered the scene again with a cartwheeling of thin light, and there was total and absolute darkness. Only the hint of that bursting of violet radiance remained on Spingarn’s retinas, an afterglow of light and pain.

  The giants were unconscious for as long as the field lasted: ten minutes, maybe less, if the gravitational field of the planet could rip the temporary dislocation of energies aside with its slow, enormous power. But for a while the monsters lay in bondage to the field, their nervous systems keyed to the subtle harmonies of the trick of twenty-ninth century technology.

  Spingarn heaved at the wickerwork of the cage. He trod on the dead man’s chest and heard the whistling of air from coagulating lungs. Gnarled branches creaked but they held. Ethel called out:

  “Spingarn! What are you doing—what happened!”

  “Dispersal field—temporary! Can you do anything with your cage?”

  “I can’t see—it’s pitch black! The giants——”

  “Out of it for now—Ethel! Can’t you break the branches?”

  “That thing—that man in the cage! He said we’d all die!”

  “Not if we can get away!”

  “How!”

  “I don’t know! But there’s a new set of events coming along—the Frames change here! If we can get out, away from the giants, we have a chance!”

  “The Frame-Shift factor?”

  “Yes!” snarled Spingarn. “Change the constants and Horace is allowed to help us in this crazy Frame!”

  Spingarn again trod on the body of the Disaster Control man. Again the corpse wheezed.

  “What’s that!” squealed Ethel.

  “Don’t worry about him! Try to find a weak spot so one of us can get out!”

  Spingarn tried branch after branch, searching with torn fingers in the unrelieved blackness. There was no sound from the giants, but Hawk was returning to consciousness.

  “To me, lads!” the Sergeant groaned. “They’ve done me at last, boys! Poor Hawk’s a goner!”

  “That man!” called Ethel. “What you did to him!”

  “Get busy! We haven’t time to worry over a dead man.” Spingarn caught himself becoming near-hysterical. He tried to calm the girl. “He was dying, and now he’s dead. And if we can’t get away, the giants will rip us open to try to forecast the future. Now, will you try to get out of that cage?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “But what about Hawk?”

  “What about Sergeant Hawk!” affirmed Hawk. “Spingarn! I hear you—we’re in the blackness of the Pit and your master’s burned me arse, Spingarn! Help an old soldier, lad! Don’t let the other devils near with their forks and their tails——”

  “Tails!” roared Spingarn. “Tails!”

  He lashed about the cage in an ecstasy of relief, the long hard tail
whipping through the air powerfully; the pain was excruciating, but Spingarn accepted it, almost rejoiced in it as he set the barb to work on the frailer branches. Razor-edged, the barb seemed to have a will of its own as it sought the ropes holding the clumsy framework together.

  “You won’t leave me, lad!”

  “No!” answered Spingarn, wrenching aside the loosened branches.

  “I can’t see, Spingarn!” called Ethel.

  “We need light!”

  “Hawk can do it!”

  Hawk revealed his own predicament in the flash of flint and steel. He nursed a patch of tinder and then illuminated the strange scene with a flaring piece of fuse from his pack.

  “Gawd!” said Hawk. “Gawd, Spingarn, you’re a master devil! And see—I’m an iron monument, strike me if I ain’t! Gawd’s bloody boots, saving the blasphemy in His Majesty’s Domains!” Hawk found the flask he kept in reserve and gurgled at it, still with his eyes on the fallen mountains of flesh. Spingarn dragged Ethel from her cage, careful to seize her by the arms and not by the delicate fabric of her wings. She soon recovered from her cramp and terror.

  “Now what, Spingarn?”

  Spingarn faced the two strange companions of his adventures.

  “You—go,” he told Ethel. “Now.”

  At least she could escape.

  “Now!”

  “No!”

  “You must!”

  “Aye, go lass! Captain Spingarn knows his mind—leave us and get the Frog monkey to help us!”

  “But those—those monsters—they’ll be back in a few minutes!”

  “No!” The girl launched herself into the air above Spingarn and he was left in impotent fury gesticulating and imploring her to go. He turned to the Sergeant and placed his arms about the massive metal mass.

  He could move it. A little. By rocking it in his thick arms and cradling its ragged bulk against the big muscles of his chest, he could disturb its equilibrium, allowing Hawk to move through a small arc. Hawk watched and then passed him the black bottle.

  “Drink, lad. Then leave me. Is it true the beasts arise again soon?” Seeing the confirmation in Spingarn’s groaning activity, he said: “You have to go, lad. Don’t worry about old Hawk. He’ll demolish a few of them—there’s a grenade or two in my pack, lad!”