The Probability Man

by Brian Ball

  Ethel gasped. She knew now what threatened the entire structure of the Frames.

  “Experiment! This is an experiment—these mad Frames! Here! You mean it wasn’t just your idea, Spingarn, to reactivate the Frames of Talisker—it isn’t your experiment!”

  “Not mine alone,” said Spingarn.

  “And Horace is saying that—the Alien!—might want to try the same thing out on another planet!”

  “A strong probability,” agreed Horace. “Isn’t it, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Spingarn. He pointed upward into the bright blue sky. “The Alien might want to use the entire structure of the Frames.”

  “But what for?”

  “That,” said Spingarn, “we don’t know yet.”

  “But you—you said you were the one who wanted to try out your Random Principle on Talisker!” Ethel regarded Spingarn with horror. “And now you say it was the Alien’s idea!”

  Spingarn had tried to solve this one himself. Nothing had come to the surface from that eroded personality which had grinned sourly through the mists of his mind. It was a problem that he had almost driven himself to distraction over before he had finally given it up.

  “My idea. Yes. And the Alien’s, too.”

  Now Ethel understood completely.

  “You found the Alien—here!”

  “I must have done.”

  “And together you planned this!”

  Spingarn wondered why there was no sudden burden of guilt; he could feel none. It was as though he were washed clean of that errant and brilliant man’s crimes.

  “Yes,” he said. “I must have found the Alien and worked with it. From the Alien, the idea. From me, the facilities of the Frames.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Spingarn.

  Hawk stared at him. The Sergeant was in a limbo of disbelief. He was neither a man of the twenty-ninth century, nor a competent Sergeant of Pioneers from the eighteenth. He had no mechanism to bridge the two opposing poles of simplicity and utter sophistication.

  “Well, Captain—it’s this, isn’t it? This lump of metal?”

  “That,” said Spingarn. “And the Genekey.”

  Ethel was lost in confusion and horror:

  “The Genekey? Didn’t that dying man say something about a Genekey?”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Horace. “How incredibly bright of you to get into the same cage as that poor man!”

  “The wretch we saw in the cage?” declared Hawk. “What did he tell you?”

  Spingarn’s eyes focused on the aberrant appendages of his companions; he was trying to estimate the reasoning behind the unknown entity’s actions. “I think,” he said at last, “that the Alien can reverse these physical changes. That’s what the Disaster Control agent meant. There has to be a goal for the various tribes in the Frames here. They have to have something to strive for. So, the Genekey. The key to unlock the chains of chromosomes. The way back.”

  “Legs,” said Hawk. “I’ll be a whole Pioneer again!”

  “No,” said Ethel. “I’ll keep what I’ve got.”

  Spingarn shrugged. “It may not affect us. But we have to go through the motions. The Alien wants us to chase the Genekey.”

  “And this?”

  Hawk tapped the meteorite.

  “Open it,” said Spingarn.

  Ethel caught his arm:

  “Before you do, tell me one more thing.”

  “If I can.”

  “Why us? You, I understand. You’re the start of all this—you found the Alien. I can believe it, now that you tell me, even though I don’t know what it really means. I can see why you’re needed here on Talisker. And, in a way, I know I’m part of your involvement. But Hawk—and Horace?”

  Hawk grumbled as he relit his pipe:

  “Needed an old soldier, eh, Spingarn! Wanted Hawk to do your mining and help you fight the Frog!”

  “In a way, Sergeant,” said Spingarn. To Ethel, he said, “I’d guess you’re needed because you too were in it at the beginning—you helped me escape. You helped set up Talisker as it is now. But Hawk? And Horace?” Spingarn looked from the bottle-nosed face and then to the robot’s bland features. “I needed someone I could trust. There’s no one more resolute than the Sergeant. And Horace is utterly trustworthy when it comes to evaluating a situation. But why choose them?” Spingarn grinned. “Call it my flair for adapting. They’ve succeeded, haven’t they?”

  “Aye,” said Hawk. “And when you’ve finished talking me over, maybe you’d look to me pedestal. D’you see, Captain Devil or Private Spingarn or whoever you are, there’s a crack running along this side. Now, do I take my chisel and try to find what’s in the thing?”

  “Do that,” said Spingarn.

  They were acclimatized to the gentle swaying of the gondola; the sun was high and they had taken off most of their ragged clothes; the red-furred robot had thoughtfully begun to emit a cooling blast of air from one of its multiple engines. It was the heat-scarred meteorite that made the three humans feel cold. Sergeant Hawk bent to look at the blackened mass.

  “You see, Captain?”

  He was right. The action of heat had found a slight flaw in the metal. There was a bright gash of clean iron to where a fragment of a grenade had smashed against Hawk’s pedestal.

  “No,” said Hawk, gasping. “I can’t get to it. You use the tools,” he told Spingarn.

  Spingarn hefted the steel chisel and the small, heavy hammer which were part of the contents of Hawk’s capacious knapsack. His hand trembled for a moment, but when he swung the hammer it was steady enough.

  “Steady!” bellowed Hawk, the shock sending a memory of pure pain through his strange body. “Ah, go on, Captain!”

  He gritted his teeth and Spingarn swung again. Hard and true. The chisel bit and the meteorite was in two.

  The day grew black.

  22

  Three blobs of the quintessence of blackness hovered in the space around the gondola, blotting out the daylight and destroying sight and sound. They were three pits of emptiness in the unclouded sky, swallowing it up and discharging a raging hollow toward the terrified occupants of the airship. Spingarn was aware that the Frames were wheeling about him once more, that there was a need for instant action, that there was desperate and horrible danger in the immediate future; but like the others he could do no more than try to ward off the huge blast of alien that surrounded him. It was worse than anything he had ever known. Comparisons with the distilled terror of the cell-fusion operation were meaningless, for they were a part of chemical and electrical changes; this thing that raged for understanding was a screaming attack on the soul. The others were gasping for breath to scream and bawl their undying horror.

  Spingarn’s hands covered his eyes, like a child in torment.

  The hovering blobs raged on.

  They became a clamorous universe of insistent demands.

  Spingarn acknowledged the things, the thing, the entity, the Alien. It bit into his mind.

  Spingarn recognized his own identity in the thing’s grinding demands. He knew that a piece of himself—of the man he had once been—had been absorbed, intact, within the structure of this alien intelligence. There was a twisted irony in the shape that swam through and through the blankness; the other man’s ghost seemed to shout a warning and a jeering yell, and then the flicker of identity was whirled away and only the intolerable nightmare of alien was left!

  “What do you want?”

  “What!!”

  Spingarn breathed, then cried the question, and the words themselves floated in the emptiness, stark chunks of symbolism in a cosmos of bewildered—the Alien bewildered!!—rage to know.

  “I don’t know you!!” Spingarn tried to yell at the heaving thing that screamed around the corners of his skull. “I’m not the one who was here before! NO!!!”

  He felt the delicate threads of nerves in lobe after lobe of his brain ripped apart by the
searing cold of the Alien; each chain of molecules was splintered and shattered as it sought for the man who had helped to reactivate the Frames of Talisker.

  “How do I talk to you!!” Spingarn said, his head a block of torn pain. “How!!”

  The words again hung in that blankness which had sealed the voyagers off from the brightness of day. And then the words became minor universes in themselves, each one shading off into everything that the word could possibly relate to: “I” was a universe of Spingarns, a whole panoramic spectacle of Spingarns tossing and swaying in a tiny ship on a vast ocean; Spingarns—trails of them—burrowing into the ground below Tournai—Spingarns watching vast steam engines roll forward at one another like embattled lobsters; Spingarns making love and awash in a cosmos of sexuality; and other, stranger men who might have related to this earlier Spingarn. Excitable men who delved into the fastness of the Frames of Talisker on the trail of an ancient hint of Alien. Spingarns who stared popeyed in wonder at the core of the planet, where a tendril of life still glowed after scores of millions of years had passed since it took refuge—or was imprisoned—or hid!—from other implacable creatures of its own kind!

  And “Talk.” Talk was another violent blaze of semantic contortions. It was mouths a hundred miles across agape with one word said slowly a million times until the long, huge message was engraved onto the lips; it was a flash of forked lightning scouring some cosmic brain with a shock of insight. It was a score of the normal representations of communication.

  “Talk!” swam before Spingarn’s mind. “Talk, if you want to.”

  Message.

  The thing had a message.

  For him.

  For Spingarn.

  “Listen first,” pleaded Spingarn, ignoring the torment in his brain, ignoring too the terrors that lay just below the level of consciousness in his mind. He fought down the wild surges of panic which told him to run, physically or mentally, from the presence of the pits of emptiness in which the Alien raged. “Listen?”

  Again the word was a symbol. A chunk of living chains of ideas. The Alien was still.

  “I am not the one you knew!”

  Spingarn found he could project the idea against the backcloth of the Alien’s curiosity. The words hovered and wound themselves into one another. A mile-high Spingarn swam in the blackness of an emptiness that was emptier than space before the act of creation; it was so terrifyingly alone that Spingarn gasped at the remoteness of it.

  The Alien deleted that Spingarn and substituted another.

  It was the earlier persona, that of the brilliant Plot Director. A slimmer version of Spingarn, less muscular, more astute. A mocking and eager man.

  “That’s him,” said Spingarn, recognizing himself.

  The process grew familiar as he began the low slow job of communicating with the fearful thing from the iron fetish. It stayed, an immensely patient presence, one which had stayed somnolent but alive throughout millions of years in the recesses of the ancient planet. It stayed and it listened. Slowly, it brought responses.

  The emptiness took on fresh images.

  There was that Plot Director and a sudden plunge through a long-hidden fault in the crust of the planet. A fault so old that vast layers of strata had sealed it from the observation of the humans who had come centuries before Spingarn’s time to build the first of the Frames. A fault which had been revealed through an almost insignificant shifting of those layers. One that the other Spingarn had become aware of casually through the monitors of the old barriers which separated the Frames from one another.

  “He found you,” said Spingarn.

  The meeting blazed in the emptiness.

  That other man, the one who had plunged into the secrecy and safety of the Frames rather than admit his faults and face the consequences of his crimes, met the Alien. Still with that wry, amused smile. Still poised lightly on the balls of his feet, ready with a photon-bomb projector in one hand and a mind beamer in the other. Ready to talk or fight.

  It seemed that the Alien had talked.

  Yes, they had matters to discuss. The young Spingarn was interested in whatever the Alien touched on. The difficulty was that the Alien was so totally confused as to its own role that its thoughts blistered the mind beamer with their powerful but completely fragmented nature.

  They would have killed the incautious human if the beamer had not shattered in his hand.

  So, the other man had come back later with a massive array of sophisticated hardware; he had gouged banks of communicators from the old Frames of Talisker and recircuited them so that they could reach through to the Alien and his searing mind. That was the way it had happened.

  “That’s how it happened,” Spingarn said.

  The Alien expressed a howl of agreement that rang around the emptiness, sweeping Spingarn’s mind into another burst of confused bewilderment. It passed.

  “You needed one another,” Spingarn enunciated.

  The Alien and that fiendish intellect!

  Two products, of different Universes, both cunning, shrewd, dominant, and malicious! Two totally diverse things somehow come together to a mutual devilment!

  Whirlpools of deities from a score of backgrounds writhed in the emptiness. Ten thousand Names of God hung like vast globules of holiness in that black space; they each solemnly dissolved into the constituent semantic patterns of association which had so shocked Spingarn before. They were symbols of gods and every last one of their own followers; they were bellowing, striding, bowing, grinning, blessing, cursing, blasting, creating and destroying deities who smiled at their own temples and chewed on the souls of their followers.

  “No,” said Spingarn, and the scene was washed clean.

  He understood now.

  You let the word slide out, and the Alien battened on to it and scanned it with the love of a maniacal lexicographer; it ripped the total meaning of the word and showed what it could do. Spingarn braced himself for the chorus of negation that would follow his breathing of the word “No.” It came.

  The semantic nightmare sprang into being, and the Alien waited for Spingarn to supply the next chunk of knowledge for it to translate into its own peculiar life. Spingarn found himself holding his breath, suppressing the expletives that almost forced themselves into his mind and then through his lips; he held down curses and queries. He attempted desperately to form the one vital question into the least number of words. He wanted the one single burst of insight that could make final sense of the incredible maelstrom of fragments that were the Frames of Talisker.

  “You and him,” began Spingarn, his whole body contorted with the efforts of restraining the unnecessary words, “you made the Random Principle? You made the Frame-Shift factors?”

  Answer.

  Pride, delight, a gouging shock of self-doubt.

  The Alien was a conscious creator. It had experienced a welter of pride in its own abilities; it had watched the deserted Frames become reactivated. And, yes, it had worked hand in hand with the Plot Director who had released it from a bondage of eons. But it wasn’t too happy with the results. They hadn’t led anywhere!

  The thing raged at Spingarn.

  You!!!!

  You said it would find the way!

  The pit of blackness was suffused with fire and rage; Spingarn found himself shuddering at the violence of the Alien’s childlike hatred. He crept around the gondola over the senseless bodies of his companions, looking for human warmth and comfort. A place to hide! To get away from the shock and the rage—to escape if only for a few seconds from that frightful questioning.

  “Not me!” roared back Spingarn, summoning the last of his strength. “It was the other persona!”

  And the words conquered the flow of hate and terror, of pain, disappointment and loss. They soared up like so many explosions into the pit which the Alien used as his outer self; the words burst and flowered into life.

  Spingarn reared up and was deleted.

  The other man appeared, a
brief ghost of a man, a subdued suppressed and almost totally dissipated thing in two dimensions and with blurred edges. “You have to deal with me!” bawled Spingarn into the pit. “With me!!!”

  Spingarn?

  The Alien considered it.

  “SPINGARN!!” bawled Spingarn again and again.

  The Alien accepted it.

  The thing from another universe recognized him.

  “You are the Probability Man,” it offered.

  “Yes!”

  Another message hung in the strange emptiness: a proposition. The Alien wanted an agreement.

  Work in the Random Principle; adjust yourself to Frame-Shift factors; operate in a random sequence of events!

  “Yes,” said Spingarn. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!!” he bawled. “Agreed!”

  23

  The blackness was clearing and Spingarn heard the animal noises of his distraught companions. He shook his head clear of the fearful communication from the thing that belonged to no part of the Universe. He felt the shock and the pain swilling away through his body, and a cold, clear determination hardening inside him. He was ready to act.

  Ethel was clutching him by the shoulder, her ample breasts thrust hard against his chest; Hawk had gripped the robot’s arms in his distress; and Horace was repeating over and over the fragments of the words that had been on Spingarn’s lips as he came free of the nightmare:

  “Time-Out! Time-Out! Time-Out! Hold back the Frames—get me out!!!!”

  Spingarn heard Horace’s hysterical tones; he realized they reflected his own. And he knew now that he and the Alien had suffered the same kind of experience.

  When he had yelled in exquisite despair from the red mud of Tournai—when the sputtering fuse was upon him and the bright, blood-reeking sword was nearing—when he had screamed to be released from the Primitive Frame—how long ago?—he had been through the same kind of experience as the Alien; for the Alien too had been trying to call Time-Out!

  “Out! I want out!” bellowed Hawk in Spingarn’s ear.

  He also had heard the Alien and was echoing its terrified call! The Sergeant of Pioneers saw Spingarn and Ethel and bellowed the demand again. Then he realized that it was not his own request that he was calling.