The Probability Man

by Brian Ball

  “Oh yes,” Spingarn roared back at him. “Bigger and better bombs than any you know of, Sergeant! Steady! The ship’s nearly down!”

  The earth rushed to meet them, though it was not the yellow sand they had swayed over for so long.

  25

  The surface of the planet was a maniacal patchwork of fragmented Frames. The gondola had come to rest high on a cliff, with the silken balloon gradually shredding away as it tore itself into pieces against spikelike projections on the cliff-face; at the base of the cliff was a section of metaled road with five or six lumbering horse-drawn vehicles still noisily grating along; above them, Spingarn saw, was a mosaic of dead trees and monolithic stone structures, which threatened to free themselves from their rock and scree of the cliff and hurtle down upon the stranded voyagers; the storm which had begun to build up was now beginning to break. Yellow lightning sprang across a violet sky, illuminating more of the crazed landscape-builder’s nightmare. Below, the horses were the first to see that the road ended abruptly: they neighed their uneasiness, while drivers shook their heads and almost fell to the road. The desert quite suddenly poured back into the terrain. Like a blanket of fog, it slid around the edges of the metaled road and, grain by grain, silted up the many fetid streams which had been there before. Spingarn and his companions cowered into the seeming safety of the gondola. Thunder shook the cliff, and the fragile basket shook in its turn. A shower of rock fragments splattered over Hawk.

  “The imps are upon us!” bellowed the Sergeant. “The flying devils with the quarrels!”

  Another bolt smashed into the rock, and Spingarn saw that the Sergeant was right; a flight of winged dwarfs was hovering in the swirling rain, seemingly impervious to the stinging power of the storm; Ethel yelled and launched herself forward as the strange creatures ranged themselves in arrowhead formation and swam through the thick air.

  “Horace!” bawled Spingarn.

  “Sir!”

  Spingarn pushed the surprisingly light frame of the automaton in front of Hawk and himself, and the impact of half a dozen well-aimed bolts, fired from small but powerful crossbows, hurled both robot and the humans against the rear of the gondola; it began to slither as a violent blast of thunder spoiled the aim of a further flight of transmogrified humans. Far below, the horses shrieked their amazement, while their masters fled across the wet sands. Then Spingarn and Hawk felt the gondola moving down the cliff-face.

  “Horace!” called Spingarn. “Stop us!”

  The craft stopped almost on the instant. Horace had reached out with two long, telescoped appendages, and anchored the falling and now wrecked gondola to the cliff-face. Rain smashed into their upturned faces as Hawk and Spingarn tried to see what was happening in the shattered Frames around them; events were happening at such a fantastic rate that neither had properly recovered his wits. It seemed that the robot too was in some form of electronic trance as it hung between the remains of the airship and the cliff.

  “Horace, what do we do!” bawled Spingarn. “Probabilities here, you befurred automaton! What’s happening!”

  A vast bawling from below told him that another group of the warped creatures had arrived on the scene; the booming noises could only come from the frightful thyroid giants which they had left spread over the wide yellow desert in their broken airships. Spingarn took in the information that there was another planetary upheaval too: without any warning whatsoever, a black and gold structure had reared itself up in the storm. He saw a glint of crystalline movement and realized that here, in the Frames of Talisker, was a recreation of the civilization which had taken the Crystalline Worlds of Sector Wu 992 as its model. He was sure that he had not come across this particular Frame before. He wondered briefly how its incredible structure had been contrived; how the men who had built these first, experimental Frames had known how to put together the delicate and elaborate tracery of forces which—so theory ran—keyed the minds of inhabitants into the very fabric of the Frame’s constituent matter, so that men and suns, women and stars, their children and planets, were at one. The building of such an elaborate Frame, even though it was only a miniature model of the original, must have absorbed the early Frame-makers for generations. And it was here, on this planet, along with the Stone Age Frame, the grotesque culture of the thyroid giants who worshiped an iron fetish, the flying creatures which ranged the skies armed with deadly crossbows, the men who drove heavy draft horses across well-metaled roads, and the other fragments of reenacted lives which Spingarn sensed rather than saw in this totally broken scene. Only the ultimate enemy was missing.

  The Alien’s failed experiment had not shown up yet.

  As Horace burbled in that particularly infuriating way of robots of almost the highest grade, Spingarn saw that his companions were watching for the appearance of the ghosts too. They had accepted the overwhelming strangeness of the amazing scenes around them. It was the manufactured alien horrors they feared.

  The giants were howling at the eerie fabric of the Crystalline Worlds fragment; they bayed with panic as the tiny universe of people and planets spun before them. One flung a lance straight into the heart of a miniature sunburst; it was a flickering of radiance for a moment, and then a tongue of fire spat back at the giant; he dispersed, incinerated. The gobbet of white fire returned, to wheel and spin in a dance that was old when the Galaxy was spawned from cosmic matter. Then the archers spotted the giants. It seemed they were old enemies, for a furious contest began, with the arrowhead formations of malevolent dwarfs hurtling across the black sky to the echoing roars of thunder and a violent back cloth of sheet lightning. More creatures emerged from stranger Frames, though only Horace was aware of them. It was a strain on his equipment to plot the terrifyingly complex spatial situation. More Frames ground together, and more groups of transformed human beings moved into the boiling arena which the Alien had called into being. Horace had to begin again and again from scratch as fresh ingredients were flung into the tempestuous living brew. And he had to keep before him his chief aim: the eradication of the ghastly things which had met them on their arrival in the Frames of Talisker.

  “Horace!” said Spingarn impatiently. “Get on with it! What’s happening down there!”

  “The blockhouse!” exclaimed Ethel. “It’s broken free from the ground!”

  “I’ll be damned,” agreed Hawk. “It has!”

  “You wanted the best guess, sir,” Horace said. “All factors point to one conclusion.”

  Spingarn was ahead of Horace’s electronic calculations; he had been aware of a hint of a memory from that earlier life that the full horrific flowering of the dismembered Frames would be centered on such a matrix.

  “The Genekey, sir!”

  “Yes, Horace?”

  “That is the Genekey installation, sir.”

  The tribes below were pouring forward, some winging in on bright yellow gliders, some smashing through the remnants of equatorial jungle which had housed them in the Frames, some burrowing upward through the crust of the ancient planet: all thrusting forward toward the monstrous blockhouse, which was their goal.

  “Yes, sir. The Alien has activated their racial memories, those which were implanted into them when they were sent into Talisker. They know where the Genekey is. And they know what it can do.”

  “It isn’t a guess any longer, is it, Spingarn?” said Ethel.

  “No,” said Hawk. “Captain, is it?”

  “That’s where we have to be,” Spingarn said. “But where are the Alien’s creatures? Where are the—the ghosts!”

  Hawk looked about him, his purple face uneasy. “Not far away, Captain.”

  “Then look to the arms, Sergeant!”

  Spingarn turned to Horace:

  “Get us down there! Quick!”

  “Sir!”

  Within seconds, the robot had fashioned one of those curious basketwork affairs that had swayed them down to the surface of the planet from the strange road. Horace spread unseen wings of force
-fields and lowered them down. Ethel followed warily, watching the bitter fight between the thyroid giants and the winged archers.

  “Drop us at the base of the Crystalline fragment,” ordered Spingarn. “Look—between the outer wall of the blockhouse and that piece of road!”

  As they were winched downward, things pointed to this new threat joining the incredible turmoil. But most of the hundreds of variegated beings were totally absorbed in trying to rip apart the monumental structure of white stone which had shaken free of the ground. They reached upward holding bronze picks, bone-tipped spears, bare chunks of rock, thermic lances, and zittering force-guns; the white stone quivered and shattered under the multiple shock. But the central structure, which had somehow grown to ten times its original size, remained untouched. It seemed to grow upward faster than its extremities were broken into rubble.

  Spingarn leaped aside as Hawk called a warning; he was in time to see two muddied heads disappearing into a pool of stagnant water. There were frightful things—creatures like the Director—which snapped with wide jaws as they emerged from black mud and slimy earth.

  Something spun from the vast shimmering structure near them, a sunburst of radiance. It launched itself against the blockhouse, blistering and boiling into the flank of that enigmatic structure, a sentient and furious living star. The blockhouse began to sway. The fighting among the tribes appeared to have ceased, for the giants were battering at the white fort with an unsurpassable energy; the dwarfs tore at the big blocks of stone, hovering in the howling gale like so many demons from the Pit in some elemental task of destruction. Creatures slunk from fetid jungles which impinged on the strange area, and, seeing the building housing the Genekey, leaped out with screams of fulfillment. Ethel cowered beside the robust form of Sergeant Hawk, appalled at the uncanny violence of the scene.

  “What do we do!” she shuddered. “What can we do! It’s all so—so mad! It’s not real, Spingarn—not all this noise and rage! And those things, Spingarn! How could they live at all! How could anything like this be!”

  Hawk was phlegmatic. He had accepted his part in the zany and horrific situation; he trusted Spingarn, and he was anxious to come to the part which he enjoyed. He grunted apologetically and took Spingarn’s arm:

  “Begging your pardon, Captain—it’s me legs. If the Frog here could work on them?”

  “Do it,” Spingarn said. “And arm the Sergeant.”

  Ethel watched as Horace became a swift cyclone of robotic efficiency. The automaton drew from its capacious recesses the fire power on which Spingarn had been counting. It was an impressive sight. And, as Hawk fondled the unfamiliar contours of a phaser’s functional controls, Horace directed a series of squirts of energy at the remains of Hawk’s iron appendage. A rough outline of what could only be a traction motor took place. Soon afterward, the robot expressed its satisfaction.

  “I couldn’t make it perfect in the time, sir, but the Sergeant will be able to direct his own motions through a series of directional beamers implanted in his skin. Is that comfortable, Sergeant?”

  Hawk was already wheeling about the sheltered place which was the only calm retreat in the frenzy of the Frames. He hefted the weapon and found it to his liking.

  “A well-balanced piece, Captain—not bad for the Frogs,” he admitted. “You’re a handy monkey,” he told Horace.

  “Wave bombs, too,” said Spingarn to the robot.

  “Wave bombs, sir?”

  Spingarn shrugged. He knew, along with Ethel and the robot, that the effects of uncontrolled wave bomb blasts were grim. It was a weapon which only the most extreme emergencies could justify.

  “We’ll need them. Prepare to launch.”

  Ethel put up an objection:

  “You’re going to use them against the tribes?” she asked.

  “No,” said Horace at once. “There are limitations, as you know. I can’t operate against humans.”

  “No,” Spingarn said. “You won’t be asked to, Horace.”

  “The ghosts?” said Ethel. “Not them?”

  “They’ll come,” Spingarn said quietly. “They’ll come.”

  A thin howling broke out at the perimeter of the strange jumble of fragmented Frames. It keened and shrieked both a warning and a threat. The voyagers looked at one another, recognizing in one another’s eyes the same fear that had made them leap for the hanging road only a few hours before. Ethel licked her lips and turned her mouth to the sweeping rain; Spingarn reached for his phaser; Hawk was sighting the lacy weapon in his gnarled, reddened hands toward the source of the noise. Horace was in a trance of calculation.

  It was at that moment that another fragment of pure incandescence from the tiny living cosmos of the Crystalline Worlds Frame shattered the structure of the blockhouse.

  The white building sprang apart.

  Molten rock flooded over a screaming crowd of snake-headed things. A score of winged dwarfs shot iron bolts into the sky as they burned. Hundreds of yelling things that had once been men and women were flung to the ground, limbs broken by flying rocks. But more pressed over their bodies to catch a glimpse of the mysterious key.

  Spingarn saw it just after the ghosts manifested themselves.

  He, the transmogrified creatures of the Frames of Talisker, and the strange Alien experiment—the ghosts—saw what the Genekey was.

  A living machine.

  A glittering tracery of creation, power, and life.

  It was what the Alien had built, with that other Spingarn.

  It was what the Alien had promised Spingarn and his two human companions if they kept to the pact.

  The vast design radiated a hypnotic presence. Within its center, a design for transmuting matter writhed and whorled in a delicate and utterly powerful radiance. Spingarn and the other watchers gasped in wonder at the subtlety of that fantastic splendor.

  They saw how genes were built up into chains.

  They watched human lives flower and burst, to be recast in a dozen forms. They watched the strange dance of molecules as they flailed themselves into patterns of life.

  For seconds, all the watchers knew what the Genekey could do for them. Then lightning showered again across the sky, picking off, here and there, a tree or an outcrop of rock or a man with his eyes frozen by the majesty of the Genekey.

  Still held by that sight, Spingarn wondered again at the other man he had been and how that other Spingarn had made his pact with the Alien. Together, human and Alien intelligence had forged the Genekey: designer, architect, creator—both of them! The Genekey reeked of Alien, but it was for humans to use. Spingarn could see how a more or less human frame could slot into there; how the genes could be transmuted there; how a new pattern could emerge; how a former shape could be built into the harmonies of the genes. Then he saw that the ghosts were calculating too.

  A wall of bulbous grotesques bubbled in awe and ecstasy. Grotesque mouths keened softly, dripping slime and slavering over the sight of the majestic Genekey.

  A thunderclap boomed hollowly among the tribes.

  It was enough to bring the watchers back to a sense of the present. As its sullen echoes flung themselves from rock to rock, the ghosts shrieked their intention: the Genekey was theirs!

  The tribes turned to face what they knew to be the ultimate enemy. Some vague but bitter sense of dread moved them. An echo of early racial encounters with other fearful monsters stirred in their bones. Spingarn felt it too. Hawk’s bottle-nosed face was drawn and dangerous. Ethel’s wide-set eyes stared in grim rage at the ghosts.

  Intuitively, the humans—whatever fearful form they had taken—recognized the presence of the last and worst of all antagonists. The ghosts.

  That sullen burst of thunder still shook their limbs, stirring a million years of inherited danger signals. It coalesced the warring tribes. The battles of Talisker were forgotten.

  There was only one enemy left.

  Spingarn drew strength from the human grotesques around him. With their
pitiful weapons they were ready to face the awesome things the Alien had cast off in a moment of experiment. Things of nightmare, gruesome sense-eating monsters from ancient myth, they stank of the charnel house and the grave.

  Horace moved as Spingarn found the strength to whisper.

  “The trigger mechanisms, Horace.”

  “Sir,” Horace answered in a strangulated whine. “Sir.”

  He passed the firing mechanisms without further comment.

  Spingarn caught Ethel’s eye. She was looking with a face set in granite lines at the wall of shaking Alien horror. He recalled the words of the Guardians. Ethel would find her function in his probability future.

  Now, she had.

  Only she could release the wave bombs at the one single instant of time when the ghosts moved forward.

  He passed the trigger mechanism to her.

  “Ethel. You have to take them.” He looked up into the black sky. Lightning flashed back at him, searing his eyeballs. “You have to do this, Ethel. Get above them and range Horace in. When they bunch, fire.”

  Gray-white bulbous shapes flooded down the cliff-face.

  They swam toward the fearful but determined human beings like the approach of doom. Spingarn was shivering uncontrollably, and Hawk put a hand to his shoulder.

  “You see, Hawk! They like this! They know they’ll use us! They’ll rip our brains out and go through the Genekey!” He was shouting, but the thunder drowned his voice; the ghosts—the things quarried from human brain-lobes and Alien detritus—screamed their rage and joy. “We’re not able to stop them, Hawk—no!!”

  Hawk pointed to either side of them, where the relics of an act of criminal folly waited. Snake heads were still; evil yellow eyes glowering from devil faces waited with deadly patience; the survivors of the contest between the thyroid giants and the winged dwarfs were gripping antique weapons; the canopies of the wagons which had ground along the road were hauled back, and Spingarn saw, to his amazement, a battery of breech-loading cannon. Ethel hovered above, a diaphanous thing wavering about in the huge gusts of air. Rain spewed down on them all.