by Brian Ball
“Hee-hee!” fluted the thing that slithered.
They saw the evil shape in the semidarkness. It rose from the yellow, radiant mud. “Welcome back, my dear Spingarn! What a transformation for you!”
The light increased and the thing reared up.
The terrible thing was that it smiled.
28
Spingarn saw the metallic sheen of hairlike tendrils. He heard his companions call out in horror. Then he looked closely at the inhuman face on the snake’s head.
He remembered something the aide had said. The frightful thing in the mud had just been fed. Almost paralyzed by the implications of that errant thought, he stared at the monster’s mouth.
Fresh blood glistened.
There was a runnel of bright red blood from its mouth.
“So good to see you back safely, Spingarn! What a little band of heroes you’ve all been—don’t be modest now! I’ve had the reports from comp and you’ve been wonderful! Such an enterprising Sergeant of Pioneers!”
Hawk grimaced and cleared his throat. He would have spoken if he could have produced sounds from a throat dry in absolute fright.
“Such a resourceful and loyal lady assistant!”
Ethel had closed her eyes tightly against the thing that leered at her. She opened them to see the Director beginning to unwind its coils and rear up out of the stinking yellow mud.
“And how well our ex-Umpire served you! What a clever automaton it was! So correct—so well-adjusted!”
Horace withdrew into the robotic equivalent of a catatonic trance. It said nothing, for its faculties were blanked off.
“And now you want your various rewards!” smiled the human mouth. “Galactic Orders of Merit for all! Now!”
Overhead, robotic attendants beamed the glowing insignia down and each one of the party was invested with the gaudy decoration.
“The Freedom of the Frames for you all! Not you, of course, robot! You get the usual overhaul.” The head bent closer to the shrinking and appalled party. “You’ve succeeded where the best of my Disaster Control agents either died or disappeared! That deserves the highest rewards! Doesn’t it?”
Spingarn sensed the underlying hostility in the Director’s sibilant words; the apparent joviality concealed the secret and undying hatred of Spingarn and what he had done.
“It does,” he said firmly. “My woman and I wish to resume our lives in the context of the twenty-ninth century. The Sergeant accepts the Freedom of the Frames.”
“Aye, Captain,” said Hawk unsurely. He looked straight at the smiling snake’s head. “To be sure, sir. A war or two. It’s not too much to ask for an old soldier?”
“Not at all, Sergeant!” the evil head whispered. “Yours it shall be! Attend to it!” the soft voice said. There was a hint of chilled iron in its murmurings. “Now.”
Again there was a slight flurry of movement in the roof of the strange vault.
“I don’t believe it,” said Ethel into Spingarn’s ear. “You’re right! It’s too easy!”
“Then that’s all?” asked Spingarn uneasily.
The thing in the mud stared at him for a few seconds.
“Not quite, Spingarn.” It looked from one to another of the three humans. “Tell me why you destroyed the Genekey.” There was so much deadly loathing in the evil voice that Spingarn found himself attempting to move back a step or two to escape its violence. Hawk backed into Horace, confused. “Yes, Spingarn. Explain.”
And then Spingarn knew what had made him suspicious of the ease with which events had worked themselves out; there had been such a flood of relief at the escape from the grim planet that none of them had asked with the Director now demanded. Why should the Genekey have to be destroyed!
“It was a pact,” Spingarn began, his own doubts enabling him to withstand the blast of hostility from the thing before him. “The Alien empowered me to destroy his own creation in return for making the planet—and our Galaxy—safe from the ghosts.” There was a flaw, and they all saw it now.
“With these ghosts obliterated, Spingarn,” said the Director, “why destroy the Genekey?”
“Yes,” said Ethel, speaking for the first time. “Why?”
The Director unwound more coils, displaying a patterned green and brown body. “Yes, Spingarn?”
The answer was inevitable. Horace provided it.
“The Alien wishes to continue his observations, sir,” Horace said in a small, respectful voice. “In a random situation. In the Frames of Talisker.”
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “It didn’t want to be left alone.”
“It won’t,” said the Director. “No, Spingarn, it won’t!”
Spingarn recalled the encounter with the Alien.
He remembered that it belonged to an era so ancient that whole stellar organisms had bloomed and burst while it lay in its urn.
“Why should it be left alone, Spingarn?” hissed the Director. “Its own time is that of a hundred million years ago!”
“Approximately,” put in Horace. Spingarn saw that the robot was recovering its wits.
The Director continued to hold Spingarn and Ethel in its unwinking stare. “You didn’t consider that with the Genekey you could have had the random despecialized cells transforms reversed? You didn’t think of returning with the Genekey?” There was an air of barely restrained rage in the hissing tones that made Spingarn search the roof for the presence of robotic wardens. The Director’s wavering head came closer still, the penetrating gaze still holding them. “You didn’t consider, Spingarn, that comp had worked out that there were Alien factors in the Probability Functions of the Frames of Talisker even before I let you proceed? You weren’t aware of comp’s assessment that there might be such a structure as the Genekey as an Uncertainty Factor on the planet?”
Spingarn eyed the thing before him dispassionately.
He had not considered this, no. “I didn’t know.” But it was obvious now, just as it was obvious why he had been sent into the frightful Frames with all the cooperation he could desire.
“You didn’t know what was your primary task, then, Spingarn?”
“Not then.”
“And now?”
“The Genekey, if it existed. For you.”
“Yes!!!” screamed the Director. “For me!!!”
It screamed and raged at the cowering humans. Then it lunged suddenly, not at them, but at its own coiled body; black blood spurted.
“For me!!!!” it howled. “For me!!!! The Director of all the Frames!!!! To get me out of this stinking mess I live in! Me!!!!”
It lunged for Spingarn. The wide flat head rang with metallic janglings as its steely hair flattened against the snake head.
Hawk threw the heavy blade he had been hefting.
It flicked the steel aside.
Again, Spingarn had the sensation of watching an event artificially slowed down. He saw a forked tongue which had flickered at lightning speed before but which now slowly moved up and down in the wide jaws.
“Spingarn!!!” screamed Ethel.
“Guards!” Horace called.
Bright arcs flashed downward and powerful force-shields guided the Director’s thrust away from Spingarn. As a soft thump took him at all points of his body simultaneously, he saw that the snake man was gibbering with frustrated rage and everlasting enmity. Spingarn heard the echoes of its last threat as he hurtled away from the weird vault.
“You’ve upset him!” the aide cried when they were ejected into the anteroom. “He was in such a good humor until you went in—what have you said?”
Hawk wheeled himself up to the thin man, leaned over his desk, and grabbed him by his shoulder.
“Don’t shout at us again, will you, little man?”
His fingers bit into the slender muscles.
“Will you?”
“Oh, no, sir! No!”
Spingarn recalled the supercilious smile with which the man had greeted them; he knew more than he had so far revealed. His
whole bearing had been that of a man who smugly nursed a nugget of information which he wasn’t going to release.
“Keep hold of him, Sergeant,” ordered Spingarn.
“Please! He’s hurting!”
“Aye, Captain?”
“He knows,” said Spingarn. “He knows why we’ve had it so easy.”
“I don’t! I’m just an assistant—they don’t tell me anything! NO!!”
Hawk grinned at him and allowed his great gnarled hands to close with a slow and massive tension.
“No need for that, Spingarn!” called a voice behind them. “Let the poor little man alone—Marvell’s here to fill you in!”
Ethel fluttered down.
“Gawd!” exclaimed Hawk, releasing the wraith, who collapsed into a moaning heap behind his desk. Three mind beamers, seizing this unusual opportunity, at once set to work on him; Marvell waved them away and their clamor ceased like that of birds who see a wildcat. “What is it, Captain!”
Marvell’s appearance would have aroused comment in any of the Frames; he combined the opalescent swathings of the twenty-third century priest-kings of Venus with a recreation of the bone structure of Java Man. The effect was appalling.
“Well done, my sincerest congratulations—Orders and Freedoms! Kudos and riches! Fame and fortune! And what an epic it all was—you know, we’re wondering if we can do a full reenactment of the whole mad adventure, balloons, Alien, giants, ghosts, dwarfs and your splendid selves! Care to advise, Spingarn? Come in as co-Director? I’m offering you your old job back, man!” Ethel tried to interrupt, but Marvell was irrepressible, hopping from subject to subject in a bull’s bellow that left even Hawk’s ears ringing. “You’ll want to know about the traction engines—great, great idea, Spingarn! We set it up just as you said! Only lost three pilots and then we had the twentieth-century traffic things completely reestablished! But how do you think they managed the pollution thing? These flying traction engines of theirs must have burned a couple of dozen tons of coal each time they did an extended flight! You know how we tackled it? We did air to air refueling! Imagine it! There’s a whole circus of the things flying out on Sector UV 23-zero—we had thousands of applicants! Just great!”
In the pause for breath, Spingarn tried to stop the flow.
“Hold it, Marvell! Hold it!”
“You wanted something—you did!” Marvell did something to his garments and a cloud of smoke encompassed them all. When it cleared, Marvell was his familiar self, bejeweled codpiece and all. “I can’t think in all this gear—distracting to have the strings of meton-souls screaming in one’s inner ear. Those priest-kings! Way-out!”
“Marvell!” Spingarn urged coldly. “I said hold it!”
“Held! Veritably held!”
“You watched it all?”
“So help me, how could I not watch? You know when you got into the balloons? How did you know it was a spaceship reenactment? And when the tribes lined up around the Genekey——”
“Listen!”
“Aye,” added Hawk. “Listen.”
“I listen!”
“It was too easy, Marvell,” said Spingarn. “We got out too easily. This runt’s holding out on us. And the Director was just working up to something when he lost control.”
“He can,” agreed Marvell more soberly. “He can lose control. You have something there. You’ve reached what and where in the uncertainties?”
“The what was the Genekey. I don’t know the where.”
Ethel looked from Marvell to Spingarn and back again.
“He’s worried about the bargain,” she told Marvell. “We got out before the job was finished.”
“Well?” asked Marvell.
Spingarn realized now what the wraith of a man was grinning about as he nursed his bruised shoulder; he knew why the Director had worn that ghastly smile.
“Well, Spingarn?” asked Marvell unsurely. “The where in the Probability Curve isn’t here!”
“No,” put in Horace. “The Director was saving it as a last unpleasant surprise.”
Ethel and Hawk were watching Spingarn, conscious of his stiffly stretched pose.
“I should have known,” said Spingarn.
“I’m surprised you didn’t,” Marvell said. “Wasn’t it obvious at the time?”
Spingarn shook his head.
“There was too much happening. We were all confused, and we were sure the problem of the Frames of Talisker was settled.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Ethel. “Isn’t it!”
“No!” said Marvell. “Not at all.”
Ethel stared at Spingarn, who avoided her gaze. She turned to Horace. “You tell me.”
“Yes, madame.”
The red-furred automaton coughed and said:
“The Alien lied.”
29
Spingarn barely noticed the arrival of the four Guardians. They glided in, massive and dully-gleaming, four quiet and subservient figures that still held their own insidious form of menace.
“Lied!” exclaimed Spingarn. “Lied! It couldn’t!”
“There was a formal treaty,” put in Hawk. “Negotiations under a flag of truce—clauses and conditions, with a meeting between plenipotentiaries of the contending parties! Captain, there was an unconditional cessation of hostilities!”
“No,” murmured Ethel. “Not again. Not when I had you to myself, you bastard, Spingarn! Don’t say you spoiled it all again! You didn’t, did you, darling! Don’t say we have to go—not back, not back there!”
“You see, you thought you called ‘Time-Out’ to the Alien,” one of the blank-faced robots said. “It wasn’t so.”
Another said:
“You averted the threat, Spingarn.”
“You served all of humanity,” the fourth added.
“It was your Time-Out blip!” Spingarn said suddenly, cutting across the quiet, sincere and determined words of the robots. “You had a blip on the planet all the time! You arranged for us to be taken out!”
“We couldn’t be sure the agents would survive. But they did, yes.” The Guardian who had spoken first pointed to Horace. “This automaton was programmed to withhold the information that they maintained a Time-Out blip. You could find its location only by meeting one of the Disaster Control agents at a moment of maximum uncertainty in the Frames of Talisker.”
Spingarn thought of the giants slowly shaking free of their torpor; and of the dying agent in the filthy wicker-work cage. He saw that Ethel was thinking of that terrible encounter too.
“We met the agent,” Ethel whispered. “We met him!”
The four Guardians conferred.
“Our math is confirmed then,” one said. “The Probability Curve is established. If you met that agent, the whole sequence of events fits the Possibility Space we told you could occur before you entered the Frames.”
Spingarn had the feeling that events were once more shaping themselves into patterns that included him: that his future was again being decided in a slow and inevitable way.
“The two agents who held the Time-Out blip?” asked Ethel while Spingarn tried to see into his future.
The Guardians were stone-faced.
“They died. They were in the front ranks of the tribes at the end, according to our monitors. We got an automatic report of their deaths shortly before the Time-Out blip processed you.”
“I didn’t see them,” said Spingarn, feeling how inconsequential were his own words.
“Aye,” said Hawk. The Sergeant understood what the two agents had done. “Aye, Captain. They must have been in the path of the boggarts.”
“It wasn’t the Alien who brought us out?” Ethel said slowly. “It was our own Time-Out mechanism.”
Spingarn saw that she too was coming around to the insidious idea that had been at the back of his mind ever since he had returned to Frames Control. There were unresolved equations, endings too neatly tied up.
The red-furred automaton coughed discreetly.
“Yes, Miss Ethel,” it said. “The Alien failed to keep to its agreement.”
The sense of impending doom began to find old, uncanny echoes of that eerie encounter with the Alien: Spingarn’s mind rang with the huge impatience of the extra-Universal intelligence so lately released from its hundred-million-year-old mausoleum.
The four Guardians were again regarding him with that look compounded of pity and resolve, the almost inert stare of robots who find it necessary to send humans into dangers which only humans could brave. They let him work the situation out for himself.
“We made an agreement,” said Spingarn.
“You had assurances!” agreed Sergeant Hawk. “The Devil of Devils said we should be released from Hades if we fought his battles! Destroy the boggarts and you have your passport! That was the pact, Captain!”
“Wasn’t it?” Ethel appealed to him. “That was it, Spingarn?”
He knew why it had been so easy.
“It wasn’t the Alien who called Time-Out for us,” Spingarn said slowly. “We cleared up the ghost experiment. We destroyed the Genekey. We showed the Alien how we could operate in a totally random situation. We and the other human beings on Talisker showed the Alien how the human mind can plan and act.”
“That’s what you promised—and you fulfilled the promise!” Ethel protested. “You’ve done what it asked!”
Spingarn shrugged:
“It was too easy.” He tried to explain to Ethel, who wouldn’t listen; to Hawk, who was too angry to care; and to the Guardian robots, who knew anyway.
“I thought the Alien would have my own sense of confusion—I thought it could become oriented, just as I did when I came out of the Siege of Tournai. I found the scanners—I used Horace here to help me. And, gradually, I knew what I was. The Probability Man. In the Frames of Talisker I hoped the Alien would follow the same path. When it saw order emerging from chaos, I hoped it would use us as scanners! Use our minds to see how we puzzle out the when and the how and why of a probability situation.”
“We did that!” Ethel called.
“We tried,” Spingarn corrected.
“No man could have done more,” said the first of the Guardians.