by Brian Ball
“Then why all this talk of the Alien lying!” yelled Ethel. “Why do you say it isn’t keeping to an agreement, Horace?”
“The Alien wants us back,” said Spingarn.
Ethel glared from Horace to Spingarn, and then to the Guardians.
She saw the answer in their curiously pitying metal faces.
30
“Why!”
Ethel’s wild call rang in Spingarn’s ears.
It was the most sublime of all ironical occurrences, he thought. The robots were ready to explain, with all sympathy to Ethel; but he knew in his bones that there was a cosmic, crazy irony in what he had to do.
The Alien had done to him, Spingarn, what he had done in another, earlier life.
“I have to go back to the Frames of Talisker,” he told her. “In a sequence of totally random situations. Always, there’s to be Frame-Shift Factors. It all has to be a random series of events, until the Frames themselves run down.”
He smiled grimly as he thought of that subtle, deadly man he must once have been. Did he live still in the most secret resources of the brain he was using?
Was there still the faintest shadow of that devious man’s persona to chuckle over this last and grimmest joke?
“Captain?” Hawk said. “Captain, sir. You lose me, with respect, Captain. It’s not the monkeys here that trouble me, but your talk of going back. D’ye see, I’m a bit fuddled when you say you have to return, when the Devil of Devils has signed your passport, so to speak. Would you tell an old soldier just what you mean?”
Ethel was still quivering before him, her wide blue eyes filled with ice and fire. The delicate membranes of her wings were shot through with a tracery of pulsating blue blood; the sight caused a rush of complete tenderness in Spingarn’s heart.
He tried to be gentle.
“There can’t be any ending for us here, Ethel. And, Sergeant, the Alien doesn’t begin to know what armistices, nor pacts, treaties, contending parties, and plenipotentiaries are for.”
“Not stay here?”
“You say, Captain?”
“The Alien didn’t make an agreement. It asked for help.”
The Guardians were ready to speak.
“That would be our reading of the math of the Possibility Space,” one said. “The Alien can’t make agreements, since it doesn’t know what they are.”
“It appealed for help, yes,” said another.
“It wants me back,” Spingarn said, holding Ethel’s eyes. “It knew me when I was the Plot Director. It knew only me when I released it from its urn. And it recognized something of me in Talisker.”
“But it could get to know other men—what about the people of Talisker! Can’t they help it?”
“They will,” said Spingarn. “I have to show the way.”
“Captain,” put in Hawk. Then he was silent. He reached for a long clay pipe and began to fill it.
Horace watched interestedly.
“But why!” said Ethel again.
“Don’t forget that when I returned to Talisker, I was the Probability Man. The random variable in all the Frames.”
“No!” said Ethel. “You’d been deleted by then!”
Spingarn shrugged again. He was traveling between overgrown and incredibly complex mazes of uncertainties and possibilities, and the answers he found were themselves shot through with doubts. But one thing was glaringly sure. He told the girl and the soldier.
“The Alien learned from me what a random variable was. What it means to us. It recognizes itself for just such a variable. It knew that it too was a thing operating in a complete maze of uncertainties.”
He could recall now that vast and hopeless hunger for identification: the Alien’s desperate search for orientation in a completely new Universe.
It had emerged into the Frames of Talisker with a problem of personal identification which no human mind could conceive of!
What was it?
How had it come to this mysterious conjunction of time and space!
“It recognized in me a similar experience. It knew me as the Probability Man.”
“And?” whispered Ethel.
“It wrote me into the Frames of Talisker. It made me a function of the Frames. Somehow, it learned from me the techniques of throwing me as a random variable into the Frames of Talisker.”
The thousands of millennia seemed to swim into the space around them, making the walls white and translucent, as if they looked down into that other universe. There was a feeling of cosmic forces at work that made the Guardians’ antennae tremble delicately and Horace withdraw into complete immobility.
There was a scent of Alien in Frames Control.
“So you have to go back,” said Ethel.
“It’s the only way the Alien can begin to learn how to call for his form of ‘Time-Out.’ ”
Marvell, who had been listening breathlessly, was unable to restrain himself any longer:
“Time-Out? Time-Out for something that’s been buried alive for a hundred million years! You’re going back to Talisker to show the Alien how it can get out of—of what!—a hundred million years late!”
Spingarn nodded.
“That’s my task. I go back to the planet, so that the Alien can plot me at work in a random situation.”
Hawk spat tobacco juice.
“Ah, Captain. Ah. So we’re going back?”
“Me.”
“I’m not letting you leave me now, you bastard, Spingarn!” said Ethel. “Not when I’ve followed you into Talisker—I’m in it too!”
Sergeant Hawk regarded her with satisfaction.
“Tell him, missie! Yes, Captain! You’ll need an old soldier.”
“It’s forever,” said Spingarn, trying to tell the girl that she was free to remain in Frames Control, but willing her to commit herself to Talisker.
“Maybe not,” the first Guardian put in.
Another of the stone-faced Guardians explained.
“It might not go on forever. We plotted the Probability Curve and the coefficients give a convergent series. There’s a slight bunching in an indeterminate future.”
“There is?” said Spingarn, feeling excited once more. The Guardians’ predictions had been right so far. Was it possible that the Alien’s problem of identification could be solved?
“You have me there, Captain,” said Hawk respectfully. “If you’d tell me what the Frog monkeys mean?”
“They mean there could be an ending of the Frames of Talisker,” said Spingarn.
They were all transfixed by the thought of normalcy in that unutterably complex maze of Frames.
“Sir?”
Horace was interrupting.
Spingarn barely heard him. He was thinking about Ethel and Sergeant Hawk in the Alien’s planet. When all came to all, he thought, they had all got more or less what they wanted, and quite possibly what they deserved.
Hawk would be able to fight his battles in a world that would forever be posing fresh challenges to his martial abilities. Ethel would have what she had always wanted—which was to accompany her man; Spingarn refused to analyze her reasons. Women were forever a complete and impenetrable mystery. As for himself, he would be able to satisfy that worm of excited curiosity about the mysterious planet which had possessed him from the first.
“Sir?” Horace again interrupted. He babbled on: “I thought you’d care to hear about that little Probability Quotient I was telling you about some time ago!” He did. He explained how the tribes of English and French who had warred; and how he had stopped an incipient Disaster by arranging for an island called Corsica to be transferred by treaty to the English. “It worked, of course!” Horace giggled. The others were barely listening. Clearly, Horace was approaching electronic breakdown; all the symptoms were showing. His antennae whirled; his voice rang up and down the sonic register; patches of his fur glowed with escaping power from overworking engines; and he was boastful. “There was a military man named Napoleon—a man highly sk
illed in projectile warfare! Shortly before he was due to become a military cadet, I put in a little probability loop which ensured that he would become a member of the tribes of the English! So simple! It restored the balance of power for the next forty years!”
The robot looked proudly about him. Then Horace said:
“Of course, you’ll need me in the Frames of Talisker, sir!”
“What!”
Spingarn could scarcely believe what the robot was saying. Then he realized what had caused it such stress. It was doing something against its conditioning: volunteering to engage in a human situation.
“You monkey!” Hawk growled fondly. “You bedamned Frog monkey!”
“Return to Talisker?” asked Spingarn. “Would it disturb the Possibility Space?”
“Oh no,” one of the Guardians said. “Not at all.”
“So we all go?” Ethel said.
“When?” asked Sergeant Hawk. His hands strayed to his pack. “I’ll need some tobacco. And a flask. Well find the rest in Hades, won’t we, Captain?”
“You may be sure of it,” Spingarn said. To the Guardians he said, “When?”
“Immediately,” the first robot said.
“An hour to refurbish and recircuit—Horace,” the second said. “New stabilizers. New weapons. We can permit only primitive armaments, of course. But they’ll be effective, we promise.”
And Spingarn grinned, feeling, against all his hopes, quite unreasonably happy. It seemed that a speech was required of him, so he put an arm around Ethel and said:
“We go to Talisker. We know why.”
There was again the sense of Alien in the room.
They could all understand Spingarn’s why. The Alien would watch with that slow and haunting desperation as the voyagers resumed their intervention in the Frames of Talisker.
“So what do we do there? You, Sergeant Hawk, Ethel, Horace? We know, I suppose. We try to restore a fragment of order—we try to show the tribes how to adapt to Frame-Shift. We try to create a small unit of continuity in a series of random situations—because we won’t be in any one Frame for any length of time! Not with me, the Probability Man at the center of things! Probability Man! No! If anything, I’ll be the Uncertainty Man in the Frames! But this is what we do,” he said, speaking with a low and fierce determination. “We show the Alien how we can bring logic and order in a random situation. We show the Alien how probability works! And we try to help the people—the things—at the same time. If we do this, we may be able to show the Alien that we need the Genekey too. We may even be able to show it what a pact is.”
“A new Genekey isn’t outside the Possibility Space,” said the third Guardian. “It’s an extreme conjecture, but it’s a possible factor.”
“So,” said Spingarn. “We show the Alien how to operate in our Universe. And, if we do that, it might be able to call for a Time-Out.”
“Time-Out?” Marvell said. “It calls Time-Out?”
“It might be able to return to its own Universe.”
“But a hundred million years late?”
“Yes!” Spingarn said. “How do we know what a hundred million years is to the Alien? How do we know what a hundred million years in the Universe is?”
“Aye,” said Sergeant Hawk. “I don’t quite follow your drift, Captain, but I’m with you.” He kicked out at Horace. “God’s bloody boots, Froggie! Get on with your repairs, you mechanical ape!”
Horace sped away, smiling ecstatically.
An hour later, Marvell saw the four companions leave for the waiting starship.
“A hundred million years?” he muttered. “A hundred million years!”
He began to follow them, but he felt ashamed of the impulse. Some things should be private. Like this walk.
The four grim robots raised steel claws in salute.
“We walk alone to the ship,” Spingarn had said.
Then Marvell remembered, like a good Director, that he could flip through the tunnels and watch them while remaining unseen himself.
He saw them enter the vessel with its patina of galactic dust and cosmic radiance. The vast ship was already impatient to begin the whirlwind ride among the starways of the dimensions. Marvell watched the ports close on the four, and the ship shivering in an unreal and eerie balance between electromagnetic and gravitational forces.
It shimmered uncannily and vanished.
Fragmented molecules hung in the air, ringing and sighing with imploding violence.
Marvell stared at the empty space where the ship had stood.
“Could he do it?” he said unsurely. “But a hundred million years!” Then he grinned at the memory of Spingarn’s tail. “He was always a determined bastard!”
Another thought struck him.
“What a Plot it would make if he pulled it off!”
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Also by Brian Ball
Sundog (1965)
Timepiece (1968)
Time pivot (1970)
Time pit (1971)
The Probability Man (1972)
Planet Probability (1973)
Singularity Station (1973)
Brian Ball (1932 – )
Brian Neville Ball was born on June 19, 1932, in Cheshire, England. Much of his substantial body of novels – science fiction, supernatural, detective thrillers and children’s fiction, beginning in the early 1960s and continuing to date – was produced whilst Ball simultaneously pursued an academic career as a Lecturer in English at Doncaster College of Education, and whilst he was Visiting Professor to the University of British Colombia, Vancouver.
Like many of his British contemporaries, Ball began by writing science fiction short stories for New Worlds and Science Fantasy, but very quickly made the transition to full-length SF novels, beginning with Sundog in 1965. His early SF novels, whilst action-packed adventure stories, were also rich in metaphysical speculation, qualities that quickly brought him international recognition, His series of children’s books, ranging from nursery to teenage titles, were equally successful.
Of his adult science fiction novels, of special note was his trilogy about an ancient Galactic Federation, Timepiece (1968), Time pivot (1970), and Planet Probability (1973). By 1971 he had begun to diversify into supernatural novels with considerable success, and in 1974 his first detective novel, Death of Low Handicap Man, was published to wide acclaim. It was followed by several crime thrillers.
In 2004 Ball resumed writing fantasy short stories, and was commissioned to write a new Space 1999 novel, Survival (2005), explaining the mysterious disappearance of Professor Victor Bergman from the last series of the Gerry Anderson TV series (for which Ball had earlier authored The Space Guardians in 1975).
In recent years, all of Ball’s detective and supernatural novels have been reprinted, along with new novels in both genres, with Gollancz’s SF Gateway featuring his earlier science fiction novels.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Brian Ball 1972
All rights reserved.
The right of Brian Ball to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2015 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 21070 7<
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All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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