He focused his memory. From what point in his prior life had he jumped? When Finesse interviewed him on Planet Nelson? No, that was too soon. When CC interviewed him, there among the chickens? That had to be it. It was hard to pick out a particular moment in an ongoing life; his memories were not of just one year, but of everything he had ever experienced, right back to childhood. He had had many more significant adventures than that one minor jaunt into the future; his point of departure simply had not made much impression on him. But he had located it now.
CC had made the change in space-travel policy, and the birth of human mutants had halted. It had only been three months since this became evident, because of the period of human gestation. Doctors could have spread the news earlier, since extreme mutation was evident long before birth; but doctors had been under instructions to keep silent. The sterilizations had not been announced; sterilizing radiation generators had merely been set up on each ship. All the sperm cells mutated by space travel were killed; only those generated after the voyage was over were available for procreation. It had been a physically and socially painless measure.
Now the truth was out. The reaction had been powerful—and not, to his surprise, all positive. Knot had been in training as a CC agent, having agreed that his best futures lay with CC, when a private enterprise had traced him down as the cause of the sterilization policy. An assassination squad had been set on his trail, and he was now in flight from it. Because he had the help of Hermine and Mit, he had been able to avoid assassination fairly handily so far—but it did not leave him comfortable. He had to escape completely, to hide, to assume a new identity, or they would surely catch him. They had psi-mutes working with them, of course; they wanted to be sure there would be a continuing supply of psi.
We must move, Hermine thought.
“Do you realize this is merely a future?” Knot asked her.
Not for me, she thought. I have lived it all, and this year has been longer in terms of my life than in terms or yours, and I cannot escape it.
That was sobering. He was here for only five minutes, but all the rest of the universe was here for the duration. Did he have the right to do this to everyone else?
No; it had to be merely a vision of what could be; it seemed real only to Hermine and the others. His act of animating it, for these five minutes, ensured that it would not come true—for himself or for anyone else. “You can escape it when I—”
He was back in the barn. “There was personal pique by some elements who preferred the mutant order,” he announced. “They were out to assassinate me, but weren’t having much luck yet.”
“There’s always hope for next time,” Finesse said with a mock frown.
“Still, they had me on the run. Machines on my trail—”
“Are you ready for the next?” Drem inquired.
“No. I think I have an inkling of my future on this track. Assassins after me in one year, and I’m dead within five years. I can guess what happened. What I still can’t fathom is why. How could my decision to cut off mutations have brought me to this pass? It’s a beneficial change, and even if it weren’t, it should take a generation for the repercussions to build substantially, as the number of mutants declines. Plenty of time to introduce some controlled mutations, on a limited scale, all from volunteers, to get telepaths and precogs to keep the ships traveling. But here within a year there’s trouble. How is this explained?”
“Your course, as you surmise, is not immediately disastrous,” CC agreed, “Other things being in balance, the lack of new mutants would at first make little apparent difference to the galaxy. But the nature of the human situation would suffer a fundamental change. It would become evident that the mutant society was coming to an end; that new planets would no longer be colonized by physical freaks, and that space travel would no longer be feasible on the scale it now exists. This would cause a shift in outlook that would have disastrous repercussions, exactly as the cessation of the growth ethic caused society severe problems in pre-galactic society on the origin-planet, Earth.”
“I didn’t know about that,” Knot said.
“You, like most men, are largely ignorant of the lessons of history. That is one reason power has been allocated to me. I consider, when I make a decision, not only the present ramifications, but also the historical ones. I do not repeat the errors of the past. On Earth, man based his cultures on constant growth—until the natural resources of his single planet were virtually exhausted. When he could no longer grow, his energies turned inward, often destructively. But for the advent of mutation, that enabled him to grow into space where he obtained vast new resources to exploit, man would have destroyed himself, as other planet-bound civilizations have. If mutancy is curtailed, these same pressures will inevitably build again, and man will suffer a similar problem—this time on a galactic scale.”
Knot wasn’t sure he believed either the history or the conclusion. He would have to think about it. Meanwhile, he had an immediate objection. “But that should take centuries! Why should an assassin be on my tail within a single year?”
“Because though your policy is unsound in the long run, it is superseded by another event in the short run. My program is to be destroyed by another agency, and that agency will seek to destroy you also, since you are the prime threat to that enemy’s success. Unless you act to prevent the destruction of my program, you cannot save yourself. The forces you will stir are too great for you to escape.”
“But I have destroyed your program—in that last future.”
“Incorrect. You merely modified my program. The enemy will wipe it out entirely.”
“I see,” Knot said, though he did not accept it. “My policy becomes passé if you are not there to implement it. So I really must come to grips with this other thing first. I think it is time to do a little basic research. CC, you’re a computer—you must have mapped out many variants of the future systematically.”
“Correct,”
“What is the nature of the threat that faces you? I mean, in some intelligible detail, if you have it.”
“I am to be destroyed, or turned off, or perverted to some program irrelevant to the maintenance of galactic civilization, so that the human empire collapses. This is to occur on most tracks, two to five years hence. I am unable to read beyond the demise of my present program, for the same reason you could not travel to a future beyond your own death. I can trace only up to the point the demise occurs. Some tracks have extremes of one to ten years, and a few have wider extremes, but I have found none that enable me to survive indefinitely or with certainty.”
“Except for a 25 percent chance if I help.”
“Correct.”
“Why can’t you follow a time-track to the point where you get turned off, make a note of who or what is responsible, and then deal with that thing in the present?”
“You are conversant with the problem of the needle in the haystack?”
“Yes. You mean there are so many alternate futures that you’ll never find the right one in the time you have? I don’t buy that. If all your futures lead to your demise, you should have no such problem. The haystack is made of needles! Pick any one.”
“All present futures appear to lead to my demise—but no single track is certain until I explore it directly to that end. Here I am limited by the capacity of the time-jumper. As you have seen, it takes time to explore any one track—perhaps hours to locate the moment of demise. Even then, the root causes may not be at all obvious.”
“Damn it, if I saw the instant of my own death, I would see the root cause!”
“You did not do so in your most recent future.”
“Well, I didn’t—” Knot paused. “Still, with your analytical circuitry—”
“Picture yourself standing amid a hail of flying knives. One of them strikes you and kills you. You might see the particular person who threw that knife—but still not understand why hundreds of people were attacking you. Without the root cause bei
ng evident, you cannot—”
“Uh, yes. But in your case—”
“Since there are an infinite number of alternatives—”
“You can only explore representative selections,” Knot finished. “That’s like the problem in chess—you don’t have time to check everything out before you have to make your move. So it becomes largely experience and strategy and luck—and the galaxy is more complicated than a chessboard.”
“Considerably,” CC agreed. “In addition, there is the randomness of the projections. We set a single policy, then visit the future resulting—but many other forces in the galaxy are making policy decisions that affect that future too. So the chance of actually achieving the future you visit becomes diminishingly small in the farther reaches. Only when the jump is brief, as with your five-minute efforts, is the probability of achieving that particular future high. A jump of a year reduces even the firmest policy-future to a probability of less than one in a thousand, and often far less.”
“So the five-year futures I was looking at are pretty unlikely,” Knot said, relieved.
“Those specific ones, yes. But they should be typical of the pattern of futures awaiting you, so are valid in that sense, just as the pattern of my own futures is valid.”
“Now I think I appreciate your problem. The future visits really aren’t of much use to you. Still, you must have found at least one of your specific demises.”
“Correct.”
“Who did that one?”
“You did.”
Knot laughed. “When I had you turn yourself off for my own experiment. That doesn’t count!”
“Incorrect. This was on another track, in which I never contacted you. The enemy contacted you, through a randomized private missive that I was unable to trace to its source, and gave you information that enabled you to act.”
“Now, wait: Missives don’t come from nowhere! You could have analyzed the material, found out where it was made—”
“Pointless. Were you to receive a book on how to fashion a bomb, knowing that tens of thousands of similar copies had been printed and distributed, it would do you no good to locate the publisher. You could make no legal connection between the publisher and the person who used that text to make a bomb with which to perpetrate a crime.”
“I keep running up against that! All right, I’ll accept that you couldn’t trace the fundamental source in time. What did I actually do?”
“You came three years from now, used your psi power to elude my defenses, and turned me off. I obviated that by contacting you on this track.”
“But you didn’t need to go to all the trouble to bring me here and tell me about it! You could simply have had me assassinated.”
“I investigated the possibility that a successful agent for one side might make as successful an agent for the other aide. Your potential seemed excellent. Therefore I set about converting you.”
“I see. This time you have shown me the consequence of the action I might otherwise have taken in three years. But I suppose there were hundreds or thousands of similar attempts, using similar dupes, so that they came at you—will come at you—like a swarm of flies, too many for you to intercept?”
“Correct, in essence.”
“But now you’re on this track, and other forces are closing in. Have you isolated any other of your turn-offs?”
“Several. But as I explained, I was unable to trace the root causes.”
“CC, I must seem awfully slow to you. I hate to make you keep rehashing material, but some things I just can’t choke down easily. If one man, like me, comes and turns you off, maybe it is random, not a part of any organized conspiracy, so you just have to take your chances. But if there is anything organized, you should be able to handle it.”
“There are organizations dedicated to my elimination. But I am not permitted to strike at them merely on suspicion. I must demonstrate a tangible and legal connection between such an organization and the one who destroys me. In your case I had no such connection. I could not demonstrate your motive.”
“My motive would have been no secret! I felt the galaxy would be better off without you. Many people feel that way.”
“Correct. Yet you had to have some specific imperative to seek me out, and some information on how to turn me off, for access to my vulnerable points is not easy for the uninitiated. A general distrust of me, and a booklet of inflammatory oratory are not sufficient. What caused you to leave your secure enclave, and how did you obtain the more specific information needed for the task? Many other people were exposed to the same overt stimuli you were, yet only you reacted, in that instance. Many others tried to eliminate me, because of other stimuli, but only you succeeded. Some other factor is involved. Probably it was psi, for I am unable to detect most psi powers directly, such as telepathy. Yet I do have the most formidable collection of psi-mutants in the galaxy as my employees, and they should have been able to detect foreign psi. Circumstantial evidence suggests that no such contact was made with you.”
Knot considered. “So in that future, Finesse didn’t come for me, and Mit and Hermine didn’t give me the control code. So if I was contacted telepathically, someone else must have been behind it; I was just the pawn. Except that you don’t think telepathy was it.”
“Correct. That is the hidden force—in your case and the others’. Any person who feels as you did is a potential missile against me, and that force even now is hurling them at me. Several hundred people make the attempt each day, unsuccessfully.”
“Several hundred a day!” Knot exclaimed.
“Fortunately, I have formidable defenses, both mechanical and psi. Only this remote terminal is vulnerable; I need it to make private contacts with agents who would otherwise be watched by the enemy.”
Knot shook his head. “The more I go over this, the more trouble I have grasping it. It seems to me you could put some kind of a tracer on those who come, searching for the common theme.”
“The great majority of assassins are ignorant. They believe they can hide a laser pistol, take ship to CCC, and fire at some key terminal. There is no force behind them, and I would waste my effort searching for it. The few who have real destructive potential are lost amidst the crowd of those who do not—and many of those have no overt knowledge of their mission, and die before I can interrogate them. I cannot trace their motives far into the past; what changes in them is mental. Their lives are ordinary until they are abruptly motivated to act against me. Thus I am confined to the successes on the future tracks, for I can investigate them in the present, while taking no overt action to alert the people or their motivators. You are such a person; I believe the enemy will contact you, because in the future it has done so. If you are actually an agent of mine—”
“Suddenly a dim bulb lights at the end of the tunnel of my mind!” Knot exclaimed. “I become the trap, the bait for the enemy. Through me, you will at last gain what you need. Assuming you can convert me to your cause.”
“Even so, the trails are well concealed. The motive agency may be only a front for a more subtle agency, itself a front for another. I cannot trace such motivations far in the present. I lack the proper investigative capacity. I have virtually no power on most planets; only in space am I supreme. The enemy is highly alert for my operatives, and foils their attempts even as I foil the enemy operatives. But the power of the enemy is growing like a dark tide, and if I do not locate the nucleus soon—within the year—it will become strong enough to overthrow me regardless. Then there will be anarchy in the galaxy.”
There was a silence. Knot realized that CC had done a lot of investigating and a lot of thinking, and that the computer was up against a really capable and subtle enemy. There might even be a counter-computer operating, anticipating and voiding CC’s moves. Since CC had a galaxy to run, it could not devote its full effort to self-preservation, without letting go of the very thing it was protecting: galactic civilization. The enemy computer, however, could devote its ent
ire capacity to the sole purpose of torpedoing CC.
“Are you ready for the next future?” Drem inquired.
“No,” Knot said. “I came here determined to present my case against CC and return to my enclave. Instead, CC has presented its case to me. It has shown me that I lack the ability to run the galaxy, or even to set meaningful policy. It has shown me that my mind is not suited to handling the complex concepts of strategy and intrigue. I am not leadership material.”
He took a deep breath, looking at Finesse. “I have been persuaded. CC knows best. I renounce the Emperorship, and agree to serve as an agent of CC in trying to trace down the source of the threat to it.”
“Oh, Knot!” Finesse cried, throwing her arms about him.
“That, too,” he agreed, enfolding her.
We told you, Hermine thought smugly. You wanted to join us all along. Ever since you saw up her leg.
“Well, at least I put up a fight,” Knot said, giving the weasel a mental stroke as he pinched Finesse’s bottom.
PART II:
Mutilation
CHAPTER 6:
Knot drove up to the enclave in a rented taxi, paid off the car, and watched its autopilot drive it back toward the spaceport. The guard at the gate challenged him, not recognizing him, and Knot explained that he was a transferee.
“Report to the placement office,” the guard said, bored. He was a man whose arms fractured into a dozen or so spaghetti-like extremities; he had been dubbed “Mister Medusa” and took pride in the designation. Technically he was a mod-mute rather than a min-mute, but the line between what constituted minimum mutancy and moderate mutancy was somewhat arbitrary. If a mod-mute or even a max-mute could make it in a min-mute enclave, and there were no complaints, the authorities let it go. Knot had known him for years, but of course the man had forgotten Knot.
He reported to the placement office. York’s triple-breasted bosom heaved gladly as he walked in; she, of course, remembered him. “Knot! I thought I’d never see you again, once that normal siren hooked you off to CC.”
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