Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  She could zoom in on any part of the colossal battlefield, where it was now past dawn and the white mist was forming in eerie hanging pockets over the broken trees and the trembling soldiery of a long-forgotten war. Marvell’s hangups didn’t matter; nor did Comp’s cold assessments. The recreation over which she had labored for so long had taken shape—was beginning! And all those men down below who had chosen the roaring life— however short!—of the Frames in preference to their own feeble attempts to fill an oversufficiency of leisure were taking part in her Plot!

  “Director Marvell’s new Mechanical Age Ritual Combat Plot!” intoned Comp. “Ten seconds!”

  Marvell dismissed the staging-bubble with a sweep of his hand. He was interested in the skies. Neither he nor Liz saw a scurrying servo-robot, blank-faced and impersonal, bearing down on them with its brain-globe shining importantly. It began throwing out unskillful mind-alerts as it drew to a halt, and Marvell caught the full impact. Liz’s eyes were on the trench where faces flowered into shocked awareness of danger, and hands gripped the damp wooden stocks of rifles.

  “Director Marvell!” the servo bellowed. Its beamers again struck at Marvell, who turned, staggered and yelled back:

  “Cut them!”

  It was not to be thwarted.

  “Director Marvell! Immediately! By the Director of the Frames—now, at once! Marvell to come!”

  “Now!” Comp intoned.

  “No!” Marvell roared.

  “My God,” Liz said as Götterdämmerung began.

  The snouts of huge cannon breathed unholy life into the Plot and men began to die. Above, in the wide gray sky of early morning, tiny glittering specks appeared. Whistles were raised to mouths by freshly shaved young officers.

  “The Director said now!” bawled the servo-robot, beamers turned off. “Now, sir!”

  Dyson was flung into the protected area by a guffawing Security robot; it unwound its tentacles from his shaking, furious body with tender concern.

  “What’s happening?” squealed Dyson. “You left me—”

  Marvell grinned at Liz.

  “Tell him,” he said. “Enjoy the Plot—our master needs me!” He climbed into the staging-bubble which had been directed to the protected area by the efficient, languid set-robot.

  “And the young lady!” bawled the servo above the roar of battle and Dyson’s questions.

  Liz had turned back, fascinated, to see the fliers approaching, their smokestacks blasting out a whirling shower of sparks and thick black smoke; the pilots were yelling with delight at the feeling of power as wings flapped noisily and engineers threw fuel into open grates. Already one machine was aligning its howitzer. And it was all wrong! Liz was about to voice her sureness when she felt herself pulled away; off-balance, she would have fallen had not the Security robot flicked a network of whippy tentacles to steady her and place her beside Marvell.

  “Me!” she gasped, understanding coming slowly. “Not me!”

  “You!” Marvell growled.

  “Why?”

  The servo raced beside the fast bubble.

  “I know!” it shouted. “I got additional instructions on the way here, miss! Comp advised the Director that you’d be useful too!”

  “For what?” snarled Marvell, glaring ahead as they raced through the long corridors toward the heart of the most sophisticated piece of hardware the human race had built. “Why does the Director want me?

  Liz began to dislike Marvell again.

  “Oh, yes! I know!” the servo boasted.

  “Tell me!”

  “The Director said I should, sir! And Miss Hassell! It’s Spingarn, sir!”

  “Spingarn!”

  Liz Hassell heard the note of baffled fear.

  “I said Spingarn was bad luck! You shouldn’t have mentioned him, you crazy bitch! If this is something to do with your turning up data on the—”

  “It’s Spingarn on Talisker!” the servo called, anxious to pass on the information. “Talisker, sir! You know—where Spingarn went!”

  Liz Hassell’s brilliant orange-flecked green eyes shone with a dangerous fire: she had been so keyed up over the Plot, so full of a tender and ghostly pity for the men of three hundred thousand dawns ago, so amazed that something she had had a hand in creating was to begin, that she could barely absorb this new turn of events. Crazy bitch! Marvell had called her. The arrogant bastard! She turned to tell him what she thought of him when she saw his staring eyes, his haunted face and the terrible fears in it. He wasn’t looking at her at all.

  Marvell whispered something. She just caught the words:

  “I know Talisker. Another name for Hell!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  LIVE! roared the mind-searing beamers outside the office of the Director of Frames. Marvell shouted to the humanoid secretary to tone them down to a level through which conversation could be heard. It waved negligently at the battery of tiny spheres clustered around the great bronze doors; they jangled into silence for a moment, and the subtle shifting hypnotic patterns of sensory impressions were stilled. A kind of peace settled on them, but only for a few seconds. It was their duty to spread the message of the Frames: nothing could halt them.

  “Jesus!” growled Marvell, tilting his black hat back to show a gleaming and sweat-covered bald head. “I have to wait? After speeding here like a maniac?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” the humanoid said. It smiled a green fluorescent smile equally at Liz and Marvell. “The Director is in conference with the Head of Disaster Control.”

  The beamers began again. Live in new dimensions! insidiously squeaked one, conjuring up in Liz’s mind an entire sequence of gossamer-winged creatures swarming toward the Crab Nebula; young, most of them, with faces like angels. And no wonder, thought Liz Hassell, for they were almost paralyzed with drugs. Ride with us! another beamer insisted, taking her abruptly for a few white-hot seconds into a searing desert on one of the Artificial Worlds of the Seventh Asiatic Confederation: and she was astride a wild gray mare, hair like a black sail in the wind and ahead one of the Confederation’s silver yoni-towers!

  She fought free of the mind-blasting impact, to try to hear what Marvell was saying for the second or third time:

  “Why you, Liz?”

  But the beamers had got to her now, and they would not let go. BE THERE! one demanded, and this one could find an echo of sympathy, so that it projected instantly the Sub-Man Frame she liked. There was the volcano, the ground-trembler! Worshiped by shambling men who had once walked on Earth, it sent a plume of fire into the blue sky. Liz Hassell wished herself two million years away from the coming encounter with the Director of Frames. Be a savage! Hunt the red apes! and Liz’s heart sang yes!

  “Turn them down!” Marvell growled, and again the glowing secretary waved a hand, bringing peace.

  “Liz! Don’t let them get to you!” Marvell said. And the beamers chimed again, for theirs was a sacred trust.

  “All right!” Liz cried.

  “Give them an edge and they flood you,” Marvell said. “Keep them out! Think of Spingarn!”

  “Yes!” she cried. “I think that’s it—Springarn! It has to be. The servo was on the way to pick you up and Comp remembered that I’d asked about him.” And she could keep the insistent clamoring out now, for there was the thrill of the Plot again. “The Director heard us talking—I expect he was having your conversations monitored, and one of the Comp circuits got clever and keyed me in to my request. Easy, Marvell!”

  Marvell was still distressed; she did not feel so full of anger now.

  “Then why me? What have I done?” he snarled at the humanoid.

  It smiled sweetly.

  The servo put in eagerly:

  “We were to tell you it’s Talisker, sir! I expect you’ve heard—”

  The green-faced secretary silenced it with a whiplash of electronic hate. The little servo backed off.

  “Well?” snapped Marvell, unimpressed.

/>   “We were just to tell you ‘Spingarn.’ Spingarn of Talisker,” the secretary said blandly. “Nothing else.”

  “Then why send for me—and why keep me waiting when I’ve a Plot up for proving?”

  “I’m sorry about the delay, sir. The Director had trouble locating the Head of Disaster Control. They’re still in together.”

  “So they’re having a conference! Why bring me?”

  “Well, sir,” the humanoid said, “you should know. You did know Spingarn better than most of us.”

  “You!” Liz Hassell said. “Spingarn the Probability Man!”

  “It was years ago—”

  “Eighteen months,” the humanoid put in.

  “Before my time in Direction,” Liz said to herself.

  “So it’s only two years!” Marvell growled.

  “A year and a half,” the secretary insisted. “And no news since the Genekey specification came back.”

  “Genekey?” Liz said.

  “Genekey,” repeated Marvell.

  Liz waited, but Marvell said nothing. Her mind raced. Comp had been cagey about Spingarn. Genekey! There had been rumors about some kind of genetic experiments… Spingarn?

  “Genes?” she asked Marvell. Apologetically, she went on, “I should know. The Director—”

  Marvell faced her. The girl was right. She should not have to go before the mad spider of a man who was the Director of Frames quite unprepared.

  “Brandies!” he called to the humanoid. It crossed to a cabinet and poured three large drinks. Liz sipped.

  “Well?” she said.

  “You’d better be told,” he said. “The Genekey stabilized the worst of the random-cell variables. Oh, Jesus!” he growled, seeing the complete incomprehension on her face. “What do you know?”

  The beamers began to chime again, but the humanoid did something to discourage them; it wanted to hear all of this. Marvell saw that it was snooping, but he was past caring.

  “About what?” Liz asked. “What do I know about what?”

  “All this!”

  “Random-cell variables?”

  “No! Leave that! Something simple for a start! The Frames. Probability. Start there!”

  * Read The Probability Man—Brian N. Ball, also in Daw Books.

  The girl saw that he was serious, seriously trying to help her. She humored him. All his ebullience was gone.

  “The Frames are easy. There’s nothing for most of mankind to do anymore. Work is over. It’s been disinvented. So we have to fill time with Possibility Space. We create happenings.”

  “You always were lucid,” Marvell said. He looked at the slender arms. The girl was dressed in rippling yellow fur; beneath the mottled skin was a suspicion of smooth, full flesh. He had never noticed her before, not as a sex-object. “Probability?”

  She smiled.

  “We don’t know what worlds existed in some eras. There’s only vague legend. So we have to build up what we can from the evidence left. We’re well-informed about the origins of the human race and everything that happened after the Mad Wars. We do a dilly of a Frame on the Asiatic Confederations, and something to take your breath away on the Sub-Men. But we don’t know much about your favorite time.”

  “And?”

  “And if we don’t know, we approximate.”

  “Yes! Those damned fliers!” He turned to the humanoid. It was sipping brandy elegantly. “How’s the new Plot going?”

  The green-faced automaton shook its fluorescent head. “Can’t say yet, sir. Not till it’s been checked out by Comp. But there’s been no Disaster yet—there hasn’t been a call for Time-out either.”

  Marvell sighed.

  “That’s something,” Liz said. “Dyson will monitor it for us.”

  “Dyson?” spat Marvell. “Now there’s someone who should get to know about Talisker! But go on, Liz.”

  “Probability?”

  “You’ve covered it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “So go on!”

  “Comp evaluates historical records and says what probably happened.”

  “And Spingarn ruined the probabilities! Why couldn’t he stick to Plotting? Brilliant stuff he turned in! Why go for random variables?”

  “He did that?”

  “That’s Spingarn!”

  “But how?”

  “That,” the humanoid put in suavely, “if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, and you, miss, would take more time than you have at the moment. Will you please enter?”

  Marvell hesitated.

  “The Director? I mean—the Genekey worked?”

  He was recalling with a numb horror what he had seen some eighteen months before when Spingarn had disappeared into the remote and horrific world of Talisker. Then, the Director had still been in the grip of a frightful gene-transmutation that had turned him into a thing from nightmare: a monstrous admixture of man and snake that reared out of radiant yellow mud. Marvell shuddered. He could see again the snake’s head, the red wet mouth, the iridescent steely hairs, the skeletal arms that waved about and showered Spingarn and himself with gobbets of stinking detritus. A vast and terrible rage had convulsed it. And it talked! “Spingarn!” the thing had breathed, choking with a sick rage. “Spingarn, who took a fancy to the extremities of the probability function and did a bit of adjusting here and a touch of recycling there and who changed my gene structure when I went to visit Talisker to inspect his experiments! And made me into a thing like this!”

  “Do go in, sir. It really worked. The Director is himself once more.” It smiled. “It would be only fair for me to tell you, though: he still has his memories.”

  Liz Hassell shivered too. She had heard of the mysterious Spingarn’s experiments, but this was something new. What had happened? And how was she, Liz Hassell, twenty-four years old, a slim and bright girl with a future in Direction, connected with the strange genius Spingarn?

  “The Director,” insisted the humanoid secretary.

  Marvell walked to the great bronze doors like a man in a trance; his wide shoulders were bowed. He looks middle-aged! thought Liz Hassell, who had always considered Marvell a slightly older contemporary. His showman’s ebullience had deserted him. The impresario’s clothes hung slackly on his defeated figure.

  The doors swung open and Liz saw what few underlings had seen, the center of the web that controlled almost all human life. The room was as big as the complete lower deck of an interstellar cruiser, huge, low, stone-floored, and with serried rows of scanners that were both empty and pulsating with latent energy, blue and eager. So this is it! The center of it all! She watched Marvell reluctantly face the desk in the center of the enormous room. And Marvell audibly groaned with relief, for the man who sat at the desk was recognizably a man, with a high-domed head, a thin long neck eroded by age, long arms, and black eyes like polished stones. Beside him was a powerful, muscular man, large-headed, dark-skinned, with thick arms hanging slightly forward. She knew him as Deneb, the Head of Disaster Control. Impressive though he was, it was the Director who dominated the scene. Liz gulped as a reedy voice issued from the wet red lips of the most powerful man in the Galaxy.

  “How sorry I was to drag you away from your first proving of the new Plot!”

  “I—” began Marvell, hat askew, bald head shining with sweat. “I came at once, sir. So Spingarn—” and he let the words hang there.

  “Spingarn!” Deneb snapped. “That’s why we need you.”

  “Oh, we need you, Marvell!” the Director fluted. “Who else could we call on?”

  Liz saw the strange hatred of the man. Who was it directed against? There was a purring quality in his voice, but underlying it was a howl of anguish. What had Marvell done to arouse such a fury?

  “He was just a colleague—”

  “More!” the old voice insisted hatefully. “You were Spingarn’s confidant—his friend—his adviser even.”

  “No! Never! I warned him—”

  “Why so modest, Ma
rvell? You, the man who encouraged him with his random probability research!”

  There was something grotesque about Marvel’s fear. Such a large man so bitterly afraid! And Liz was infected with his terrors. She moved quietly behind him, interposing his bulk between herself and the source of danger. It was a pattern of behavior that would have made Liz laugh only minutes before; she did not despise herself, though. The hatred was real, and the evil she saw in the Director’s stone-like eyes was real.

  “Who else?” the man muttered.

  “Not me, sir!” Marvell said hastily. “Encourage Spingarn! Never! The man was a lunatic—he should have been kept in the Gunpowder Frame! He’s no more than a wrecker, sir—why, I knew nothing about the reactivation of Talisker—nothing, sir, nothing!”

  The old man giggled.

  “Oh, Marvell! You know, Miss Hassell, your immediate superior has this delightful ability to see fun in everything! How happy you’ll be together! You, dear, with your meticulous scholarship, and our own Marvell with his panache and blundering recklessness!” The black eyes were full of a sudden rage that sent shivers down the girl’s spine once more; the old man. was a powerful and evil thing, quite outside her range of experience. “You wondered, Miss Hassell,” he said, “why I asked for you?”

  “I did.”

  She answered in a firm enough voice, but she felt completely lost. What did the stone eyes see? Why did he hate? What did he want?

  “My dear,” sneered the hateful, insidious voice, and she knew he hated her youth, her energy. “Why? A whim! An old man’s fancy!”

  “No,” she whispered, certain. “It wasn’t.”

  “So it wasn’t! How right the young lady can be! Eh, Marvell? Eh, Deneb?”

  “Comp was right,” Deneb agreed. “It mostly is right on probability.”

  “Not always!” snarled the Director. “But this time, yes! You see, my dear,” he said, turning back to Liz, “you brought it on yourself! I sent for Marvell because he was the one associate of Spingarn’s that might be able to cope with Talisker—”