Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  Fifteen tons of scaled horror pounded up the steep slope. Liz cried out with relief, for Hawk was safe, Marvell had not been harmed, and she herself could think once more. Her brain was no longer filled with a stunned terror. Scores of questions shot through her mind in the instant of recovery. Most centered on the weird way in which they had been deposited in this arid and utterly strange place. What a grotesque transition it had been! Though there had been little of physical sensation, there was the undeniable and horrifying otherness of what Hawk had called the Gates of Hell. Would dying be a stranger experience?

  Then there was the vast reptile!

  Liz watched in fascinated horror as it scrambled up and up. She strained her aching body continually to watch its progress. The thing’s brains had been splashed about the rocks, its blood was a steaming carpet on the ground, and still it clawed its way in a frenzied search for the enemy that had attacked it. But such a reptile! A creature extinct on Terra for over a hundred million years! Only when the surface of Terra was covered by warm seas and swamps had such creatures existed. But it was here, undeniably it was in this region of harsh rock and belching volcanoes!

  Her rapidly clearing thoughts were interrupted by Hawk’s yell:

  “Monkey—Horace! Go up there on your skinny legs and see what happens to the boggart! Up with ye!”

  So high had the monster climbed that it looked like a toy animal against the immense boulders. Liz could see that it was tiring. It stopped and tried to sniff the air. Puzzled, perhaps already dead, it began to move again, always upward. Some vast compulsion made it try to climb. Were its natural enemies to be found on the heights? Or was some other weird subliminal force at work in what was left of its consciousness, a wild desire to find peace and death in some hidden sanctuary? Again Liz’s speculations were interrupted.

  “Has it gone?” Marvell muttered. “Liz, please!”

  Hawk, who was also watching, realized that Horace had ignored his order.

  “Ye rebellious ape! Away about your duties! Up ye go after the boggart!”

  “What about me?” wailed Marvell. “Sergeant, please! Liz! Horace! Help!”

  Horace turned to the angry sergeant.

  “I don’t think it’s necessary, Sergeant, to go any further. The dinosaur is no danger, and I have a responsibility to my two clients here. May I suggest that they be released?”

  “Bowels of God!” bawled Sergeant Hawk. “D’ye want a bullet in your belly? D’ye want a handful of steel in your befurred guts? That I’ve lived to hear one of me old captain’s men give such a rebellious answer—”

  He stopped because the dinosaur had reached the top of the great red-black cliff. It pawed at the hot air twice. Slowly its head turned around on the supple neck. Even at this distance, Liz could see that it was still searching for its enemies. Having tried to look about it and failed, and having smelled its immediate environs, the monster appeared to recognize failure; it was still for perhaps twenty seconds, quite still. There was a curious inevitability about what happened next. The little party far below watched the end.

  The monster put its head back and howled.

  One great foghorn note only. The noise came down to Liz and the others in a flood. It was a death-note. The forearms went up once, and then the colossal frame seemed to stiffen. Then it fell away down the slope it had ascended so laboriously; rocks smashed the green body; sharp edges punched away the scales. Loose shale and rocks joined the tons of dead reptile, but the three humans ignored the danger. The monster had been so huge, so menacing. And now all that tonnage of muscle was dead.

  “Dinosaur!” Marvell exclaimed. “A bloody dinosaur?”

  “Destroyed and veritably done for!” Hawk said with satisfaction. “The boggart is mutton!”

  Rocks began to spill around them, and the new danger impinged on their thoughts. Marvell yelled as the great monster slithered along a slope above them.

  “Horace!”

  And, at last, the robot acted. Liz saw its skeletal arms reach down and then the ropes had slipped away; her hands would not fall apart, however. She was stiff, quite rigid through lack of circulation during the period as the madman’s captive. Marvell had suffered worse, but he had the strength to begin to crawl away as bigger rocks rolled down the steep face of the broken ground above them.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said Horace suddenly, and Liz found herself gently scooped up in the steely telescopic arms and moving at speed away from the path of the rock-fall. She saw that Hawk was half carrying the bulky Marvell to the safety of an overhang. He was bawling his fears at the same time, though his shouts were lost in the clattering roar from above.

  The great reptile smashed to the spot where they had lain only seconds after Horace’s intervention. Its corpse twitched, terribly torn. For a moment Liz was possessed by the primordial fear she had felt at the monster’s attack, for the shattered jaw was working and the ends of the limbs shook as life declined in the beast. But it was dead, truly dead.

  “A dinosaur!” Liz said in awe as Horace set her down. “It is a dinosaur—but it can’t be! Nothing like that could be produced! It couldn’t be done! And there’s nothing like it in the Galaxy—there’s simply no other pattern of evolution on any planet we know that had this stage! Horace, it just isn’t possible! See—it isn’t plastic and metal—it’s real! Real! We couldn’t get near a replica of anything like that—”

  She stopped.

  “It is real, isn’t it?”

  Horace considered the corpse. He had removed Liz to a point about fifty yards from the overhang where Hawk and Marvell had sheltered. The corpse of the monster was only a dozen strides away from the robot; Liz could almost feel the scanners at work as the robot concentrated. She saw glittering antennas sprout momentarily from its elegant furred carapace. Wire-like sensors writhed and glittered and retreated. Liz could hear Marvell trying to win an argument but she didn’t try to listen to him; this latest mystery claimed her.

  “Well?” she asked after a few moments.

  “Oh yes, miss, it’s real. That is, it fits all the data I have for such a creature. Physiologically, it is a gigantic reptile of the kind that inhabited Terra during what is known as the Cretaceous period.”

  “Horace!” yelled Marvell. “Horace, come over here! Get me free!”

  Liz wished fervently that Hawk would gag Marvell too.

  “It’s real, but it’s impossible, Horace! You know it is!”

  Horace said, in his professorial tones: “Miss Hassell, I think I explained that Probability Quotients don’t function with a high degree of certainty on Talisker.”

  “Talisker? How do you know we’re even on Talisker?”

  “A reasonable point,” Horace agreed. “Would you accept that we are now on a possible Talisker?”

  “You red buffoon!” yelled Marvell.

  “Come over here with the doxy!” bawled Hawk. “And you, ye godless Frog traitor, silence!”

  Liz distinctly heard air escaping from the great reptile’s throat. All its systems and organs were winding down. And it couldn’t be here! Wherever here was!

  “It is the same planet?” she asked Horace.

  “Yes, miss. Yet there are present certain force-fields that I can’t account for. I have no comparable data for them.”

  “And the dinosaur?”

  “Again, miss, it doesn’t fit the Probability Quotients for the Talisker we might have expected. It has the basic biochemistry and naturally occurring amino acids of a Terran creature, yet there is something else too. Regrettably, I am not able to analyze this additional element.”

  Liz surveyed the torn corpse. Boggart? It was a dinosaur. A predatory kind of dinosaur, one armed with ferocious weapons of attack. Was Hawk right, though, when he called it a thing of the imagination, a creature from the night? Was it possible that Hawk’s intuition might have the germ of a deep and hidden truth?

  “We’re on a possible Talisker,” she said. “And here is an impossible Tyrannos
aurus.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “I know where we are,” said Liz. “We’re in the Alien’s Possibility Space.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Yes, miss.”

  A trembling shook Liz’s limbs. She had seen the misty horizons of the dinosaur’s land. At the edges, there were the red-black high cliffs and beyond them the belching volcanoes. The sky was a glowing canopy of dusted red light. It was a bleak and barren land, and it was a country that the Alien had summoned up! Hell! Without having to think much about it, she knew that there were other and stranger sights in what the Alien took to be possible rearrangements of human scenes and events. She looked up to the top of the cliff. She was quite sure that the dinosaur had been making for another region that was part of the Alien’s Possibility Space.

  “Horace, what do we do?”

  “Liz!” yelled Marvell.

  Horace came to a decision.

  “I think the first thing, Miss Hassell, is to gain Mr. Marvell’s release. He must be most uncomfortable.”

  Liz felt impatient retorts rising to her lips but she restrained herself. After all, she had a duty of some kind to her boss.

  “Well, if you can get through to Sergeant Hawk, do so.”

  “Yes, Miss Hassell.”

  Marvell regarded the robot with a mixture of relief and resentment. Such automatons should know their place. It was, first, to ensure that every whim of their assigned human should be carried out. But at various stages of the crazy visit to Talisker it had shown an unnatural disregard for his instructions. Horace had refused to intervene in the encounters with the destroyed psyche, Hawk; and the robot had shown no sign whatsoever that it was particularly concerned during the attack of the dinosaur. For the first time in his life, however, Marvell swallowed his resentment and tried to placate a machine.

  “Ah, Horace! Sergeant Hawk and I were having a discussion about—”

  “Be still!” bawled Hawk. “Haven’t I enough torment from the boggart? Wasn’t poor old Hawk dragged down into the Pit by a traitorous whoreson rogue? Now hush your rattle, ye primped up gut-bellied bastard of a Flanders sow-gelder or I’ll dash your few brains out for ye!”

  The robot placated Hawk.

  “Sergeant,” the rather high-pitched overeducated tone soothingly said, “it is true that you have a prisoner taken in lawful warfare.”

  “Aye, aye, ye monkey! What of it?” growled Hawk suspiciously. “Why, ye might be a Frog spy yourself! What did ye do to help poor Hawk when the gut-belly tripped him and propelled him through the very Gates of Hell? Eh? Eh, ye befurred machine-ape?”

  “Sergeant, I’m a noncombatant!” Horace said persuasively. “You know as well as I do that Captain Spingarn regarded me as a guide, with certain local knowledge, but no more than that. Sergeant, I’m not a creature of action, and I owe no allegiance to Queen Anne. You’ll agree?”

  Marvell had the wit on this occasion to remain silent. He was not familiar with the jargon of the Gunpowder Age Frames of the Primitive European era, but he could see that Horace was working on Hawk’s overlaid persona in the only way possible. Through persuasion.

  “You!” Hawk laughed, braying out a long snarling laugh through yellow teeth, gray moustaches and a bronchitic throat. “Why, monkey, why, ye ape, no regiment would have an outlandish creature like you! You, in the service of Her Majesty!”

  “It would be improbable,” agreed the robot. “So, as I expect Captain Spingarn told you, you will understand that I am not permitted to interfere in the encounters that might befall you and my companions?”

  “Aye, aye! Me old Captain Devil did say monkey-men like yourself had no place in a properly conducted campaign. Why?” the sergeant said, a shade less suspiciously. “D’ye intend to show your true colors? What are ye, Frog or true-blue British?”

  The robot was not at a loss for an answer.

  “Sergeant, regrettably I have no country. I am an accredited civilian observer of the campaign you find yourself in. And, as an observer, I might be permitted to offer some advice.”

  “Ah? Ye say?”

  “I might, for instance, have some information for you, Sergeant, about the nature of the, ah, boggart, which you destroyed with such expedition.”

  Hawk glared from Marvell to the robot. Marvell bit back on his tongue and did not commit another mistake. He was learning the value of silence.

  “Aye?”

  “And I might, if you would treat me as a local guide, as your captain did, be able to furnish even more information. It is possible,” Horace said pedantically, “that I might be able to locate Captain Spingarn!”

  “What! Find me old captain in the boggarts’ dominions? Aye?” The sergeant glared, blue eyes cold, bushy eyebrows almost obscuring his keen gaze. “And what of his lady? Eh? Now, ye ape-machine, now ye clockwork monkey! The captain’s lady!”

  Marvell almost interrupted, for his imagination had caught fire as the robot appealed to the destroyed psyche’s strange loyalty to Spingarn. It was quite incredible that an overlaid persona should retain a regard for a companion in an old Frame, but that was what had happened. Hawk had been a Sergeant of Pioneers in a Gunpowder Frame: Spingarn, when he had surfaced after his fantastic adventures, had also been in that Frame. And, against every likelihood, Hawk had stuck to Spingarn as a talismanic figure in the weird Frames of Talisker! After being Spingarn’s sergeant, Hawk had become his devoted follower. And, such had been the effect of Hawk’s conditioning, Hawk had insisted on promoting his old companion, Spingarn, into a captaincy. To Hawk, Spingarn was a man who held Queen Anne’s warrant.

  But Spingarn had gone into Hell!

  Would the robot reconcile these grotesque elements in Hawk’s mind? Marvell felt his wrists sticky with blood once more as wounds reopened. If he had known that he would be projected onto a dangerous and crazy planet, and then bound by a destroyed psyche; and, as a climax, thrust through a black-gold hole in space-time into a region where dinosaurs roamed, he might have made a run into the nearest available Frame, whatever it was. Sanctuary! Anything but this weirdest of all worlds, where even his assistant, Liz of the well-shaped tits, was in league with the madman!

  “I think it not unlikely that Captain Spingarn may be located, Sergeant,” said the robot. “Both the captain and his lady.”

  Marvell understood. It seemed that Spingarn could not be avoided.

  “Spingarn!” Marvell groaned. “That is, how pleasant!” he added hastily as Hawk’s long, grim face turned his way. “I shall be glad to meet the captain and his lady-wife!”

  “Aye?” glowered Hawk.

  “Of course! I expect that Captain Spingarn and”—what was the wretched woman’s name? Ethel? Yes, Ethel! Fat little piece, one of Spingarn’s assistants—went through restructuring and shed her lard, didn’t she?—“Ethel will be around somewhere! Splendid news!” Marvell enthused. “Great friend of mine, your captain!”

  Hawk’s confusion was almost laughable; Horace tried to add reassurance.

  “Sergeant, I think you have made a mistake about my two companions. They came with no wish to harm you or your captain. In fact, they are allies of his.”

  “Ye say? Not sutlers, then? Not spying whoreson Frog rogues?”

  “No!” cried Marvell.

  “Aides and auxiliaries,” said Horace.

  “Aye?”

  “Unquestionably and assuredly,” the robot insisted. “You can release Mr. Marvell into my custody, and I will guarantee his good conduct. It’s quite in keeping with the ordinances of warfare, Sergeant, to allow such an arrangement.”

  “Aye, aye?” Hawk said, agitated now. “I don’t like the looks of the lard-bellied rogue, but if ye say so—”

  “I do!” Horace repeated. “May I cut his ropes?”

  Hawk hesitated, and Marvell made a tremendous effort to keep his mouth firmly shut. To be at the mercy of a lunatic Time-outer! To have to listen while a fractious and rebellious automaton convinced a
destroyed psyche that he, Marvell, a Director of Plotting, was some kind of Gunpowder Age civilian observer! It defied credibility! But the ropes were there, real rope, and the swelling on the side of his head had been the result of sharp contact with a real musket butt! Marvell could have screamed with impatient rage. He didn’t, even though the dinosaur let out one last gusty stream of fetid air as its lungs collapsed. Dinosaur! He shuddered mentally. A bloody great dinosaur!

  The sooner he could get out of this mad arena, the better!

  “I’ll be watching ye!” Hawk snarled. “Right, monkey— cut him loose!”

  “And Miss Hassell?” Horace said, as he sheared through the rope. “The same terms for her?”

  “Aye, aye!”

  “Then we are to be comrades in this predicament,” Horace announced. “You agree, Sergeant?”

  Hawk was still surly.

  “Comrades? That’s to be seen! I misdoubt your promises, ye ape! Ye abandoned me old captain once before! No, none of your tales!” he snarled as Horace was about to speak. “We’ll agree on a truce until I have reason to mistrust the Frogs!”

  He glowered once more as Marvell crawled to a rock and pulled himself to his feet. But it seemed that a working arrangement had been agreed upon. Marvell looked down at his raw and bleeding wrists and made a silent vow that he would escape from the company of the madman at the first opportunity. Meanwhile, there was the question of surviving in this fantastic Possibility Space. Marvell looked for Liz. A determined bitch, she was nevertheless far more astute than him. He knew it. He would profit from her abilities. She had known at once what the Alien had intended.

  Possibility Space! The idea was far removed from anything he knew as a Possibility Space. The term was part of the robots’ jargon, the robots who investigated the ideas Directors threw up. They told you if your vague ideas could fit in with any aspect of recorded history. They said what was possible. What was possible could fit into a certain framework. For want of a better word they called this framework a space. But an Alien’s Possibility Space! What in Christ’s name was possible for an Alien?