Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  “Please!” he got out.

  “Sir?”

  Marvell conquered his rage.

  “The tiger! It’s got me!”

  “Got you, sir? Really? I thought it was offering you a helping hand?”

  Marvell fainted as the tiger’s claws shot out. If it hadn’t hooked him by what was left of his frock coat, he would have plummeted down the cliff by the same route as the dinosaur. Horace looked on approvingly as the girl clambered up toward the prostrate figure of Marvell.

  Liz Hassell reached the top and saw what lay on the far side of the cliff. It was a dish-like plateau covered with vegetation, ranging from giant evergreen plants in a vast area of swampland to rolling downs and scrubby forest. At the rim of the plateau, there was a region of deciduous trees; she recognized, in one glance, the rich blossoms of magnolia and fig trees; there were large planes, maple and poplar. Such a confusion of vegetation! But there was enough of variety to accommodate the creatures they had encountered. There was swampland for the dinosaur, forest for the carnivores, even a winding river for the ferocious reptiles that had ripped up Hawk’s boggart. Her excitement increased, for she and Horace were entirely in agreement about the nature of the Alien’s experiments now.

  If only Marvell could be released from his preoccupation with himself, he could use the sense of creative lunacy that had made him one of the most creative Directors of all to help resolve the Alien’s dilemma!

  “Is it?” she said, seeing the tiger exert its strength to place Marvell on the scrubby grass of the cliff-top.

  Hawk, red-faced and determined, had his musket aligned on the enormous head of the tiger.

  “Don’t antagonize it, please, Sergeant!” Horace said. “It’s a friendly beast! If you could put the musket down?”

  Liz advanced toward the long striped cat. Its tail lashed from side to side. There was doubt in it; green-yellow eyes.

  “Have a care, wench!” Hawk said. “Put down me musket? Eh? Friendly? A beast like that?”

  “Don’t you see, Sergeant?” Liz said, forgetting that his persona could not absorb the nature of the situation. “It recognized Marvell. You did, didn’t you?” she said to the beast. “You’re down the evolutionary ladder too, aren’t you?”

  “I think caution,” advised Horace. “Not too close, miss. After all, Spingarn didn’t meet you, did he? He would know Mr. Marvell, and certainly the sergeant, but you, miss?”

  “What?” snarled Hawk. He had lowered his musket. “What’s this talk of me captain? What d’ye mean, monkey? Speak, ye befurred Frog!”

  Liz smiled, for Hawk was afraid as well as puzzled. How would Horace explain the fantastic transmutation that had occurred? After all, Hawk had seen human beings enter the Pit, as he called it—recognizable people! He would not have seen what happened to them when the Alien began its tricks with the genetic structure of the Time-outers of Talisker! Of course, he’d seen the results of those tricks. And drawn his own conclusions. And how near to the truth of the matter he had been!

  His Primitive mind had absorbed what data he had collected and made a pattern that fitted in with the eschatology of his own age! The Alien’s Possibility Space had been, naturally enough, Hell. The monsters— unknown to the Gunpowder Age—were, of course, creatures from primeval fantasy. Boggarts. And what an expressive word it was! Hawk had assumed that his old companion, Spingarn, had gone to Hell.

  As, in a sense, he had.

  Liz almost chuckled as she thought of how she herself would explain to Marvell just what the Alien had done to Spingarn. Meanwhile, she would listen to Horace.

  “Sergeant, there are matters that defy a reasonable explanation,” Horace announced in a portentous tone. “It would need a Doctor of Philosophy and one learned in Divine Studies to give an account of the satanical practices which abound here.”

  “Aye, aye!” Hawk agreed. “A most desperate and fearful Pit this is!”

  “And strange transmutations have occurred into which a wise man would not wish to inquire!”

  As he said this, Horace pointed to the tiger, which seemed to be listening to the robot’s voice.

  “Oh, tell him!” said Liz.

  “Speak on, monkey! I’ll not fear anything to be found in this Pit! Didn’t I bombard and destroy the boggart? And couldn’t I have shot yon fawning tiger? Aye, Hawk’s not done yet, even though he be in the regions of Satan!”

  The tiger had completed its inspection of Marvell. It too seemed to be tired of listening. Liz stared in awe as its great lithe body seemed to swim toward her; the rippling muscles, the heavy bones, the beautiful and deadly markings had an hypnotic effect on her. Theories slipped away as she took in the rank smell of the male tiger. It passed close and stopped in front of Hawk.

  The ears went back. The eyes stared straight into Hawk’s morose, fearful face.

  Marvell surfaced to see the black and gold cat as it fixed Hawk’s face with its unblinking stare. He sat up. Perhaps it would be satisfied with one, even two victims. Hawk and Liz. There was, however, his own bulky form. He swallowed. Could he crawl away unnoticed? He looked around him and saw the nearer deciduous trees.

  “Christ!” he breathed.

  In the shadow of a gaudy magnolia was another tiger. And, almost hidden in the grass, two cubs.

  Marvell knew why they waited. For the huge cat. It was keeping him for its mate and offspring.

  “Sergeant, can’t you see he recognizes you?” the callous bitch was saying. Who recognized who?

  “Ye say?”

  Marvell was delighted to hear the panic in Hawk’s clipped voice.

  “Oh, Sergeant, it’s all an evolutionary mix-up!”

  Marvell was stunned. Evolutionary mix-up? Tiger? He thought of a pit of bones and six species of identifiable anthropoids, two human. A reptile’s claw. Dinosaurs? All in a Possibility Space?

  Why?

  “Oh, say hello to Spingarn!” the bitch said to Hawk.

  “Spingarn! Not him!” Marvell yelled involuntarily. “He’s bad news—”

  “Spingarn? Me old captain?” Hawk said, deeply confused. “Where?”

  “There!” said Liz.

  She pointed to the tiger.

  Marvell shrieked. A passing pterodactyl hissed back. He shrieked again.

  “Me old Captain Devil Spingarn? What?”

  “Be quiet!” Liz ordered Marvell. “Act like a man!”

  “That’s Spingarn?” Marvell yelled, knowing the bitch could never be wrong. “That?”

  “I’m sure, sir,” the robot put in. “A most extraordinary circumstance! If we take Mr. Spingarn as an element in the Probability Quotients and place him against the Possibility Space we have here, there is a most interesting divergence in the quantifiable coefficients—”

  “Christ, keep it simple!” groaned Marvell.

  “He means it’s all a sort of evolutionary mess!” Liz said.

  “Aye?” said Hawk, still face to face with the tiger.

  “But it’s a planned mess!”

  She was right, of course. The Alien had done some conjuring with the evolutionary scales. It had made a space where humans gamboled—or ripped one another to pieces—as their earlier ancestors had done. The trick, the hard part anyway, was that the Alien had sent them down the evolutionary ladder.

  “Hello, Spingarn,” Marvell said tiredly.

  The tiger turned. It snarled gently.

  At the edge of the trees the cubs peeped shyly at the assorted group. Marvell suppressed a groan. More Spingarns! It seemed he and fat Ethel had progeny!

  “Bring the family over,” Marvell went on. “The kids’ll be excited about Horace.”

  “Well!” said Liz, and Marvell could have sworn that he could detect a maternal interest. “Aren’t they sweet?”

  The great black and gold beast rumbled with pleasure. It growled commandingly, and the lighter stepping beast emerged from the trees. Two cubs followed.

  “Ye’re saying this, this, is me captain?” Ha
wk said, still incredulous.

  “Transmuted by a satanical conjuration,” Horace agreed.

  “Bowels of God!” murmured Hawk. “And the captain’s lady?”

  “Yes,” said Horace.

  Hawk indicated the cubs. “His bairns?”

  “Oh yes!” Liz said impatiently. “Of course!”

  “Bowels of God!”

  Marvell sat up.

  Illumination came to him in a golden moment. He got to his feet.

  “Liz!” he announced. “Listen! You, Horace, and you, Spingarn! I think I know where it’s wrong!”

  The tiger growled, a deep and interested rumbling.

  “He might!” Liz said. Marvell had these moments. She knew herself to be a plodder. With Marvell, the sudden leaps of imaginative insight were often lunatic, sometimes so dazzlingly right that she was bewildered. “Horace, listen!”

  “I always listen, miss,” said Horace. “It’s a part of my conditioning. I always listen to everything.”

  The cubs dashed to the tiger. It cuffed one of them playfully. The female tiger kept a certain distance between itself and the party, but she stared with great interest at Hawk. Marvell ignored the new arrival. He was busy with enormous, grandiloquent thoughts that he could barely begin to express.

  “It isn’t as mad as it seems!” he declared. “All this— there’s a mixed set of vegetation, but it’s mixed in almost a sequence! See, there’s the swamp for the reptiles!” He pointed to the enormous stretch of swampland which glistened greenly in the middle of the plateau. “And next to it, there’s a sort of Miocene setup! That’s for the anthropoids, I expect! The Alien’s put the two areas together because it isn’t quite sure of their relative time-structure! It’s got bloody great dinosaurs next to apes, and there’s nearly two hundred million years of evolution between them! It’s all mixed up! I know what it’s trying to do!” He turned to the tiger which had gathered its family in a tight, comfortable group around it “Spingarn, you know too, don’t you?”

  “Captain?” growled Hawk, hesitantly speaking to the cat.

  He seemed to have accepted Horace’s explanation of diabolical wizardry at work. The Primitive mind had these safety valves for disposing of unacceptable information: boggarts: a Pit: wizardry. Well, thought Liz, it was an interesting manipulation of one’s incipient neuroses. If you couldn’t take it, you said the hell with it.

  The tiger’s eyes blazed with interest. But how much did it follow? Was it Spingarn? And how much of Spingarn? Was there intelligence behind those great swimming eyes? Did Spingarn’s overlaid psyche function underneath the carnivore’s mind? Obvious, Spingarn-tiger knew Hawk and Horace and Marvell, but did it understand Marvell’s inspired speech?

  Liz listened as Marvell gathered his ideas together.

  “Well, even if you don’t follow, Spingarn, you’ve some idea of what I’m talking about?”

  The tiger looked more puzzled. It rumbled softly in the depths of its deep, thick throat. Liz felt a thrill of terror once more. Suppose Spingarn forgot?

  “Well, I know what the Alien’s groping toward!” Marvell said. “I know why it’s mucking about with the evolutionary structures! And I know what’s wrong with its guesswork!”

  Marvell laughed aloud in triumph.

  “I know!”

  Liz felt herself to be on a thin and nervous thread of near-exhaustion. She saw Marvell’s fat chest, his splayed moustaches, his beaming dirty face, his thick bare leg, and one of a pair of spats which had survived the mishaps on Talisker: bloody, tired, hungry and totally out of place in his absurd costume, Marvell nevertheless had some quality that was lacking in every one of the bland men she had known. He was arrogant, not overbright, frequently wrong, stupid at times and invariably pompous: self-seeking, licentious and untrustworthy, he was grand! He had the vigor of a defeated emperor, the arrogance of a seeless medieval bishop, the cunning inspiration of a failed poet.

  “Sir?” asked Horace humbly.

  “Down there is where the Time-outers enter the Alien’s Possibility Space!” declared Marvell. “Right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the robot.

  The tiger cubs looked over the cliff and were nipped back by their mother.

  “Ye say?” grunted Hawk.

  “And we know that the Alien got them to go in.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Horace again.

  Liz thought of the collie bitch, left alone in the curious combined agricultural and graser Frame; its human owners had simply upped and gone, called by the Alien’s irresistible piping. And only Hawk had resisted! How?

  “So when they got into the Possibility Space, it started shoving them up and down the evolutionary ladder, even if there was an evolutionary dead-end, like the dinosaurs.”

  “Ye mean the boggarts? Ye speak in a Froggish way!”

  Liz understood what Frogs were then. A Primitive tribe. A vague memory came back of a race that were rather less uncouth than that to which Hawk claimed allegiance. She wondered again at Hawk’s ability to remain unaffected by the alien’s black-gold note in space-time. She was caught up, though, in Marvell’s confident speech.

  “Yes! The Alien brought them here, then tried to work out what we were! Humans, I mean! It’s been playing some sort of evolutionary game—Liz is right! But it’s not sure how to do it! Look at this place—it defies logic! I mean, dinosaurs hunting us! Dear Christ, and tigers! You see, the Alien’s guessed something about the way life emerged on Terra and it’s trying to weigh up its own cycle of existence against it!”

  Liz saw that the tiger had understood.

  It pushed a paw at Marvell’s foot, but the fat man barely noticed. He seemed armored in his conceit and interpretative lunacy.

  “That’s it!” he cried. “The bloody Alien needs us as guinea pigs—or dinosaurs or tigers or apes—to work out what it’s doing here! It’s lost, but lost in a space-time it can’t fathom!”

  Liz exploded with understanding.

  A lost entity, adrift in a chaotic universe!

  A thing that could watch humans emerge but understand nothing of the processes that brought them into existence!

  The Alien—whatever it was—had contacted Spingarn. That much they knew. It had somehow got through to that warped intellect, and Spingarn had obtained its assistance.

  But to what end!

  “Don’t you see?” bawled Marvell, and he was all Plot Director now. Liz could see him groping for the lighted cigar. None came, and his hands scrabbled at the remains of his frock coat. “Liz! Horace! My old colleague, Spingarn! And Ethel! And you, Sergeant Hawk!”

  He waited.

  Liz knew that he loved such moments. Suspense. Just like the time he had unveiled the fliers with their steam engines and howitzers. It was impossible that they should lift off the ground. But Spingarn had got the machines to master the technology of steam to such an extent that the string and plywood-winged airplanes had lumbered and heaved themselves into the air, crew, guns, coal, water tanks and all!

  “Yes, Marvell?” she cried.

  “Why, the Alien’s trying—”

  He had stopped. Even the robot had lost its impassivity. Hawk glowered, against his will interested in Marvell’s impassioned explanation.

  Marvell seemed to have something stuck in his throat.

  “—trying urgle-urgoo—”

  Liz saw him clutch the base of his skull.

  “Sir?” asked the robot. “The Alien, you were saying?”

  “—uggow—” Marvell gasped.

  Now he had both hands at the back of his neck.

  “—ogg-uffoo—”

  Liz groaned, defeated. She saw a strangely witless expression cloud Marvell’s eyes. His forehead was awash with sweat. His arms sank down to his sides, and his shoulders rounded, so that he looked shorter, brutish, subhuman. Hair sprouted on his gleaming skull.

  “—uffaw-oogg!” Marvell got out.

  His eyes were cunning, his whole demeanor loutish.

 
; “Sir?” the robot said.

  Instinctively, Hawk was adjusting the priming of his musket. Liz could see religious awe in his fierce blue eyes. The tiger snorted, and the cubs raced to it. The female glared at Marvell.

  “Not now,” Liz said. “You were just telling us—”

  Marvell’s gaze turned to her.

  A vicious pain blasted loose inside her head. Her hands went to a point just below the base of her skull. For perhaps a half-second she understood what was happening. Chemical engineering. A genetic time-bomb. The one tiny cell injected back at Center that would gobble up what was Liz Hassell’s mind and replace it with another!

  That single cell would multiply in a microsecond until it had eaten across the whole of her brain and set out on its journey, magnified a million million times, to the uttermost reaches of the nervous system! She knew it would happen, for she had gone through recycling before; but there was left to her a monumental spasm of regret! This was the Alien’s Possibility Space!

  She experienced a weird jumble of sensory impressions as her memories began to writhe away. Dominating them was a terrible fear.

  She knew what had happened to the other humans who had been lured into the Possibility Space.

  They had been thrown into blind alleys of evolutionary history!

  Would she suffer their fate?

  She asked Marvell.

  “Aaag—offaw?” she said. “Uff?”

  Marvell stared at her. His small, beady eyes glared from under the greasy mat of hair.

  “Ogg!” he bawled suddenly.

  Liz caught the stench of tiger and leaped as the male commanded. She saw a skeletal metal arm come out to restrain her and she dodged under it. A tiger cub leaped out at her, but she evaded that too and ran after the joggling buttocks of the male. His stench left a trail on the grass. She fled in the tracks he made. The trees were safety, though the cats could climb. It meant finding a stream and crossing so the stench was lost. Absently she picked at a flea in her fur and ate it. She did not lose a stride. She disliked the extra skin.

  Marvell was at the trees.

  He had turned to see if she was safe. When he saw that the tigers had not pursued them, he jumped up and down three times, letting out a wild roar of glee. Liz yelped too until Marvell knocked her sideways. She saw a caterpillar and put it to her mouth. It was bitter so she threw it away.