Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  “Aye!”

  Horace retracted the sensors.

  “Yes, Sergeant. And this lodestone has the quality of attracting men and women! It is by this means that the King of Hell is able to gather together the poor creatures you see in front of you.”

  “Monkey, it is a cunning device!”

  Hawk was most impressed by the explanation. Nevertheless, he asserted his authority without hesitation.

  “Ye said ye had means of circumventing the Devil and his works, didn’t ye?”

  “Indeed I did, Sergeant.”

  “Ye have strange ways!”

  Horace assembled a tracery of writhing, almost living, wires on the dome of the little rock; the tiger shivered, another memory trickling through the lobes of its brain.

  “I propose to describe a pentacle of power hereabouts,” said Horace. “Inside the pentacle, I shall make counter-conjurations, such as will altogether confound the machinations of the Devil!”

  Hawk blanched.

  “Trafficking in wizardry, are ye?”

  “According to the customs of the philosophers of Cambridge,” agreed Horace. “And also,” he added, as he put the finishing touches to the warping device, “just as the eminent scholar Isaac Newton suggested.”

  “Bowels of God!”

  Fascinated, the large cats saw the thin and dead red thing pour sunlight from its talons. Fingers of rosy dawn stretched to the wire and the whole became a pale, glowing sun. The cubs closed their eyes against the glare, while the tigress howled mournfully. She curled against her black-gold mate for comfort, but he watched.

  “Black wizardry!” breathed Hawk. “Ye’d be burned in England, assuredly!”

  “Sergeant, if you’d be ready to step into the circle when it forms?”

  “Me? Walk into a wizard’s unchristian den? No! Not Hawk of the Pioneers! I’ll shoot your clockwork guts full of holes! I’ll bayonet and destroy you! I’ll have your monkey-machine guts for me leggings! I’ll bombard and utterly explode ye!”

  Horace concentrated as the darkness increased. The patch of pale sunlight increased in size, lapping beyond the small rock. Shifting traceries of power shivered within the orbit of the energy-fields created by Horace; the whole rock itself shuddered slightly, under the stress of force and counter-force. One cub put back its head and yelped its fear.

  The tiger snarled savagely at Hawk. It feared the dead red thing, feared its molten talons; it sensed powers unknown.

  “No, Sergeant?” asked Horace.

  Hawk raised the musket.

  “No, damn ye!”

  Horace shrugged elegantly. His thin, high shoulders expressed regret.

  “Under the circumstances, Sergeant, I have no alternative but to—”

  Hawk interrupted his words, the old soldier’s instincts ever alert.

  “Be damned to ye for a cozening rogue!” snarled Hawk, grabbing the cylindrical grenado from his belt. “Here’s fire!”

  He had the waxy taper of the fuse at the incandescent pool of fire in a moment, and the greasy cotton crisply spattered into life. The sparks flew into the grass beside the tiger and its terrified mate and cubs. It leaped high into the air. Horace sighed and daintily flicked a small glittering pellet between Hawk and the cats.

  “I have to use my discretion at this point,” he said apologetically. “A small local disturbance only. A little neural-interference field, Sergeant—a mere dose of laudanum, which you’ll forgive me for administering?”

  The pellet spread its load of time-suspending seeds. The cubs wilted and fell against one another. Poised for a leap to snap Hawk’s neck, the tigress felt her legs turn to jelly. The tiger had already stretched out a vast paw to intercept the potent little container, but it was far too late, for the quiet power surged into all of its nervous system in an instant, and the cat dropped its head to the rough grass. Horace took the grenado in mid-flight with a negligent movement. He pinched away the fuse between metal claws.

  The amber and yellow sparks drifted down. The little rock’s dome split. Conflicting energy-fields warred for a few seconds, and then a weakness developed. Horace had a moment to drag one of the cubs closer to the terrible radiance around the boiling rock.

  Tall, spindly, red fur glistening, long fingers extended to pour power into his creation, he was indeed an archetypal imp. Hieronymus Bosch could have used him as a model.

  The emptiness reached for the little party. Shot through with energy-bands of haunting beauty, it claimed them. They passed through a tunnel of vivid golden blackness, bodies floating grotesquely and turning as bulk and weight sought for a gravitational base. Horace congratulated himself as they left the Alien’s Possibility Space.

  During the days after the hunting of the lame red ape, Marvell and Liz had little success. Though they had all the cunning and strength of a pair of subhumans of a kind that had originated in Africa at the start of the Pleistocene period, they had not, in reality, undergone the critical refining of their faculties that only years of successful survival in a true savage environment would have effected. They caught no other living animal. True, they discovered a bed of clams in a warm, salt swamp, but their feeding was interrupted by the sudden swooping-down of a flying reptile. They ran. Insects, grubs and fruit became their main source of food. And even then, their lack of previous experience brought dangers.

  Marvell scooped a handful of purple worms from a rotten tree and gobbled them, only to retch and splutter violently as their poison worked in his guts. He was sick for a day and a night, Liz watching over him fearfully. He moaned so much that she stopped his mouth with earth at one stage, for fear of attracting any of the voracious beasts that roamed the swamps and jungles and grasslands. Twice she moved away from him when she thought him dead. The second time, she returned and raised her stone knife. But slow memories of more humane days tumbling about inside her brain checked the hungry impulse.

  He looked up and croaked a command. She went for water. Slowly he stirred into life as the next day passed. He shed thirty pounds of bulk and his body took on a vigorous appearance. They roamed hungrily until Liz stumbled across a vast heap of bones with some flesh still attached to one crushed femur. It was enough meat to keep the pair of them full and content for another two days.

  They mated frequently. A good deal of the time was taken up by sleep. They took to sniffing out trails used by other bipeds, some of which led to rocky outcrops. On one rainy morning, they chanced on a half-hidden cave. Within, there was the rancid stench of decaying flesh, and also something strange: burnt hair and bone.

  Marvell pushed Liz behind him as he glimpsed a wall covered in striking representations of animals. It took him an hour to summon up his courage. At last, he put a filthy hand out to seize one of the small, unliving paintings. He caught only hard stone. Retreating, he sniffed his hand. Liz took it and sniffed too. There was only Marvell’s intensely appealing stench. They backed away from the cave like children who have accidentally strayed into a haunted cathedral. After that, they gave such caves a wide berth.

  Hunger, however, was their continual problem. Fruit supplied only a short-term satisfaction, while grubs and nuts were often inedible, even dangerous. Liz whined her annoyance when they saw a troop of small red apes in flight through distant trees. Both of them sensed that they had been lucky when they caught the crippled ape. Marvell placed a finger in her mouth to console her; she nipped gently, but she was still angry.

  Meat. Her mind was dazzled with memories of blood and meat.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Spingarn surfaced to find the world different. It was as though his olfactory organs had been cut out and his ears stopped up. When he opened his eyes, a wider and sharper range of vision was available to him. But the subtle and powerful senses of smell and hearing were almost extinct. He rolled over onto his belly and stretched puny limbs with a strange slowness. A small sound of dismay came from his mouth.

  “What happened to the—” he
began, and then he saw the skeletal red figure bending over a woman still in the grip of the sense-blinding molecular-dispersal field. He blinked, conscious of familiarity with the woman, with the robotic, red-furred figure, but still with the cobwebs of the field hanging inside his head; the loss of most smells and much of sound, combined with the vividness of full three-dimensional vision after the tiger’s flatter, duller sight, troubled him too.

  He knew something of what had happened. He could recall the apologetic murmur as Horace threw the little missile between his mate and Hawk. And then there was the mind-bending zany dance of the particles. There had been a gentle afterglow of violet radiance, which he could still feel on his retinas.

  “Horace?” he said aloud. “Hawk?”

  The robot turned.

  “Ah, sir, you’re recovering!”

  Spingarn got to his feet. He was a short man of great width of shoulder, something over the age of thirty and in perfect health. But standing on two feet was both odd and at the same time right. He felt too high.

  “Ethel!” he bawled suddenly, rushing to the unconscious woman. “And the twins!”

  He located the two infants, cradled in an arm by their mother. He stared at them, vaguely disturbed. Although he could not recall seeing the boys before, they were his and Ethel’s, no doubt of it. It puzzled him that he could not remember their looks.

  “Absolutely unharmed, I assure you, sir! The lady will sleep for a few minutes, the children perhaps for half an hour. But the neural-interference has caused no damage, none. I have calibrated the electromagnetic disturbance and found it well within the tolerable range. Sergeant Hawk’s condition too is good, though with such an overlaid psyche, it’s impossible to give an entirely accurate reading of brain-patterns.”

  Spingarn rolled the boys tighter into their sleeping mother’s side. It was early morning, and there was a slight chill in the air. He looked down and saw that he was quite naked. For the first time, he realized that he was Spingarn again.

  “Talisker!” he exclaimed. “This is Talisker?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! This is indeed Talisker!”

  “Talisker!” repeated Spingarn.

  He was hungry. And why should he salivate so? And why should he think of a small hole in the ground which he had further excavated? He knew. There was the rest of the carcass. Ripe by now. Covered with leaves, and ready for eating. He thrust the thought away.

  What had happened?

  “I took the liberty of putting myself at the disposal of the sergeant,” Horace said. “He was, sir, the only available human. I expect Sergeant Hawk will be able to explain the full circumstances of Director Marvell’s and Miss Hassell’s transmutation, but it will be in his own terms. I had to make the subject matter comprehensible to him—”

  “Marvell?”

  “And Miss Hassell, sir. She was new to Direction. She joined Mr, Marvell’s team a little after the first Talisker expedition.”

  “Marvell here?

  Spingarn remembered the large and lunatic Marvell who had taken such an interest in his own career. Always eager for a new twist to an established Frame, Marvell had questioned him about the way he had sent Time-outers to revive the desolate Frames of Talisker. But the fat man was a sophisticated modern—he had never been inside a Frame in his life, to Spingarn’s knowledge. Not once had Marvell so much as moved from the complex of Plotting arenas at Frames Control Center. He wasn’t a man for working in the field. Certainly not here, not on Talisker! “Yes, sir.”

  Spingarn looked about, took in the expanse of desert, the sand, the gradually increasing light as Talisker’s twin moons spun out of the sky and the sun came from below the horizon. There were more urgent matters than the presence of Marvell and his female assistant.

  “How long was I in the Frame?” he asked Horace. He was unsure of the past. That was the trouble with cell-fusion. It hit you in one blinding second, and then you were whatever persona was contained in the tiny seed-cell. Then, you were in the Plot. But now he was out of whatever recreation of reality had held him. He was no longer that other man who seemed to have had a different set of sensory equipment from his own.

  Spingarn could not help speculating on what era had claimed him. Stray memories would keep skittering through his alert and highly-organized mind. But such memories! Why, especially, blood? Why was that the dominant image? And why did he have to look at his own muscular arms and hands and regard them with such contempt? Why, too, the feeling that he should be nearer to the ground and stepping with massive grace, alert for sounds that no ear could perceive? “Frame, sir?”

  Spingarn recognized the half-playful question for what it was. The robot was pretending to misunderstand him. In its pedantic way, it was implying a superiority of knowledge and understanding. It had been the same ever since the first time he had seen its conceited head and its bizarre fur skin. Always attempting to display its mental powers. Spingarn did not show his faint annoyance. “I was in a Frame. I came out of it a few minutes ago. You must have brought me out. There’d be enemies, or you wouldn’t have used the neural-interference capsule. I still feel the effects.” He did, too. It was like coming out of the Gunpowder Age Frame, so long ago, when he had first learned of his weird escape from the consequences of his actions on Talisker. Then, it had taken him long minutes to adjust to the idea that he was no longer a Private of Pioneers in the army of the English Queen. His calmness had helped him on that occasion. He had tricked the Time-out Umpire, Horace of the red fur, into helping him. “So how long was I out?”

  “You were, ah, out, sir, for about a year and a half.”

  Spingarn looked at the sleeping woman. The infants were very young. As he looked, he had a sudden vision of supple muscles under black-gold fur. Why should he think of a slinking, exquisite beast? The vision blurred and he saw Ethel’s mature curves once more.

  “What Frame?”

  Spingarn felt other memories surging for an opportunity to express themselves on the canvas of his mind. There was much more to Talisker. Here was a small oasis. Other, stranger scenes must lie over the horizon, beyond the unseen barriers. And, somewhere beyond all human consciousness, there was the other thing. The blind and inchoate power of the Alien!

  “It wasn’t exactly a Frame, sir,” said Horace, and Spingarn knew that he had walked in the shadowy lands.

  “Well?”

  “It was a Possibility Space, sir.”

  Spingarn felt memories thundering through his mind. There had been contests just as deadly, worse because they had taken place on the eerie planet of Talisker, where grotesque cell-fusion changes had occurred. He knew the robot was gloating over his disturbed state of mind.

  “What Possibility Space?”

  “Why, sir, the Possibility Space into which Sergeant Hawk projected Director Marvell and Miss Hassell!”

  Spingarn sensed a weird mystery. But on Talisker that was commonplace.

  “Go on,” he said again calmly.

  “Sergeant Hawk went too, sir. And myself.”

  “You came across me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how did you get into the Possibility Space?”

  “Ah, Sergeant Hawk had observed that the remains of the Genekey had been developed—

  “Genekey! But it was destroyed—that was the understanding! No more random cell-fusing!”

  “I’m afraid, sir, that your agreement was unenforceable—after all, sir, it was a most, ah, tenuous pact.”

  Spingarn nodded. Horace was right, of course. His mind boiled with questions. Marvell here? That meant he had been dispatched. And the Genekey reactivated? And himself inside a Frame that was a Possibility Space, for a year and a half? And now he had returned with no identifiable memories but with Ethel and a pair of sons.

  “So this is Possibility Space?”

  “Yes, sir. The Alien’s.”

  If Horace had hoped for a reaction of dismay on Spingarn’s part, he was to be disappointed. The brilliant mi
nd was unimpaired. Spingarn’s imagination was already leaping ahead to plan for the future. So the utterly strange entity that had somehow been slipped into the Universe and taken up residence among the ruins of Talisker had used him, Spingarn, in some experiment of its own! What did Horace know?

  “Why haven’t I any clear memories?” he demanded.

  He would ask Ethel, and Hawk, once they were fully awake. Surely they would be able to recall something of their patterns of experience in this Possibility Space.

  “I think, sir,” the robot said contentedly, “that you should ask yourself whether or not you retain any human memories.”

  Spingarn’s mind suffered a shock of realization. It was a sudden and brief flaring-up of enlightenment. No memories—just impressions. Impressions of a flatter world, of blood and clawing violence. Of steely power and long feeding and his face awash with blood.

  “Animal?”

  “Yes, sir. When I encountered you recently, sir, you were a carnivore. A tiger, to be precise, sir.”

  “Ethel too,” murmured Spingarn.

  She had experienced strange transformations since her introduction to the planet of Talisker! The random cell-fusion effect had worked a wonderful change on that first occasion. He remembered the swelling ripe breasts, the elegant curves of her legs—and the tracery of membrane at her back. Wings! In her surprise, she had shot up to twenty feet above the ground, where she hovered, astonished, her wings beating gracefully against the light breeze. And now she had been turned into a tigress!

  Spingarn regarded the sleeping children with a more proprietorial air. Twins! He looked forward to hearing Ethel’s comment when she awoke. They must have mated in the weird Possibility Space.

  “I was a carnivore!” Spingarn exclaimed. “It means there’s more than recycling! The cassettes couldn’t have done it—it just isn’t possible psychologically to adapt the human mind to such a way of life!”