by Brian N Ball
The other twin became a normal human infant. It sat back on its buttocks and poked a finger at the collie’s long face. It licked him, delighted.
“Spingarn!” Ethel called impatiently. “They are awake! I want them—they’re filthy!”
Hawk came out of the house, his satisfied grin gone. He was carrying two zinc buckets and a set of clothes.
“Your lady sent these out, sir,” he reported. “Not the rightful uniform for ye, Captain, but needs must when orders come!” Hawk frowned at Horace. “Monkey, we’ll have some duties for you! Here, fill the buckets! And see to the blocked spring in the yard!”
Spingarn nodded to the robot.
“We’ll spend a day or two in putting the place to rights,” he told the sergeant and Horace.
“Spingarn!” Ethel said again, this time with an edge of warning.
The twins knew the voice now. They shouted back and pulled at Spingarn’s hair until he moved. The bitch followed, tongue hanging out. A low mournful noise sounded from the barn. The cows needed milking.
Spingarn shook his head. It was a strange transition. Beast to farmer in one day. He thought of the glittering seas of energy that indicated the Alien’s presence on Talisker and swallowed down his excitement.
A few days, he promised himself. No more.
Marvell grunted to Liz one dismal morning when they were almost starving. He indicated the terrible swamplands. She came down from the hollow oak. There were no grubs, no eggs, no helpless chicks. Marvell posed a question. She opened her mouth to show that she had not eaten secretly. He grunted again.
She fell in behind him. They stepped lightly, both very afraid. Marvell had fashioned two clubs. Each was made of a stick and a stone. His was larger. But Liz could swing her primitive ax with some dexterity.
When they reached the edge of the swampland, they listened. Evil, slithering sounds came from the giant evergreens. Red eyes looked alertly around for lesser horrors that could provide food. Liz and Marvell were mud-covered themselves. The shadows of heavy-leaved bushes covered them. They were invisible.
“Uffaw,” whispered Marvell.
Liz visualized large green eggs stuffed with delicious golden goo. They had found one some time before. Its reptilian parent had, apparently, forgotten its existence. They edged from the shadows, finding submerged foliage and dead logs with their bare feet.
A long, heavy-boned snake rippled near them. Its head turned to them, then it looked away. Marvell’s stone club was firm in his hand. Liz contemplated flight. But Marvell’s hand touched her anus and she was calm again.
They were looking for an unguarded dinosaur egg.
They were aglow with hunger and hope.
“Uff!” Marvell exclaimed.
Liz cowered.
Beneath the slime of the running mud, a vast submarine wave showed the passage of one of the cow-like monsters. It was feeding on succulent roots. Would it have a nest hereabouts?
Marvell slavered. Saliva ran down his ponderous jaw. Liz reacted by munching on her tangled, greasy hair.
There was a new sound, and a young fifty-foot high evergreen toppled. Marvell and Liz froze, horrified. The armored snout of a hunting dinosaur pushed through the smaller growth.
They ran back toward the forest, hunger forgotten. Liz dropped her club and knew Marvell would beat her. The ferocious roar of the carnivorous dinosaur surged around them. It was hunting the swimming, unaware, slow-moving monster.
Deeply disappointed, they stopped about a mile from the central swamp. Marvell held up his club and grunted. Liz cowered and stroked his belly. He hit her with his fist. It was a bad day.
Dazed, Liz felt a shadowy plan emerging. She had already dismissed the savage blow from her mind. With a lithe jerk she was on her feet. Marvell caught a grub and munched it. She snorted rapidly, outlining her plan. His small black eyes focused unintelligently on her dirty, weather-beaten face.
“Aff?” he said.
With considerable patience, Liz explained once more.
Marvell bit her affectionately when she had done.
She pushed him away. She was too hungry for mating.
She pointed to a trail.
They slipped along like hunting dogs.
After ten days of mounting impatience, Spingarn told Ethel that he was going. She did not raise any objection, but she insisted on being heard.
“I’m not going,” she told him. “I know you didn’t intend that I should, but I want to be sure you’ve thought it all out. You see, you still jump into things, Spingarn! I know we came out of the other thing reasonably well, but going too near the Genekey ruins was a crazy thing to do. I mean, we’d sent Horace off with the specifications, just as you planned, but we needn’t have set out immediately to contact the Alien. We could have waited. It might have worked out some way of orienting itself, given time.”
Spingarn listened, knowing she was wrong. When he had approached the Genekey ruins eighteen months before it was with the deliberate plan of contacting the Alien, and that, as soon as possible. The Alien had been the victim of some kind of disposal plot in a far distant time. For a hundred million years it had been buried. Once it had learned of the existence of other sentient beings, it was anxious to achieve a living existence itself. It was impatient to be.
The difficulty was that it did not know how to live.
Immured in a different framework of space-time from that it had known, the Alien had wanted to know where it was, how it could exist, where it had come from.
And he, Spingarn, was its link with the beings of the Universe into which it had been cast.
No, there had been no choice, a year and a half ago. The only evidence of the Alien’s passage on Talisker was the ruined installation that could reverse the effects of random cell-fusion. It was in those bizarre whorls of energy-fields that he could find it again.
Whatever it had learned of the human condition had been learned from him, Spingarn. And whatever experiments it would attempt in an effort to learn about the Universe—and its place in this strange Universe—must include him.
He had decided, on his return to Talisker, that he must face the Alien at once.
So, he and Ethel had become absorbed into the weird Possibility Space: and, into it, had come the rest of Talisker’s unfortunate inhabitants.
He must go back.
“Besides,” Ethel went on, “it played about with the evolutionary chain and where has it got to? I mean, what good did we do it?”
It was evening. Hawk puffed on his pipe and stared into the red fire. Horace stood at the door, a negligent and elegant figure. He listened with interest. The twins were long in bed. They still slept together, curled toward one another for warmth and security. But they behaved now like ordinary human children. Spingarn watched the fire for a moment.
“What good?” he repeated.
About this at least she was right. They had been caught up in the subtle trickery of the Alien’s power. It had watched the transmuted humans pass from one environment to another, from one kind of existence to another; they themselves had been thrust down the evolutionary ladder and then up another branch of it. And they had been lucky. But what positive results were there?
“I know what we were sent here to do,” said Ethel, “but we just haven’t been able to do it.”
“There was the Genekey specification—it made us a present of that.”
“That was only part of it!” Ethel said. “You know as well as I do that our job was to try to get the Alien back to where it came from!”
Spingarn’s mind rang with the thought of the strange and potent being’s long burial. The thousands of millennia seemed to swim in the space around him, making the farmhouse’s whitewashed walls a view into another Universe. There was a feeling of cosmic forces at work that was deeply disturbing.
It had known him because he was the Probability Man. His own shattered psyche had echoed its wish to know the how and the why of its awakening. And, for a time
, he had been able to contact it. Was Ethel right? Had they altogether failed in showing the Alien what life in the Universe was?
Were all the forced sacrifices of the Time-outers of Talisker in vain? Spingarn struggled against the answer. Surely, by examining the cycles of life in its bizarre Possibility Space, it knew more than before? Hadn’t it been able to trace the evolution of all Terran species from the first beginnings in the warm seas of the planet?
Spingarn said slowly: “It should know something by now. About us. Enough to enable it to localize itself in space-time.”
“I expect so,” said Ethel levelly. “But we were sent to do more.”
“Time-out!” whispered Spingarn. “We wanted it to be able to call Time-out!”
There was a pause. Ethel turned to Horace. “What’s your estimation?”
“My estimate is that the Alien has learned a little of the Universe. I assigned every probability a function and extended a curve. There’s a slight bunching of factors which indicates some hope of self-identification, but in an indeterminate future.”
“Not good enough,” said Spingarn.
“I don’t want to stay here indefinitely!” Ethel said.
Spingarn looked about the pleasant, homely room. Some families could be content here. But not the Probability Man! Not Spingarn!
“If it stays on Talisker, we have to,” pointed out Ethel. “You’re its only contact.”
“Then why didn’t it get in touch when we were in the Possibility Space?”
Horace made a tentative move to suggest that he join the conversation.
“Horace?” asked Ethel.
“The probabilities are that it tried.”
Spingarn felt unguessable forces crowding around him once more. The Alien trying to get through to him, when he was a brute beast? Failing? And, disappointed, still trying to fix a point of reference in a Universe totally beyond its experience?
Spingarn thought of the twins’ first reaction to the sunlight when they awoke. They had gone to sleep as cubs and woken up as humans. Their baffled incomprehension was nothing to the Alien’s bewilderment. It might have tried to get through the beast’s brain. And failed?
“So what will it do?” said Spingarn aloud.
It was a blind and deaf giant in a room crowded with tiny, fragile, infinitely vulnerable creatures. Where would it tread as it struggled to escape the confines of its impediments?
What was it planning as it tried to observe the few thousand Time-outers in the weird jumble of pasts and long-extinct monsters?
“At least think before you go back,” suggested Ethel. Spingara was freshly shocked by her calmness. He knew her rather smug smile was caused by the thought of the two sleeping infants.
Spingarn turned to the robot.
“Well, Horace? The Guardians gave you your instructions. What can I do? And what can you tell me?”
The brilliant red fur rippled in the firelight.
“My powers are limited, sir. I have been programmed so that I have minimal powers of intervention in your affairs. What information I have is available, and I have a certain amount of discretion in avoiding certain unpleasantnesses, sir. When the sergeant commanded that I find a way out of the Pit, I could, for instance, assist you and Mrs. Spingarn, as well as your family, because to do so would not interfere with the probabilities of the situation. But as to suggesting a course of action, sir, that is impossible for me. I can make predictions if you set up hypothetical situations, but I cannot cause any alteration in the present situation. That is, sir, I can carry out your orders if I am convinced that there is a strong possibility that you could perform any actions involved for yourself.”
Spingarn nodded. What it amounted to was that Horace couldn’t contravene what was likely. But what was likely on Talisker? And what would the Alien do?
Already the Alien had begun a vast and monstrous experiment. What else would it do? As it struggled to try to identify itself, what chaos would it cause?
Spingarn sat for a long time thinking of the way he had boasted to Hawk and Ethel a year and a half earlier. He had been convinced that he, Spingarn, could create a small framework of logic and order and show it to the Alien. How arrogant he had been! And how ineffectual! How little he had done compared with his grandiose schemes!
“But I have to try!” he groaned. “We can’t wait for it to think up more experiments on Talisker! Ethel, the twins—think what they might have to go through! When it’s tired of watching cell-mutations up and down the evolutionary ladder, it might decide on something worse!”
“There are certain possibilities,” agreed Horace.
“I’ve got to go!” Spingarn said.
“Yes, dear,” agreed Ethel. “But you don’t seem to be the right man to help the Alien, do you?”
Spingarn stared at the calm face. Ethel had once been completely subservient. Her only ambition had been to glorify Spingarn.
“Not the right man?”
“They sent someone else,” Ethel pointed out.
“Who?”
Even as she said the name, Spingarn realized that he had forgotten the Guardians’ powerful intellect. They had chosen the one they thought could help in the Frames of Talisker.
“Why, Marvell!”
“And Miss Hassell,” added Horace.
Marvell?
Spingarn could remember his last sight of the buffoon Marvell. He had been dressed in the bejeweled codpiece of the priestly hierarchy of the First Galactic Empire, a vast and wildly enthusiastic man whose only thought was of the lunatic Plots he directed. Marvell—Marvell to reach out to the Alien! But the Guardians, inscrutable and omniscient, had chosen him!
And Marvell was loose inside the Possibility Space, transmuted into some other kind of life form, together with his assistant!
“Gawd!” said Spingarn.
“Aye!” murmured Hawk in his sleep.
Ethel announced that she was ready for bed. Her hair was brushed and parted. Her skin shone with health. Spingarn saw the prominent bosom and felt a glow of proprietorial pride. And then he thought of Marvell.
“Marvell!” he said aloud, shaking his head.
Ethel smiled. “He had some interesting ideas.”
She would not elaborate and Spingarn spent half the night lying awake and thinking of Marvell, splendid lunatic Marvell. He found himself annoyed at the idea of Marvell being sent to solve the weird enigma of Talisker. He, Spingarn, was the Probability Man!
Before he fell asleep, he laughed at his own conceit.
He would find Marvell.
And, undoubtedly, the Alien would find him, Spingarn. After all, for the Alien, Spingarn was a part of its strange environment. Spingarn was a function of the Frames of Talisker. He was inextricably a part of what it had created. As Spingarn he could reach it again.
He dreamed of the long entombment of the Alien, a long and deadly dream, full of a sense of slow doom and the immense tread of the centuries.
* * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Marvell was unconvinced at first.
The female was too sure of herself. He could not meet her eyes when she bared her teeth like this. She stared too hard, yelped with laughter too much. Marvell clambered out of the deep pit he had scooped with such labor.
Seeing his frown, smelling his anger, she offered a finger. He put it into his mouth. Large, flat, yellow teeth closed on it. She betrayed no anxiety. He nipped her without breaking the skin.
She indicated the rocks above the wet trail.
He looked at the dark hole which was inches deep in water. There was something missing. He scratched his head and discovered a louse. Liz took it from him.
She too looked at the hole.
Then her bloodshot orange-flecked green eyes widened. She did not tell Marvell of her other idea yet. Liz had learned that too much independence of thought brought pain.
When the sun was down. That was the time. First, they would sleep.
Spingarn made
his preparations with the care advised by Ethel. He admired her shrewdness, though he found himself disturbed by the change in their relationship. She treated him as a slightly older version of the twins. On her recommendation, he watched the shifting seas of the ruined Genekey installation over a period of days.
There was a regular cyclic pattern of events. As Talisker’s haunted globe glided around its single dull-red sun, the strength of the energy-fields within the chaotic and stormy arena of the Genekey varied; it seemed that the Alien had left some form of time-device that was linked with the orbits of the sun, the twin moons, and Talisker itself. Regularly Hell Gates opened.
At certain times of the day, the hole through which the Time-outers had passed reappeared. Hawk had watched in the same way for over a year and a half, waiting for the companions of his bizarre quest. Like Hawk, Spingarn caught occasional glimpses of the transmuted denizens of the Alien’s Possibility Space. Once he was a fur-headed beast looking back at him. It was waiting, expectantly. Spingarn tried not to think of the times he had waited.
Naturally, he interrogated Hawk over and over. The man’s mind was full of his own interpretation of the events he had seen—full of tales of boggarts and trolls, fantastic alliances of Frenchmen and wizards, strange and terrible appearances of Satan’s legions and bursting grenadoes. Yet Hawk had the military eye. His observation had been acute; it was his Primitive persona that made him talk in miraculous terms.
When Hawk was asked to describe Marvell and his female assistant, his descriptions matched those that Horace was able to supply. “Beasts! Beasts, Captain! Unnatural apeish creatures they became, with hairy bellies and long arms and the eyes of devils, and tails! Tails, Captain! Veritable apes of the forest! And shameless, especially the doxy with the big bubbies, the whore! Aye, and running for the woods away from Hawk’s musket! Leave them be, Captain! Begging your pardon, your honor, they’re naught but whoreson treacherous French deserters! And beastly too!”
Hawk was able to remember Marvell’s triumphant yell too, much as Horace had recorded it. And even in the sergeant’s picturesque language, Spingarn could sense the triumph of the man he had known as Marvell. It all centered on the game, as Hawk remembered it. There was a game in progress. Hawk interpreted the notion of the Alien playing evolutionary games with the human race as some form of military exercise, the kind of parallel he might have been expected to draw. One phrase, though, came through Hawk’s lengthy narrative.