Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  Marvell had called the Time-outers—including Spingarn, Ethel and now Marvell himself—guinea pigs. Experimental animals. Unfortunately, as Horace pointed out, Marvell had not been able to complete his assessment of the Alien’s intentions or state of mind. His words had turned into grunts and incomprehensible bellowing. And then the two apes, male and female, had run.

  It did not seem so absurd now that the Guardians should have sent Marvell to Talisker. The gross man of the splendidly lunatic mind had been able to work out, in a lightning analysis, what the Alien was trying to do. It seemed more than possible that Marvell would have the necessary intuition to go further.

  Spingarn waited day after day until he was sure he knew the working of the black entrance into Hawk’s Hell. He plotted, with Horace’s assistance, every combination of factors in the series of situations in an effort to work out the likeliest plan of action; but, as he did so, he knew that on Talisker forward planning was laughable. The only certainty on Talisker was that there would be quintessence of the bizarre.

  When the time came—when he was convinced that no further observation was profitable—it would depend upon him, Spingarn the Probability Man.

  There was only one more thing he could do. Confront the Alien. Find Marvell, then confront the Alien.

  He, Spingarn, must once again try to reach out to that long-incarcerated heaving mass of intelligence.

  Marvell jumped up and down with glee when Liz showed him how to cover the pit. She was not expecting praise, so she had taken the precaution of climbing a tree. She came down to have her belly rubbed.

  The first night they caught a small marsupial creature. It spent hours trying to scramble up the wet sides. Marvell and Liz listened until its efforts ceased. In fear but salivating with hunger they looked. The grass was disturbed, the frail twigs supporting it broken.

  Large, terrified eyes stared back at them.

  Marvell sank his teeth into Liz’s shoulder in his excitement. She hit him with all her strength.

  Marvell reeled. Then he laughed with pleasure.

  They raised their stone axes. Marvell struck first. Liz was more accurate. They hauled the dead body up in wonderment at their success.

  “You’re sure about the cell-fusion?” Spingarn asked for the third time.

  “Quite sure, sir,” Horace told him. “All remnants of the implanted recycling processes have been erased from your brain.”

  Spingarn put a hand to the back of his head. It was the one doubtful element. He, Spingarn, had a chance of contacting the Alien.

  A tiger had no such chance. He thought of the other life forms in the Possibility-Space. Some of them had a very short life span. How ludicrous it would be to enter the Alien’s evolutionary experiment and find oneself some kind of simple trilobite or nautiloid!

  Horace declared once more that statistically he must remain human. According to the robot, the Alien had used the processes of memory-recycling and simply extended them to include its evolutionary games. Thus, anyone who had the apparatus for recycling in his or her skull was subject to a rapid descent down the ladder of evolution once in the Possibility Space.

  It made a kind of rough logic, Spingarn supposed.

  “Sir,” Horace had told him, explaining how the Alien seized on any available structure or framework that lay to hand, “the Alien entity used cell-fusion more or less as it is used in the Frames. In a sense, sir, the Possibility Space is a Frame!”

  Spingarn was almost convinced. If Horace was right, he would be Spingarn, for there was no traceable element of the sophisticated structures of cell-fusion still in his brain. There was no straw for the Alien to make bricks with. Hawk was another such.

  The robot had explained Hawk’s resistance to the insidious attraction of the Possibility Space by pointing to the stable nature of Hawk’s conditioning.

  “The sergeant, sir, isn’t anything else but the sergeant! Cell-fusion completely destroyed the psyche underneath. He is Sergeant Hawk, not an overlaid persona. The Alien couldn’t use our methods of reorganizing memories and personality traits because the structures we use had been eradicated. And it’s the same in your case, sir. I extrapolated a Probability Curve and it gave a very high success quotient for your stability as a psyche. All the cell-fusion structures were absorbed when you underwent your previous transformation, sir. As a carnivore.”

  Spingarn tried to accept the robot’s reasoning. But the human mind was not a reasoning thing, not altogether. He still had moments of dread, along with the sick excitement and blazing wonder, at the thought of stepping into the eerie gap that formed in Hawk’s oasis.

  Spingarn woke Ethel early one morning. He told her that it was time for him to go. She accepted his decision in the same calm way that she had accepted his reasons for endangering himself once more. Spingarn knew that her horizons were wider than his now. Or perhaps narrower.

  He looked in at the sleeping twins and was freshly amazed at the fact of creation. Spingarn’s one true act of originality!

  Hawk was snoring. He would learn later, from Horace, that his captain was gone once more into the Kingdom of Satan. Spingarn went past the sergeant’s room quietly.

  It was dawn when he came to the oasis.

  The cycle of time and energy was slowly coming around once more to a bizarre conjunction of forces and events.

  Spingarn shuddered as a blackness lapped out from the Genekey. He saw shifting gold splashes deep inside the blackness. Hawk had not misnamed the entrance to the Possibility Space!

  He kept his eyes open, full of dread but in complete command of himself.

  The Gates of Hell swallowed him.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Spingarn heard the slithering just in time.

  A few more seconds and they would have boiled over his body, rending and snapping with greedy jaws. He had known what to expect, but the reality was worse than he could have dreamed. A ring of the scaled, short-jawed things had formed around him. He saw, evaluated and leaped almost in the same instant. His perfect physical condition saved him. There was the merest handhold, and only friction for his bare feet, but he had the strength and agility to use them to scramble clear of the red-rimmed eyes and the fangs. Some kind of reptile, a primitive crocodile!

  But there had been a coordination about their movement, a synchronization, that belied their primitive natures. Spingarn looked down and fancied that he could see the human bafflement beneath the hungry stares. These things had been men! For a moment, haunting memories of another kind of existence came back to him. He too had waited beside this cliff for the chances of Hell Gates and what passed through them!

  He looked at himself and almost smiled. He was Spingarn. Horace was, after all, right. Would he be right as to the probable location of the apes that once were Marvell and his woman assistant? ,

  Spingarn climbed lithely to the top of the cliff and saw the eerie admixture of territories in which he had spent a dim, blood-curdling year or more. From the swamplands came a distant shrieking as some Time-outer perished in the warm mud. The apes would not dare to go into the swamps. Not when they knew the dangers.

  Spingarn checked his course. Distances seemed different. The Possibility Space smelled different too. Where once a thousand hints of stenches would have built into a pattern to tell him what animals lurked nearby, there was now only the overpowering scent of the flowering trees and bushes. He wondered if he had been right to enter the Alien’s domain alone.

  Spingarn shrugged off his doubts.

  Time enough to call for Horace once he had discovered the missing Plot Director. Marvell must be brought back to a tenable structure of space-time.

  The twins had discovered water and containers.

  Horace was kept busy filling buckets as they poured water from the kitchen sink to the stone floor. Already they had learned how to make him obey. Ethel came to see them after they had thoroughly swamped the floor. She bawled at them until the younger one wept. Th
e sturdier child looked her straight in the eyes and poured a last beaker of water onto the floor.

  Ethel was stunned by his resemblance to Spingarn. As she scolded him, she felt a thrill of fear. She called to Horace: “Shouldn’t you have gone with him?”

  “With Mr. Spingarn? Assuredly not, Mrs. Spingarn! He knows roughly where to find Mr. Marvell and Miss Hassell, and he is quite competent to bring them back through the Possibility Space entrance. It would be against my programming schedule to give more assistance.”

  “But the Alien’s tricky!”

  “So is Mr. Spingarn.”

  Ethel was still dissatisfied.

  “And where’s Sergeant Hawk?” she demanded. “I haven’t seen him since early morning.”

  Horace’s elegant pose altered. He looked confounded, as far as a high-grade automaton could.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, madam.”

  The twins noted the tones of concern. The older boy poked Horace’s leg. He looked at his finger afterward, unsure what to make of the steel beneath the red fur.

  “I think you’d better find the sergeant,” said Ethel. “I hope he hasn’t any crazy idea of following Spingarn.”

  “I hope not, madam.”

  There was a considerable pile of bones near the game trail. The male gnawed absently on an almost-clean shoulder blade. Liz’s eyes narrowed. She grunted softly.

  Marvell stopped trying to find meat on the dry bone. Game. He put the bone down and reached for the stone ax. Liz grimaced at him. He put a hand out to her. She bit gently at a finger.

  They were both absolutely silent.

  Sergeant Hawk stuck to his task. He had listened to the red clockwork monkey when his captain asked the way to the Possibility Space. Confused though he was by the terms Horace used, he was able to follow the robot’s directions. And so Hawk doggedly stuck to the trails.

  “Bowels of God!” he muttered as he passed the ruins of the green city. “A very strange and wonderful place! Heathen, though! Far Cathay would be just such a place! But Hawk knows the way—the Pioneers lead through to Hell itself! Be damned to all Froggish wiles for luring the captain back into the boggarts’ hole! Enough! Let the likes of the fat deserter and his trull stay with Satan—I’ll not have my captain in there again!”

  He chuckled as he sat to take his refreshment.

  “Aye, the old soldier’s the one that has his wits about him! I’ll destroy, bombard and entirely subdue the Frog demons! And the captain and his bairns will be the ones to thank me!”

  Spingarn sensed the presence of others. He was on a narrow trail that he could dimly recognize. There had been much rain, and many of the familiar smells would have been washed away: not that he could have read them! As it was, he relied on his inadequate hearing and his acute visual powers. But a warning flashed itself into his brain. He was being watched.

  “Marvell?” Spingarn said quietly.

  He had the little container ready in his hand. When he found the missing Direction team, he would at once dislocate their minds. A neural-interference pellet would keep them quiet for a while. He need only lob it softly between them and they would fall as the subtle trickery of twenty-ninth century technology subdued them.

  He looked around, to see fairly open forest. A few grotesque insects swam through the heavy air. Once Spingarn caught a glimpse of a heavy carnivore; its lips went back in a snarl, but it had fed and it turned away. He looked up. There was a tiny movement of black hair.

  “Marvell?” he said again.

  They were in the right place. Horace had worked out the approximate location of the best feeding ground for this kind of anthropoidal creature. It was here, away from the hideous dangers of the central swamp, and near rocks in which the apes could hide from bigger hunters. They would live on fruit, grubs and the occasional fish or small creature they caught; their diet would be supplemented by an occasional windfall, as when a larger beast hid its prey for later feasting. Their patience would be small, their intelligence low, their foresight limited. At best, their tools would be hunks of rock.

  Spingarn was amused at the thought of Marvell with a rock in his hand. A cigar was more his style. He held out his hands to show that he had no weapon.

  “Marvell! It’s Spingarn!”

  Some echo might awaken in the depths of Marvell-ape’s subconscious, just as it had happened when he, Spingarn-tiger, had seen Marvell’s face at the cliff-top.

  He heard a tiny, greedy noise. It brought the short hairs on his neck crawling coldly. But what had he to fear from two apes? He was Spingarn, a man of iron! With his skilled hands, he could quickly render them unconscious; and, after all, there was the time-bending little pellet, with its seeds of unconsciousness!

  He walked on, making no effort at silence or concealment.

  “Now what did the clockwork ape say about these causeways?” Hawk growled to himself, as he reached the strange mass of the barrier. “Climb over only when they were firm at the base?”

  He hefted the pack onto his back. Carefully he inspected the glittering black walls that were more than walls. He strapped his musket over the pack.

  “Aye!” he declared, finding one of a number of handholds. “The red befurred ape spoke the truth! I’ll soon be at the Gates of Hell! And then, steady the Pioneers!”

  Spingarn understood as he pitched downward. The mud hadn’t even looked right! He had trodden on it even though he had been aware of its odd consistency! And why? Because they’d panicked him! Because that glimpse of black hair had been intended! Because Marvell and the female with him weren’t just anthropoidal apes, but transmuted human beings of great tenacity and a terrible shrewdness.

  He should have known!

  Spingarn cursed himself in the microseconds of descent into the blackness as the grass gave way and the twigs snapped. How simple it had been for them! Dig a pit on a game trail, cover it with rotten twigs, grass, and then a thin layer of mud—keep the mud soft and wet by sprinkling it at frequent intervals: but no wild creature would have mistaken such a surface for the real thing!

  Only if it were distracted from looking at the path would it move on—only if it had some other care on its mind that overrode normal caution!

  He, Spingarn, had been distracted!

  Even as he fell, he tried to release the little pellet. It flew away from his hand, into the mud. No pattern of neural-interference radiated from it. It slid below the water and mud, inactive.

  Spingarn felt shock, pain, wetness, a clinging gooey mud. Bright waves of shock flashed into his brain, but they came and went instantly. He hurt in many parts of his body. Consciousness remained throughout.

  He checked, moving carefully. No bones broken. Bruising extensive, but no serious damage.

  A yelping, gleeful, triumphant shriek rang out.

  Another followed.

  It was the victory chant of the apes.

  Spingarn righted himself and reached for the top of the pit. It was like a huge grave. He scrabbled at a clay soil, wet and slimy. There was enough daylight for him to be able to make out marks on the side of the hole.

  Deep, wet scorings were on all sides.

  Spingarn stared in horror now.

  Other animals had been trapped in this pit. They had used up their strength trying to escape. Marvell and his assistant would be waiting.

  “Marvell!” yelled Spingarn. “Marvell, you fool!”

  Hawk made his preparations in accordance with the drills of the Pioneers. He checked the short piece of fuse with great care. There were no cracks in the greased cotton.

  “Aye!” muttered Hawk. “Old Hawk destroyed the boggart! He’ll make sure that Hell Gates close for good! A pox on all satanical Frogs!”

  There was almost half a barrel of gunpowder left.

  Spingarn had explored every inch of the pit. There was no rock, no stone that he could use to dig steps and handholds in the oozing clay mud. He had tried to make a flimsy structure out of the remains of the rotten sticks tha
t had disguised the pit’s existence; but they were useless. They held no weight at all. He could not drive them into the sides of the pit, for they broke off.

  It was ridiculous, but he feared Marvell.

  Marvell!

  Sergeant Hawk watched the bowl of his pipe. It glowed cherry-red. All was in order. The train was laid, the powder packed down, the barrel to hand.

  He saw the long thin shadow of the robot, but he was not completely surprised.

  “ ’Orris!” he said, chuckling. “Aye, monkey, ye’re come to watch the fireworks?”

  “Sergeant?”

  Hawk indicated the barrel.

  “Be thankful there’s an old soldier to take all precautions against a viperous enemy!”

  The robot’s circuits sprang into rapid calculation.

  “Sergeant, you don’t intend to—”

  The enormity of the Sergeant’s intentions precipitated severe confusion in the sophisticated automaton’s workings.

  Hawk bellowed with laughter. He had always known the befurred clockwork ape ’Orris as a fool.

  Liz peered over the edge of the pit. There had been no sound from the trapped ape for an hour. She hoped it had been stunned and then drowned in the rainwater and mud. Her mate pushed her to one side.

  Marvell looked down and grasped the big stone ax tighter. He was not afraid of the creatures they trapped, for they were helpless. Not this one, however.

  Something about the smell of this one was wrong.

  There was a sickly and disgusting odor from it.