by Brian N Ball
The grotesque conversation proceeded. Spingarn felt his admiration for the girl growing. She was an ill-kempt creature, not overly attractive physically, but she had a vitality he could appreciate. The male ape was watching him, Spingarn noticed.
It was strange to think of Marvell-ape jealous of Spingarn in this emptiness.
Time passed, and the girl probed with question after question in the gutturals of the subhuman speech; Marvell answered with growing pride. Did he sense that he was once more the center of the stage? Was there a hint of the boisterous loudmouthed buffoon in the pouting lips of the ape? A memory of Marvell’s vast conceit in its wide gestures of hairy paw and in the straddle-legged belly-protruding stance?
“Anything?” Spingarn asked.
The Alien sensed a forward movement. It brought a baying, howling, billowing series of cosmic demands into the blackness. Spingarn reeled at the force.
The ape tottered back, dismayed.
Patiently Liz restored its confidence.
Again Marvell-ape strutted. More gutturals followed.
Finally, the anthropoidal creature glared at Spingarn.
“Agg-affaw-agg-guff-agg?” it demanded.
Liz soothed it.
“What is it saying?” Spingarn exclaimed.
“It wants to know if you’re the one who’s asking the questions.”
“Why?”
Liz smiled.
“It wants you out of the way. I think Mr. Marvell’s jealous.”
“Tell him yes!”
Liz jabbered at Marvell-ape, and then the hairy squat creature got to its fullest height and intoned, in a triumphant call:
“Agg-uff-agg-fagg-uffaw-agg!”
“What?”‘ bawled Spingarn, who had scarcely believed in Liz’s abilities as a linguist at the start, but who now hung onto every clicking, guttural noise. “What does Marvell say?”
Liz had a beatific expression on her face.
“I knew it! It was all wrong! The Alien doesn’t really know much about us—it’s all so tenuous! I mean, it got its chain of evolution wrong—it shoved some of us down dead-ends, and it got the geological periods mixed up! I knew it was all so experimental! And now Marvell’s told us!”
What… !
A whirlwind announced the end of the Alien’s patience. A monumental, hundred-million-year-old period of waiting was in the cry of bewilderment.
“Tell me!” screamed Spingarn, his mind shocked into fragments by the shattering call of the Alien.
Liz reeled against him.
“Marvell says it’s got to—”
She spun, her mind a battered, tormented thing.
“What, Miss Hassell?”
Liz Hassell mouthed the words, and Spingarn caught them.
“Tell it to do what Marvell does—”
“Yes?”
“—approximate!”
Spingarn felt a giant thrust of hope.
It was not enough, not yet.
“How?”
The Alien took up the query.
How?
Liz gasped: “If you don’t have all the facts—guess!”
Spingarn exulted. It was Marvell, after all, who had seen into the problem. The splendid lunatic baboon-Marvell had solved the riddle of releasing the Alien from the desolate Frames of Talisker.
“Approximate!”
He yelled into the emptiness and felt the cold uncanny intelligence of the Alien all about him. It grabbed every fiber of his nervous system, coiling in and around every tendril of knowledge.
“You did it with us!” Spingarn bawled. “Do it with your own knowledge of yourself!”
Yes?
“Yes! Make an approximation of your own evolutionary progress—there must have been one, whatever Universe you belong to! Transform your own genes or whatever you’re made up of!”
It’s possible!
There was hope in the Alien’s answer. It was awash with something of Spingarn’s own exultation.
“You made a Possibility Space for us—try to make one for yourself!”
Yes?
“Yes…!”
If it fails?
Spingarn grinned.
“Call for the Probability Man!”
Emptiness hung, coalescing into a writhing, living mass of pure otherness. Marvell-ape yelled again. Liz Hassell put her arms around it. Blobs of blackness congealed.
“It’s going!” Liz squealed. “Spingarn, get Marvell put right!”
Spingarn understood. The Time-outers of Talisker must be returned to what they had been. Marvell, glorious ape-thing, too.
“Return us! Release the guinea pigs!”
The grotesque, quivering blobs of emptiness were steady for a moment. Spingarn and Liz Hassell felt a rush of decision from the Alien.
Agreed!
Spingarn breathed a sigh of relief. His mission was accomplished. The Alien had set up the weird experiments on Talisker to try to find how other intelligent beings adapted themselves against a fragmented situation. It had tried to assess its own being against their efforts. When it failed to make progress, it had extended the experimental procedures to take in the entire evolutionary history of the beings it found on Talisker.
And Marvell had sprung on it the dazzling idea of making an approximation of its environment.
Perhaps the Alien could learn enough about itself to allow a return to its own long-lost Universe!
Marvell-ape gibbered with fear and annoyance. The fear was caused by the overwhelming majesty of the scene the three cowering beings witnessed. They saw the departure of the Alien.
Marvell’s annoyance came from Spingarn’s continued presence. Marvell-ape felt blood-hate whirling in its brain. Fear too, fear of the collapse of this blackness. But hate!
There was nothing any of the three could think or feel at the slow, terrible, sinuous unwinding of the great coils of power that held the Alien’s Possibility Space in place. They saw Talisker lurch in its orbit, the sun glow with a surge of fire, the twin moons race around the planet in a frenzy. Continents plunged into the central core, volcanoes fifty miles across spumed in anguish as power-sources were realigned. Ancient Frames which had withstood the shocks of Frame-Shift for centuries crumbled into shards of luminescent metals. And creatures writhed down their own gene-structures and gradually became men and women and their children.
There was an appraisal of Spingarn by the Alien in the seconds that remained.
No farewell, no acknowledgment. Just a fixed, long Alien assessment. Spingarn shuddered as Alien eyes peered into the recesses of his soul.
With a rushing, colossal shock, the Alien plunged out of Talisker’s space-time, away from the lonely, haunted planet, out somewhere into the Void to find its own destiny.
Gone!
Spingarn yelled with shock and triumph.
The blackness raged for a few microseconds, and then was gone.
Liz Hassell blinked in the sunlight. Glittering sand reflected the harsh light of Talisker’s sun. It was daytime. They were near the oasis.
“Bowels of God! It’s the Frog doxy!”
“Mr. Spingarn!” called Horace.
“Look out!” yelled Liz Hassell.
A lean and malevolent Marvell had launched himself at Spingarn’s throat, white teeth drawn apart.
Spingarn looked, evaded the rush, and twisted Marvell into a spitting heap, mouth full of sand.
“The loon!” bawled Hawk, raising his musket. “Shall I shoot the deserter, Captain?”
Spingarn shook his head. Marvell looked up, astonished.
“What—” he said, wiping his mouth.
“Forget it,” said Spingarn. “It’s over.”
Marvell looked down at his body. He saw that the paunch was gone. Memory came back.
“Spingarn! It’s you!”
“Captain?” asked Hawk again. He indicated his musket.
“No, Sergeant,” Spingarn said firmly. “It is truly over!”
“Sir?” asked Hora
ce. “The Alien? I cannot record the unusual energy-fields now.”
“Gone,” said Spingarn.
Marvell was staring at Liz. She smiled shyly.
“Me—” Marvell began. “I— We—”
“They said we might,” Liz agreed.
Marvell grinned at Spingarn.
“All that aggression! With teeth, too! You were lucky, Spingarn! Hell’s teeth, what was I?”
“Tell him,” Spingarn ordered Horace.
Sergeant Hawk glared at the place where the ruins of the Genekey had stood.
“Captain,” he said, pointing to the sandy waste. “Did old Hawk have the right of it? Ye see, I’d a notion of utterly bombarding Hell Gates and giving the Devil a touch of Woolwich powder to remind him that good Christians are not to be trifled with. Was I right to mine the Devil?”
Spingarn patted Hawk on the shoulder.
“You had the right of it, Sergeant. And the Devil’s gone to find another Pit.”
Liz Hassell felt a new and shameful coyness in the presence of Marvell. Absurd but nonetheless real.
“It’s gone,” she told him. “You did it.”
Marvell found standing upright unfamiliar. He had an impulse to round his shoulders and allow his hands to touch the ground. He resisted it.
“I wouldn’t have been able to help without you,” he said.
Spingarn began to laugh.
A modest Marvell!
Marvell joined the laughter.
It was Hawk who broke the mood.
“ ’Ware the Devil,” he warned Spingarn. “That one is like the Frogs—he comes back when he’s least expected.”
Spingarn looked upward, to the blue-violet sky. Where had it gone, that eerie being? A cold echo of its frustrated glittering intelligence rang in his mind. Was it truly gone from Talisker?
* * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Getting Talisker’s thousands of Time-outers back to Center proved a tiresome business. Spingarn turned them over to Horace. Blank, bored, shocked, bewildered, they were dimly aware that they had existed in strange territories. There were many casualties, of course. But their numbers had been increased by the normal process of reproduction. There were hundreds of child refugees from Hell.
The Alien’s Possibility Space had maximized fecundity.
Liz Hassell found herself pregnant. Marvell was freshly astonished at his powers. His modesty wilted and faded, though his girth did not increase. He discovered that fitness was an invigorating condition: for several weeks after the retreat of the Alien, he and Liz rambled over Talisker’s Frames, or such of them as had survived the collapse of the barriers. Together they plotted a dozen new variations on the new Frame that was to be established around the legend of Spingarn, the Probability Man. It was a time of pleasurable excitement for them both.
Marvell was only faintly disturbed to hear that Dyson had interfered with the Mechanical Age warfare scheme; it seemed that the elegant young Dyson had lowered the survival rate so much that the Plot was almost insatiable. There was actually a shortage of genuine suicidal psychopaths throughout the vast fabric of the Frames. Marvell sent a message suggesting that Dyson be recruited, but a bleak answer came back to say that he was already programmed into an almost forgotten Frame that projected the end of life on Terra, a Frame of long-headed crawling men and women with no relief from eternal bitter rain. Liz felt sorry for the slim Dyson, but only briefly. Her main interest was in the process of reproduction. In Ethel, she found a garrulous soul-mate.
Spingarn gradually learned the minimal importance of the male in society. Now that her future was assured, and that of the twins, Ethel had no time to discuss the implications of all they had been through together. That they had lived as elemental beasts, that they had together endured the fantastic whims of the Alien in Talisker’s crazy Frames, meant nothing to her: here, now, the twins. That was her cosmos.
When the directive came, Spingarn was almost glad.
Talisker would revert to its museum status.
It was the end of a vast, cosmic experiment. The Alien had crawled out of the underground pit in which it had lain for a hundred million years, and now it was gone to build an approximation of its own environment.
And Spingarn?
Spingarn endured Marvell’s banal excitement during the relatively slow journey back to Center. No tricks of warping away the eerie dimensions this time in the latest vessels. Talisker was no longer a priority. Sergeant Hawk was glumly aware of his captain’s increasing state of depression. He tried to cheer him up daily, with accounts of this or that half-mythical encounter with the ghastly things that had once been the victims of random cell-fusion; the sergeant’s career had reached a splendid climax, for he was convinced that he had been instrumental in destroying a dangerous alliance between the tribes of the French and the Devil; he was careful to glorify Spingarn’s part, however.
Not all his martial boasting could counter Spingarn’s miserable sense of anticlimax. Constantly his thoughts returned to the strange intelligence he had liberated. He could recall the vast and hopeless hunger for identification that had possessed the disinterred Alien: it had come from the deep rocks with a problem of personal identification that no human mind could conceive of. And it was gone from Talisker.
Only the empty ruins were left.
The black eyes glistened like damp pebbles. Spingarn had made his report, produced his recommendations, and announced his plans.
“You expect congratulations, Spingarn?” the Director asked. “You!”
Spingarn could still trace the features of the frightful thing the Director had once been. That terrible transmutation, now reversed, had been a red-lipped rearing snake-headed beast that had fed on living things brought by its robot attendants; for years it had lived in the fetid, stinking mud of the low cavern at the center of the web of structures at Frames Control. For years, the man who now stared with undying hate in his eyes at the returning Spingarn had suffered from the effects of Spingarn’s experiments with random despecialized cell transforms.
Even now the man was snake-like. The attenuated neck, the flat black eyes, the hiss of indrawn breath: all were most terribly a reminder of that lunging and ferocious beast that the Director had become. Spingarn knew there was no forgiveness.
“I don’t expect anything,” Spingarn said. “I did what you asked. I completed the instructions given me by the Guardians.”
Marvell was there too. So was Liz Hassell. Deneb watched impassively, though there was a cautious regard for Spingarn in his eyes. A man of action, he recognized the strange, compelling aura of vitality in Spingarn’s short, wide-shouldered frame.
“They all did their assigned duty,” Deneb pointed out. “Comp initially gave us a low reading on the probability of success, sir. Statistically, one or more of them should have succumbed in the Alien Possibility Space. Survival of all three was most exceptional in the math we have.”
Marvell was almost his ebullient self again.
“It is over!” he exclaimed. “Christ, we did it! I gave the Alien a viewpoint it could recognize—me, Marvell! There isn’t any Alien interference in Talisker—all that Uncertainty Factor you were getting in the Frames is out!”
Spingarn could barely realize that it was over, as Marvell said. Star systems had grown, bloomed and died during the time the Alien had endured on Talisker. And now that vast and almost impenetrable being had flown into some cosmic hideaway to determine its own nature. Gone!
And with it the function of Spingarn in the Frames of Talisker!
It had taken weeks for Spingarn to realize that his special identity was gone. .
He was no longer—no longer!—the Probability Man!
The Director glared at Marvell and questioned him and Liz Hassell about the fantastic encounter between the transmuted Marvell, Liz, Spingarn and the Alien. Liz was brief and coherent, Marvell spluttered repetitiously, the Director examining them with that combination of icy intelligence and h
ateful irony that was his chief characteristic.
Spingarn smiled as Marvell told of his plans to build an entire Frame around the exploits of Spingarn the Probability Man. He could retire. No more grotesque encounters, no more violence. A peaceful, humdrum existence in some minor capacity in Frames Control. The twins clearly needed a firm hand: Spingarn would supply it.
“We’re sure the Alien’s gone,” said Liz. “We got readings of power losses from all over the Galaxy which corresponded with the release of some kind of extra-universal energy-field—Comp checked them out, and it’s sure there’s an unparalleled surge.”
Spingarn could imagine it.
All through the Galaxy, the Alien would have reached out to gather in the tendrils of its presence. It would have interfered, in its bizarre way, with the gravitational systems of a billion stars. Tremors of shockwaves had been recorded clear across the vast reaches of the arms of the island-universe as the Alien gathered itself together for a leap into otherness.
“You think it’s over, Spingarn?” snarled the Director, seeing his abstraction. “Is it?”
“Yes,” said Spingarn. “It’s over.”
Deneb said tiredly: “Most of the Uncertainty Factors are gone. We can clear up the rest.”
“Miss Hassell?” the Director asked. “You showed an excellent appreciation of Talisker once before. Do you say it’s over?”
Spingarn held his breath. There was more than evil malice in the terrible old man’s intent face.
Liz smiled nervously. She had heard enough of Talisker, Alien, Spingarn, Probability Theory and the effects of random cell-fusion.
“It’s over,” she said. “Yes.”
“Marvell?” asked the Director.
“Yes! We go ahead with the Frame—all of it! There’ll be Spingarn Frames for generations—no end to them!”
“Spingarn?”
“I think so,” said Spingarn unsurely.
Was there something he had missed?
“Take him to the Guardians,” the Director said.
“And Miss Hassell and Marvell?” Deneb asked.