by Mike Ashley
Darwin stared at him intently. “Just how did you plan to dissuade me?”
“By doing what I just did, telling you what is going to happen if you do publish it.”
“What if I refuse, or am not convinced? I admit that it irks me greatly that certain bishops are so opposed to my ideas.” He looked at Albright sharply. “Are you prepared to accept failure?”
Albright hesitated, suddenly aware of the heavy lump in his overcoat pocket. “Mr Darwin, sir, I . . . we wish you no harm, but we are determined not to fail our world.”
“I see. You will stop me by force if necessary.” Darwin looked at him as if appraising what means Albright would use.
Albright nodded slightly. I’m losing him, he thought unhappily. “If I can persuade you that there is independent proof of your theory, would you be satisfied?”
Darwin drew himself up. “Proof? Young man, I have labored for decades on my theory of Natural Selection. I truly believe that I have amassed an overwhelming body of evidence—”
“Someone has found the mechanism for inheritance.”
Darwin stopped short. “The mechanism? What do you mean?”
“Well, not the actual . . . ah . . .” He fought back another wave of dizziness. “Well, you understand, not the actual, uh, bodies in the cell, but the mathematics of inheritance.”
Darwin stared uncomprehendingly.
Albright rushed on. “There’s a book, just published, by Gregor Mendel, about experiments he did with garden pea plants. He has established that there is a unit of heredity, some . . . factor passed from parent to offspring, in a regular and repeatable way. Some of these factors are transmitted visibly, and are called dominant. Others become, ah, latent in the process and are called recessive. With the correct crosses, Mendel could make them reappear in later generations, so he knew they were still there, albeit hidden.”
A look of awe slowly washed over the older man’s face and his mouth worked as he silently wrestled with the implications.
“So you see,” continued Albright, “if an organism exhibits an unfavorable factor and dies because of it, and this happens to all the other individuals with the same factor, it will be eliminated from the population.” Bright sparks flashed across his eyes. He reached into his coat and clutched the weapon. “It’s the mechanism for nashural s’lection!”
“The mechanism for natural selection. Yes. It could very well be. I will need to see that book! Tell me again who is the author?”
“M . . . M . . . Mendel,” he slurred. “G . . . G . . . Gregor Mendel, a m . . . m . . . monk, an Augush . . . tini . . . tian.”
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand. Speak up, please!”
Albright stared fuzzily. The scene around him was becoming grainy. Still time. In desperation he yanked his arm out of his pocket, aimed the antique pistol at Darwin. God help me. He squeezed the trigger as greyness descended.
The crackling noise awakened her. Solange started up, feeling woozy and a bit unclear. She absentmindedly put her hand up to her hair to tuck a stray red curl into . . . nothing.
“Rats, must’ve dozed off.”
The screen in front of her was full of diagonal lines.
“That does it. I can’t do any assignment if the freaking Viewer conks out on me.”
Electronics never worked for her. This morning already her chronometer had failed to network with her wakeup implant. She’d almost missed her session with the TVS. She’d rushed to the library in the nick of time, shouldered her way past the waiting students and jammed her ID thumbprint down just as the robo-librarian was about to give her slot away. As it was she’d lost fifteen minutes.
Someone pounded on the door. “Two minutes!”
She checked the big chronometer.
“Hell, my session’s over! What’d I see anyway?”
The vidrecorder was still running. She shut it off and removed the spool.
The door opened suddenly. The librarian rolled in. “Time’s up,” it rumbled. “Please relinquish the Temporal ViewScreen.”
“Okay, okay, keep your treads on,” she muttered. “I’m leaving.”
Her eye fell on the assignment sheet. “Observation of Charles Darwin during writing of The Origin of Species, 1858.”
It was clearly marked “Easy”. Hell, she hadn’t even been able to tune the freaking gizmo to that date. It’d stuck on 1866. Well, she’d done something different. But what? She felt for the spool in her pocket.
Whatever I see, I’ll just be creative with my interpretation, she thought. After all, what difference could it make what some old guy was thinking three hundred years ago?
She hurried out into the bright new morning in search of coffee.
TRY AND CHANGE THE PAST
Fritz Leiber
The following is the oldest story in the book, first published in 1958, but it is such a classic, yet surprisingly little known, that I could not leave it out. The story was the first of what would become Leiber’s Change War series, which included his novel The Big Time (1961) and stories collected as The Change War (1978). The series explores a war raging across the spacetime continuum between two factions each seeking to protect their version of reality. There are only hints of that in this story, which is arguably the definitive story on whether it is possible to change the past or whether causality and fate are so powerful that the past is somehow protected. It’s a theme we’ll return to a few more times in this volume.
Fritz Leiber (1910–92) was one of the giants of the science-fiction and fantasy fields from the 1940s up until his death. He may be best remembered now for his long-running heroic fantasy series featuring the Grey Mouser and Fafhrd, but Leiber was as equally adept at science fiction and his novels include The Green Millennium (1953), The Wanderer (1964) and A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969).
No, I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to change the past, at least not his personal past, although changing the general past is my business, my fighting business. You see, I’m a Snake in the Change War. Don’t back off – human beings, even Resurrected ones engaged in time-fighting, aren’t built for outward wriggling and their poison is mostly psychological. “Snake” is slang for the soldiers on our side, like Hun or Reb or Ghibbelin. In the Change War we’re trying to alter the past – and it’s tricky, brutal work, believe me – at points all over the cosmos, anywhere and anywhen, so that history will be warped to make our side defeat the Spiders. But that’s a much bigger story, the biggest in fact, and I’ll leave it occupying several planets of microfilm and two asteroids of coded molecules in the files of the High Command.
Change one event in the past and you get a brand new future? Erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a Neolithic pebble? Extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain? Brother, that isn’t the way it works at all! The space-time continuum’s built of stubborn stuff and change is anything but a chain-reaction. Change the past and you start a wave of changes moving futurewards, but it damps out mighty fast. Haven’t you ever heard of temporal reluctance, or of the Law of the Conservation of Reality?
Here’s a little story that will illustrate my point: This guy was fresh recruited, the Resurrection sweat still wet in his armpits, when he got the idea he’d use the time-traveling power to go back and make a couple of little changes in his past so that his life would take a happier course and maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t have to die and get mixed up with Snakes and Spiders at all. It was as if a new-enlisted feuding hillbilly soldier should light out with the high-power rifle they issued him to go back to his mountains and pick off his pet enemies.
Normally it couldn’t ever have happened. Normally, to avoid just this sort of thing, he’d have been shipped straight off to some place a few thousand or million years distant from his point of enlistment and maybe a few light-years, too. But there was a local crisis in the Change War and a lot of routine operations got held up and one new recruit was simply forgotten.
Normally, too, he’d never have
been left alone a moment in the Dispatching Room, never even have glimpsed the place except to be rushed through it on arrival and reshipment. But, as I say, there happened to be a crisis, the Snakes were shorthanded, and several soldiers were careless. Afterwards two N.C.s were busted because of what happened and a First Looey not only lost his commission but was transferred outside the galaxy and the era. But during the crisis this recruit I’m telling you about had opportunity and more to fool around with forbidden things and try out one of his schemes.
He also had all the details on the last part of his life back in the real world, on his death and its consequences, to mull over and be tempted to change. This wasn’t anybody’s carelessness. The Snakes give every candidate that information as part of the recruiting pitch. They spot a death coming and the Resurrection Men go back and recruit the person from a point a few minutes or at most a few hours earlier. They explain in uncomfortable detail what’s going to happen and wouldn’t he rather take the oath and put on scales? I never heard of anybody turning down that offer. Then they lift him from his lifeline in the form of a Doubleganger and from then on, brother, he’s a Snake.
So this guy had a clearer picture of his death than of the day he bought his first car, and a masterpiece of morbid irony it was. He was living in a classy penthouse that had belonged to a crazy uncle of his – it even had a midget astronomical observatory, unused for years – but he was stony broke, up to the top hair in debt, and due to be dispossessed next day. He’d never had a real job, always lived off his rich relatives and his wife’s, but now he was getting a little too mature for his stern dedication to a life of sponging to be cute. His charming personality, which had been his only asset, was deader from overuse and abuse than he himself would be in a few hours. His crazy uncle would not have anything to do with him any more. His wife was responsible for a lot of the wear and tear on his social-butterfly wings; she had hated him for years, had screamed at him morning to night the way you can only get away with in a penthouse, and was going batty herself. He’d been playing around with another woman, who’d just given him the gate, though he knew his wife would never believe that and would only add a scornful note to her screaming if she did.
It was a lousy evening, smack in the middle of an August heat wave. The Giants were playing a night game with Brooklyn. Two long-run musicals had closed. Wheat had hit a new high. There was a brush fire in California and a war scare in Iran. And tonight a meteor shower was due, according to an astronomical bulletin that had arrived in the morning mail addressed to his uncle – he generally dumped such stuff in the fireplace unopened, but today he had looked at it because he had nothing else to do, either more useful or more interesting.
The phone rang. It was a lawyer. His crazy uncle was dead and in the will there wasn’t a word about an Asteroid Search Foundation. Every penny of the fortune went to the no-good nephew.
This same character finally hung up the phone, fighting a tendency for his heart to spring giddily out of his chest and through the ceiling. Just then his wife came screeching out of the bedroom. She’d received a cute, commiserating, tell-all note from the other woman; she had a gun and announced that she was going to finish him off.
The sweltering atmosphere provided a good background for sardonic catastrophe. The French doors to the roof were open behind him but the air that drifted through was muggy as death. Unnoticed, a couple of meteors streaked faintly across the night sky.
Figuring it would sure dissuade her, he told her about the inheritance. She screamed that he’d just use the money to buy more other women – not an unreasonable prediction – and pulled the trigger.
The danger was minimal. She was at the other end of a big living room, and her hand wasn’t just shaking; she was waving the nickel-plated revolver as if it were a fan.
The bullet took him right between the eyes. He flopped down, deader than his hopes were before he got the phone call. He saw it happen because as a clincher the Resurrection Men brought him forward as a Doubleganger to witness it invisibly – also standard Snake procedure and not productive of time-complications, incidentally, since Doublegangers don’t imprint on reality unless they want to.
They stuck around a bit. His wife looked at the body for a couple of seconds, went to her bedroom, blonded her graying hair by dousing it with two bottles of undiluted peroxide, put on a tarnished gold-lamé evening gown and a bucket of make-up, went back to the living room, sat down at the piano, played “Country Gardens” and then shot herself, too.
So that was the little skit, the little double blackout, he had to mull over outside the empty and unguarded Dispatching Room, quite forgotten by its twice-depleted skeleton crew while every available Snake in the sector was helping deal with the local crisis, which centered around the planet Alpha Centauri Four, two million years minus.
Naturally it didn’t take him long to figure out that if he went back and gimmicked things so that the first blackout didn’t occur, but the second still did, he would be sitting pretty back in the real world and able to devote his inheritance to fulfilling his wife’s prediction and other pastimes. He didn’t know much about Doublegangers yet and had it figured out that if he didn’t die in the real world he’d have no trouble resuming his existence there – maybe it’d even happen automatically.
So this Snake – name kind of fits him, doesn’t it? – crossed his fingers and slipped into the Dispatching Room. Dispatching is so simple a child could learn it in five minutes from studying the board. He went back to a point a couple of hours before the tragedy, carefully avoiding the spot where the Resurrection Men had lifted him from his lifeline. He found the revolver in a dresser drawer, unloaded it, checked to make sure there weren’t any more cartridges lying around, and then went ahead a couple of hours, arriving just in time to see himself get the slug between the eyes same as before.
As soon as he got over his disappointment, he’d learned something about Doublegangers he should have known all along, if his mind had been clicking. The bullets he’d lifted were Doublegangers, too; they had disappeared from the real world only at the point in space-time where he’d lifted them, and they had continued to exist, as real as ever, in the earlier and later sections of their lifelines – with the result that the gun was loaded again by the time his wife had grabbed it up.
So this time he set the board so he’d arrive just a few minutes before the tragedy. He lifted the gun, bullets and all, and waited around to make sure it stayed lifted. He figured – rightly – that if he left this space-time sector the gun would reappear in the dresser drawer, and he didn’t want his wife getting hold of any gun, even one with a broken lifeline. Afterwards – after his own death was averted, that is – he figured he’d put the gun back in his wife’s hand.
Two things reassured him a lot, although he’d been expecting the one and hoping for the other: his wife didn’t notice his presence as a Doubleganger and when she went to grab the gun she acted as if it weren’t gone and held her right hand just as if there were a gun in it. If he’d studied philosophy, he’d have realized that he was witnessing a proof of Leibniz’s theory of Pre-established Harmony: that neither atoms nor human beings really affect each other; they just look as if they do.
But anyway he had no time for theories. Still holding the gun, he drifted out into the living room to get a box seat right next to Himself for the big act. Himself didn’t notice him any more than his wife had.
His wife came out and spoke her piece same as ever. Himself cringed as if she still had the gun and started to babble about the inheritance; his wife sneered and made as if she were shooting Himself.
Sure enough, there was no shot this time, and no mysteriously appearing bullet hole – which was something he’d been afraid of. Himself just stood there dully while his wife made as if she were looking down at a dead body and went back to her bedroom.
He was pretty pleased: this time he actually had changed the past. Then Himself slowly glanced around at him, still with t
hat dull look, and slowly came toward him. He was more pleased than ever because he figured now they’d melt together into one man and one lifeline again, and he’d be able to hurry out somewhere and establish an alibi, just to be on the safe side, while his wife suicided.
But it didn’t happen quite that way. Himself’s look changed from dull to desperate, he came up close . . . and suddenly grabbed the gun and quick as a wink put a thumb to the trigger and shot himself between the eyes. And flopped, same as ever.
Right there he was starting to learn a little – and it was an unpleasant and shivery sort of learning – about the Law of the Conservation of Reality. The four-dimensional space-time universe doesn’t like to be changed, any more than it likes to lose or gain energy or matter. If it has to be changed, it’ll adjust itself just enough to accept that change and no more. The Conservation of Reality is a sort of Law of Least Action, too. It doesn’t matter how improbable the events involved in the adjustment are, just so long as they’re possible at all and can be used to patch the established pattern. His death, at this point, was part of the established pattern. If he lived on instead of dying, billions of other compensatory changes would have to be made, covering many years, perhaps centuries, before the old pattern could be re-established, the snarled lifelines woven back into it – and the universe finally go on the same as if his wife had shot him on schedule.
This way the pattern was hardly affected at all. There were powder burns on his forehead that weren’t there before, but there weren’t any witnesses to the shooting in the first place, so the presence or absence of powder burns didn’t matter. The gun was lying on the floor instead of being in his wife’s hands, but he had the feeling that when the time came for her to die, she’d wake enough from the Pre-established Harmony trance to find it, just as Himself did.