Store of Infinity

by Robert Sheckley

  And above all, there was no loud boom to startle them, no smell of cordite, no click of a new shell levered in…

  Dixon thought, Maybe they aren’t smart enough to know this is a killing weapon. Maybe they haven’t figured out what’s going on. Maybe they think I’m defenseless.

  He walked more rapidly through the dim forest. He was in no danger, he reminded himself. Just because they couldn’t realize it was a killing weapon didn’t alter the fact that it was. Still, he would insist on a noisemaker in the new models. It shouldn’t be difficult. And the sound would be reassuring.

  The arboreals were gaining confidence now, swinging down almost to the level of his head, their fangs bared. Probably carnivorous, Dixon decided. With the Weapon on automatic, he slashed great cuts in the treetops.

  The arboreals fled, screaming at him. Leaves and small branches rained down. Even the dogs were momentarily cowed, edging away from the falling debris.

  Dixon grinned to himself—just before he was flattened. A big bough, severed from its tree, had caught him across the left shoulder as it fell.

  The Weapon was knocked from his hand. It landed ten feet away, still on automatic, disintegrating shrubs a few yards from him.

  He dragged himself from under the bough and dived for the weapon. An arboreal got to it first.

  Dixon threw himself face-down on the ground. The arboreal, screaming in triumph, whirled the disintegrator around its head. Giant trees, cut through, went crashing to the forest floor. The air was dark with falling twigs and leaves, and the ground was cut into trenches. A sweep of the disintegrator knifed through the tree next to Dixon, and chopped the ground a few inches from his feet. He jumped away, and the next sweep narrowly missed his head.

  He had given up hope. But then the arboreal became curious. Chattering gaily, it turned the Weapon around and tried to look into the muzzle.

  The animal’s head vanished—silently.

  Dixon saw his chance. He ran forward, leaping a trench, and recovering the disintegrator before another arboreal could play with it. He turned it off automatic.

  Several dogs had returned. They were watching him closely.

  Dixon didn’t dare fire yet. His hands were shaking so badly, there was more risk to himself than to the dogs. He turned and stumbled in the direction of the ship.

  The dogs followed.

  Dixon quickly recovered his nerve. He looked at the glittering Weapon in his hand. He had considerably more respect for it now, and more than a little fear. Much more fear than the dogs had.

  Apparently they didn’t associate the forest damage with the disintegrator. It must have seemed like a sudden, violent storm to them.

  But the storm was over. It was hunting time again.

  He was in thick brush now, firing ahead to clear a path. The dogs were on either side, keeping pace. He fired continually into the foliage, occasionally getting a dog. There were several dozen of them, pressing him closely.

  Damn it, Dixon thought, aren’t they counting their losses?

  Then he realized they probably didn’t know how to count.

  He struggled on, not far from the spaceship. A heavy log lay in his path. He stepped over it.

  The log came angrily to life and opened enormous jaws directly under his legs.

  He fired blindly, holding the trigger down for three seconds and narrowly missing his own feet. The creature vanished. Dixon gulped, swayed, and slid feet-first into the pit he had just dug.

  He landed heavily, wrenching his left ankle. The dogs ringed the pit, snapping and snarling at him.

  Steady, Dixon told himself. He cleared the beasts from the pit’s rim with two bursts, and tried to climb out.

  The sides of the pit were too steep and had been fused into glass.

  Frantically he tried again and again, recklessly expending his strength. Then he stopped and forced himself to think. The Weapon had got him into this hole; the Weapon could get him out.

  This time he cut a shallow ramp out of the pit, and limped painfully out.

  His left ankle could hardly bear weight. Even worse was the pain in his shoulder. That bough must have broken it, he decided. Using a branch as a crutch, Dixon limped on.

  Several times the dogs attacked. He disintegrated them, and the gun grew increasingly heavy in his right hand. The carrion birds came down to pick at the neatly slashed carcasses. Dixon felt darkness crawl around the edges of his vision. He fought it back. He must not faint now, while the dogs were around him.

  The ship was in sight. He broke into a clumsy run, and fell immediately. Some of the dogs were on him.

  He fired, cutting them in two and removing half an inch from his right boot, almost down to the toe. He struggled to his feet and went on.

  Quite a weapon, he thought. Dangerous to anyone, including the wielder. He wished he had the inventor in his sights.

  Imagine inventing a gun without a bang!

  He reached the ship. The dogs ringed him as he fumbled with the airlock. Dixon disintegrated the closest two, and stumbled inside. Darkness was crawling around his vision again and he could feel nausea rising thickly in his throat.

  With his last strength, he swung the airlock shut and sat down. Safe at last!

  Then he heard the low cough.

  He had shut one of the dogs inside with him.

  His arm felt too weak to lift the heavy Weapon, but slowly he swung it up. The dog, barely visible in the dimly lighted ship, leaped at him.

  For a terrifying instant, Dixon thought he couldn’t squeeze the trigger. The dog was at his throat. Reflex must have clenched his hand.

  The dog yelped once and was silent.

  Dixon blacked out.

  When he recovered consciousness, he lay for a long time, just savoring the glorious sensation of being alive. He was going to rest for a few minutes. Then he was getting out of here, away from alien planets, back to a Terran bar. He was going to get roaring drunk. Then he was going to find that inventor and ram the Weapon down the man’s throat, crossways.

  Only a homicidal maniac would invent a gun without a bang.

  But that would come later. Right now it was a pleasure just to be alive, to lie in the sunlight, enjoying the…

  Sunlight? Inside a spaceship?

  He sat up. At his feet lay the tail and one leg of the dog. Beyond it there was an interesting zigzag slashed through the side of the spaceship. It was about three inches wide and four feet long. Sunlight filtered through it.

  Outside, four dogs were sitting on their haunches, peering in.

  He had cut through his spaceship while killing the last dog.

  Then he saw other slashes in the ship. Where had they come from?

  Oh, yes, when he was fighting his way back to the ship. That last hundred yards. A few shots must have touched the spaceship.

  He stood up and examined the cuts. A neat job, he thought, with the calm that sometimes accompanies hysteria. Yes, sir, very neat indeed.

  Here were the severed control cables. That was where the radio had been. Over there he had managed to nick the oxygen and water tanks in a single burst, which was good shooting by anybody’s standards. And here—yes, he’d done it, all right. A really clever hook shot had cut the fuel lines. And the fuel had all run out in obedience to the law of gravity and formed a pool around the ship and sunk into the ground.

  Not bad for a guy who wasn’t even trying, Dixon thought crazily. Couldn’t have done better with a blowtorch.

  As a matter of fact, he couldn’t have done it with a blowtorch. Spaceship hulls were too tough. But not too tough for the good old little old sure-fire never-miss Weapon…

  A year later, when Dixon still hadn’t reported, a ship was sent out. They were to give him a decent burial, if any remains could be found, and bring back the prototype disintegrator, if that could be found.

  The recovery ship touched down near Dixon’s ship, and the crew examined the slashed and gutted hull with interest.

  “Some guys,�
�� said the engineer, “don’t know how to handle a gun.”

  “I’ll say,” said the chief pilot.

  They heard a banging noise from the direction of the rain forest. They hurried over and found that Dixon was not dead. He was very much alive, and singing as he worked.

  He had constructed a wooden shack and planted a vegetable garden around it. Surrounding the garden was a palisade. Dixon was hammering in a new sapling to replace a rotten one when the men came up.

  Quite predictably, one of the men cried, “You’re alive!”

  “Damned right,” Dixon said. “Touch and go for a while before I got the palisade built. Nasty brutes, those dogs. But I taught them a little respect.”

  Dixon grinned and touched a bow that leaned against the palisade within easy reach. It had been cut from a piece of seasoned, springy wood, and beside it was a quiver full of arrows.

  “They learned respect,” Dixon said, “after they saw a few of their pals running around with a shaft through their flanks.”

  “But the Weapon—” the chief pilot asked.

  “Ah, the Weapon!” exclaimed Dixon, with a mad, merry light in his eyes. “Couldn’t have survived without it.”

  He turned back to his work. He was hammering the sapling into place with the heavy, flat butt of the Weapon.

  THE DEATHS OF BEN BAXTER

  Edwin James, the Chief Programmer of Earth, had seated himself upon a little three-legged stool in front of the Probabilities Calculator. He was a small, spare man, impressively ugly, dwarfed by the great control board which soared a hundred feet above him.

  The steady hum of the machine, the slow drift of lights across the face of the panel, brought a sense of security which he recognized as false, but which soothed him all the same. He had just started to doze off when the pattern of lights changed.

  He sat up with a start and rubbed his face. A paper tape inched from a slot in the panel. The Chief Programmer tore it off and scanned it. He nodded sourly to himself and walked quickly out of the room.

  Fifteen minutes later, he entered the meeting room of the World Planning Council. Summoned there by his order, the five representatives of the Federated Districts of Earth were seated around the long table, waiting for him.

  There was a new member this year, Roger Beatty, from the Americas. He was tall and angular and his bushy brown hair was just beginning to thin on top. He appeared eager, earnest and ill at ease. He was reading a procedural handbook and taking short, quick sniffs from his oxygen inhaler.

  James knew the other members well. Lan II from Pan-Asia, looking as small, wrinkled and indestructible as ever, was engaged in intense conversation with large, blond Dr. Sveg from Europe. Miss Chandragore, beautiful and sleek, was playing her inevitable game of chess with Aaui of Oceania.

  James turned up the room’s oxygen supply and the members gratefully put away their inhalers.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” James said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “The current prediction just came through.”

  He took a notebook from his pocket and opened it.

  “At our last meeting, we selected Alternate Probability Line 3B3CC, which began in the year 1832. The factor we were selecting for was the life of Albert Levinsky. In the Main Historic Line, Levinsky died in 1935 of an automobile accident. By switching into Alternate Probability Line 3B3CC, Levinsky avoided this accident and lived to the age of sixty-two, completing his work. The result now, in our own time, is the opening up of Antarctica.”

  “What about side-effects?” asked Janna Chandragore.

  “Those were discussed in the paper you will be given later. Briefly, though, 3B3CC adhered closely to the Historic Main Line. All important events remained constant. There were, of course, some effects which the prediction did not cover. They include an oil-well explosion in Patagonia, a flu epidemic in Kansas and an increase in smog over Mexico City.”

  “Have all injured parties been compensated?” Lan II wanted to know.

  “They have. And the colonization of Antarctica is already begun.”

  The Chief Programmer unfolded the paper tape he had taken from the Probabilities Calculator.

  “But now we face a dilemma. As predicted, the Historic Main Line leads into unpleasant complications. But there are no good alternate lines to switch into!”

  The Members murmured to each other.

  James said, “Let me explain the situation.” He walked to a wall and pulled down a large chart. “The crisis-point occurs on April 12, 1959, and our problem centers around an individual named Ben Baxter. The circumstances are as follows…”

  Events, by their very nature, evoke alternate possibilities, each of which produces its own continuum of history. In other spatial-temporal worlds, Spain lost at Lepanto, Normandy at Hastings, England at Waterloo.

  Suppose Spain had lost at Lepanto…

  Spain did, disastrously. And Turkish sea power, invincible, swept the Mediterranean of European shipping. Ten years later, a Turkish fleet conquered Naples and paved the way for the Moorish invasion of Austria…

  In another time and space, that is.

  The speculation became observable fact after the development of temporal selection and displacement. By 2103, Oswald Meyner and his associates were able to show the theoretical possibility of Switching from the Historic Main Line—so named for its convenience—to alternate lines. Within definite limits, however.

  It would be impossible, for example, to Switch into a past where William of Normandy lost the battle of Hastings. The world developing from that event would be too different, alien in every way. Switching was found possible only into closely adjacent lines.

  The theoretical possibility became a practical necessity in 2213. In that year, the Sykes-Raborn Calculator at Harvard predicted the complete sterilization of Earth’s atmosphere by the accretion of radioactive by-products. The process was irreversible and inevitable. It could be stopped only in the past, where the poisoning had begun.

  The first Switch was made with the newly developed Adams-Holt-Maartens Selector. The World Planning Council chose a line which involved the early death of Vassily Ouchenko (and the obliteration of his erroneous radiation-damage theories). A large part of the subsequent poisoning was avoided, although at the cost of seventy-three lives—descendants of Ouchenko for whom no Switchparents could be found.

  After that, there was no turning back. Line Switching became as necessary to the world as disease prevention.

  But the process had its limitations. A time had to come when no available line would be usable, when all futures looked unfavorable.

  When that happened, the Planning Council was prepared to use more direct means.

  “And those are the consequences for us,” Edwin James concluded. “That is the outcome if we allow the Main Historic Line to continue.”

  Lan II said, “Meaning that you predict serious trouble for Earth, Mr. Programmer.”

  “With regret, I do.”

  The Programmer poured himself a glass of water and turned a page in his notebook.

  “Our pivotal point is Ben Baxter, who dies on April 12, 1959. He must live at least another ten years for his work to have the desired effect upon world events. In that time, Ben Baxter will purchase Yellowstone National Park from the government. He will continue to maintain it as a park, but will farm the trees. This enterprise will be highly successful. He will buy other great tracts of land in North and South America. The Baxter heirs will be lumber kings for the next two hundred years and will own huge standings throughout the world. Due to their efforts, there will be great forests in the world, up to and including our own time. But if Baxter dies—”

  James gestured wearily. “With Baxter dead, the forests will be cut before the governments of the world are fully aware of the consequences. Then comes the great blight of ‘03, which the few remaining woodlands cannot withstand. And at last the present, with the natural carbon-dioxide-oxygen cycle disrupted by the destruction of the tre
es, with all combustion devices banned, with oxygen inhalers a necessity merely to survive.”

  “We’ve started the forests again,” Aaui said.

  “It will be hundreds of years before they have grown to any significant size, even with forced growing methods. In the meantime, the balance may become further upset. That is the importance of Ben Baxter to us. He holds the key to the air we breathe!”

  “Very well,” said Dr. Sveg. “The Main Line, in which Baxter dies, is clearly unusable. But there are Alternates—”

  “Many,” James said. “As usual, most of them cannot be selected. Counting the Main Line, we have a total of three choices. But, unfortunately, each of them results in the death of Ben Baxter on April 12, 1959.

  The Programmer wiped his forehead. “To be more specific, Ben Baxter dies on the afternoon of April 12, 1959, as a result of a business meeting with a man named Ned Brynne.”

  The new member, Roger Beatty, cleared his throat nervously. “This event takes place in all three probability worlds?”

  “Yes. In every one of them, Brynne is the cause of Baxter’s death.”

  Dr. Sveg came ponderously to his feet. “Formerly, this Council has avoided any direct interference with the existing lines of probability. But this situation seems to call for interference.”

  The council members nodded their agreement.

  “Let’s get down to cases,” said Aaui. “For the good of Earth, can this Ned Brynne be Switched Out?”

  “No,” replied the Programmer. “Brynne himself plays a vital role in our future. He has an option on almost a hundred square miles of forest. He needs Baxter’s backing to purchase it. If Brynne could be kept from that meeting with Baxter—”

  “How?” asked Beatty.

  “Take your pick,” James suggested. “Threats, persuasion, bribery, kidnapping—any means short of murder. We have three worlds to work in. If we can restrain Brynne in just one of them, our problem is solved.”

  “What would be our best method?” asked Aaui.

  “Try several, a different one in each probability world,” said Miss Chandragore. “Our chances would be best that way. Shall we go ourselves?”