by Larry Niven
Notes I had, but somehow the thesis wouldn’t move. I knew why. For all I’d learned, I had nothing original to say about anything. It wouldn’t have stopped everyone (remember the guy who counted every I in Robinson Crusoe?) but it stopped me. Until one Thursday night—
I get the damnedest ideas in bars. This one was a beaut. The bartender got my untouched drink as a tip. I went straight home and typed for four solid hours. It was ten minutes to twelve when I quit, but I now had a complete outline for my thesis, based on a genuinely new idea in Christian witchcraft. All I’d needed was a hook to hang my knowledge on. I stood up and stretched…
…And knew I’d have to try it out.
All my equipment was in Mrs. Miller’s basement, most of it already set up. I’d left a pentagram on the floor two nights ago. I erased that with a wet rag, a former washcloth, wrapped around a wooden block. Robes, special candles, lists of spells, new pentagram…I worked quietly so as not to wake anyone. Mrs. Miller was sympathetic; her sense of humor was such that they’d have burned her three centuries ago. But the other residents needed their sleep. I started the incantations exactly at midnight.
At fourteen past I got the shock of my young life. Suddenly there was a demon spread-eagled in the pentagram, with his hands and feet and head occupying all five points of the figure.
I turned and ran.
He roared, “Come back here!”
I stopped halfway up the stairs, turned, and came back down. To leave a demon trapped in the basement of Mrs. Miller’s apartment house was out of the question. With that amplified basso profundo voice he’d have wakened the whole block.
He watched me come slowly down the stairs. Except for the horns he might have been a nude middle-aged man, shaved, and painted bright red. But if he’d been human you wouldn’t have wanted to know him. He seemed built for all of the Seven Deadly Sins. Avaricious green eyes. Enormous gluttonous tank of a belly. Muscles soft and drooping from sloth. A dissipated face that seemed permanently angry. Lecherous—never mind. His horns were small and sharp and polished to a glow.
He waited until I reached bottom. “That’s better. Now what kept you? It’s been a good century since anyone called up a demon.”
“They’ve forgotten how,” I told him. “Nowadays everyone thinks you’re supposed to draw the pentagram on the floor.”
“The floor? They expect me to show up lying on my back!” His voice was thick with rage.
I shivered. My bright idea. A pentagram was a prison for demons. Why? I’d thought of the five points of a pentagram, and the five points of a spread-eagled man…
“Well?”
“I know, it doesn’t make sense. Would you go away now, please?”
He stared “You have forgotten a lot.” Slowly and patiently, as to a child, he began to explain the implications of calling up a demon.
I listened. Fear and sick hopelessness rose in me until the concrete walls seemed to blur. “I am in peril of my immortal soul—” This was something I’d never considered, except academically. Now it was worse than that. To hear the demon talk, my soul was already lost. It had been lost since the moment I used the correct spell. I tried to hide my fear, but that was hopeless. With those enormous nostrils he must have smelled it.
He finished, and grinned as if inviting comment.
I said, “Let’s go over that again. I only get one wish.”
“Right.”
“If you don’t like the wish I’ve got to choose another.”
“Right.”
“That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Who said anything about fair?”
“—Or traditional. Why hasn’t anyone heard about this deal before?”
“This is the standard deal, Jack. We used to give a better deal to some of the marks. The others didn’t have time to talk because of that twenty-four-hour clause. If they wrote anything down we’d alter it. We have power over written things which mention us.”
“That twenty-four-hour clause. If I haven’t taken my wish in twenty-four hours, you’ll leave the pentagram and take my soul anyway?”
“That’s right.”
“And if I do use the wish, you have to remain in the pentagram until my wish is granted, or until twenty-four hours are up. Then you teleport to Hell to report same, and come back for me immediately, reappearing in the pentagram.”
“I guess teleport’s a good word. I vanish and reappear. Are you getting bright ideas?”
“Like what?”
“I’ll make it easy on you. If you erase the pentagram I can appear anywhere. You can erase it and draw it again somewhere else, and I’ve got to appear inside it.”
A question hovered on my tongue. I swallowed it and asked another. “Suppose I wished for immortality?”
“You’d be immortal for what’s left of your twenty-four hours.” He grinned. His teeth were coal black. “Better hurry. Time’s running out.”
Time, I thought. Okay. All or nothing.
“Here’s my wish. Stop time from passing outside of me.”
“Easy enough. Look at your watch.”
I didn’t want to take my eyes off him, but he just exposed his black teeth again. So—I looked down.
There was a red mark opposite the minute hand on my Rolex. And a black mark opposite the hour hand.
The demon was still there when I looked up, still spread-eagled against the wall, still wearing that knowing grin. I moved around him, waved my hand before his face. When I touched him he felt like marble.
Time had stopped, but the demon had remained. I felt sick with relief.
The second hand on my watch was still moving. I had expected nothing less. Time had stopped for me—for twenty-four hours of interior time. If it had been exterior time I’d have been safe—but of course that was too easy.
I’d thought my way into this mess. I should be able to think my way out, shouldn’t I?
I erased the pentagram from the wall, scrubbing until every trace was gone. Then I drew a new one, using a flexible metal tape to get the lines as straight as possible, making it as large as I could get it in the confined space. It was still only two feet across.
I left the basement.
I knew where the nearby churches were, though I hadn’t been to one in too long. My car wouldn’t start. Neither would my roommate’s motorcycle. The spell which enclosed me wasn’t big enough. I walked to a Mormon temple three blocks away.
The night was cool and balmy and lovely. City lights blanked out the stars, but there was a fine werewolf’s moon hanging way above the empty lot where the Mormon temple should have been.
I walked another eight blocks to find the B’nai B’rith synagogue and the All Saints church. All I got out of it was exercise. I found empty lots. For me, places of worship didn’t exist.
I prayed. I didn’t believe it would work, but I prayed. If I wasn’t heard was it because I didn’t expect to be? But I was beginning to feel that the demon had thought of everything, long ago.
What I did with the rest of that long night isn’t important. Even to me it didn’t feel important. Twenty-four hours, against eternity? I wrote a fast outline on my experiment in demon raising, then tore it up. The demons would only change it. Which meant that my thesis was shot to hell, whatever happened. I carried a real but rigid Scotch terrier into Professor Pauling’s room and posed it on his desk. The old tyrant would get a surprise when he looked up. But I spent most of the night outside, walking, looking my last on the world. Once I reached into a police car and flipped the siren on, thought about it, and flipped it off again. Twice I dropped into restaurants and ate someone’s order, leaving money which I wouldn’t need, paper-clipped to notes which read “The Shadow Strikes.”
The hour hand had circled my watch twice. I got back to the basement at twelve-ten, with the long hand five minutes from brenschluss.
That hand seemed painted to the face as I waited. My candles had left a peculiar odor in the basement, an odor overlaid with the stin
k of demon and the stink of fear. The demon hovered against the wall, no longer in a pentagram, trapped halfway through a wide-armed leap of triumph.
I had an awful thought.
Why had I believed the demon? Everything he’d said might have been a lie. And probably was! I’d been tricked into accepting a gift from the devil! I stood up, thinking furiously—I’d already accepted the gift, but—
The demon glanced to the side and grinned wider when he saw the chalk lines gone. He nodded at me, said, “Back in a flash,” and was gone.
I waited. I’d thought my way into this, but—
A cheery bass voice spoke out of the air. “I knew you’d move the pentagram. Made it too small for me, didn’t you? Tsk, tsk. Couldn’t you guess I’d change my size?”
There were rustlings, and a shimmering in the air. “I know it’s here somewhere. I can feel it. Ah.”
He was back, spread-eagled before me, two feet tall and three feet off the ground. His black know-it-all grin disappeared when he saw the pentagram wasn’t there. Then—he was seven inches tall, eyes bugged in surprise, yelling in a contralto voice. “Whereinhell’s the—”
He was two inches of bright red toy soldier. “—Pentagram?” he squealed.
I’d won. Tomorrow I’d get to a church. If necessary, have somebody lead me in blindfold.
He was a small red star.
A buzzing red housefly.
Gone.
It’s odd, how quickly you can get religion. Let one demon tell you you’re damned…Could I really get into a church? Somehow I was sure I’d make it. I’d gotten this far; I’d outthought a demon.
Eventually he’d look down and see the pentagram. Part of it was in plain sight. But it wouldn’t help him. Spread-eagled like that, he couldn’t reach it to wipe it away. He was trapped for eternity, shrinking toward the infinitesimal but doomed never to reach it, forever trying to appear inside a pentagram which was forever too small. I had drawn it on his bulging belly.
• • •
• • •
She thrust herself into the sky, naked; waved her arms and yelled. The Dark shark froze. A window came open in a nearby cluster of cubes. The beast charged.
Rather didn’t have his wings. He called, “Sectry! Dark sharks aren’t funny!”
…“Are you nuts?” he bellowed, and she laughed. Then the Dark shark burst through in a shower of leaves and splintered wood.
…The predator snapped its teeth at them, raging and impotent. Sectry murmured in his ear. “Gives it a kick, doesn’t it?”
THE SMOKE RING, 1987
ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS
A quarter of a century has passed since I first read “Sideways in Time,” by Murray Leinster. He wasn’t the first to write of alternate time tracks—that was O. Henry in “Roads of Destiny,” unless someone beat him—but Leinster codified the idea and gave science fiction a whole new playground.
Wholesale theft is the sincerest form of flattery, as someone once said. Your novice writer begins his career by writing the story to end all stories about the basic themes, the ones that never seem to wear out: deals with the devil, three wishes, the locked room mystery, solipsism, the sun going nova, the little shop that sells wonders…and alternate histories.
There are a lot of them. Some are unforgettable classics. Phil Dick’s The Man In The High Castle opens decades after the Axis won the Second World War. The world of Ward Moore’s Bring The Jubilee diverged at the Battle of Gettysburg. There’s a scholarly retrospective on Abraham Lincoln’s life following his recovery from that gunshot wound, called “The Lost Years.” Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream had Adolf Hitler migrating to the United States after the First World War, to become a hack science-fiction writer.
Many are good entertainment. Some are simple cribs from history, with little of ingenuity or original thinking, the dance of ideas that hooks us before our teens. But Keith Laumer, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and Fritz Leiber took Leinster’s idea a step further, giving some worldlines the vehicles that allow travel between the lines, for trade and conquest.
What if? Like other worlds, like the past and future, like worlds where magic works: a younger reader sees playgrounds for the mind. Mature readers and novelists sees more. Alternate timelines are a background on which one may play games of political theory, refight old philosophical or military battles with altered rules, and explore the many ways of being human. If it hadn’t happened that way, how would it have happened, and how would we be living now?
I finally decided I hated the whole idea.
Don’t misread that. I could live with a handful of parallel universes, or a hundred, or a million. They’d make life more interesting. Many stories do restrict the proliferation of the timelines, via doubletalk. It’s the whole idea I dislike, taken honestly and without modifying it for story purposes.
Take it from quantum mechanics: the idea is that every time an elementary particle may zig instead of zagging, it does both, and the universe splits in two. When an observer gets around to looking [“the collapse of the wave function”], he sees only one state of things; but all other states are just as real. Similarly, every time you’ve made a decision in your life, you made it all possible ways. I see anything less than that as a cheat, an attempt to make the idea easier to swallow.
A thought-experiment, then. Let’s play a game with loaded dice. There are thirty-six ways a pair of dice can fall. That implies thirty-six universes every time we roll, 1296 universes for two rolls, 46,656 universes for three rolls, 1,679,616 universes for four rolls, etc. Your chance of finding yourself in any one of these universes is the same, whether or not the dice are biased. In practice, however, the bias can be seen to affect the roll. Therefore the theory doesn’t hold.
Does the argument hold? Probably not. Branching histories in all their horrible multiplicity have come to be accepted as basic to quantum mechanics. [Then there are all those universes where it is regarded as nonsense…]
My real grievance is that I spent time, sweat, effort, and agony to become what I am. It irritates me to think that there are Larry Nivens working as second-rate mathematicians or adequate priests or first-rate playboys, who went bust or made their fortunes on the stock market. I even sweated over my mistakes, and I want them to count.
But that’s my problem, not yours. I wrote my story to end all alternate-timeline stories long ago, and of course it didn’t. It never does.
I wrote one myself, afterward. The idea has a fascination.
Breathes there a history student with soul so dead, that he has not wondered what would have happened if? If the South had won the Battle of Gettysburg, what would the world be like today? We’d like to know.
Why?
We can’t get there from here. Travel between the lines isn’t like space travel; it’s not an achievable ideal. No assertion in Bring The Jubilee can be proved, even in principle; and in principle all assertions are true somewhere in the megauniverse of the timelines.
Bring The Jubilee and all its cousins are fantasy without fantasy trappings. In fantasy, more than in other forms of literature, the obligation is to teach something universally true about the human condition.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
There were timelines branching and branching, a megauniverse of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn’t understand the theory, though God knows he’d tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems.
Senseless suicides, senseless crimes. A city-wide epidemic. It had hit other cities too. Trimble suspected that it was worldwide, that other nations were simply keeping it quiet.
Trimble’s sad eyes focused on the clock. Quitting time.
He stood up to go home, and slowly sat down again. For he had his teeth in the problem, and he couldn’t let go.
Not that he was really accomplishing anything.
But if he left now, he’d only have to take it up again tomorrow.
Go, or stay?
And the branchings began again. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Some had left early. Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their multitudes, leaving a multitude of Trimbles behind them. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city’s endless, inexplicable parade of suicides.
Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on his desk. From the bottom drawer he took his gun-cleaning equipment, then his .45. He began to take the gun apart.
The gun was old but serviceable. He’d never fired it except on the target range, and never expected to. To Trimble, cleaning his gun was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered off. Turn the screws, don’t lose them. Lay the parts out in order.
Through the closed door to his office came the sounds of men hurrying. Another emergency? The department couldn’t handle it all. Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men.
Gun oil. Oiled rag. Wipe each part. Put it back in place.
Why would a man like Ambrose Harmon go off a building?
In the early morning light he lay, more a stain than a man, thirty-six stories below the edge of his own penthouse roof. The pavement was splattered red for yards around him. The stains were still wet. Harmon had landed on his face. He wore a bright silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sash.