by Larry Niven
“But you’re saying it’s real. Every time I get a haircut—”
“One of you waits until tomorrow,” said the brown-haired man. “One of you keeps the sideburns. One gets a manicure, one cuts his own nails. The size of the tip varies too. Each of you is as real as the next, and each belongs to a different world line. It wouldn’t matter if the world lines didn’t merge every so often.”
“Uh huh.” I grinned at him. “What about my hotel?”
“I’ll show you. Look through that window. See the street lamp?”
“Vaguely.”
“You bet, vaguely. San Francisco is a town with an active history. The world lines are constantly merging. What you’re looking at is the probability of a street lamp being in a particular place. Looks like a big fuzzy ball, doesn’t it? That’s the locus of points where a bulb might be—or a gas flame. Greatest probability density is in the center, where it shows brightest.”
“I don’t get it.”
“When the world lines merge, everything blurs. The further away something is, the more blurred it looks. I shouldn’t say looks, because the blurring is real; it’s no illusion. Can you see your hotel from here?”
I looked out the appropriate window, and I couldn’t. Two hours ago I’d nearly lost my way just crossing the street. Tonight a man could lose himself in any city street, and wander blindly in circles in hopes of finding a curb…
“You see? Your hotel’s too far away. In the chaos out there, the probability of your hotel being anywhere specific is too small to see. Vanishingly small. You’d never make it.”
Something about the way he talked…
“I wondered when you’d notice that.” He smiled as if we shared a secret.
“All this time,” I said, “I’ve been thinking that you talk just like everyone else. But you don’t. It’s not just the trace of accent. Other people don’t say probability density or theorem or on the order of.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Then we must both be mathematicians!” I smiled back at him.
“No,” he said.
“But then…” But I backed away from the problem, or from the answer. “My glass is empty. Could you use a refill?”
“Thanks, I could.”
I fixed it with the bartender. “Funny thing,” I told the brown-haired man. “I always thought the blurring effect of fog came from water droplets in the air.”
“Bosh,” he said. “Bosh and tish. The water’s there, all right, whenever the fog rolls in. I can’t explain it. The condensation must be a side effect from the blurring of the world lines. But that’s not interfering with your vision. Water’s transparent.”
“Of course. How could I have forgotten that?”
“I forgot it myself, a long time ago.” The scotch was beginning to reach him, I think. He had an accent, and it was growing stronger. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why I stopped you. Because you’d remember.”
The bartender brought us our drinks. His big shoulders were hunched inward against the damp gray light that seeped in the windows.
I sipped at the burning hot glass. Irish whiskey and strong black coffee poured warmth through me, to counteract the cold beyond the walls. A customer departed, and the fog swirled around him and swallowed him.
“I walked into the fog one afternoon,” said the brown-haired man. “The fog was thick, like tonight. A cubic mile of cotton, as we say. I was just going out for a pouch of snuff. When I reached the tobacconist’s he tried to sell me a bundle of brown paper sticks with a Spanish trademark.”
“Uh huh. What did you do?”
“Tried to get home, of course. Things changed oddly while I wandered in the fog. When it cleared and left me stranded, even my money was no good. The worst of it was that I couldn’t even tell my story. Nobody could read my mind to see that I was sane. It was find another fog bank or try to make a life for myself.”
“With no money?”
“Oh, I sold my ring and found a poker game.”
“Oh. Oh!”
“That was a year ago. It’s worked out well enough. I thought I might invent something, like the zipper, but that fell through. You’re far ahead of us in the physical sciences. But money’s no problem. Sometimes there’s a fixed horse race. Sometimes I find a poker game, or a crooked crap game where they’ll let me bet the right way.”
“Sounds great.” But not very honest, I thought.
“You disapprove?” My companion’s voice had gone thin and cold.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I compensate for what I take,” the brown-haired man said angrily. “I know how to untwist a sick man’s mind. If a player sits down with emotional problems, I can help him. If he really needs the money, I can see that it comes to him.”
“Why don’t you become a psychiatrist?”
He shook his head. “It would take years, and then I’d never be able to hold a patient long enough to do myself any good. He’d get well too fast. Besides that, I hate certain people; I’d want to harm them instead of helping them…
“Anyway, I don’t go out in the fog anymore. I like it here. I stopped you because you’re one of those who remember.”
“You said that before. What exactly—?”
“After all, people are constantly walking into fogs. Why is it that we don’t hear more about people wandering in from alternate world lines? It’s because their memories adjust.”
“Ah.”
“I caught it happening once. A girl from somewhere else…I didn’t catch the details; they faded too fast. I got her a job as a go-go dancer. I think she was a prize concubine in someone’s harem before she ran into the fog.
“Their memories adjust. They forget their friends, their relatives, their husbands and wives in the old world line. They remember what man is king or president or chairman in the new. But not us. You and I are different. I can recognize the rare ones.”
“Because you can read minds.” Sarcastically. Part of me still disbelieved; yet…it fit too well. The brown-haired man talked like a mathematics professor because he was talking to me, and I was a mathematics professor, and he was reading my mind.
He looked thoughtfully into his glass. “It’s funny, how many sense the truth. They won’t walk or drive in the fog if they can help it. At the bottom of their minds, they know that they might return home to find a Romish camp, or a Druidic dancing ground, or the center of a city, or a sand dune. You knew it yourself. The top of your mind thinks I’m an entertaining liar. The deepest part of you knew it all before I spoke.”
“I just don’t like fog,” I said. I looked out the window, toward my hotel, which was just across the street. I saw only wet gray chaos and a swirling motion.
“Wait until it clears.”
“Maybe I will. Refill?”
“Thanks.”
Somehow, I found myself doing most of the talking. The brown-haired man listened, nodded occasionally, asked questions from time to time.
We did not mention fog.
“I need an ordered universe,” I said at one point. “Why else would I have studied math? There’s never an ambiguity in mathematics.”
“Whereas in interpersonal relationships…”
“Yes! Exactly!”
“But mathematics is a game. Abstract mathematics doesn’t connect with the real universe except by coincidence or convenience. Like the imaginary number system: it’s used in circuit design, but it certainly wasn’t intended for that.”
“No, of course not.”
“So that’s why you never got married?”
“Right,” I said sadly. “Ordered universe. Hey, I never knew that. Did I?”
“No.”
The fog cleared about one o’clock. My brown-haired friend accompanied me out.
“Mathematics doesn’t fit reality,” he was saying. “No more than a game of bridge. The real universe is chaotic.”
“Like in-ter-personal re-lationships.”
“May
be you’ll find them easier now.”
“Like fog. Well, maybe I will. I know some new things about myself…Where’s my hotel?”
There was no hotel across the street.
Suddenly I was cold sober, and cold scared.
“So,” said my drinking partner. “You must have lost it earlier. Was it foggy when you crossed?”
“Thick as paste. Oh, brother. Now what do I do?”
“I think the fog’s starting to roll in again. Why not wait? The bar won’t close until four.”
“They close at two in my world.” In my world. When I admitted that, I made it real.
“Then maybe you should stay in this one. At least the bartender took your money. Which reminds me. Here.” He handed me my wallet.
He must have picked my pocket earlier. “For services rendered,” he said. “But it looks like you’ll need the money.”
I was too worried to be angry. “My money passes, but my checks won’t. I’ve got half a term of teaching to finish at Berkeley…Tenure, dammit! I’ve got to get back.”
“I’m going to run for it,” said the brown-haired man. “Try the fog if you like. You might find your way home.” And off he went, running to beat the fog. It was drifting in in gray tendrils as I went back into the bar.
An hour later the fog was a cubic mile of cotton, as they say. I walked into it.
I intended to circle the block where I had left my hotel. But there was no way to get my bearings, and the outlines of the block would not hold still. Sight was gone, sound was strangely altered and muffled. I walked blind and half-deaf, with my arms outstretched to protect my face, treading lightly for fear of being tripped.
One thing, at least, the brown-haired man had failed to warn me about. I walked up to a pedestrian-sized gray blur to ask directions, and when I reached it it wasn’t human. It watched me dispassionately as I sidled off.
I might have drifted away from the area. The hotel varied from an ancient barrow to a hot springs (I smelled warm pungent steam) to a glass-sided skyscraper to a vertical slab of black basalt to an enormous pit with red-glowing rock at the bottom. It never became a hotel.
The mist was turning white with dawn. I heard something coming near: the putt-putt-putt of a motor scooter, but distorted. Distorted to the clop-clop-clop of a horse’s hooves…and still approaching. It became a pad-pad-pad-pad, the sound of something heavy and catlike. I stood frozen…
The fog blew clear, and the sound was two sets of footsteps, two oddly dressed men walking toward me. It was dawn, and the fog was gone, and I was stranded.
In eerie silence the men took me by the elbows, turned me about and walked me into the building which had been my hotel. It had become a kind of hospital.
At first it was very bad. The attendants spoke an artificial language, very simple and unambiguous, like deaf-mute sign language. Until I learned it, I thought I had been booked into a mental hospital.
It was a retraining center for people who can’t read minds.
I was inside for a month, and then an outpatient for another six. Quick progress, they say; but then, I hadn’t suffered organic brain damage. Most patients are there because of damage to the right parietal lobe.
It was no trouble to pay the hospital fees. I hold patents on the pressure spray can and the butane lighter. Now I’m trying to design a stapler.
And when the fog is a cubic mile of cotton, as we say, I stay put until it goes away.
• • •
• • •
Chintithpit-mang remembered the man’s rib cage sagging under his foot. It thrashed and clawed and finally stopped moving…It didn’t know how to surrender. They didn’t know how to surrender. Bad.
FOOTFALL, 1985
THE MEDDLER
“The Meddler” began as satire. The Mickey Spillane school of writing was still alive and well in those days. What I learned was that if I set out to satirize a school of writing, I must know how to use it too. “The Meddler” is detective fiction; I was forced to make it a fair puzzle.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Someone was in my room.
It had to be one of Sinc’s boys. He’d been stupid. I’d left the lights off. The yellow light now seeping under the door was all the warning I needed.
He hadn’t used the door: the threads were still there. That left the fire escape outside the bedroom window.
I pulled my gun, moved back a little in the corridor to get elbow room. Then—I’d practiced it often enough to drive the management crazy—I kicked the door open and was into the room in one smooth motion.
He should have been behind the door, or crouching behind a table, or hidden in the closet with his eyes to the keyhole. Instead he was right out in the middle of the living room, facing the wrong way. He’d barely started to turn when I pumped four GyroJet slugs into him. I saw the impacts twitching his shirt. One over the heart.
He was finished.
So I didn’t slow down to watch him fall. I crossed the living-room rug in a diving run and landed behind the couch. He couldn’t be alone. There had to be others. If one had been behind the couch he might have gotten me, but there wasn’t. I scanned the wall behind me, but there was nothing to hide under. So I froze, waiting, listening.
Where were they? The one I’d shot couldn’t have come alone.
I was peeved at Sinc. As long as he’d sent goons to waylay me, he might have sent a few who knew what they were doing. The one I’d shot hadn’t had time to know he was in a fight.
“Why did you do that?”
Impossibly, the voice came from the middle of the living room, where I’d left a falling corpse. I risked a quick look and brought my head down fast. The afterimage:
He hadn’t moved. There was no blood on him. No gun visible, but I hadn’t seen his right hand.
Bulletproof vest? Sinc’s boys had no rep for that kind of thing, but that had to be it. I stood up suddenly and fired, aiming between the eyes.
The slug smashed his right eye, off by an inch, and I knew he’d shaken me. I dropped back and tried to cool off.
No noises. Still no sign that he wasn’t alone.
“I said, ‘Why did you do that?’”
Mild curiosity colored his high-pitched voice. He didn’t move as I stood up, and there was no hole in either eye.
“Why did I do what?” I asked cleverly.
“Why did you make holes in me? My gratitude for the gift of metal, of course, but—” He stopped suddenly, like he’d said too much and knew it. But I had other worries.
“Anyone else here?”
“Only we two are present. I beg pardon for invasion of privacy, and will indemnify—” He stopped again, as suddenly, and started over. “Who were you expecting?”
“Sinc’s boys. I guess they haven’t caught on yet. Sinc’s boys want to make holes in me.”
“Why?”
Could he be that stupid? “To turn me off! To kill me!”
He looked surprised, then furious. He was so mad he gurgled. “I should have been informed! Someone has been unforgivably sloppy!”
“Yah. Me. I thought you must be with Sinc. I shouldn’t have shot at you. Sorry.”
“Nothing,” he smiled, instantly calm again.
“But I ruined your suit…” I trailed off. Holes showed in his jacket and shirt, but no blood. “Just what are you?”
He stood about five feet four, a round little man in an old-fashioned brown one-button suit. There was not a hair on him, not even eyelashes. No warts, no wrinkles, no character lines. A nebbish, one of these guys whose edges are all round, like someone forgot to put in the fine details.
He spread smoothly manicured hands. “I am a man like yourself.”
“Nuts.”
“Well,” he said angrily, “you would have thought so if the preliminary investigation team had done their work properly!”
“You’re a—martian?”
“I am
not a martian. I am—” He gurgled. “Also I am an anthropologist. Your word. I am here to study your species.”
“You’re from outer space?”
“Very. The direction and distance are secret, of course. My very existence should have been secret.” He scowled deeply. Rubber face, I thought, not knowing the half of it yet.
“I won’t talk,” I reassured him. “But you came at a bad time. Any minute now, Sinc’s going to figure out who it is that’s on his tail. Then he’ll be on mine, and this dump’ll be ground zero. I hate to brush you. I’ve never met a…whatever.”
“I too must terminate this interview, since you know me for what I am. But first, tell me of your quarrel. Why does Sinc want to make holes in you?”
“His name is Lester Dunhaven Sinclair the third. He runs every racket in this city. Look, we’ve got time for a drink—maybe. I’ve got scotch, bourbon—”
He shuddered. “No, I thank you.”
“Just trying to set you at ease.” I was a little miffed.
“Then perhaps I may adapt a more comfortable form, while you drink—whatever you choose. If you don’t mind.”
“Please yourself.” I went to the rolling bar and poured bourbon and tap water, no ice. The apartment house was dead quiet. I wasn’t surprised. I’ve lived here a couple of years now, and the other tenants have learned the routine. When guns go off, they hide under their beds and stay there.
“You won’t be shocked?” My visitor seemed anxious. “If you are shocked, please say so at once.”
And he melted. I stood there with the paper cup to my lip and watched him flow out of his one-button suit and take the compact shape of a half-deflated gray beach ball.
I downed the bourbon and poured more, no water. My hands stayed steady.
“I’m a private op,” I told the martian. He’d extruded a convoluted something I decided was an ear. “When Sinc showed up about three years ago and started taking over the rackets, I stayed out of his way. He was the law’s business, I figured. Then he bought the law, and that was okay too. I’m no crusader.”