by Andre Norton
“What you’re saying, Miss Lje,” Thor Wald said in a resigned voice, “is that the future is fixed, and that you can read it, in every essential detail.”
“Quite right, Dr. Wald. Both those things are true.”
There was a brief silence.
“All right,” Weinbaum said grimly. “Talk.”
“All right, Captain Weinbaum, pay me,” Dana said calmly.
Weinbaum snorted.
“But I’m quite serious,” she said. “You still don’t know what I know about the Dirac communicator. I won’t be forced to tell it, by threat of prison or by any other threat. You see, I know for a fact that you aren’t going to send me to prison, or give me drugs, or do anything else of that kind. I know for a fact, instead, that you are going to pay me—so I’d be very foolish to say a word until you do. After all, it’s quite a secret you’re buying. Once I tell you what it is, you and the entire service will be able to read the future as I do, and then the information will be valueless to me.”
Weinbaum was completely speechless for a moment. Finally he said, “Dana, you have a heart of purest brass, as well as a knee with an invisible gunsight on it. I say that I’m not going to give you my appropriation, regardless of what the future may or may not say about it. I’m not going to give it to you because the way my Government—and yours—runs things makes such a price impossible. Or is that really your price?”
“It’s my real price . . . but it’s also an alternative. Call it my second choice. My first choice, which means the price I’d settle for, comes in two parts: (a) to be taken into your service as a responsible officer; and (b) to be married to Captain Robin Weinbaum.”
Weinbaum sailed up out of his chair. He felt as though copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each of his ears. “Of all the—” he began. There his voice failed completely. From behind him, where Wald was standing, came something like a large, Scandinavian-model guffaw being choked into insensibility.
Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little.
“You see,” she said, “I don’t point my best and most accurate knee at every man I meet.”
Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and carefully. “Walk, do not run, to nearest exit,” he said. “Women and childlike security officers first. Miss Lje, are you trying to sell me the notion that you went through this elaborate hanky-panky—beard and all-out of a burning passion for my dumpy and underpaid person?”
“Not entirely,” Dana Lje said. “I want to be in the bureau, too, as I said. Let me confront you, though, Captain, with a fact of life that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you at all. Do you accept as a fact that I can read the future in detail, and that that, to be possible at all, means that the future is fixed?”
“Since Thor seems able to accept it, I suppose I can too—provisionally.”
“There’s nothing provisional about it,” Dana said firmly. “Now, when I first came upon this—uh, this gimmick—quite a while back, one of the first things that I found out was that I was going to go through the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ masquerade, force myself onto the staff of the bureau, and marry you, Robin. At the time, I was both astonished and completely rebellious. I didn’t want to be on the bureau staff; I liked my free-lance life as a video commentator. I didn’t want to marry you, either. And above all, the masquerade struck me as ridiculous.
“But the facts kept staring me in the face. I was going to do all those things. There were no alternatives, no fanciful ‘branches of time,’ no decision-points that might be altered to make the future change. My future, like yours, Dr. Wald’s, and everyone else’s, was fixed. It didn’t matter a snap whether or not I had a decent motive for what I was going to do; I was going to do it anyhow. Cause and effect, as I could see for myself, just don’t exist. One event follows another because events are just as indestructible in spacetime as matter and energy are.
“It was the bitterest of all pills. It will take me many years to swallow it completely, and you too. Dr. Wald will come around a little sooner, I think. At any rate, once I was intellectually convinced that all this was so, I had to protect my own sanity. I knew that I couldn’t alter what I was going to do, but the least I could do to protect myself was to supply myself with motives. Or, in other words, just plain rationalizations. That much, it seems, we’re free to do! the consciousness of the observer is just along for the ride through time, and can’t alter events—but it can comment, explain, invent. That’s fortunate, for none of us could stand going through motions which were truly free of what we think of as personal significances.
“So I supplied myself with the obvious motives. Since I was going to be married to you and couldn’t get out of it, I set out to convince myself that I loved you. Now I do. Since I was going to join the bureau staff, I thought over all the advantages that it might have over video commentating, and found that they made a respectable list. Those are my motives.
“But I had no such motives at the beginning. Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we called motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless, observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event coming—and, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen.”
“Wow,” Dr. Wald said, inelegantly but with considerable force. “Either Vow’ or ‘balderdash’ seems to be called for—I can’t quite decide which,” Weinbaum agreed. “We know that Dana is an actress, Thor, so let’s not fall off the apple tree quite yet. Dana, I’ve been saving the really hard question for the last. That question is: How? How did you arrive at this modification of the Dirac transmitter? Remember, we know your background, where we didn’t know that of J. Shelby Stevens.’ You’re not a scientist. There were some fairly high-powered intellects among your distant relatives, but that’s as close as you come.”
“I’m going to give you several answers to that question,” Dana Lje said. “Pick the one you like best. They’re all true, but they tend to contradict each other here and there.
“To begin with, you’re right about my relatives, of course. If you’ll check your dossier again, though, you’ll discover that those so-called ‘distant’ relatives were the last surviving members of my family besides myself. When they died, second and fourth and ninth cousins though they were, their estates reverted to me, and among their effects I found a sketch of a possible instantaneous communicator based on de Broglie-wave inversion. The material was in very rough form, and mostly beyond my comprehension, because I am, as you say, no scientist myself. But I was interested; I could see, dimly, what such a thing might be worth—and not only in money.
“My interest was fanned by two coincidences—the kind of coincidences that cause-and-effect just can’t allow, but which seem to happen all the same in the world of unchangeable events. For most of my adult life, I’ve been in communications industries of one kind or another, mostly branches of video. I had communications equipment around me constantly, and I had coffee and doughnuts with communications engineers every day. First I picked up the jargon; then, some of the procedures; and eventually, a little real knowledge. Some of the things I learned can’t be gotten any other way. Some other things are ordinarily available only to highly educated people like Dr. Wald here, and came to me by accident, in a hundred other ways—all natural to the environment of a video network.”
Weinbaum said, with unintentional brusqueness: “What’s the other coincidence?”
“A leak in your own staff.”
“Dana, you ought to have that set to music.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I can’t suit myself,” Weinbaum said petulantly. “I work for the Government. Was this leak direct to you?”
“Not at first. That was why I kept insisting to you in person that there might be such a leak, and why I finally began to hint about it in public, on my program. I was hoping that you’d be able to seal it up inside the bureau before my first rather tenuous contact with it got lost
. When I didn’t succeed in provoking you into protecting yourself, I took the risk of making direct contact with the leak myself—and the first piece of secret information that came to me through it was the final point I needed to put my Dirac communicator together. When it was all assembled, it did more than just communicate. It predicted. And I can tell you why.”
Weinbaum said thoughtfully, “I don’t find this very hard to accept, so far. Pruned of the philosophy, it even makes some sense of the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ affair. I assume that by letting the old gentleman become known as somebody who knew more about the Dirac transmitter than I did, and who wasn’t averse to negotiating with anybody who had money, you kept the leak working through you—rather than transmitting data directly to unfriendly governments.”
“It did work out that way,” Dana said. “But that wasn’t the genesis or the purpose of the Stevens masquerade. I’ve already given you the whole explanation of how that came about.”
“Well, you’d better name me that leak, before the man gets away.”
“When the price is paid, not before. It’s too late to prevent a getaway, anyhow. In the meantime, Robin, I want to go on and tell you the other answer to your question about how I was able to find this particular Dirac secret, and you didn’t. What answers I’ve given you up to now have been cause-and-effect answers, with which we’re all more comfortable. But I want to impress on you that all apparent cause-and-effect relationships are accidents. There is no such thing as a cause, and no such thing as an effect I found the secret because I found it; that event was fixed; that certain circumstances seem to explain why I found it, in the old cause-and-effect terms, is irrelevant. Similarly, with all your superior equipment and brains, you didn’t find it for one reason, and one reason alone: because you didn’t find it. The history of the future says you didn’t.”
“I pays my money and I takes no choice, eh?” Weinbaum said ruefully.
“I’m afraid so—and I don’t like it any better than you do.”
“Thor, what’s your opinion of all this?”
“It’s just faintly flabbergasting,” Wald said soberly. “However, it hangs together. The deterministic Universe which Miss Lje paints was a common feature of the old relativity theories, and as sheer speculation has an even longer history. I would say that in the long run, how much credence we place in the story as a whole will rest upon her method of, as she calls it, reading the future. If it is demonstrable beyond any doubt, then the rest becomes perfectly credible—philosophy and all. If it doesn’t, then what remains is an admirable job of acting, plus some metaphysics which, while self-consistent, are not original with Miss Lje.”
“That sums up the case as well as if I’d coached you, Dr. Wald,” Dana said. “I’d like to point out one more thing. If I can read the future, then J. Shelby Stevens’ never had any need for a staff of field operatives, and he never needed to send a single Dirac message which you might intercept. All he needed to do was to make predictions from his readings, which he knew to be infallible; no private espionage network had to be involved.”
“I see that,” Weinbaum said dryly. “All right, Dana, let’s put the proposition this way: I do not believe you. Much of what you say is probably true, but in totality I believe it to be false. On the other hand, if you’re telling the whole truth, you certainly deserve a place on the bureau staff—it would be dangerous as hell not to have you with us—and the marriage is a more or less minor matter, except to you and me. You can have that with no strings attached; I don’t want to be bought, any more than you would.
“So: if you will tell me where the leak is, we will consider that part of the question closed. I make that condition not as a price, but because I don’t want to get myself engaged to somebody who might be shot as a spy within a month.”
“Fair enough,” Dana said. “Robin, your leak is Margaret Soames. She is an Erskine operative, and nobody’s bubble-brain. She’s a highly trained technician.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Weinbaum said in astonishment. “Then she’s already flown the coop—she was the one who first told me we’d identified you. She must have taken on that job in order to hold up delivery long enough to stage an exit.”
“That’s right. But you’ll catch her, day after tomorrow. And you are now a hooked fish, Robin.”
There was another suppressed burble from Thor Wald.
“I accept the fate happily,” Weinbaum said. “Now, if you will tell me how you work your swami trick, and if it backs up everything you’ve said to the letter, as you claim, I’ll see to it that you’re also taken into the bureau and that all charges against you are quashed. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to kiss the bride between the bars of a cell.”
Dana smiled. “The secret is very simple. It’s in the beep.” Weinbaum’s jaw dropped. “The beep? The Dirac noise?”
“That’s right. You didn’t find it out because you considered the beep to be just a nuisance, and ordered Miss Soames to cut it off all tapes before sending them in to you. Miss Soames, who had some inkling of what the beep meant, was more than happy to do so, leaving the reading of the beep exclusively to ‘J. Shelby Stevens’—who she thought was going to take on Erskine as a client.”
“Explain,” Thor Wald said, looking intense.
“Just as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is picked up by every receiver that is capable of detecting it. Every receiver—including the first one ever built, which is yours, Dr. Wald, through the hundreds of thousands of them which will exist throughout the Galaxy in the Twenty-Fourth Century, to the untold millions which will exist in the Thirtieth Century, and so on. The Dirac beep is the simultaneous reception of every one of the Dirac messages which have ever been sent, or ever will be sent. Incidentally, the cardinal number of the total of those messages is a relatively small and of course finite number; it’s far below really large finite numbers such as the number of electrons in the Universe, even when you break each and every message down into individual ‘bits’ and count those.”
“Of course,” Dr. Wald said softly. “Of course! But, Miss Lje . . . how do you tune for an individual message? We tried fractional positron frequencies, and got nowhere.”
“I didn’t even know fractional positron frequencies existed,” Dana confessed. “No, it’s simple—so simple that a lucky layman like me could arrive at it. You tune individual messages out of the beep by time-lag, nothing more. All the messages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction of time that exists, something called a ‘chronon.’ ”
“Yes,” Wald said. “The time it takes one electron to move from one quantum-level to another. That’s the Pythagorean point of time-measurement.”
“Thank you. Obviously no gross physical receiver can respond to a message that brief, or at least that’s what I thought at first. But because there are relay and switching delays, various forms of feedback, and so on in the apparatus itself, the beep arrives at the output end as a complex pulse which has been ‘splattered’ along the time axis for a full second or more. That’s an effect which you can exaggerate by recording the ‘splattered’ beep on a high-speed tape, the same way you would record any event that you wanted to study in slow motion. Then you tune up the various failure-points in your receiver, to exaggerate one failure, minimize all the others, and use noise-suppressing techniques to cut out the background.” Thor Wald frowned. “You’d still have a considerable garble when you were through. You’d have to sample the messages—”
“Which is just what I did; Robin’s little lecture to me about the ultrawave gave me that hint. I set myself to find out how the ultrawave channel carries so many messages at once, and I discovered that you people sample the incoming pulses every thousandth of a second and pass on one pip only when the wave deviates in a certain way from the mean. I didn’t really believe it would work on the Dirac beep, but it turned out just as well: 90% as intelligible as the original transmission after it came through the smearing device. I’d already
got enough from the beep to put my plan in motion, of course—but now every voice message in it was available, and crystal-clear: If you select three pips every thousandth of a second, you can even pick up an intelligible transmission of music—a little razzy, but good enough to identify the instruments that are playing—and that’s a very close test of any communications device.”
“There’s a question of detail here that doesn’t quite follow,” said Weinbaum, for whom the technical talk was becoming a little too thick to fight through. “Dana, you say that you knew the course this conversation was going to take—yet it isn’t being Dirac-recorded, nor can I see any reason why any summary of it would be sent out on the Dirac afterwards.”
“That’s true, Robin. However, when I leave here, I will make such a transcast myself, on my own Dirac. Obviously I will—because I’ve already picked it up, from the beep.”
“In other words, you’re going to call yourself up—months ago.”
“That’s it,” Dana said. “It’s not as useful a technique as you might think at first, because it’s dangerous to make such broadcasts while a situation is still developing. You can safely “phone back’ details only after the given situation has gone to completion, as a chemist might put it. Once you know, however, that when you use the Dirac you’re dealing with time, you can coax some very strange things out of the instrument.”
She paused and smiled. “I have heard,” she said conversationally, “the voice of the President of our Galaxy, in 3480, announcing the federation of the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light-years—but what kind of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension. And many other things. When you check on me, you’ll hear these things too—and you’ll wonder what many of them mean.
