Worlds of Maybe

by Robert Silverberg

  That is the cause of the utter disappearance of Rio and Tokyo. Where Rio stood an untouched jungle remains. It is of our own geological period, but it is simply from a path in time in which Rio de Janeiro never happened to be built. On the site of Tokyo stands a forest of extraordinarily primitive type, about which botanists and paleontologists still debate. Somewhere, in some space and time, Tokyo and Rio yet exist and their people still live on. But Detroit. . . .

  We still do not understand what happened to Detroit. It was upon an oscillating segment of earth. It vanished from our time, and it returned to our time. But its inhabitants did not come back with it. The city was empty; deserted as if the hundreds of thousands of human beings who lived in it had simply evaporated into the air. There have been some few signs of struggle seen, but they may have been the result of panic. The city of Detroit returned to its own space and time untouched, unharmed, unlooted and undisturbed. But no living thing, not even a domestic animal or a caged bird, was in it when it came back. We do not understand that at all.

  Perhaps if Minott had returned to us, he could have guessed at the answer to the riddle. What fragmentary papers of his that have been shown to refer to the time-upheaval have been of inestimable value. Our whole theory of what happened depends upon the papers Minott left behind as too unimportant to bother with—plus, of course, Blake’s and Harris’ account of his explanations to them. Tom Hunter can remember little that is useful. Maida Haynes has given some worth-while data, but it covers ground we have other observers for. Bertha Ketterline also reports very little.

  The answers to a myriad problems yet elude us, but in the saddle-bags given to Minott by Blake as preparation for his desperate journey through space and time, the solutions to many must remain. Our scientists labor diligently to understand and to elaborate the figures Minott thought of trivial significance. And throughout the world many, many minds turn longingly to certain saddle-bags, loaded on a led horse, following Minott and Lucy Blair through unguessable landscapes, to unimaginable adventures, with revolvers and text-books as their armament for the conquest of a world.

  Sail On! Sail On! by Philip José Farmer

  The parallel world depicted in this high-spirited little story is so brilliantly realized, within the scope of just a few thousand words, that it needs no introduction here. It is best to enter it without a guidebook, and to find one's way around in it step by hilarious step. As a bonus, the author has supplied a postscript,written more than fifteen years after the original story, in which he explains how a science-fiction writer goes about creating the kind of world shown in “Sail On! Sail On!”

  Philip José Farmer has been in the front ranks of science fiction since his startling debut in 1952 with “The Lovers.” His recent works include the Hugo-winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” and the controversial novels Image of the Beast and Lord Tyger.

  Friar Sparks sat wedged between the wall and the realizer. He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes. From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swiveled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poop deck. Visibility was low.

  Outside was dusk and a lantern by the railing. Two sailors leaned on it. Beyond them bobbed the bright lights and dark shapes of the Nina and the Pinta. And beyond them was the smooth horizon-brow of the Atlantic, edged in black and blood by the red dome of the rising moon.

  The single carbon filament bulb above the monk’s tonsure showed a face lost in fat—and in concentration.

  The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.

  “Zzisss! So you are out of sherry already. . . . Pop!

  . . . Too bad . . . Crackle . . . you hardened old winebutt.

  . . . Zzz . . . May God have mercy on your sins. . . .

  “Lots of gossip, news, et cetera. . . . Hisses! . . . Bend your ear instead of your neck, impious one. . . . The Turks are said to be gathering . . . crackle ... an army to march on Austria. It is rumored that the flying sausages, said by so many to have been seen over the capitals of the Christian world, are of Turkish origin. The rumor goes they have been invented by a renegade Rogerian who was converted to the Muslim religion. . . . I say . . . zziss ... to that. No one of us would do that. It is a falsity spread by our enemies in the Church to discredit us. But many people believe that. . . .

  “How close does the Admiral calculate he is to Cipangu now?

  “Flash! Savonarola today denounced the Pope, the wealthy of Florence, Greek art and literature, and the experiments of the disciples of Saint Roger Bacon. . . . Zzzl . . . The man is sincere but misguided and dangerous. ... I predict he’ll end up at the stake he’s always prescribing for us. . . .

  “Pop. ... This will kill you.... Two Irish mercenaries by the name of Pat and Mike were walking down the street of Granada when a beautiful Saracen lady leaned out of a balcony and emptied a pot of . . . hiss! . . . and Pat looked up and . . . Crackle. . . . Good, hah? Brother Juan told that last night. . . .

  “PV . . . PV .. . Are you coming in? . . . PV . . . PV . . . Yes, I know it’s dangerous to bandy such jests about, but nobody is monitoring us tonight. . . . Zzz.... I think they’re not, anyway. . . .”

  And so the ether bent and warped with their messages. And presently Friar Sparks tapped out the PV that ended their talk—the “Pax vobiscum.” Then he pulled the plug out that connected his earphones to the set and, lifting them from his ears, clamped them down forward over his temples in the regulation manner.

  After sidling bent-kneed from the toldilla, punishing his belly against the desk’s hard edge as he did so, he walked over to the railing. De Salcedo and de Torres were leaning there and talking in low tones. The big bulb above gleamed on the page’s red-gold hair and on the interpreter’s full black beard. It also bounced pinkishly off the priest’s smooth-shaven jowls and the light scarlet robe of the Rogerian order. His cowl, thrown back, served as a bag for scratch paper, pens, an ink bottle, tiny wrenches and screwdrivers, a book on cryptography, a slide rule, and a manual of angelic principles.

  “Well, old rind,” said young de Salcedo familiarly, “what do you hear from Las Palmas?”

  “Nothing now. Too much interference from that.” He pointed to the moon riding the horizon ahead of them. “What an orb!” bellowed the priest. “It’s as big and red as my revered nose!”

  The two sailors laughed, and de Salcedo said, “But it will get smaller and paler as the night grows, Father. And your proboscis will, on the contrary, become larger and more sparkling in inverse proportion according to the square of the ascent—”

  He stopped and grinned, for the monk had suddenly dipped his nose, like a porpoise diving into the sea, raised it again, like the same animal jumping from a wave, and then once more plunged it into the heavy currents of their breath. Nose to nose, he faced them, his twinkling little eyes seeming to emit sparks like the realizer in his toldilla.

  Again, porpoiselike, he sniffed and snuffed several times, quite loudly. Then satisfied with what he had gleaned from their breaths, he winked at them. He did not, however, mention his findings at once, preferring to sidle toward the subject.

  He said, “This Father Sparks on the Grand Canary is so entertaining. He stimulates me with all sorts of philosophical notions, both valid and fantastic. For instance, tonight, just before we were cut off by that” —he gestured at the huge bloodshot eye in the sky— “he was discussing what he called worlds of parallel time tracks, an idea originated by Dysphagius of Gotham. It’s his idea there may be other worlds in coincident but not contacting universes, that God, being infinite and of unlimited creative talent and ability, the Master Alchemist, in other words, has possibly—perhaps necessarily—created a plurality of continua in which every probable
event has happened.”

  “Huh?” grunted de Salcedo.

  “Exactly. Thus, Columbus was turned down by Queen Isabella, so this attempt to reach the Indies across the Atlantic was never made. So we could not now be standing here plunging ever deeper into Oceanus in our three cockle-shells, there would be no booster buoys strung out between us and the Canaries, and Father Sparks at Las Palmas and I on the Santa Maria would not be carrying on our fascinating conversations across the ether.

  “Or, say, Roger Bacon was persecuted by the Church, instead of being encouraged and giving rise to the order whose inventions have done so much to insure the monopoly of the Church on alchemy and its divinely inspired guidance of that formerly pagan and hellish practice.”

  De Torres opened his mouth, but the priest silenced him with a magnificent and imperious gesture and continued.

  “Or, even more ridiculous, but thought-provoking, he speculated just this evening on universes with different physical laws. One, in particular, I thought very droll. As you probably don't know, Angelo Angelei has proved, by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that different weights fall at different speeds. My delightful colleague on the Grand Canary is writing a satire which takes place in a universe where Aristotle is made out to be a liar, where all things drop with equal velocities, no matter what their size. Silly stuff, but it helps to pass the time. We keep the ether busy with our little angels.”

  De Salcedo said, “Uh, I don’t want to seem too curious about the secrets of your holy and cryptic order, Friar Sparks. But these little angels your machine realizes intrigue me. Is it a sin to presume to ask about them?”

  The monk’s bull roar slid to a dove cooing. “Whether it’s a sin or not depends. Let me illustrate, young fellows. If you were concealing a bottle of, say, very scarce sherry on you, and you did not offer to share it with a very thirsty old gentleman, that would be a sin. A sin of omission. But if you were to give that desert-dry, that pilgrim-weary, that devout, humble, and decrepit old soul a long, soothing, refreshing, and stimulating draught of lifegiving fluid, daughter of the vine, I would find it in my heart to pray for you for that deed of loving-kindness, of encompassing charity. And it would please me so much I might tell you a little of our realizer. Not enough to hurt you, just

  enough so you might gain more respect for the intelligence and glory of my order.”

  De Salcedo grinned conspiratorially and passed the monk the bottle he’d hidden under his jacket. As the friar tilted it, and the chug-chug-chug of vanishing sherry became louder, the two sailors glanced meaningfully at each other. No wonder the priest, reputed to be so brilliant in his branch of the alchemical mysteries, had yet been sent off on this halfbaked voyage to devil-knew-where. The Church had calculated that if he survived, well and good. If he didn’t, then he would sin no more.

  The monk wiped his lips on his sleeve, belched loudly as a horse, and said, “Gracias, boys. From my heart, so deeply buried in this fat, I thank you. An old Irishman, dry as a camel’s hoof, choking to death with the dust of abstinence, thanks you. You have saved my life.”

  ‘Thank rather that magic nose of yours,” replied de Salcedo. “Now, old rind, now that you’re well greased again, would you mind explaining as much as you are allowed about that machine of yours?”

  Friar Sparks took fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, his listeners asked a few permitted questions.

  “. . . and you say you broadcast on a frequency of eighteen hundred k.c.?” the page asked. “What does ‘k.c.’ mean?”

  “K stands for the French kilo, from a Greek word meaning thousand. And c stands for the Hebrew cherubim, the ‘little angels.’ Angel comes from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger. It is our concept that the ether is crammed with these cherubim, these little messengers. Thus, when we Friar Sparkses depress the key of our machine, we are able to realize some of the infinity of messengers’ waiting for just such a demand for service.

  “So, eighteen hundred k.c. means that in a given unit of time one million, eight hundred thousand cherubim line up and hurl themselves across the ether, the nose of one being brushed by the feathertips of the cherub’s wings ahead. The height of the wing crests of each little creature is even, so that if you were to draw an outline of the whole train, there would be nothing to distinguish one cherub from the next, the whole column forming that grade of little angels known as C.W.”

  “C.W.?”

  “Continuous wingheight. My machine is a C.W. realizer.”

  Young de Salcedo said, “My mind reels. Such a concept! Such a revelation! It almost passes comprehension. Imagine, the aerial of your realizer is cut just so long, so that the evil cherubim surging back and forth on it demand a predetermined and equal number of good angels to combat them. And this seduction coil on the realizer crowds ‘bad’ angels into the left-hand, the sinister, side. And when the bad little cherubim are crowded so closely and numerously that they can’t bear each other’s evil company, they jump the spark gap and speed around the wire to the ‘good’ plate. And in this racing back and forth they call themselves to the attention of the little messengers,’ the yea-saying cherubim. And you, Friar Sparks, by manipulating your machine thus and so, and by lifting and lowering

  your key, you bring these invisible and friendly lines of carriers, your etheric and winged postmen, into reality. And you are able, thus, to communicate at great distances with your brothers of the order.”

  “Great God!” said de Torres.

  It was not a vain oath but a pious exclamation of wonder. His eyes bulged; it was evident that he suddenly saw that man was not alone, that on every side, piled on top of each other, flanked on every angle, stood a host. Black and white, they presented a solid chessboard of the seemingly empty cosmos, black for the nay-sayers, white for the yea-sayers, maintained by a Hand in delicate balance and subject as the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea to exploitation by man.

  Yet de Torres, having seen such a vision as has made a saint of many a man, could only ask, “Perhaps you could tell me how many angels may stand on the point of a pin?”

  Obviously, de Torres would never wear a halo. He was destined, if he lived, to cover his bony head with the mortar-board of a university teacher.

  De Salcedo snorted. “Til tell you. Philosophically speaking, you may put as many angels on a pinhead as you want to. Actually speaking, you may put only as many as there is room for. Enough of that. Pm interested in facts, not fancies. Tell me, how could the moons rising interrupt your reception of the cherubim sent by the Sparks at Las Palmas?”

  “Great Caesar, how would I know? Am I a repository of universal knowledge? No, not I! A humble and ignorant friar, I! All I can tell you is that last night it rose like a bloody tumor on the horizon, and that when it was up I had to quit marshaling my little messengers in their short and long columns. The Canary station was quite overpowered, so that both of us gave up. And the same thing happened tonight.”

  “The moon sends messages?” asked de Torres.

  “Not in a code I can decipher. But it sends, yes.”

  “Santa Maria!”

  “Perhaps,” suggested de Salcedo, “there are people on that moon, and they are sending.”

  Friar Sparks blew derision through his nose. Enormous as were his nostrils, his derision was not smallbore. Artillery of contempt laid down a barrage that would have silenced any but the strongest of souls.

  “Maybe”—de Torres spoke in a low tone “—maybe, if the stars are windows in heaven, as I’ve heard said, the angels of the higher hierarchy, the big ones, are realizing—uh—the smaller? And they only do it when the moon is up so we may know it is a celestial phenomenon?”

  He crossed himself and looked around the vessel.

  “You need not fear,” said the monk gently. “There is no Inquisitor leaning over your shoulder. Remember, I am the only priest on this expedition. Moreover, your conjecture has nothing to do with dogma. However, that’s unimportant. Here�
��s what I don’t understand: how can a heavenly body broadcast? Why does it have the same frequency as the one I’m restricted to? Why—”

  “I could explain,” interrupted de Salcedo with all the brashness and impatience of youth. “I could say that the Admiral and the Rogerians are wrong about the earth’s shape. I could say the earth is not round but is flat. I could say the horizon exists, not because we live upon a globe, but because the earth is curved only a little ways, like a greatly flattened-out hemisphere. I could also say that the cherubim are coming, not from Luna, but from a ship such as ours, a vessel which is hanging in the void off the edge of the earth.”

  “What?” gasped the other two.

  “Haven’t you heard,” said de Salcedo, “that the King of Portugal secretly sent out a ship after he turned down Columbus’ proposal? How do we know he did not, that the messages are from our predecessor, that he sailed off the world’s rim and is now suspended in the air and becomes exposed at night because it follows the moon around Terra—is, in fact, a much smaller and unseen satellite?”

  The monk’s laughter woke many men on the ship. “I’ll have to tell the Las Palmas operator your tale. He can put it in that novel of his. Next you’ll be telling me those messages are from one of those fire-shooting sausages so many credulous laymen have been seeing flying around. No, my dear de Salcedo, let’s not be ridiculous. Even the ancient Greeks knew the earth was round. Every university in Europe teaches that. And we Rogerians have measured the circumference. We know for sure that the Indies lie just across the Atlantic. Just as we know for sure, through mathematics, that heavier-than-air machines are impossible. Our Friar Ripskulls, our mind doctors, have assured us these flying creations are mass hallucinations or else the tricks of heretics or Turks who want to panic the populace.