Destiny Times Three

by Fritz Leiber

  Jerry eBooks

  No copyright 2015 by Jerry eBooks

  No rights reserved. All parts of this book may be reproduced in any form and by any means for any purpose without any prior written consent of anyone.

  ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION

  Part One

  March, 1945

  Volume XXXV, Number 1

  Part Two

  April, 1945

  Volume XXXV, Number 2

  Custom eBook Created By

  Jerry eBooks

  February, 2015

  First of Two Parts.

  There were the self-made gods of destiny who knew—so they thought!—the truth of the thing. And there were two worlds they’d made, and spoiled in the making—that wanted revenge on the third, the Utopian world. And none of those three knew—

  I.

  The ash Yggdrasil great evil suffers,

  Far more than men do know;

  The hart bites its top,

  its trunk is rotting,

  And Nidhogg gnaws beneath.

  Elder Edda.

  In ghostly, shivering streamers of green and blue, like northern lights, the closing hues of the fourth Hoderson symchromy, called “the Yggdrasil,” shuddered down toward visual silence. Once more the ancient myth, antedating even the Dawn Civilization, had been told—of the three of life with its roots in heaven and hell and the land of the frost giants, and serpents gnawing at those roots and the gods fighting to preserve it. Transmuted into significant color by Hoderson’s genius, interpreted by the world’s greatest color instrumentalists, the primeval legend of cosmic dread and rottenness and mystery, of wheels within cosmic wheels, had once more enthralled its beholders.

  In the grip of an unearthly excitement, Thorn crouched forward, one hand jammed against the grassy earth beyond his outspread cloak. The lean wrist shook. It burst upon him, as never before, how the Yggdrasil legend paralleled the hypothesis which Clawly and he were going to present later this night to the World Executive Committee.

  More roots of reality than one, all right, and worse than serpents gnawing, if that hypothesis were true.

  And no gods to oppose them—only two fumbling, overmatched men.

  Thorn stole a glance at the audience scattered across the hillside. The upturned faces of utopia’s sane, healthy citizenry seemed bloodless and cruel and infinitely alien. Like masks. Thorn shuddered.

  A dark, stooped figure slipped between him and Clawly. In the last dying upflare of the symchromy—the last wan lightning stroke as the storm called life departed from the universe—Thorn made out a majestic, ancient face shadowed by a black hood. Its age put him in mind of a fancy he had once heard someone advance, presumably in jest—that a few men of the Dawn Civilization’s twentieth century had somehow secretly survived into the present. The stranger and Clawly seemed to be conversing in earnest, low-pitched whispers.

  Thorn’s inward excitement reached a peak. It was as if his mind had become a thin, taut membrane, against which, from the farthest reaches of infinity, beat unknown pulses. He seemed to sense the presence of stars beyond the stars, time-streams beyond time.

  The symchromy closed. There began a long moment of complete blackness. Then Thorn sensed what could only be described as something from a region beyond the stars beyond the stars, from an existence beyond the time-streams beyond time. A blind but purposeful fumbling that for a moment closed on him and made him its agent.

  No longer his to control, his hand stole sideways, touched some soft fabric, brushed along it with infinite delicacy, slipped beneath a layer of similar fabric, closed lightly on a round, hard, smooth something about as big as a hen’s egg. Then his hand came swiftly back and thrust the something into his pocket.

  Gentle groundlight flooded the hillside, though hardly touching the black false-sky above. The audience burst into applause. Cloaks were waved, making the hillside a crazy sea of color. Thorn blinked stupidly. Like a flimsy but brightly-painted screen switched abruptly into place, the scene around him cut off his vision of many-layered infinities. And the groping power that a moment before had commanded his movements, now vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him with the realization that he had just committed an utterly unmotivated, irrational theft.

  He looked around. The old man in black was already striding toward the amphitheater’s rim, threading his way between applauding groups. Thorn half-withdrew from his pocket the object he had stolen. It was about two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem, nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all four.

  It would be easy to run after the man, to say, “You dropped this.” But he didn’t.

  The applause became patchy, erratic, surged up again as members of the orchestra began to emerge from the pit. There was a lot of confused activity in that direction. Shouts and laughter.

  A familiar sardonic voice remarked, “Quite a gaudy show they put on. Though perhaps a bit too close for comfort to our business of the evening.”

  Thorn became aware that Clawly was studying him speculatively. He asked, “Who was that you were talking to?”

  Clawly hesitated a moment. “A psychologist I consulted some months back when I had insomnia. You remember.”

  Thorn nodded vaguely, stood sunk in thought. Clawly prodded him out of it with, “It’s late. There are quite a few arrangements to check, and we haven’t much time.”

  Together they started up the hillside.

  Especially as a pair, they presented a striking appearance—they were such a study in similarities and contrasts. Certainly they both seemed spiritually akin to some wilder and more troubled age than safe, satisfied, wholesome utopia. Clawly was a small man, but dapper and almost dancingly lithe, with gleamingly alert, subtle features. He might have been some Borgia or Medici from that dark, glittering, twisted core of the Dawn Civilization, when by modern standards mankind was more than half insane. He looked like a small, red-haired, devil-may-care satan, harnessed for good purposes.

  Thorn, on the other hand, seemed like a somewhat dishevel and reckless saint, lured by evil. His tall, gaunt frame increased the illusion. He, too, would have fitted into that history-twisted black dawn, perhaps as a Savonarola or da Vinci.

  In that age they might have been the bitterest and most vindictive of enemies, but it was obvious that in this they were the most unshakably loyal of friends.

  One also sensed that more than friendship linked them. Some secret, shared purpose that demanded the utmost of their abilities and put upon their shoulders crushing responsibilities.

  They looked tired. Clawly’s features were too nervously mobile, Thorn’s eyes too darkly circled, even allowing for the shadows cast by the groundlight, which waned as the false-sky faded, became ragged, showed the stars.

  They reached the amphitheater’s grassy rim, walked along a row of neatly piled flying togs with distinctive luminescent monograms, spotted their own. Already members of the audience were launching like bats into the summary darkness, filling it with the faint gusty hum of subtronic power, that basic force underlying electric, magnetic, and gravitational phenomena, that titan, potentially earth-destroying power, chained for human use.

  As he climbed into his flying togs, Thorn kept looking around. False-sky and groundlight had both dissolved, opening a view to the far horizon, although a little weather, kept electronically at bay for the symchromy, was beginning to drift in—thin streamers of cloud. He felt as never before a poignancy in the beauty of utopia, because he knew as never before how near it might be to disaster, how closely it was pressed upon by alien infinities. There was something spectral about the grandeur of the lonely, softly-glowing skylons, lofty and distant as mountains, thrusting u
p from the dark rolling countryside. Those vertical, one-building cities of his people, focuses of communal activity, gleaming pegs sparsely studding the whole earth—the Mauve Z peering over the next hill, seeming to top it but actually miles away; beyond it the Gray Twins, linked by a fantastically delicate aerial bridge; off to the left the pearly finger of the Opal Cross: last, farther left, thirty miles away but jutting boldly above the curve of the earth, the mountainous Blue Lorraine—all these majestic skylons seemed to Thorn like the last pinnacles of some fairy city engulfed by a rising black tide. And the streams of flying men and women, with their softly winking identification lights, no more than fireflies doomed to drown.

  His fingers adjusted the last fastening of his togs, paused there. Clawly only said, “Well?” but there was in that one word the sense of a leave-taking from all this beauty and comfort and safety—an ultimate embarkation.

  They pulled down their visors. From their feelings, it might have been Mars toward which they launched themselves—a sullen ember halfway up the sky, even now being tentatively probed by the First Interplanetary Expedition. But their actual destination was the Opal Cross.

  II.

  Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem: now the wise men almost unshed they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters.

  Nyarlathotep, H. P. Lovecraft.

  Suppressing the fatigue that surged up in him disconcertingly, Clawly rose to address the World Executive Committee. He found it less easy to suppress the feeling that had in part caused the surge of fatigue: the illusion that he was a charlatan seeking to persuade sane men of the truth of fabricated legends of the supernatural. His smile was characteristic of him—friendly, but faintly diabolic, mocking himself as well as others. Then the smile faded.

  He summed up, “Well, gentlemen, you’ve heard the experts. And by now you’ve guessed why, with the exception of Thorn, they were asked to testify separately. Also, for better or worse—he grimaced grayly—“you’ve guessed the astounding nature of the danger which Thorn and I believe overhangs the world. You know what we want—the means for continuing our research on a vastly extended and accelerated scale, along with a program of confidential detective investigation throughout the world’s citizenry. So nothing remains but to ask your verdict. There are a few points, however, which perhaps will bear stressing.”

  There was noncommittal silence in the Sky Room of the Opal Cross. It was a huge chamber and seemed no less huge because the ceiling was at present opaque—a great gray span arching, from the World Map on the south wall to the Space Map on the north. Yet the few men gathered in an uneven horseshoe of armchairs near the center in no way suggested political leaders seeking a prestige-enhancing background for their deliberations, but rather a group of ordinary men who for various practical reasons had chosen to meet in a ballroom. Any other group than the World Executive Committee might just as well have reserved the Sky Room. Indeed, others had danced here earlier this night, as was mutely testified by a scattering of lost gloves, scarves, and slippers, along with half-emptied glasses and other flotsam of gaiety.

  Yet in the faces of the gathered few there was apparent a wisdom and a penetrating understanding and a leisurely efficiency in action that it would have been hard to find the equal of, in any similar group in earlier times. And a good thing, thought Clawly, for what he was trying to convince them of was something not calculated to appeal to the intelligence of practical administrators—it was doubtful if any earlier culture would have granted him and Thorn any hearing at all.

  He surveyed the faces unobtrusively, his dark glance flitting like a shadow, and was relieved to note that only in Conjerly’s and perhaps Tempelmar’s was a completely unfavorable reaction apparent. Firemoor, on the contrary, registered feverish and unquestioning belief, but that was to be expected in the volatile, easily-swayed chief of the Extraterrestrial Service—and a man who was Clawly’s admiring friend. Firemoor was alone in this open expression of credulity. Chairman Shielding, whose opinion mattered most, looked on the whole skeptical and perhaps a shade disapproving; though that, fortunately, was the heavy-set man’s normal expression.

  The rest, reserving judgment, were watchful and attentive. With the unexpected exception of Thorn, who seemed scarcely to be listening, lost in some strange fatigued abstraction since he had finished making his report.

  A still-wavering audience, Clawly decided. What he said now, and how he said it, would count heavily.

  He touched a small box. Instantly some tens of thousands of pinpricks of green light twinkled from the World Map.

  He said, “The nightmare-frequency for an average night a hundred years ago, as extrapolated from random samplings. Each dot—a bad dream. A dream bad enough to make the dreamer wake in fright.”

  Again he touched the box. The twinkling pattern changed slightly—there were different clusterings—but the total number of pinpricks seemed not to change.

  “The same, for fifty years ago,” he said. “Next—forty.” Again there was merely a slight alteration in the grouping. “And now—thirty.” This time the total number of pinpricks seemed slightly to increase.

  Clawly paused. He said, “I’d like to remind you. gentlemen, that Thorn proved conclusively that his method of sampling was not responsible for any changes in the frequency. He met all the objections you raised—that his subjects were reporting their dreams more fully, that he wasn’t switching subjects often enough to avoid cultivating a nightmare-dreaming tendency, and so on.”

  Once more his hand moved toward the box. “Twenty-five.” This time there was no arguing about the increase.

  “Twenty.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Ten.”

  “Five.”

  Each time the total greenness jumped, until now it was a general glow emanating from all the continental areas. Only the seas still showed widely scattered points, where men dreamed in supra- or sub-surface craft, and a few heavy clusters, where ocean-based skylons rose through the waves.

  “And now, gentlemen, the present.”

  The evil radiance swamped the continents, reached out and touched the faces of the armchair observers.

  “There you have it, gentlemen. A restful night in utopia,” said Clawly quietly. The green glow unwholesomely emphasized his tired pallor and the creases of strain around eyes and mouth. He went on, “Of course it’s obvious that if nightmares are as common as all that, you and yours can hardly have escaped. Each of you knows the answer to that question. As for myself—my nightly experiences provide one more small confirmation of Thorn’s report.”

  He switched off the map. The carefully nonconunital faces turned back to him.

  Clawly noted that the faint, creeping dawn-line on the World Map was hardly two hours away from the Opal Cross. He said, “I pass over the corroborating evidence—the slight steady decrease in average sleeping time, the increase in day sleeping and nocturnal social activity, the unprecedented growth of art and fiction dealing with supernatural terror, and so on—in order to emphasize as strongly as possible Thorn’s secondary discovery: the similarity between the nightmare landscapes of his dreamers. A similarity so astonishing that, to me, the wonder is that it wasn’t noticed sooner, though of course Thorn wasn’t looking for it and he tells me that most of his earlier subjects were unable, or disinclined, to describe in detail the landscapes of their nightmares.” He looked around. “Frankly, that similarity is unbelievable. I don’t think even Thorn did full justice to it in the time he had for his report—you’d have to visit his offices, see his charts and dream-sketches, inspect his monumental tables of correlation. Think: hundreds of dreamers, to take only Thorn’s samples, thousands of miles apart, and all of them dreaming—not the same nightmare, which might be explained by assuming telepathy or some subtle form of mass suggestion—but nightmares with the same landscape, the same general land
scape. As if each dreamer were looking through a different window at a consistently distorted version of our own world. A dream world so real that when I recently suggested to Thorn he try to make a map of it, he did not dismiss my notion as nonsensical.”

  The absence of a stir among his listeners was more impressive than any stir could have been. Clawly noted that Conjerly’s frown had deepened, become almost angry. He seemed about to speak, when Tempelmar casually forestalled him.

  “I don’t think telepathy can be counted out as an explanation,” said the tall, long-featured, sleepy-eyed man. “It’s still a purely hypothetic field—we don’t know how it would operate. And there may have been contacts between Thorn’s subjects that he didn’t know about. They may have told each other their nightmares and so started a train of suggestion.”

  “I don’t believe so,” said, Clawly slowly. “His precautions were thorough. Moreover, it wouldn’t fit with the reluctance of the dreamers to describe their nightmares.”

  “Also,” Tempelmar continued, “we still aren’t a step nearer the underlying cause of the phenomenon. It might be anything—for instance, some unpredictable physiological effect of subtronic power, since it came into use about thirty years ago.”

  “Precisely,” said Clawly. “And so for the present we’ll leave it at that—vastly more frequent nightmares with strangely similar landscapes, cause unknown—while I”—he again gaged the position of the dawn line—“while I hurry on to those matters which I consider the core of our case: the incidence of cryptic amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition. The latter first.”

  Again Conjerly seemed about to interrupt, and again something stopped him. Clawly got the impression it was a slight deterring movement from Tempelmar.

  He touched the box. Some hundreds of yellow dots appeared on the World Map, a considerable portion of them in close clusters of two and three.