The Universe Maker

by A. E. van Vogt

  The next instant he had his answer. There was a blur of movement near the door, a swelling darkness. Lela screamed.

  And then the Shadow was in the room.

  10

  Cargill had a blank awareness of getting out of the control chair and backing toward the far wall. The act of moving drained the initial sense of shock, and he stopped and stiffened. He saw that the Shadow shape had paused and was studying him. And, momentarily, he had tune for another look at the strange phenomenon of ... shadow.

  In the dawn light that filtered into the room, the Shadow was a transparent, foggy structure, and that was what was so disturbing. This thing had structure. It should have flowed like any gaseous element until it had dissipated into formless mass. Instead, it was definitely human in silhouette.

  He remembered his earlier speculations about the soul, and wondered: Is this it, somehow made visible? He couldn't quite accept that. A manifestation, perhaps, but even this idea seemed far-fetched and unsatisfactory. It was hard to believe that this was what had inspired five hundred centuries of humankind to a sense of spiritual ecstasy.

  His evaluative thought ended abruptly, as the improbable creature spoke: "We meet again, Morton Cargill."

  It was identification, not so much of Cargill, as of the Shadow. This must be the same Shadow he had seen with Ann Reece. Some of the others might have observed him while he was unconscious, but only one had met him.

  Cargill’s thought ended, and then he had no time for further immediate speculation. The Shadow said no more. He came striding forward. The foggy stuff that was his substance enveloped Cargill.

  This time, there was no sense of transition. One instant he was in the floater with Lela and the Shadow. The next moment he was sitting in a chair, trying to blink away a blur over his vision. It cleared after several seconds and he looked around him.-

  He saw that he was in a chair at one end of a tastefully furnished living room. On one wall was a clock that said "May 6, 9:24 p.m." To his left was an open door through which he could see the edge of a bed.

  The wall directly across from him was made of transparent glass and beyond it, at the far end of another room, he could see a girl sitting in a chair that seemed to be a replica of his own. Just for a moment, Cargill had the feeling that all this was strange and then he recognized the girl. He jerked erect with amazement.

  It was the young woman who had tried to pretend that she was Marie Chanette.

  He was back in the room where he had first arrived into the 24th century. And if the clock were right, then he was back to the evening of his original arrival.

  He had actually no doubt about it. The knowledge grew out of a score of separate incidents that now drew together inside him to form the full perception: He had returned to the time of his arrival from the DREAM ROOM, from 1954.

  Taking time to verify this idea, he trembled as he wrote a note to the girl and held it up against the glass. The note read: How long have you been here?

  In answer, she wrote, About three hours.

  Even though he expected something like that, the reply tensed Cargill. He told himself that he had to remember that she was capable of playing a devious game, and equally capable of lying. Several times during the past few months, he had considered this descendant of Marie Chanette, and her willingness to have him murdered as a part of her therapy.

  He stood, eyes narrowed, fingers pressed against the transparent material that separated them, and stared at her. She also had been moved in time, back to 1954, then returned here. It made her as special as himself. It made it possible for him to ask himself: "What is there about her? How was the rigidity of time bypassed?"

  It was an old question now for him, but the answer must be right here before his eyes, if only he could read the language in which it was written: The language of time-space, of reality, of the energy field that made up the complex of life. The language of eternity—perhaps. Cargill groaned inwardly and, closing his eyes, tried to recall at what exact moments in his own life there might have been manifestations which would now be meaningful. The blackouts, of course. Those highly charged moments when he had actually been transported through time. But they seemed unreachable, un-analyzable. There was the time when he had been wounded. Tensely, he remembered the shock as the bullet had struck him, the immediate numbness, and the sense of being far away.

  Partial death? Cargill wondered. Just for a moment the feeling had come to him that his time had come. For many seconds, if there were such an energy field as he had conceived, the relationship between it and the physical structure that was Morton Cargill had been disturbed. And then, he'd realized that it was a minor injury. Almost immediately, the pain began, and the odd feeling of far-awayness ended.

  It seemed like a clue to the search in which he—of all the people in the world needed most to succeed. But it would have to wait. Distracted, he realized that this was not the time. It was theoretically possible that one person could resolve the riddle of the centuries in an hour. The decisive element would be the hypothesis with which one approached the subject. It was as true as ever that if one could ask the right questions, the right answers would be available. But at the moment he had to devote his attention to the urgent matter of a second escape.

  He found himself wondering about Lela. What had happened to her? Or rather what would happen to her? He had to remember that what had happened was several months in the future. Staggered, he thought about some of the possible paradoxes.

  The confusion that followed brought him out of his chair and sent him on a frantic exploration of the apartment. It was all as he remembered it and what was particularly important was that the bed looked as if he had previously slept on it. He remembered the chair that he had smashed, and raced from the bedroom back to the living room. He found the chair crumpled hi a corner where he had tossed it. His picture of the limits of the paradox grew sharper. This was the room after Ann-Reese had rescued him—not very long after, however.

  Cargill began to sag. The pressure that was working on him was different from anything he had ever experienced. Different even from the first minutes of his initial arrival. There was a shattering implication here. If these people didn't like what had happened in any time period they could alter it. In one directed time-reversal they could cancel what had displeased them and the next time, with pre-knowledge, could force events to the pattern they desired.

  It seemed clear that, after what he had done in trying to organize a Planiac rebellion, Grannis wanted the Shadows to carry through with their original purpose of murdering him. That would be the simplest way of nullifying the past.

  His captors, knowing nothing of his months with the floater folk, could now proceed to kill him without ever suspecting that Grannis had plotted against them. Cargill decided grimly, "I'll fix that. The moment they get hi touch with me I'll tell the whole story."

  He was planning his exact words when a voice said from behind him, "Morton Cargill, it is my duty to prepare you for death."

  11

  The moment for action—and counteraction—had come. Cargill climbed to his feet. Fighting his anxiety and speaking clearly he launched into his account. He had time for half a dozen sentences and then the voice interrupted him, not deliberately, not with any intent to break into what he was saying. The interruption showed no awareness that he had said anything. Whoever was talking had not heard his words.

  The voice said, "Events are supremely convincing. I shall now describe to you the complex problem with which you presented us when Marie Chanette was killed in the twentieth century."

  Cargill couldn't help it. He had to cut in. He said loudly, "Just a minute. You've explained this to me before."

  "Violence," the voice said, "affects not just one individual but future generations as well."

  Cargill shouted, "Listen to me. There's a plot—"

  "It's like a stone," said the voice, "that is flung furiously into a limitless sea. The ripples go on forever and wash
up many a strange flotsam on shores remote beyond imagination."

  Cargill trembled with anger. "You stupid idiots!" he yelled. "Surely you haven't put me in here without any chance of telling you what's happened." But his very anger measured the extent of his own belief that this was exactly what they had done.

  Inexorably, the voice continued. And for the first time Cargill realized that it was giving him information different from that of—months ago. "Listen to the case," it said, "of Marie Chanette."

  For better or worse he listened. His muscles tensed and his mind jumped with impatience, but he listened. Gradually then, in spite of his own purposes, he grew calmer and began to feel fascinated.

  Much indeed had happened as the result of the death of Marie Chanette. She died in a car accident and in pain. The pain ended with her death but that was not the end. There was no normal end.

  Marie Chanette was survived by a daughter who, at the time of her mother's decease, was three years and two months of age, and by a husband from whom she was not yet officially divorced. The fight for the possession of the child had been bitter and on the death of her mother, little Julia Marie reverted automatically to the care of her father, an insurance salesman.

  At first he kept her hi a nursery school and had a neighboring woman tend her after the school bus brought her home. At first he spent occasional evenings with her. But he was a hard worker, and evening calls on prospects were part of his routine. The enforced habit of not having much to do with his daughter made it easy to forget all about her on evenings when it was just a matter of going out with the gang for a good time. He told himself that she was really getting a better upbringing than if her mother had been alive and that he was "paying plenty" for her care. When Julia Marie asked why she didn't have a "mummy" like the other kids he decided in her own interests (so he informed himself) to tell her his distorted version of the truth.

  He discovered, however, that she already knew it. Some of the other kids had heard garbled stories and had shrieked the words at her. These tales were locked up tightly inside her heart. She grew up unstable, blotchy-faced, easily upset, a bad-tempered, wilful child —"just like your mother, blast you!" Chanette shouted at her when he was drunk.

  She never got over the tensions of her childhood, though she turned out to be a good-looking girl and had a brief exciting spring between the ages of 21 and 25. She married in 1973 a young man named Thompson, who was not good enough for her. But she had too great a negation of self to aspire to anything higher. In 1982 she gave him a boy child, a girl in 1984. She died in 1988, ostensibly from a major hysterectomy but actually from an ultimate case of overwrought nerves.

  Thompson drifted along for a while at his job but now that the intense, driving, frightening personality of his wife was no longer pushing him he was quick to retreat from responsibility. He lacked the capacity to appreciate the benefits he had accumulated in fifteen years of service with the Atomotor Corporation. Just as he was about to be promoted to the kind of field work which the firm's "Constitutional" psychologist had recommended for him, he traded his atobout for a floater, gave up his job, sold his house—and became a Planiac.

  They called them that in those lazy glorious days just before the turn of the twenty-first century. They were floaters, people who had no home but a house in the sky. All day long they floated through the air anywhere from a few thousand feet to a few miles up. At night they would come down beside a stream and cast for fish. Or they would float down onto the ocean and return to land with a catch which some cannery would be glad to buy. They followed the crops. They were the new race of fruit pickers, harvesters and casual laborers. They remained a day, a week, but seldom a month. They only wanted a stake, enough money to live until tomorrow.

  In 2010 A.D. it was estimated that nineteen million people in the United States had become floaters or Planiacs. The stay-at-home majority was shocked and economists predicted disaster for the land unless something was done to bring the skyriding population back to earth. When a hard-pressed Congress in 2012 tried to pass a law restricting sky-riding to vacations only, it was too late. The voting power of the Planiacs frightened the house majority, and thereafter the floaters—who had themselves received a big scare—were a political force to be reckoned with.

  The bitter feeling between the floaters and the grounders, already intense, grew sharper and deadlier with the passing years. Everyone took sides. Some who had been grounders bought floaters and joined the restless throngs in the sky. Others, vaguely recognizing the danger and moved by some kind of moral feeling, descended from the sky.

  Among the latter was an oldster named William Thompson, his grown-up son, Pinkey, and his daughter, Christina. Pinkey Thompson never married and so he was merely an environment, a ne'er-do-well anthropological "climate," an irritant on the slime of time. He existed, therefore he influenced those with whom he came in contact. Whatever he took into his cells before severing bodily connection with his mother manifested indirectly. Many years were to pass before psychologists proved that the tensions of men too could affect the child. But Pinkey had no child.

  When Christina Thompson, his sister, came out of the blue sky her grandmother, Marie Chanette, had been dead sixty-one years. The emotional ripples of her death had therefore already reached into another century. Her mother's tense body had precipitated Christina into life in the eighth month of her pregnancy. The seventh month would have been better. During the eighth month certain growths occur in a child which should not be disturbed.

  The process was disturbed in Christina. She was a quiet intense little girl, given to sudden, unexpected tears and when she was younger was a problem to her father and brother. She knew, in a casual fashion, about the way her grandmother had died.

  What she did not know was that the new psychology had already established that people could be affected by events in the remote past of the continuous protoplasm which had passed from mother through daughter since the first cell divided in two. Christina reluctantly attached herself to a job and, when she was twenty-eight, married the son of a former Planiac. The three children that arrived in quick succession were demoralized by the endless plans of their restless poverty-stricken parents to save so they could buy a floater, so that they could forever abandon the hardships of ground life. Two of the children dreamed with their parents but the second child, a girl, reacted violently against what she came to consider her parents' shiftless attitude. Their very talk made her uneasy and insecure.

  Her opinions being discovered she became unpopular until she learned to show false enthusiasm for the venture. She ran away when she was eighteen, on the eve of the first trip in the hard-earned floater.

  She had several jobs, then at twenty-one she became a clerk in a small air-transport company. Small! It barely paid a living wage to the father and son who owned it, hi addition to paying her salary. When she married Garry Lane, the son, at twenty-two, it looked like a very poor match, even to her desperate eyes. But it was a love match and, surprisingly, the business prospered.

  It was not exactly surprising—the son had a personality. When he made a contact it held. Business flew their way and soon they lived in a grand house. They had two children, Betty and Jack. And what saddened the parents was that both were highly disturbed individuals. Specially trained nurses were hired, but they did not help as much as the parents hoped.

  At twenty-four Betty Lane, having been advised that her instability was not rooted in her own childhood, was directed by her personal psychologist to go to the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustment. She went. An investigation was made and it was decided that the death of Marie Chanette was responsible.

  "—and that," said the voice from the air in front of Cargill, "explains why you are here in this therapy room. Tomorrow morning it will be necessary to kill you in order that the effects of Marie Chanette's violent death can be nullified. That is all."

  There was silence and it was evident that the speaker had withdrawn
.

  For an hour Cargill paced the room, his temper steadily gathering strength.-Incredibly the Shadows, despite their vaunted superiority, were going to be destroyed by the schemes of one of their number. It served them right, Cargill told himself in fury. Imagine setting up a situation whereby their victims couldn't even talk to them—the silly, stupid fools!

  In renewed rebellion against his fate, he again explored the apartment. First the living room and then— As he entered the bedroom, Ann Reece was just getting up from the floor. She saw him and put a finger to her lips. "Ssssshh!" she said.

  Cargill blinked at her with eyes that watered with relief. He could have rushed over and hugged her. He had to restrain himself from racing over to the elongated tube-like instrument which had brought her, grabbing at it and shouting, "Let's get out of here!" He restrained himself because it was up to her to show if she remembered a previous rescue.

  She said, "This time let's not waste a moment. It's bad enough having to come twice."

  This time—twice! That was all he wanted to know. Silently, sure of himself again, Cargill grabbed at the tube. He blinked—and it must have happened as quickly as that.

  He was standing on a dusty road and it was quite dark. A few feet from him Ann Reece was bent over, making adjustments to the long tube-like transport instrument She had evidently recovered more quickly than he.

  She looked up and said satirically, "Well, here we are, starting all over again, Mr. Cargill."

  Briefly her sarcastic tone blurred the implication of what she had said. And then he thought shakily that somewhere around here, just about this time of day and possibly on this very day, he had run off into the brush. At this very moment, about a mile from here, Lela and her father were settling down beside a lake, and in a few moments she would capture Morton Cargill number one. He had an impulse to escape again and watch that other Morton Cargill's capture. He shook his head, rejecting the desire. A man threatened as he was had no time for side excursions.