“He is a sick man, not one of your spies.”
“The men I interview are never my spies. I will decide if he is … sick.”
“That is a medical decision, not a military one. Have you read his journal? It is the product of a deluded mind.”
“If it is what it appears to be. It could also be the product of a clever mind. Madness as a cover for espionage? Kelly would not be the first spy with an outrageous cover.”
He walked past the doctor into the cell. Ochsenfuss followed him. Kelly looked up from his cot. He sat on the edge, hands clasped tightly, leaning on his knees. A night’s sleep had not refreshed him. He pointed at Knecht.
“I remember you,” he said. “You’re the guy that caught me.”
The Hexmajor forestalled Knecht’s reply. “Bitte, Herr Leutnant,” he said in Pennsylvaanish. “You must speak in our own tongue.”
“Warum?” Knecht answered, with a glance at Kelly. “The prisoner speaks English, nicht wahr?”
“Ah, but he must understand German, at least a little. Either our own dialect or the European. Look at him. He is not from the West, despite his Spanish forename. Their skin color is much darker. Nor is he from Columbia, Cumberland, or the Carolina Kingdom. Their accents are most distinctive. And no white man from Virginia on north could be ignorant of the national tongue of Pennsylvania.”
“Nor could any European,” finished Knecht. “Not since 1917, at any rate. I cannot fault your logic, Herr Doctor; but then, why…”
“Because for some reason he has suppressed his knowledge of German. He has retreated from reality, built himself fantasy worlds. If we communicate only in Pennsylvaanish as we are doing now, his own desire to communicate will eventually overcome his ‘block’ (as we call it); and the process of drawing him back to the real world will have begun.”
Knecht glanced again at the prisoner. “On the other hand, it is my duty to obtain information. If the prisoner will speak in English, then so will I.”
“But…”
“And I must be alone.” Knecht tapped his lapel insignia meaningfully. The double-X of the Scout Corps.
Ochsenfuss pursed his lips. Knecht thought he would argue further, but instead, he shrugged. “Have it your way, then; but remember to treat him carefully. If I am right, he could easily fall into complete withdrawal.” He nodded curtly to Knecht and left.
Knecht stared at the closed door. He disliked people who “communicated.” Nor did he think Vonderberge was a fool like Ochsenfuss had said. Still, he reminded himself, the Hexmajor had an impressive list of cures to his credit. Especially of battle fatigue and torture cases. Ochsenfuss was no fool, either.
He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. Let’s get this over with, he thought. But he knew it would not be that easy.
* * *
Within an hour Knecht knew why the others had quarreled. Kelly could describe his fantasy world and the branching timelines very convincingly. But he had convinced Vonderberge that he was telling the truth and Ochsenfuss that he was mad. The conclusions were incompatible; the mixture, explosive.
Kelly spoke freely in response to Knecht’s questions. He held nothing back. At least, the scout reminded himself, he appeared to hold nothing back. But who knew better than Knecht how deceptive such appearances could be?
Knecht tried all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. He came at the same question time after time, from different directions. He hop-scotched from question to question. He piled detail on detail. No lie could be perfectly consistent. Contradictions would soon reveal themselves. He was friendly. He was harsh. He put his own words in the prisoner’s mouth to see their effect.
None of it worked.
If Kelly’s answers were contradictory, Knecht could not say. When the entire story is fantasy, who can find the errors? It was of a piece with the nature of Kelly’s cover. If two facts contradict each other, which is true? Answer: both, but in two different worlds.
Frustrated, Knecht decided to let the prisoner simply talk. Silence, too, was an effective tactic. Many a prisoner had said too much simply to fill an awkward silence. He removed fresh cigars from his pocket humidor and offered one to the prisoner, who accepted it gratefully. Knecht clipped the ends and lit them. When they were both burning evenly, he leaned back in the chair. Nothing like a friendly smoke to set the mind at ease. And off-guard.
“So, tell me in your own words, then, how you on the Wyoming Trail were found.”
Kelly grunted. “I wouldn’t expect the military mind to understand, or even be interested.”
Knecht flushed, but he kept his temper under control. “But I am interested, Herr Kelly. You have a strange story to tell. You come from another world. It is not a story I have often encountered.”
Kelly looked at him, startled, and unexpectedly laughed. “No, not very often, I would imagine.”
“Ach, that is the very problem. Just what would you imagine? Your story is true, or it is false; and if it is false, it is either deliberately so or not. I must know which, so I can take the proper action.”
Kelly ran a hand through his hair. “Look. All I want is to get out of here, away from you … military men. Back to Rosa.”
“That does not tell me anything. Spy, traveler, or madman, you would say the same.”
The prisoner scowled. Knecht waited.
“All right,” said Kelly at last. “I got lost. It’s that simple. Sharon tried to tell me that a field trip was premature, but I was so much smarter then. Who would think that the distance from B to A was different than the distance from A to B?”
Who indeed? Knecht thought, but he kept the thought to himself. Another contradiction. Except, grant the premise and it wasn’t a contradiction at all.
“Sure,” the prisoner’s voice was bitter. “Action requires a force; and action causes reaction. It’s not nice to forget Uncle Isaac.” He looked Knecht square in the eye. “You see, when I Jumped, my world moved, too. Action, reaction. I created multiple versions of it. In one, my equipment worked. In others, it malfunctioned in various ways. Each was slightly displaced from the original location.” He laughed again. “How many people can say they’ve misplaced an entire world?”
“I don’t understand,” said Knecht. “Why not two versions of all worlds? When you, ah, Jumped, you could for many different destinations have gone; and in each one, you either arrived, or you did not.”
His prisoner looked puzzled. “But that’s not topologically relevant. The Jump occurs in the metacontinuum of the polyverse, so … Ah, hell! Why should I try to convince you?”
Knecht sat back and puffed his cigar. Offhand, he could think of several reasons why Kelly should try to convince him.
“You see,” the prisoner continued, “there is not an infinity of possible worlds.”
Knecht had never thought there was more than one, so he said nothing. Even the idea that there were two would be staggering.
“And they are not all different in the same way. Each moment grows out of the past. Oh, say…” He looked at his cigar and smiled. He held it out at arm’s length. “Take this cigar, for instance. If I drop it, it’ll fall to the floor. That is deterministic. So are the rate, the falling time, and the energy of impact. But, I may or may not choose to drop it. That is probabilistic. It is the choice that creates worlds. We are now at a cusp, a bifurcation point on the Thom manifold.” He paused and looked at the cigar. Knecht waited patiently. Then Kelly clamped it firmly between his teeth. “It is far too good a smoke to waste. I chose not to drop it; but there was a small probability that I would have.”
Knecht pulled on his moustache, thinking of Vonderberge’s speculations of the previous night. Before he had spoken with Kelly. “So you say that … somewhere … there is a world in which you did?”
“Right. It’s a small world, because the probability was small. Temporal cross-section is proportional to a priori probability. But it’s there, close by. It’s a convergent world.”
“C
onvergent.”
“Yes. Except for our two memories and some ash on the floor, it is indistinguishable from this world. The differences damp out. Convergent worlds form a ‘rope’ of intertwined timelines. We can Jump back and forth among them easily, inadvertently. The energy needed is low. We could change places with our alternate selves and never notice. The only difference may be the number of grains of sand on Mars. Tomorrow you may find that I remember dropping the cigar; or I might find that you do. We may even argue the point.”
“Unconvincingly,” said Knecht sardonically.
Kelly chuckled. “True. How could you know what I remember? Still, it happens all the time. The courts are full of people who sincerely remember different versions of reality.”
“Or perhaps it is the mind that plays tricks, not the reality.”
Kelly flushed and looked away. “That happens, too.”
After a moment, Knecht asked, “What has this to do with your becoming lost?”
“What? Oh. Simple, really. The number of possible worlds is large, but it’s not infinite. That’s important to remember,” he continued to himself. “Finite. I haven’t checked into Hotel Infinity. I can still find my own room, or at least the right floor.” He stood abruptly and paced the room. Knecht followed him with his eyes.
“I don’t have to worry about worlds where Washington and Jefferson instituted a pharaonic monarchy with a divine god-king. Every moment grows out of the previous moment, remember? For that to happen, so much previous history would have had to be different that Washington and Jefferson would never have been born.” He stopped pacing and faced Knecht.
“And I don’t have to worry about convergent worlds. If I find the right ‘rope,’ I’ll be all right. Even a parallel world would be fine, as long as it would have Rosa in it.” He frowned. “But it mightn’t. And if it did, she mightn’t know me.”
“Parallel?” asked Knecht.
Kelly walked to the window and gazed through the bars. “Sure. Change can be convergent, parallel, or divergent. Suppose, oh suppose Isabella hadn’t funded Columbus, but the other Genoese, Giovanni Caboto, who was also pushing for a voyage west. Or Juan de la Cosa. Or the two brothers who captained the Niña and the Pinta. There was no shortage of bold navigators. What practical difference would it have made? A few names are changed in the history books, is all. The script is the same, but different actors play the parts. The differences stay constant.”
He turned around. “You or I may have no counterpart in those worlds. They are different ‘ropes.’ Even so, we could spontaneously Jump to one nearby. Benjamin Bathurst, the man who walked behind a horse in plain sight and was never seen again. No one took his place. Judge Crater. Ambrose Bierce. Amelia Earhart. Jimmy Hoffa. The Legion II Augusta. Who knows? Some of them may have Jumped.”
Kelly inspected his cigar. “Then there are the cascades. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. The differences accumulate. The worlds diverge. That was my mistake. Jumping to a cascade world.” His voice was bitter, self-mocking. “Oh, it’ll be simple to find my way back. All I have to do is find the nail.”
“The nail?”
“Sure. The snowflake that started the avalanche. What could be simpler?” He took three quick steps along the wall, turned, stepped back, and jammed his cigar out in the ashtray. He sat backward, landing on his cot. He put his face in his hands.
Knecht listened to his harsh breathing. He remembered what Ochsenfuss had said. If I push him too hard, he could crack. A spy cracks one way; a madman, another.
After a while, Kelly looked up again. He smiled. “It’s not that hard, really,” he said more calmly. “I can approximate it closely enough with history texts and logical calculus. That should be good enough to get me back to my own rope. Or at least a nearby one. As long as Rosa is there, it doesn’t matter.” He hesitated and glanced at Knecht. “You’ve confiscated my personal effects,” he said, “but I would like to have her photograph. It was in my wallet. Along with my identification papers,” he added pointedly.
Knecht smiled. “I have seen your papers, Herr ‘Professor Doctor’ Kelly. They are very good.”
“But…”
“But I have drawn others myself just as good.”
Kelly shrugged and grinned. “It was worth a try,” he said.
Knecht chuckled. He was beginning to like this man. “I suppose it can do no harm,” he said, thinking out loud, “to give you a history text. Surely there gives one here in the fortress. If nothing else, it can keep you amused during the long days. And perhaps it can reacquaint you with reality.”
“That’s what the shrink said before.”
“The shrink? What…? Oh, I see. The Hexmajor.” He laughed. Then he remembered how Ochsenfuss and Vonderberge had quarreled over this man and he looked at him more soberly. “You understand that you must here stay. Until we know who or what you are. There are three possibilities and only one is to your benefit.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “It gives some here who your story believe, and some not.”
Kelly nodded. “I know. Do you believe me?”
“Me? I am a scout. I look. I listen. I try to fit pieces together so they make a picture. I take no direct action. No, Herr Kelly. I do not believe you; but neither do I disbelieve you.”
Kelly nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Do not thank me yet, Herr Kelly. In our first five minutes of talking it is clear to me you know nothing of value of the Wyoming, or the Nations, or anything. In such a case, my official interest in you comes to an end.”
“But unofficially…” prompted the other.
“Ja.” Knecht rose and walked to the door. “Others begin to have strong opinions about you, for whatever reasons of their own I do not know. Such are the seeds, and I do not like what may sprout. Perhaps this…” He jabbed his cigar at Kelly, suddenly accusing. “You know more than you show. You play-act the hinkle-dreck Quatschkopf. And this, the sowing of discord, may be the very reason for your coming.”
He stepped back and considered the prisoner. He gestured broadly, his cigar leaving curlicues of smoke. “I see grave philosophical problems with you, Herr Kelly. We Germans, even we Pennsylvaanish Germans, are a very philosophical people. From what you say there are many worlds, some only trivially different. I do not know why we with infinitely many Kellys are not deluged, each coming from a world almost like your own!”
Kelly gasped in surprise. He stood abruptly and turned to the wall, his back to Knecht. “Of course,” he said. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! The transformation isn’t homeomorphic. The topology of the inverse sheaf must not be Hausdorff after all. It may only be a Harris proximity.” He turned to Knecht. “Please, may I have my calculator, the small box with the numbered buttons … No, damn!” He smacked a fist into his left hand. “I ran the batteries down when I was with Goodman deVeres. Some pencils and paper, then?” He looked eager and excited.
Knecht grunted in satisfaction. Something he had said had set Kelly thinking. It remained to be seen along which lines those thoughts would run.
* * *
Rumors flew over the next few days. A small border fort is their natural breeding ground, and Fox Gap was no exception. Knecht heard through the grapevine that Vonderberge had had the Hexmajor barred from Kelly’s cell; that Ochsenfuss had telegraphed his superiors in Medical Corps and had Vonderberge overruled. Now there was talk that General Schneider himself had entered the dispute, on which side no one knew; but the General had already postponed his scheduled departure for Wind Gap Fortress and a packet bearing his seal had gone by special courier to Oberkommando Pennsylvaanish in Philadelphia City. A serious matter if the General did not trust the security of the military telegraph.
The General himself was not talking, not even to Knecht. That saddened the scout more than he had realized it could. Since his talk with the prisoner, Knecht had thought more than once how slender was the chain of chance that had brought Schneider and himself together, the team of scout and strategist th
at had shepherded the Commonwealth through two major wars and countless border skirmishes.
He had dined with the General shortly after submitting his report on Kelly. Dinner was a hearty fare of shnitz un’ knepp, with deutch-baked corn, followed by shoofly pie. Afterward, cigars and brandy wine. Talk had turned, as it often did, to the Piney War. Schneider had deprecated his own role.
“What could I do, Rudi?” he asked. “A stray cannon shot and both Kutz and Rittenhouse were dead. I felt the ball go by me, felt the wind on my face. A foot the other way would have deprived this very brandy of being so thoroughly enjoyed today. Suddenly, I was Commander of the Army of the Delaware, with my forces scattered among the Wachtungs. Rittenhouse had always been the tight-lipped sort. I had no idea what his plans had been. So I studied his dispositions and our intelligence on Enemy’s dispositions, and…” A shrug. “I improvised.”
Knecht lifted his glass in salute. “Brilliantly, as always.”
Schneider grinned through his bushy white muttonchop whiskers. “We mustn’t forget who secured that intelligence for me. Brilliance cannot improvise on faulty data. You have never failed me.”
Knecht flushed. “Once I did.”
“Tcha!” The General waved his hand in dismissal. “The nine hundred ninety-nine other times make me forget the once. Only you constantly remember.”
Knecht remembered how once he had misplaced an entire regiment of Virginia Foot. It was not where he had left it, but somewhere else entirely. General Schneider, except that he had been Brigadier Schneider, had salvaged the situation and had protected him from Alois Kutz’s anger. He had learned something about Konrad Schneider then: The General never let the short-term interfere with the long-term. He would not sacrifice the future on the whim of the moment. It had been such a simple error. He had improperly identified the terrain. The Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia looked much the same from ridge to ridge.
Or was it so simple? He recalled his discussion with the prisoner, Kelly. Ich biete Ihre Entschuldigung, Herr Brigadier, he imagined himself saying, but I must have slipped over into a parallel universe. In my timeline, the Rappahannock Guards were on the north side of the river, not the south.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection Page 63
