Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  “Then we’ll find a place to sit down,” he suggested.

  Presently, inconspicuously, he wiped sweat off his forehead. The ship would be about halfway on its journey. If it made a signal, and if the signal could reach so far, it would reach the two nearest planets some three years from now, when the Corianis was forgotten. There were other resources, but they depended on the ship being missed right away. That wasn’t likely.

  So he talked to the girl. Her name was Kathy Sanders. She was secretary to an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce.

  When they separated, he thought of something.

  “Now, why the hell didn’t I remember that a passenger ship has to have a spare overdrive unit?” he demanded of himself. “How silly can I get? Everything’s all right. It must be!”

  But it wasn’t.

  V

  The Corianis lay dead in space. Dark objects floated about her; they were lumps, bits, masses, mountain-sized things which millions of years before had been part of a planet.

  There’d been only the skipper and the first officer and a quartermaster in the control-room when the disaster happened. Utterly without warning of any sort, the overdrive unit bucked and roaring arcs leaped and crackled; the overdrive unit turned to scrap metal in less than seconds. The brownish, featureless haze outside the unshuttered ports vanished. There were myriads of stars—and objects. Something the size of a mountain-range turned slowly, off to one side of the ship. Innumerable other floating things hung suspended on every hand.

  Save for the arcs—and they were momentary—there was no sound. There was a jar from the bucking of the Unit before it slumped into melted metal, but there was no flash of flame—no explosion of any sort. Yet the ship which had moved at the rate of three-quarters of a trillion miles per hour was still, and the first officer gaped stupidly out the ports, and the quartermaster began to shake visibly where he stood.

  This was while the Corianis lay dead in space. But the skipper sprang across the control-room. He flipped on the ship’s radars and swung the control which would warm up the planetary drive, normally used only for lifting from a space-port and for landing. The radars began to register. The Corianis was within miles of a floating rock-and-metal continent which existed in emptiness. She was within tens of miles of hundreds of bits of cosmic junk, ranging from the size of sand-grains to that of houses. Within hundreds of miles, there were thousands of floating dangers.

  The “ready” light for planetary drive glowed green. The skipper jerked the lever to minimum power; the ship gathered way. He steered her clear of the nearest dangers. Below, the engine-room crew matter-of-factly cut away the wrecked drive-unit and began to braze the spare to functioning connection.

  Time passed. The skipper, sweating, navigated the Corianis among the leisurely, rolling, gigantic things which could crush the ship’s hull like an eggshell. It took him hours to get to where he dared use more than a quarter-gravity drive. It was more hours before he dared use half-gravity. Many hours passed before the radars promised safety if he went again into overdrive.

  When the brown haze settled before the control-room ports once more, the skipper was jumpy; the ship would be at least ten hours late to Maninea. The skipper let his third officer make the announcement over the public-address system. He couldn’t do it himself; his throat clicked spasmodically shut when he tried to talk.

  The Corianis should have been destroyed! She should have gone out of existence in a monstrous gout of flame; by this instant she should be no more than a cloud of vapor-fine particles, floating in emptiness. She had hit an enormous mass of planetary wreckage while speeding faster than light; she had hit a solid object she could not skip beyond. She had burned out her overdrive in what could only have been a collision! But it was not conceivable that the ship would remain as she was, solid and unstrained, after-a collision with a continent of metal out between the stars.

  The skipper knew he couldn’t be alive. He had a strange, numb conviction that he was a ghost, and the ship and all on board her with him. Despite this belief, however, he was cautious in his approach to Maninea. Ordinarily he’d have come out of overdrive for a corrective sight something over a minute short of estimated time of arrival; a thousand thousand million miles is leeway enough for anybody. But the skipper cut overdrive three hours short of arrival, and an hour, and twice more before he went on interplanetary drive again and called down hoarsely for permission to land. The Corianis was more than thirteen hours late.

  Even so, she didn’t land immediately. Instead of getting clearance in forty-five seconds, it required more than an hour to get permission to descend. There was confusion aground; there was argument; there was acute apprehension and flat disbelief and the deepest of deep suspicion. When the Corianis did settle on the spaceport tarmac, there was hysteria.

  Because the Corianis—at least a Corianis—was already aground. She had landed on Maninea just forty-seven hours thirteen minutes after lifting off from Kholar. She had brought home the Planetary President of Maninea, the Speaker of the Senate of Maninea, and various persons dependent upon them. She had also brought the Minister of State for Kholar, the Minister of Commerce, the Chairman of the Lower House Committee on Extra-Planetary affairs, and a mass of aides, assistants, secretaries, wives, children, and servants. The ship itself was still aground at the spaceport.

  When the Corianis landed—the Corianis-with-a-burned-out-drive-unit—she settled down beside herself. There were two Corianis. There were two Planetary Presidents of Maninea. There were also two Speakers of the Senate, two Ministers of State for Kholar, two Ministers of Commerce, two Chairmen of the Lower House Committee, and two of very nearly everybody else who’d sailed from Kholar. And the twos, the twins, the sets, the pairs of individuals, were not merely as much alike as two peas are like each other. They were as much alike as a pea is to itself. They were exactly alike.

  It was quite impossible. It was utterly impossible.

  But it was even more embarrassing.

  VI

  Barely a day after the departure of the Corianis from Kholar, a hastily-chartered mail-ship lifted off to carry corrected instructions to the emissaries negotiating a trade-treaty on Maninea. This other ship went out some twenty thousand miles from the planet Kholar, winked into overdrive, stayed in overdrive with its position relative to Kholar changing at the rate of seven hundred fifty thousand million miles per hour, and arrived at the Maninean solar system on schedule and without incident. But the Corianis had not arrived before her. The Corianis was overdue. There had been a disaster; the Corianis was missing.

  The shipping-service force on Maninea tore its collective hair. There was a ship aground, taking off for Ghalt. It carried away with it a plea from the shipping service for ships to help hunt for the missing Corianis. The mail-ship sped back to Kholar; it carried a plea for aid in the urgently necessary search. Meanwhile, Maninea would take all possible measures. Kholar would do the same.

  The main reason for hope, about the Corianis, was that she carried on board the very latest distress-signal system for ships of her size and class. She carried a rocket which could drive some thousands of miles away from a disabled ship, and then detonate a fission-type atomic bomb. The rocket was of iron, which would be volatized by the explosion. It would be spread as a cloud of iron particles in space. In less than a week the infinitesimally thin cloud should spread to a million miles. In a month it would be a sizeable patch of vapor. It would be thinner than an ordinary hard vacuum, but it could be detected. In six months it would still be detectable, and it would cover an almost certainly observable area of a spectrotelescope’s field between Kholar and Maninea.

  The point was that there are no iron-atom clouds in space. Should one appear it would have to be artificial and hence a distress-signal. In the case of the Corianis, her course was known; one could know along what line to look for an appeal for aid.

  So, immediately, the shipping-service force on Maninea sent up a space lifeboat with a
spectrotelescope on board. It would look for an iron cloud in space along the line to Kholar. The evidence for such a cloud would be the fact that it absorbed iron-spectrum frequencies from the starlight passing through it.

  If the Corianis set off her signal-bomb a mere one hundred sixteen thousand thousand million miles from Maninea, the cloud could be detected within a week. If it were set off farther away, its detection would be delayed. But ships to search had been asked for; when they came, they’d follow the Corianis‘ course back toward Kholar, stopping to look for iron-clouds every few light-days along the way. They’d pick up an artificial cloud of iron vapor long before light passing through it could get to either planet.

  So the shipping-service forces hoped. The job of finding one spaceship on a sight-light-year course, with possible errors in all three dimensions—it wasn’t an easy one. But if the shipping service did find the Corianis, it could feel proud.

  But it didn’t. It only found out where the Corianis had vanished.

  VII

  The Corianis’ loudspeaker system bellowed, demanding attention. An agitated voice tried to explain to the passengers why they must remain on board for the time being. There was now in port—in fact right next to the Corianis—another ship of the same name and same design and same interior and exterior fitting. That other ship had brought passengers to Maninea who had claimed to be, and been believed to be, the persons the Corianis brought. Somebody who claimed to be the Planetary President had been on that other ship. Naturally, there was concern when a second claimant to that identity and office appeared. There’d been a Minister of State from Kholar on the other vessel. And a Speaker of the Senate, and a Chairman of a Lower House Committee and—in short—persons claiming to be nearly everybody down to the smallest child on board the ship.

  The passengers on the Corianis erupted in indignation. Everybody knew who he was! It was ridiculous to ask him to stay on board while the identification of the other person claiming to be him was investigated! That other person was an impostor! He was a scoundrel! Clap him in jail and…

  Jack Bedell was possibly the only person on board the Corianis who really tried to make sense of the agitated words from the public-address system. The others seethed and growled and roared their resentment; he listened.

  His expression changed from astonishment to incredulity, and then much later to a very great thoughtfulness. Kathy watched his face as bewilderment and uneasiness increased in her.

  “It’s official!” he said presently, almost in awe. “And no politician would dare try to make anybody believe such a thing! It’s panic—pure, unimaginative panic that makes them admit it!”

  Kathy swallowed. “I can—imagine one person impersonating somebody else,” she said uneasily. “But a lot of people—a shipload! And—the President of the planet? How could anybody impersonate him? Too many people know him too well!—Couldn’t they be crazy to suspect us of being impostors?”

  Bedell shook his head. “Delusions have a sort of cockeyed logic to them,” he told her. “Nothing is as crazy as facts. I believe this. Reality can always outguess imagination!”

  She stared at him.

  “I’ve forgotten the figures,” he added, “but the odds are billions to one against any person having the same fingerprints as any other member of the human race since time began. Of course, two in a generation is unthinkable. And here we’ve got scores of identical-fingerprint pairs of people turning up. The odds against it—oh, nobody will believe it!”

  “But it can’t be true, can it?” asked Kathy. She felt more comfortable, talking to Bedell, than she’d ever felt with anybody else. She hoped he felt the same way.

  “Oh, it’s probably true,” said Bedell. “It’s just impossible. That’s always upsetting…Let’s get some lunch and think about it.”

  They moved past corridors full of people who had been prepared to leave the ship and now were forbidden to do so. They were infuriated; they were insulted.

  “Leaving aside the impossibility of the thing,” observed Bedell as he and Kathy seated themselves in one of the ship’s dining salons, “there are some other angles. There are two Planetary Presidents. Which is which? There are two Ministers of State for Kholar. The duplication runs all down the line. I wonder if there’s another me on board that other ship. I’d guess that the odds are less than for most people. And I wonder if there’s another you.”

  Kathy started. She turned pale. “Nobody’d have reason to impersonate me!” she protested. But she was frightened. “Anyhow that—that couldn’t be!”

  Jack Bedell shrugged, but he smiled at her, reassuringly. They saw a waiter, but no one came to serve them. Presently other passengers came into the dining-room, talking indignantly of the affront of suspecting them of being fakes.

  Strangers in uniform moved past the doorway of the dining-saloon. A pompous figure, the Minister of State, stood splendidly in their way. He addressed them as if they were voters, his voice rolling and sonorous and angry. He oratorically protested the outrage of doubting his identity. It would be resented! There would be retaliation! An apology was in order, and an immediate withdrawal of the order forbidding him to land…

  The strangers walked around him and moved on. A bewildered man in ship’s uniform led the way.

  “They’re going to the purser’s office,” said Bedell, nodding his head. “They’ll take the passenger-list to compare with the other Corianis‘ list of people on board. Of course the local problem is that their president exists in two copies. That will upset the whole planetary government.”

  “You—seem to know what’s going on,” said Kathy, uneasily.

  “I don’t,” Bedell told her. “But there’s such a thing as a universe of discourse—an acceptance of the preposterous so you can arrive at sense. If it’s true that there are doubles of almost everybody, alike even to fingerprints—why—such-and-such other things must be true, also. But not even in a universe of discourse would absolutely everybody on both ships be absolutely alike! There’d have to be some exceptions…How long have you been the secretary of somebody who would naturally want you on this trade-treaty trip?”

  She licked her lips. She was scared; the idea of another, independent version of herself, knowing everything she knew, capable of anything she could do, but not under her control…

  “I’ve had my job three months,” she said. “Before that…”

  “The chances are good that you’re unique,” said Bedell, “if the universe of discourse I’m thinking of is valid.”

  The men in strange uniforms went back past the dining salon door. They were followed by the Speaker of the Senate of Maninea. He expostulated furiously. The men in the strange uniforms looked hunted and upset. They still had the ship’s purser with them.

  “I think,” said Bedell, “that this is going to go pretty far. How’d you like to look out a port at this lunatic world which says we can’t be ourselves because somebody else is us?”

  He led the way down two levels to where nobody crowded the corridors. It was quite silent, here. Someone had turned off the thread-thin whisper of music which prevented ghastly silence on the ship while in flight. They went to the end of a corridor. Bedell cranked open the shutters of a port and they looked out.

  They were in the Corianis, but the Corianis rested solidly aground two hundred yards away. The other ship was gigantic; it was solid. It was an absolutely perfect duplicate of the Corianis from which they looked. It was not the kind of object one could imagine as partaking of the impossible or the unreal. There was nothing ghostly about it; it was defiantly an actual thing.

  Bedell looked down at the spaceport’s surface.

  “There,” he observed with careful calmness, “there’s the purser—from this ship. And there’s the other of him, over there. There are two of him, just as the loudspeakers said.”

  The men in strange uniforms had reached the spaceport tarmac with the Corianis‘ purser in their midst. They now met another group of unifo
rmed men with the Corianis‘ purser in their midst. The port from which Bedell and Kathy looked down was a good fifty feet high, but they could see perfectly. The purser just emerged from the ship was identical to the man already on the spaceport ground. They were identical in height and weight and the fit of their uniforms. That was conceivable. But they moved alike; they made the same gestures. It was insanely like seeing mirror-images making independent motions. One felt the same shocked incredulity.

  Kathy pointed a shaking finger. “There’s Mr. Brunn! My boss! But he’s here on the ship! If—if there’s—if I’m down there too…”

  She searched for her own self among the figures down below, shaking with terror lest she might succeed.

  A ground-car rolled out past the spaceport buildings and came to a halt below. Bedell recognized the man who stepped out; he was the Planetary President. With him was the Kholarian Minister of State. Both of them happened—as Bedell knew very well—also to be on board the Corianis which had recently landed.