Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  “Now I wonder,” said Bedell meditatively, “if the President who got here first is going to try to face down the President who got here second! And if the Minister of State of Kholar is going to denounce his other self, who’s foaming at the mouth at this instant on board this ship!”

  Another ground-car arrived and disgorged dignified persons. The intention was clear; the head of the Maninean planetary government found himself accused of imposture. Somebody else claimed to be him. Lesser officials who had seen the claimant were uncertain and unsure. But the President knew who he was! With enormous dignity he came to confound the impostor who could bewilder his subordinates. Face-to-face, he was sure, there could be no doubt of who was who!

  But Jack Bedell, staring from overhead, saw the confusion and then the terrific and undignified row which followed the discovery that it was hopeless—not only to know who was who, but which was which. Other ground-cars arrived, and the two identical Planetary Presidents of Maninea faced each other. They were backed by equally identical Ministers of State of Kholar, two identical Speakers of the Maninean Senate, two Chairmen of the Lower House Committee, and so on down to the utterly identical nurses—identical to fingerprints and eye-patterns—who tended the utterly identical children of identical assistant undersecretaries, and even to the identical undersecretaries’ identical wives. And even the wives were identical to the very number and location of gray hairs in their heads caused by identical griefs caused by their identical husbands! Naturally, there was tumult.

  It was a beautiful row, a stupendous one, and it settled nothing whatever. The governmental process of an entire planet clanked to a halt pending the solution of the problem posed by the Corianis‘ tardy or over-hasty arrival. The government of another planet would be thrown into confusion as soon as this news reached it.

  “I think,” said Bedell, gazing down, “I think they’re going to have to try something else. They’ll never be able to settle the matter on objective evidence. They’ve just tried to act on the theory that two people can’t be exactly alike—but it appears that they can be, and are. Now they’ll try to find some people who aren’t identical and study them to find out why not. I suspect that we may be called on, Kathy.”

  Kathy’s teeth chattered.

  “I—didn’t see myself down there,” she said shakily. “I—I don’t want to! I’d—I think I’d hate her.”

  Bedell looked surprised. Then his expression changed.

  “Yes. I suppose one would. Hmmm…Simple, natural instincts like that will probably have a good deal to do with settling this business.”

  As they turned away from the port, loudspeakers clicked and everywhere over the ship the same voice was heard in innumerable echoings of the same words: “Will the following passengers please go to the exit-port? Will the following passengers please go to the exit-port?” There followed four names. One was Bedell’s. One was Kathy’s. Neither of them recognized the other two.

  “This is good,” said Bedell. “They hope to learn something from us because we came on the Corianis and we are nevertheless like everybody else on every other planet in the galaxy. We’re peculiar. We are ourselves alone. We can feel proud.”

  Presently, in one of the spaceport offices a harried Maninean official looked at them with great though precarious self-control.

  “Look here!” he said uneasily. “On both ships together there are just seven people who don’t match up to the last pimple with somebody else. You’re two of the seven. Can you explain why you aren’t part of the business that is driving everybody crazy?”

  Bedell found himself hesitating. Then he cursed himself for self-consciousness. He said, “I got on the Corianis at the last minute—by accident. I wasn’t really supposed to be on the ship. I imagine you’d say my presence is accidental. That might explain it.”

  The official said drearily, “The ship record says you’re a mathematical physicist. Is there anybody on Maninea who might know you personally?”

  “I think so,” said Bedell. “There was a convention of astrophysicists on Hume, some years ago. I read a paper there. Some men from your astrophysical institute here will probably remember me.”

  “We’ll check that,” said the official. He seemed to brood. “This is the devil of a mess! The planetary vice-president has issued an executive order, keeping authority in his own hands until it’s decided who is the real president. Both—both men who seem to be President have agreed to it, though both of them are raging. The two Ministers of State from Kholar have agreed to hold up official conferences until things are straightened out. And we’re sending a ship to Kholar with a report and records and memos from everybody on both ships, to see if they can solve it on Kholar. You aren’t anybody’s double. But do you want to send any message? Nobody claims to be you—or her.”

  Bedell frowned. “I think,” he said thoughtfully, “that there’ll be somebody back on Kholar who’ll claim to be me. He’ll be registered at the Grampion Hotel in Kholar City. He’ll be waiting for a ship that will be coming here. He missed the Corianis. I’d like to write him a note.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said the Maninean official sardonically, “you wouldn’t let sleeping doubles lie?”

  “No,” said Bedell. “I know him rather well. If he isn’t there, it will be informative. If he answers, it will be more helpful still. And I think I can promise that he’ll stay on Kholar. He won’t come here. I wouldn’t. I don’t think he will.”

  “It’s nice that somebody believes he can arrange something helpful!” said the official bitterly. “I don’t see a chance! Do you realize that every pair of doubles we’ve tested so far has had the same blood type and same RH factor and same immunity-antibodies in his blood at the same intensities? And they also have the same fingerprints and same teeth and same height and weight and metabolic readings? I’m getting so I talk to myself! If this keeps up I’ll start answering back!”

  “It could be worse,” said Bedell, after consideration. “I don’t think it likely, but there could be a third Corianis.”

  “Don’t say it!” snapped the Maninean vehemently. “Don’t say any more! I was relaxing, talking to a man from the Corianis that there’s only one of! It felt good! Don’t say any more!”

  He turned to Kathy. “Young lady,” he said. “I’d like you to talk to another girl from the other Corianis. She doesn’t claim to be you, but she does claim to have the job of secretary to the same man. Will you see what you can find out about each other?”

  “N-naturally,” said Kathy.

  The official pressed a button and said, “Ask her to come in, will you?”

  He slumped back in his chair. Within seconds, a girl came in. She was nervous; she was jumpy. She looked relieved to see, in Kathy, somebody who didn’t look in the least like herself.

  “Miss Kossuth,” said the official, “this is Miss Sanders. It seems that you’ve got something but not too much in common.”

  “Y-yes,” said the girl from the first-arrived Corianis. “I’m Mr. Brunn’s secretary. He’s Assistant Undersecretary of Commerce.”

  “I’m Mr. Brunn’s secretary, too,” said Kathy. She moistened her lips. “Is his wife’s name Amelie, and does he have three children—two boys and a girl?”

  The girl from the first-arrived Corianis said uneasily, “Yes. This is crazy! Is your Mr. Brunn rather fat, and does he fiddle with his ear when he’s dictating?”

  “Yes!” said Kathy. She looked appalled. “Does your Mr. Brunn have a picture of a baseball team on his desk?”

  “Yes!” said the other girl. “Alton High School. He played second base.”

  “So did my Mr. Brunn,” said Kathy. Then she added, “I—I’ve seen you before. I—know you. I’m sure of it!” The first-arrived girl said helplessly, “I don’t remember you. But at least we aren’t doubles!”

  Kathy swallowed. “But I remember you. You had the job I’ve got. You’d resigned to get married, three months ago, and you showed me about the work I
was to do. You were going to marry a boy named Al Loomis. You said he was a draftsman.”

  The first girl went ashen-white. “I m-married him? I—I…But I didn’t! W-we had a quarrel and—broke up!…How did you know? I never saw you before! I never told you…How do you know all about my private affairs? How…

  The other girl from the other Corianis began to cry. She ran out of the room.

  There was silence. Kathy turned unhappily to Bedell. He said encouragingly, “That was fine, Kathy! It clears up several points. You did splendidly!”

  The official stirred. He said without hope, “I’m glad somebody’s pleased! If you’ve got a theory, don’t tell me. Get it worked out and we’ll have the Astrophysical Institute boys look you over and then we’ll have whoever should pass on what you think pass on it. I don’t want to understand this business, because I don’t want to believe it! But there’s nobody claiming to be you, so far, so you can leave the Corianis if you choose to.”

  “No,” said Bedell. “I think I’d better stay on the ship. This state of things should be unstable. I want to do some calculating from some books I have with me…But I would like to talk to the Astrophysics people.”

  “You sound like you think you know what’s happened,” the official said. “It’s all right with me if you stay aboard your ship. We’re trying to keep the two sets of people apart, anyhow. Do you know what happens when duplicates see each other?”

  “I can guess,” said Bedell, “but I’d rather not. Come along, Kathy. Let’s get back to the ship.”

  VIII

  The Corianis had vanished between Kholar and Maninea. After the fact was discovered, it took a mere few hours to get a space lifeboat out of atmosphere with a spectrotelescope on board to watch for the iron-atom cloud in emptiness which would be a plea for aid, and only two days and a few hours were needed to get the news back to Kholar. On the way back, the mail-ship which took the news may have passed within light-hours of the spot where the Corianis had collided with a celestial scrap-heap. But it was not equipped for search.

  By the time the Corianis was four days overdue, a trampship took off from Maninea; it also was equipped with a spectrotelescope. It began, methodically, to make short hops in overdrive along the line the Corianis should have followed. Each time it came out of overdrive it made a search. It searched from three light-days from Maninea and six, and twelve, and so on. It did not really expect to pick up a distress-signal so early. An iron-atom cloud would be relatively small so soon after its presumed formation. But it would enlarge, and the fact that it would also thin out didn’t matter.

  That first hunting ship from Maninea reached Kholar. No news. It was joined by another ship which had come into port. The two ships spaced themselves some light-minutes apart and headed back for Maninea; they reached it without any discovery. Two other ships had arrived from other worlds in response to the shipping service’s request. Four ships headed back for Kholar.

  Empty space is dark. The firmament glitters with innumerable stars, of all the colors that light can be; but the total light is faint, and where there is no sun it is very, very lonely. Each of the ships making multi-billion-mile casts through emptiness seemed utterly solitary. A ship came out of overdrive to unstressed space. It located the sun Kholar. It focussed a spectrotelescope upon a five-degree square area of space with Kholar at its center. It turned on the scope. Only stars with strong absorption-lines in their spectra would appear in the scope-field. They were examined separately. If or when one of them showed the lines slightly widened, it would indicate that iron existed between the star and the ship. Then there must be a cloud of iron particles in space—a signal of distress.

  A little more than halfway across, a ship from Ghalt—the last ship to join in the search—found the telltale widening of iron-spectrum lines in the light of Kholar itself. It aimed for the cloud and jumped for it. It overleaped. It went back. It found the cloud—and danger-signals clanged inside it. The iron-atom cloud was then two and a half million miles in diameter. The ship sought its center; it found debris floating in space. It measured the iron-vapor cloud and computed its mass. There was too much vaporized metal to have come from a signal-rocket’s substance; there was not enough to say that the Corianis itself had broken down to atoms.

  The ship began to examine all the debris its radars picked up. It found some rocky and many metallic masses; some were the size of houses. There was a dense cloud of still larger metal lumps. Its parts were in motion, as if it had only recently been jolted by something enormous.

  The first ship was joined by a second, which also had found the iron-cloud. Later a third ship drove up and joined the search.

  They did not find the Corianis. They did find a mountain-sized mass of metal, on one of whose flanks there was a circular, hollow, glistening scar, as if some incredible blast of heat had burned or boiled away the metal there. Rough estimate suggested that the amount of metal boiled away at this spot might account for the metal-cloud.

  It did. An analysis of the cloud’s substance disclosed nickel in considerable quantity with the iron. A measurement of the cloud’s expansion gave the time of its beginning to expand—its creation.

  The iron-cloud did not come from the Corianis‘ hull or signal-rocket. It was not iron alone; it was a nickel-iron cloud. It was metal vaporized from a mass of metallic debris. It had been vaporized at the time the Corianis had passed through this part of emptiness. Here, then, was where the Corianis had vanished.

  But there was no trace of the ship itself, though one or another of the three ships examined every particle of solid stuff within thousands of miles.

  The search-ships, though, had done a remarkable job; they’d located the scene of a disaster in space. The ship involved could not be found—but to pinpoint even the place where a ship had been wrecked was more than had ever been accomplished before.

  IX

  The confusion on Maninea already made for jumpiness. When a mail-ship came in from Kholar and called down for landing-permission, panic began. But this was not a third Corianis; it was an ordinary small mail-ship. It brought new and confidential instructions for the diplomatic party from Kholar.

  The skipper of the mail-ship landed. He saw the Corianis, then he saw her duplicate. He did not believe his eyes. He had diplomatic mail for the Minister of State for Kholar. Shaking his head, he asked questions. He learned that there were two Ministers of State for Kholar hereabouts. He did not know to which he should deliver the diplomatic pouch. He tried to find out from lesser officials—from Kholar. There were two Ministers of Commerce. There were two Chairman of the Lower House Committee on Extra-Planetary Affairs. There were two of everybody that had left Kholar. Everybody…

  He learned of the gibbering mix-up that defied all possibility and all reason. He saw the armed guards placed to keep the two ships isolated from each other. He heard of the freak discovery of a criminal in the Corianis‘ crew. In the ordinary course of events this man—an oiler—would never have been detected; he had only to stay aboard ship and nobody would pay any attention to him. But everybody on both Corianis had been fingerprinted. This murderer was identified by his fingerprints; the police wanted him badly.

  But they didn’t want two of them—which they had. He was taken from both ships and put in jail. The cells to which the two copies of one man were assigned happened to face each other. When a lawyer was appointed, he verified certain crucial items, and the crewmen in their cells howled with laughter.

  Two men, obviously, could not be punished for a crime that only one had committed. So far as any conceivable test could determine, these two men were identical; they were the same man. But they could not both be punished; they could not even be kept in jail. They would have to be freed, because there was no way to assign guilt to one rather than the other; both were the criminal meriting punishment.

  The upsetting fact was that they could now go out and commit any conceivable crime—and provided only one had committed it, and the
y contrived to mix themselves together so that one couldn’t be picked out, the law could not touch them.

  The mail-skipper went back to Kholar for instructions. He carried a painstaking account of the confusion on Maninea, and carefully-written documents by each person involved, claiming his identity and beseeching help to establish it past question. There was only one person whose letter was addressed to his own counterpart on Kholar; that was Jack Bedell. He wrote to a person of his own name in the Grampion Hotel; he was quite certain that he would receive informed and cheerful cooperation.

  Two men from the Astrophysical Institute came to talk to Bedell on the Corianis. He was with Kathy when they arrived. The atmosphere in the ship was that of advanced neurosis, and Kathy could not bear the bright-eyed, indignant tension which led everybody to try to buttonhole everybody else and insist that they were who they had always been, and that their doubles were impostors and criminals. There is nothing more mortifying than to be uncertain who one is. And these people had faced other people who claimed their names and possessions and pasts, their personalities and their futures.