Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  Kathy kept close to Bedell.

  The talk with the astrophysicists, though, was technical to a degree that Kathy found impenetrable. The two spectacled men recognized Bedell. One of them remembered a conversation, on Hume three years before; they had no doubt of him. So they plunged into talk, and Kathy heard stray phrases. “Obviously there could be no impact, but…”

  “The effect is of replication, of course.”—That was the shorter astrophysicist’s contribution. Bedell demurred. “Replication,” he said carefully, “implies the idea of folding. I don’t think it’s that. I think we have multiple reality with true simultaniety in the different sequences.”

  Kathy could make nothing of it. She stopped listening, though relatively simple terms like “trans-chronal” and “alternative presents” and “tangential displacement” followed and sounded as if they might mean something.

  She did notice with some surprise that presently they were talking absorbedly about the sacks of mail the two ships had brought with them.

  The astrophysicists went away, still talking enthusiastically to each other. Bedell shrugged. “Maybe we’ll work out something practical. They’re going to try to get permission to read the mail.”

  “Why?” asked Kathy. She felt horribly stupid.

  “We’ve agreed on a tentative hypothesis,” he explained. “It seems that the mail, like the people, should be almost but not quite identical in the two ships. Some letters will be exactly alike, but some should differ a little.”

  This, also, did not register with Kathy.

  “What’s tangential displacement?” she asked. “I felt so stupid!”

  “It’s what they’re going to look for in the letters,” said Bedell. “If the postal authorities permit it, they’ll send some of it to me.”

  The postal authorities did permit. A creditable reaction had begun among the persons on Maninea actually concerned with the problem the duplication of the Corianis had produced. At first, the sheer, stark impossibility of the facts made everybody’s thinking chaotic. But the officials of the spaceport and the government developed a dogged, unhopeful, resolute point of view. This was no ordinary affair, but they would act as if it were. They would go through the motions of a normal investigation, using their brains as sanely as possible upon what had to be delusion. They were not sure that they would get anywhere; it did not seem that anybody could. But to act rationally about even a lunatic occurrence would be better than mere dithering or howling at the nearest of Maninea’s two moons.

  The head of the spaceport police interviewed the skipper of the Corianis—one Corianis. His answers made sense; if there hadn’t been a second Corianis in port he’d have made an excellent impression. He seemed a truthful and conscientious man. But then the same spaceport officer interviewed the second skipper.

  “You graduated from the Merchant Space Academy on Ghalt?”

  “Yes,” said the skipper of the Coranis-with-the-burned-out overdrive.

  “You were fourth officer on the Ulysses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Third on the Panurge and second on the Dhombula?”

  “Yes,” said the skipper.

  “You got your first command as recognition of your behavior in an emergency the Dhombula ran into on Astris IV?”

  “No,” said the skipper.

  The spaceport officer looked at the record of the other talk. “It says here you did.”

  “I didn’t,” insisted the skipper. “I remember putting in to Astris IV while I was second on the Dhombula, but there wasn’t any emergency.”

  The interviewer made a memo and observed, “You skippered the Contessa, the Ellen Trent, and the Cassiopia before you took over the Corianis.”

  “No,” said the skipper doggedly. “The Cassiopia was my first command. I went from her to the Corianis.”

  The spaceport man chewed on his pencil. “This happens all the time!” he said distastefully. “The other skipper—the other you, you might say—did nearly everything you’ve done. But not quite! Each two people who are absolutely identical make nearly identical statements, but never completely identical ones. It can be checked whether you skippered the Contessa and the Ellen Trent! We can find out whether you’re stating the facts. But when you’re identical in every way but a part of your professional history, why do you differ on that? And even if we find out one of you is wrong—what then? You’ll still be identical!”

  The skipper looked at him numbly.

  “Haven’t you any idea, however unlikely, to explain the—this mess?” demanded the official.

  “I don’t know what’s happened,” said the skipper in a dull voice, “unless I’m dead and in hell.”

  The spaceport man could have asked, “Why dead?” He might have gotten a suggestive answer. But instead, he asked, “Why hell?”

  The skipper said heavily, “I’ve got a wife and kids. He says they’re his. I know they’re mine. I’ve seen—him. I don’t know how to prove he isn’t me! But I know he’s not!—Do you think I’m going to let him go back to my family, and my wife not able to know he isn’t me, and my kids thinking he’s their father? Will I let that happen?”

  His hands clenched and unclenched. The spaceport official said very tiredly, “I give up, skipper.—Maybe you’ll be interested to know that he said exactly what you just said, in nearly the same words and with apparently the same sincerity.”

  He waved a hand in dismissal, and then watched out the window of his office to make sure the skipper went back to his own ship and not the other. There’d been one deplorable incident. An aide to the Minister of Commerce had met his duplicate and his duplicate’s wife while both were taking exercise between the two grounded ships, and there was very nearly a murder there and then. One of the two men had made the trip alone, his wife having sprained her ankle two days before the take-off. The other had brought his wife along. She’d tripped, but not quite sprained her ankle.

  The man who’d come alone went into a murderous rage when he saw his wife with the other man. She was living with the other man on the other Corianis! Openly! She was his wife and the other man was himself. The man who’d traveled alone tried desperately to kill his duplicate—who as determinedly tried to destroy him. The wife screamed in horror because she could not tell which of the two was her husband.

  But not all minor non-correspondences produced so much emotion as, in that case, the fact that one woman had sprained her ankle while her duplicate had not.

  There was the mail. In some dozens of sacks from each Corianis, less than a score of letters were not twinned. In many cases the twin missives were exactly alike, down to the last and least and most unconsidered comma. In others, a word or an occasional phrase differed from one counterpart to the other. One personal letter, however, mentioned in one copy that a certain person had died, and in the other copy that he had made an unexpected recovery.

  Kathy said desperately, “But it’s all so—so impossible! Things like this…I feel as if we’d all gone insane! We, and the people in the other ship, and the people on Maninea who believe in the people of the other ship—everybody!”

  Bedell nodded. “Yes. It’s like walking up to a big mirror, and suddenly you find that there isn’t any glass there, and the people can walk out of the mirror—or maybe we’ve walked into it. We don’t know.”

  “But it’s—impossible!”

  “Hmmm…” said Bedell. “There was a time when people thought you couldn’t talk to anybody a mile away, and people couldn’t fly, and nobody could travel faster than light. All these things are still impossible. You still can’t do them. But you can do things that have the same consequences. We use those other things as substitutes for things that can’t happen. In a way, this apparently impossible state of things may be a substitute for something that couldn’t happen.”

  “Such,” demanded Kathy, “such as what?”

  “Such as the wrecking of the Corianis,” he suggested. “Maybe all this has happened as the alter
native to the Corianis exploded to vapor from some collision, with all of us floating around as gas-particles in space.”

  Kathy didn’t believe it. Still Bedell acted more like a sane man than anybody else on the Corianis. The nervous strain inside the ship was nerve-racking.

  X

  When the two Corianis had been aground for two weeks, the situation took a very nasty turn. At first, the ordinary citizens of Maninea accepted the problem of the two ships as a sort of sporting event. They assumed that daring and clever crooks had planned a massive imposture, and that they’d been stymied by the appearance of the impersonatees. It seemed still more of a sporting event when the assumed frauds gallantly seemed to try to bluff it out; when they defied the police to unmask them. And when the police failed, the citizens of Maninea admired the impostors more than ever—but they were no longer certain which set of passengers were the frauds. So they waited for the scientists to make their tests and say, with confident certitude, that these persons were who they said they were, and those other persons were impostors.

  But the scientists couldn’t answer either. That was a shock. It was a disappointment. It was frightening. For example, the news-broadcasters found a man who’d been a schoolmate of the Planetary President when both of them were ten years old. He hadn’t spoken to the President since. He would remember things that nobody but the President and himself could possibly know about. He could tell! The newscasters also found a grandmother who—at seven—had made mud pies with the now Speaker of the Senate. Nobody could fool her! The two unimportant persons spoke, respectively, to the two claimants to the Planetary President’s identity, and to the two men who claimed to be Speaker of the Senate. They came from their interviews shaking and unable to decide. Both Planetary Presidents remembered everything from the age of ten. They reminded their pre-presidential playmates of things that the playmates had forgotten. The woman who’d made mud pies with the Speaker of the Senate was positive after she’d spoken to only one. He’d reminded her of the spanking she got for using the morning milk to manufacture mud-pie pancakes. Only her old playmate knew about that! But the second copy of the Speaker of the Senate not only remembered it too, but described to her the funeral of a defunct mouse and the decoration of its grave. So he was her former playmate, too.

  During the ships’ third week aground the citizens of Maninea reacted violently. It seemed as if they suddenly realized that the natural order of things was defied, that something sneakingly suggestive of the supernatural was involved. When science could not reveal the mystery, the mystery might be beyond science. Rumors sprang up and flew about. Some were ominous; some were pure horror.

  There was the rumor that devils out of hell had somehow escaped confinement and planned to move in among mankind and ultimately destroy it. Only a few people believed this.

  There was the rumor that witches, by compact with the powers of evil, had become able to take forms other than their own. They would rule humanity; they would eventually enslave it. A larger number believed this.

  The most popular of the rumors had a touch of scientific imagination in it. One Corianis and the beings on board it, said this rumor, had come from a remote and hidden world where there existed a race of monsters. They were non-human Things which could make even scientists believe them human. They could read human minds; they could take control of human bodies. They had come to Maninea to begin the extermination of humanity. And this rumor declared that the monsters could duplicate human bodies and that humans were being missed, about the space-port. Children had vanished; women had disappeared. The monsters who passed for men were anthropophagi. They devoured human flesh in orgies too horrible to be described, and then went out in the likeness of their victims to allure or seize on other victims.

  Very many people accepted this idea and felt a growling, rumbling hatred for the two ships which could not be explained except by some such tale as this. And the fact that this story spread and spread brought denials. There were women who had sons and daughters in government service; they’d made the trip to Kholar and returned, but in duplicate. Some of these women fiercely demanded to see their children. They’d know their flesh and blood!

  But they didn’t. A woman who’d had one son found that she had two. And she could not have two, but she did. Then there were women whose husbands were aboard the Corianis. They protested that they would know them! And they came to weep horribly because they could not know which of two burning-eyed, frantic men had been their husband before he went to Kholar.

  Enmity to the Corianis‘ passengers became a thing to shudder over. Almost any man would agree that, in all probability, one of the two sets of human beings was human; but one was not. It was something more horrible than death, and it must be destroyed. If it could not be decided which was human and which was not—then, regretfully but remorselessly, all must die…

  Kathy no longer made any attempt to mingle with the other passengers. She and Jack Bedell had been two retiring, diffident, self-conscious people who found talk with other people absurdly difficult. Now the confined shipload of diplomats and political appointees was so nerve-racked that Kathy felt aloof rather than retiring; she was defensive instead of shy. And Bedell’s manner had taken on a tinge of authority. He’d started to work with the men of the Astrophysical Institute, testing materials from the two ships in extreme conditions to find out some basic difference. Very soon it was unwise for Bedell to try to go from the spaceport to the Institute and back. Shortly after, it became even dangerous for the people at the Institute to come on board the ship. So they worked together with a vision-screen connection in being. As other approaches to the mystery proved hopeless, the research of which Bedell was the driving force came to be the only hope for a truly scientific solution. In self-defense he had to adopt a manner pushing aside hysterical passengers who’d have taken up all his time.

  Then there came a day when a delegation from the ship-passengers waited on him. The Planetary President of Maninea headed it; he was accompanied by the Minister of State of Kholar, the Chairman of the Lower House Committee, the Speaker of the Senate, the Minister of Commerce, and others. It was a stately delegation, though now and again muscles twitched in what should have been composed features.

  “Mr. Bedell!” said the Planetary President. “The municipal authorities tell me that some scientists believe you know what has caused the monstrous state of affairs in which we find ourselves.”

  “Together with the Astrophysical Institute,” said Bedell mildly, “I’ve offered some suggestions. We’re trying to get experimental evidence for certain ideas. There are a number of things that seem to support the opinion we hold. But it isn’t yet proved.”

  There was a pause. The Planetary President said firmly, “Suppose you tell us, Mr. Bedell! Decisive action must be taken, and soon! Where did that other ship and its company of impostors come from?”

  “Where did we come from?” asked Bedell matter-of-factly.

  “No hocus-pocus!” rasped the Minister of Commerce. “We’re in no mood to be trifled with! Answer the question!”

  “There’s some resemblance between the two ship’s companies,” insisted Bedell, “so the question’s relevant. We come from Kholar. But more certainly we come from ten days ago and the marriage of our parents. We come from the voyages of the early explorers of space. We come from events more surely than from places. I’m here because by accident I got passage on the Corianis. You are here from a longer but certain series of events. Do you understand? If you want to know where the other ship comes from, I have to name events rather than places!”

  “This is nonsense!” fumed the Minister of Commerce.

  “It’s the fact…”

  “Answer the question!” commanded the Planetary President, ominously. “Where did the impostors come from? How have they deceived the police? I warn you that there can be no more delay! These frauds must be unmasked, and at once…”

  “The evidence—what there is—” said Be
dell angrily, “points to this ship as the abnormal, and you as the impostors! It’s very probable that this is the ship which doesn’t belong here!”

  Anger bubbled over. These were practical men who’d been unable to do anything practical. They were half-mad with nerve-strain and frustration and bewilderment. Every man of them faced the possibility that an impostor might take his name and place and identity, and acquire with them his destiny and all his achievements. It was intolerable even to fear such a thing. These men wanted an answer that would give them something violent and satisfying to do.

  “Damned nonsense!” raged the Minister of Commerce. “We know what we’ve got to do. Let’s get it over with!”

  And Bedell suddenly roared at them. He astonished himself. But he was no longer the mild and diffident and self-conscious person that previous events had made of him. Recent events had made it necessary for him to act in a new fashion.