Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  “Sir!” interrupted Deneb. “Sir, Talisker is the danger! We’re still getting random variables in the established Frames—we’re still getting inexplicable happenings. It must be Talisker!”

  Marvell groaned.

  “Not us! Not me, anyway!”

  “You!” Deneb said, while the Director gobbled noiselessly in an attempt to contain his vicious rage. “The Guardians say both you and Miss Hassell.”

  The Director pointed a skinny hand at them.

  “Go!”

  Liz shrank away from the unconcealed violence of the gesture. She was dazed, afraid and bewildered. But there turned in her mind a fierce desire to know more about the enigmatic Spingarn whom she must now follow with the reluctant Marvell. Random variables! And cell-mutation changes! It made the little Plot she had been working on with such intensity for the past months seem altogether banal. In all of her short working life she had never known this complete, almost frenzied lust for knowledge.

  “Dear God!” Marvell whimpered. “He means it!”

  When they were outside the great cavernous room, Liz turned to Marvell.

  “It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of! It makes Plotting look like kids’ games! Marvell, I want to go to Talisker!”

  He looked at the smiling green-faced humanoid secretary.

  “Dear God, she means it!”

  Horace regarded Marvell with distaste.

  “The Guardians are ready for you, sir. Miss?”

  “If you only knew what you were letting yourself in for!” Marvell groaned. “Why pick on me? I’m too good a Director to be wasted on Talisker! I’ve got a new Plot running at this very minute—how is it doing?” he called over his shoulder as Horace tried to usher him away.

  “A success, sir. Assistant Dyson reports an overwhelming triumph. The fliers were particularly invigorating— there was an unprecedented casualty list. May I offer my congratulations, sir?”

  Marvell glared at Liz Hassell.

  “And I have to leave it to Dyson! Do you know what they’re going to do to us now?”

  Liz grinned back at him. “I can guess. Is it memory-cassettes? We go through the sausage machine?”

  “Why do you always know everything, woman?” He spoke to the robot, Horace: “Was Spingarn’s woman like that?”

  “A most loyal lady,” Horace answered. “And, at times, a resourceful companion. At least, I believe so from the impressions that remain to me. More, alas, I cannot say. Shall we proceed?”

  Deneb called them back.

  “Marvell! Miss Hassell! The Director is distraught. There are good reasons, but I’ll not delay you by speaking of them. I think you are both still in some doubt as to the nature of your assignment.”

  Marvell shook his head. “Where’s the cause for doubt? We’re to go to a planet that’s deserted. And we’re to look for someone you don’t really want to find. And when we find him, we’re to ask why we’re there. I ask you, Deneb, doesn’t it sound straightforward?”

  Deneb did not respond to the irony.

  “Comp says it’s you to go, Marvell. They’ll explain the reasoning for your selection. I have to tell you this: we’re getting unaccountable Disasters all through the Frames. Comp is barely able to cope. All through the Galaxy, we’re having troubles, and not just the simple kind.”

  “So let me stay to help solve your problems!”

  Deneb carried on, unperturbed, serious and grave: “Spingarn faced the Alien and brought back the Genekey. When you contact the Alien, do as much as he did. That’s your assignment. Contact the Alien entity and find some way of ironing out the random probabilities in the Frames.”

  Liz began to understand the immensity of the task. It was beyond all comprehension at first; simply, there had been too much information. Talk first of the half-mythical figure of Spingarn and his wild experiments in the random probability variables of the Frames had been followed by a sight of a planet like a graveyard.

  And now this Alien with whom they must make contact! She felt almost kindly disposed toward Marvell; she knew herself to be the stronger of the two of them.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s face the Guardians. At least when we get to Talisker we know that there are no Frames operating—we’ll be in no immediate danger.”

  Marvell shambled forward.

  “Anything Spingarn has handled is trouble! Trouble! I’d rather be back in that Mechanical Age Plot we started off. At least one could die believing in something credible. But Talisker! Dear God, Liz, do you know what he did to the derelict Frames there?”

  Liz felt almost gay. “No! Let’s find out!”

  Horace was completely subdued by the time they had been wafted through the lower levels of the most sophisticated of all humanity’s installations. For Horace, this descent into the deep, silent corridors was the equivalent of entering Heaven: to the red-furred automaton, the Guardians were God. Marvell was quiet too, for he had never seen the highest grades of robots before. Few knew of their existence. Liz Hassell told herself that they were simply machines, man-made like the rest of the gigantic apparatus that controlled the Frames on all the settled planets of the Galaxy; yet when the four robots came out of the shadows to face the small party, she could not help feeling that she was wrong.

  No human had invented the Guardians, she was sure of it. Humanoid, functional, almost squat, they regarded the two humans and the quivering Time-out Umpire with an expression of quizzical sympathy. It came to Liz Hassell that the machines before her were what the robots themselves had built. Guardians. They were the ultimate authority on the operation of the Frames.

  When you had a system whereby most of humanity spent most of its time in recreations of other eras, you set up a fantastically complex series of interrelated events. So complex that they were beyond the powers of the human mind to follow. All Frames were operated—not invented— by the machines. And these must be what the machines themselves had evolved as their conscience.

  “I’m Marvell,” Marvell declared. “How in God’s name did you select me for this crazy idea? You did the selection, didn’t you?”

  They looked at him for a moment.

  When one of them spoke, Liz had the eerie feeling that they all spoke together. Only one set of near-lips moved, but a faint sense of repetition or echoing thoughts hung over all four dull-black frames.

  “We are the Guardians,” it said, as if amused at the idea. “All information comes through to these storehouses around you. Every recorded piece of data about everything known is here. When a Frame is required, the data are available to fill it out. That is the function of the machines about you. Ultimately, we provide ways of making your Frames and the Plots within them viable. Ours is not a decision-making function.”

  “Then get me out of here!” Marvell said. “I don’t want to go to Talisker—this crazy bitch does, but let me out! Don’t decide for me!”

  Another machine spoke, just as dispassionately.

  “There are occasions when we must give advice on decisions. This is one.”

  Horace was in an electronic trance.

  Liz Hassell said firmly: “You decided that we should go to Talisker. Don’t quibble about terms! You came to a decision and advised the Director accordingly. Is that right?”

  “It is, Miss Hassell,” the first Guardian said.

  “On what grounds?”

  “They won’t tell you!” growled Marvell.

  “We will,” a third Guardian said. “We applied a statistical test of significance to the possibility of contacting the Alien. Your name came up, Miss Hassell, as one of the likelier possibilities.”

  “Mine! But I thought it was Marvell—”

  “That lets me out!” Marvell cried. “You want her— take her! Let me get back to my fliers! Dear God, I don’t know what gives on this Talisker thing, but you can keep my share!” He shook his paunch with relief in his fit of laughter. “Ho-ho, Liz! Ho-ho-ho-ho! It’s you, not me! You for Spingarn’s luna
tic planet! You for the Alien! And me for the Battle of the Somme! I’ll have a month of it! A month of mud and blood and fliers and howitzers—I’ll build bombing planes, they must have had them! Bloody great bombers with smokestacks twenty feet high and a crew of hundreds!”

  He almost wept in his relief.

  “Your name came up too,” said the first robot Guardian.

  “Mine? I knew Spingarn, but not well—a mere acquaintance, an accidental friendship, not even a friendship really—I knew the fool only because we’d been in Plotting together once, before he turned mad and went to Talisker! Count me out! Liz, tell them I’m no use to them!”

  Liz laughed aloud. “Oh, you fat fool! Stop blubbering, Marvell! Stop it! Listen!”

  The first Guardian nodded in a friendly fashion. “On what grounds, you asked, Miss Hassell. First, you had an interest in Spingarn—there was the inquiry you made. Second, you were emotionally involved with Spingarn’s closest associate, Director Marvell—”

  “Emotionally involved!” gasped Liz, for the first time amazed by something the Guardians said. “Me? With him?”

  “I scarcely knew Spingarn! Have I got the right name? Spingarn?” Marvell lied.

  They looked at one another, fear and curiosity on Marvell’s face, outrage and amazement on Liz Hassell’s. She studied the broad, fleshy features and felt freshly repulsed by the ponderous nose, the heavy chins, the half-hidden eyes; for his part, Marvell noticed Liz’s flushed face, her sparkling, angry eyes, and then the rise and fall of her chest. It had never struck him before that well-built women were peculiarly well-suited to display emotion. She heaved prettily.

  “—and third,” the Guardian proceeded, “such a liaison as yours might be appropriate for entering the Alien’s Possibility Space.”

  “Liaison!” Liz shouted. “Liaison!”

  “Exactly,” the Guardian said. “It seemed, according to our math, statistically certain that a man and a woman, both sexually compatible, should engage in a sexual liaison when exposed to adverse circumstances of the kind likely to be encountered in a random probabilities situation—”

  It stopped, because Liz shouted out very loudly: “Stop! You say I’m going to—to—”

  “Mate,” the second Guardian said.

  “—to mate!—with that overweight buffoon!”

  Marvell looked embarrassed.

  Horace put in a caution: “You have little time, Miss Hassell, and you, sir. The Talisker ship is scheduled for eighteen hundred hours. That leaves only an hour or so for the memory-cassettes.”

  “That!” Marvell shuddered. “Do we have to go?” he pleaded hopelessly.

  “Yes,” the third Guardian said.

  “The two of us?” Liz asked.

  “Yes.”

  Marvell’s face became cunning. “You’ve said we’re needed to face this Alien. How do you know there is such a thing? Horace knows nothing—he’s said as much.”

  Liz Hassell was again overcome by the terrifying mystery of Talisker. Shadowy and vague thoughts chased through her excited mind, pictures of the lost and lonely ruins of Talisker formed and misted into emptiness.

  Talisker!

  On that haunted, experimental planet there could be some inhuman, questing intelligence. In the derelict Frames of Talisker, the Alien that had supplied the Genekey still lingered!

  “Spingarn met the Alien entity,” the first Guardian said with an inarguable certainty.

  “See,” said another Guardian, and they looked.

  A screen glowed, starlight blazed, Talisker loomed and Liz had the sensation of Phase, with the brain’s electronic messages slightly out of key with the skull, so that she seemed to be in a hundred contiguous fields of space-time at once: they cleared, and she could see Talisker as it had appeared to Spingarn. The Guardians were showing her the probability variables of that mad place. A whirlwind of events so inextricable interwoven with planetary motions and chains of human growth—and with the ghastly things Spingarn had encountered—was engraved into her innermost thoughts. Blazing, sun-drenched ice caps towered and splintered. Roads—roads? Or rather rearing energy-bands—curled and vanished into chasms where vast humanoids stood about in dumb malice; engines roared across violet skies, and twin moons flitted in a pattern of insidious grace. Always, there was a random progression of events, tortuous, eerie, spasmodic, with endings and beginnings snaking into one another as the waves of a space-time Singularity vanish and appear. There was much that was made by man; and much that was not.

  “Dear God!” Marvell said, appalled. “We can’t face that, Liz!”

  “You’ll be conditioned,” the fourth Guardian said. “Your robot guide was right. There is little time to prepare.”

  “You must go,” the first Guardian said bleakly. “We have no other remedy. You must find why Talisker is empty, Director Marvell.”

  “And Miss Hassell must go with you,” said the second. “Now.”

  There was another short journey through warm, silent tunnels as they were rushed by a coffin-like shuttle to the automaton-surgeon. They arrived together, both of them still in shock after seeing the images of Talisker. Liz barely noticed the skeletal surgeon-robot ushering them to a high-backed seat. She was used to the messy part of memory-cassette injection.

  “Liz!” Marvell yelled. “Keep him off!”

  “It’s the surgeon,” she told him. Hadn’t he been in the Frames? Not ever? “Keep still! It doesn’t hurt—not physically. Don’t struggle, they’ll just have to anesthetize you! Give in gracefully, Marvell—enjoy it!”

  “I’m not a bloody virgin being raped! Get off, you—”

  Liz was hypnotized by the sight of the glittering metal arms. They danced about her head, with the tiny bead of memory-circuiting held daintily in a thin hook of bright steel. What did it contain?

  “Aaaaaargh!” Marvell yelled. “Don’t let it, Liz! I’m going back to—”

  He was silent as the spray hit him in the face. His eyes turned up in their fleshy pouches, his big body slumped; it was lifted easily into the chair beside Liz’s.

  The messy part, thought Liz. The insidious injection of one single, complex cell that gobbled up old memories and supplanted them by others: what had happened to the hundred thousand men who were now reenacting the ancient war of antiquity in the mud and gore of that distant arena was now to happen to her. The cell would smash through the tissues at the base of her skull, racing with lightning speed to the vital areas of control, speeding with the powerful knowledge of a sperm that knows it must find union and renew itself a million million million times! She felt the soft touch of a steel claw.

  She shook and shivered. There would be no physical pain, but there would be a most terrible mental agony. The psyche had to absorb the new information: the old had to be destroyed. There would be conflict, fission, pain. A genetic bomb would shortly burst in her brain. And what would she be then? What possible Liz Hassell could cope with the dreadful arena of Talisker’s living grave? What new persona that the machines could devise could successfully maintain an equilibrium where an Alien stalked the planet?

  “A pleasant journey, miss,” said the red-furred automaton watching her. There was an expression of considerable distaste on its smooth, angular features. She recalled that some robots were fastidious about the use of cassettes; they disliked the notion of restructuring the human psyche.

  She smiled at its dismay as the cell struck.

  The long blast of agony began.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marvell and Liz Hassell missed the long, looping journey through the spin-shafts of Center. Their gently respiring bodies were shunted in white coffin-like containers at high speed to the waiting shuttle. Within an hour, the little craft had linked with the enormous interstellar vessel that loomed like a black cliff in orbit beyond the planet that housed Center. Then the two voyagers were transferred into pods filled with the clinging, comforting gray ooze which was to cushion them against the disag
reeable shocks of Phase. Horace followed elegantly.

  The little shuttle fell away.

  Deneb, who had come to watch, saw the great interstellar ship begin to shimmer as its gigantic force-fields strained against the confines of Euclidean space. It shimmered, hesitated against mighty, invisible barriers, and then vanished.

  It blasted its way through blossoming suns, plunged in and out of mad vortices of warped space and time, guided by robots who were programmed to hasten the ship’s voyage, no matter at what material cost. Marvell and Liz missed too the blank and terrifying reaches of space-time between the spiraling arms of the Galaxy as the ship leaped out into the gulfs where tiny shards of new matter occasionally spilled through the gaps in the island universes’s dimensions. The robots expertly spun the black vessel around the dangerous, unreal arenas, preserving their human cargo for the stranger unrealities beyond.

  Liz Hassell yawned, stretched and raised herself onto one elbow. She blinked twice at the dull glare of the dying red sun that shone through layers of orange haze. There was a feeling of time somehow spent, a time of fitful dreaming; otherwise, the last thing she could recall with any clarity was the sight of Marvell struggling against the surgeon-robot. She shaded her eyes against the sunlight. Two things were immediately apparent. The place where they had been set down was an extremely ordinary bit of green and quiet countryside; and she herself was still Liz Hassell. It was the second of these that was most important, of course. It might be that there were unpleasant surprises hidden just beyond the gentle, undulating curves of green meadows; in the beech and oak copse, there could lurk some unnameable monstrosity, a thing conjured up by Spingarn’s meddling fingers; and the little stream that oozed its way between the banks a few yards away might also shelter tiny malevolences. Liz expected no less. It was to be assumed that Talisker would house frightfulness on a vast scale.

  Meanwhile, her own psyche was intact. So was her body; she looked at herself approvingly. It was a handsome frame, well-fleshed, firm, in good condition. She patted her black hair and was pleased. The trouble with the sausage machine at Center was that it could—and often did— enforce physical changes to enable a subject to cope with the demands a particular Plot might make on him or her. If the stories were not lying rumors, Spingarn had been the victim of his own meddling when he had been sent to Talisker to remedy the discord there. Liz laughed aloud. She had not been transmogrified—and neither had Marvell.