Planet Probability

by Brian N Ball

  “Quite, sir,” said the robot.

  “We could do the physical changes—up to a certain point,” Spingarn went on. “But the conditioning necessary for even a moderate chance of successful adaptation is beyond us! We can’t make people into tigers!”

  “And dinosaurs, sir,” added Horace.

  “Dinosaurs?”

  “Mr. Marvell went subhuman, sir. We all saw the dinosaurs. Sergeant Hawk destroyed one.”

  “Destroyed—”

  Spingarn looked down at his hands. Blurred memories of enormous padded paws came back. Talons. Talons and fangs.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So in the Possibility Space humans have been turned into dinosaurs? Tigers?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! There was almost a complete range of reptilian and mammalian life. Mr. Marvell and Miss Hassell had the characteristics of anthropoidal apes, somewhat advanced from the most primitive known. There was a fair degree of intelligence, with some toolmaking ability.” The robot chuckled. “As far as I could make out, sir, they were not dissatisfied with the transformation.”

  Spingarn was dazzled by the enormous prospects.

  “A full range?”

  “I detected certain of the very earliest reptiles, sir, though I suspect that they have a very low survival rate.”

  “So it’s the Genekey—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And humans—”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Spingarn?” said a clear voice. Ethel was awake.

  He heard but relegated the inquiry into a corner of his mind.

  “All the features of random recycling—”

  “Yes, sir, but extended.”

  “Yes!” said Spingarn impatiently.

  “Spingarn!” the call came, more urgently.

  He waved a hand irritably.

  “Yes, but it’s the same principle!”

  “Quite, sir.”

  “Extended so that all probabilities are given a maximum degree of variation—”

  “Sir!”

  “Gawd!” said Spingarn, relapsing into a dialect of the Gunpowder Age. “Gawd’s boots!”

  “Aye?” said a familiar voice. Hawk too had recovered consciousness. “Aye, Captain?”

  Spingarn looked around, to see Ethel disengaging from the twins. Hawk looked at him as she rose to her feet.

  “Spingarn!” she said. “What is it? Where have we been? The babies! My babies!”

  “Naked as an infant!” Hawk said loudly. “Captain, your lady wife hasn’t a stitch about her!”

  Spingarn was shocked at the immense conception of which he had been a part.

  “Gawd!” he said again. He recognized Hawk. “Sergeant, we’ve been in a strange place!”

  “Aye, Satan’s Kingdom!”

  Ethel waited.

  Spingarn at length got out: “It’s quite fantastic!”

  “It is outside my range of known facts,” admitted Horace.

  “Ethel, do you know what we’ve been—where we’ve been? How we went? Gawd!” He shuddered. “And what we did!”

  “I heard you mention a Possibility Space,” Ethel said calmly. “I want clothes, and food for the babies.”

  “Ethel, we’ve been down the evolutionary ladder of mankind! For the past year and a half, we’ve been inside a mixture of Terra’s complete range of pasts! It’s all been recreated—and the creatures too!”

  Ethel looked at the children. She was unsurprised.

  “Tigers? It fits. I wonder what they’d like to eat.”

  Spingarn’s mouth opened wide in dismay.

  “Like to eat?”

  He was stupefied. At the edge of the strangest mystery of all, she could concern herself with such matters?

  “A little minced steak,” she decided.

  “And clothes for the bairns!” agreed Hawk. He averted his eyes from Ethel’s magnificent figure. “And a dress for yourself, ma’am?”

  “If you please, Sergeant,” she said.

  Spingarn said helplessly: “Ethel, the Alien sent us down the evolutionary chain! All the Time-outers are in there.”

  “Not quite all, sir,” said Horace.

  Ethel gave Hawk directions. She kissed the sleeping infants and moved them into the shade as the sun came up in a surge of yellow flame.

  “No?” said Spingarn.

  There was a most disagreeable sensation in his belly.

  “Carnivores require large amounts of fresh meat, sir,” Horace pointed out. “There was a low survival rate among many species.”

  Blood!

  No wonder he felt queasy! Spingarn thought of the thousands of Time-outers he had committed to the recreations among Talisker’s desolate Frames. And of what the fate of many of them must have been. He looked with dismay at Ethel.

  “Ethel, those others! In the Possibility Space! We must have used them—as—as—”

  Spingarn saw that Ethel was unconcerned. Her whole attention was on the babies. In her beautiful eyes there was a reflection of the ecstasy of motherhood. Spingarn felt his heart wrenched by the sight of the still-sleeping children; and he thought of their diet. Crawling insidiously into his mind came recollections of Ethel ripping the tender portions of still-quivering victims.

  How could she be so callous? Spingarn regarded her without affection. Women were so much more basic than men.

  “See, the sergeant’s built a little house!” she declared. “And a garden! But it won’t do, Spingarn. I’ll need more room. And some decent clothes. Isn’t there somewhere not too far away where we can settle until all this ghastly business is cleared up?”

  Spingarn gasped.

  Ethel wanted to set up a home.

  On Talisker, the grotesque enigma of the Alien’s Possibility Space still writhed in the insubstantial dimensions of the Genekey. Marvell and his assistant were in it. So were the survivors of a hellish, disgusting piece of monumental juggling with mankind’s evolutionary patterns. Dinosaurs that were once men stalked lesser beasts that were their fellows. There were flying reptiles preying on transmuted Time-outers. Women like Ethel swung from trees. Men like himself scuttled through hot mud to escape scaled horrors from the dawn of life on Terra.

  The Alien had done all this. The blind and terrible creative force that had once met him mind to mind had run amok. And ultimately he, Spingarn, was responsible.

  Ethel thought only of homemaking.

  “Horace,” said Spingarn. “Find somewhere.”

  Ethel smiled charmingly. Horace left at once.

  “Sergeant!” she called. “Did you say you had a dress for me?”

  Hawk came back with his clay pipe clamped in his mouth. He carried a tattered piece of clothing.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he apologized, “it’s all there is. I kept it against your return after ye’d gone down into the boggarts’ lair with the captain.”

  Spingarn looked from the cheerful woman to the phlegmatic Sergeant of Pioneers. Hawk too had accepted the bizarre situation with a wonderful equanimity. The last he had seen of Spingarn and Ethel must have been the gradual encroachment of the Alien’s weird Pit. Devotedly he must have pitched camp at the entrance to the Possibility Space, awaiting their return. How was it, though, that he could come to terms with the fantastic enigma of the hellish regions he had seen? And how could a Primitive psyche such as Hawk’s account for dinosaurs, men transmuted into tigers, gaping holes in space-time?

  Spingarn saw that Hawk kept his eyes averted as Ethel shrugged herself into the barely adequate garment.

  “Sergeant,” he said.

  “Captain Spingarn?”

  “Horace explained about the Possibility Space— the nether regions?”

  “Aye, that he did, Captain! And an unlikely tale it was! Oxford and Cambridge philosophers! Why,” said Hawk, winking, bottle-nosed face lit up with a smile, “that befurred machine-monkey knows no more than me! But we know, Captain, don’t we?”

  “We do?”

  What stra
nge rationalization had the sergeant come to? What could have accounted for his wonderful experiences?

  “Aye, sir!”

  Spingarn was pleased that Horace had not been able to trick the sergeant. However he had explained the Alien and the Possibility Space away—and it seemed as though the robot had described them as the Devil and his Kingdom—the grinning soldier had not been fully taken in.

  “Sergeant?”

  “Aye, sir! More Frog wiles! They’ll be at the back of it—we know, sir! But we’ll not tell Mrs. Spingarn?” Hawk winked violently. “The Frogs and Satan?”

  “No, Sergeant. I think perhaps not.”

  There was no confusion in Hawk’s mind, Spingarn saw. He was still fighting a war that had finished millennia ago. To his mind, the tribe of the French had made a pact with Satan in order to confound the army of Queen Anne.

  “Knew ye’d return, sir! Knew ye’d be a match for the Frogs! Hawk kept a watch! Hawk wasn’t tricked into going into Hell! And when he did go, didn’t old Hawk utterly bombard the boggart? He did, sir!”

  Spingarn wondered what the story that lay behind this claim could be. No doubt he would hear of it again. Hawk enjoyed the discussion of his martial exploits, like any old military man. For the Primitive, it had been a successful foray, for hadn’t he been instrumental in rescuing his captain, the captain’s lady and the infants? Coupled with this was some violent encounter with a monster. Hawk’s grin was justified. He was a hero.

  “I’m eternally grateful, Sergeant!” declared Spingarn. Decisions came easily to him. “But I require more of you, d’ye see, I’ll need to feel that Ethel—Mrs. Spingarn—is in safe keeping.”

  “Sir!”

  “You will remain with the lady, under her orders.”

  “Sir!” bellowed Hawk, vastly pleased with himself. “And you, sir? Ye’ll join us?”

  “Not at once, Sergeant. When Horace returns, I have certain duties for him. You will accompany Mrs. Spingarn to the place of safety he has found.”

  “Aye, sir, but yourself?”

  Spingarn felt a thrill of pleasure. He had always known that the final confrontation with the Alien had to be on its own ground. The mysterious entity could not reach out to him. If he wished to eradicate the strange and terrible results of his own meddling among the Frames of Talisker, he would have to enter the bizarre Pit it had created.

  Spingarn had to be, once again, the Probability Man!

  He would have to enter what Hawk thought of as some kind of Frenchified Hell and discover a way of bending time and space until he could impose his desires on the Alien that had been cast out from its own Universe a hundred million years ago.

  Once more, he must go into the Pit.

  Ethel seemed not to have heard the conversation, and Spingarn had dismissed her entirely from his mind as an intelligent woman; but she had been listening.

  “Spingarn!” she said, and to his astonishment he could detect a shrewish quality in her golden voice. “You’re not thinking of going back there!”

  She pointed to the path of the sun, and Spingarn could see the shifting, uncertain energy-bands that had once been the radials of the Genekey.

  “The Genekey!” he whispered.

  There it was, the center of the enigma. But there was chaos, where once there had been a certain bizarre kind of order. Such terrible chaos!

  And he, Spingarn, must enter it once more!

  “You wouldn’t leave the children!” the woman snapped.

  Hawk nodded approval.

  Spingarn temporized, his mind suffused with the seas of uncertainty before him.

  “Not at once, my dear,” he said.

  Recognizing a position of advantage, Ethel smiled.

  “Then carry the twins,” she told him. “Here’s Horace.”

  Days passed, and Marvell grew thin. Liz lost some of her small measure of excess weight too. Their hair was thickly matted. They learned how to deal with lice and other minor annoyances. A pattern of life imposed itself on them. They slept when the sun was hot, and during the night they either shivered together, afraid and cold, or slunk away from the dangers of prowlers and creeping things. A ferocious electrical storm panicked many of the jungle-dwellers one night. Many of them made for the open grasslands, and, to Marvell’s delight, a soft turtle-like mammal flopped down beside him exhaustedly. They gorged themselves until a pair of huge snakes discovered them and their prey. They had to run once more, furious and still unsatisfied.

  They were very cunning by this time.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Horace made some difficulty about using his more sophisticated circuitry to get them across the barriers between Hawk’s oasis and the retreat he had found; but Spingarn firmly put him down. It was imperative to settle the children—still asleep in his strong arms—and Ethel before beginning the ultimate experiment.

  Spingarn strode across hot sands, crisp wet turf, through the streets of a city chiseled entirely from a luminous green jade-like rock, past the splendors of Terra’s lurid pasts as they had been recreated during the wild years of Talisker’s first experiments: more and more he felt the pull of his destiny. He was almost suffocated by the thought of the glittering whorls of the ruined Genekey. All that had passed on Talisker echoed in his mind. The arrival of that first small expedition—himself, Ethel, Sergeant Hawk and the red-furred automaton. That first sight of the strange road in the sky that was no road but a traveling, rearing barrier! The ghastly thyroid giants, those that had battered a weird rhythm as they called for blood!

  And what was Marvell’s place in all this?

  A terrible impatience possessed Spingarn. His thin face and iron muscles shuddered with the forces boiling in his brain. He was like a magnificent horse that senses the coming trial of speed and power. Yet none of his inner turmoil showed to the others. Spingarn was a man of dedication and iron resolve; he had learned, during the incredible years of the Frames, to control his emotions.

  They came to a small fragment of peace after half a day’s march. It was a green and pleasant stretch of country, with a few small farmsteads of weathered gray stone. They were deserted. The only sign of life was in the thick hedgerows, from which beady eyes looked out with surprise. Horace indicated a substantial dwelling in good condition.

  “I thought this would be the most suitable,” he said. “I managed to locate three cows, one recently calved. They were afraid, so I took the liberty of inducing a slight state of hallucination. They have unpleasant memories of the graser-mines which littered this area, sir.”

  “Grasers?” Spingarn frowned.

  Ethel inspected the farmhouse with Hawk.

  “There was some kind of Frame-Shift at one time, sir. The grasers would have drifted through a barrier. I cleared them, sir.”

  “I remember this place,” said Spingarn. It was a small recreation of a bit of pastoral Terra. Some Time-outers had found and farmed it. But the ditches were blocked, and the vegetable gardens overrun. But grasers! Well, thought Spingarn, dismissing the idea, Talisker was a planet of the unexpected. In his arms the twin infants showed signs of returning consciousness.

  Ethel called from an upstairs window: “It’s fine, Spingarn! Bring the boys in!”

  Horace turned as a sound came from one of the outbuildings. Spingarn’s reaction was slower, but it was still extremely fast.

  It was an animal of some kind, he was sure.

  The twins opened their eyes, first the older boy, who was heavier than the other. He had a squarish chin and Spingarn’s solid frame. They mewled at the light, and Spingarn knew how the world had altered for them. He kept his eyes on the outbuilding. Then he saw the cringing white and black collie bitch that recognized the smell of human beings and wanted companionship.

  “Spingarn!” Ethel called. “There’s clothes here—and food! I’ll feed them if they’re waking up!” Spingarn heard Ethel giving Hawk precise instructions about water and firewood. Soon she would have a broom in
her hands. Domesticity! Who would have thought that fat little Ethel, who had been one of his assistants in the days of Direction, would turn into such a splendidly proportioned matron!

  “Coming!” he called.

  The twins realized that they were in his arms. They glared fiercely from hostile eyes, puzzled and alarmed, yet drawn to the brown face. They struggled to be released. Spingarn laughed at them with great pleasure. He put them down, and they mewled sadly.

  “Mr. Marvell and Miss Hassell passed through this Frame,” Horace informed Spingarn. “The animal made contact with them, but it refused to use an adapted graser-beam to gain access to the contiguous Frame.”

  Spingarn listened with only half his attention, for the boys were trying to crawl. The smaller boy, who had his mother’s astonishingly blue eyes, propped himself against the other and tried to get onto his feet. They looked at the ground, the sky, Spingarn, their own brown hands, the direction from which their mother had shouted, and back to one another. They stared in wonder at themselves, and then they saw the collie bitch.

  It knew children. It advanced, tail waving furiously and mouth grinning in delight.

  Horace began a report on the resources of the farm, but Spingarn waved him into silence. The robot was deeply offended, its whole posture one of distaste for the way Spingarn was disregarding his duties. He was absorbed in the behavior of the twins.

  They were unsure of themselves, but they seemed to have retained the instincts of the tiger. After all, thought Spingarn, they knew only one way of life. He was alarmed for a moment when he thought of the subtle and violent effects of the Alien’s transmutation of himself, Ethel and the Time-outers of Talisker; but he checked his anxieties. The boys were human, with human intelligence. Stronger than normal infants of only nine months or so, they had the memories of tigers and the appearance of mankind.

  The beast in them won for the moment.

  When the collie reached them, they moved each to one side. Spingarn felt waves of amusement as they bared two tiny teeth each. The collie sensed that something was wrong. She turned to the older boy. The other would have tried to leap onto her back had Spingarn not swept him up. His blue eyes flashed hate and Spingarn dissolved into laughter.