At the Narrow Passage

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At the Narrow Passage Page 17

by Richard Meredith


  I nodded.

  A group of men dressed in antique costumes that must have represented the period of the first American rebellion paraded onto the stage. Three of them led the procession -- one played a horn or whistle of some kind that I didn't recognize, one played a drum, and the man between the two carried a flag that I believe was one of the original flags of the rebellion. They were followed by ten more men dressed as farmers, clergymen, clerks, backwoods trappers, soldiers, and the like of that period. When the procession reached the center of the stage, it stopped, turned to face the audience, waited until the end of the music, and then the flag was carefully placed in a socket in the floor of the stage.

  Two or three patriotic songs followed, one of them called "Yankee Doodle" or something like that. For some reason another of them stuck in my mind, and later I wrote the words down with some help from Sally. It was about the man called Mad Anthony Wayne, one of their principal heroes, and the words went something like this:

  Bang! Bang! the rifles go; down falls the startled foe.

  Aim! Fire! exclaim his eyes; bang! bang! each gun replies.

  Ran-tan! the bugles sound; our force has still the ground.

  Tramp! Tramp! away they go; now retreats the beaten foe.

  Many a red coat, the Continental scorning,

  Shall never meet the blaze of the broad sunlight

  that shines on the morrow morning.

  His sword blade gleams and his eyelight beams,

  And never glanced either in vain;

  Like the ocean tide, at our head he rides,

  The fearless mad Anthony Wayne.

  [This is followed by the Chorus:]

  Bang! Bang! the rifles go; down falls the startled foe;

  Many a redcoat, the Continental scorning

  Shall never meet the blaze of the broad sunlight

  that shines on the morrow morning.

  Was e'er a chief of his speech so brief,

  Who utters his wishes so plain?

  E'er he utters a word, his orders are heard,

  From the eyes of Mad Anthony Wayne.

  Chorus

  It is best to fall at our country's call,

  If we must leave this lifetime of pain;

  And who would shrink from the perilous brink

  When led by Mad Anthony Wayne?

  Chorus

  Let them form their ranks in firm phalanx;

  They will melt in our rifle ball rain;

  Every shot must tell on a redcoat well,

  Or we anger Mad Anthony Wayne.

  Chorus

  Then they repeated the whole introductory chorus again before ending the song.

  I'm not sure why that particular song impressed me so. It may have been that its jingoistic fervor showed more than any other the dedicated militancy of the American rebels which I was coming to understand. I'm not sure. But the song did stick with me.

  When the song was finished, the costumed retinue retired, and two men carried a microphoned rostrum to the center of the stage. Moments later a clergyman carrying a huge black Bible under his arm came out, placed the Bible on the rostrum, opened it and began reading something from Moses that I can't seem to recall at the moment.

  He then asked the Christian God for His blessing on this assembly and on the proceedings and asked His guidance in making the right choice of nominees for the council. During his prayer he alluded to men and events I was unfamiliar with, but which must have had some meaning to the native Americans. Then he retired from the stage, and the convention got down to business.

  I won't try to relate the convention at all. There was too much of it, too many things happening at once, and I was never quite sure just what was really going on. In a way it reminded me of the way some elections are held back in my own Homeline -- since we Greeks invented the idea, anyway -- but there were a lot of differences too.

  One thing I do remember, though, was when a man I didn't know got up and nominated Sally for a position on the city's governing council. Sally immediately rose, told them that she couldn't accept; she had been gone too long and was out of touch with things in Staunton, but she certainly did appreciate the gesture. She received a standing ovation.

  Then there were other nominations and secondings and acceptance speeches, and sometime long after midnight on Saturday, when my eyelids weighed a ton each, the voting got started in earnest, with more yelling and cheering and calls to order and just about everything else you can think of.

  I managed to slip away while Sally was making some parliamentary point and at last got some of the sleep I so badly needed -- and I was grateful that Mica didn't send someone to keep me company that night. I wouldn't have been up to it.

  "I don't think anyone before us really understood the principles behind the sautierboat, or skudder, as you call it," the gray-clad technician told me, pointing toward the huge craft that now occupied fully half of the hangar. "I mean, the Kriths could skud, but they never really knew how they did it. It was just something they did. I mean, men have been able to think for thousands of years, but we're only now really learning how we think."

  I nodded.

  Sally had brought me to the hangar, introduced me to the technician, and then gone on her way, saying she'd be back later to get me. In the meantime, he was trying to help me understand how their Transtemporal sautierboats worked.

  "Well," the technician said, "when the Kriths had human beings start building skudders for them, they did it pretty much on an empirical basis. The human engineers learned the mechanics behind Krithian skudding and reproduced them in a machine without really learning the fundamental laws that govern this sort of thing. They didn't have to since all they had to do was reproduce a mechanical model of the skudding mechanism inside the Kriths. Follow me?"

  "Yes, I believe so."

  "I don't pretend to understand it all myself," the technician said, gesturing toward a shelf of technical manuals and reference books above his elaborate workbench. "I just know enough to repair these things when something goes wrong, but despite that I think I know a hell of a lot more about it than any of your people." The way he put an emphasis on "your" gave me the impression that he, for one, didn't really trust me, but he was going to give me a rundown of their sautierboats as Sally had requested and Mica had approved.

  "I wouldn't doubt it," I said, hoping that would put him more at ease. "I've seen your boats do things I thought were impossible."

  "That's exactly what I mean," the technician said. "How about a cup of coffee?"

  "Okay. I could stand one."

  While he dropped coins into the vending machine and waited for the hot coffee to come gurgling out, he went on talking. "The engineers say that you can't really talk about sautiering in words; they say you need a special set of mathematics for it. And I guess that it's true, but I'm doing well just to follow the math when it's on paper and explained for me. I can't tell you much about it."

  "That's okay," I said. "I probably wouldn't understand any of it anyway. Cigarette?"

  "Thanks," he said, taking my offered pack and knocking a cigarette into his hand.

  I got the two cups of coffee from the machine, handed him one of them.

  "Go on," I said. "Explain to me what you can."

  "All right," he said, taking a light from my lighter. "It all has to do with what they call probability potentials and probability indices. It's as if nothing really is; everything is just might be. Like, ah, the universe can't make up its mind. Follow me?"

  "Not really."

  "That's okay. I don't think anyone does really. Well, they say that back when the universe first started there was just one Paratime, one Line, the Original Line, and it had a probability of 1.0000 forever. It was real. Then the first uncertainty happened. I mean, something came up that could have gone one way or the other. And the universe couldn't decide which. So both happened. Each new Paratime had a probability of 0.5000.

  "Okay, so far?" he asked.

&nbs
p; I nodded, sipped my coffee, puffed my cigarette.

  "Well, when it all started, the Original Paratime had a probability index of 1.0000, like I said. When there were two Paratimes, one had a probability of -0.5000 and the other had a probability of +0.5000. The plus and minus represent what you call T-West and T-East. Well, let's say that the plus Line came to a fork and two new Paratimes were formed, each with a probability index of 0.2500. One was a ++0.2500 and the other was a -+0.2500. Still with me?"

  "I guess so."

  "Okay. The double plus Line hit another fork, and the result was now a +++0.1250 and a -++0.1250. And this would go on and on and on toward infinity, with each new fork lowering the probability and increasing the number of signs. They figure that the probability of any given Line is now somewhere on the order of 10^-85."

  I tried to visualize the number, but all I got was a string of zeros running across a sheet of paper and dribbling off the side. I couldn't comprehend it.

  "That's an oversimplification, way over. The way I understand it," the technician was saying, "is that the probabilities don't break apart even. I mean, it isn't always a fifty-fifty chance. You might come to a fork with, say, a thirty percent probability one way and a seventy percent probability the other, but that only confuses the probability values that much more. But you get the basic picture, don't you?"

  "I think so," I said. None of this was very new to me. The Kriths had been able to tell me this much a long time ago.

  "Okay, then, every Paratime had its own particular value in pluses and minuses and its own numerical index. It's kind of like a fingerprint; there's no two alike."

  "I understand that."

  "Well, that's how we travel across the Paratimes," the technician said smugly. "The sautier generator, well, creates its own probability potential. We adjust it to -- well, to whatever we want to adjust it to and then the boat and everything within the field of the generator sort of seeks its own level."

  "I'm with you."

  "I guess that's the best I can do to explain it."

  "That's good enough," I said, "but I still don't understand how you can move about in space. The Kriths can't do that."

  "Okay. As I said before, you and the Kriths don't really understand what it's all about," he said. "Oh, they're right about the relationship of probability generators and most other types of machinery. You can't fly a sautierboat with a jet engine, but we've found out how to turn that into a positive advantage.

  "Now, the Kriths have a vague idea that there are two, well, dimensions to sautiering, skudding, I mean plus and minus, but what they don't understand is that there are three more. I mean, as well as having Transtemporal plus and minus probability, there are three spatial coordinates involved in probability. That is, even within a given Paratime the probability of one thing or place varies from all the others."

  "You've lost me," I said. This was something new to me. The Kriths had never talked about anything like this.

  "Me too," the technician said, smiling. "Look, you're familiar with the mass displacement phenomenon, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay, the Kriths know that an object entering a Paratime from Outtime cannot occupy the same place as an object already in existence in a Paratime. The newcomer, since it has a much lower probability within the Paratime, must give way to the one that's already there. Its mass is displaced in space a sufficient distance to avoid coming in physical contact with the thing that's already there. Right?"

  "Right," I said. I guess if that weren't so, skudding would have been next to impossible.

  "Well, whereas your people and the Kriths seem to accept this and go on, our people wanted to find out why, and when they did, they learned about probability interactions. The best I can tell you is that there are some kinds of interactions between the separate Paratimes. Some things are, well, more probable than others even in the same Paratimes. Take Here and Now for example. Going plus and minus across the Paratimes, we'd find a number of worlds almost identical to this one, but each slightly different in some respects. Even though this hangar isn't native to these Paratimes and doesn't exist on any other, let's pretend that it does, okay?"

  "I guess."

  "Well then, if we were to take the nearest five Paratimes in either direction and built a composite picture of the hangar, we'd find some things identical in some, but different in others.

  "All right, they all add together in a sense. Let's say, in the totality, that this building has the highest order of probability, then the tools on the bench, then me, then you with the lowest. Okay, then each item in this room has an order of probability in relation to each other item as a part of the total probability index of this Paratime because of the, well, interaction of the other ten Paratimes. Still with me?"

  "I think so."

  "Okay. Suppose the index of this Paratine is 5^25 x 5^-25. Now everything in this Paratine has varying potentials. If we assign 1.000 to the most likely thing, the hangar itself, the sautierboat might be, say, 0.7500 and the tools on the bench 0.5000 and me 0.2500 and you, say, 0.1250. Now each of these things here has a value, call it a field, that centers on the object itself, but extends outward, diminishing in force, still with a probability focal point."

  "I'm getting a headache."

  The technician smiled. "I'll cut it short. Take this sautierboat. We can adjust the generator to take us to a given Paratime. Right?"

  "Granted."

  "Now within that Paratime we can subtly vary the sautier field, alter the probability potential just a little. Well, if we can move from Paratime to Paratime by seeking the level of the generator, it follows that within a given Paratime we can move from place to place by varying the field within that Paratime. Got me?"

  I nodded. "That sounds awkward, though. How do you know which way you're going to go when you vary the field? And how can you be sure that you're not going to jump right out of this Line into another?"

  "As I said, all this is oversimplification," he said. "We've got instruments that can detect the variations of probability within a Paratime. And these instruments feed into the boat's computer. I guess you know that most electronic devices, like most living organisms, don't seem to be bothered by probability fields. Don't ask me why. I don't know." He paused. "Anyhow, a human being never has to worry about any of these things anyway. All he does is set the controls to take him to a certain spot. The instruments gauge the probability potentials around the boat, find the levels that will take the boat where the pilot wants to go, and the computer varies the generator's potential accordingly."

  "I see," I said, "and that would also prevent the boat from slipping into another Line by accident, I guess."

  "Right," the technician said. "Say, if you can get permission from Mica, I'll take you for a ride sometime and show you how it works.

  "I'd like that," I said, thinking that I had overcome the technician's initial distrust of me -- and also thinking that his sautierboat would be sure to have a radio in it.

  But I was sure that it would take some time before I could persuade Mica to allow me to take the offered ride, and I just might not have that time.

  The arsenal of the Paratimers under the West Florida earth contained weapons of every imaginable type, from crossbows to thermonuclear bombs big enough to sterilize half the planet. And I wondered why they had weapons that big and if they would really use them if it appeared that the Kriths were winning on this Line.

  "Now this is one of my favorites," Scoti said to me, taking a well-oiled handgun down from its wall cradle. It was a big, heavy six-shot revolver that reminded me a little of the Harling that Scoti had taken from me. I wondered where it was now.

  "This is from a fairly nearby Paratime," Scoti was saying. "And it's one of the most efficient pistols I've ever seen. It's called a .44 Magnum, and it packs one hell of a punch."

  "Single-action, isn't it?" I asked to keep up my end of the conversation.

  "Yes" Scoti agreed, "but I'm partial to th
em."

  "They're dependable."

  "This one sure is. Notice the construction of the cylinder." He snapped the weapon open. "Rugged as hell. There's virtually no way in the world to foul it up. And the hammer spring, well, it just won't wear out. That's the beauty of it -- simple, efficient, and it's one of the most accurate big-bore pistols you'll ever find."

  For an instant I wished that there were shells in the cylinder. Given half a chance, even now, I might be tempted to try to shoot my way out of here. Then I smiled and handed it back to him.

  "If you can get Mica's permission," Scoti said, "I'll see if you can try it out on the range."

  "That might be fun," I said, though again I doubted that Mica trusted me that much -- enough to let me have a loaded weapon in my hands even on a target range surrounded by guards.

 

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