World Without Chance

by John Russell Fearn

  “Unless they are the same light waves that were in existence when this world got this way. In that case they, too, would be incapable of exhaustion, and also incapable of increase. The result is just—well, plain daylight. The more I think of it, Arch, the more sure I am that we’ve struck the most amazing planet in creation. One where there actually is no random element.”

  “We’ll figure this out on the ship,” he decided promptly. “We’ll see if there’s anything over the hill, then head back.”

  They resumed the climb and gained the hilltop in the space of a few minutes. Once there they stood gazing down on the amazing sight of a deserted city, stone gray as was everything else, but conveying the suggestion of once having reached inconceivable scientific attainment.

  Its area was probably nearly forty square miles, reaching clear to the horizon on all sides. In appearance it was almost like that of Earth, save that it was far in advance of even the colossal futurist cities of Earth, 2136. The main impression seemed to be one of square towers reaching to the unmoving clouds; towers that were studded with windows and braced by slender bridges. The streets were canyons, laid out in perfect order and symmetry, groups of four running into a broad and cleverly planned square poised over what were obviously far-reaching subway systems.

  “Dead—quite dead!” Lakington muttered at last, drawing a deep breath from his air cylinder. “Science down there far beyond anything we ever knew, I expect, and we had to come too late!”

  “Suppose you stop being dramatic and come with me and find out if you’re right?” Joyce suggested crisply. “We might find a clue if nothing else. How about it?”

  “Of course. If you’re not tired?”

  “Active bodies never get tired,” she returned in a tone of mocking challenge.

  She set off boldly down the brittle moss defile, slipping ever and again, until caution against the possibility of ripping her spacesuit forced her into a crawl. Her husband was right beside her.

  Only once on the descent did they stop to consume a few of their food and water tabloids, thrusting them through the special vacuum traps in helmets and haversack. Then again they were on their way. Two hours more, and they gained the first broad street of the strange metropolis and stood regarding its enormity in perplexity.

  “This is going to present some difficulty,” Lakington murmured, nodding back to the roadway. “Wherever we touch anything, we leave this ashy deposit. Look at the apparently solid stone behind us.” He pointed to the trail of footmarks. “If we go inside a building it might come down on top of us! Like your tree.”

  “But that idea’s not so good,” Joyce observed thoughtfully. “No reason why a complete building should come down unless we deliberately push it. Walking along its floor should be fairly safe.” She hesitated a moment. “There’s something else I’ve been considering, too,” she said slowly. “If we are actually on a planet that’s achieved organization, doesn’t it occur to you that we represent a random element ourselves. Maybe that’s why we make such a mess everywhere we go.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” He shrugged. “Still, we’ve no time to worry over that now. We’ve started this thing, and we may as well finish it. Watch your step when we get right into the city.”

  They advanced again, leaving that long trail of ashy substance in their wake. At length they gained the central square with its bordering edifices.

  Curiously enough, many of the great doors were wide open, but there seemed to be no trace of inhabitants. Only the empty vista of streets leading beyond the square; only the stationary clouds bunched overhead.

  Archer Lakington stopped before a promising-looking building and stared into the interior at a dimly visible mass of machinery.

  “We’ll chance going in,” he announced, and with Joyce by his side began to ascend the steps. The imprints of crumbling dust still followed them.

  Once within the enormity of hall, they stood looking around. There was no trace of dust. The daylight was bright through the mighty floor-length windows, revealing a wilderness of incomprehensible machines of the stone-gray color. In rapt attention, Archer Lakington left his wife and began to wander round, taking good care to keep his distance from the machines in case the slightest tremor from him should send them crumbling into ruin.

  “Whoever put these together sure knew all the answers,” he said thoughtfully, as Joyce caught up with him. “I can’t figure out a third of it. Transformers are here, condensers and armatures of an advanced design, but the rest of the stuff has got me licked. I should imagine—”

  He stopped abruptly as they came around the corner of a gigantic engine that looked like an overgrown dynamo. He felt Joyce’s gloved hand tighten on his arm as she, too, saw what was focusing his gaze—a motionless, fantastic figure seated before a control board in the very heart of the machinery.

  “Take it easy this time,” he cautioned. “Leave your meddling for less interesting things.”

  Joyce was too absorbed to think of a retort. With careful footsteps, they moved to within two feet of the creature and stood perplexedly regarding it.

  It had little parallel to anything they knew, unless it was perhaps an upright alligator with greatly extended forepaws. The back was scaly and the belly smooth. Legs were only brief and ended in appendages remarkably like sea flippers. Similar curious extremities rested gently on the multiple banks of switches comprising the control board.

  Leaning farther sideward, it was just possible for the pair to see the face—almost fishlike, with large eyes, no nose, and a tight, set scar that was probably a mouth. The eyes were the most remarkable, faceted like diamonds, and uncannily inhuman.

  “Nice little playmate,” Joyce muttered, with a shudder, after a breathless space. “Wonder if it was ever intelligent?”

  He snorted expressively.

  “What do you mean, intelligent? Of course it was intelligent! How else could it understand a switchboard like that? Probably had far more brains than you and I put together.” He groaned helplessly. “Hell, if only it could speak! This is like being stuck in a wax museum.”

  “You’ll be making me homesick next,” she retorted tartly, “and here are we stuck amongst a lot of junk that doesn’t make sense, with a frost-bound alligator seated one day at the organ. I’m getting fed up with this!”

  “Not so fed up as tired, probably.” Lakington smiled inside his glass, “Tell you what we’ll do! We’ll have one more nose around the other buildings and then come back here and have a rest—if you can rest in a place like this. How’s that?”

  “Check.”

  She nodded, and they retraced their crumbled footprints to the exterior and started another investigation.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Experiment

  In the time they allotted themselves, they only managed to add to their perplexity. They found further infinities of machinery, obviously all remotely controlled from the first edifice they had entered. Other buildings were apparently offices and domiciles, equipped with all manner of odd furniture to suit the queer inhabitants.

  Most remarkable of all was one gigantic place filled from wall to wall with thousands of beings, like the one they had seen in the control room, all frozen into one solid mass in various postures, their unseeing, faceted eyes gazing at a solitary alligator at the far end of the hall. Since it was impossible to reach him without smashing the jammed beings to dust, the two investigators reluctantly turned away and went back to the first edifice. They squatted down on the floor near that main switchboard, fervently wishing it were possible to remove their hot and cumbersome spacesuits.

  “It looks to me as though some experiment brought about this mess,” Archer Lakington murmured presently, his abstracted eyes traveling once again to the motionless machine controller. “Maybe some experiment in matter that brought about the elimination of a random element. It’s a hard fact to credit that a world might exist without it, without entropy, where everything is, and never becomes. Yet in col
d fact it is just as possible as a world where the random element does exist.”

  “Like the pack of cards from the maker which you shuffle once and can only shuffle into the primary order by a coincidence?” Joyce questioned with a yawn. “Gosh, I’m sleepy!”

  “Like that, yes. The more you shuffle, the worse the disorganization; and the more things you shuffle, the greater the disorganization. Only a complete state cannot be shuffled. It is free of the random element. If we suppose that these alligator gentlemen found a way to weld their entire planet and all it contained into one absolute state, it would destroy the random element. It would be like taking the king of spades out of the card pack and trying to shuffle it alone.”

  Joyce’s weary face brightened momentarily behind the shield of sonium glass.

  “After all, that isn’t so impossible as it sounds!” she exclaimed. “The quantum laws admit of the emission of certain kinds and quantities of light from an atom, and they also admit of absorption of the same kinds and quantities, the undoing of the emission. That very process defies a random element, but in losing the random element it gains something far more complex—the loss of future and past time, because a certain sequence of events running from past to future is the doing of an event, and the same sequence running from future to past is the undoing of it.

  “That infers there is no time at all. The laws of Nature are indifferent as to the doing or undoing of an event, so they must be just as indifferent as to a direction of time from past to future.”

  “Mathematically correct,” Lakington admiringly confirmed. “Left is minus x, right is plus x; past is minus t, future is plus t. What more do you want? And it holds good for all single units, but is at once destroyed when one achieves a composite.”

  He fell silent, brooding, his eyes on the incomprehensible machinery.

  “Yes, I think we’ve hit it,” he averred after a while. “The behavior of my gun, the absolute timelessness of this world. Perfect organization has been achieved, either by accident or design. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Say, has it ever occurred to you that absolute organization of molecules can be shown in poetry? Listen:

  “The famous Duke of York

  With twenty thousand men,

  He marched them up to the top of the hill

  And marched them down again.”

  “So what?” Joyce questioned sleepily, curling up in the ashy hole her body had made in the floor. “I’m going to take a nap. You can recite poetry. Why not try Humpty Dumpty? He was the exact opposite of the Duke of York. Disorganization plus! Remember the stuff about all the king’s horses and all the king’s men that couldn’t put him together again? Random element entered into Humpty—and how!”

  She was asleep before she could answer him. He smiled down at her, then with a sigh at his own peculiar lassitude, he lay down beside her, allowing his drowsy mind to play over the incredible things they had discovered together.

  But long before he could formulate a reason for the organized planet, he had fallen dead asleep.

  To be conscious of the fact that he had fallen asleep was something Lakington could not understand. Where he should have encountered oblivion or hazy indeterminate dreams, he found instead that he was in a profoundly complex condition of sleeping wakefulness.

  His brain was remarkably alert and keen, yet it was no longer controlling his body. An inner conviction assured him that he was fast asleep, or else in a curious state wherein his bodily reactions had no power. He vaguely wondered if Joyce was undergoing the same experience. He could not see her—could, in fact, see only a blank wall of darkness. Nor could any effort of will break it down. His body was no longer under control.

  “Have no fear. You will not be harmed.”

  His brain jolted at the sudden inception of that sentence. It was not spoken, for his ears were useless by reason of the all-enclosing helmet. Neither was it Joyce who had spoken. Vaguely he realized that it must be the pure essence of thought, in sympathy with his own mentality.

  “I am the being at the switchboard,” the communicator suddenly resumed. “By some indeterminate chance you and your mate have come out of the cosmos to this world to release us from a bondage of our own foolish making. You have not gone to sleep in the fashion you call sleep; rather you have succumbed to my stronger mentality, which has temporarily deprived you of the use of your bodies. Only in that state, with your minds dissociated from the mastery of your physical selves, am I able to communicate with you.”

  There was silence for a space and Lakington yearned, with a helpless desperation, to ask the questions surging into his mind. Then suddenly the being resumed.

  “My name is Ixal, so far as I can transcribe it into your language. Before this experiment I was the leading scientist of our people. We numbered five hundred thousand, all of us the last of our race that had formerly occupied other planets in this system. Those other planets have died away. Even the Sun they possessed has ceased to be, and another one has come into being.

  “The course of our experiments took us into the study of entropy, probability of electrons, and disorganization. We reasoned that by a process of molecular selection we could force our world and all it contained into a state of perfect organization, thereby defeating the primary and secondary laws of Nature and bringing into being a state of perfect thermodynamic equilibrium.

  “We achieved this state by working from the basis that energy is not infinitely divisible, or at least not infinitely divided in the process of shuffling. This involved a completely new science of physics, including what you term the quantum laws, which admit of the reversibility of varied radiations from an atom back to the point of origin.

  “We began to study the major stars of our galaxy and determined that their interiors were in a condition of perfect thermodynamic equilibrium. The energy within them was shuffled as it was radiated from matter into ether and back again, so that the possibility of shuffling soon attained maximum limit.

  “Every change had been made and perfect organization achieved—but there were certain laws that governed that process, laws relating to atoms and molecules which are the prime basis of all disorganization. If there were not such laws, perfect balance could never be achieved.

  “The same laws that produce disorganization can be reversed to produce the opposite effect. A flying object striking another object can, by the government of electro-dynamic laws, be made to retain its original kinetic energy and return to its starting point without conversion into heat energy. This fact we proved for ourselves with the instruments we constructed. Thus we built up our science of molecular and atomic organization—a science basically implying that one law can be made to govern another and eliminate the random element from matter and energy.

  “Unfortunately, however, though our experiments were perfect, though our machines definitely brought into being the electrical laws governing the organization of energy, we omitted to reckon in our eagerness that perfect organization cancels the law of Time. This will be clear to you, because increase of a random element indicates the future; more organization indicates the past—but perfect organization without increase or decrease achieves the state of balanced non-entropy, no time.”

  Ixal’s thoughts saddened a trifle as he went on.

  “We were all eager to test out the idea on a large scale. We became the slaves of a scientific obsession, built larger and larger machines capable of bringing organization to bear on all parts of our planet. We arranged a day when the machine should be loosed. My fellows congregated in the main hall of science to listen to our ruler’s preliminary speech. I took up my position at the master control board here and waited for the signal. When it came I released the engines.

  “Since then, millions of years ago, I have never moved. Nor have my fellows. In that instant we came to a dead standstill, neither living nor dying, in a state of perfect timeless equilibrium. Our minds have lived on because mind is not a thing of molecules and atoms, but one sector of a
n inconceivable pattern of mentality in space.

  “Our world could not crumble, could not change, could not revolve; could not do anything but stay exactly as we placed it in that instant of organization. Only by the coming of a random element could we find release.

  “You, my friends, have brought us that release. You have introduced the first random element in nearly twenty millions of years. With every second the shuffling will increase. It started from the instant your space machine entered our atmosphere. Time will catch up with itself and our world and all it contains will cease to be. Be warned of that fact. Leave it immediately!”

  CHAPTER V

  Return of Chance

  Archer Lakington stirred with sudden uneasiness and jolted his eyes open in abrupt bewilderment to survey the great mass of the machine hall. As he sat up in the deepening hole where his body lay, his mind was still swirling with vivid memories of the things he had been told.

  “Did I hear that, or dream it?” he muttered, regarding the motionless alligator man in deep perplexity.

  “You don’t imagine a limited mind like yours could dream a technical thing like that, do you?”

  He twisted round to find Joyce looking at him. Her heated face behind its glass helmet was half serious and half amused. She slowly began to nod.

  “We both heard it,” she confirmed. “The alligator talked to me as well as to you.” She went on reflectively. “Funny, isn’t it? Two boneheads like us from an incredibly far-off world drop in here and provide the key to a prison that’s had these infinitely brilliant people locked up for twenty million years!”

  “Which reminds me!” Lakington interrupted, scrambling to his feet. “He told us to get out of here in double-quick time. Let’s get moving.”

  They cast one last envious, half perplexed look at the vast machinery, tribute to a science that had defeated its own end, and then crept silently out into the ashy street.

  The moment they reached the top of the steps they stood transfixed in consternation, overwhelmed at the sight that met their eyes. Something had happened—something that unimaginably changed the outlook.