A Century of Science Fiction

by Damon Knight (ed. )

  “Hold the phone,” Knight said. “This is a gag. Remember? I—”

  “Is it?” Boyne interrupted. “Is it? Look at me.”

  For almost a minute the young couple stared at the bleached white face with its deadly eyes. The half-smile left Knight’s lips, and Jane shuddered involuntarily. There was chill and dismay in the back room.

  “My God!” Knight glanced helplessly at Jane. “This can’t be happening. He’s got me believing. You?”

  Jane nodded jerkily.

  “What should we do? If everything he says is true we can refuse and live happily ever after.”

  “No,” Jane said in a choked voice. “There may be money and success in that book, but there’s divorce and death too. Give him the book.”

  “Take it,” Knight said faintly.

  Boyne rose instantly. He picked up the parcel and went

  into the phone booth. When he came out he had three books in one hand and a smaller parcel made up of the original wrapping in the other. He placed the books on the table and stood for a moment, smiling down.

  “My gratitude,” he said. “You have eased a precarious situation. It is only fair you should receive something in return. We are forbidden to transfer anything that might divert existing phenomena streams, but at least I can give you one token of the future.”

  He backed away, bowed curiously, and said, “My service to you both.” Then he turned and started out of the tavern. “Hey!” Knight called. “The token?”

  “Mr. Macy has it,” Boyne answered and was gone.

  The couple sat at the table for a few blank moments like sleepers slowly awakening. Then, as reality began to return, they stared at each other and burst into laughter.

  “He really had me scared,” Jane said.

  “Talk about Third Avenue characters. What an act. What’d he get out of it?”

  “Well ... he got your almanac.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense.” Knight began to laugh again. “All that business about paying Macy but not giving him anything. And I’m suposed to see that he isn’t cheated. And the mystery token of the future . . .”

  The tavern door burst open and Macy shot through the saloon into the back room. “Where is he?” Macy shouted. “Where’s the thief? Boyne, he calls himself. More likely his name is Dillinger.”

  “Why, Mr. Macy!” Jane exclaimed. “What’s the matter?” “Where is he?” Macy pounded on the door of the men’s room. “Come out, ye blaggard!”

  “He’s gone,” Knight said. “He left just before you got back.”

  “And you, Mr. Knight!” Macy pointed a trembling finger at the young lawyer. “You, to be party to thievery and racketeers. Shame on you!”

  “What’s wrong?” Knight asked.

  “He paid me one hundred dollars to rent this back room,” Macy cried in anguish. “One hundred dollars. I took the bill over to Bernie the pawnbroker, being cautious-like, and he found out it’s a forgery. It’s a counterfeit.”

  “Oh, no.” Jane laughed. “That’s too much. Counterfeit?”

  “Look at this,” Mr. Macy shouted, slamming the bill down on the table.

  Knight inspected it closely. Suddenly he turned pale and the laughter drained out of his face. He reached into his inside pocket, withdrew a checkbook and began to write with trembling fingers.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Jane asked.

  “Making sure that Macy isn’t cheated,” Knight said. “You’ll get your hundred dollars, Mr. Macy.”

  “Oliver! Are you insane? Throwing away a hundred dollars . .

  “And I won’t be losing anything either,” Knight answered. “All will be adjusted without dislocation! They’re diabolical. Diabolical!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look at the bill,” Knight said in a shaky voice. “Look closely.”

  It was beautifully engraved and genuine in appearance. Benjamin Franklin’s benign features gazed up at them mildly and authentically; but in the lower right-hand corner was printed: “Series 1980 D.” And underneath that was signed: “Oliver Wilson Knight, Secretary of the Treasury.”

  A word about the unusual speech of Mr. Boyne: Vorloss might be read as German Verlust, damage, loss, in which case verdash would obviously be a Puritan version of ver-dammt; hence, “Vorloss verdash—loosely, “Hell and damnation! Other neologisms used by Mr. Boyne are selfexplanatory, such as chronos for “hour”; but in still others, as for instance “ ‘The Future is Tekon' ” Mr. Bester is thumbing his nose at you. The speech of a man from 1990 would inevitably include words we could not interpret at all, and therefore Mr. Bester is allowed to make them up and does not have to understand them himself. All the same, if only we could unravel the meaning of that “one lightning, skazon line” . . .

  One way of resolving time paradoxes is to tie them into a knot, as Alfred Bester did in the story you have just read, and as Robert A. Heinlein did in “By His Bootstraps” Another way is to suppose that every possible event takes place somewhere in an infinity of parallel time tracks. There is a world where the Scandinavians colonized America, for instance, and one where they did not, but the Chinese did; and one where you went back in time and killed your grandfather. Murray Leinster was the first to use this idea in science fiction, in a 1934 story called “Sidewise in Time.”

  Now here is a story, from the December 1952 Startling Stories, about one of those parallel universes; and what its differences are from the world around you, you will find out as you read.

  SAIL ON SAIL ON!

  BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  Friar Sparks sat wedged between the wall and the realizer. He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes. From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swiveled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poop deck. Visibility was low.

  Outside was dusk and a lantern by the railing. Two sailors leaned on it. Beyond them bobbed the bright lights and dark shapes of the Nina and the Pinta. And beyond them was the smooth horizon-brow of the Atlantic, edged in black and blood by the red dome of the rising moon.

  The single carbon filament bulb above the monk’s tonsure showed a face lost in fat—and in concentration.

  The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.

  “Zzisss! So you are out of sherry already. . . . Pop! . . . Too bad . . . Crackle . . . you hardened old winebutt. . . . Zzz . . . May God have mercy on your sins. . . .

  “Lots of gossip, news, et cetera. . . . Hisses! . . . Bend your ear instead of your neck, impious one. . . . The Turks are said to be gathering . . . crackle ... an army to march on Austria. It is rumored that the flying sausages, said by so many to have been seen over the capitals of the Christian world, are of Turkish origin. The rumor goes they have ,been invented by a renegade Rogerian who was converted to the Muslim religion. ... I say . . . zziss ... to that. No one of us would do that. It is a falsity spread by our enemies in the Church to discredit us. But many people believe that. . . .

  “How close does the Admiral calculate he is to Cipangu now?

  “Flash! Savonarola today denounced the Pope, the wealthy of Florence, Greek art and literature, and the experiments of the disciples of Saint Roger Bacon. . . . Zzz! . . . The man is sincere but misguided and dangerous. ... I predict he’ll end up on the stake he’s always prescribing for us. . . .

  “Pop. . . . This will kill you. . . . Two Irish mercenaries by the name of Pat and Mike were walking down the street of Granada when a beautiful Saracen lady leaned out of a balcony and emptied a pot of . . . hiss! . . . and Pat looked up and . . . Crackle. . . . Good, hah? Brother Juan told that last night. . . .

  “PV . . . PV . . . Are you coming in? . . . PV . . . PV ... Yes, I know it’s dangerous to band
y such jests about, but nobody is monitoring us tonight. . . . Zzz. . . . I think they’re not, anyway. . . .”

  And so the ether bent and warped with their messages. And presently Friar Sparks tapped out the PV that ended their talk—the “Pax vobiscum.” Then he pulled the plug out that connected his earphones to the set and, lifting them from his ears, clamped them down forward over his temples in the regulation manner.

  After sidling bent-kneed from the toldilla, punishing his belly against the desk’s hard edge as he did so, he walked over to the railing. De Salcedo and de Torres were leaning there and talking in low tones. The big bulb above gleamed on the page’s red-gold hair and on the interpreter’s full black beard. It also bounced pinkishly off the priest’s smooth-shaven jowls and the light scarlet robe of the Rogerian order. His cowl, thrown back, served as a bag for scratch paper, pens, an ink bottle, tiny wrenches and screwdrivers, a book on cryptography, a slide rule, and a manual of angelic principles.

  “Well, old rind,” said young de Salcedo familiarly, “what do you hear from Las Palmas?”

  “Nothing now. Too much interference from that.” He pointed to the moon riding the horizon ahead of them. “What an orb!” bellowed the priest. “It’s as big and red as my revered nose!”

  The two sailors laughed, and de Salcedo said, “But it will get smaller and paler as the night grows, Father. And your proboscis will, on the contrary, become larger and more sparkling in inverse proportion according to the square of the ascent—”

  He stopped and grinned, for the monk had suddenly dipped his nose, like a porpoise diving into the sea, raised it again, like the same animal jumping from a wave, and then once more plunged it into the heavy currents of their breath. Nose to nose, he faced them, his twinkling little eyes seeming to emit sparks like the realizer in his toldilla.

  Again, porpoiselike, he sniffed and snuffed several times, quite loudly. Then, satisfied with what he had gleaned from their breaths, he winked at them. He did not, however, mention his findings at once, preferring to sidle toward the subject.

  He said, “This Father Sparks on the Grand Canary is so entertaining. He stimulates me with all sorts of philosophical notions, both valid and fantastic. For instance, tonight, just before we were cut off by that”—he gestured at the huge bloodshot eye in the sky—“he was discussing what he called worlds of parallel time tracks, an idea originated by Dysphagius of Gotham. It’s his idea there may be other worlds in coincident but not contacting universes, that God, being infinite and of unlimited creative talent and ability, the Master Alchemist, in other words, has possibly—perhaps necessarily—created a plurality of continua in which every probable event has happened.”

  “Huh?” grunted de Salcedo.

  “Exactly. Thus, Columbus was turned down by Queen Isabella, so this attempt to reach the Indies across the Atlantic was never made. So we would not now be standing here plunging ever deeper into Oceanus in our three cockleshells, there would be no booster buoys strung out between us and the Canaries, and Father Sparks at Las Palmas and I on the Santa María would not be carrying on our fascinating conversations across the ether.

  “Or, say, Roger Bacon was persecuted by the Church, instead of being encouraged and giving rise to the order whose inventions have done so much to insure the monopoly of the church on alchemy and its divinely inspired guidance of that formerly pagan and hellish practice.”

  De Torres opened his mouth, but the priest silenced him with a magnificent and imperious gesture and continued.

  “Or, even more ridiculous, but thought-provoking, he speculated just this evening on universes with different physical laws. One, in particular, I thought very droll. As you probably don’t know, Angelo Angelei has proved, by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that different weights fall at different speeds. My delightful colleague on the Grand Canary is writing a satire which takes place in a universe where Aristotle is made out to be a liar, where all things drop with equal velocities, no matter what their size. Silly stuff, but it helps to pass the time. We keep the ether busy with our little angels.”

  De Salcedo said, “Uh, I don’t want to seem too curious about the secrets of your holy and cryptic order, Friar Sparks. But these little angels your machine realizes intrigue me. Is it a sin to presume to ask about them?”

  The monk’s bull roar slid to a dove cooing. “Whether it’s a sin or not depends. Let me illustrate, young fellows. If you were concealing a bottle of, say, very scarce sherry on you, and you did not offer to share it with a very thirsty old gentleman, that would be a sin. A sin of omission. But if you were to give that desert-dry, that pilgrim-weary, that devout, humble, and decrepit old soul a long, soothing, refreshing, and stimulating draught of lifegiving fluid, daughter of the vine, I would find it in my heart to pray for you for that deed of loving-kindness, of encompassing charity. And it would please me so much I might tell you a little of our realizer. Not enough to hurt you, just enough so you might gain more respect for the intelligence and glory of my order.”

  De Salcedo grinned conspiratorially and passed the monk the bottle he’d hidden under his jacket. As the friar tilted it, and the chug-chug-chug of vanishing sherry became louder, the two sailors glanced meaningfully at each other. No wonder the priest, reputed to be so brilliant in his branch of the alchemical mysteries, had yet been sent off on this half-baked voyage to devil-knew-where. The Church had calculated that if he survived, well and good. If he didn’t, then he would sin no more.

  The monk wiped his lips on his sleeve, belched loudly as a horse, and said, “Gracias, boys. From my heart, so deeply buried in this fat, I thank you. An old Irishman, dry as a camel’s hoof, choking to death with the dust of abstinence, thanks you. You have saved my life.”

  “Thank rather that magic nose of yours,” replied de Salcedo. “Now, old rind, now that you’re well greased again, would you mind explaining as much as you are allowed about that machine of yours?”

  Friar Sparks took fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, his listeners asked a few permitted questions.

  “. . . and you say you broadcast on a frequency of eighteen hundred k.c.?” the page asked. “What does ‘k.c.’ mean?” “K stands for the French kilo, from a Greek word meaning thousand. And c stands for the Hebrew cherubim, the ‘little angels.’ Angel comes from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger. It is our concept that the ether is crammed with these cherubim, these little messengers. Thus, when we Friar Sparkses depress the key of our machine, we are able to realize some of the infinity of ‘messengers’ waiting for just such a demand for service.

  “So, eighteen hundred k.c. means that in a given unit of time one million, eight hundred thousand cherubim line up and hurl themselves across the ether, the nose of one being brushed by the feathertips of the cherub’s wings ahead. The height of the wing crests of each little creature is even, so that if you were to draw an outline of the whole train, there would be nothing to distinguish one cherub from the next, the whole column forming that grade of little angels known as C.W.”

  “C.W.?”

  “Continuous wingheight. My machine is a C.W. realizer.” Young de Salcedo said, “My mind reels. Such a concept! Such a revelation! It almost passes comprehension. Imagine, the aerial of your realizer is cut just so long, so that the evil cherubim surging back and forth on it demand a predetermined and equal number of good angels to combat them. And this seduction coil on the realizer crowds ‘bad’ angels into the left-hand, the sinister, side. And when the bad little cherubim are crowded so closely and numerously that they can’t bear each other’s evil company, they jump the spark gap and speed around the wire to the ‘good’ plate. And in this racing back and forth they call themselves to the attention of the ‘little messengers,’ the yea-saying cherubim. And you, Friar Sparks, by manipulating your machine thus and so, and by lifting and lowering your key, you bring these invisible and friendly lines of carriers, your etheric and winged postmen, into reality. And you are able, thus, to com
municate at great distances with your brothers of the order.” "

  “Great God!” said de Torres.

  It was not a vain oath but a pious exclamation of wonder. His eyes bulged; it was evident that he suddenly saw that man was not alone, that on every side, piled on top of each other, flanked on every angle, stood a host. Black and white, they presented a solid chessboard of the seemingly empty cosmos, black for the nay-sayers, white for the yea-sayers, maintained by a Hand in delicate balance and subject as the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea to exploitation by man.

  Yet de Torres, having seen such a vision as has made a saint of many a man, could only ask, “Perhaps you could tell me how many angels may stand on the point of a pin?” Obviously, de Torres would never wear a halo. He was destined, if he lived, to cover his bony head with the mortarboard of a university teacher.

  De Salcedo snorted. “I’ll tell you. Philosophically speaking, you may put as many angels on a pinhead as you want to. Actually speaking, you may put only as many as there is room for. Enough of that. I’m interested in facts, not fancies. Tell me, how could the moon’s rising interrupt your reception of the cherubim sent by the Sparks at Las Palmas?” “Great Caesar, how would I know? Am I a repository of universal knowledge? No, not I! A humble and ignorant friar, I! All I can tell you is that last night it rose like a bloody tumor on the horizon, and that when it was up I had to quit marshaling my little messengers in their short and long columns. The Canary station was quite overpowered, so that both of us gave up. And the same thing happened tonight.” “The moon sends messages?” asked de Torres.

  “Not in a code I can decipher. But it sends, yes.”

  “Santa María !”

  “Perhaps,” suggested de Salcedo, “there are people on that moon, and they are sending.”

  Friar Sparks blew derision through his nose. Enormous as were his nostrils, his derision was not small-bore. Artillery of contempt laid down a barrage that would have silenced any but the strongest of souls.