The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Please elucidate, dear. I, for one, do not understand.”

  “The first day we arrived at Prime Base, almost eight years ago our time and about six months ago their time, my master and tutor, Worsel, said to me mind-to-mind in talking about how he had spanked—he didn’t say ‘spanked’ but that was the idea—how he had spanked Sir Austin: ‘I neither pleasure in it nor dislike doing it. It needed doing: I did it.’ While I don’t expect us to think like Velantians—”

  “We can’t!” I blurted out.

  “No, Deety, we can’t. But we can stop thinking like children; we can refuse to let ourselves be diverted by fun—even fun as exciting as risking our lives to kill vermin. Instead, we can and should go back to our original purpose: extermination. We can make a real effort to see whether or not it can be done.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Zebbie, of course you don’t see how … and neither do I. Let’s find out! We have the greatest mathematicians of three universes—Jacob, Mobyas Toras, and Sir Austin. We have Worsel—who could teach all of you what he’s taught me, if you’ll let him. We have great strategists—what would be the outcome if we asked Hal Halsa and Port Admiral Haynes to confer over our problem? There would be no language barrier; Hal Halsa is used to telepathy and the admiral has his Lens. Dear ones, we haven’t even begun to see what resources we have. Let’s find out.”

  “Manpower.”

  “But Jacob, it may not be manpower we need; it may be brainpower. Let’s find out. I so move!”

  “Second!” said my husband.

  “Me, too!” I yelped.

  “Passed by acclamation,” Pop agreed. “Deety, will you take notes? Put Ted Smith’s name down. And Carthoris. And LaVerne. Mmm … would Mentor advise us?”

  “We can ask Worsel, Jacob. It can’t hurt to ask.”

  XLIX

  Zebadiah

  Minus six hours and counting ….

  I,Zebadiah John Carter, quondam Captain United States Aerospace Force Reserve of Earth-Zero—definition of “Earth-Zero” to follow—quondam “research” professor and playboy, skipper of private Continua Craft Gay Deceiver, and temporarily commander in chief (wry laugh) of Strike Force The Number of the Beast, am making this running record for the benefit of history (histories), or so I keep telling myself—the truth being that I am making this personal record to keep from jittering in front of “my” staff officers and the crew. If I can sit here and talk into this thing, maybe they won’t notice that I’m as jumpy as an ant on a hot rock.

  Designations of universes and planets: the number of universes accessible via the Burroughs-Cardynge-Mobyas transformations is 1.03144247+ × 1028 —correct to nine places, which isn’t nearly enough. That sloppily inaccurate figure mislays a few billion or trillion universes. But what’s a billion universes, more or less, when the total is so large that no human being, not even a Barsoomian, can possibly count it in a lifetime? Yet it is a small number compared with a googol to the googolth power—another finite number which does not approach infinity. (“Infinity” is not a number; it is a metaphysical hang-up.)

  This number, 1.03+ to the 28th power of 10, is sometimes (for no good reason) called “The Number of the Beast.” The expression “The Number of the Beast” is also used (for better reason) to mean the number of vermin we seek to exterminate on sixteen infested planets—once an unknown number but now closely approximated (more later). How many there may be in the totality of universes we have no way to guess—we may have to attempt to fumigate again in a century … or a millennium … or longer.

  Earth-Zero, hereafter designated Earth0: no universe or sheaf of universes has a unique zero point; any point may be selected. Earth0 is so designated because Dr. Jacob Burroughs was born on that planet; the spatial axes of Universe0 (containing Earth0) are arbitrarily designated x°, y°, and z°—x° is Galactic North of the galaxy containing Earth0; y° is direction from Earth0 of Galactic Center (i.e., the direction of Sagittarius, more or less); z° is at right angles to the other two.

  The duration axis of Universe0 is t°; the B-C-M transformations include two more duration axes, tau and teh; Earth0 does not use them but universes that do use them are accessible by rotation with the aid of Burroughs-Thorndyke continua devices.

  We use three more relative coordinates, which refer solely to a ship or other craft (not a universe): length, width, and height—called l, w, and h—meaning fore-and-aft, thwartships, and up-and-down; forward, starboard, and up are arbitrarily positive.

  (Confusing? Believe me, you can’t get to the post office without a map—and sometimes it isn’t easy with a map.)

  In this battle, we are concerned with sixteen infested planets, each planet one spatial quantum from its two nearest neighbors, strung like beads along the hyper—or pseudodirection—tau. All are analogs of Earth0 and all share duration along t-axis.

  There are many, many other analogs of Earth0, some of which use t for duration (e.g., the current home of the Burroughs-Carter family, Earth-Teh-Thirty-Nine-Plus = Earth-Teh-39+), and some of which do not use t for duration (e.g., the world of Prime Base and the Galactic Patrol, and the world of the Land of Oz). Nobody knows how many Earth-analogs there are, especially as any of the six known axes can be a duration axis … and any one of three of the remaining five can be spatial. This could be fairly simple if all shifts were ninety degrees—but angle can be divided into angular quanta … and it gets so out-of-hand that you wind up with the Number of the Beast (first meaning). Me, I have barely glanced at a few hundred of the universes and have lived for any considerable time in only five.

  Minus five hours thirteen minutes and counting ….

  This is being recorded in “my” flagship, Britannia II, on loan by the Galactic Patrol, and is simultaneously being recorded via sub-ether radio in sixteen command ships and at Prime Base, and an eighteenth copy is being flipped via Burroughs-Thorndyke message captures to a walled-off root cellar in our home on Earth-Teh-39+, or perhaps I should say that I hope they arrive in empty air in that root cellar. If not, there may be a crater there instead … as we still don’t know what happens when something goes wrong, and Murphy’s Law never sleeps. But I have great faith in Master Technician LaVerne Thorndyke. In addition to my personal commentaries, all details of the battles on sixteen planets will be recorded automatically and flipped inside an enormous spherical net in 24-hour orbit above Prime Base.

  Back to those sixteen planets: to me, an “Earth Analog” is a planet so much like the one where I was born that I can recognize its continents. The continental outlines may be changed by climate—glaciation, interglaciation, low-mean sea level, high-mean sea level; Luna and Sol are always recognizable. It would appear (not certain) that all or many of these Earth-analogs share quasi-identical histories up to some branching date or event. At our present home (E-Teh-39+) the branching point is the early 1600s, when most of the ice melted and thereby changed the history and shorelines of the entire planet. Earth of Prime Base differs from Earth0 at a branch point in 1965; when we had Humphrey for president, they got someone named Goldwater.

  Earth-Tau-Three-Plus branches about the same time but in a different way; the sequence there was Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (?), Ford (Henry Ford III?), Carter (I noticed that name as it is my own surname—but Earth0 had no prominent politician of any name). Earth-Tau-3+ is worth noting as it is the most heavily infested of the sixteen.

  1066 is a branch point; Earth-analogs in which the Norman Invasion never took place are in their history quite unlike the ones I can recognize somewhat. 1939 is another branch date; Earth-Tau-2+ is one such and worth noting because Jake, Deety, Hilda, and I spent several weeks in that universe, not on that Earth-analog (it’s a dreary mess and will be hard to clean—badly infested) but on another planet several light years away and about two thousand years in “our” future—and all four of us are now biologically about twenty-five years old—desirable, very desirable, but it means that Deety and I have a daught
er, Janie (Hilda Jane) who is as big as her mother; the two look more like twins than mother and daughter. The discrepancy shows even more in the Burroughs family; Jayzee (Jacob Zebadiah) is much bigger than Sharpie and three centimeters taller than Jake.

  But anachronisms don’t bother our kids. All their lives they have experienced both anachronism and switching universes. They know that they may switch relative ages, too, either through living on different time axes … or from visiting Doc Lafe Hubert’s clinic more than two thousand years up Tau-axis (as we adults did) and getting rejuvenated, then returning.

  Like Gay Deceiver, Lafe’s ship operates both in space and time, but his experience is the reverse of ours. He traveled in time along t-axis quite a bit without leaving his native universe (Tau-2+) before he discovered that he could reenter from irrelevance (null space-time) into another spatial axes … whereas Jake and I have been aware of Gay’s time-traveling potential from scratch, but have barely used it, both from lack of subjective time and from sheet funk, fear of getting hopelessly lost.

  Lafe doesn’t worry about that; his computer-autopilot is a couple of millennia more advanced than Gay; it (she) even has a personality without being in the Land of Oz. We ran across Lafe at Prime Base during the several years (Prime Base time-zero years by New Earth time) of re-education we underwent before mounting this sixteen-planet battle. Deety had her third child there (Ted, both for Ted Smith and E. E. Smith); Lafe took care of her—he was there, so he told me, studying traumatic surgery and regeneration … but Deety took a shine to him and asked him to tend her. Lafe was well qualified—he told me one foggy night that he had delivered over twelve thousand babies, about fifty of them his own. I mentioned it to him the next day and he said ‘I must have drunk too much.’ No matter; Lafe is filled with stories, many of them contradictory—but he was lecturing in OB to pay for his additional training. Deety could not have had a better baby cotcher.

  Anachronism does bother me; I’m not used to being twenty-five again after having moved more-or-less gracefully into my forties. But my background is not that of my kids. My great-grandfather crossed the plains in a covered wagon at a headlong twelve miles (19+ km) per day, the longest trip of his life. I remember him; he died when I was three—our lives overlap. I bounce around the universes via a gadget I don’t understand; stay two years at Prime Base; flip home to pick up some photographs; find the pot of coffee Sharpie made two years before, still fresh and hot; stop and drink a cup while I sort out the pix I want; flip back and find I’ve been gone no time. That’s not Future Shock, that’s everything shock.

  It was both Lafe and Mobyas Toras who caused us to back into this rejuvenation deal. One quick trip had given Mobyas a taste for space-time-universes travel; he happily accepted when invited to go to Prime Base to confer with Jake and Sir Austin—then moaned at dinner one night, in the jargon that he and Jake had worked up, that the most exciting mathematics of his life had been opened to him just as his life was closing—so much to do, so little time.

  Lafe was having dinner with us; he seemed to understand the jargon (he’s quick with languages). The next morning Mobyas did not show up on time for his daily wrangle with Jake and Sir Austin. Instead, about twenty minutes late, Lafe appeared with this handsome young Barsoomian warrior who insisted, in fluent English, that (all appearances to the contrary), he was Mobyas Toras—then proved it by resuming the shouting argument he had been having with Jake and Cardynge the day before—an argument that at once became four-cornered as Lafe joined in—it seemed Lafe was a field-theory mathematician as well as a physician and surgeon … a good enough one that Sir Austin took less than two hours to accord him the same rude warmth with which he generally treated Jake.

  So here we were: Deety in her thirties, me in my forties, Hilda in her fifties, Jake in his sixties—and all of us getting ready for the biggest trial of our lives. Sharpie conferred with Worsel about it, then we all went with Lafe to his home and came back the next day, having been gone two months—and we are all in our middle twenties again. I’m not going to try to tell about Lafe’s household and his remarkable family; there’s a battle coming on.

  Minus three hours forty-seven minutes and counting ….

  This fleet is assembled and now almost fully manned; the Barsoom Brigades are here; General Hal Halsa just now reported to me. But we won’t rotate until minus ten seconds, whereupon all sixteen fleets will do so at once, automatically, via sub-ether radio tick—with my trembling right index finger on the manual button, just in case Murphy’s Law picks that instant to sneeze—(almost) impossible; LaVerne has been outwitting Murphy all his adult life.

  In the ensuing ten seconds, each ship will report (automatically via sub-ether) to its planet-force flag; those sixteen planet-force commanders will report “rotated and ready” to me via Burroughs-Thorndyke message capsules—sub-ether radio doesn’t work between universes but Burroughs translation works even faster—if the messages are pre-prepared (they are) and the Burroughs-Thorndyke capsules are set to bounce to Earth0 orbit—where I will be. But the capsules will not arrive in this ship; they will arrive in open space and at once signal arrival via sub-ether—LaVerne outwitting Murphy’s Law again; no chance is being taken of a capsule 30 cm in diameter and grossing 8.91 kilos blowing the bejasus out of Brittannia II.

  This should take seven seconds max. That gives me three seconds in which to call off the battle by punching one button that could flip forty-eight capsules to sixteen universes at sixteen Earth-analogs, with sub-ether automatic signal not to attack—but to rotate and go home to Prime Base.

  Otherwise, on the tick of zero seconds, the attack starts, in sixteen parallel universes, tau-axis.

  In front of me is an array, 4 × 4, of sixteen lights. If they all wink green, the attack goes forward. If fewer than sixteen come on, I’m supposed to make up my mind, one way or the other.

  I’ve made up my mind. But I haven’t told anyone, not even my chief of staff, Gray Lensman Ted Smith. I shan’t ask his advice.

  Minus two hours thirty-one minutes and counting ….

  Why did I get kicked upstairs to this useless job? Once the fighting starts I can’t affect it. Oh, theoretically I could, as there is a Velantian Lensman in each planet-force flagship, and Worsel (here beside me) should be able to reach any or all of them; the seventeen Velantians have practiced dummy runs on teh-axis from minus one to minus sixteen—the linkup worked, after Worsel restrained all but two (who got through the first time).

  Ted tells me that admirals rarely can affect the outcome of a battle. They establish battle plan and doctrine—but once the shooting starts the unit commanders are on their own. I’m sure he senses my feelings (not via Lens; Ted is naturally empathic) and is trying to assure me that I am not useless. I reminded him that Kimball Kinnison had devised a way for an admiral-in-chief to handle multiple fleets during action. He agreed but pointed out that Kinnison’s method did not apply to sixteen parallel universes—but is about to be used by each of sixteen planetary force commands. And so it is.

  How I got here: 1) I flunked out of school. 2) Then I got drafted. Deety and Jake and I all took sensitivity training from Worsel and Dr. Phillips while Sharpie went to Arisia—no, I’m telling this in the wrong order. Hilda took a refresher with Worsel while Jake and Cardynge and (later) Mobyas discussed the mathematics of an optimum strategy for hitting sixteen planets to exterminate hidden vermin, each of the sixteen being a unique problem and rendered enormously complicated by the necessity of not hurting the legitimate population other than by mischance (and that has to be minimized), and the need not to damage property unnecessarily—but this last factor was of least importance. Sometimes the only way to kill rats is to burn the barn—but the horses must be taken out first.

  I heard from Jake that the simplest planetary problem (Tau-8+) had seventy-three major variables, and the mathematics committee’s first job was to decide which variables must be reduced to constants through reconnaissance before a strateg
y board could consider turning mathematics into logistics and strategy—after which weapons and tactics could be discussed sixteen separate ways.

  All this took years.

  But they were Prime Base years; time stood still on t-axis. Deety had our third child (Ted), recovered from childbirth, and was back to work—while that pot of fresh coffee never cooled off in our home on New Earth, Teh-39+.

  But this trading around of time works two other ways, also. Worsel, Cardynge, LaVerne Thorndyke, and Ted Smith all were needed in the war with Boskone. But they (even Worsel) could borrow time by flipping to t-axis duration on Barsoom; LaVerne’s first Burroughs-Thorndyke device had been installed as promised in a ship large enough for Worsel—and Barsoom had not only cleared out the Panki vermin but also Barsoom was a place used to the idea that humans need not look like homo sapiens. Worsel was a welcome guest in the palace, used our former giant apartment, and held honorary rank as staff colonel general. He could think undisturbed in Helium, for weeks or months at a time, on our problems or his own, and return to Prime Base at the very instant he left. So could the others.

  But the third method of manipulating time could be used to “freeze” an instant both in Prime Base and on our sixteen target planets; go to Lafe Hubert’s home some twenty-five hundred years up t-axis in World-Tau-2+, stay there as long as needed, then be reinserted at Prime Base or elsewhere with no elapsed clock time. I don’t know how Lafe’s ship works; its technology is far in advance even of that at Prime Base. It looks like a huge flying saucer and has no machinery in it that I recognize. It is usually piloted by one or the other of Lafe’s sisters—although that piloting seems to consist solely in telling the autopilot in unstructured language (I think it is unstructured) what is needed.

  Minus two hours seven minutes and holding ….

  Something odd is going on with Planetary Attack Force Earth-Tau-3+—and I’ve had to make my first decision as commander in chief. Ships—no, fleets—have been showing up out of nowhere and asking to be attached to that particular planetary strike force. They are not unwelcome, as that is our most difficult target, most heavily infested (millions!), and the Posenian Lensmen who reconnoitered it reported apologetically that no accurate count could be made from space. They extrapolated that the planet would sterilize itself in ten to one hundred years, leaving nothing alive above sea level—and that might be the logical course to follow.