Trimble thought of a lonely woman making herself a drink at three in the afternoon. She thinks of myriads of alter egos, with husbands, lovers, children, friends. Unbearable, to think that all the might-have-beens were as real as herself. As real as this ice pick in her hand. Well, why not?
And she goes out to a movie, but she takes the ice pick.
And the honest citizen with a carefully submerged urge to commit rape, just once. Reading his newspaper at breakfast, and there's another story from Crosstime: They've found a world line in which Kennedy the First was assassinated. Strolling down a street, he thinks of world lines and infinite branchings, of alter egos already dead, or jailed, or president. A girl in a miniskirt passes, and she has nice legs. Well, why not? .
Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.
Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not?
And he ran out of the office shouting, "Bentley, listen. I've got the answer!"
And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn't any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would continue.
And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a philosophical point! .
And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a sandwich and some coffee.
And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one...
And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and
fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.
fired. The gun jerked and blasted a hole in the ceiling.
fired. The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.
took off the top of his head.
PASSERBY
It was noon of a hot blue day. The park was lively with raised voices and bright clothing, children and adults and the geriatrics generation, of which I have the honor to be a member. I had come early enough to claim a bench, and was old and feeble enough to hold it.
I had brought a sandwich lunch in a Baggy. I ate slowly, saving out an orange and a second sac of beer for later. The populace danced before me, never dreaming that I was watching.
The afternoon sun burned warm on my scalp. A lizardlike torpor stole over me, so that the sound of adult voices and children's screaming-for-the-hell-of-it dimmed and faded.
But I heard the footsteps. They jarred the earth.
I opened my eyes and saw the rammer.
He was six feet tall and massively built. He wore a scarf and a pair of blue balloon pants, not too far out of style, but they didn't match. What they exposed of his skin was loose on him, as if he had shrunk within it. Indeed, he looked like a giraffe wearing an elephant's skin.
He walked without springs. His feet slapped hard into the gravel with all his weight behind them. Small wonder I had heard him coming. By now everyone in sight was either looking at him, or turning to see what everyone was looking at. Except the children, who had already lost interest.
To me he was irresistible.
There are the casual peoplewatchers who watch their neighbors in restaurants or monorail stations when they have nothing else to do. They develop their own amateurish technique, and they don't know what to look for, and they usually get caught. But I'm not that kind of peoplewatcher.
There are the fanatics, the dedicated ones, who learn their technique in a closed-circuit 3V class. They hold lifetime subscriptions to Face In The Crowd and Eyes Of The City, the hobby magazines. They write letters to the editor telling how they spotted Secretary-General Haruman in a drug store and he looked unhappy.
That's me.
And here I was not twenty yards from a rammer, a man from the stars.
He had to be that. His taste in clothing was odd, and his carelessly draped skin was alien. His legs had not yet learned to cushion his weight against Earth's heavier gravity. He projected an indefinable combination of discomfort and self-consciousness and interest and surprise and pleasure, that silently shouted: Tourist!
His eyes, looking out from behind the ill-fitting mask of his face, were bright and blue and happy. Our staring rudeness was noticed, but did not affect his almost religious joy. Nor did his feet, though they must have hurt. His smile was dreamy and very strange. Lift the corners of a spaniel's mouth with your forefingers, and you'd see such a smile.
He drew in life from the sky and the grass and the voices and the growing things. I watched his face and tried to read it. Was he the priest of some new Earth-worshipping religion? No. Probably he was seeing Earth for the first time: tuning his bio-rhythms to Earth for the first time, feeling Earthweight settle over and into his bones, watching suns rise twenty-four hours apart, until his very genes told him he was home.
It made his day when he saw the boy.
The boy was around ten, a handsome child, naked and tanned all over. (When I was growing up, even the infants wore clothing in public.) I had not noticed him until now, and he in turn had not noticed the rammer. He knelt on the path that passed my bench, his back toward me. I could not see what he was doing; but he was very intent and serious about it.
By now most of the passerby had turned away, from disinterest or an overdose of good manners. I watched the rammer watching the boy. I watched through half-closed eyes, practicing my famous imitation of an old man asleep in the sun. The Heisenberg Principle implies that no peoplewatcher should allow himself to be caught at it.
The boy stooped suddenly, then rose with his hands cupped. Moving with exaggerated care, he turned from the gravel path and crossed the grass toward a dark old oak.
The rammer's eyes went big and round. All his pleasure gave way to horror, and then the horror drained away and left nothing. The star man's eyes turned up in his head, his slack face went even slacker, and his knees began to buckle.
Stiff as I am these days, I reached him. I slid an admittedly bony shoulder under his armpit before he could fall. All the mass of him came gratefully down on me.
I should have folded like an accordion. Somehow, I got the rammer to the bench before I had to let go of him. To an astonished matron I wheezed, "Get a doctor!"
She nodded briskly and waddled away. I turned back to the rammer. Sick eyes looked up at me from under straight black bangs. The rammer's face was oddly tanned: dark where the sun could reach, white as milk where folded skin cast shadows. His chest and arms were like that too. Where the skin was pale it had paled further with shock. "No need for doctor," he whispered. "Not sick. Something I saw."
"Sure. Put your head between your legs. It'll keep you from fainting." I opened my remaining beer sac.
"I will be all right in a moment," he said from between his knees. He spoke the tongue oddly, and his weakness slurred it further. "It was the shock of what I saw."
"Here?"
"Yes. No. Not completely..." He stopped to shift mental gears, and I handed him the beer. He looked at it as if wondering which end to suck on, found the nipple, raised the sac and half-drained it in one desperate draught.
"What was it you saw?" I asked.
He had to finish swallowing. "I saw an alien spacecraft. Without the spacecraft it would have meant nothing."