This particular phase of this particular problem had been completed. The basic questions had been answered. An unseen hand had reached into the remote past, had twisted probabilities to the ultimate degree of distortion. In its simplest sense, false worlds had been created. The historical derivations had been weighed. Cause-effects had been measured in all temporal directions.
And now the ultimate step in the problem was held in stasis, merely because of the almost unpredictable whim of a female who, being a structural portion of an experiment in improbability, was herself improbable...
He came to her as she stood at the high window, and he said, “You must return. I know that. Come back, if it can be done, and if you have the desire. I can keep you a prisoner no longer.”
“Not a prisoner, Andro.”
“You must go back.”
“I will return if I can. But you’re right.”
They went to the golden ship where the cables were already attached, waiting.
She turned as she entered the port, and lifted her hand slowly. Her eyes were misted. She turned quickly to the controls. The port folded shut.
And thus, with the whip crack of her departure, the universe itself, Andro’s time and place and cities and suns and planets and wars and history — snapped out as though a quick finger had touched the light switch, leaving a room in darkness. The webs of probability had been pulled tight, twisted. And now the pressure was released. The record had been kept. The experiment was over.
Probability is like a plastic which is formed with a molecular “memory.” It can be distorted, but once released, it will revert.
The reversion will be a function of time, rather than space. Tangential worlds can be artificially created. So long as the artificial pressure is maintained, they will seem to “exist.” But with the release of that pressure...
The Agent Ship had plunged into the crust of Zeran in Era 4, powerless to save the sole remaining ship, the flagship of Andro’s fleet. The crippled flagship swung lower, out of control. Solin, at the controls of the Agent ship, picked up the crippled ship in his screens and swung up through the planet crust in order to be within close range in case anything might be done. He halted the Agent ship twenty feet below ground level just as the crippled ship landed with a tremendous jarring crash.
Calna moved up behind him and watched the screen over Solin’s shoulder. A powerful man staggered out through the huge rent in the skin of the ship, dragging an unconscious dark-haired girl. They saw him glance up at the dark skies, his face twisted with fury and anger. He fumbled for a pulse in the girl’s throat, then stood silently, shoulders slumped, in stoic grief. Again he searched the blackness overhead, and ran into the city. His wounds had weakened him. He weaved as he ran, but he tugged a weapon from his holster.
“Can we save him once more?” Calna asked calmly.
“Not this time. They’ve seen him run into the city.”
“At least we could follow. Report the end of it.”
They took the portable screen from the rack, left the ship standing there, sliced through the depths of the city, following Andro in his blundering run. They saw him take refuge in a blind alley, shadowed by the eternal blue dusk. They saw him brace his shoulders against the wall, waiting for them to find him.
Calna and Solin waited directly below him.
Soon the dying man was spotted. He used the weapon well. His last shot was fired from within the boundary of death itself, the finger tightening in the last convulsion. Deralan came and cautiously inspected the body. He signaled to the others to take the body away.
Solin started back along the fresh tunnel, but Calna did not follow. He turned and stared at her. “What is it?”
“I... I don’t know. A very odd feeling. As though somehow we have made a mistake that we could not predict. We should have cut up through to him, saved him.”
“And turn a decent rebellion into a pseudo-religious revival?” Solin said.
“I know all that. It was just an odd feeling. But strong, Solin. Very strong.”
Sarrz, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Socionetics, turned in his chair so that he would not have to look at the face of the female Agent who had asked to speak with him after she and Solin had made a rather disappointing, but unavoidable, report on the demise of one Andro, rebel of Era 4.
“You say you are troubled.”
She chose her words carefully. “I wish to request EC, Deputy Director. I have had odd imaginings. Possibly the strain of the last few months in Era 4.”
“Do you care to tell me any of them?”
She shrugged. “They are all a bit ridiculous. It seemed that in some other existence we had saved Andro rather than permitting him to be killed. I know how unfortunate a mistake it would have been to save him again. Also, I found myself thinking that we had lost some of the eras by permitting too great a probability divergence from our basic eras. And during the last sleep I dreamed that we have a power source which can cause slip to any era, no matter how divergent.”
“Those are concrete examples. But what is your attitude toward them?”
“Awe, I would say. Foreboding. And a feeling of having led other existences.”
Sarrz said, “All of us have dreams. I dreamed of dying at this desk. I have dreamed of losing all the worlds.”
“And you feel fear?”
“Tension. Doubt. But those, I feel, are the result of our primitive heritage. It is in our blood and our bones to think of only one space and one time. Now we know that there are twenty-six available space-times contiguous to our own which we can reach, and an infinite number of others that we cannot yet reach. I would not worry too much, Agent Calna. We live in a day of oddness, of new philosophic evaluations, of invisible doors which have opened so that we can step through. The first wild dogs that joined savage man in his caves must have had uneasy dreams by the fires of night. And maybe, Agent Calna, we are no higher in our possible evolutionary scale than those dogs were in relation to the man they joined. Even now, at this moment, some inconceivable intelligence from our remote future may be tampering with our acts and the consequences of our acts. Such tampering would leave elusive traces in your mind, in my mind. Possibly every time we enter a strange room and have the feeling that we have been in that room before, it is because we actually have been in that room, in some fragmentary part of a vast experiment which was later abandoned. Our present actions, this very conversation, this room... it could all be part of an artificially induced environment merely in order to test your reaction and mine. In fact, you may not even exist in the ordinary sense of the word, but only as a manufactured entity thrown into my personal equation as some portion of a test for a solution.”
The girl smiled uncertainly. “This begins to sound like one of the conversations planned to disprove the existence of everything except the mind of the beholder.”
“I will approve EC if you insist.”
“I think I must insist.”
“You can report to EC at once, if you wish. I will reassign Solin, and give you a new partner when you return.”
The girl left. Sarrz sat in utter stillness for a long time. The girl’s request had crystallized some of his own weary doubts as to the rightness of the entire program on which they had embarked.
He sat and felt a sour yearning for the days gone by, the days when man could concern himself with only one environment — back in the functional simplicity of the third atomic era.