They were so alike, so like four peas in a pod, that Lansing could not think of them as four, but only as a single entity, as if the four were one. He did not know their names. He had never heard their names. He wondered if they might, in fact, have no names. To distinguish one from the other, he assigned them identities, mentally tying tags upon them. Starting from the left, he would think of them as A, B, C and D.
Resolutely, he and Mary marched down the length of room. They came to a halt some six feet from where the players sat. They came to a halt and waited. So far as the card players were concerned, it seemed, they were not even there.
I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to speak, Lansing told himself. I’ll stand here till they speak. I’ll make them speak.
He put his arm around Mary’s shoulder and held her close against him, the two of them standing side by side, facing the silent players.
Finally A spoke to them, the thin slash of mouth moving just a little, as if it were an effort to force out the words.
“So,” he said, “you have solved the problem.”
“You take us by surprise,” said Mary. “We are not aware a problem has been solved.”
“We might have solved it sooner,” Lansing said, “if we had known what the problem was. Or even that there was a problem. Now, since you say we’ve solved it, what happens? Do we get to go back home?”
“No one ever solves it the first time round,” said B. “They always must come back.”
“You’ve not answered my question,” said Lansing. “What happens now? Do we go back home?”
“Oh, my, no,” said D. “No, you don’t go home. We could not let you go.”
“You must realize,” said C, “that we get so few of you. Out of a few of the groups we may get one, almost never two, as is the case with you. Out of the most of them, we get none at all.”
“They go fumbling off in all directions,” said A. “They go bolting off, seeking sanctuary in the apple-blossom world or they become entranced with the translators or they—”
“By translators,” Mary said, “you mean the machines in the city that keep crooning to themselves?”
“That is our name for them,” said B. “Perhaps you can think of a better name.”
“I wouldn’t even try,” said Mary.
“There’s Chaos,” Lansing said. “That must gobble up a lot of them. Yet you threw me a rope at Chaos.”
“We threw you the rope,” said A, “because you tried to save the robot. At the risk of your own life, never hesitating, you tried to save the robot.”
“I thought he was worth saving. He was a friend of mine.”
“He well might have been worth saving,” said A, “but he used poor judgment. Here we have no place for those who have poor judgment.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at,” said Lansing, angrily. “I don’t like the way you sit in judgment. I don’t like anything about the four of you and I never have.”
“As we go,” said D, “we are getting nowhere. I grant you the privilege of the animosity that you bear us. But we cannot allow petty bickering to sway us from the need to talk with one another.”
“Another thing,” said Lansing. “If the talk promises to be of any length, we do not propose to stand here before you like supplicants before a throne. You at least might have the decency to provide us a place to sit.”
“By all means, sit,” said A. “Drag over a couple of chairs and be comfortable.”
Lansing walked to one side of the room and came back with chairs. The two of them sat down.
The creature that had been sleeping in the basket came strolling across the floor, sniffling as it came. It rubbed affectionately against Mary’s legs and lay down on her feet. It gazed up at her with eyes of liquid friendliness.
“Can this be the Sniffler?” she asked. “It prowled about our campfires, but we never caught a glimpse of it.”
“This is your sniffler,” said C. “There are a number of snifflers; this one was assigned to you.”
“The sniffler watched us?”
“Yes, it watched you.”
“And reported back?”
“Naturally,” said C.
“You watched us every minute,” Lansing said. “You never missed a lick. You knew everything we did. You read us like a book. Would you mind telling me what is going on?”
“Willingly,” said A. “You’ve earned the right to know. By coming here, you have earned the right to know.”
“If you’ll only listen,” said B, “we shall attempt to tell you.”
“We’re listening,” said Mary.
“You know, of course,” said A, “about the multiplicity of worlds, worlds splitting off at crisis points to form still other worlds. And I take it you are acquainted with the evolutionary process.”
“We know of evolution,” Mary said. “A system of sorting out to make possible the selection of the fittest.”
“Exactly. If you think about it, you will see that the splitting off of alternate worlds is an evolutionary process.”
“You mean for the selection of better worlds? Don’t you have some trouble with the definition of a better world?”
“Yes, of course we do. That’s the reason you are here. That’s the reason we have brought many others here. Evolution, as such, does not work. It operates on the basis of the development of dominant life forms. In many cases the survival factors that make for dominance in themselves are faulty. All of them have flaws; many of them carry the seeds of their own destruction.”
“That is true,” said Lansing. “On my own world we have developed a mechanism which enables us, if we wish or blunder into it, to commit racial suicide.”
“The human race, with its intelligence,” said B, “is a life form too finely tuned to be allowed to waste itself — to commit, as you say, racial suicide. It is true, of course, that when, and if, the race dwindles to extinction, a successor will arise, some other life form with a survival factor greater than intelligence. What that factor might be, we cannot imagine. It would not necessarily be superior to intelligence. The trouble with the human race is that it has never given the intelligence it possesses the opportunity to develop to its full potential.”
“You think you have a way to develop that full potential?” Mary asked.
“We hope we have,” said D.
“You have seen this world you now are on,” said A. “You have had the opportunity to guess at some of its accomplishments, at the direction in which its technology was trending.”
“Yes, we have,” said Lansing. “The doors that open on other worlds. A better concept than world-seekers in my world have come up with. Back home we dream of starships. Only dream of them, for they may not be possible. Although, come to think of it, on Jurgens’s world Earth was empty because its people had gone out to the stars.”
“Do you know,” asked C, “if they ever got there?”
“I assume they did,” said Lansing. “But no, I don’t know they did.”
“And there are what you call the translators,” said Mary. “Another way to travel — to travel and to learn. I suppose you could utilize the method to study the entire universe, bring back ideas and concepts the human race might never have dreamed of on its own. Edward and I were only caught on the edges of it. The Brigadier rushed in and was lost. Could you tell us where he went?”
“That we cannot do,” said A. “Used improperly, the method can be dangerous.”
“Yet you leave it open,” Lansing said. “Callously, you leave it open, a trap for unwary visitors.”
“There,” said D, “you have hit exactly on the point. The unwary are eliminated from consideration. In our plan we have no use for those who act as fools.”
“The way you eliminated Sandra at the singing tower and Jurgens on the slopes of Chaos.”