COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 172
He turned to nod toward a corner of the room in which he stood that was outside Bill's range, and in a moment the blue-uniformed, staring crowd about him parted and a low, rakish barrel of blue-gleaming steel glided noiselessly forward toward that surface of the cube which was a window into the past-future that parted Bill and themselves. Bill had never seen anything like it before, but he recognized its lethal quality. It crouched streamlined down upon its base as if for a lunge, and its mouth facing him was a dark doorway for death itself. Dunn bent behind it and laid his hand upon a half-visible lever in its base.
"Now," he said heavily. "William Cory, there seems to be a question in your mind as to whether we could reach you with our weapons. Let me assure you that the force-beam which connects us can carry more than sight and sound into your world! I hope I shan't have to demonstrate that. I hope you'll be sensible enough to turn to that televisor screen in the wall behind you and call Marta Mayhew."
"M-Marta?" Bill heard the quiver in his voice. "Why—"
"You will call her, and in our sight and hearing you are going to ask her to marry you. That much choice is yours, marriage or death. Do you hear me?"
Bill wanted insanely to laugh. Shotgun wedding from a mythical future—"You can't threaten me with that popgun forever," he said with a quaver of mirth he could not control. "How do you know I'll marry her once you're away?"
"You'll keep your word," said Dunn serenely. "Don't forget, Cory, we know you much better than you know yourself. We know your future far more completely than you saw it. We know how your character will develop with age. Yes, you're an honorable man. Once you've asked her to marry you, and heard her say yes—and she will—you won't try to back out. No, the promise given and received between you constitutes a marriage as surely as if we'd seen the ceremony performed. You see, we trust your honor, William Cory."
"But—" Bill got no further than that, for explosively in his brain a sweet, high voice was sobbing:
"Father, father, what are you doing? What's happened? Why don't you speak to me?"
In the tension Bill had nearly forgotten Sue, but the sound of that familiar voice tore at him with sudden, almost intolerable poignancy. Sue—the promise to protect her had risen to his lips involuntarily at the very mention of danger. It was answer to an urgency rooted race-deep, the instinct to protect the helpless and the loved. For a moment he forgot the gun trained on him from the other window; he forgot Billy and the world behind him. He was conscious only of his daughter crying in terror for help—for help from him and for protection against him at once, in a dizzy confusion that made his head swim.
"Sue—" he began uncertainly.
"Cory, we're waiting!" Dunn's voice had an ominous undernote.
-
BUT THERE WAS a solution. He never knew just when he first became aware of it. A long while ago, perhaps, subconsciously, the promise of it had begun to take shape in his mind. He did not know when he first realized that—but he thought he knew whence it came. There was a sureness and a vastness about it that did not originate in himself. It was the Cosmic Mind indeed in which his own small soul was floundering, and out of that unthinkably limitless Plan, along with the problem came at last the solution. (There must be balance ... the force that swings the worlds in their orbits can permit of no question without an answer—)
There was no confusion here; there had never been. This was not chance. Purpose was behind it, and sudden confidence came flooding into him from outside. He turned with resolution so calm upon his face that Billy sighed and smiled, and Dunn's tense face relaxed.
"Thank God, sir," breathed Billy, "I knew you'd come to your senses. Believe me, sir, you won't be sorry."
"Wait," said Bill to them both, and laid his hand on the button beneath his desk that rang a bell in his laboratory. "Wait and see."
In three worlds and times, three people very nearly identical in more than the flesh alone—perhaps three facets of the same personality, who can say?—stood silent and tense and waiting. It seemed like a very long time before the door opened and Miss Brown came into the room, hesitating on the threshold with her calm, pleasant face questioning.
"You want me, Dr. Cory?"
Bill did not answer for a moment. He was pouring his whole soul into this last long stare that said good-by to the young son he would never know. For understanding from some vast and nameless source was flooding his mind now, and he knew what was coming and why it would be so. He looked across the desk and gazed his last upon Sue's familiar face so like his own, the fruit of a love he would never share with pretty Sallie. And then, drawing a deep breath, he gulped and said distinctly:
"Miss Brown, will you marry me?"
Dunn had given him the key—a promise given and received between this woman and himself would be irrevocable, would swing the path of the future into a channel that led to no world that either Billy or Sue could know.
Bill got his first glimmer of hope for that future from the way the quiet woman in the doorway accepted his question. She did not stare or giggle or stammer. After one long, deep look into his eyes—he saw for the first time that hers were gray and cool behind the lenses—she answered calmly.
"Thank you, Dr. Cory. I shall be very happy to marry you."
-
AND THEN—it came. In the very core of his brain, heartbreak and despair exploded in a long, wailing scream of faith betrayed as pretty Sue, his beloved, his darling, winked out into the oblivion from which she would never now emerge. The lazy green Eden was gone forever; the sweet fair girl on her knees among the myrtle leaves had never been—would never be.
Upon that other window surface, in one last flash of unbearable clearness, young Billy's incredulous features stared at him. Behind that beloved, betrayed face he saw the face of the Leader twisting with fury. In the last flashing instant while the vanishing, never-to-exist future still lingered in the cube, Bill saw an explosion of white-hot violence glare blindingly from the gun mouth, a heat and violence that seared the very brain. Would it have reached him—could it have harmed him? He never knew, for it lasted scarcely a heartbeat before eternity closed over the vanishing world in a soundless, fathomless, all-swallowing tide.
Where that world had stretched so vividly a moment ago, now Marta's violet gaze looked out into the room through crystal. Across the desk Sallie's lovely, careless smile glowed changelessly. They had been gateways to the future—but the gates were closed. There would never be such futures now; there never had been. In the Cosmic Mind, the great Plan of Things, two half-formed ideas went out like blown candle flames.
And Bill turned to the gray-eyed woman in the doorway with a long, deep, shaken sigh. In his own mind as he faced her, thoughts too vast for formulation moved cloudily.
"I know now something no man was ever sure of before—our oneness with the Plan. There are many, many futures. I couldn't face the knowledge of another, but I think—yes, I believe, ours will be the best. She won't let me neglect the work we're doing, but neither will she force me to give it to the world unperfected. Maybe, between us, we can work out that kink that robs the embryo of determination, and then—who knows?
"Who knows why all this had to happen? There was Purpose behind it—all of it—but I'll never understand just why. I only know that the futures are infinite—and that I haven't lost Billy or Sue. I couldn't have done what I did without being sure of that. I couldn't lose them, because they're me—the best of me, going on forever. Perhaps I'll never die, really—not the real me—until these incarnations of the best that's in me, whatever form and face and name they wear, work out mankind's ultimate destiny in some future I'll never see. There was reason behind all this. Maybe, after all, I'll understand—some day."
He said nothing aloud, but he held out his hand to the woman in the door and smiled down confidently into her cool, gray eyes.
The End
ALL IS UNKNOWN
Unknown – April 1940
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Henry Kuttner)
You doubt it? Well, reasonably enough, so did Bertram Moore. But he argued the point with the wrong—ah, man.
-
BERTRAM MOORE should never have entered the strange little tavern. But, even so, he might have avoided serious trouble had he kept his temper and refused to argue with the belligerent midget with the fuzzy whiskers. Mr. Moore, being Irish, certainly should have suspected something amiss from the moment he walked into the unusual taproom.
A tall, gawky, and red-haired fellow was Bertram, with a face somewhat reminiscent of a philosophic horse—not really ugly, though. The sort of average, fortyish person one sees every day, a little past his prime but not yet beginning to crumble. A likable guy, though he talked too much.
Bertram Moore had a watch, and this watch could really be blamed for the whole affair. It wasn't an unusual timepiece. Quite an ordinary one, in fact. But it was Moore's watch, and thereby had acquired a certain air of sanctity to him. He wound it religiously and consulted its passionless face whenever necessary. The only trouble tonight was that its hands pointed at eight thirty instead of seven thirty. This nonconformity caused Moore to arrive at the Union Depot exactly one hour too soon to meet his sister, Corinne, who, after living in New York for twenty-five years, had suddenly looked around her, fought down a fit of violent nausea, and decided to visit Bertram.
Moore was not a man of sudden impulse. He compared his watch with the clock on the depot tower, found several other timepieces, and finally, to clinch the argument, asked a porter what time it was. Seven thirty. Corinne's train would not arrive for an hour. Moore stared around at the painfully clean and glittering depot and hastily went toward the bar.
One glance through the glass door, however, dissuaded him. The room was sardine-full. Moore, being civilized, preferred to hoist his elbow in comparative quiet, so he emerged from the depot and stared around.
Across the street was an empty lot. It had been empty for years, what with taxes, high rents, and depression. Much to Moore's surprise, however, he saw that a building had been erected on the lot.
Things had a way of popping up overnight, Moore thought, and was much closer to the truth than he knew. He walked toward the structure. It was a high-arched dome, something like the Brown Derby without its brim, and there were no windows. From the swinging doors clouds of smoke and the noise of merriment proceeded. Moore entered and burst into a spasm of coughing.
At first he could see nothing for the smoke. The big room was filled with it, a gray, coifing cloud pungent with the aroma of scented tobacco. Then, gradually, Moore began to make out objects through the mist.
There were no booths. Tables were set at random here and there, until they vanished hazily into the fog. People sat at the tables, and at the nearest one was a bald, fat old man with a blaze of jeweled rings hiding his fingers. He was smoking a narghile, and emitting an extraordinary amount of smoke, Moore thought. Moreover, his clothing was unorthodox. He wore a goatskin strategically, and a wreath of vine leaves on his bald dome completed the ensemble. This was obviously either a masquerade or an advertising stunt.
The fat old man hiccuped loudly, lifted a pewter mug from the table, drained it, and waved negligently to Moore. He said something in a language Moore did not understand. But his gesture, as he pointed to a nearby table, was eloquent enough.
Moore advanced and took his seat at the table. Most of the others were occupied, he discovered, by a motley assortment. It was difficult to see clearly through the fog, but he thought their clothing, while more plentiful than the old man's, was equally odd. He caught glimpses of high-crowned and pointed hats, white robes, black robes, and similar eccentricities .
The waiter approached. He seemed normal enough, a cadaverous man rather grimly dressed in a Tuxedo. His sallow face was quite expressionless, and his eyes were peculiarly glazed. In his lapel he wore a lily. Also, he walked with the stiff, mechanical stride of a zombie.
"Your order, sir?" he asked in a deep, grating voice.
"Whiskey sour," Moore said. The man departed, returning almost immediately. He set down a pewter mug on the table. Moore paid, and tested the drink. It wasn't a whiskey sour. He was sure of that. But he didn't know just what, it was. It was heady, strong, pungent, and yet curiously sweet. The fumes mounted to his brain swiftly. Potent stuff.
Now Moore always could carry his liquor, and he certainly couldn't have got tight on one mugful; Yet his head was unquestionably swimming when the belligerent midget with the' fuzzy whiskers arrived.
-
AT FIRST GLIMPSE Moore saw only beard, a vast, overwhelming avalanche of curly white hair that floated across the floor like a tumbleweed. The beard mounted the chair opposite Moore's. A small hand emerged from the mess and thumped the table. Two beady, twinkling eyes regarded Moore with a certain sardonic humor in their depths.
The waiter brought a pair of brimming mugs. The midget began the conversation.
"Nasty curmudgeon," he said throatily, staring at Moore, who pointedly ignored the remark. But the midget could not be squelched.
From the depths of his beard he extracted a long, keen knife and thumbed its edge. "I am not in the habit of being snubbed," he observed.
Moore looked around for the waiter, but could not locate him in the swirling gray smoke. He said, with a certain delicacy, "I beg your pardon. I didn't hear—"
"Ah," said the midget. "That's better. Better for you. For a copper coin I'd have slit your weasand.
The horrid little man was either drunk or mad, Moore decided. He looked for the door.
The midget laughed, and inserted liquor into the depths of the beard. "Drink up," he said menacingly, and Moore obeyed.
The drink was potent. Remarkably so. Moore felt his terror vanishing. In its place grew indignation. Was he to be bullied by a puppet—a mere bug of a man, whom he could squash with one blow?
"To hell with you," he said slowly and distinctly, and then wondered at himself. Was he trying to start a barroom brawl? Moore shuddered; he had a rather nice taste in such things, and, moreover, did not favor the idea of becoming embroiled with the beard. The very sight of the thing was loathsome. It was all tangled and woolly, and burs and dead leaves were entangled in it.
The midget's eyes snapped dangerously. "To hell with me?" he asked.
Moore nodded.
"You're not a magician?" the other asked rather doubtfully. "No? Then it's all right. A figure of speech merely. Drink with me, friend."
More liquor had surprisingly appeared. It was downed. Moore made the odd discovery that his spinal cord had been dissolved; in its place was a column of the fiery drink. It seemed to move up and down like the mercury in a thermometer. But the sensation was not entirely unpleasant. Smoke blew in his eyes; he coughed and stared across at the fat man with the narghile.
"Funny place," he said in an undertone.
The midget looked surprised. "What did you expect on Midsummer Eve?" he asked, and Moore couldn't quite figure out what he meant. It seemed to mean something, but—
The fat old man arose and went toward the back. He passed close to Moore's table, and, glancing aside, said in a kindly voice, "All is Maya—illusion." He hiccupped, drew himself up in a dignified manner, and hastily continued his journey into the smoke.
The midget nodded. "How true," he observed. "Oh, how true: All is illusion."
Moore felt in an argumentative mood. He lowered the pewter mug from his lips, smacked them slightly, and said, "Boloney."
"By that," the midget said, "I am inclined to believe that you are skeptical: But how can you be? I am a noted authority on such matters and I assure you that all is illusion."
Moore refuted the contention with a sneer. "Prove it," he snapped.
"But it's obvious, isn't it? Things are only what they seem. That's why magic is possible."
"You're drunk," Moore said insultingly.
"I'm drunk? By Father Poseidon and Kronos! Not for thou—not for years have I been accused of that. If you weren't drunk yourself—"
"Prove it;" Moore said again; pressing home his advantage.
-
THE BEARD twitched indignantly. A small, gnarled brown hand emerged and pointed at Moore's pewter mug. "You think, that's liquor, eh?"
Moore was rather doubtful, but he nodded anyway. The midget gleamed with satisfaction. "Then it isn't. It's water; Taste it and see."
Moore tasted. Unfortunately he was in no condition to realize whether he was drinking liquor or benzine. It did taste rather watery, but Moore wouldn't have admitted it for the world. He said it wasn't water.
"And you're a crackpot," he continued, remembering the knife and angry that he had once been afraid of the midget. "Go away before I step on you. All is illusion—ha!" He made impolite sounds.
