Collected Short Fiction, page 443
Dent jerked his bare dark head toward the shimmering bubble on Pantechnicon Tower. His lean face looked worried.
“Something wrong?” asked Challis.
“Stanislav’s rebuilding the projection cell into some sort of weapon,” Dent told him gravely. “He wants to attack Levin. I told him we’re safe so long as we just lie low. But he won’t listen to reason.”
“He’s bitter,” Challis agreed. “I’ll talk to him.”
Pantechnicon Tower was the community’s heart. The great uranatomic generator was in its basement vaults. The long wrings contained libraries, lecture rooms, and laboratories, planned to keep science a living, growing thing, even in this exile. An elevator lifted them past the administration offices to Dr. Stanislav’s laboratory.
The big Russian limped heavily to meet them across a long, cluttered room and took Nadya in his arms, His gray-streaked beard didn’t quite hide the long white scar where a uranatomic bomb had burned one side of his face.
“Nadya—my little Nadyezhda!”
Challis and Dent assumed a tactful interest in the big tri-polar infra-gravitic field coils Dent had been busy winding. Soon Stanislav called:
“Come up to the cell. Challis, I’ve got something to show you.” Emotion quivered in his deep voice. “At last I’ve got a weapon that Levin can’t beat.” His dark, hollow eyes looked down at the thin girl. “At last, little Nadya, I can pay back what the Yellow Guards did to Sergei and Sonya, and my poor Alleyueva—”
Gravely, Nadya protested:
“Please, father—let’s forget. They are dead, and now we are free. The past is past. It can’t be changed.”
His haunted eyes glittered.
“Perhaps it can be!” His quivering fingers caught the arm of Challis in a grasp painfully tense. “Come.”
THEY CLIMBED a metal stair into the fused-quartz spheroid. A flat copper disk made a six-foot floor. A control post rose out of its center. Stanislav tapped keys upon it, and a muted whine started under their feet. Dent dropped a copper door into place.
Standing close beside Nadya, Challis had a brief glimpse of the red-tiled town and the dark basaltic cliffs leaping up to the roof of cloud beyond. Then a milky glow filled the quartz. The whine grew louder and abruptly faded.
Challis felt a faint, giddy sensation, as if the copper floor had tilted inexplicably. The pale girl made a little gasping cry and clutched his hand.
“Watch, Nadya.” The Russian’s voice was strange and harsh with hatred. “I’ll show you Levin.”
The crystal shell cleared again. Nadya caught her breath and Challis felt her fingers tighten. The crater was gone! The projection cell seemed to be floating with them, high over a dark, featureless landscape.
Watching a little illuminated chart, Stanislav tapped his keys. That dark, flowing world became fixed and brighter. Above a sprawling city, Challis saw an immense and ornate tower. Upon the tower stood a colossal statue of a man in uniform. One mighty fist was lifted in salute, and sodium-vapor tubes made yellow lightning flashing in its clutch.
“The statue of Levin.” Dent’s hard voice was crisp as a guide’s. “At the New State capitol.”
Stanislav tapped the keys, and they dropped toward the streets. Beneath the colossus, gray death flowed in an endless river: gray-pointed tanks and guns and armored cars, and ranks of robot-faced men in gray.
“The Yellow Square.” Dent’s voice held no emotion. “And there is Levin.”
Challis found the stand at last, draped in black-and-yellow lightning banners. Beneath his colossal statue, the black-mustached man in uniform looked oddly insignificant.
“Levin!” Nadya whispered hoarsely, and her eyes were dark with dread. “Reviewing the army that conquered the world!”
Angrily, Stanislav’s blunt fingers fell hard upon the keys. The crystal bubble turned milky, once more. When it cleared, the Yellow Square was gone. They were floating low over a pen fenced with barbed wire.
Ragged men huddled in it, unsheltered, knee-deep in mud.
The Washington Monument stood lonely in the gray background.
An Eurasian officer snapped an order. The gray-clad guards turned their machine guns through the fence. The sound seemed queerly remote in the quartz cell. But the prisoners toppled into the mud. Challis started, biting into his knuckles.
THE CRYSTAL SHELL glowed and cleared again. The whine was louder once more. The fields were bright and peaceful beyond the red-tiled town, and black cliffs soared to the flat roof of cloud.
Pale and shaken, Challis stared at Stanislav.
“I thought,” he gulped, “there were faces I knew. I saw the President of the United States.” He shook his head, bewildered. “But the Washington Massacre happened last year.”
The bearded man nodded.
“It did,” he said. “And Levin’s victory parade, in the Yellow Square, was three years ago.” His hollow eyes burned with elation. “With the new tri-polar units I can deflect the projection field back through time. That’s where I’m going to attack Levin—in his vulnerable past.”
“In the past?” Challis blinked. “Things that have happened can’t be changed. The future, maybe. But the past is real.”
“Reality is relative.” The dark, sunken eyes of Stanislav were almost hypnotic. “Science has yet to find any absolute. The statistical mathematics of probability has conquered. The facts of yesterday are merely more probable.”
Challis shook his head.
“If we live in a world that is merely probable, how are we to know it?”
“We don’t.” The big Russian shrugged. “Suppose the probability against your existence here is a million to one. If the universe around you is on the same plane of probability, you cannot determine the fact. Everything else is equally tenuous. For you, in your own particular strand of cause and effect, your own probability of existence always appears to be one hundred percent.
“But the absolute is always illusion. The past is merely relatively probable. There is a continual branching and diffusion of probability in the direction of the future. It is that which points the arrow of entropy.
“Exploring the past, we seemed to be merely phantasmal observers, unseen, without power to influence the things we saw. But in fact there are certain nodes of probability at which we should be able to deflect the arrow of entropy and increasing probability, and so determine the course of future events.”
Challis looked doubtful.
“Then aren’t we lifting ourselves by our own bootstraps?”
“The Pantechnicon is isolated from the world,” Stanislav pointed out. “That enables it to serve as a fulcrum—that we can use to lever Levin out of existence!”
He caught a rasping breath as Challis asked:
“What is a node of probability?”
“I’ve found one in Levin’s life.” Hate grated in the Russian’s voice. “His parents, you know, were shot for intellectuals when he was a child. Afterward his uncle tried to escape to America with the boy—Levin was ten years old.
“They almost made it. They were crossing the frontier when Levin was wounded and captured by a guard. If the bullet’s course had been changed through a fractional degree the boy would have died.
“And the arrow of entropy would have been deflected along a different track of probability.”
“You can’t change that bullet’s course?”
“But I can.” The Russian’s voice rang harsh and resolute. “We have the power of the uranatomic generator. We have the infra-gravitic field through which to apply it. We have an isolated fulcrum for it to react against.” Fever burned in his hollow eyes. “Levin is doomed!”
CAPTAIN DENT leaned protestingly over the control post.
“Why, doctor?” His voice was low and urgent. “Why not leave things alone. I tell you, Levin isn’t the monster you think. You see, I knew him.”
Stanislav’s face went dark with suspicion.
“I was military attache at the Eurasian embassy,” Dent explained, “when Levin was just an ex-lieutenant in aviation. He was experimenting with rockets—my specialty—when he wasn’t expounding his half-baked New State ideology in some beer joint. He wasn’t a bad sort. Except, like yourself, he was bitter about things that had happened in the past.”
Stanislav trembled angrily, rasping:
“You talk like an Eurasian spy.” He turned to Challis and the girl. “Listen to my plan. I have already proved that I can look back into the past, even with the experimental thousand-kilowatt field coil. As soon as the new unit is finished and installed—”
Dent’s anxious voice interrupted:
“Challis, you’re director of the Pantechnicon. You own it, really. Are you going to allow such a thing?” His lean brown face looked tense and desperate. “You planned this for a repository of culture. Don’t you realize that violence is fatal to culture?”
“No more fatal than passive surrender,” Challis said. “The Pantechnicon is a democracy. I have kept no authority for myself. If the thing came to a vote, Stanislav might win—if he could really stop Levin. None of us here are friends of the New State.”
“If you are all insane—”
Dent choked off his angry voice and stamped out of the room. Fifteen minutes later Challis heard the scream of rocket jets. Blue flame was swallowed in the gray cloud ceiling. At the hangar, Challis found the sentry nursing a scalp wound.
“It was Dent,” the sentry gasped. “He gave me this before he hit me.”
The crumpled note was addressed to Challis:
Sorry, old man, but Stanislav hit the mark. I really joined you as a New State secret agent. I liked the original purpose of the Pantechnicon. But this mad plan to murder Levin recalls me to a duty I had almost forgotten. I can’t begin to express my regret. So long.
VIC DENT.
Challis stared down across the red-tiled town, and the white tower, and the bright fields cupped within the sheer black cliffs. The note fluttered out of his stiff fingers.
This meant the end of the Pantechnicon.
Levin’s rocket base at Capetown was only four or five hours away. No defense was possible. A single uranatomic bomb could sear all life from the crater. The triumph of the twisted, fantastic New State ideology would be complete.
Unless—
Challis caught his breath and hurried back to the Pantechnicon Tower. If Stanislav’s plan would work at all, they had no choice but to try it now. There might be time to finish winding the new field coil and get it in-, stalled before the rocket bombers came.
STILL, eight hours later, no bellow of rockets had come through the gray cloud roof. The new coil was wired in place beneath the copper disk, Challis followed the limping Russian up into the big quartz bubble. Anxiously, Nadya begged from the stair:
“Father, may I come, too?”
Stanislav shook his scarred, haggard head.
“No, my little Nadyezhda,” he protested. “I’m afraid there’s too much danger. The first bomb will surely destroy the projection cell here on the tower. We can’t really escape into the past, remember. There is merely a tenuous projection that lasts only so long as the field is maintained by power from the generator here. You’ll be safer with the others in the library vaults.”
Her dark, frightened eyes looked pleadingly at Challis.
“Please—”
But Stanislav dropped the copper door and started the whining mechanism.
“There’s no time to waste. Dent’s first bomb will cut off the power and leave us helpless.” He thrust a worn notebook into Challis’ hands. “Here are the components of Levin’s node of probability. Read them while I set them up.”
Challis read what seemed a confused jumble of symbols while Stanislav tapped the keys. Once again the whining faded while the quartz wall was filled with cloudy opalescence. At last it cleared, and the black cliffs had vanished.
Gray light of an overcast dawn showed a landscape of snow-clad hills. A two-wheeled donkey cart was creeping out of a straw-thatched village. Above the road stood a gray concrete pillbox. Stanislav pointed to the barbed-wire fence along the wooded ridge above.
“The border fence.” His voice was hoarse and strained. “Forty years ago. Levin is driving the cart. His uncle is hidden in the straw. But watch.”
The cart stopped where trees grew near the road. The boy leaped from the seat and a man in peasant costume burst from the load of straw. They floundered through deep snow toward the fence along the ridge.
Stanislav tapped his controls again, and the quartz bubble seemed to float toward the little concrete fortress. Challis saw the stocky, swarthy soldier stationed outside of it, stamping his feet on hard-packed snow.
The guard saw the fugitives running through the trees and snapped his rifle level.
“Watch,” rasped Stanislav. “The first shot kills the uncle.”
The bubble sank into the snow. Stanislav tapped the keys, and it moved until the guard was apparently beside them, within the quartz globe. Unaware of them, he deliberately fired the rifle. The sound was a tiny snap, but the running man pitched to his face in the snow.
The boy knelt beside his uncle for an instant and then floundered on desperately. The guard spat with satisfaction and worked the rifle’s bolt and lifted the weapon to his cheek again.
“Now!” The Russian’s voice was low and desperate. “The bullet just grazed Levin’s head in the past we know. And the range is three hundred yards. It won’t take a great deflection of the rifle barrel to make the wound fatal. Get ready!”
THE THICK steel barrel felt cold and solid to Challis. It seemed strange that the squinting guard couldn’t see them. Stanislav kept his eyes on the moving chart and the lighted dials beside it. Low and savage and triumphant, his voice croaked:
“Three seconds, two, one—now!”
Challis flung all his strength against the steady barrel. His muscles cracked with effort, but it didn’t seem to move. He watched the quivering needles. Somehow, he knew, a million kilowatts of energy was flowing through his body. But it wasn’t merely a gun that he pushed against. It was the inertia of a world.
“Harder!” gasped Stanislav. “Can’t you—”
Challis surged desperately. A needle quivered. The gun jerked in his hand. The sentry spat again and ejected the fired cartridge. Far away, the running boy dropped limply into the snow. The Russian’s scarred face twisted with elation.
“We’ve done it,” he shouted. “Levin’s dead!”
Trembling with eagerness, he tapped the controls.
“Levin’s dead,” he rasped again. “The whole structure of probability is altered. Let’s go back to see the new world we have made.” Milky light hid the stamping sentry and the dead youth in the snow. “Without Levin’s military genius, Eurasia could never have conquered the West. The democracies must have triumphed. Let’s look at England.”
The white mist cleared again.
“Here,” whispered Stanislav, “is Lond—”
His voice was gone and his jaw fell slack.
A blood-red sun burned dimly in a strange copper sky. Red mud stretched in endless flats, cut with black, sprawling gullies. A few skeletal girders jutted out of the mud. A gully was dammed with shattered masonry. Nothing else showed that men had ever been here.
There was nothing alive. No wing moved in all that brazen sky. There was only red dust blowing out of the west. Stanislav made a choked, stricken sound and tapped the keys again.
Hoarsely, Challis whispered:
“What ghastly thing caused that? Let’s see if America escaped.”
The crystal sphere clouded again and cleared. But America was no different. The naked land was slashed with wind and rain. Red alluvial flats spread desolate from every elevation, and new canyons slashed them. Stanislav shrugged hopeless.
“The world was like this,” he muttered, “before life ever came out of the sea.”
“Why?” whispered Challis. “We must find the cause.”
Year by year they probed the past, until they found a city on the eve of its doom. Millions had fled, uselessly. The few who remained were coughing, clutching their throats, dying. The bodies crumbled, and red dust swirled on the high west wind.
Stanislav dropped the cell beside an abandoned newspaper stand, and Challis read the black-lettered warning:
VIRUS THREATENS AMERICA
Washington officials admitted today that all efforts have failed to discover protective measures against the “red dust.” This is now established to be a synthetic virus, which destroys all organic matter. It is believed to have been developed by Eurasian military biologists as a weapon against the Anglo-American Army of Occupation.
If that is true, its creators were the first to be destroyed. The most of Asia is reported already desolated, and every dust storm—
A tiny reddish mote fell upon the faded page. A ragged hole swiftly grew. The sheet crumpled into crimson dust, and a red wind swirled it across the pavements. A running man tore the dissolving mask from his face and clutched his throat and died.
The keys clicked, and kindly light obscured the crystal walls. Challis stared at the old Russian, too ill to speak. Hunched over the control pillar, Stanislav looked haggard and hopeless and old.
“I’m turning back.” His dull, hollow eyes watched a trembling needle. “Now something is wrong back at the Pantechnicon. The power’s failing. If the field collapses while we are projected, I think we shall be electrocuted!”
That didn’t seem to matter.
“The red dust—” Challis shuddered, imagining that swift and terrible decay in his own lungs. “It must have swept the whole world, except Antarctica.”
“Don’t you remember?” The hollow eyes of Stanislav glittered at him queerly. “That was nine years ago.”
Challis felt confused and ill.
The bubble cleared again. He peered out in dull-eyed wonder. This was the crater. But the Nordholm field had failed, and the roof of cloud was gone. The lights were out. Under the pale aurora, the fields looked black with frost. Nothing moved. The Pantechnicon was dead.
“I don’t see anybody,” he rasped anxiously. “Where’s Nadya?”
