The Quincunx of Time

James Blish

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Front Pages

Published by
Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
New York, New York 10017

Copyright^© 1953, 1973 by James Blish

This book is an expanded version of a shorter work entitled “Beep,” originally published in Galaxy Magazine .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

Dell® ™ 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
First printing – October 1973

to
PAUL SHACKLEY
who reads my stories far more closely than I (sometimes) think they deserve

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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A CRITICAL PREFACE:
To Be Skipped by Friends of Fiction

As is honestly shown a few pages earlier, along with the copy­right notice and other matters which publishers call “indicia,” this book began life as a short story of some 14,000 words, first pub­lished in a maga­zine in 1954. Even then it was not much of a story by ordinary narra­tive standards. When William Sloane antholo­gized it the same year (in Stories for Tomorrow, Funk and Wag-nails), he said in his intro­duction, with almost ex­cessive kindness, that the yarn was “not redun­dant with physical action” and that in fact it had only a “slight pattern of out­ward events.” These stric­tures were quite true, and hence I was all the more aston­ished when Andre Norton sub­sequent­ly included the piece in an antho­logy for teen­age readers called Space Police (World, 1956). Miss Norton did cut out of it some of the refer­ences to drinking, but she left intact all of what Mr. Sloane thought would jolt or numb even new adult readers–the hard stuff about physics and philo­sophy.

Padding a short story out into a novel is not ordi­narily regarded as good prac­tice, either, and since I have been accused a few times by some putative friends of doing exactly this, I was further startled to be asked by editor Larry Shaw to do it to that unpro­mising, almost plot­less story called "Beep." On the other hand, Mr. Shaw had been the first to see some sense and merit in a novella of mine which even­tually became a very success­ful novel called A Case of Conscience (1958), so I felt obli­gated to take a second look.

I made two interesting disco­veries. The first of these was not really new with me. I disco­vered, like the late C. S. Forester, that I did not know what a novel was. Given the whole sweep of the form in English, from Pamela to V, the closest one can come to label­ing it is Forester's defini­tion, “a prose fiction of some length.” People who tell you sternly that a fiction of 45,000 words or more that doesn't meet their stan­dards of compli­cation is not, there­fore, a novel should perhaps read more widely before open­ing their mouths. If Forester can't help them, may­be Flaubert or Leonid Andreyev might open their minds.

The second discovery was that “Beep,” as Mr. Shaw had seen all along, was about some­thing – and some­thing impor­tant to me, if not to any­one else. It deserved re­thinking and expan­sion, espe­cially from the perspec­tive of fifteen addi­tional years of brood­ing about the things it dis­cus­ses. I had come to some new con­clu­sions about its mat­ter (some of them by my­self, some with the help of discus­sions with the dedi­catee, although he appeared rather later in the process) which I thought – I shan't pause for modesty – to be down­right urgent.

One way of putting this would be to say that al­though the book is fiction, the succes­sive and con­flicting specu­lations which it con­tains about time, know­ledge, and free will are all intended to be taken seriously.

There is still not much physical action here, let alone any melo­drama. The struc­ture of the story is still nearly as skeletal, indeed nearly perfunc­tory, as Mr. Sloane held it to be in 1954. I have not “novelized” it by inclu­ding a batch of new char­ac­ters or psycho­logical analysis or social com­ment. There are a number of new epi­sodes, but only those I needed to further the new course of the argu­ment.

Instead, I have tried to make a great deal more out of the specu­lations that prompted the story in the first place. I had set out to drama­tize these specu­lations in the short version; here, I am still going about that work, I hope more thought­fully. The drama, for those capa­ble of enjoy­ing it in this form, lies more in the specu­lations than in the action, just as before.

Science-fiction stories do come out like this some­times. That is for me one of the several joys of the field. But then, I actively enjoy brood­ing, rather to the despair of my rela­tives; and the kind of science fiction I some­times write out of it – or read into it – is not for every­body. Those who ex­pect fairy chimes, or blood­shed, must this time apply else­where. I condemn neither, but I am up to neither here.

– JAMES BLISH
Treetops
Woodlands Road
Harps den (Henley)
Oxon., England, 1970

The principle of causality, for example,– what is it but a postulate, an empty name cov­ering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day mani­fest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbi­trary juxta­position which now pheno­menally appears? It is as much an al­tar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scien­tific and philo­sophi­cal ideals are altars to un­known gods. Uni­form­ity is as much so as is free will. If this be admitted, we can debate on even terms.
— WILLIAM JAMES, The Dilemma of Determinism

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PROLOGUE:
A Frame on Randolph

The man code-named Josef Faber – and after ten years he no longer cared about his birth name – lowered his bulky newsfac slightly. Find­ing the softly pretty young girl on the park bench look­ing his way, he smiled an ago­niz­ingly embar­rassed smile and ducked back into the paper again.

Pretty indeed, in a blond sort of way; also, bland with youth and blind with unfocus­sed expec­tancy. She'd hardly noticed him; he wasn't the right sort. He was quite certain that he looked the part of a middle-aged, steadily employed, harm­less citizen enjoy­ing a Sunday break from the book­keep­ing and family routines – hardly the man to fill out a day­dream.

He was also quite certain, despite his official in­structions, that it wouldn't make the slightest dif­ference had he looked like him­self, or like the young Adonis, for that matter. These boy-meets-girl assign­ments always came off. Jo had never tackled a single one that had really required him.

As a matter of fact, the primi­tive news­paper, which he was supposed to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more than his job did. He had only barely begun to sus­pect the obvious ten years ago, when the Service for myste­rious reasons had snapped him up. Now, after a decade as a field agent, he was still fasci­nated to see how smoothly the really impor­tant situa­tions came off. The dangerous situa­tions – not boy-meets-girl.

This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for ex­ample. Some days ago the papers and the com­mentators had begun to mention reports of dis­turbances in that area, and Jo's prac­ticed eye had picked up the mentions. Some­thing big was cook­ing.

Yesterday it had boiled over – the Black Horse Nebula had suddenly spewed forth ships by the hun­dreds, a massed armada that must have taken more than a century of effort on the part of a whole star-cluster, a produc­tion drive con­duc­ted in a dark and distant and diffi­cult-to-observe part of the galaxy, and under the strictest and most fana­tical kind of secrecy.

And, of course, the Service had been on the spot in plenty of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with mathe­matical preci­sion so as to enfi­lade the entire armada the moment it broke out from the nebula. The battle hadn't even been a mas­sacre; most of the irrup­ting fleet had found itself so trapped that not even auto­matic suici­ding circuits had been fast enough to prevent surren­der. The attack had been smashed before the average citi­zen could ever even begin to figure out what the attackers might have thought it had been aimed at.

Good had triumphed again over evil.

Of course.

Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his atten­tion briefly. He looked at his watch, which said 14:58:03. That was the time, according to his in­struc­tions, when boy had to meet girl.

He had been given the strictest kind of orders to let nothing inter­fere with this meeting – the orders always issued on boy-meets-girl assign­ments. But, as usual, he had noth­ing to do but ob­serve. The meet­ing was coming off on the dot, with­out any prodding or protec­tion from Jo. They always did.

Of course.

With a sigh, he folded his newspaper, smiling again at the couple – yes, it was the right man, too – and moved away, as if reluc­tant to abandon his bench, but yield­ing politely all the same to the exigen­cies of inci­pient love. He won­dered what would happen were he to pull away the false mus­tache, pitch the news­paper onto the grass, and bound away with a joy­ous whoop. He suspec­ted that the course of history would not have been deflec­ted by even a second of an arc.

He was not minded to try the experi­ment, though. For one thing, that was not how he was supposed to earn his pay. For another, only the suspi­cion that his presence had been totally irrele­vant preven­ted him from feeling like a pimp. So ambi­guous a state of mind was an uncom­fort­able distance from how he had ex­pected a field agent of the Service would feel, ten years ago when he had first been approached. He no longer expected to be asked to meet space pirates in hand-to-hand battle, or to out­wit some sinister plane­tary regent in a diplo­matic duel with no reward but a secret promo­tion and the grate­ful smile of a princess who, alas, must wed another; but he did not know why. He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princes­ses, but what was worse, he had be­come a lot more cyni­cal without hav­ing become even slightly the wiser.

He had also become pretty damned bored.

The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed the gravel path and the green­ery with­out any of the blast­ing heat which one or the other brought to bear later in their sepa­rate, epi­cyclic summers. The people here were candid, friendly, hard­working, obsessed with gardens, all bread and cheese and beer; their idea of adven­ture was pri­vate flying to the next county to look at the scen­ery. Randolph was alto­gether the most com­fort­able planet he had visited in years. More than a little back­ward, perhaps, but restful, too.

It was also slightly over a hundred light-years away from Earth. It would be in­teres­ting to know how Service head­quarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy would meet girl at a certain spot on Randolph, precisely at 14:58:03.

Or how Service head­quarters could have am­bushed with micro­metric pre­ci­sion a major in­terstellar fleet, with no more prepa­ration than a few days' build-up in the news­papers and video could evi­dence.

The press was free on Randolph, as every­where. It reported the news it got in any way it chose. Any con­cen­tra­tion of Service ships in the Black Horse area, or any­where else, would have been noticed and reported on. The Service did not forbid such reports for “security” reasons or for any other reasons. Yet there had been noth­ing to report but that:

(a) an armada of staggering size had erupted with no real warn­ing from the Black Horse Nebu­la; and

(b) the Service had been ready.

By now, it was common­place that the Service was always ready. It had not had a defect or a fail­ure in well over two centu­ries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming-sounding tech­ni­cal term by which it referred to the possi­bi­lity that a boy-meets-girl assign­ment might not come off.

Jo hailed a hopper. The hell with it. What­ever he had joined the Service for, it had not been to be bored to death. It was time for a show­down.

Once inside the hopper, he stripped himself of the mus­tache, the bald spot, the fore­head creases – all the make-up that had given him his mask of friendly innoc­uous­ness – and defied both regula­tions and anti-litter ordi­nan­ces by drop­ping them out the window.

The hoppy watched the whole process in the rear-view mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes.

“Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn't care if I saw you. You must be a Service man.”

“That's right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?”

“Sure enough.” The hoppy gunned his ma­chine. It rose smoothly to the ex­press level. “First time I ever got close to a Ser­vice man – far as I know. Didn't hardly believe it at first when I saw you taking your face off. You sure looked differ­ent.”

“Have to, sometimes,” Jo said, pre­occu­pied.

“I'll bet. No wonder you know all about every­thing before it breaks. You must have a thou­sand faces each, your own mother wouldn't know you, eh? Don't you care if I know about your snoop­ing around in dis­guise?”

Jo grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sen­sation across one curve of his cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped away the over­looked bit of tissue and exa­mined it reproach­fully.

“Of course not. Disguise is an ele­men­tary part of Service work. Any­one could guess that. We don't use it often, as a matter of fact – only on very simple assign­ments.”

“Oh.” The hoppy sounded slightly disap­pointed, as melo­drama faded. He flew silent­ly for about a minute. Then specu­la­ti­ve­ly he said, “Some­times I think the Service must have time-travel, the things they pull.”

Jo could not have risen to this bait even had he known the answer. He was in fact be­gin­ning to feel a slight ebbing of his own bra­vado.

“Well, here you are. Good luck, mister.”

“Thanks.” He thought he would need it. Set­ting his shoulders, Jo marched di­rectly to Krasna's office.

Krasna was a Ran­dolpher, Earth-trained, and answer­able to the Earth office, but other­wise pretty much on his own. His heavy, mus­cular face wore the same ex­pres­sion of serene confi­dence that was charac­teristic of senior Service offi­cials every­where – even some that, tech­ni­cally speak­ing, had no faces to wear it.

“Boy meets girl,” Jo said briefly. “On the nose and on the spot.”

“Good work, Jo. Smoke? Drink? Rax?” He ro­tated the table beside his desk at Jo with an ex­pansive gesture.

“Nope, not now, thanks. Like to talk to you, if you've got the time.”

Krasna pushed a button, and a toad­stool-like chair rose out of the floor be­hind Jo. “All the time in time. What's on your mind?”

“Well,” Jo said care­fully, “I'm won­dering why you patted me on the back just now for not doing a job.”

“You did a job.”

“I did not,” Jo said flatly. “Boy would have met girl, whether I'd been here on Ran­dolph or back on Earth. The course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in all the boy-meets-girl cases of every other field agent with whom I've com­pared notes.”

“Well, good,” Krasna said, smiling easily. “That's the way we like to have them run. And that's the way we expect them to run. But, Jo, we like to have some­body on the spot, some­body with a repu­ta­tion for re­source­ful­ness, just in case there's a snag. There almost never is, as you've observed. But ... just suppose there were?”

Jo snorted. “If what you're trying to do is es­tablish pre­con­di­tions for the fu­ture, any inter­fer­ence by a Service agent would throw the even­tual result farther off the track. I know that much about prob­abi­lity.”

“And what, may I ask, makes you think we're trying to set up the future?”

“It's obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet. The one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had time-travel. It's espe­cially ob­vious to all the indi­vi­duals and govern­ments and entire popu­la­tions that the Service has bailed out of serious messes for cen­tu­ries, with never a single failure.” Jo shrugged. “A man can be asked to safe­guard only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases be­fore he reali­zes, as an agent, that what the Service is safe­guard­ing is the future children of those meet­ings. Ergo – the Ser­vice knows what those chil­dren are to be like and has reason to want their fu­ture exis­tence guaran­teed. What other con­clu­sion is possible?”

Krasna took out a ciga­rette and lit it deli­be­rate­ly; it was ob­vious that he was us­ing a custo­mary maneu­ver to cloak his res­ponse.

“None,” he admit­ted at last. “We have some fore­know­ledge, of course. We couldn't have made our repu­ta­tion with espio­nage alone. But we have ob­vious other ad­van­tages: genetics, for instance, and ope­ra­tions research, the theory of games, the Dirac trans­mitter – it's quite an arse­nal, and of course there's a good deal of predic­tion involved in all those things.”

“I see that,” Jo said. He changed his mind about the ciga­rette and helped him­self to one. “But these things don't add up to infalli­bility – and that's a quali­tative differ­ence, Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The mo­ment the armada appeared, we'll assume, Earth heard about it by Dirac and started to assemble a coun­ter-armada. But it takes finite time to bring to­gether a con­cen­tra­tion of ships and men, even if your message system is instant­aneous.”

“The Service's counter-armada was already on hand. It had been build­ing there for so long and with so little fuss that no­body even noticed it con­cen­tra­ting until a day or so before the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and take notice, and be un­easy about what was going to break. But not very un­easy; the Service always wins – that's been a statis­tical fact for cen­tu­ries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord, it takes almost as long as that, in straight prepa­ra­tion, to mount some of the cam­paigns we've pulled off! The Dirac gives us an advan­tage of ten to twenty-five years in re­ally extreme cases out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than that.”

He realized that he had been fuming away on the ciga­rette until the roof of his mouth was al­most scorched, and snubbed it out angrily.

“That's a very different thing,” he said, “than knowing in a general way how an enemy is like­ly to behave, or what kind of children the Mende­lian laws say a given couple should have. It means that we've got some way of read­ing the future in minute detail. That's in flat contra­dic­tion to every­thing I've been taught about proba­bi­lity, but I have to believe what I see.”

Krasna laughed. “That's a very able presen­ta­tion,” he said. He seemed ge­nuinely pleased. “I think you'll remem­ber that you were first enticed into the Service when you began to won­der why the news was al­ways good. Fewer and fewer peo­ple wonder about that nowa­days; it's become a part of their expect­ed en­viron­ment.” He stood up and ran a hand through his hair, a gesture usually pre­limi­nary to an inter­view with some civi­lian offi­cial. “Now you've carried your­self through to the next stage. Con­gratu­la­tions, Jo. You've just been promoted!”

“I have?” Jo said incre­du­lously. “I came in here with the notion that I might get myself fired.”

“Quite the contrary. These were ques­tions you had to ask and that I've been wait­ing to hear. Now, come around to this side of the desk, Jo, and I'll play you a little history.”

Krasna unfolded the desk top to expose a holo­graph tank – a small 3V screen. Obe­diently Jo rose and went around the desk to where he could see what­ever was com­ing from the front; 3V was of course visi­ble from any side, but pro­sce­nium thinking died hard, and he dis­liked watch­ing peo­ple's backs.

Krasna said, “I had a standard indoc­tri­na­tion tape sent up to me a week ago, in the expect­ation that you'd be ready to see it about now. It's mostly a drama­tiza­tion, and it pretty well had to be, as you'll see, consider­ing that it covers some events that happened before either of us was born and which weren't record­ed at the time. But it's as ac­curate as we could possibly make it. Ready?”

“You bet. Go ahead.”

Krasna touched the board. A small dot of light appeared in the heart of the tank and went out again. At the same time, there was a small beep of sound. Then the tape began to un­roll and a scene devel­oped within the cube. The set seemed to be an office much like this one, though that had now gone quite dark; but the cloth­ing was defi­nite­ly period.

“As you suspected,” Krasna's voice said con­ver­sa­tion­ally in the dim­ness, over the rising voices of the actors, “the Service is infal­lible – within limits. How it got to be that way is a story that started several cen­turies back.”

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THE SONG OF THE BEEP

CHAPTER ONE:
A Little Slip of a Thing

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CHAPTER TWO:
Three Unpleasantries

The door to Weinbaum's office swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and a half feet of him. He was extre­mely blond and looked awk­ward, gen­tle, and not very intelli­gent. Wein­baum never in­trodu­ced him to any of his current girl friends if he could possi­bly avoid it.

“Thor, this young lady is our press neme­sis, Dana Lje, as I don't have to tell you, by the look on your face. Dana, Doctor Wald is offi­cially our chief engi­neer, unoffi­cially our director of re­search. He is also the inven­tor of the Dirac com­muni­cator, about which you have so damn­ably much infor­ma­tion.”

“It's out already ?” Dr. Wald said, scanning the tiny girl with grave deli­be­ra­tion.

“It is, and lots more – lots more. Dana, I think you're a good girl at heart, and for some reason I trust you, stupid though it is to trust any­body in this job. I should detain you until Year Day, video­casts or no video­casts. Instead, I'm just going to ask you to sit on what you've got until further notice, and I'm going to explain why.”

“Shoot.”

“I've already men­tioned how slow com­mu­ni­ca­tion is between star and star. We have to carry all our mes­sages on ships, just as we did locally before the in­ven­tion of the tele­graph. The Haertel Drive lets us beat the speed of light, for ships, but not by much of a margin over really long dis­tances. Do you under­stand that?”

“Certainly,” Dana said. She appeared a bit net­tled, and Wein­baum decided to give her the full dose at a more rapid pace. After all, she could be assu­med to be better inform­ed than the aver­age lay­man.

“What we've needed for a long time, then,” he said, “is some virtually in­stan­ta­neous method of getting a message from some­where to any­where. Any time lag, no matter how small it seems at first, between trans­mis­sion and recep­tion has a way of be­com­ing major as longer and longer dis­tances are involved. Sooner or later we must have this instan­ta­neous method, or we won't be able to get messages from one system to another fast enough to hold our juris­dic­tion over out­lying re­gions of space.”

“Wait a minute,” Dana said. "I'd always under­stood that ultra­wave is faster than light."

“Effectively it is; physically it isn't. You don't under­stand that?”

She shook her dark head.

“In a nutshell,” Wein­baum said, “ultrawave is radia­tion, and all radia­tion in free space is limit­ed to the speed of light. The way we hype up ultra­wave is to use an old appli­ca­tion of wave-guide theory, whereby the real trans­mission of ener­gy is at light speed, but a quasi-imagi­nary thing called phase velo­city is going faster. But the gain in speed of trans­mission isn't much. By ultra­wave, for in­stance, we get a beamed message to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly four. Prac­tically, that's not a very use­ful gain even over that short a dis­tance. We need speed.”

“Can't it be made to go any faster?” she said, frowning.

“No. Think of the laser pipe between here and Centaurus III as a cater­pillar. The cater­pil­lar him­self is moving along quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But the pulses, the waves of con­trac­tion, which pass along his body are going for­ward in the same direc­tion faster than he's going as a whole – and if you've ever watched a cater­pil­lar, you'll know that that is in fact the case. Now if the cater­pil­lar is end­less – tail on Earth, head on Cen­taurus III – and we im­pose pulse modu­la­tion on those waves, we can get the message carried by the modu­la­tion there faster than the cater­pillar him­self would have gotten there.”

“Thor here tells me that dimen­sio­nal ana­lysis shows that this shouldn't work at all, but it does. But there's a physi­cal limit to the number of pulses that can travel along that hard-working cater­pil­lar, and we've already reached that limit. We've taken phase velo­city right out to its end point, which is roughly twenty-five per­cent faster than the speed of light. And we were able to do that much only because it wasn't energy we were trans­mit­ting, that remained con­stant, but infor­mation. Clear so far?”

“I think so. When I don't under­stand, I'll whimper.”

“Okay. Obviously, twenty-five per­cent is no ef­fective gain at all over inter­stellar dis­tan­ces; ships remain still faster. For a long time, our rela­ti­vity theo­ries dis­couraged hope of any im­prove­ment. Even the high-phase velo­city of a guided wave didn't contra­dict those theories – it just found a limited, math­e­ma­ti­cally irrele­vant loop­hole in them. But when Thor here began look­ing into the ques­tion of the velo­city of pro­pa­ga­tion of a Dirac pulse, which is not an energy trans­fer sys­tem at all in any usual sense, he found the answer. The com­mu­ni­cator he developed from this does seem to act over long dis­tan­ces, any dis­tance, instan­taneously – and it may wind up knock­ing relativi­ty into a cocked hat. If I don't explain further, you'll under­stand why.”

The girl's face was a study in stunned rea­liza­tion. “I'm not sure I've taken in all the tech­ni­cali­ties,” she said. “But if I'd had any notion of the poli­ti­cal dyna­mite in this thing –”

“– you'd have kept out of my office,” Wein­baum said grimly. “A good thing you didn't. The Brindisi is carry­ing a model of the Dirac com­muni­cator out to the peri­phery of human ex­ploration – the Three Ghosts system – for a final test. The ship is sup­posed to get in touch with me from out there at a given Earth time, which we've cal­cu­la­ted very ela­bo­rate­ly to account for the resi­dual Lorentz and Milne trans­form­ations in­volved in over­drive flight, and for a lot of other time pheno­mena that wouldn't mean any­thing at all to you.”

“If that signal arrives here at the predicted Earth time, then – aside from the havoc the news will create among the few theo­re­ti­cal physi­cists whom we decide to let in on it – we will really have our instan­ta­neous com­mu­ni­cator, and can include all of occupied space in the same time zone. And we'll have a vir­tually in­super­able ad­van­tage over any law­breaker who has to resort to ultra­wave locally, and to letters carried by ships over the really long hauls.”

“Not,” Thor Wald said with a sort of sad sweet­ness, like Sauer­braten gravy, “if the secret has al­ready found its way into other hands.”

“That, of course, is the next ques­tion,” Wein­baum said. “It still remains to be seen just how much of it has leaked. The prin­ciple is more than a little eso­teric, Thor, and the name of the thing alone is large­ly hono­rific and wouldn't mean much by itself even to a trained scien­tist ... though I'm begin­ning to wish we'd called it the Pooh­sticks com­mu­ni­cator any­how. I gather that Dana's mys­te­rious infor­mant didn't go into tech­nical details about the con­struc­tion of the device itself ... or did he?”

“No,” Dana said. “I got no engi­neer­ing details from him at all, let alone any theory.”

“Tell the truth, Dana. I know that you're sup­pres­sing some of that letter. I can smell blanks in cru­cial infor­ma­tion a mile away. Hell, you haven't even read me the man's second predic­tion yet.”

The reporter shifted her posi­tion slightly in the chair. “All right – yes, I am sup­pres­sing some of it. But noth­ing in the least bit tech­ni­cal. There's an­other part of the first predic­tion that lists the number and class of ships you'll send to protect the Brindisi – the pre­dic­tion says they'll be suffi­cient for the job, by the way – and I'm keep­ing that to myself, to see whether or not it comes true along with the rest. If it does, I think I've hired my­self a leg­man.”

“If it does,” Wein­baum said, “what you'll have hired for your­self will be a jail­bird. Then we'll see how much mind-read­ing Mister J. Whasit Stevens can do from the sub­cellar of Fort Butner.”

He arose and ushered her out with what he hoped was con­trol­led polite­ness. This con­versa­tion had been a severe strain in a good many more ways than he could have anti­ci­pated. The minute the door had closed behind her, he swung on Thor Wald.

“This is very bad,” he said. “We'll just have to hope that this Stevens has got­ten his infor­ma­tion by some con­ven­tional means, miracle though that would be all by itself. I can see only three other possi­bili­ties. One is that a Dirac message can after all be picked up by some other kind of appa­ratus.”

“Well, I won't risk saying that's im­pos­sible,” Wald said. “But it's about as like­ly as making an audio tape of a smoke signal. I think you would save your­self effort to rule that one out.”

“The second is that this Stevens has a genuine, in­depen­dent method of pre­dic­ting the future. I'll rule that one out all by my­self. If he did, he wouldn't be using it in this way. The third is that he has some­how gotten from us enough in­for­ma­tion to build a Dirac machine of his own.”

“You have left out the most im­por­tant possi­bil­ity of all.”

“I have? What's that?”

“That he has inde­pen­dently discovered the com­mu­ni­cator.”

“Dear God,” Weinbaum said. “How likely is that?”

“It's almost com­pletely unlikely. But my dear Robin, like­li­hood has almost noth­ing to do with the matter. What counts is the state of the art, plus in­sight. I in­vented this machine? Very well, I live in my times – and I am not the only smart cookie who does. The his­tory of science is full of such co­inci­den­ces, re­gard­less of what the pro­ba­bili­ties say.”

“Yes ... I remember a few myself. So it all comes down to police work in the end, after all. We've got to find Stevens – and fast.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER THREE:
The Non-Appearance of J. Shelby Stevens

The age of Dun and Bradstreet, of F.B.I, dos­siers bulging with anony­mous gossip, of legal­ized wire­tap­ping, of Social Security numbers, of uni­versal credit cards, of coded addres­ses and tele­phone numbers and in­come tax returns (Fed­eral, state, city), and finally of an almost com­plet­ely com­puter­ized bureau­cracy had done its work: On the one hand, privacy was now hedged about by the most com­plex maze of laws in legal his­tory, so com­plex indeed that viola­tions cases took Jarndycean life­times to try, and in all ordi­nary situa­tions the laws had been re­placed by an only slightly less com­plex code of manners; and on the other, there was no one in the world who had any privacy from Captain Robin Wein­baum of Secu­rity Service, when he deemed the situa­tion an emer­gency, which was seldom, and was sure of his legal grounds, which was usually.

This was an emer­gency; but his first finding was that J. Shelby Stevens had no past what­so­ever.

This in itself did not sur­prise him, in one sense, for the first step for any­one attemp­ting anything even faintly illegal in this day and age was to adopt an alias, and peddling classi­fied infor­ma­tion was certainly a good deal more than faint­ly ille­gal. And yet in another sense it did sur­prise him; Wein­baum always antici­pated high intelli­gence in his oppo­nents – he got fewer rude shocks that way – and he would have thought that any man with the brains to try to set up as enor­mous an opera­tion as Inter­stellar Infor­mation appeared to be (or was trying to pass itself off as) would know that Wein­baum's bureau could pene­trate any ima­gin­able alias with the speed and facility of a pin burst­ing a balloon. If J. Shelby Stevens did not want to work with the Govern­ment, it would have been much more sensible for him to have operated in the open under his own name, sur­rounded by the hundreds of legal safe­guards a really good privacy lawyer could set up for him, and either patient­ly abide or legally fend off the ques­tions the bureau would inevi­tably ask him.

It was obvious that Stevens did not want to work with the Govern­ment, for all the first, polite formal in­quir­ies directed to him were answered by varia­tions of that madden­ing letter which is usually the pre­ro­ga­tive of Govern­ment offi­cials: “Thank you for your letter of November 15th. Mr. Stevens is presently out of town on busi­ness, but I shall call your letter to his atten­tion when he returns.” Routine field work in Rico City showed that he was indeed not in his offices, and that no­body there knew where he was. To put the matter more bluntly, he had vanished.

It was not supposed to be possible to vanish un­der the multi­faceted eye of Captain Robin Wein­baum, but Stevens had managed it. There were no exis­ting photo­graphs of him, nor any existing sig­natures – he paid his bills in cash, in itself so extra­ordi­nary a proce­dure that it should have made tracing the source or sources of the money as easy as follow­ing a dog to its kennel, but not a single such note proved to have any use­ful history. Inter­stellar Infor­ma­tion appeared to have no oth­er officers to be ques­tion­ed; indeed, it had no staff at all, at least in Rico City, except for one secre­tary, who proved to be about as stupid as it was possible for a secre­tary to be in these days of robot tran­scri­bers.

Weinbaum, who knew that his unders­tanding of the recesses of the female mind was less than perfect, sent Margaret Soames to Rico City to check on the girl, and Margaret reported her to be just what she appeared to be: a genuinely dumb blonde, the kind that thinks Betel­guese is some­thing Indians use to darken their skins. There was, Margaret further reported, no possi­bi­lity that she could be faking it; nor did her back­ground turn up any­thing in the least use­ful. She had been hired off the street, with­out the inter­posi­tion of any employ­ment agency, and all she knew about J. Shelby Stevens was that he was a little strange, but all the same, “such a sweet old man.” Pressed for a descrip­tion of J. Shelby Stevens, she gave a descrip­tion of a sweet old man – apparently quite an old man, but with­out further details. Did his letters tell her any­thing about his business? No, he had only dictated one so far, the one to be sent to Robin Wein­baum or any­body else who called while he was away. Hadn't he also given her one to Dana Lje? Oh no, that must have been before her time; she would re­mem­ber because she watched Dana Lje's program a whole lot.

And most extra­ordinary of all, a check upon the cor­porate status of Inter­stellar Infor­ma­tion showed that it had been provided with no repeat no legal safe­guards beyond those that the ordinary citizen could expect in the body of the law. Nor were there any special secu­rity pre­cau­tions set up in the Rico City offices; Wein­baum's field opera­tives, armored to the teeth against all possible boo­by-traps and equally well armed to crack the most in­ge­nious safe, found the offices more open to surrep­ti­tious search than an ordi­nary bookie joint would be. The search produced no in­crimi­na­ting letters or indeed any letters at all, no clue as to Stevens's source of in­come, no list or code ta­ble that might lead the bureau to a line on Stevens's field staff, and above all, no trace of Stevens's identity. The offices had been tenanted by another firm up until a little over a month ago; the place was a mass of finger­prints, but there was no way to tell which set, if any, belonged to Stevens.

There simply could not be any such person on Earth. There was only one con­clusion possible: Stevens was an Erskine opera­tive, without any pre­vious Earthly history, but with the colossal gall – and, Weinbaum had reluc­tant­ly to admit, the even more colossal skill – to attempt a plot of enor­mous and ob­vious­ly still hidden com­plex­ities with noth­ing but the bare bones of his un­know­able idea. Under such cir­cum­stances, the bold­ness of his approach to Dana Lje was both breath­taking and in­sul­ting; his intent, pro­bably dis­rup­tive.

Weinbaum ordered a twenty-four-hour Din­wid­die watch on the Rico City offices from the sec­ond story of a tamale parlor across the street in case Stevens should show up again, and had the secre­tary tailed with­in the limits of the law; but the secre­tary did not meet with any old men, or any­body who might be dis­guised as an old man, nor did any such show up at the offices. He could not im­pose any such watch on Dana Lje – that would have in­volved him with the laws protect­ing free­dom of the press, which were almost as fero­cious as those pro­tect­ing privacy – but offi­cially, at least, Dana Lje did not hear any­thing further from Stevens either, although at Wein­baum's in­struc­tions she had offered to accept Stevens's tenta­tive con­tract. An in­tensive check of all known Erskine opera­tives both on and off Earth proved equally un­reward­ing; they were all accounted for; this had to be a new­comer – perhaps Wein­baum's counter­part himself, a man whose identity was un­known even to his under­lings.

In the end, Wein­baum was forced to a public ad­mis­sion of his in­com­pe­tence: he issued an ap­peal to J. Shelby Stevens to produce him­self.

Within twenty-four hours, he had an answer. It was a wire­fax message that had been dic­tated from a primi­tive tele­phone booth in Rico City and paid for in coin – lots of coin. It read:

MY TIME LIMITED BUT READY TO MEET WITH YOU WITHIN NEXT 24 HOURS. WILL PLACE SELF UNDER STOOLIE'S ARREST VICTORIA CITY JAIL 0200 TOMOR­ROW AND AWAIT YOUR PLEASURE
J. SHELBY STEVENS

“Stoolie's arrest” was a slang tech­nical term for a most com­plex legal situa­tion under which a cit­izen volun­teered co­ope­ra­tion and in­for­ma­tion to the Govern­ment under com­plete protec­tion against self-incri­mi­nation, even should his infor­ma­tion impli­cate him in a major crime. Further­more, Stevens had chosen his jail and his time very well; it would be impos­sible to muster a prop­er tech­ni­cal crew to make the limited per­sonal study of Stevens which the law allowed and still get there – “there” being in Australia – before Stevens would be re­leased on his own re­cogni­zance. All Wein­baum would be allowed would be a secre­tary – which would, of course, be Margaret Soames, a trained observer; and all that he could con­trive to take with him ille­gally would be a but­ton camera too small to be loaded with color film and filters, and a button recorder too small to pro­duce use­ful voice spectra.

Clearly, Stevens knew exactly what he was do­ing. But so, ordinarily, did Captain Robin Wein­baum. Stevens had had the daring to present him­self to the jaws of Security. He would escape them this time, there was no possi­ble doubt about that; but he could not possi­bly escape with­out leaving behind a resi­duum of in­for­ma­tion that the bu­reau could put to good use. His bold­ness was ad­mir­able; but the times were very hard on free­lancers.

Nevertheless, Weinbaum was dis­quieted. Ste­vens's exper­tise was unu­sual, but not unprece­dented. What was impos­sible was what he had al­ready shown he knew.

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER FOUR:
A Free Prediction

The Victoria jail was a proper horror. Wein­baum would not have been sur­prised to find that Stevens had been put into some equi­valent of a Dallas jail's drunk tank, and was a little relieved to find instead that he had been put in soli­tary. How­ever, when he let him­self and Margaret into Stevens's cell, lock­ing the door behind them and passing the keys out to the guard, he was upset all over again, for there was so little light in here that the button camera was going to be almost use­less.

He sat down heavily on the nearest stool and studied Stevens as best he could. Stevens in turn smiled the weak, bene­vo­lent smile of the very old, and laid his book aside on the bunk. The book, Wein­baum knew – since his office had cleared it – was only a volume of pleasant, harm­less lyrics by a New Dynasty poet named George Macbeth. Similarly, Stevens had refused to be finger­printed, voice­printed, have his retinal eye­prints photo­graphed, or under­go any other sort of standard iden­tifi­ca­tion proce­dure, as was his privi­lege as a self-surrendered stoolie. And he was wear­ing gloves. On him they looked quite in character, for all the diffe­rence that made.

“For someone who wants to cooperate with us,” Weinbaum said, “your methods are rather ex­treme, Mr. Stevens.”

“No, they are quite standard, as I am sure you know,” Stevens said. His voice was high and mu­sical, rather like that of a boy soprano. “I did come here to help you, and I trust you will give me credit for that. Other­wise, let us part friends, and that will be the end.”

Weinbaum was momen­tarily baffled. “All right, thank you for small favors. Now let's get down to busi­ness. What did you come here to offer me?”

“Were our predic­tions correct, Captain?” Stevens said.

“I thought I was supposed to be asking the ques­tions. But, again, all right, they were. You still won't tell us how you did it, I presume?”

“But I already have,” Stevens protested, “through Dana Lje, as I am sure you also know. Our intelli­gence net­work is the best in the uni­verse, Captain. It is supe­rior even to your own ex­cellent organi­zation, as events have shown.”

In the back­ground, Margaret Soames's pen raced silently over her pad. If Stevens took any notice of her at all, he gave no sign of it.

“Its results are superior, that I'll grant,” Wein­baum said glumly. “If Dana Lje had thrown your letter down her dis­posal chute, we would have lost the Brindisi and our Dirac trans­mitter both. Incidentally, did your original letter pre­dict ac­curately the number of ships we would send?”

Stevens nodded pleasantly, his neatly trimmed white beard thrus­ting for­ward slightly in the gloom as he smiled.

“I was afraid so.” Weinbaum leaned forward. “Do you have the Dirac trans­mitter, Stevens?”

“Of course, Captain. How else could my cor­respondents report to me with the effi­cien­cy you have observed?”

“Then why don't our receivers pick up the broad­casts by your agents? Dr. Wald says it's in­herent in the principle that Dirac 'casts are picked up by all instru­ments tuned to receive them, bar none. And at this stage of the game, there are so few such broad­casts being made that we'd be almost certain to detect any that weren't coming from our own opera­tives.”

“I decline to answer that question, if you'll ex­cuse the im­polite­ness,” Stevens said, his voice quaver­ing slightly. “I am an old man, Captain, and this in­telli­gence agency is my retire­ment ven­ture, into which I have invested all my savings. If I told you how we operated, we would no long­er have any advan­tage over your own Service, ex­cept for the limited free­dom from secrecy which we have. I have been assured by com­petent coun­sel that I have every right to ope­rate a private in­vesti­gation bureau, properly licensed, upon any scale that I may choose; and that I have the right to keep my methods secret, as the so-called ‘intel­lectual assets’ of my firm. If you wish to use our services, well and good. We will provide them, with abso­lute guaran­tees on all infor­ma­tion we furnish you, for an appro­priate fee. But our meth­ods are our own property.”

Robin Weinbaum smiled twistedly. “I'm not a naive man, Mr. Stevens,” he said. “My Service is hard on naivete. You know as well as I do that the Govern­ment can't allow you to operate on a free­lance basis, supply­ing top-secret in­for­ma­tion to any­one who can pay the price, or worse, free of charge to video colum­nists on a ‘test’ basis, even though you arrive at every jot of that informa­tion inde­pen­dently of es­pio­nage – which I still haven't entire­ly ruled out, by the way. If you can dupli­cate this Brindisi per­formance at will, we will have to have your services exclu­sive­ly. In short, you will have to become a hired civi­lian arm of my own bureau.”

“Quite,” Stevens said, returning the smile in a fatherly way. “We anti­ci­pated that, of course. How­ever, we have con­tracts with other govern­ments to con­sider: Erskine, in parti­cular. If we are to work ex­clu­sive­ly for Earth, neces­sarily our price will include com­pen­sation for re­nounc­ing our other accounts.”

“Why should it? Patriotic public servants work for their govern­ment at a loss, if they can't work for it any other way.”

“I am quite aware of that. I am quite prepared to renounce my other inter­ests. But I do require to be paid.”

“How much?” Weinbaum said, suddenly aware that his fists were clenched so tightly that they hurt.

Stevens appeared to consider, nodding his flow­ery white poll in senile deli­bera­tion.

“My associates would have to be consulted. Ten­tatively, however, a sum equal to the present ap­propria­tion of your bureau would do, pending further nego­tia­tions.”

Weinbaum shot to his feet, eyes wide. “You old buccaneer! You know damned well that I can't spend my entire appro­pria­tion on a single civilian service! Did it ever occur to you that most of the civi­lian out­fits work­ing for us are on cost-plus con­tracts, and that our civi­lian exe­cu­tives are being paid just a credit a year, by their own choice? You're demand­ing nearly two thousand credits an hour from your own govern­ment, and claim­ing the legal protec­tion that the Government af­fords you at the same time, in order to let those fanatics on Erskine run up a higher bid!”

“The price is not unreasonable,” Stevens said. “The service is worth the price.”

“That's where you're wrong! We have the in­ventor of the machine work­ing for us. For less than half the sum you're asking, we can find the appli­ca­tion of the device that you're trading on – of that you can be damned sure.”

“May I point out that the device has a mini­mum of two inde­pendent in­ven­tors? You are en­tering upon a danger­ous gamble, Captain.”

“Perhaps. We'll soon see!” Weinbaum glared at the placid face. “I'm forced to let you remain a free man, Mr. Stevens. Even were you not pro­tected by the terms of stoolie's arrest, we've been unable to show that you came by your informa­tion by any ille­gal method. You had classi­fied facts in your posses­sion, but no classi­fied docu­ments, and it's your privi­lege as a citizen to make guesses, no matter how educated.”

“But we'll catch up with you sooner or later. Had you been reason­able, you might have found yourself in a very good posi­tion with us, your in­come as assured as any poli­ti­cal in­come can be, and your person res­pec­ted to the hilt. Now, how­ever, you're sub­ject to censor­ship–you have no idea how humi­lia­ting that can be, but I'm going to see to it that you find out. There'll be no more news­beats for Dana Lje, or for any­one else.”

“Illegal.”

“It is indeed illegal – but don't you think the Govern­ment also has lawyers? Barratry is a dead­ly weapon in a govern­ment's hands. We can tie you in so many knots that – well, as you your­self point out, Mr. Stevens, you're an old man. If you bring suit against us, you will probably win im­probably a mini­mum of fif­teen years after you are dead. In the mean­time, until you manage to get a restrain­ing order, I want to see every word of copy that you file with any client outside the bu­reau. Every word that is of use to me will be used, and you'll be paid the statu­tory one cent a word for it – the same rate that the F.B.I, pays for anon­ymous gossip. Every­thing that I don't find use­ful will be killed with­out clear­ance. Even­tually we'll have the modi­fica­tion of the Dirac that you're us­ing, and when that happens, you'll be so flat broke that a pan­cake with a hare­lip could spit right over you.”

Weinbaum paused for a moment, astonished at his own fury.

Stevens's clarinet-like voice began to sound in the window­less cavity. “Captain, I have no doubt that you can do this to me, at least in­com­pletely. But it will prove fruit­less. I will give you a predic­tion, at no charge. It is guaran­teed, as are all our predic­tions. It is this: You will never find that modi­fica­tion. Even­tually, I will give it to you, on my own terms, but you will never find it for your­self, nor will you force it out of me. In the mean­time, not a word of copy will be filed with you; for, despite the fact that you are an arm of the Govern­ment, I can well afford to wait you out.”

“Bluster,” Weinbaum said.

“Fact. Yours is the bluster – loud talk based on nothing more than a hope. I, however, know where­of I speak. But let us con­clude this dis­cus­sion. It serves no pur­pose; you will need to see my points made the hard way. Thank you for grant­ing me my free­dom. We will talk again un­der different circum­stances on – let me see; ah, yes, on January 9th of the year 2091. That year is, I believe, almost upon us.”

Stevens picked up his book again, nodding at Wein­baum, his ex­pres­sion harm­less and kindly, his hands show­ing the marked tremor of paralysis agi­tans. Wein­baum moved help­less­ly to the door, ges­turing to Mar­ga­ret, and flagged the turn­key. As the bars closed behind them, Stevens's voice called out:

“Oh, yes, and a Happy New Year, Captain.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER FIVE:
No News Is Bad News

Weinbaum sent Margaret home, and then went back by him­self by way of Rico City, just in case his field opera­tives had turned up any­thing new, or in case Stevens should have made the mis­take of check­ing in back there him­self. But, of course, there was noth­ing.

Weinbaum then blasted his way back into his own home office, at least twice as mad as the pro­ver­bial nest of hornets, and at the same time rath­er dis­mal­ly aware of his own pro­bable fu­ture. If Stevens's second predic­tion turned out to be as pheno­menally accu­rate as his first had been, Cap­tain Robin Wein­baum would soon be peddling a natty set of second-hand uni­forms.

He glared down at Margaret as he went by her desk. She glared right back; she had known him too long to be intimi­dated.

“Anything?” he said.

“Dr. Wald's waiting for you in your office. There's one field report – just came in – and a couple of Diracs on your private tape. Any more luck with the old codger?”

“That,” he said crushingly, “is Top Secret.”

“Poof. That means that still no­body knows the answer but J. Shelby Stevens.”

He collapsed suddenly. “You're so right. That's just what it does mean. But we'll bust him wide open sooner or later. We've got to.”

“You'll do it,” Margaret said. “Anything else for me?”

“No. Tip off the clerical staff that there's a half-holi­day today, then go take in a steak or a stereo or some­thing your­self. Dr. Wald and I have a few private wires to pull ... and un­less I'm sadly mis­taken, a private bottle of aqua­vit to empty.”

“Right,” the secre­tary said. “My trans­cribed notes are on your desk. Tie one on for me, chief. I under­stand that beer is the best chaser for aqua­vit – I'll have a case sent up.”

“If you should return after I am suitably squiffed,” Wein­baum said, feel­ing a little better al­ready, “I will kiss you for your thought­ful­ness. That should keep you at your stereo at least twice through the third feature.”

As he went on through the door of his pri­vate sanc­tum, she said de­mure­ly be­hind him, “It cer­tainly should.”

As soon as the door closed, however, his mood abruptly became almost as black as before. De­spite his com­para­tive youth – he was now only fifty-five – he had been in the Ser­vice a long time, and he needed no one to tell him the possi­ble con­se­quen­ces that might flow from posses­sion by a private citizen of the Dirac com­mu­ni­ca­tor. If there was ever to be a Fede­ration of Man in the galaxy, it was with­in the power of J. Shelby Stevens to ruin it before it had fairly gotten started. Whether or not Stevens intended any such thing was of course irrele­vant; he could not know the stakes. And there seemed to be noth­ing at all that Wein­baum or any­body else could do about it.

As predicted, Thor Wald was wait­ing for him, and so was the bottle, which except for its label could have been taken to contain noth­ing more lethal than water. The physi­cist, note-pad open beside him, was read­ing a jour­nal the text of which seemed to be about 75 per­cent mathe­mat­ics, which was no sur­prise; Wein­baum was a little taken aback, how­ever, to see that the other 25 percent was in­argua­bly Chinese.

“Hello, Thor,” he said glumly. “Pass the bottle. I didn't know Chinese was one of your languages.”

“It isn't, not one word,” Wald said. “But I don't have to speak it to be able to read it. I can go di­rectly from the ideo­graphs into any of the Eu­ropean lang­uages I do know. It's aw­fully help­ful that the written charac­ter for ‘horse’ is a pic­ture of a horse, the word for ‘woman’ is a mouth with a roof above it, and so on. When I get into trou­ble, I can usually guess the mean­ing from the con­text of the math – I'd be no good at all with poetry.”

“You are a solid mass of surprises. I wish I had a few in exchange.”

“I gather it went badly, Robin. Tell me about it.”

Briefly, Weinbaum told him. “And the worst of it,” he finished, “is that Stevens him­self pre­dicts that we won't find the appli­ca­tion of the Dirac that he's using, and that even­tually we'll have to buy it at his price. Some­how I believe him – but I can't see how it's possi­ble. If I were to tell the Con­gress that I was go­ing to spend my entire appro­pria­tion for a single civi­lian ser­vice, I'd be out on my ear with­in the next three sessions.”

“Perhaps that isn't his real price,” the scientist sug­gested. “If he wanted to barter, he'd natu­rally begin with a price miles above what he actually wants.”

“Sure, sure ... but frankly, Thor, I'd hate to give the old repro­bate even a single credit if I could get out of it.” Weinbaum sighed. “Despite all the res­tric­tions in that damn jail, I smuggled out quite a bit in the way of raw data, but the trouble is, I don't know what to do with it. I've ordered the I. D. lab staff to start with the voice com­pa­rator, which is usually pretty sure-fire, but some­how in this case I haven't much hope of its turn­ing up any­thing.”

“How does that work?” Wald said inter­est­edly.

“It's an analog of the blink micro­scope that as­trono­mers use for dis­cover­ing new aster­oids, com­ets, and the like. Or new planets, for that matter; Perse­phone was dis­covered that way. You put two plates of the same star field, taken at dif­fer­ent times, side by side and blink from one to the oth­er; if any­thing moves, you've got your object. In the same way, the voice comparator isolates in­flec­tions on single nor­mally stressed sylla­bles and matches them. It's standard I. D. search­ing tech­nique, on a case of this kind, but it takes so long that we usually get the quarry by other means be­fore it pays off. In this case, we'll have to com­pare Stevens's voice with every single person we've got record­ed, since we have no sus­pects. We'll start with the staff of the bureau itself, since the Dirac is in­volved, and then go on to the Erskine file. After that, I guess we'll just go on at ran­dom, maybe start­ing with the Presi­dent. Pardon me while I groan a little.”

“Here comes the beer. That ought to help some.”

“I doubt it. Well, let's see what's come in from the field.”

Thor Wald moved silently away from Wein­baum's desk while the officer un­folded it and set up the Dirac screen. Stacked neatly next to the ultra­phone – a device Wein­baum had been think­ing of, only a few days ago, as per­ma­nent­ly out­moded – were the tapes Mar­garet had men­tioned. He threaded the first one into the Dirac and turned the toggle to the posi­tion labeled Start.

Instantly the whole screen went pure white and the audio speakers emitted an al­most instantly end-stopped blare of sound – a beep that, as Wein­baum al­ready knew, made up a conti­nuous spec­trum from about 15 cycles per second to well above 28,000 c.p.s; how much farther above had yet to be deter­mined, for it reached well beyond the limits of any known record­ing appa­ra­tus, into re­gions where it killed labo­ra­tory ani­mals and set fire to their cages. Then the light and the noise were gone as if they had never been, and were replaced by the fami­liar face and voice of Wein­baum's local Din­widdie ops chief in Rico City.

“There's been no trans­mis­sion of any kind ei­ther into or out of Stevens's offi­ces here,” the oper­ative said with­out pre­amble. “They're using hard­ly enough power to keep the lights on, there hasn't been one phone call, and Ste­vens's secre­tary has been spend­ing most of her time with the button of a tran­sis­tor radio in her ear. What she's been getting from that has been com­mer­cial junk, from the sta­tion in Aca­pulco, eighty per­cent hop-and-holler and the rest pitches for Genuine Juarez Old Ame­ri­can Scotch. Abso­lutely nothing is go­ing on, I'd stake my life on it – the place is a des­ert. And there's no sign of Stevens at all. Orders?”

Weinbaum dictated rapidly to the blank stretch of tape that follow­ed: “Margaret, next time you send any Dirac tapes in here, cut that damn­able beep off them first. Tell the boys in Rico City that Stevens has been released, and that I'm pro­ceed­ing for an Order in Security to tap his ultra-phones and his vocal lines – this is one case where I'm sure we can per­suade the court that the tap is necessary. Also – and be damn sure you code this – tell them to pro­ceed with the tap immedi­ately and to main­tain it whether or not the court okays it; and ditto with the Din­widdie moni­tor­ing. I will thumb­print a Full Res­pon­si­bi­lity Con­fes­sion for them. We can't afford to play patty-cake with Stevens – the poten­tial damage is just too damn great. And, oh, yes, Margaret, send the mes­sage by courier, and send out general orders to every­body con­cerned not to use the Dirac again except when dis­tance and time rule every other me­dium out. For the time being I prefer to take Stevens's claim that he can receive Dirac 'casts as proved.”

He put down the mike and stared morosely for a mo­ment at the beau­ti­ful Eri­da­nean scroll­wood of his desk top. Wald coughed in­quiring­ly and re­trieved the aqua­vit.

“Excuse me, Robin,” he said, “but I should think that would work both ways.”

“So should I. And yet the fact is that we've never picked up as much as a whis­per from either Ste­vens or his agents. I can't think of any way that that could be pulled off, but evi­dent­ly it can.”

“Well, let's rethink the problem, and see what we get,” Wald said. “I didn't want to say so in front of the young lady, for ob­vious reasons – I mean Miss Lje, of course, not Margaret – but the truth is that the Dirac is essen­tially a sim­ple mech­anism in prin­ciple. As I told you, I seriously doubt that there's any way to trans­mit a message from it that can't be detected – and an exa­mina­tion of the theory with that pro­viso in mind might give us some­thing new.”

“What proviso?” Weinbaum said. Thor Wald left him be­hind rather often these days.

“Why, that Dirac trans­mission doesn't neces­sarily go to all com­mu­ni­ca­tors ca­pable of receiv­ing it. If that's true, then the reason why it is true should emerge from the theory.”

“I see. Okay, proceed on that line. There doesn't seem to be any other; as my Rico City op said, every­thing else is an abso­lute desert, and that in­cludes Stevens's dossier. Prior to the open­ing of the office in Rico City, there's no dope what­ever on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good as rubbed my nose in the fact that he's using a pseud when I first talked to him. I asked him what the ‘J’ in his name stood for, and he said, ‘Oh, let's make it Jerome.’ But who the man behind the pseud is –”

“Is it possible that he's using his own initials?”

“No,” Weinbaum said. “Only the dumbest ever do that, or trans­pose sylla­bles, or retain any con­nection at all with their real names. Those are the people who are in serious emo­tio­nal trouble, peo­ple who drive them­selves into ano­ny­mity, but leave clues strewn all around the land­scape – those clues are really a cry for help, for dis­covery. Of course, we're work­ing on that angle – we can't neg­lect any­thing – but J. Shelby Stevens isn't that kind of hair­pin, I'm sure. In fact – I haven't brought this up before, because it's a grave­yard secret – I'm se­rious­ly enter­tain­ing the possi­bility that he's actually an entity called a vom­bis, a to­tally protean crea­ture work­ing for a sort of em­pire on the far side of the galaxy called the Green Exarchy. If he is, we've had it, for sure.”

“I never heard of either.”

“I wish I never had. Forget it for the time be­ing.” Wein­baum stood up ab­rupt­ly. “Pretend I never men­tioned it, Thor. In the mean­time, what's first on your tech­nical program?”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER SIX:
A Cycle of Hoops

“Well ... I suppose we'll have to start by check­ing the fre­quen­cies we use. We're going on Dirac's assump­tion – and it works very well, and al­ways has – that a posi­tron in motion through a crystal lattice is accom­pa­nied by de Broglie waves which are trans­forms of the waves of an elec­tron in mo­tion some­where else in the uni­verse. Thus if we control the fre­quen­cy and path of the posi­tron, we con­trol the place­ment of the elec­tron – we cause it to appear, so to speak, in the cir­cuits of a com­mu­ni­cator some­where else. After that, re­ception is just a matter of ampli­fying the bursts and read­ing the signal.”

“Plus collimation, I assume.”

Wald scowled and shook his blond head. “No, colli­ma­tion is not only un­neces­sary, it's out­right im­pos­sible. The effect is abso­lu­tely non-linear – it doesn't even spread like a wave front, it just occurs every­where, all at once and at the same time. If Stevens is getting out messages that we don't pick up, my first assump­tion would be that he's worked out a fine-tuning cir­cuit that's more deli­cate than ours, and that he's more or less sneak­ing his messages under ours. The only way that could be done, as far as I can see at the mo­ment, is by some­thing really fan­tas­tic in the way of exact fre­quen­cy con­trol of his posi­tron gun – quite ig­nor­ing the fact that your people haven't caught him with as much as a water pistol, thus far. If so, the logi­cal step for us is to go back to the be­gin­ning of our tests and re-run our X-ray diffrac­tions, to see if we can refine our mea­sure­ments of posi­tron fre­quen­cies.”

The scientist looked so in­expres­sibly gloomy as he offered this con­clu­sion that a pall of hope­less­ness settled over Wein­baum in sheer sym­pathy.

“You don't look as though you expected that to uncover anything new.”

“I don't. You see, Robin, things are differ­ent in phy­sics now than they used to be in the twen­tieth cen­tury. In those days, it was al­ways pre­supposed that phy­sics was limit­less – the classic state­ment was made by Hermann Weyl, who said that ‘It is in the nature of a real thing to be in­ex­haus­ti­ble in con­tent.’ We know now that that's not so, ex­cept in a remote, asso­cia­tio­nal sort of way. When Haertel proved that there is only one fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cle, that in effect closed the book. Nowa­days, phy­sics is a de­fined and self-limit­ed science; its scope is still prodi­gious, but we can no longer think of it as end­less.

“Thanks to Haertel, this is better es­tab­lish­ed in parti­cle phy­sics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physi­cists of the last century had with Eucli­dean geometry – and hence the reason they evolved so many com­pli­cated theories of rela­tivi­ty – is that it's a geo­metry of lines, and thus can be sub­divi­ded in­finit­ely. When Cantor proved that there really is an infin­ity, at least math­e­mati­cally speak­ing, that seemed to clinch the case for the possi­bi­lity of a really in­finite phy­sical uni­verse, too.”

Wald's eyes grew vague, and he paused to gulp down a slug of the licorice-fla­vored aqua­vit that would have made Wein­baum's every hair stand on end.

“I remember,” Wald said, “the man who taught me theory of sets in Prince­ton, many years ago. He used to say: ‘Cantor teaches us that there are many kinds of infinities. There was a crazy old man!’ ”

Weinbaum rescued the bottle hastily. “So, go on, Thor.”

“Oh.” Wald blinked. “Yes. Well, what we know now is that the geo­metry which applies to ulti­mate particles, like the posi­tron, isn't Eucli­dean at all. It's Py­tha­gorean – a geo­metry of points, not lines. Haertel, who I some­times think must have been God, made that assump­tion just for the sake of argu­ment when he was seven­teen years old, and almost every­thing that's happened in par­ticle phy­sics since has flown out of it. Once you've measured one of those points, and it doesn't mat­ter what kind of quan­tity you're mea­su­ring, you're down as far as you can go. At that point, the uni­verse be­comes dis­con­ti­nuous, and no fur­ther refine­ment is possible. At once you have a work­able Uni­fied Field Theory, and both the equi­va­lency prin­ciple and the whole of quan­tum mech­anics go out the win­dow, and good rid­dance, too; philo­sophi­cally they were always scan­da­lous, as a good many twen­tieth-century physi­cists rea­liz­ed at the time, but they felt that they were stuck with them; after all, they did get re­sults. A little of quan­tum mech­anics remains – hence our trans­mitter – but that's all. The re­main­ders are noth­ing more than bad dreams, like the Aris­tote­lean spheres, or Isaac Newton's bad clock repair­man.”

“Philosophy isn't my subject, I'm afraid. Let's get back to measure­ments, and what we might be able to do.”

“Well, that's why I was talking about discon­tinuity, Robin. Haertel may be all wrong about the nature of the uni­verse – ho, ho, ho – but until he's re­placed, I have to say that our posi­tron-fre­quen­cy mea­sure­ments have al­ready gotten as far down as they can go. There isn't another ele­ment in the uni­verse den­ser than per­gium, which you'll recall is the last of the new meta­stable ele­ments made by the Alva­rez pack­ing process – atomic number 1287, the high­est per­missible un­der the scho­lium. Yet we get the same fre­quency values by dif­frac­tion through per­gium crys­tals that we get through os­mium crys­tals; there's not the slight­est dif­fer­ence. I'll bet that if we had the ener­gy to drive our X-rays through a neu­tron star, which I hope I will never be asked to try, the out­come would be the same.”

“So: If J. Shelby Stevens is oper­ating in terms of frac­tions of those values, then he's doing what an orga­nist would call ‘playing in the cracks be­tween the keys’ – which is cer­tain­ly some­thing you can think about do­ing, like try­ing to grow a mighty oak out of the acorn on top of your neck, but some­thing that's in ac­tua­lity im­pos­sible to do. Hoop.”

“Hoop?” Weinbaum said.

“Sorry. A hiccup only.”

“Oh. Well ... maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?”

“That of course has been done. I my­self have heard an organ in the Nether­lands, built by a fana­tic named Fokker, which is tuned to a thirty-one-tone scale – the same scale pro­posed by Chris­tian Huy­gens quite a few scores of de­cades ear­lier. The ana­logy is not too bad a one, now that I think back on it. The in­stru­ment sounds like a battery of fire trucks and ambu­lances in heat and is in it­self the best possi­ble demon­stra­tion that the Py­thago­rean musi­cal scale is the natu­ral one. But if J. Shelby Stevens,” the physicist added firmly, “has rebuilt the metri­cal frame of the uni­verse to accom­mo­date a pr­ivate skip-tracing firm, or even an espion­age agency, I for one see no reason why we can't coun­ter­act him – hoop – by declaring the whole cosmos null and void, and de­voting our­sel­ves hence­forth to serious drinking.”

“All right, all right,” Weinbaum said, grinning in spite of himself. “I didn't mean to push your ana­logy right over the edge – I was just asking. But let's get to work on the tests, any­how. We can't just sit here and let Stevens get away with every­thing right down to our trousers. If this fre­quen­cies angle turns out to be as hope­less as you pic­ture it, we'll just have to try some­thing else.”

“Yes, but what else? That's a very pretty prob­lem in it­self.” Wald eyed the aqua­vit bottle owl­ishly. “But not one I'm up to at the moment. Tell me, have I ever sung you the song we have in Sweden called Natt och Dag?”

“ Hoop ” Weinbaum said in a high fal­setto, to his own sur­prise. “Excuse me. No. Let's hear it.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER SEVEN:
A Few Cosmic Jokes

To go to the Zen state, you must turn your back on it. In the Void every­thing disap­pears, inclu­ding certainty. At the origin of inner space, you are not only on the map; you are also where the map is.

–JOHN H. CLARK

The computer occupied an entire floor of the Security build­ing, its seem­ingly iden­tical banks laid out side by side on the floor along an ad­vanced patho­logi­cal state of Peano's “space-filling curve.” At the cur­rent busi­ness end of the line was a master con­trol board with a large televi­sion screen at its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Wein­baum looking, silently but an­xiously, over his shoulder.

The screen itself showed a pattern that, except that it was drawn in green light against a dark gray back­ground, strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished maho­gany. Photo­graphs of similar X-ray dif­frac­tion patterns were stacked on a small table to Dr. Wald's right; several had spilled over onto the floor.

“Well, there it is,” Wald sighed at length. “And I won't struggle to keep my­self from say­ing ‘I told you so.’ What you've had me do here, Robin, is re­con­firm about half of the basic pos­tu­lates of parti­cle physics – which is why it took so long, even though it was the first project we started.” He snapped the screen off. “Haertel was right. There are no cracks between the keys for J. Shel­by Stevens to play in. That's definite.”

“If you'd said ‘That's flat,’ you'd have made a joke,” Weinbaum said sourly.

“My English isn't good enough for puns, alas – any more than my Chinese is good enough for poetry.”

“Look ... isn't there still a chance of error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the com­pu­ters? After all, they're set up to work only with the unit charges of mo­dern phy­sics; mightn't we have to dis­con­nect the banks that con­tain that bias be­fore the mach­ines will fol­low the frac­tional-charge search­ing in­struc­tions we gave them?”

“Disconnect, he says,” Wald groaned, mop­ping his brow re­flec­tive­ly. “The bias exists every­where in the machine, my friend, be­cause it func­tions every­where on those same unit charges. It wasn't a matter of sub­trac­ting banks; we had to add one with a bias all its own, to correct the correc­tions the com­puter would other­wise have applied to the pro­gram­ming. The techni­cians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I've proved it.”

“I'm in about the same state. I've turned up a couple of things that are use­ful, but that I'm none too glad to have found out all the same. For in­stance, our medi­cal director has been issuing vast orders for phony supplies to a dummy firm, pay­ing for them with bureau checks which he's been bank­ing in his own name in a building-and-loan society some­where in a box canyon in Utah. I don't know how the hell he ima­gined he could get away with it, under modern credit-check­ing sys­tems; my only guess is that he's a goose in human feathers. I've had his license revoked, and given the medi­cal side of Per­sonnel a good wig­ging to boot, but there seems to be no con­nec­tion at all between these petty thefts and the Stevens affair.”

“What was the other thing?”

“That's more serious. Dana Lje was quite right in sugges­ting that there might be a top-level leak in my own staff. What's worse, the leak turns out to be my in­valu­able Mar­garet Soames. I'm letting that rope pay out; it doesn't appear that Mar­garet is an Erskine ope­ra­tive in her­self, but only a tool, and I'm wait­ing to see whom it is she's feed­ing the in­for­ma­tion to. She's not in con­tact with any of the known Erskine people on Earth, of that I'm quite sure, and I hope to pre­sent her un­known friend with a nasty shock by pre­tending inno­cence for the time being.”

“That is a shock,” Wald said gravely.

“Yes. I have no busi­ness being Security chief at all; I seem to become more naive every time I as much as blow my nose. But there might just pos­sibly be some link with Stevens here. The logic of it quite escapes me, but I'm watch­ing. One thing is for sure: Our ex-medical director, now de­frocked, as well as fired, is not Stevens and had no tie with him what­so­ever. Possibly Mar­garet's con­tact is, or does, or possi­bly not. At the mo­ment all my desk drawers are so full of fog that it's aw­fully diffi­cult even to find the bottle.”

“I know that feeling.”

“What about the other technical projects?”

“All done,” Wald said. “Some time back, as a matter of fact. The staff and I checked every sin­gle Dirac tape re­ceived since you re­leased J. Shel­by from his Aus­tra­lian pokey, for any sign of in­ter­modu­lation, mar­ginal sig­nals, patterned sta­tic or any­thing else of the kind. There's noth­ing, Robin, abso­lutely noth­ing. That's our net result, all around.”

“Which leaves us just where we started,” Wein­baum said. “All the moni­toring pro­jects came to the same dead end; I strongly suspect that Stevens hasn't risked any further calls from his home office to his field staff, even though he seemed confi­dent that we'd never inter­cept such calls – as we haven't. Even our local wire-tapping hasn't turned up anyt­hing except calls by Stevens's secre­tary, mak­ing appoint­ments for him with various clients, actual and poten­tial. Any infor­ma­tion he's selling these days he's pass­ing on in person – and not in his office, either, because we've got bugs planted all over that and haven't heard a thing.”

“That must limit his range of opera­tions enor­mous­ly – and cut down the possi­bi­lity of catch­ing him out,” Wald objected.

Weinbaum nodded. “Without a doubt – and ours, too, of course – but he shows no signs of be­ing bothered by it. He can't have sent any tips to Erskine recently, for in­stance, because our last tangle with that crew came out very well for us, even though we had to use the Dirac to send the orders to our squadron out there. If he over­heard us, he didn't even try to pass the word; even though we couldn't have over­heard him doing so, we'd have known if he had by the out­come. Just as he said, he's sweating us out –”

Weinbaum paused. “Wait a minute. Here comes the in­va­lu­able Mar­garet.” His mouth seemed to fill with acid as he spoke. “And by the length of her stride, I'd say she's got some­thing parti­cu­larly nasty on her mind.”

Margaret had hove into ear­shot in time to catch the last sentence. “You bet I do,” she said, with marked vin­dic­tive­ness. “And it'll blow plen­ty of lids around here, or I miss my guess. The I. D. squad has finally pinned down J. Shelby Stevens. And they did it the hard way, with the voice comparator alone.”

“The motto of the bureau,” Weinbaum said, “is, ‘Sometimes something works.’ Well, don't stand there like a dummy, Margaret. Who is he?”

“You're prepared for a shock, I hope.”

“I am,” Weinbaum said gently. “It ought to be every­body's standard state of mind around here. Let's cut out all this god­dam back­ing and fill­ing. Who is he ?”

“ ‘ He,’ ” Margaret said, “is your sweetheart of the video waves, Miss Dana Lje.”

“They're crazy!” Wald said, staring at her.

Weinbaum came slowly out of his first shock of stunned dis­belief. “No, Thor,” he said finally. “No, it figures. If a woman is going to go in for dis­guises, there are al­ways three she can assume con­vinc­ingly out­side her own sex: A young boy, a homo­sexual, and a very old man. Just as a man with a medium-high voice can take on the role of a butch dyke, if he thinks he needs to. And Dana's an actress; that's no news to us.”

“But – but why did she do it, Robin?”

“That's what we're going to find out right now. So we wouldn't get the Dirac modi­fi­ca­tion by our­selves, eh! Well, there are other ways of getting answers besides particle phy­sics. Margaret, do you have a pick-up order out for that girl?”

“No,” the secre­tary said. “This is one chest­nut I wanted to see you pull out for your­self. You give me the autho­rity, and I send the order – not be­fore.”

“Spiteful child. You may regret the delay. Send it, then, and glory in my grit­ted teeth. Come on, Thor–let's put the nut­cracker on this, and hope it isn't just another horse-chest­nut after all.”

As they were leaving the computer-room floor, Weinbaum stopped sud­denly in his tracks and be­gan to mutter in an almost in­aud­ible voice.

Wald said, “What's the matter now, Robin?”

“Nothing, I hope. I keep being brought up short by those predictions. What's the date?”

“Why – January ninth, 2091, if that matters. Why?”

“It's the exact date that ‘Stevens’ predicted we'd meet again, dammit! Some­thing tells me that this isn't going to be as simple as it looks.”

“What is?” Wald said, raising his eye­brows.

“Nothing, of course. But hope springs eternal in the human spleen.”

“And what about Margaret?”

“One problem at a time, dammit; one problem at a time.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER EIGHT:
The Courtship of Posi and Nega

If Dana Lje had any idea of what she was in for – and con­sider­ing the fact that she was “J. Shel­by Stevens” it had to be assumed that she did – the know­ledge seemed not to make her at all fear­ful. She sat as com­posed­ly as ever be­fore Wein­baum's desk, smoking her eter­nal ciga­rette, and waited, one dimpled knee pointed directly at the bridge of the officer's nose. The knee was a cour­tesy; that was the year of the front­less skirt.

“Dana,” Wein­baum said, “this time we're going to get all the answers, and we're not going to be gentle about it. Just in case you're not aware of the fact, there are certain laws rela­ting to giving false infor­ma­tion to a secu­rity offi­cer, un­der which we could heave you in prison for a mini­mum of fif­teen years. By appli­ca­tion of the stat­utes about using com­muni­ca­tions to de­fraud, plus va­rious local laws against trans­ves­titism with in­tent to deceive, pseudo­ny­mity ditto, and so on, we could pro­bably pile up enough addi­tional short sen­ten­ces to keep you in Fort Butner until you really do grow a beard. So I'd ad­vise you most ear­nest­ly to open up.”

“I have every inten­tion of open­ing up,” Dana said. “I know, prac­ti­cal­ly word for word, how this inter­view is going to pro­ceed, what in­for­ma­tion I'm go­ing to give you, just when I'm go­ing to give it to you – and what you're go­ing to pay me for it. I knew all that many months ago. So there would be no point in my hold­ing out on you.”

“What you're saying, Miss Lje,” Thor Wald said in a resigned voice, “is that the future is fixed, and that you can read it, in every essen­tial detail.”

“Quite right, Doctor Wald. Both those things are true, with cer­tain quali­fi­ca­tions. I couldn't have predic­ted that you'd get to the heart of the matter so quick­ly – I gather that you have had in­ten­sive philo­sophi­cal as well as scien­ti­fic training – but as you'll see in due course, that won't turn out to be what either of us regard as ‘an essential detail.’ ”

There was a brief silence.

“All right,” Weinbaum said grimly. “Talk.”

“All right, Captain Weinbaum, pay me,” Dana said calmly.

Weinbaum snorted.

“But I'm quite serious,” she said. “You still don't know what I know about the Dirac com­mu­ni­cator. I won't be forced to tell it, by threat of prison, or by any other threat. You see, I know for a fact that you aren't going to send me to pri­son, or give me drugs, or do any­thing else of that kind. I know for a fact, in­stead, that you are going to pay me – so I'd be very fool­ish to say a word until you do. After all, it's quite a secret you're buy­ing. Once I tell you what it is, you and the entire bureau will be able to read the future just as I do, and then the in­for­ma­tion will be val­ue­less to me.”

Weinbaum was com­pletely speech­less for a mo­ment. Finally he said, “Dana, you have a heart of purest brass, as well as a knee with an invisible gun­sight on it. I say that I'm not going to give you my appro­pria­tion, regard­less of what the future may or may not say about it in your pri­vate ear. I'm not going to give it to you because the way my govern­ment – and yours, in case you hadn't no­ticed that – runs things makes such a price im­pos­si­ble. Or is that really your price?”

“It would have been my real price, had it turned out that there was any chance of its being paid. How­ever, there is no such chance, and there­fore it has to be re­gar­ded as a null alter­na­tive. Call it my second choice. My first choice, which means the price I'll settle for, and in fact am going to have to settle for, comes in two parts:”

“ (a) to be taken into your bureau as a respon­sible officer; and,”

“ (b) to be married to Captain Robin Wein­baum.”

Weinbaum sailed up out of his chair. He felt as though copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each of his ears.

“Of all the ...” he began. There his voice again failed him com­pletely.

From behind him, where Thor Wald was stand­ing, came some­thing like a large, Scan­di­na­vian-model guffaw being choked into in­sensi­bi­lity.

Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little.

“You see,” she said, “I don't point my best and most accurate knee at every man I meet.”

Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and care­fully.

“Walk, do not run, to nearest exit,” he said. “Women and child-like secu­rity officers first. Miss Lje, are you trying to sell me the notion that you went through this ela­bo­rate hanky-panky – beard and all – out of a burn­ing passion for my dumpy and under­paid person?”

“Not entirely,” Dana Lje said. “I want to be in the bureau, too, as I said. Let me con­front you, though, Captain, with a fact of life that doesn't seem to have pene­trated to you at all, though ob­viously it has to Doctor Wald. Do you accept as a fact that I can read the fu­ture in de­tail, and that that, to be pos­si­ble at all, means that the future is fixed? The ques­tion has noth­ing what­so­ever to do with strate­gy or tac­tics or poli­tics or pas­sion or any other foot­ling notions of that kind; it is in­stead one of the seven or eight great philo­sophi­cal ques­tions that re­main un­answered, the prob­lem of whether man has or has not free will. I have al­ready gone a very long dis­tance to­ward pro­ving that he hasn't, as Doctor Wald saw at once. That's what this whole cha­rade has been about. Will you accept that?”

“Since Thor seems able to accept it, I suppose I can, too – pro­vi­sio­nal­ly – very damned provi­sion­ally.”

“I don't accept it, yet,” Wald said. “You have piled up quite a start­ling series of coin­ciden­ces, Miss Lje, but I in my turn have seen many pain­fully con­struc­ted tables of ran­dom numbers turn out to con­tain un­suspec­ted perio­di­ci­ties; na­ture appears to be in­herently rhyth­mic. Hence my ac­ceptance is just as pro­vi­sio­nal as Robin's is.”

“There's nothing provi­sio­nal about my solu­tion,” Dana said firmly.

“Defend it, then,” Wald said.

“And defend it to me, while you're at it,” Wein­baum said. “Un­less I've lost my mind some time back, what we are sup­posed to be talk­ing about is the Dirac com­mu­ni­cator – the gimmick. You know some­thing about it that we don't know. What is it?”

“Have it your way,” Dana said. “Very well. When I first came upon this–uh, this gimmick – quite a while ago, one of the first things that I found out was that I was going to go through the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ mas­que­rade, force my­self onto the staff of the bureau, and marry you, Robin. At the time, I was both aston­ished and com­pletely rebel­lious. I didn't want to be on the bureau staff; I liked my free-lance life as a video com­men­tator. I didn't want to marry you, though I wouldn't have been averse to living with you for a while – say, six months or so; good affairs seldom burn out short of that, and in any case you're more attrac­tive than you seem to think you are. And above all, the mas­que­rade struck me as ri­di­cu­lous.”

“But the facts kept staring me in the face. I was going to do all these things. There were no alter­na­tives, no fanci­ful ‘branches of time,’ no de­ci­sion-points that might be al­tered to make the future change. My future, like yours, Doctor Wald's, and ever­yone else's, was fixed. It didn't matter a snap whether or not I had a decent mo­tive for what I was going to do; I was going to do it any­how. Cause and effect, as I could see for my­self, just don't exist. One event follows another be­cause events are just as in­de­struc­tible in space-time as matter and energy are.”

“It was the bitter­est of all pills. I had always thought of myself as com­pletely free-wheeling and in­dependent. For that matter, I had always been dedi­cated – and I mean fiercely dedi­cated–to the belief that people are res­pon­sible for what they do, and that an evil act is the product of an evil man. It will take me many years to swal­low it com­plete­ly, and you, too. Doctor Wald will come around a little sooner, I think.”

“At any rate, once I was intel­lec­tual­ly con­vin­ced that all this was so, I had then to pro­tect my own sa­nity. I knew that I couldn't alter what I was go­ing to do, but the least I could do to pro­tect myself was to supply my­self with mo­tives. Or, in other words, what Freud would have called just plain ra­tion­a­li­za­tions.”

“That much, it seems, we're free to do; the con­scious­ness of the ob­ser­ver is just along for the ride through time, and can't alter events – but it can com­ment, ex­plain, in­vent, in­ter­pret, and some­times even enjoy. That's for­tu­nate, for none of us could stand going through motions that were truly free of what we think of as per­sonal signifi­cances.”

“So I used this single free­dom to supply my­self with the ob­vious mo­tives. Since I was going to be married to you and couldn't get out of it, I set out to con­vince my­self that I loved you. Now I do. Since I was go­ing to join the bu­reau staff, I thought over all the ad­van­tages that it might have over being a video com­men­tator, and found that they made a res­pec­table list. Those are my mo­tives now.”

“But I had no such motives at the begin­ning. Actually, there are never mo­tives behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we call mo­tives evi­dently are ra­tion­ali­za­tions by the help­less observ­ing con­scious­ness, which is intel­li­gent enough to smell an event coming – and, since it cannot avert the event, in­stead cooks up reasons for want­ing it to happen ... or ascribes it to the malice of God or man.”

“Wow,” Thor Wald said, in­elegant­ly, but with con­sider­able force.

“Either ‘wow’ or ‘balderdash’ seems to be called for – and I can't quite de­cide which,” Wein­baum said. “We know that Dana is an actress, Thor, so let's not let ourselves get knocked out of the apple tree quite yet. Dana, you've obviously been sav­ing the really hard question for the last, and I in­sist upon that answer now. That question is: How ?”

“There are several ways to answer it, of course. For in­stance what is the gim­mick? Or, how did you arrive at this modi­fica­tion of the Dirac trans­mitter, and how did it tell you what you're now tel­ling us? Re­mem­ber, we know your back­ground, where we didn't know that of ‘J. Shelby Stevens.’ You're not a scien­tist. There were some fairly high-powered intel­lects among your dis­tant rela­tives, but that's as close as you come. Now you ex­pect us to accept every­thing you say by fiat, as though you were an Ein­stein or a Haer­tel. Your cha­rade, as you call it your­self, has been master­fully baff­ling, but one doesn't have to be a scien­tist or a stu­dent of tables of ran­dom num­bers to know that such things can be rigged, and often have been rigged, and that utterly stupid an­swers to some of the great philo­sophi­cal ques­tions have been erec­ted upon far lon­ger chains of co­in­ci­den­ces – look at poor old Rhine, for example.”

“Also quite true,” Thor Wald said. “I do agree that it would be better, Miss Lje, if you came down off Mount Sinai for a mo­ment and started talk­ing par­ticle phy­sics to us instead.”

“I'm going to give you a lot of answers to those ques­tions,” Dana Lje said. “Pick the ones you like best. They're all true, but they tend to con­tra­dict each other here and there. The one thing I can't do is give you an answer in terms of par­tic­le phy­sics, be­cause I know just enough about that sub­ject to rea­lize that my ig­no­rance of it is pretty close to being abject.”

“To begin with, you're right about my rela­tives, of course. If you'll check your dossier again, though, you'll dis­cover that those so-called ‘dis­tant’ rela­tives were the last sur­viving mem­bers of my family be­sides myself. When they died, sec­ond and fourth and ninth cousins though they were, their estates re­ver­ted to me, and among their effects I found a sketch of a pos­sible in­stan­taneous com­muni­cator based upon de Broglie-wave in­ver­sion. The ma­terial was in very rough form, and mostly beyond my com­pre­hen­sion, be­cause I am, as you say, no scien­tist my­self. But I was in­teres­ted, be­cause com­mu­ni­ca­tion was my busi­ness. I could see, dimly, what such a thing might be worth – and not only in terms of my credit account.”

“My interest was fanned by two co­in­ci­den­ces – the kind of co­in­ci­den­ces that cause-and-effect just can't allow, but which do seem to hap­pen all the same in the world of un­change­able events. Haven't you noticed? There are thir­teen mil­lion people on Man­hat­tan alone, and yet every time I turn around I see some­one I know. I've been all over the world and I run into them every­where ... I've never been into space, but I wouldn't be a bit sur­prised to meet some­body on Mars or Stor­isende or Er­skine that I knew when I was nine years old.”

“Yes, and a word I learned only yester­day crops up in some­thing I read today,” Wald said. “One sees what one recog­nizes, and then is duly aston­ished; but noth­ing is proved by it. What actually did happen?”

“For most of my adult life, I've been in com­mu­ni­ca­tions in­dus­tries of one kind or another, mostly branches of video. I had com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment around me con­stant­ly, and I had cof­fee and dough­nuts with com­mu­ni­ca­tions engi­neers every day. First I picked up the jar­gon, then some of the pro­ce­dures, and even­tually, a lit­tle real tech­ni­cal know­ledge. Some of the knowl­edge was very simple, like how to read a cir­cuit dia­gram; and there was a rough dia­gram in the ma­te­rial I had in­herited. Some of the rest of it couldn't have been gotten in any other way.”

“Some other things are ordi­narily avail­able to highly edu­cated people like Doctor Wald here, and came to me by acci­dent, in horse­play, be­tween kisses, and a hun­dred other ways – all nat­ural to the en­viron­ment of a video net­work, and especially acces­sible to some­one in that en­viron­ment who wields a cer­tain amount of power, as I in­creasing­ly did. I don't sup­pose I have to defend the exis­tence of the power to you, Robin; you were com­plain­ing of it when we first met.”

“How true,” Weinbaum said. He found, to his own astonish­ment, that the “between kisses" phrase did not sit very well in his chest, despite the fact that sex­ual jeal­ousy – parti­cu­lar­ly the ret­ro­spec­tive kind – had been dy­ing out of the world long before he had been born. He added, with un­in­ten­tio­nal brus­que­ness:

“What's the other coincidence?”

“A leak in your own staff.”

“Dana, you ought to have that set to music. It's be­com­ing so fami­liar that it may turn into a cliche and be lost to the world other­wise.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I can't suit myself,” Wein­baum said, a little petu­lantly. “I work for the Govern­ment. Was this leak direct to you?”

Grimly, he felt another co­in­ci­dence co­ming, to be piled onto the top of the rest; but he was not going to give Dana Lje the slight­est hint or lead to­ward it. Never­the­less, he felt per­fectly, irra­tion­ally sure that the jaws of the trap of time were clo­sing stead­ily.

“Not at first,” Dana said. “That was why I kept insisting to you in person that there might be such a leak, and why I finally began to hint about it in public, on my pro­gram. I was hop­ing that you'd be able to seal it up in­side the bu­reau be­fore my first rather te­nuous contact with it got lost. When I didn't suc­ceed in pro­vok­ing you into pro­tect­ing your­self – remem­ber, back then I was still think­ing of human acts in terms of mo­tives and voli­tion – I took the risk of mak­ing di­rect con­tact with the leak my­self. And the first piece of secret in­for­ma­tion that came to me through it was the final point I needed to put my Dirac com­mu­ni­ca­tor together. I asked a friend who on Earth Dirac was; he told me about the 1933 Nobel Prize, and sent me to Prin­ci­ples of Quan­tum Mech­anics, and then to de Broglie's Phy­sics and Micro­physics ; when I was baffled, which was most of the time, he explained things very patiently. And bingo, all of a sudden I knew what the cir­cuit dia­gram was sup­posed to do.”

“When the machine was all assem­bled – my friend helped there, too, though he was too amused at my dab­bling to take it seriously – it did more than just com­mu­ni­cate. It predicted. And now I can tell you why.”

Weinbaum said thought­fully, “I don't find this very hard to accept, after all, so far. Pruned of the philo­sophy, it even makes some sense of the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ affair. I assume that by letting the old gentle­man become known as some­one who knew more about the Dirac trans­mitter than I did, and who wasn't averse to nego­tiating with any­body who had money, you kept the leak work­ing through you – rather than trans­mitting sensi­tive data to un­friendly govern­ments.”

“It did work out that way,” Dana said. “But that wasn't the genesis or the pur­pose of the Ste­vens mas­que­rade. I've already given you the whole ex­pla­na­tion of how that came about. It hap­pened be­cause it was going to hap­pen. All other ex­pla­na­tions for any­thing are super­fluous. All other ex­pla­na­tions for any­thing ”

“Well, you'd better name me that leak, before the man gets away.”

“When the price is paid, not before. It's too late to pre­vent a get­a­way, any­how. In the mean­time, Robin, I want to go on and tell you the other answer to your ques­tion about how I was able to find this par­ti­cu­lar Dirac machine secret, where­as you and Doctor Wald didn't. What answers I've given you up to now have been cause-and-effect answers, with which we're all more com­fort­able. But I want to im­press upon you that all ap­pa­rent cause-and-effect rela­tion­ships are acci­dents. There is no such thing as a cause, and no such thing as an effect. I found the secret because I found it; that event was fixed. That certain cir­cum­stan­ces seem to ex­plain why I found it, in the old cause-and-effect terms, is irrele­vant. Simi­larly, with all your supe­rior equip­ment and brains, you didn't find it for one reason, and one reason alone: Be­cause you didn't find it. The his­tory of the fu­ture says you didn't.”

“I pays my money and I takes no choice, eh?” Wein­baum said rue­fully.

“I'm afraid so – and I don't like it one bit bet­ter than you do.”

“Thor, what's your opi­nion of all this?”

“It's just faintly flabbergasting,” Wald said so­berly. “How­ever, it hangs to­gether. The deter­mi­nistic uni­verse which Miss Lje paints was a com­mon fea­ture of the old rela­ti­vi­ty theo­ries, and as sheer specu­lation has an even longer his­tory. I would say that in the long run, Robin, how much cre­dence we place in the story as a whole will rest upon her method of, as she calls it, reading the fu­ture. If it is demon­strable beyond any doubt, then the rest be­comes per­fectly credi­ble – philo­sophy and all. If it doesn't, then what remains is only an admir­able job of acting, plus some meta­physics that, while self-con­sis­tent, are not ori­gi­nal with Miss Lje.”

“That sums up the case as well as if I'd coached you, Doctor Wald,” Dana said. “I'd like to point out one more thing. If I can read the future, then ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ never had any need for a staff of field oper­a­tives, and he never needed to send a single Dirac message that you might inter­cept. All he needed to do was to make predic­tions from his read­ings, which he knew to be infal­lible; no pri­vate espion­age net­work had to be in­volved. There was no­body for you to catch but me.”

“I see that,” Weinbaum said drily. What he saw, of course, was in fact only the logi­cal force of the pro­po­si­tion, which could only support, but never prove, its vali­dity. For that he had still an­other test in mind than the one that Wald had pro­posed. “All right, Dana, let's put the pro­posi­tion this way: I do not believe you. Much of what you say is pro­bably true, but in to­tali­ty I be­lieve it to be false. On the other hand, if you're tell­ing even a part of the truth, you cer­tainly de­serve a place on the bu­reau staff – it would be dan­ge­rous as hell not to have you with us – and the mar­riage is more or less of a minor matter, ex­cept to you and me. You can have that with no strings at­tached; I don't want to be bought, any more than you would.”

“So: If you will tell me where the leak is, we will con­sider that part of the ques­tion closed. I make that con­di­tion not as a price, but be­cause I don't want to get my­self en­gaged to some­body who might be shot as a spy with­in a month. Aid­ing and abet­ting, I must tell you, carries the same penal­ties.”

“Fair enough,” Dana said. “Robin, your leak is Mar­ga­ret Soames. She is an Erskine contact, and no­body's bubble­brain. She's not an Erskine opera­tive her­self, but as a highly trained tech­ni­cian she's pro­bably just as effec­tive as one.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Weinbaum said. He did not have to work very hard to regis­ter as­tonish­ment. “Then she's al­ready flown the coop – she was the one who first told me that we'd iden­ti­fied you. She must have taken on that job in order to hold up deli­very long enough to arrange a get­away.”

“That's right. But you'll catch up with her, day after tomor­row. And you are now a hooked fish, Robin.”

There was another sup­pres­sed burble from Thor Wald.

“I accept the fate happily,” Wein­baum said, eye­ing the gun­sight knee. “In return, I'll tell you that we al­ready knew about Mar­ga­ret – I was hop­ing to use her to trap her oppo­site num­ber. And she made a nice test case for you, which you passed. Now, if you will tell me how you work your swami trick, and it backs up every­thing else you've said to the letter, as you claim, I'll see to it that you're also sworn into the bu­reau and that all charges against you are quashed. Other­wise, I'll probably have to kiss the bride between the bars of a cell.”

Dana smiled. “The secret is very simple. It's all in the beep.”

Weinbaum's jaw dropped. “The beep? The Dirac noise?”

“That's right. You didn't find it out because you con­sidered the beep to be just a nui­sance, and ordered Miss Soames to cut it off all the tapes before send­ing them in to you. Miss Soames, who had some ink­ling that the beep was im­por­tant, was more than happy to do so, leaving the read­ing of the beep ex­clusi­vely to ‘J. Shelby Stevens’, who she thought was going to take on Erskine as a client.”

“Explain,” Thor Wald said, looking intense.

“Just as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is picked up by every receiver that is ca­pable of detect­ing it, regard­less of dis­tance. Every re­ceiver – inclu­ding the first one ever built, which is yours, Doctor Wald, through the hundreds of them that will exist throug­hout the galaxy in the twenty-fourth century, to the un­told thousands of them that will exist in the thir­tieth century, and so on. The Dirac beep is the simul­ta­neous re­cep­tion of every one of the Dirac messages that has ever been sent, or ever will be sent. In­ci­den­tally, the car­di­nal num­ber of the total of those messages is a rela­tively small and of course finite number; it's far below really large finite num­bers such as the number of elec­trons in the uni­verse, even when you break down each and every mes­sage into ‘bits’ and count those. I have the im­pres­sion that the use of the in­stru­ment in the future is a great deal lower than its po­ten­tia­li­ties. It seems deli­ber­ate, but I have no ex­pla­na­tion for it.”

“Of course,” Dr. Wald said softly. “Of course! But, Miss Lje ... how do you tune for an indi­vi­dual mes­sage? We tried frac­tio­nal posi­tron fre­quen­cies, and got now­here.”

“I didn't even know fractional positron fre­quencies existed,” Dana con­fes­sed. “No, it's sim­ple–so simple that a lucky lay­man like me could arrive at it. You tune in­di­vi­dual messages out of the beep by time-lag, noth­ing more. All the mes­sages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction of time that exists, some­thing called a ‘chronon.’ ”

“Yes,” Wald said. “The time it takes one elec­tron to move from one energy level to the next. That's the Pytha­go­rean point of time mea­sure­ment.”

“Thank you. Obviously no gross phy­sical re­ceiver can respond to an input that brief, or at least, that's what I thought at first. But be­cause there are relay and switch­ing delays, various forms of feed­back and so on in the appa­ratus it­self, the beep arrives at the out­put end as a com­plex pulse which has been ‘splattered’ along the time axis for a full second or more. That's an effect which you can exag­ge­rate by record­ing the ‘splattered’ beep on high-speed tape, the same way you would record any event you wanted to study in slow mo­tion. Then you tune up the various fail­ure points in your receiver, to exag­ge­rate one fail­ure and mini­mize all the others, and use noise-sup­pres­sing tech­ni­ques to cut out the back­ground.”

Thor Wald frowned. “You'd still have a con­siderable garble when you were through. You'd have to sample the mes­sages –“

“Which is just what I did; Robin's little lecture to me about the ultra­wave would have given me that hint, if in fact I hadn't been quite fami­liar with the tech­ni­que before. I set myself to find out how the ultra­wave channel carries so ma­ny mes­sages at once, and I dis­covered that you people sample the in­coming pulses every thou­sandth of a second and pass on one pip only when the wave de­viates in a cer­tain way from the mean. Old stuff to me; tele­phone com­pa­nies have been doing it for dec­ades. I didn't really be­lieve it would work on the Dirac beep, but it worked out just as well: ninety pe­rcent as in­telli­gi­ble as the ori­gi­nal trans­mis­sion after it came through the smearing de­vice. I'd already got enough from the beep to put my plan in motion, of course – but now every voice message in it was avail­able, and crystal clear. If you select three pips every thou­sandth of a sec­ond, you can even pick up an intel­li­gible trans­mis­sion of music – a little razzy, but good enough to iden­tify the in­stru­ments that are play­ing, and that's a very good test of any com­mu­ni­ca­tions de­vice.”

“Yes, it would be,” Thor Wald said. “It would show that you were getting a sig­ni­fi­cant num­ber of the upper par­tials – the over­tones.”

“There's a question of detail here that doesn't quite follow,” said Wein­baum, for whom the tech­nical talk was be­com­ing a little too thick to fight through. “Dana, you said that you knew the course this con­ver­sa­tion was going to take – yet it isn't being Dirac re­corded, nor can I see any rea­son why any sum­mary of it would be sent out on the Dirac after­ward.”

“That's true, Robin. How­ever, before I leave here, I will make such a trans­cast myself, on your own office mac­hine. Ob­viously I will – because I've already picked it up on my own Dirac, from the beep.”

“In other words, you're going to call your­self up – months ago.”

“That's it,” Dana said. “It's not as use­ful a tech­nique as you might think at first, because it's dan­gerous to make such broad­casts while a situ­ation is still develop­ing. You can safely ‘phone back’ details only after the given situ­ation has gone to com­ple­tion, as a chem­ist might put it.”

“That seems to me to be quite a good deal more than a mere ques­tion of detail,” Thor Wald said. “In fact, it poses a meta­phy­sical problem quite stag­ger­ing in its im­pli­ca­tions; I'll need some time to think it through. But do go on, Miss Lje.”

“Very well. Once you know, in short, that when you use the Dirac you're deal­ing with time, you can coax some very strange things out of the in­stru­ment.”

She paused and smiled.

“I have heard,” she said con­ver­sa­tion­ally, “the voice of the presi­dent of our galaxy, in 3480, an­noun­cing the fede­ra­tion of the Milky Way and the Magel­lanic Clouds. I've heard the com­man­der of a world-line cruiser, travel­ing from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Hath­shepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, call for help across eleven mil­lion light-years – but what kind of help he was call­ing for, or will be call­ing for, is be­yond my com­pre­hen­sion. And many other such things. When you check on me, you'll hear those things, too – and you'll wonder what many of them mean.”

“And you'll listen to them even more closely than I did, in the hope of find­ing out whet­her or not any­one was able to under­stand in time to help.”

Thor Wald looked quite as dazed as Weinbaum felt. Dana Lje's voice be­came a little more som­ber.

“Most of the voices in the Dirac beep are like that – they're cries for help, which you can over­hear decades or cen­turies before the senders get into trouble. You'll feel obli­gated to answer every one, to try to supply the help that seems to be needed. And you'll listen to the suc­ceed­ing mes­sages and say: ‘Did we – will we get there in time? Did we understand in time?’ ”

“And in most cases you won't be sure. You'll know the fu­ture, but not what most of it means. The further into the future you ‘travel’ with the machine, the more in­com­pre­hen­sible the messages become, and so you're reduced to telling your­self that time will, after all, have to pass by at its own pace, before enough of the sur­round­ing events can emerge to make those remote mes­sages even a little clearer.”

“The long-run effect, as far as I can think it through, is not going to be that of omni­science – of our con­scious­ness being extracted entirely from the time stream and allowed to view its whole sweep from one side. Instead, the Dirac in effect simply slides the bead of con­scious­ness for­ward a cer­tain dis­tance from the present. Wheth­er it's five hun­dred or five thou­sand years still re­mains to be seen. At that point, the law of di­minish­ing returns sets in – or the noise factor be­gins to over­balance the in­for­ma­tion, take your choice – and the ob­server is reduced to travel­ing in time at the same old speed. He's just a bit ahead of him­self, so to speak.

“To a his­torian, I suppose it will be deeply dis­ap­point­ing that one can't use the beep to look into the past at all. The whole power it gives us quite ob­viously can date only from the construc­tion of Doctor Wald's first machine. But the pow­ers it does give us I find exci­ting enough, when I don't find them utterly fright­ening.”

“You've thought a great deal about this,” Wald said slowly. “I dislike to think of what might have happened had some less con­scien­tious person stum­bled on the secret of the beep.”

“That wasn't in the cards,” Dana said.

In the ensuing quiet, Wein­baum felt a faint, ir­ra­tional sense of let­down, of some­thing that had prom­ised more than had been de­li­ver­ed – rather like the taste of fresh bread as com­pared to its smell, or the dis­covery that Thor Wald's Swedish “folk song” Natt-och-Dag was only Cole Porter's Night and Day in another language. He recog­nized the feel­ing: It was the usual emo­tion of the hunter when the hunt is over, the born detec­tive's pro­fes­sion­al ver­sion of the post coitum triste. After looking at the smiling, supple Dana Lje a mo­ment more, how­ever, he was almost content.

“There's one more thing,” he said. “I don't want to be insufferably skeptical about this – but I want to see it work. Thor, can we set up a sam­pling and smear­ing device such as Dana describes and run a test, within any prac­tic­able period?”

“In about half an hour, I would guess,” Dr. Wald said. “We have most of the unit al­ready in assembled form on our big ultra­wave receiver, and it shouldn't take any effort to add a high­speed tape unit to it. I'll get it done right now.”

He went out. Wein­baum and Dana looked at each other for a mo­ment, rather like strange cats. Then the secu­rity offi­cer got up, with what he sus­pected look­ed like an air of some­what grim de­ter­mi­na­tion, and seized his fiancee's hands, an­tici­pa­ting at least a slight struggle.

That first kiss was, by inten­tion at least, most­ly pro forma. But by the time Wald padded back into the office, a heavy elec­tro­nics chassis under each arm, the letter had been pretty tho­roughly super­seded by the spirit.

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER NINE:
A Comity of Futures

The scientist harrumphed and set his gray, crackle-cased burdens on the desk.

“This is all there is to it,” he said, “but I had to hunt all through the library to find a Dirac re­cording with a beep still on it. Just a mo­ment more while I make con­nec­tions ...”

Weinbaum used the time to bring his mind back to the matter at hand, al­though not quite com­pletely. While Wald worked, the scien­tist added:

“While I was searching, it also occurred to me that we have here an oppor­tunity to throw a large monkey-wrench into the works if we wish to do so. If it worked it would rob the beep of all predic­tive value – which from the bureau's point of view may turn out to be a desir­able thing to do.”

“How?” Weinbaum said.

“Miss Lje said she was going to use the office machine to call her­self up, back in the past. As far as I can see, it would be simpli­city itself to pre­vent her from doing so. Of course, she could send her­self the message later, on her own machine – or, after she is a member of the bureau, on mine – but neither such situa­tion would make an exact match with what she has heard in the beep.”

“Would the message in the beep change ac­cordingly? If so, we would after all have an ave­nue, though perhaps a small one, toward affect­ing the past. Or if the message stayed the same, it would become in­accu­rate, and any­thing else we may hear in the beep would become simi­larly pro­visio­nal and dubious.”

“Absolutely not,” Weinbaum said. “I am not about to author­ize the crea­tion of para­doxes at this stage of our ig­nor­ance. I want to know what there is to be known, not start tamp­ering with the evi­dence before I even know what it is.”

“Epistemologically sound, I suppose,” Wald said; but he looked a little dis­ap­point­ed all the same. The act of not per­form­ing an experi­ment did vio­lence to all his best in­stincts, Wein­baum knew; but he also knew that al­ways giving scien­tists their heads had lead in the past into some nasty cul-de-sacs. And this thing he was dead sure, was as explo­sive as any­thing of the kind he had ever en­countered.

“In fact,” he said, “I want her to make that call right now, before the machine goes tem­porar­ily out of service. Dana, step up to the micro­phone and sing out loud and clear.”

Smiling, Dana complied, though she had to be helped with the appa­ratus; her own, it turned out, was a bread­board rig, while this one was neatly encased. One of its knobs, labeled SYM, baffled her completely.

“What does that do?” she said, pointing.

Thor Wald looked a little embarrassed and at the same time a little amu­sed, like a small boy caught in what he knows is only a minor dere­lic­tion.

“Nothing,” he said. “It's just that when I got the box onto the trans­mitter, I dis­covered I had eight knobs on this side and only seven on the other. So I added one for sym­metry, and it's so labeled.”

This confession nearly prevented Dana from making the call after all. “Now,” she said, “I know why I seemed to be gig­gling all through what was ob­viously a dead-serious call. Well, any­how, it's done. Next patient?”

“I'll just finish the hookup. ... There now; all ready.”

Then two tape spindles began to whir like so many bees, and the end-stopped sound of the Dirac beep filled the room. Wald stopped the re­corder, reset it, and started the smear­ing tape very slowly in the oppo­site direc­tion. When this pro­cess was finished, he rever­sed again and touched the Start button.

A distant babble of voices came from the speak­er. Wald frowned and tweedled knobs; the voices faded, but not entirely. As Wein­baum leaned for­ward tensely, one voice said clearly and loudly above the rest: “Hello, Earth Service. Lieu­tenant T. L. Matt­hews at Hercu­les Sta­tion NGC 6341, trans­mis­sion date 13-22-2091. We have the last point on the orbit-curve of your dope-run­ners plotted, and the curve itself points to a small sys­tem about twenty-five light years from the base here; the place hasn't even got a name on our charts. Scouting shows the home planet to be at least twice as heavily forti­fied as we had antici­pated, so we'll need another cruiser. We have a ‘can-do’ from you in the beep for us, but we're waiting as ordered to get it in the present. NGC 6341 Matthews out.”

After the first instant of stunned amaze­ment – for no amount of in­tellec­tual willing­ness to accept it could have prepared him for the over­whelm­ing fact it­self – Wein­baum had grabbed a pencil and begun to write at top speed. As the voice signed out, he threw the pencil down and looked excitedly at Dr. Wald.

“Seven months ahead,” he said, aware that he was grin­ning like an idiot. “Thor, you know the trouble we've had with that needle in the Her­cules hay­stack! This orbit-curve trick must be some­thing Matthews has yet to dream up – at least he hasn't come to me with it yet, and there's noth­ing in the situa­tion as it stands now that would in­dicate a clos­ing time of seven months for the case. The com­puter said it would take three more years.”

“It's new data,” Dr. Wald agreed solemnly.

“Well, don't stop there, in God's name! Let's hear some more!”

Dr. Wald went through the spin­ning and tweed­ling ritual, much faster this time. The speaker said, “Nausen­tampen. Eddet­tompic. Berob­silom. Aim­kak­setchoc. San­betog­mow. Dat­dec­tamset. Doma­tros­min. Vwap­ting­dorpic. Gum­mis­ampel. Out.”

“My word,” Wald said. “What's all that? It sounds vaguely Slavic. Of course if it's Chinese, I'm properly paid off for my pre­sump­tion.”

“That's what I was talking about,” Dana Lje said. “At least half of what you get from the beep is just as in­com­pre­hen­sible. I suppose it's what­ever has hap­pened to the English language – or some other lang­uage – thou­sands of years from now.”

“No, it isn't,” Weinbaum said. He had resumed writing, and was still at it, des­pite the com­para­tive brief­ness of the trans­mission. Sudden­ly he was back again upon reason­ably fami­liar ground. “Not this sample, anyhow. That, ladies and gen­tle­men, is code – no lang­uage consists exclu­sively of four-syllable words, of that you can be sure. And the sign-off was clear. What's more, it's a ver­sion of our code. I can't break it down very far – it takes a full-time expert to read this stuff – but I get the date and some of the sense. It's March 12, 3022, and there's some kind of a mass eva­cu­ation taking place. The message seems to be a routing order.”

“But why will we be using code?” Dr. Wald wanted to know. “It implies that we think some­body might over­hear us – some­body else with a Dirac. That could be very messy.”

“It could indeed,” Weinbaum said. “But very obviously, Thor, we cannot count upon the secret being kept. It's a fact of na­ture, and as some­body or other re­mark­ed long ago, Nature is a blabber­mouth; ask the right ques­tion, and you'll always get the answer. Look how easily Dana found out some­thing that we hadn't, and out of a very lim­ited range of tech­nical in­for­mation. But we'll find out more about this parti­cular mystery later, I ima­gine. Give her another spin, Thor.”

“Shall I try for a picture this time?”

Weinbaum nodded. A moment later, he was looking squarely into the green-skinned face of some­thing that looked like an ani­mated traffic sig­nal with a helmet on it. Though the creature had no mouth, the Dirac speaker was saying quite clearly:

“Hello, Chief. This, as if you didn't know, is Thammos NGC 2287, trans­mis­sion date Gor 60, 302 by my calen­dar, July 2, 2973, by yours. This is a lousy little planet. Every­thing stinks of oxy­gen, just like Earth. But the natives accept us and that's the im­por­tant thing. The effects of the radia­tion dosage from the nova next door were a hell of a lot worse than the beep had given us to anti­ci­pate and we're making repairs corres­pond­ingly slowly. But we did find the cub who's sup­posed to take over from us when he grows up, and get him under shield­ing; he's sick but safe, unless he's allergic to neutri­nos, which would make him a real mu­seum piece, wouldn't it? De­tailed report coming later by paw. NGC 2287 Thammos out.”

“I wish I knew my New General Cata­logue better,” Wein­baum said. “Isn't that M 31 in Canis Ma­jor, the one with the red star in the middle? And we'll be using non-huma­noids there! What was that creature, any­how? It looked like its ances­tors had evolved in a puddle of creme de menthe. Never mind, spin her again.”

The spindles whirred, and the screen lit to show a view of a widely spaced forest of gi­gan­tic mis­siles, evi­dent­ly being viewed almost at cap­sule height, as if from the top of a gantry crane. The camera was slowly scanning. There must have been nearly a hundred of the im­mense ships, all apparently iden­tical; those near­est the camera were visibly streaked with rust.

From the speaker, a male voice said:

“Service to Rescue. What you see here is the old Kennedy Space­port, pop­ularly known as the Bone Heap. All of these inter­plane­tary craft si­mul­ta­neously be­came ob­solete with the dis­covery of how to travel the Fortean tunnels to the solar and alter­nate-solar planets. They are all solid-fueled jobs, each powered by a single grain of powder, and an unknown number of them are still funct­ional, after a fashion.”

“Burrowes used to pilot one of these things and has been known to hang around here a lot lately. We know that Burrowes and his girl friend are holed up in one of them now. The girl's family lodged a com­plaint with us of possible elope­ment – which would be none of our busi­ness – or even ab­duc­tion, which would. But what they don't know is that the girl is a con­firmed thrill-hunter and an ex­perien­ced man-trap. At the present mo­ment, she's en­gaged in goading Burrowes to take one of those crocks off, to show off his prowess. As an ex-hero he's pecu­liarly sus­cep­tible to such an appeal, and he'll yield.”

“We have reviewed this tape a dozen times and have never been able to figure out which ship it is, because the actual launch­ing will set off a chain deto­na­tion among the other vessels that lost us all visi­bi­lity, and left this field look­ing like the back side of the Moon. Thus the prob­lem be­comes one of get­ting Burrowes and the trollop off their fly­ing junk­heap before it runs out of pro­pel­lent or comes apart in mid-air. Remem­ber, once he's air­borne, he has very little maneu­vera­bility; the ships were essen­tially ballis­tic mis­siles and were ca­pable of no more than two minor course cor­rections while in the atmos­phere.”

A low, almost subsonic rumble began to rise under the voice. The camera swiveled wildly. “There he –”

The rumble suddenly was capped by the begin­nings of a colossal explo­sion. The screen went white, and then dead, and so did the sound.

“Whew,” said Weinbaum. “I wonder what they will be plan­ning to get them off with? And just what, by the way, is an alter­nate-solar planet, and a For­tean tunnel?”

“I never heard of either,” Wald said.

“Well, evidently the tunnel is some­thing we're going to dis­cover in the very near future. The ship model shown is con­temp­orary with us, and solid-fuel grains don't have a very long shelf-life. Besides, we can't have been using the Dirac very long by then – as you probably noticed, the re­porter committed an ele­men­tary failure in tech­nique.”

“What was it?” Dana said.

“He forgot to mention the date. We'll have to put out a direc­tive about that. Another spin, please, Thor.”

Now the screen showed a flat-on photo­graph of a spiral galaxy. That it was the Milky Way was made plain by the presence of two satel­lite gal­axies which were obviously the Magel­lanic Clouds. Given the inclu­sion of these in the pic­ture, plus the unu­sual­ly large size of the home lens, Wein­baum quickly esti­mated that the dis­tance of the camera from the subject could not have been un­der ten million light years.

The photograph had been turned into a map by the addi­tion of a three-color over­lay in red, green, and gray. The red covered a large, irregu­lar area on the south­ern side of the disc, includ­ing the Clouds, while the green covered much more of the north­ern side. The gray area wan­dered narrow­ly between them, but spread out, fan-like, to the west; and there were small patches of gray iso­la­ted in both the tinted areas, al­though most of these were on the red side. Some areas were also cross-hatched. One sun far out on a spiral arm in the red area, near the Clouds, had been marked with a tiny flag, while another deep in the green area seemed to be capped by a sort of tiara.

On the audio, a vibrant lec­turer's voice, ob­vious­ly that of a pro­fes­sional actor, was saying, “The Green Exarchy is gene­rally known to be older than man, but no­body knows man's age. Time is relative; and what with the dis­tor­tions of inter­stellar travel, the welter of galac­tic lang­uages, the dif­fer­ent stages of history to be found on every world, the bad com­muni­ca­tions, and the indif­fer­ence fostered by longevity , no one can say with confi­dence even what today's date might be, no, not within a year.”

And so much for the directive, Weinbaum thought.

“We may guess, however, that man discovered the Ima­ginary Drive about four thou­sand years ago, and emerged from Ur­Space to find the Ex­archy, or its parent empires, already estab­lished. The Exarchy today consists exclu­sively of non-human races and is still one of the two major cen­ters of power in the galaxy. It is thought to be a ty­ranny, but the applica­bility of so anthro­pocen­tric a word to a non-human poli­tical system is du­bious; in­deed, we can­not even be sure that the Exarchy is a ‘political’ system, except as viewed exter­nally.”

“The second major power is the loose and shift­ing confe­dera­tion of planets domi­nated by High Earth. These are pre­domi­nately human or hu­manoid in popu­lation.” At the words “High Earth,” the flag expanded slightly, just enough to show that it bore some un­read­able device, and then shrank to its former size.

“Both systems constantly contend for the inde­pen­dent planets. Of these there are two types. Those popu­lated mainly or entirely by hu­mans are ex-colo­nies that broke free of High Earth in the past, or were for­got­ten; these may also bear en­claves of huma­noid or non-human abori­gines. Those popu­lated mainly by huma­noid or non-human peoples are pr­oducts of inde­pen­dent evo­lution; a few also tole­rate human en­claves.”

“The independent planets are almost invari­ably divi­ded into nation-states. Once such a plan­et develops a world govern­ment, if it does, it tends to gravi­tate, or be forced, into one of the main power systems.

“Incessant intrigue is there­fore the social norm alike upon the inde­pen­dent planets and up­on those domi­nated by High Earth, and has quasi-offi­cial status through the Traitors' Guild, an insti­tution now perhaps a thousand years old (or so it claims).”

Here the flag expanded once more until it com­pletely covered the screen. The device upon it could now be seen to be a color­less coat-of-arms. Its crest con­sis­ted of a two-faced space helmet, backed by wings, one a bird's, the other a bat's, and wreathed; from the wreath arose a hand flou­rish­ing a two-edged sword. The shield was di­vided down the middle, and showed a coat, one half of which was up­side down. The motto read: Mundus vult decipi.

“Little is known, necessarily, of the policy of the Guild. Opera­tion­ally, it has not been above selling an occa­sion­al planet to the Green Exarch, but seems firmly to oppose any­one else's doing so. Its methods are deli­be­rate­ly en­shroud­ed in rumor, but in general, seem to place a very high value on soli­dari­ty, exper­tise, and tradi­tion.”

“If a social norm pre­vails under the Exarch, other than the will or policy of the Exarch itself, no offi­cial know­ledge of it exists in the Con­federa­tion.”

The screen went dark. Dana Lje said:

“Now there's a sticky-sound­ing situa­tion, if you please. I wonder how many thou­sands of years it will take for that to evolve? That an­noun­cer guessed he was speak­ing about four thou­sand years after it had begun to jell – but how long from the present will that be?"

“I suspect it will begin sooner than I like to think,” Wein­baum said. “We don't have that so-called Ima­gin­ary Drive yet – unless that's what they come to call the Haer­tel Over­drive, for which it doesn't seem to be a very appro­priate term – but all the same, we have al­ready made first con­tact with the Exarchy, as I men­tioned briefly to Thor back while we were still search­ing for you. And I also have a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that the first seeds of that Traitors' Guild are right here in the bureau, if not in fact in this very room. What does the motto mean, Thor?”

“ ‘The world wishes to be deceived.’ ”

“Well, so it does,” Weinbaum said. “Or maybe that's only a bias forced on me by my line of work. But I remem­ber a quo­ta­tion from some­where: ‘To con­ceal from a man his own nature is the easiest of all tasks, and the basis of civi­lized inter­course.’ Machiavelli? Lord Gro? This is all getting to be pretty heady stuff, isn't it? Spin her again!”

There was no picture with the next transmis­sion, and the voice spoke in Machine, a lang­uage pro­bably un­known to Dana Lje, but per­fectly in­telli­gible to both Wein­baum and Thor Wald. It said evenly and rapidly, “This is Ant­arc­tic Base Two to Cen­tral Compu­tation.” There was a pause, and then a little pip of pure sound. “We have a case here which may be of some use against the Bird King, but it is also po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous and presents several ano­ma­lies. What ap­peared at first to be a perfectly ordi­nary Rebirth Four tribes­man named Tlan yes­ter­day stumbled into one of our out­posts. He claimed also to har­bor the per­son­ality of Qvant, the sup­reme aut­arch of Re­birth Three, who at last reports was im­prisoned in a brain-case in the Rebirth Three Museum, where he was be­ing con­sulted as a god by Tlan's people and others like them.”

“Deep analysis supports the claim, as of course, more trivially, does the dis­tance traveled through Bird country. But the cir­cum­stances of Qvant's escape are clouded; more­over, the ana­lysis found dis­tinct traces of pre­vious occu­pancy by a third person­ality, dating the year of its origin to ‘1955’. This style of dating ante­cedes Rebirth One and thus cannot be any less than twenty-five thou­sand years in the past.”

“Sub-query.” Pip! “ How could time-pro­ject­ion have been known that long ago with­out signifi­cantly chang­ing his­tory – let alone with­out our having been aware of it?”

“Main query.” Pip! “ If this person­ality was misted by Qvant, or by Qvant and his host acting in con­cert, under what ci­rcum­stances might it have sur­vived be­yond the usual two or three sec­onds in our con­ti­nuum?”

Weinbaum waited breath­lessly for the reply, but there was nothing further.

“Boy, I'd love to hear the answer to that one,” he said. "But for all we know, the computer re­plied on another channel, or just gave them a print-out. I sup­pose sort­ing all this mate­rial is go­ing to be a major head­ache in itself."

“Since we cannot know the back­ground situa­tion, the answer to the main query would be of no use to us any­how,” Wald said. “I would have been much more inter­ested in the answer to the sub-query. Miss Lje assumed from what she found in the beep that the future is fix­ed in every essen­tial res­pect, though you'll recall that she implied some lee­way for small varia­tions – ‘before a situa­tion goes to com­ple­tion,’ I think she said. Yet roughly twenty-five thou­sand years from now, they do not believe this. I begin to feel that we should make it our first order of busi­ness to find out why they dis­be­lieve it.”

“Twenty-five thousand years!” Dana Lje said. “Then how on Earth could you under­stand them?”

“They were addres­sing a com­puter in a mathe­ma­tical lang­uage that's uni­ver­sal even now,”

Weinbaum said. “Mathematics grows with time, but it doesn't change, espe­cially in stan­dard situa­tions like that. Still, Thor, there were enough nov­elties in that trans­mis­sion so that we might have mis­under­stood the impli­cation you suggest.”

“If we both heard it the same way, the im­plica­tion was there. And it is a matter of the high­est gravity.”

“It can wait,” Weinbaum said. “Spin her again.”

He was already feeling more than a little dizzy, and had given up taking notes quite a while back. That could come later, all that could come later. Now he wanted only scenes and voices, more and more scenes and voices from the future. They were better than aquavit, even with a beer chaser.

“No. I insist that we consider it now. We stand at the begin­ning of some­thing in history, the ef­fects of which are abso­lutely un­known to us. We can be sure only that they will be enor­mous. If the future is fixed and there is really no such thing as cause-and-effect, as Miss Lje assumes, then it will not matter what we do. If it is not fixed, how­ever, then what we do today in this room may alter the whole fate of man­kind, and for all we know, the uni­verse itself. Think, Robin!”

“All right, I guess I'm willing,” Wein­baum said with a sigh. “It's time for a break for the potty, any­how.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
 ∨ 
CHAPTER TEN:
Weinbaum on Sinai

“Now,” Weinbaum said. “I really don't see how you can expect to solve a prob­lem of that magni­tude in what little remains of one after­noon.”

“We have just been given a huge hint,” Wald said. “If a techno­logi­cally soph­isti­cated people of twenty-five thou­sand years from now be­lieves that the future is not fixed, it is plain on the face of it that they know some­thing about the matter that we don't know. What­ever it may be, I take their con­se­quent as­sump­tion as a given for the prob­lem. And as I told Miss Lje, the sort of deter­mi­nis­tic uni­verse that she pic­tures was a common­place of the old rela­tivity theories, so a vast amount of my think­ing has already been done for me by bet­ter minds than mine, from Galileo to Haertel.”

“The idea be­hind it is that if time is a linear dimen­sion, just like length, height, and width, then the entity that I see before me as Captain Robin Wein­baum is only a second-by-second sec­tion through a much larger entity, one of whose exten­sions is invi­sible to me. By the way, I won­der if you have any idea how big that entity would be, physi­cally, in four dimen­sions? As­suming, to keep the figures simple, that Robin lives to be a century old, he would then be rough­ly a foot thick, two feet wide, five feet five inches in height, and five hun­dred and eighty-six tril­lion, five hun­dred and six­ty-nine bil­lion, six hun­dred mil­lion miles in dura­tion. Consider, Miss Lje, the sheer mass of the object you're marry­ing!”

“And the conscious­ness of Robin Wein­baum is mov­ing along that entity in that invi­sible direc­tion. He is not free in any way to change the shap­ing of the ulti­mate crea­ture; all he can do is ob­serve, as you noted.”

“Now, let me point out that to this day no­body knows whether time ‘really’ is a linear dimen­sion or not. The idea was widely adopted because it greatly simpli­fied mathe­matics in cer­tain impor­tant fields: In the broad­est possible terms, what is mech­anics in three dimen­sions becomes statics in four. But a fifth promptly be­comes philo­sophi­cally neces­sary to con­tain this system; we find that we actually need a mini­mum of eight to de­scribe certain pro­cesses that go on in atomic nu­clei if we resort to quan­tum mech­anics; and al­though Haertel scrap­ped all that non­sense, the fact remains that mathe­mati­cally we are allowed to use any number of dimen­sions that we find we require for the simpli­fica­tion of any given prob­lem. We often resort to some­thing called Hilbert space, which is described as n -dimensional – it's like modern sex, any number may be played with.”

“The point I am getting to is that although statics may be mathe­mati­cally more con­ve­nient for us than mech­anics, this fact may ref­lect noth­ing in the real uni­verse except ordi­nary human lazi­ness. Or, to put the best possi­ble face on the matter, a facet of aes­the­tics. That's really all the law of parsi­mony comes down to, you know, Rob­in: we prefer the simp­lest theory that fits all the facts, but no­body has ever been able to prove that it is a real law of nature.”

“Objection,” Wein­baum said. “Dana, do you know what a world-line is?”

“No, it's just a word I heard in the beep.”

“I guessed as much. It happens to be one of those relati­vistic enti­ties Thor is talk­ing about: The total his­tory of an object, as viewed in all four dimen­sions, like that umpty-trillion-mile-long pink worm you're marry­ing. You over­heard a cruiser travel­ing along such a world-line; you couldn't have made up such an odd term; and the fact that some­body in the future can cruise a world-line would seem to me to esta­blish that world-lines really exist.”

“Granted,” Thor Wald said instantly. “But, Robin, I never said that they couldn't, or didn't. There's a differ­ence between a con­ve­nience and a fic­tion. What is further esta­blish­ed by this da­tum is that if some­body can travel a world-line – and you may re­mem­ber that that cruiser was ac­tually going back­ward in time – then this im­plies not only the con­ve­nience but the actual reality of a five-dimensional frame, at a mini­mum.”

“But ...” The girl put a hand help­lessly to her fore­head. “I don't under­stand what that means at all. And even if I did, I wouldn't be able to un­der­stand how any­thing we did could have any effect upon it. If we can't change things in the fourth dimen­sion, if we can't even see in that di­rec­tion, what good does the exis­tence of a fifth do us?”

“We can see in that direc­tion a little now, thanks to you,” Thor Wald said. “And as for what it means, well, it means that the uni­verse of me­cha­nics is re­stored; and, in some meta­mathe­mati­cal sense which it is now im­pera­tive for us to work out, so is free will.”

“In more practi­cal terms,” Wein­baum said som­berly, “it means that you have placed an intoler­able burden on us, Dana. It means that these events in the beep are only poten­tially real; and that we, as mere mortal men, have been given the power to select which of them we wish to have happen, for un­know­able thou­sands of cen­tu­ries to come. We may look at the quin­cunx of time from above, and decide now which tree we wish to cut down, and which we will let live. And we do not have the wis­dom. We have the power – but not the wis­dom.”

“We shall have to learn it,” Thor Wald said.

Weinbaum stared straight ahead. Sud­denly, every­one and every­thing in the room was strange to him. He felt as though he had been enclosed in a glacier for 25,000 years.

“No,” he said. “We three are not gods. We are a repor­ter, a phy­si­cist, and a secu­rity offi­cer. No exer­cise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than mar­gi­nally better than who we are. To think even for an in­stant that we shall ever have the wis­dom to handle this in­sane gift is in itself mad­ness of the highest order. The Greeks had a name for that mad­ness: hybris, or over­ween­ing pride. And they left us cau­tio­nary tales about it in great plenty.”

“Do you think, then, that muddling through would be any better?” Thor Wald said. “History has left us a few cau­tio­nary tales about that, too, Robin.”

“Of course not.”

“Then what,” Dana Lje said, “do you pro­pose to do? How can you both choose, and not choose?”

“I propose to enforce modesty upon our suc­ces­sors. It is the only exer­cise of this power that I would dare to permit my­self, now or ever again. By the time we three leave this room, I hope it will be per­ma­nently im­possi­ble for any hu­man be­ing to believe either that he has, or can ever learn, the wis­dom to train and prune the jungle of the future into a formal garden or monkey-puzzle. I may not succeed, but I am going to try.”

“On what principle?” Thor Wald said.

“Why, upon the only principle we have ever encountered which permits a man to both choose, and not choose,” Weinbaum said. “I may be ad­dressing it to nothing but a sort of cosmic Dead Letter Office, but that can't be helped. The mes­sage itself is plain. It has got to read:”

“To Whom it may concern: Thy will, not mine.”

 ∧ 
 ♦ 
AN EPILOGUE:
Which Asserts Nothing

Teach us to care, and not to care;
Teach us to sit still.
– T. S. Eliot

The indoctrination tape ended, and Krasna touched a button. The holo­graph tank darkened, and folded silently back into the desk. The office lights came back up.

“They didn't see their way through to us, not by a long shot, but they didn't need to,” he said. “They took the gene­ral steps, and left the de­tails as free to take care of them­selves as they possibly could. They didn't see, for in­stance, that when one section of the govern­ment becomes nearly all-knowing – no matter how small it was to begin with – it neces­sarily be­comes all of the govern­ment that there is. Thus the bureau turned into the Service, and pushed every­one else out. The Trai­tors' Guild is yet to come, and we don't worry about it yet.”

“On the other hand, those people did come to be afraid that a govern­ment with an all-knowing arm might become a rigid dic­tator­ship. That couldn't hap­pen, and didn't happen, because the more you know, the wider your field of pos­si­ble opera­tions becomes, and the more fluid and dy­namic a society you need. How could a rigid so­ciety expand to other star systems, let alone other galax­ies? It couldn't be done.”

“I should think it could,” Jo said slowly. “After all, if you know in advance what every­body is go­ing to do –”

“But we don't, Jo. That's just a popu­lar fiction – or, if you like, a red her­ring. Not all the busi­ness of the cos­mos is carried on over the Dirac, af­ter all. The only events we can ever over­hear are those which are trans­mitted as a message. Do you order your lunch over the Dirac? Of course you don't. Up to now, you've never said a word over the Dirac in your life. Nor would it be pos­sible for us to mount moment-by-moment sur­veil­lance over the bil­lions of sen­tient crea­tures scattered through space-time, even if we had an instru­ment suit­able for it. We don't even know how many of them there are.”

“And there's much more to it than that. All dic­tator­ships are based on the pro­po­si­tion that govern­ment can some­how control a man's thoughts. From the four-dimen­sional point of view which we provi­sionally adopt – and please note well that ‘pro­vi­sio­nal­ly’ – we know that the con­scious­ness of the ob­ser­ver is the only free thing in the uni­verse. Wouldn't we look foolish trying to con­trol that, when our work­ing physics shows that it's im­pos­sible to do so? That's why the Service is in no sense a thought police. We're inter­ested only in acts. We're an Event Police.”

“But why?” Jo said. “If all history is fixed, why do we bother with these boy-meets-girl assign­ments, for in­stance? The meet­ings will happen any­how.”

“They will and they won't,” Krasna said. “I see you haven't yet deduced the act­ual nature of Wein­baum's deci­sion. So let's con­tinue to look at it for a while from the point of view of Dana Lje's deter­minis­tic uni­verse, which ninety per­cent of the time is the way we do look at it. Our interests as a govern­ment de­pend upon the fu­ture. We op­erate as if the future is as real as the past, and so far we haven't been disap­poin­ted: the Ser­vice is entire­ly suc­cess­ful. But even with­in this frame, that very suc­cess isn't with­out its warn­ings. What would hap­pen if we stop­ped super­vising events?”

“We no more know now than we did in Thor Wald's day whether the uni­verse is truly deter­mi­nis­tic or not; and in fact, the meta­math­e­ma­tics that he later de­vel­oped to handle the ques­tion showed quite con­vin­cing­ly that we'd have no more chance of under­stand­ing the ans­wer if we got it than a leaf under­stands the photo­syn­thesis that's go­ing on in­side it.”

“How could anybody prove such a thing?”

“Wellll ... I don't know whether you've ever heard of anybody named Gödel, but he was child's play com­pared to Wald, so I'm not going to at­tempt to ex­plain the demon­stration. You can study it later, if you feel up to it. Let me put it in a more gene­ral way. In the his­tory of science, you en­coun­ter things called para­digms – defined by Kuhn as ‘uni­ver­sally recog­nized scien­tific achieve­ments that for a time pro­vide model prob­lems and solu­tions to a com­mu­nity of prac­tition­ers.' These pre­con­cep­tions govern how we look at the uni­verse, and there­fore what we see in it. The Ptole­maic system, Coper­nica­nism, Gali­lean rela­tivity, the electro­mag­netic theory, Ein­stein­ean rel­ativity, Haer­te­lism, these are all obvious exam­ples.”

“Scientists find it difficult to break out of the cur­rent para­digm. The in­form­ed lay­man, and even more the man on the street, is usually stuck in the pre­vious one. Thus in Einstein's life­time, there was a wide­spread belief that his ideas were just fanci­ful fool­ish­ness and that it was Newton who really had had the straight goods. In an age when Haertel's was the going para­digm, Miss Lje was still see­ing her uni­verse from the point of view of Gene­ral Rela­tivity–Ein­stein's. And for scien­tists them­selves, they tend to stick to the cur­rent one until the evi­dence for its suc­ces­sor be­comes abso­lutely over­whelm­ing.”

“Now in the beep, we are con­fron­ted with vast masses of evi­den­ce that don't fit into the cur­rent para­digm. What is much, much worse is that we are con­fronted with many future para­digms, which not only con­flict with ours but with each other. Wald's meta­lang­uage simply shows that the very struc­ture of science it­self makes it im­possi­ble for us to choose among them, because that struc­ture is in it­self one of those para­digms. Follow?”

“Well, at a distance, but I may never catch up,” Jo said frankly.

“I think you will. Any­how, though we have a vast mass of evi­dence that the future is fixed, every single piece of that evi­dence is super­ficial. As a result, we have to take on the role of the care­taker of in­evi­ta­bi­lity. We be­lieve that noth­ing can possibly go wrong ... but we have to act on the philo­sophy that history helps only those who help them­selves.”

“That's why we safe­guard huge numbers of court­ships right through to con­tract, and even beyond it – we have even revived the Ita­lian Re­nais­sance cus­tom of legal wit­nesses to con­sum­ma­tion. We have to see to it that every single per­son who is men­tioned in any Dirac 'cast gets born. Our obli­ga­tion as Event Police is to make the events of the future pos­si­ble, be­cause those events are cru­cial to the evolu­tion of our society – even the smal­lest of them. That is simply one single ex­ample of Wein­baum's general deci­sion. Can you figure out now what that was?"

“I think so,” Jo said, very slowly indeed. “He deci­ded that every­thing had to happen. Every­thing, good or bad.”

Krasna nodded appro­vingly. “Abso­lutely cor­rect. The only way to safe­guard the future from the Dirac trans­mitter in the hands of some mad­man who thinks he's a god is to make no selec­tion what­so­ever. If an event is men­tioned in the Dirac beep, then by God we rush there and make it happen – wheth­er we like it or not. The very fact that we in­creas­ingly like the results indi­cates that some­thing we might just as well call free will is ope­ra­ting some­where in the uni­verse of dis­course in which we're mo­ving and think­ing – there­fore may­be in the real uni­verse – and that we'd damn well better be res­pon­si­ble and res­pon­sive to it. If we were to quit now, we simply do not know what the con­se­quen­ces would be. All we know is that we have some­thing by the tail, and that we could find out whether or not it's a tiger only by let­ting go. No thank you, please.”

“It's an enor­mous task, believe me, and it gets big­ger and big­ger every day. Ap­pa­rent­ly it al­ways will.”

“Always?” Jo said. “What about the public? Isn't it going to smell this out soon­er or later? The evi­dence is piling up at a terri­fic rate.”

“Yes and no,” Krasna said. “Lots of people are smel­ling it out right now, just as you did. But the num­ber of new people we need in the Service grows faster – it's always ahead of the num­ber of lay­men who follow the clues to the truth.”

Jo took a deep breath. “You take all this as if it were as common­place as boiling eggs, Kras,” he said. “Don't you ever won­der about some of the things you get from the beep? That 'cast Dana Lje picked up from Canes Vena­tici, for in­stance, the one from the ship that was travel­ing back­ward in time? How is that possible? What could be the purpose? Is it –”

“Pace, pace,” Krasna said. “It's possible because some day we are going to make it possible. As for its purpose, I don't know, and I don't care. Neither should you. That event is too far in the fu­ture for us to worry about. We can't possi­bly know its con­text yet, so there's no sense in try­ing to under­stand it. At head­quarters on Earth, there's a whole build­ing full of specia­lists who are try­ing to con­struct a coherent his­tory of the fu­ture from the beep, and specu­late their way be­tween the gaps, but for the really far future it's a sterile task. If an Eng­lish­man of around 1600 had found out about the Ameri­can Revo­lu­tion, he pro­bably would have thought it a tragedy; an En­glish­man of 1950 would have had a very dif­fe­rent view of it. We're in the same spot. The mes­sages we get from the really far fu­ture have no con­texts yet.”

“I think I see,” Jo said. “I'll get used to it in time, I sup­pose, after I use the Dirac for a while. Or does my new rank autho­rize me to do that?”

“Yes, it does. But, Jo, first I want to pass on to you a rule of Ser­vice eti­quette that must never be broken. You won't be allowed any­where near a Dirac mike until you have it burn­ed into your memory beyond any for­get­ful­ness.”

“I'm listening, Kras, believe me.”

“Good. This is the rule: The date of death of a sen­tient entity must never be men­tioned in a Dirac 'cast.”

Jo blinked, feeling a chill sweep through him. The reason behind the rule was deci­dedly tough-minded, but its ulti­mate kind­ness was plain. An Event Police might have its justi­fica­tions; but an As­sas­sins' Guild, none. He said:

“I won't forget that. I'll want that pro­tec­tion my­self. Many thanks, Kras. What's my new assign­ment?”

“To begin with,” Krasna said, grinning, “as simple a job as I've ever given you, right here on Ran­dolph. Skin out of here and find me that cab-driver – the one who men­tioned time travel to you. He's un­com­fort­ably close to the truth; closer than you were in one cate­gory.”

“Find him, and bring him to me. The Ser­vice is about to take in a new raw recruit!”

—•—