Worlds of Maybe: Seven Stories of Science Fiction
Author: Robert Silverberg; Murray Leinster; Philip José Farmer; Miriam Allen Deford; Larry Niven; Isaac Asimov; Poul Anderson
Date: 1970-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy
Description: Introduction; Sidewise in Time by Murray Leinster; Sail On! Sail On! by Phillip Jose Farmer; Slips Take Over by Miriam Allen deFord; All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven; Living Space by Isaac Asimov; Translation Error by Robert Silverberg; Delenda Est by Poul Anderson
Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Worlds

of

Maybe

Seven

Stories

of

Science Fiction

Edited by

Robert Silverberg

THOMAS
NELSON INC.

New
York                   Camden

Books by Robert Silverberg

Revolt on Alpha C

Lost Race of Mars

Time of the Great Freeze

Conquerors from the Darkness

Planet of Death

The Gate of Worlds

The Calibrated Alligator

Needle in a Timestack

To Open the Sky

Thorns

The Masks of Time

The Time Hoppers

Hawksbill Station

Recalled to Life

Starman’s Quest

Earthmen and Strangers (editor)

Voyagers in Time (editor)

Men and Machines (editor)

Tomorrow’s Worlds (editor)

Three for Tomorrow (editor)

No character in this book is intended to represent any actual person; all the incidents of the stories are entirely fictional in nature.

Copyright © 1970 by Robert Silverberg

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions. Published in Camden, New Jersey, by Thomas Nelson Inc. and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Thomas Nelson & Sons (Canada) Limited.

First edition

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-123115

Manufactured in the United States of America

“Sidewise in Time." by Murray Leinster, copyright 1934 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 580 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10036.

“Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Jose Farmer, copyright 1952 by Better Publications, Inc. Postscript, copyright © 1968 by Harry Harrison. Both reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

“Slips Take Over,” by Miriam Allen deFord, copyright © 1964 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“All the Myriad Ways,” by Larry Niven, copyright © 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Living Space,” by Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1956 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Translation Error,” by Robert Silverberg, copyright © 1959 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

“Delenda Est,” by Poul Anderson, copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

Contents

Introduction
Sidewise in Time by Murray Leinster
Sail On! Sail On! by Philip José Farmer
Slips Take Over by Miriam Allen deFord
All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven
Living Space by Isaac Asimov
Translation Error by Robert Silverberg
Delenda Est by Poul Anderson

Introduction

One of science fiction’s most fascinating themes is that of the alternate world. What if history had not taken the course we know? What if Napoleon had died in infancy, or the Thirteen Colonies had lost the American Revolution, or the Roman Empire had lasted another thousand years? The writer makes his one basic history-changing assumption; then he plunges his characters into a world that never was, and investigates all the imaginable consequences of that world’s divergence from the “real” time-line. The result, if the work is done intelligently and perceptively, is an excursion into speculative history, stimulating and strange.

The theme can be handled in many ways. The writer may suppose that an infinite number of worlds of maybe exist simultaneously, as parallel universes. One of them is our world. In the world next door, the atomic bomb was never invented. In the world beyond that, electricity is unknown. In the world beyond that, mankind never evolved. And so on, through as many variations as anyone wishes, with the characters stepping from world to world as the plot dictates. Or, perhaps, the writer will want to assume that only one “real” world can exist at a time, but that it is possible to enter the past and make some alteration that will throw that world into some alternate probability-track —say, by assassinating Mohammed, or giving Thomas Edison the secret of nuclear energy in 1880. The possibilities are endless.

The first known example of the world-of-maybe story is “Hands Off” by Edward Everett Hale, published in Harpers Magazine in 1898. This subtle little theological fantasy made the assumption that Joseph, the son of Jacob, had not been sold into slavery in Egypt, but rather had escaped the slave traders and returned to his fathers camp in the desert. Whereupon —without the shrewd mind of Joseph to guide its government—Egypt was conquered by Canaanite barbarians, who went on to engulf the rest of the ancient world; Judaism died out, the great culture of Greece never had a chance to emerge, Rome was crushed, and a reign of “lust, brutality, terror, cruelty, carnage, famine, agony, horror” descended on humanity, until, after a series of hideous wars, civilization perished entirely. All because Joseph, son of Jacob, had never reached the court of Pharaoh!

Successors to Hale’s brilliant story were slow in coming. In 1931, finally, there appeared an extraordinary volume called If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses Into Imaginery History, edited by J. C. Squire. This was not exactly a work of science fiction, since most of its eleven contributions had the form of historical essays, not of stories; but each of the distinguished authors—Winston Churchill, Hilaire Belloc,

G. K. Chesterton, and Andre Maurois were among them—offered a speculative exploration of a world of maybe. Churchill’s piece was called “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” and the other contributors examined such themes as “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln” and “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America.” The world-of-maybe theme became part of science fiction’s repertoire in 1934, when Murray Leinster’s short novel, “Sidewise in Time,” appeared in Astounding Stories, the leading science-fiction magazine of the period. Since then it has been tackled often. Unfortunately for the purposes of this anthology, many writers have preferred to develop their alternate-world ideas at novel length, for that allows them to dwell in detail on the ramifications of their imaginary universes. Space would not permit the inclusion here of such extraordinary long works as Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (in which the South won the Civil War), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (unforgettably depicting an Axis-conquered United States), or L. Sprague de Camp’s rollicking The Wheels of If (in which the Norsemen rule the New World in the twentieth century). Among more recent novels of this type, we have Keith Roberts’ Pavane, showing a twentieth-century England untouched by the Industrial Revolution as the result of the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I in 1588, and Randall Garrett’s Too Many Magicians, set in a very different sort of twentieth-century England, which traces its course of development back to Richard the Lion-Hearted (who in Garrett’s universe lived long, ruled wisely, and built a great empire). My own novel The Gate of Worlds deals with a twentieth-century America ruled by the Indians: a Turkish conquest of Europe in medieval times had prevented the European invasion of the New World.

Though it was impossible to use any of the novel-length worlds-of-maybe stories, I have been able to gather here a representative sampling of shorter works that display the various facets of this branch of science fiction. Though they cannot offer the same rich harvest of ideas as full-scale novels, I think they provide ample entertainment in their own right, giving excellent testimony of the diversity of science fiction.

—Robert Silverberg

Worlds of Maybe

Sidewise in Time by Murray Leinster

It is no secret whatever within the science-fiction world that Murray Leinster is the pseudonym of a soft-spoken Virginia gentleman named Will F. Jenkins, whose longevity record is unmatched in the field. When the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, was founded in 1926, Jenkins was already a science-fiction master with more than a decade of professional work behind him. When a new magazine called Astounding Stories appeared late in 1929, he contributed a story to its first issue. And as the decades passed, Jenkins remained— publishing the classic “First Contact” in that same Astounding in 1945, picking up a Hugo for “Exploration Team ’ in 1956, and continuing to write stories and books on into the 1970’s.

“Sidewise in Time” was first published in 1934, which makes it something of a literary antique, as science-fiction stories go. But time has not impaired the freshness and vigor of its plot, nor can it ever detract from the story s historical importance. For this was the work that introduced the parallel-worlds theme into science fiction. Its vivid depiction of a time-quake that jumbles past, present, and future inaugurated the subspecies of science fiction with which this anthology is concerned, and earns this memorable story the place of honor here.

Looking back, it seems strange that only James Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain. In early December Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute—could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen. A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m. Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth's surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance. A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after-disturbances in the suns photosphere.

For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th, the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, egg-shaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses. A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals. An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.

Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of the time should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June the news-services of the nation were flooded with items of similar import. For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to “drown” in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly-up and floated placidly at an imaginary water-level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.

But it seems clear enough that Minott was the only man in the world who guessed the meaning of these now clear-cut indications of later events. He was then an instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the happenings which we still only partly understand, though they affected every human being in our world—and in other worlds most of us had never dreamed could exist.

He made no attempt to share his knowledge with the rest of us. At first glance it seems unbelievable, but actually the attempt would have been useless. He was merely an instructor—not even a full professor—in what can only be called a jerkwater college. He had no scientific reputation, and even his fellow faculty members and all his former instructors at Johns Hopkins University considered him brash, cocky, unreliable, and thoroughly in need of having his ears pinned back. They would have taken great pleasure in putting him in his place. Had he attempted to publicize his foreknowledge he would surely have been firmly deprived of any chance at a hearing. His mathematics, in any case, were undoubtedly so far advanced that only a very limited number of people would have been able to understand them—as was the case with Einstein’s relativity theory at the beginning—and there could be no experimental proof except the universal experience which came later.

Even had he tried to use the preliminary signs— noted above—as proofs of his explanation and mathematics, he would have been considered insane.

And yet he knew. Whether his first clue was Michaelsons report on the variable velocity of light, which proved the existence of strains of a sort never before reported—the speed of light has now ceased to be variable, by the way—or whether another of the eccentric variations in natural law suggested his calculations, we cannot even guess. But he knew what was going to happen before it did. He knew it so thoroughly that he had calculated our chances of survival at one in four. Which pessimistic estimate alone would have caused him to be shouted down instantly had he offered his knowledge ahead of time.

In any event, he made no effort to give warning. He bought revolvers and books. He had sandwiches made. He arranged to hire horses—and this was his preparation for the greatest danger that has ever existed, anywhere, and for the most exotic enterprise any man ever attempted. Maybe he succeeded. We shall never know.

The main features of his life are well enough established. He was the son of a small farmer in West Virginia, with no history of previous genius in his family. He attended a rural grammar and consolidated high school, and seems to have annoyed each and every teacher with whom he came in contact. He worked his way through Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, displaying the same talent for unpopularity.

He had brains. We know that now! But he was aware of them too, and so pushingly ambitious to prove and use them that he aroused antagonism wherever he went. The story is now classic, of the term-paper he submitted in his junior year, covering a problem in the calculus of probability. He solved the problem in wholly orthodox fashion, and added a scornful note: “The above is what I was supposed to do to get a good grade. It happens to be idiotically wrong. The problem should be solved as below:'

And then he re-stated the problem in a fashion of which his instructor could not make head or tail, and got an answer normal mathematics would not justify. The term-paper was preserved by accident, and after his genius had been proved it was closely studied. The result is that Minott’s Equation is now regarded with reverence and has changed the whole mathematical treatment of some aspects of probability.

The world lost a great deal through the sheer unamiability of Minott’s character. He was embittered by his own impatience, frustrated by his own intelligence, and undoubtedly cursed with an ambition not seemly in an instructor in mathematics at Robinson College, Fredericksburg. Perhaps if he had had normal emotional ties the world would have benefited. Perhaps he would have, also. But it is useless to guess. We do know that if we had the notes he burned on the night of June 4th our mathematics would be so greatly advanced as to be practically a new science bringing all knowledge into a new unity. The few unburned scraps found in the fireplace of his living-room have given tantalizing glimpses of that science. They are invaluable. Some partly-burned fragments have been infuriating in their incompleteness. But he must have taken his most valuable notes with him, into that un-guessed-at place where he may still live and work.

He would be amused at the diligence with which his least-considered scribble is now discussed by men who would have ignored him before. Perhaps—it is quite possible—he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have no word for it as yet. There is no term which can indicate a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system would have been destroyed. Not only our solar system but our galaxy. Not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all the space we know. And even more than that, the destruction of time itself, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future, but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, all those other strange states of existence we now know of, those other universes, those other pasts and presents and futures—all to be shattered into nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe!

It would be interesting to know what Minott termed it to himself as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier merely to wonder how he felt when the morning of June 5th dawned. We do not know, of course. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt—and what happened.

It was 7:30 a.m. of June 5th. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass-blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning-spiders glittered like diamond-dust in the early sunshine. In the most easterly suburb a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before school-time. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It back-fired, stopped, roared again, and throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. The voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street. From an upper window a radio blatted: “—one, two, three, four! Higher, now!—three, four! Put your weight into it!—two, three, four! . . The radio suddenly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of ten thousand thunder-storms on the air at once. Then it was silent.

The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the push-bar of the lawn-mower. At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree-trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched, varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women. “Earthquake! Earthquake/” Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses. Someone fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and in his pajamas tripped over a rose-bush. In seconds, it seemed, the entire population of the street was out-of-doors.

And then there was a queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney had cracked. Not so much as a dish or window-pane had made a sound in smashing. The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the ground. There had been movement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of that movement much later. Now they stared blankly at each other.

And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the tramp of marching feet. With it came a curious clanking and clattering noise. And then a barked command, which was definitely not in the English language.

Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers, in the short, skirtlike dress of ancient Rome. They wore helmets upon their heads. They peered about as if they were as blankly amazed as the citizens of Joplin who regarded them. A long column of marching men came into view, every man with shield and spear and the indefinable air of being used to just such weapons.

They halted at another barked order. A wizened short man with a short-sword snapped a question at the staring citizens. The high-school boy jumped. The wizened man roared his question again. The high-school boy stammered, and painfully formed syllables with his lips. The wizened man grunted in satisfaction. He talked, articulating clearly if impatiently. And the high-school boy turned dazedly to the other Americans.

“He wants to know the name of this town,” he said, disbelieving his own ears. ‘‘He’s talking Latin, like I learn in school. He says this town isn’t on the roadmaps, and he doesn’t know where he is. But all the same he takes possession of it in the name of the Emperor Valerius Fabricius, emperor of Rome and the far corners of the earth.” And then the school-boy stuttered. “He—he says these are the first six cohorts of the Forty-Second Legion, on garrison duty in Messalia. That—that’s supposed to be two days march up that way.”

He pointed in the direction of St. Louis.

The idling motor-car roared suddenly into life. Its gears whined and it came rolling out into the street. Its horn honked peremptorily for passage through the shield-clad soldiers. They gaped at it. It honked again and moved toward them.

A roared order, and they flung themselves upon it, spears thrusting, short-swords stabbing. Up to this instant there was not one single inhabitant of Joplin who did not believe the spear-armed soldiers motion-picture actors, or masqueraders, or something else equally insane but credible. But there was nothing make-believe about their attack on the car. They assaulted it as if it were a strange and probably deadly beast. They flung themselves into battle with it in a grotesquely reckless valor.

And there was nothing at all make-believe in the thoroughness and completeness with which they speared Mr. Horace B. Davis, who had only intended to drive down to the cotton-brokerage office of which he was chief clerk. They thought he was driving this strange beast to slaughter them, and they slaughtered him instead. The high-school boy saw them do it, growing whiter and whiter as he watched. When a swordsman approached the wizened man and displayed the severed head of Mr. Davis, with the spectacles dangling grotesquely from one ear, the high-school boy fainted dead away.

It was sunrise of June 5th. Cyrus Harding gulped down his breakfast in the pale gray dawnlight. He had felt very dizzy and sick for just a moment, some little while since, but he was himself again now. The smell of frying filled the kitchen. His wife cooked. Cyrus Harding ate. He made noises as he emptied his plate. His hands were gnarled and work-worn, but his expression was of complacent satisfaction. He looked at a calendar hung on the wall, a Christmas sentiment from the Bryan Feed and Fertilizer Company, in Bryan, Ohio.

“Sheriff’s goin’ to sell out Amos today,” he said comfortably. “I figger I’ll get that north forty cheap.”

His wife said tiredly:

“He’s been offerin’ to sell it to you for a year.”

“Yep,” agreed Cyrus Harding more complacently still. “Cornin’ down on the price, too. But nobuddy’ll bid against me at the sale. They know I want it bad, an’ I ain’t a good neighbor to have when somebuddy takes somethin’ from under my nose. Folks know it. I’ll git it a lot cheaper’n Amos offered it to me for. He wanted to sell it t’meet his int’rest an’ hoi’ on another year. I’ll git it for half that.”

He stood up and wiped his mouth. He strode to the door.

“That hired man shoulda got a good start with his harrowin’,” he said expansively. “I’ll take a look an’ go over to the sale.”

He went to the kitchen door and opened it. Then his mouth dropped open. The view from this doorway was normally that of a not-especially neat barnyard, with beyond it farmland flat as a floor, cultivated to the very fence-rails, with a promising crop of corn as a border against the horizon.

Now the view was quite otherwise. All was normal as far as the* barn. But beyond the barn was delirium. Huge, spreading tree-ferns soared upward a hundred feet. Lacy, foliated branches formed a roof of incredible density above sheer jungle such as no man on earth had ever seen before. The jungles of the Amazon basin were park-like by comparison with its thickness. It was a riotous tangle of living vegetation in which growth was battle, and battle was life, and life was deadly, merciless conflict. No man could have forced his way ten feet through such a wilderness. From it came a fetid exhalation which was part decay and part lush rank growing things, and part the overpowering perfumes of glaringly vivid flowers. It was jungle such as paleobotanists have described as existing in the Carboniferous Period; as the source of our coal-beds.

“It—it ain’t so!” said Cyrus Harding weakly. “It— ain’t so!”

His wife did not reply. She had not seen. Wearily, she began to clean up after her lord and master’s meal.

He went down the kitchen steps, staring and shaken. He moved toward this impossible apparition which covered his crops. It did not disappear as he neared it.

He went within twenty feet of it and stopped, still staring, still unbelieving, beginning to entertain the monstrous supposition that he had gone insane.

Then something moved in the jungle. A long, snaky neck, feet thick at its base and tapering to a mere sixteen inches behind a head the size of a barrel. The neck reached out the twenty feet to him. Cold eyes regarded him abstractedly. The mouth opened. Cyrus Harding screamed.

His wife raised her eyes. She looked through the open door and saw the jungle. She saw the jaws close upon her husband. She saw the colossal, abstracted eyes half-close as Something gulped, and partly choked, and swallowed. She saw a lump in the monstrous neck move from the relatively slender portion just behind the head to the enormous mass of flesh where the neck joined its unseen body. She saw the head withdraw into the jungle and be instantly lost to sight.

Cyrus Harding’s widow went very pale. She put on her hat and walked subduedly out of the front door. She began to walk steadily toward the house of the nearest neighbor. As she went, she said composedly to herself:

“It’s come. I’ve gone crazy. They’ll have to put me in an asylum. But I won’t have to stand him any more. 1 wont have to stand him any more!”

And at 10:30 a.m. on the morning of June 5th, Instructor James Minott of Robinson College turned upon the party of students with a revolver in each hand. Gone was the appearance of the dour young instructor whose most destructive possibility was a below-passing mark in Math. He had guns in his hands now, instead of chalk or pencil, and his eyes were glowing even as he smiled frostily. The four girls gasped. The young men, accustomed to see him only in a class-room, realized that not only could he use the weapons in his hands, but that he would. And suddenly they respected him as they would respect— say—a burglar or a prominent gangster or a well-known murderer. He was raised far above the level of a mathematics instructor. He became instantly a leader, and by virtue of his weapons, even a ruler.

“As you see,” said Minott evenly, “I have anticipated the situation in which we find ourselves. At any moment, to be sure, we and all the human race may be wiped out with a completeness of which you can form no idea. But we may survive, and I am prepared equally to be wiped out or to make the most of my chance of survival—if we live.”

He looked steadily from one to another of the students who had followed him to explore the extraordinary appearance of a sequoia forest north of Fredericksburg.

“I know what has happened,” said Minott coolly. “I also know what is likely to happen. And I know what I intend to do about it. Any of you who are prepared to follow me can say so. Any of you who objects—well —I can’t have mutinies! I’ll shoot him!”

“But Mr. Minott,” said Blake nervously, “we ought to get the girls home—”

“They will never go home,” said Minott calmly. “Neither will you nor any of the rest of us. As soon as you’re quite convinced that I’m ready to use these weapons, I’ll tell you whats happened and what it means. I’ve been preparing for it for weeks.”

It was noon of June 5th. The cell-door opened and a very grave, whiskered man in a curious gray uniform came in. He tapped the prisoner gently on the shoulder.

“I’m Doctor Holloway,” he said encouragingly. “Army Medical Corps. Suppose you tell me, suh, just what happened t’you? I’m right sure it can all be straightened out.”

The prisoner sputtered:

“Why—why—dammit,” he protested. “I drove down from Louisville this morning. I had a dizzy spell and— well—I must have missed my road, because suddenly I noticed that everything around me was unfamiliar. And then a man in a gray uniform yelled at me, and a minute later he began to shoot, and the first thing I knew they’d arrested me for having the American flag painted on my car! I’m a traveling salesman for the Uncle Sam Candy-Bar Company! Dammit, it’s funny when a man can’t fly his own country’s flag—”

“In your own country, of co’se,” assented the doctor, comfortingly. “But you must know, suh, that we don’t allow any flag but ouah own to be displayed heah. You violated ouah laws, suh.”

“Your laws!” The prisoner stared blankly. “What laws? Where in the United States is it illegal to fly the American flag?”

“Nowheah in the United States, suh.” The doctor smiled. “You must have crossed ouah border unawares, suh. I will be frank, an’ admit that it was suspected you were insane. I see now that it was just a mistake.”

“Border—United—” The prisoner gasped. “I’m not in the United States? I’m not? Then where in hell am I?”

“Ten miles, suh, within the borders of the Confederacy,” said the doctor, and laughed. “A queer mistake, suh, but theah was no intention of insult. You’ll be released at once. Theah is enough tension between Washington an’ Richmond without another border incident to upset ouah hot-heads.”

“Confederacy?” The prisoner choked. “You can’t— you don’t mean the Confederate States—”

“Of co’se, suh. The Confederate States of North America. Why not?”

The prisoner gulped.

“I—I’ve gone mad!” he stammered. “I must be mad! There was Gettysburg—there was—”

“Gettysburg? Oh, yes!” The doctor nodded indulgently. “We are very proud of ouah history, suh. You refer to the battle in the War of Separation, when the fate of the Confederacy rested on ten minutes time. I have often wondered what would have been the result if Pickett’s charge had been driven back. It was Pickett’s charge that gained the day for us, suh. England recognized the Confederacy two days later, France in another week, an’ with unlimited credit abroad we won out. But it was a tight squeeze, suh!”

The prisoner gasped again. He stared out of the window. And opposite the jail stood an unquestionable court-house. Upon the court-house stood a flag-pole. And spread gloriously in the breeze above a government building—floated the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy!

It was night of June 5th. The post-master of North Centerville, Massachusetts, came out of his cubbyhole to listen to the narrative. The pot-bellied stove of the general store sent a comfortable, if unnecessary glow about. The eyewitness chuckled.

“Yeah. They come around the cape, thirty or forty of ’em in a boat all o’ sixty feet long with a crazy square sail drawin’. Round things in the gun’le like— like shields. An’ rowin’ like hell. They stopped when they saw the town an’ looked s’prised. Then they hailed us, talkin’ some lingo that wa’n't American. Ole Peterson, he near dropped his line, with a fish on it too. Then he tried t’ talk back. They hadda lotta trouble understandin’ him, or made out to. Then they turned around an’ rowed back. Actors or somethin’,* try in’ to play a joke. It fell flat, though. Maybe some o’ those rich folks up the coast pullin’ it. Ho! Ho! Ole says they was talkin’ a funny, old-fashioned Skowegian. They told him they was from Leifsholm, or somethin’ like that, just up the coast. That they couldn’t make out how our town got here. They’d never seen it before! Can y’ imagine that? Ole says they were Vikin’s, an’ they called this place Vinland, an’ says—My Gawd! What’s that?”

A sudden hubbub arose in the night. Screams. Cries. A shot-gun boomed dully. The loafers in the general store crowded out on the porch. Flames rose from half a dozen places on the water-front. In their light could be seen a full dozen serpent-ships, speeding for the shore, propelled by oars. Firelight glinted on swords, on shields. A woman screamed as a huge, yellowmaned man seized her. His brazen helmet and shield glittered. He was laughing. Then a figure in overalls hurtled toward the blonde giant, an axe held threateningly—

The giant cut him down with an already dripping blade and roared. Men rushed to him and they plunged on to loot and burn. More of the armored figures leaped to the sand from another beached ship. Another house roared flames skyward. . . .

Tall trees rose around the party. Giant trees. Magnificent trees. They towered two hundred and fifty feet into the air, and their air of venerable calm was at once the most convincing evidence of their actuality, and the most improbable of all the things which had happened in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The little group of people sat their horses affrightedly beneath the monsters of the forest. Minott regarded them estimatingly, these three young men and four girls, all students of Robinson College.

Minott was now no longer the faculty-member in charge of a party of exploration, but a definitely ruthless leader.

At eight-thirty a.m. on June 5th the inhabitants of Fredericksburg had felt a curious, unanimous dizziness. It passed. The sun shone brightly. There seemed to be no noticeable change in any of the facts of everyday existence. But within an hour, the sleepy little town was buzzing with excitement. The road to Washington—Route One on all road-maps—ceased abruptly some three miles north. A colossal, a gigantic forest had appeared magically to block the way. Telegraphic communication with Washington had ceased. F,ven the Washington broadcasting stations were no longer on the air. The trees of the extraordinary forest were tall beyond the experience of any human being in town. They looked like the photographs of the giant sequoias on the Pacific Coast, but—well—the thing was simply impossible.

In an hour and a half, instructor Minott had organized a party of sight-seers among the students. He seemed to pick his party with a queer definiteness of decision. Three young men and four girls. They would have piled into a rickety car owned by one of the boys, but Minott negated the idea.

“The road ends at the forest,” he said, smiling. “I'd rather like to explore a magic forest. Suppose we ride horseback? I’ll arrange for horses.”

In ten minutes the horses appeared. The girls had vanished to get into riding-breeches or knickers. They noted appreciatively on their return that besides the saddles, the horses had saddle-bags slung in place. Again Minott smiled.

“Were exploring,” he said humorously. “We must dress the part. Also, we’ll probably want some lunch. And we can bring back specimens for the botanical lab to look over.”

They rode forth; the girls thrilled, the young men pleased and excited, and all of them just a little bit disappointed at finding themselves passed by motorcars which whizzed by as all Fredericksburg went to look at the improbable forest ahead.

There were cars by hundreds where the road abruptly ended. A crowd stared at the forest. Giant trees, their roots fixed firmly in the ground. Undergrowth here and there. Over it all, an aspect of peace and utter serenity—and permanence. The watching crowd hummed and buzzed with speculation, with talk. The thing they saw was impossible. It could not have happened. This forest could not possibly be real. They were regarding some sort of mirage.

But as the party of riders arrived, half a dozen daring men came out of the forest. They had dared to enter it. Now they returned, still incredulous of their own experience, bearing leaves and branches and one of them certain small berries unknown on the Atlantic Coast.

A State Police officer held up his hand as Minott’s party went toward the edge of the forest.

“Look here!” he said. “We been hearin’ funny noises in there. I’m stoppin’ anybody else from goin’ in until we know what’s what.”

Minott nodded.

“We’ll be careful. I’m a faculty member of Robinson College. We’re going in after some botanical specimens. I have a revolver. Were all right.”

He rode ahead. The State policeman, without definite orders for authority, shrugged his shoulders and bent his efforts to the prevention of other attempts to explore. In minutes, the eight horses and their riders were out of sight.

That was now three hours past. For three hours, Minott had led his charges a little south of north-east. In that time they saw no dangerous animals. They saw some—many—familiar plants. They saw rabbits in quantity, and once a slinking gray form which Tom Hunter, who was majoring in zoology, declared was a wolf. There are no wolves in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, but neither are there sequoias. And the party had seen no signs of human life, though Fredericksburg lies in farming country which is thickly settled. In three hours the horses must have covered between twelve and fifteen miles, even through the timber. It was just after sighting a shaggy beast which was unquestionably a woodland buffalo—extinct east of the Rockies as early as 1820—that young Blake protested uneasily against further travel.

‘‘There’s something awfully queer, sir,” he said awkwardly. “I don’t mind experimenting as much as you like, sir, but we’ve got the girls with us. If we don’t start back pretty soon, we’ll get in trouble with the dean!” And then Minott drew his two revolvers and very calmly announced that none of them would ever go back. That he knew what had happened and what could be expected. And he added that he would explain as soon as they were convinced he would use his revolvers in case of a mutiny.

“Call us convinced now, sir,” said young Blake. He was a bit pale about the lips, but he hadn’t flinched. In fact, he’d moved to be between Maida Haynes and the gun-muzzle. “We’d like very much to know how all these trees and plants, which ought to be three thousand miles away, happen to be growing in Virginia without any warning. Especially, sir, we’d like to know how it is that the topography underneath all this brand-new forest is the same. The hills trend the same way they used to, but everything that ever was on them has vanished, and something else is in its place.” Minott nodded approvingly.

“Splendid, Blake!” he said warmly. “Sound observation! I picked you because you re well spoken of in geology, even though there were—er—other reasons for leaving you behind. Let’s go on over the next rise. Unless I’m mistaken, we should find the Potomac in view. Then I’ll answer any questions you like. I’m afraid we’ve a good bit more of riding to do today.”

Reluctantly, the eight horses breasted the slope. They scrambled among underbrush. It was queer that in three hours they had seen not a trace of a road leading anywhere. But up at the top of the hill there was a road. It was a narrow, wandering cart-track. Without a word, every one of the eight riders turned their horses to follow it. It meandered onward for perhaps a quarter of a mile. It dipped suddenly. And the Potomac lay before and below them.

Then seven of the eight riders exclaimed. There was a settlement upon the banks of the river. There were boats in harbor. There were other boats in view beyond; two beating down from the long reaches upstream, and three others coming painfully up from the direction of Chesapeake Bay. But neither the village nor the boats should have been upon the Potomac River. The village was small and mud-walled. Tiny, blue-clad figures moved about the fields outside. The buildings, the curving lines of the roofs, and more especially the unmistakable outline of a sort of temple near the center of the fortified hamlet—these were Chinese. The boats in sight were junks, save that their sails were cloth instead of slatted bamboo. The fields outside the squat mud walls were cultivated in a fashion altogether alien. Near the river, where marsh flats would be normal along the Potomac, rice-fields intensely worked spread out instead.

Then a figure appeared nearby. Wide hat, wadded cotton-padded jacket, cotton trousers, and clogs, it was Chinese peasant incarnate, and all the more so when it turned a slant-eyed, terror-stricken face upon them and fled squawking. It left a monstrously heavy wooden yoke behind, from which dangled two buckets filled with berries it had gathered in the forest.

The riders stared. There was the Potomac. But a Chinese village nestled beside it, Chinese junks plied its waters. . . .

“I—I think,” said Maida Haynes unsteadily, “I— think I’ve—gone insane. Haven’t I?”

Minott shrugged. He looked disappointed but queerly resolute.

“No,” he said shortly. “You’re not mad. It just happens that the Chinese happened to colonize America first. It’s been known that Chinese junks touched the American shore—the Pacific Coast, of course—long before Columbus. Evidently they colonized it. They may have come all the way overland to the Atlantic, or maybe around by Panama. In any case, this is a Chinese continent now. This isn’t what we want. We’ll ride some more.”

The fleeing, squawking figure had been seen from the village. A huge, discordant gong began to sound. Figures fled toward the walls from the fields round about. The popping of fire-crackers began, with a chorus of most intimidating yells.

“Come on!” said Minott sharply. “We’d better move!”

He wheeled his horse about and started off at a canter. By instinct, since he was the only one who seemed to have any definite idea what to do, the others flung after him.

And as they rode, suddenly the horses staggered. The humans atop them felt a queer, queazy vertigo. It lasted only for a second, but Minott paled a little.

“Now we’ll see what’s happened,” he said composedly. “The odds are still fair, but I’d rather have had things stay as they were until we’d tried a few more places. . .

That same queazy vertigo affected the staring crowd at the end of the road leading north from Fredericksburg. For perhaps a second they felt an unearthly illness, which even blurred their vision. Then they saw clearly again. And in an instant they were babbling in panic, starting their motor-cars in terror, some of them fleeing on foot.

The sequoia forest had vanished. In its place was a dreary waste of glittering white; stumpy trees buried under snow; rolling ground covered with a powdery, glittering stuff. . ..

In minutes dense fog shut off the view, as the warm air of a Virginia June morning was chilled by that frigid coating. But in minutes, too, the heavy snow began to melt. The cars fled away along the concrete road, and behind them an expanding belt of fog spread out—and the little streams and runlets filled with a sudden surplus of water, and ran more swiftly, and rose. .. .

There were only sparse trees and a tall, canelike grass. The ground was still rolling, but the air was misty. Clear vision was not possible for a very long distance. Still, the topography in terms of hills and valleys had not changed. But they saw a tapir—it looked like a pigmy elephant at first glance—and they had seen other things that looked human, but weren’t. So two of the young men rode on ahead, watching lest there should be anything hidden in the breast-high grass, and Minott followed with the four girls, and another of the students followed twenty yards behind.

“I don’t like this,” said Minott coldly. “Not at all. But we’ll keep going.”

Lucy Blair rode beside him on one hand. He’d shown her how to use a revolver. Maida Haynes rode on the other.

“What were those—things we saw?” asked Lucy shakenly. “They—looked human. Were they, really?”

“Depends on what you mean by human,” said Minott. “If you mean homo sapiens—our species—probably not. The human family had a number of species, like the equine and feline families. There was Neanderthal man and Java man and so on. Homo sapiens wiped them out, in the world we came from. But in the history of this particular place the battle may have gone the other way.”

Maida Haynes licked her lips. She was terribly tense.

“History,” she said in a queer voice. “What has that to do with—what’s happening to us? I—I still think I’m dreaming. I—I must be!”

“I think I’m dreaming too,” said Lucy. “And I’m scared too, but so far it’s rather wonderful. I—think I’ll get over being scared, in time.”

One of the two figures on ahead swerved to one side. He rode cautiously, and reined in, and then turned his horse and came racing back to Minott.

“Some of those—creatures lying in wait there,” he said through chattering lips. “The—funny things that look like men. What’ll we do?”

Minott considered coldly.

“If we planned to stay here,” he said presently, without emotion, “we’d charge them and kill enough of them to teach a needed lesson. But we don’t intend to stay here. It isn’t worth the risk or trouble. We’d gain nothing. Swing wide of them. If they try to follow us we’ll shoot one or two.”

Harris sent his horse plunging back to join young Blake. They changed course. Beastly howlings arose from a spot they would now avoid. Loping, bouncing figures with long brown shaggy hair went leaping and bounding to intercept them. The figures carried clubs and spears.

Minott very calmly drew a revolver. He aimed and fired six times. A creature screamed up ahead. Its fellows fled away, howling. The wounded creature thrashed and shrieked. Then it suddenly made bubbling sounds and was still. Minott reloaded his revolver.

“You—killed it!” gasped Maida, horrified.

“To be sure,” said Minott casually. “Killing one made the others run away. If they’d attacked us we’d have had to kill several, and it would have used up a good deal of ammunition.

“Intelligence isn’t at a premium here,” said Minott. “We can’t make much out of this environment!”

He made no other comment. Far, far away, the misty air seemed to grow thicker. There was a white fog before them. It seemed to stretch out of sight on either hand. They rode toward it.

Lucy Blair said suddenly:

“Do you really think well come upon a civilization where well be welcomed, Mr. Minott?”

“Naturally!” His tone was dry. “I did not plan this expedition without some definite ideas!”

“And do you think we will—we will—”

“Rule it?” He said more dryly still: “I assure you that I will rule it. I need only to be received—to be accepted—in a community not too far advanced in culture, but a shade above savagery. Given that foothold, I can use my special knowledge to its full value. I need only a society still fluid, still malleable, not yet frozen in a pattern of conventional stability. I will end by ruling it. In our own culture, man is only afraid of losing what he has. I can do nothing with such people. But give me men who want what they have not, and I can give it to them! I can make them prosper as if by magic!”

“By mathematics?” asked Lucy dubiously.

He smiled faintly.

“You might call it that,” he said ironically. “But by your definition mathematics is only a form of integration dealing with quantity. Logic is a form of integration which deals with ideas but not with quantity. There can be—there is!—a form of integration which deals with both and more besides. I discovered it. It is useless in our time, of course. It would upset too much that is solidly established. But it is as precise in its operation as either mathematics or logic. And I assure you that it will give me as much advantage in all dealings with men of a proper culture, as the ability to count gives in dealings with savages who cannot.”

Lucy Blair looked at him oddly.

“That sounds like pure intellectuality. You act like something else entirely. Do you know, I’ve always thought you were lonely?”

“I always have been,” said Minott bitterly. “I always will be. But I shall do things to make up for it now! Let me find just one community of men who are restless and desirous, and I will remake it, remould it, rule and guide it, and—”

But then he stopped. Lucy did not look shocked. She said interestedly:

“And how do we fit into that?”

“You will help me,” he said calmly. “All of you. You have no choice, of course, but you will have such rewards as you cannot now imagine. I won't need to force any of you. You'll have no choice. But you will be glad, I think.”

“But it’s—preposterous—” protested Maida, shrilly, “not to—not to be able to go home again—”

“You will marry,” said Minott practically. “Then you won’t mind. Even that, though, will be of your own choice. Of course. You won't find semi-savages interesting, any more than any of the rest of us would. You’ll do all right.”

The two girls stared at each other. There were four girls. Three students—and Minott.

“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “I shall marry one of you. The most suitable for my plans. I shall want an intelligent empress.”

But then he spurred ahead. The fog-bank before them spread from one horizon to the other. As the horses went uneasily into it, the air turned icy cold.

The ferryboat from Berkeley, California, ploughed valorously through the fog. Its whistle howled mournfully at the proper intervals. Up in the pilot-house, the skipper said confidentially :

“I tell you, I had the funniest feelin’ of my life, just now. I was dizzy an’ sick all over, like seasick an’ drunk together.”

The mate said abstractedly:

“Me too, a little while ago. Somethin’ we ate, prob’ly. Say, that’s funny 1”

“What?”

“Was a lot o’ traffic in the harbor just now. Whistlin’. I ain’t heard a whistle for minutes. Listen I”

Both men strained their ears. There was the rhythmic shudder of the vessel, itself a sound produced by the engines. There were fragmentary voice-noises from the passenger-deck below. There was the wash of water by the ferryboat’s bow. There was nothing else. Nothing at all.

“Funny!” said the skipper.

“Dam’ funny!” agreed the mate.

The ferryboat went on. The fog cut down all visibility to a radius of perhaps two hundred feet.

“Funniest thing I ever saw!” said the skipper worriedly. He reached for the whistle-cord and the mournful bellow of the horn resounded. “We’re near our slip, though. I wish . . .”

With a little chugging, swishing sound a steam-launch came out of the mist. It sheered off, the men in it staring blankly at the huge bulk of the ferry. It made a complete circuit of the big, clumsy craft. Then someone stood up and bellowed unintelligibly in the launch. He bellowed again. He was giving an order. He pointed to the flag at the stern of the launch—it was an unfamiliar flag—and roared furiously.

“What the hells the matter with that guy?” wondered the mate.

A little breeze blew suddenly. The fog began to thin. The faintly brighter spot which was the sun overhead grew bright indeed. Faint sunshine struggled through the fog-bank. The wind drove the fog back before it— and the bellowing man in the steam-launch grew purple with rage as his orders went unheeded.

Then, quite abruptly, the last wisps of vapor blew away. San Francisco stood revealed. But—San Francisco? This was not San Francisco! It was a wooden city. A small city. A dirty city with narrow streets and gas street-lamps and four monstrous, barrack-like edifices fronting the harbor. Nob Hill stood, but it was barren of dwellings. And—

“My Gawd!” said the mate of the ferryboat.

He was staring at a colossal mass of masonry, foursquare and huge, which rose to a gigantic spiral-fluted dome. A strange and alien flag fluttered in the breeze above certain buildings. Figures moved in the streets. There were motor-cars, but they were clumsy and huge. The mate’s eyes rested upon a horse-drawn carriage. It was drawn by three horses abreast, and they were either so trained or so check-reined that only the the center one faced straight ahead. The necks of the other two were arched outward in the fashion of Tsarist Russia.

But that was natural enough, after all. When an interpreter could be found, the mate and skipper were savagely abused for entering the harbor of Novo Skevsky without obeying the ordinances in force by ukase of the Tsar Alexis of All the Russias. Those rules, they learned, were enforced with special rigor in all the Russian territory in America, from Alaska on south.

The eight riders were every one very pale. Even Minott seemed shaken but no less resolute when he drew rein.

“I imagine you will all be satisfied now,” he said composedly. “Blake, you’re the geologist of the party. Doesn’t the shore-line there look familiar?”

Young Blake nodded. He was very white indeed. He pointed to the stream.

“Yes. The falls, too. This is the site of Fredericksburg, sir, where we were this morning. There is where the main bridge was—or will be. The main highway to Richmond should run—” He licked his lips. “It should run where that very big oak-tree is standing. The Princess Anne Hotel should be on the other side of that hill. I—I would say, sir, that somehow we’ve gone backward in time or else forward into the future. It sounds insane, but I’ve been trying to figure it out . . .”

Minott nodded coolly.

“Very good. This is the site of Fredericksburg, to be sure. But we have not traveled backward or ahead in time. I hope that you noticed where we came out of the sequoia forest. There seems to be a sort of fault along that line, which it may be useful to remember.” He paused. “We’re not in the past or the future, Blake.

We’ve traveled sidewise, in a sort of oscillation from one time-path to another. We happen to be in a—well —in a part of time where Fredericksburg has never been built, just as a little while since we were where the Chinese occupy the American continent. I think we’d better have lunch.”

He dismounted. The four girls tended to huddle together. Maida Haynes’ teeth chattered. Blake moved to the horses’ heads.

“Don’t get rattled,” he said urgently. “We’re here, wherever it is. Mr. Minott is going to explain things fully in a minute. Since he knows what’s what, we’re in no danger. Climb off your horses and let’s eat. I’m hungry as a bear. Come on, Maida!”

Maida Haynes dismounted. She managed a rather shaky smile.

“I’m—afraid of—him,” she said in a whisper. “More than—anything else—stay close to me, please!”

Blake frowned. Minott said dryly:

“Look in your saddle-bags and you’ll find sandwiches. Also you’ll find firearms. You young men had better arm yourselves. Since there’s now no conceivable hope of getting back to the world we know, I think you can be trusted with weapons.”

Young Blake stared at him, then silently investigated his own saddle-bags. He found two revolvers, with what seemed an abnormally large supply of cartridges. He found a mass of paper, which turned out to be books with their cardboard backs torn off. He glanced professionally at the revolvers and slipped them in his pockets. He put back the books.

“I appoint you second in command, Blake,” said

Minott, more dryly than before. “You understand nothing, but you want to understand. I made no mistake in choosing you, despite my reasons for leaving you behind. Sit down and Til tell you what happened.”

With a grunt and a puffing noise, a small black bear broke cover and fled across a place where only that morning a highly elaborate filling-station had stood. The party started, then relaxed. The girls suddenly started to giggle foolishly, almost hysterically. Minott bit calmly into a sandwich and said pleasantly:

“I shall have to talk mathematics to you, but Til try to make it more palatable than my class-room lectures have been. You see, everything that has happened can only be explained in terms of mathematics, and more especially certain concepts in mathematical physics. You young ladies and gentlemen being college men and women, I shall have to phrase things very simply, as for ten-year-old children. Hunter, you’re staring. If you actually see something, such as an Indian, shoot at him and he’ll run away. The probabilities are that he never heard the report of a firearm. We’re not on the Chinese continent now.”

Hunter gasped, and fumbled at his saddle-bags. While he got out the revolvers in it, Minott went on imperturbably:

“There has been an upheaval of nature, which still continues. But instead of a shaking and jumbling of earth and rocks, there has been a shaking and jumbling of space and time. I go back to first principles. Time is a dimension. The past is one extension of it, the future is the other, just as east is one extension of a more familiar dimension and west is its opposite.

But we ordinarily think of time as a line, a sort of tunnel, perhaps. We do not make that error in the dimensions about which we think daily. For example, we know that Annapolis, King George Court House, and—say—Norfolk are all to eastward of us. But we know that in order to reach any of them, as a destination, we would have to go not only east but north or south in addition. In imaginative travels into the future, however, we never think in such a common-sense fashion. We assume that the future is a line instead of a coordinate, a path instead of a direction. We assume that if we travel to futureward there is but one possible destination. And that is as absurd as it would be to ignore the possibility of traveling to eastward in any other line than due east, forgetting that there are north-east and south-east and a large number of intermediate points.”

Young Blake said slowly:

“I follow you, sir, but it doesn’t seem to bear—”

“On our problem? But it does!” Minott smiled, showing his teeth. He bit into his sandwich again. “Imagine that I come to a fork in a road. I flip a coin to determine which fork I shall take. Whichever route I follow, I shall encounter certain landmarks, and certain adventures. But they will not be the same, whether landmarks or adventures. In choosing between the forks of the road I choose not only between two sets of landmarks I could encounter, but between two sets of events. I choose between paths, not only on the surface of the earth, but in time. And as those paths upon earth may lead to two different cities, so those paths in the future may lead to two entirely different futures. On one of them may lie opportunities for riches. On the other may lie the most prosaic of hit-and-run accidents which will leave me a mangled corpse, not only upon one fork of a highway in the state of Virginia, but upon one fork of a highway in time. In short, I am pointing out that there is more than one future we can encounter, and with more or less absence of deliberation we choose among them. But the futures we fail to encounter, upon the roads we do not take, are just as real as the landmarks upon those roads. We never see them, but we freely admit their existence.”

Again it was young Blake who protested:

“All this is interesting enough, sir, but still I don’t see how it applies to our present situation.”

Minott said impatiently:

“Don’t you see that if such a state of things exists in the future, that it must also have existed in the past? We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future. There is a theoretic necessity—a mathematical necessity—to assume more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks’ in time. There are any number of destinations to eastward. There are any number to futureward. Start a hundred miles west and come eastward, choosing your paths on earth at random, as you do in time. You may arrive here. You may arrive to the north or south of this spot, and still be east of your starting-point. Now start a hundred years back instead of a hundred miles west!”

Groping, young Blake said fumblingly:

“I think you’re saying, sir, that—well as there must be any number of futures, there must have been any number of pasts besides those written down in our histories. And—and it would follow that there are any number of what you might call presents/ ”

Minott gulped down the last of his sandwich and nodded.

“Precisely! And today’s convulsion of nature has jumbled them, and still upsets them from time to time. The Northmen once colonized America. In the sequence of events which mark the pathway of our own ancestors through time, that colony failed. But along another path through time that colony throve and flourished. The Chinese reached the shores of California. In the path our ancestors followed through time, nothing developed from the fact. But this morning we touched upon the pathway in which they have colonized and conquered the continent, though from the fear that one peasant we saw displayed, they have not wiped out the Indians as our ancestors did. Somewhere the Roman Empire still exists, and may not improbably rule America as it once ruled Britain. Somewhere, the conditions causing the glacial period still obtain and Virginia is buried under a mass of snow. Somewhere even the Carboniferous Period may exist. Or to come more closely to the present we know, somewhere there is a path through time in which Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg went desperately home, and the Confederate States of America is now an independent nation with a heavily fortified border and a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward the United States.

Blake alone had asked questions, but the entire party had been listening open-mouthed. Now Lucy Blair said:

“But—Mr. Minott, where are we now?”

“We are probably,” said Minott, smiling, “in a path of time in which America has never been discovered by white men. That isn’t a very satisfactory state of things. Were going to look for something better. We wouldn’t be comfortable in wigwams, with skins for clothing. So we shall hunt for a more congenial environment. We will have some weeks in which to do our searching, I think. Unless, of course, all space and time is wiped out by the cause of our predicament.”

Tom Hunter stirred uncomfortably.

“We haven’t traveled backward or forward in time, then.”

“No,” repeated Minott. He got to his feet. “That odd nausea we felt seems to be caused by travel sidewise in time. It’s the symptom of a time-oscillation. We’ll ride on and see what other worlds await us. We’re a rather well-qualified party for this sort of exploration. I chose you for your training. Hunter, zoology. Blake, engineering and geology. Harris—” He nodded to the rather undersized young man, who flushed at being noticed. “—Harris is quite a competent chemist, I understand. Miss Ketterline is a capable botanist. Miss Blair—”

Maida Haynes rose slowly.

“You anticipated all this, Mr. Minott, and yet you brought us into it. You—you said well never get back home. Yet you deliberately arranged it. What—what was your motive? What did you do it for?”

Minott climbed into the saddle. He smiled, but there was bitterness in his smile.

“In the world we know,” he told her, “I was an instructor in mathematics in a small and unconsidered college. I had absolutely no chance of ever being more than a professor of mathematics in a small and unconsidered college. In this world I am, at least, the leader of a group of reasonably intelligent young people. In our saddle-bags are arms and ammunition and—more important—books of reference for our future activities. We shall hunt for and find a civilization in which our technical knowledge is at a premium. We shall live in that world—if all time and space is not destroyed—and use our knowledge.”

Maida Haynes said:

“But again—what for?”

“To conquer it!” said Minott in sudden fierceness. “To conquer it! We eight will rule a world as no world has been ruled since time began! I promise you that when we find the environment we seek, you will have wealth by millions, slaves by thousands, every luxury and all the power human beings could desire!”

Blake said evenly:

“And you, sir? What will you have?”

“Most power of all,” said Minott steadily. “I shall be the emperor of the world!”

He turned his back to them and rode off to lead the way. Maida Haynes was deathly pale as she rode close to Blake. Her hand closed convulsively upon his arm. “J-jerry!” she whispered. “I’m—frightened!”

But Lucy Blair rode onward with an odd, excited smile on her face.

The boy ran shouting up to the village. “Hey, Grampa! Hey, Grampa! Lookit the birds!” He pointed as he ran. A man looked idly, and stood transfixed. A woman stopped, and stared. Lake Superior glowed bluely off to westward, and the little village most often turned its eyes in that direction. Now though, as the small boy ran shouting of what he had seen, men stared, and women marveled, and children ran and shouted and whooped in the instinctive excitement of childhood at anything which entrances grown-ups.

Over the straggly pine forests birds were coming. They came in great dark masses. Not by dozens, or by hundreds, or even by thousands. They came in millions, in huge dark clouds which literally obscured the sky. There were two huge flights in sight at the boy’s first shouting. There were six in view before he had reached his home and was panting a demand that his elders come and look. And there were others, incredible numbers of others, sweeping onward straight over the village.

Dusk fell abruptly as the first flock passed overhead. The whirring of wings was loud. It made people raise their voices as they asked each other what such birds could possibly be. Daylight again, and again darkness as the flocks poured on. The size of each flock was to be measured not in feet or yards, but in miles of front. Two—three miles of birds, flying steadily in a single enormous mass some four miles deep. Another such mass, and another, and another . . .

“What are they, Grampa? There must be millions of ’em!”

Somewhere, a shot-gun went off. Small things dropped from the sky. Another gun-shot, and another. A rain of bird-shot went up from the village into the mass of whirring wings. And crazily careening small bodies fell down among the houses. . . .

Grampa examined one of them, smoothing its rumpled plumage. He exclaimed. He gasped in excitement.

“It’s a wild pigeon! What they used t’ call passenger pigeons! Back in 78 there was these birds by billions. Folks said a billion was killed in Michigan that one year! But they' gone now. They’ gone like the buffalo. There ain’t any more.”

The sky was dark with birds above him. A flock four miles wide and three miles long literally made lights necessary in the village. The air was filled with the sound of wings. Droppings fell like snow. The passenger pigeon had returned to a continent from which it had been absent for more than fifty years. Flocks of passenger pigeons flew overhead in thick masses equalling those seen by Audubon in 1813, when he computed the pigeons in flight above Kentucky at hundreds of billions in number. In flocks that were literally innumerable they flew to westward. The sun set, and still the air was filled with the sound of their flying. For hours after darkness fell, the whirring of wings continued without ceasing.

A great open fire licked at the rocks against which it had been built. The horses cropped uneasily at herbage nearby. The smell of fat meat cooking was undeniably savory, but one of the girls blubbered gustily on a bed of leaves. Harris tended the cookery. Tom Hunter brought wood. Blake stood guard a little beyond the firelight, revolvers ready, staring off into the blackness. Minott pored over a topographical map of Virginia. Lucy Blair tried to comfort the blubbering girl.

'‘Supper’s ready,” said Harris. He made even that announcement seem somehow shy and apologetic.

Minott put down his map. Tom Hunter began to cut great chunks of steaming meat from the haunch of venison. He put them on slabs of bark and began to pass them around. Minott reached out his hand and took one of them. He ate with obvious appetite. He seemed to have abandoned his preoccupation the instant he laid down his map. He was displaying the qualities of a capable leader.

“Hunter,” he observed, “after you’ve eaten that stuff, you might relieve Blake. We’ll arrange reliefs for the rest of the night. By the way, you men mustn’t forget to wind your watches. We’ll need to rate them, ultimately.”

Hunter gulped down his food and moved out to Blake’s hiding-place. They exchanged low-toned words. Blake came back to the fire. He took the food Harris handed him and began to eat it. He looked at the blubbering girl on the bed of leaves.

“She’s just scared,” said Minott. “Barely slit the skin on her arm. But it is upsetting for a senior at Robinson College to be wounded by a flint arrow-head.”

Blake nodded.

“I heard some noises off in the darkness,” he said curtly. “I’m not sure, but my impression was that I was being stalked. And I thought I heard a human voice.”

“We may be watched,” admitted Minott. “But we’re out of the path of time in which those Indians tried to ambush us. If any of them followed, they’re too bewildered to be very dangerous.”

“I hope so,” said Blake.

His manner was devoid of cordiality, yet there was no exception to be taken to it. From his standpoint, Minott had deliberately gotten the party into a predicament from which there seemed to be no possibility of escape. He had organized it to get it into just that predicament. He was unquestionably the leader of the party, despite his action. Blake made no attempt to undermine his leadership. But Blake himself had some qualifications as a leader, young as he was. Perhaps the most promising of them was the fact that he made no attempt to exercise his talents until he knew as much as Minott of what was to be looked for; what was to be expected. He listened sharply, and then said: “I think we’ve digested your lesson of this morning, sir. But—how long is this scrambling of space and time to continue? We left Fredericksburg and rode to the Potomac. It was Chinese territory. We rode back to Fredericksburg, and it wasn’t there. Later we hit a highly primitive area with ape-men in it, and then a glacial area, and afterward we encountered Indians who let loose a flight of arrows at us and wounded Bertha Ketterline in the arm. We were nearly out of range at the time, though.”

“They were scared,” said Minott. “They’d never seen horses before. Our white skins probably upset them, too. And then our guns, and the fact that I killed one, should have chased them off.”

“But—what happened to Fredericksburg. We rode away from it. Why couldn’t we ride back?”

“The scrambling process has kept up,” said Minott dryly. “You remember that queer vertigo? We’ve had it several times today, and every time, as I see it, there’s been an oscillation of the earth we happened to be on. Hm . . . Look!”

He got up and secured the map over which he had been poring. He brought it back and pointed to a heavy penciled line.

“Here’s a map of Virginia in our time. The Chinese continent appeared just about three miles north of Fredericksburg. The line of demarcation was, I consider, the line along which the giant sequoias appeared. While in the Chinese time we felt that giddiness and rode back toward Fredericksburg. We came out of the sequoia forest at the same spot as before. I made sure of it. But the continent of our time was no longer there. We rode east and before we reached the border of King George County there was another abrupt change in the vegetation. From a pine country to canelike grass and primitive trees and tapirs and ape-men, which are not exactly characteristic of this part of the world in our time. We saw no signs of any civilization. We turned south, and ran into that heavy fog and the snow beyond it. Evidently, there’s a section of a time-path in which Virginia is still subject to a glacial climate.”

Blake nodded. He listened again. Then he said:

“You’ve three sides of an—an island of time marked there.”

“Just so,” agreed Minott. “Exactly! In the scrambling process, the oscillating process, there seem to be natural ‘faults’ in the surface of the earth. Relatively large areas seem to shift back and forth as units from one time-path to another. In my own mind, I’ve likened them to elevators with many stories. We were on the Fredericksburg ‘elevator,’ or that section of our time-path, when it shifted. We rode off it onto the Chinese continent. While there, the section we started from shifted again, to another time altogether. When we rode back to where it had been—well—the town of Fredericksburg was in another time-path altogether.” Blake said sharply:

“Listen!”

A dull, dull mutter sounded far to the north. It lasted for an instant, and died away. There was a crashing of bushes nearby and a monstrous animal stepped alertly into the firelight. It was an elk, but such an elk! It was a giant, a colossal creature. One of the girls cried out affrightedly, and it turned and crashed away into the underbrush.

“There are no elk in Virginia,” said Minott dryly. Blake said sharply again:

“Listen!”

Again that dull muttering to the north. It grew louder, now. It was an airplane motor. It increased in volume from a dull mutter to a growl, from a growl to a roar. Then the plane shot overhead, the navigation-lights on its wings glowing brightly. It banked steeply and returned. It circled overhead, with a queer effect of helplessness. And then suddenly it dived down . . .

“An aviator from our time,” said Blake, staring toward the sound. “He saw our fire. He’s going to try to make a crash landing in the dark. . . .”

The motor cut off. An instant in which there was only the crackling of the fire and the whistling of wind around gliding surfaces off there in the night. Then a terrific thrashing of branches. A crash . . .

Then a flare of flame. A roaring noise, and the lurid yellow of gasoline-flames spouting skyward.

“Stay here!” snapped Blake. He was on his feet in an instant. “Harris, Minott! Somebody has to stay with the girls! I’ll get Hunter and go help!”

He plunged off into the darkness, calling to Hunter. The two of them forced their way through the underbrush. Minott scowled and got out his revolvers. Still scowling, he slipped out of the firelight and took up the guard-duty Hunter had abandoned.

A gasoline-tank exploded, off there in the darkness. The glare of the fire grew intolerably vivid. The sound of the two young men racing through undergrowth became fainter and died away.

A long time passed. A very long time. Then, very far away, the sound of thrashing bushes could be heard again. The gasoline-flare dulled and dimmed. Figures came slowly back. They moved as if they were carrying something very heavy. They stopped beyond the glow of light from the campfire. Then Blake and Hunter reappeared, alone.

“He’s dead,” said Blake curtly. “Luckily, he was flung clear of the crash before the gas-tanks caught. He came back to consciousness for a couple of minutes before he—died. Our fire was the only sign of human life he’d seen in hours. We brought him over here. We’ll bury him in the morning.”

There was silence. Minott’s scowl was deep and savage as he came back to the firelight.

“What—what did he say?” asked Maida Haynes.

“He left Washington at five this afternoon,” said Blake shortly. “From our time, or something like it. All of Virginia across the Potomac vanished at four-thirty, and virgin forest took its place. He went out to explore. At the end of an hour he came back, and Washington was gone. In its place was a fog-bank, with snow underneath. He followed the Potomac down and saw palisaded homesteads with long, oared ships drawn up on shore.”

“Vikings—Norsemen!” said Minott in satisfaction.

“He didn’t land. He swept on down, following the edge of the bay. He looked for Baltimore. Gone. Once, he’s sure, he saw a city, but he was taken sick at about that time and when he recovered, it had vanished. He was heading north again and his gasoline was getting low when he saw our fire. He tried for a crash landing. He’d no flares with him. He crashed—and died.”

“Poor fellow!” said Lucy shakenly.

“The point is,” said young Blake, “that Washington was in our present time at about four-thirty today. We’ve got a chance, though a slim one, of getting back! We’ve got to get to the edge of one of these blocks that go swinging through time, the edge of what Mr. Minott calls a ‘time-fault,’ and watch it! When the shifts come, we explore as quickly as we can. We’ve no great likelihood, perhaps, of getting back exactly to our own period, but we can get nearer to it than we are now! Mr. Minott said that somewhere the Confederacy exists. Even that, among people of our own race and speaking our own language, would be better than to be marooned forever among Indians, or among Chinese or Norsemen.”

Minott said harshly:

“Blake, we’d better have this out right now! I give the orders in this party! You jumped quickly when the plane crashed, and you gave orders to Harris and to me, I let you get away with it, but we can have but one leader. I am that leader! See you remember it!”

Blake swung about. Minott had a revolver bearing on his body.

“And you are making plans for a return to our time,” he went on savagely. “I won’t have it! The odds are still that we’ll all be killed. But if I do live, I mean to take advantage of it! And my plans do not include a return to an instructorship in mathematics at Robinson College!”

“Well?” said Blake coolly. “What of it, sir?”

“Just this! I’m going to take your revolvers. I’m going to make the plans and give the orders hereafter. We are going to look for the time-path in which a Viking civilization thrives in America. We’ll find it, too, because these disturbances will last for weeks yet. And once we find it, we will settle down among those Norsemen and when space and time are stable again I shall begin the formation of my empire! And you will obey orders or you’ll be left afoot while the rest of us go on.”

Blake said very quietly indeed:

“Perhaps, sir, we’d all prefer to be left to our own destinies rather than be merely the tools by which you attain to yours.”

Minott stared at him an instant. His lips tensed.

“It is a pity,” he said coldly. “I could have used your brains, Blake. But I can’t have mutiny. I shall have to shoot you.”

His revolver came up remorselessly.

The British Academy of Sciences was in extraordinary session to determine the cause of various untoward events. Its members were weary, bleary-eyed, but still conscious of their dignity and the importance of their task. A venerable, whiskered physicist spoke with fitting definiteness and solemnity.

“. . . And so, gentlemen, I see nothing more that remains to be said. The extraordinary events of the past hours seem to follow from certain facts about our own closed space. The gravitational fields of point 10^79 particles of matter will close space about such an aggregation. No cosmos can be larger. No cosmos can be smaller. And if we envision the creation of such a cosmos we will observe its galaxies vanish at the instant the 10^79th particle adds its own mass to those which were present before it. However, the fact that space has closed about such a cosmos does not imply its annihilation. It means merely its separation from its original space, the isolation of itself in space and time because of the curvature of space due to its gravitational field. And if we assume the existence of more than one area of closed space, we assume in some sense the existence of a hyper-space separating the closed spaces; hyper-spatial coordinates which mark their relative hyper-spatial positions; hyper—”

A gentleman with even longer and whiter whiskers than the speaker said in a loud and decided voice: “Fiddlesticks! Stuff and nonsense!”

The speaker paused. He glared.

“Sir! Do you refer—”

“I do!” said the gentleman with the longer and whiter whiskers. “It is stuff and nonsense! Next you’d be saying that in this hyper-space of yours the closed spaces would be subject to hyper-laws, revolve about each other in hyper-orbits regulated by hyper-gravitation, and undoubtedly at times there would be hyper-earthtides or hyper-collisions, producing decidedly hyper-catastrophes!”

“Such, sir,” said the whiskered gentleman on the rostrum, quivering with indignation, “such is the fact, sir!

“Then the fact,” rejoined the scientist with the longer and whiter whiskers, “the fact, sir, makes me sick!”

And as if to prove it, he reeled. But he was not alone in reeling. The entire venerable assembly shuddered in abrupt, nauseating vertigo. And then the British Academy of Sciences adjourned without formality and in a panic. It ran away. Because abruptly there was no longer a rostrum nor any end to its assembly-hall. Where their speaker had been was open air. In the open air was a fire. About the fire were certain brutish figures incredibly resembling the whiskered scientists who fled from them. They roared at the fleeing, venerable men. Snarling, wielding crude clubs, they plunged into the hall of the British Academy of Sciences. It is known that they caught one person—a biologist of highly eccentric views. It is believed that they ate him.

But it has long been surmised that some, at least, of the extinct species of humanity such as the Piltdown and Neanderthal men were cannibals. If in some pathway of time they happened to exterminate their more intelligent rivals—if somewhere pithecanthropus erectus survives and homo sapiens does not—well, in that pathway of time cannibalism is the custom of society.

With a gasp, Maida Haynes flung herself before Blake. But Harris was even quicker. Apologetic and shy, he had just finished cutting a smoking piece of meat from the venison haunch. He threw it, swiftly, and the searing mass of stuff flung Minott’s hand aside at the same instant that it burned it painfully.

Blake was on his feet, his gun out.

“If you pick up that gun, sir,” he said rather breathlessly but with unquestionable sincerity, “I’ll put a bullet through your arm!”

Minott swore. He retrieved the weapon with his left hand and thrust it in his pocket.

“You young fool!” he snapped. “I’d no intention of shooting you. I did intend to scare you thoroughly! Harris, you’re an ass! Maida—I shall discuss your action later! The worst punishment I could give the lot of you would be to leave-you to yourselves!”

He stalked out of the firelight and off into the darkness. Something like consternation came upon the group. The flow of fire where the plane had crashed flickered fitfully. The base of the dull-red light seemed to widen a little.

“That’s the devil!” said Hunter uneasily. “He does know more about this stuff than we do. If he leaves us, we’re messed up!”

“We are,” agreed Blake grimly. “And perhaps if he doesn’t.”

Lucy Blair said:

“I—I’ll go and talk to him. He—used to be nice to me in class. And—and his hand must hurt terribly. It’s burnt.”

She moved away from the fire, a long and angular shadow going on before her. Minott’s voice came sharply.

“Go back! There’s something moving out here!”

Instantly after, his revolver flashed. A howl arose, and the weapon flashed again and again. Then there were many crashings. Figures fled. Minott came back to the firelight, scornfully.

“Your leadership is at fault, Blake,” he commented sardonically. “You forgot about a guard. And you were the man who thought he heard voices! They’ve run away now, though. Indians, of course.”

Lucy Blair said hesitantly:

“Could I—could I do something for your hand? It’s burnt . . .”

“What can you do?” he asked angrily.

“There’s some fat,” she told him. “Indians used to dress wounds with bear-fat. I suppose deer-fat would do as well.”

He permitted her to dress the burn, though it was far from a serious one. She begged handkerchiefs from the others to complete the job. There was distinct uneasiness all about the campfire. This was no party of adventurers, prepared for anything. It had started out as an outing of undergraduates. Minott scowled as Lucy Blair worked on his hand. Harris looked as apologetic as possible, because he had made the injury. Bertha Ketterline blubbered—less noisily, now, because nobody paid her any attention. Young Blake frowned meditatively at the fire.

The horses moved uneasily. Bertha Ketterline, between her blubberings, sneezed. Lucy felt her eyes smarting. She was the first one to see the spread of the blaze started by the gas-tanks of the aeroplane. Her cry of alarm roused the others.

The plane had crashed a good mile from the campfire. The blazing of its tanks had been fierce but brief. The burning of the wings and chassis-fabric had been short, as well. The fire had died down to seeming dull embers. But there were more than embers ablaze out there now.

The fire had died down, to be sure, but only that it might spread among thick and tangled underbrush. It had spread widely on the ground before some climbing vine, blazing, carried flames up to resinous pine-branches overhead. A small but steady wind was blowing. And as Lucy looked off to see the source of smoke which stung her eyes, one tall tree was blazing, a long line of angry red flame crept along the ground, and then at two more,—three more—a dozen points bright fire roared upward toward the sky.

The horses snorted and reared. Minott snapped:

“Harris! Get the horses! Hunter, see that the girls get mounted, and quickly!”

He pointedly gave Blake no orders. He pored intently over his map as more trees and still more caught fire and blazed upward. He stuffed it in his pocket. Blake calmly rescued the haunch of venison, and when Minott sprang into the saddle among the snorting, scared horses, Blake was already by Maida Haynes’ side, ready to go.

“We ride in pairs,” said Minott curtly. “A man and a girl. You men, look after them. I’ve a flashlight. I’ll go ahead. We’ll hit the Rappahannock River sooner or later, if we don’t get around the fire first—and if we can keep ahead of it.”

They topped a little hillock and saw more of the extent of their danger. In a half-mile of spreading, the fire had gained three times as much breadth. And to their right, the fire even then roared in among the trees of a forest so thick as to be jungle. The blaze fairly raced through it as if the fire made its own wind, which in fact it did. To their left it crackled fiercely in underbrush which, as they fled, blazed higher.

And then, as if to add mockery to their very real danger, a genuinely brisk breeze sprang up suddenly. Sparks and blazing bits of leaves, fragments of ash and small, unsubstantial coals began to fall among them. Bertha Ketterline yelped suddenly as a tiny live coal touched the flesh of her cheek. Harris’ horse squealed and kicked as something singed it. The eight of them galloped madly ahead. Trees rose about them. The white beam of Minott’s flashlight seemed almost ludicrous in the fierce red glare from behind, but at least it showed the way.

Something large and dark and clumsy lumbered cumbersomely into the space between Grady’s statue and the post-office building. The arc-lights showed it clearly, and it was not anything which should be wandering in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, at any hour of the day or night. A taxicab chauffeur saw it, and nearly tore off a wheel in turning around to get away. A policeman saw it, and turned very pale as he grabbed at his beat-telephone to report it. But there had been too many queer things happening this day for him to suspect his own sanity, and the Journal had printed too much news from elsewhere for him to disbelieve his own eyes.

The Thing was monstrous, reptilian, loathsome. It was eighty feet long, of which at least fifty was head and tail and the rest flabby-fleshed body. It may have weighed twenty-five or thirty tons, but its head was not much larger than that of a rather large horse. That tiny head swung about stupidly. The Thing was bewildered. It put down a colossal foot—and water gushed up from a broken water-main beneath the pavement. The Thing did not notice. It moved vaguely, exhaling a dank and musty odor.

The clang of police-emergency cars and the scream of fire-engine sirens filled the air. An ambulance flashed into view—and was struck by a balancing sweep of the mighty tail. The ambulance careened and crashed.

The Thing uttered a plaintive cry, ignoring the damage its tail had caused. The sound was like that of a bleat, a thousand times multiplied. It peered ceaselessly around, seeming to feel trapped by the tall buildings about it, but it was too stupid to retrace its steps for escape.

Somebody screamed in the distance as police-cars and fire-engines reached the spot where the first Thing swayed and peered and moved in quest of escape. Two other Things, smaller than the first, came lumbering after it. Like it, they had monstrous bodies and disproportionately tiny heads. One of them blundered stupidly into a hook-and-ladder truck. Truck and beast went down, and the beast bleated like the first.

Then some fool began to shoot. Other fools joined in. Steel-jacketed bullets poured into the mountains of reptilian flesh. Police sub-machine-guns raked the monsters. Those guns were held by men of great daring, who could not help noting the utter stupidity of the Things out of the great swamp which had appeared where Inman Park used to be.

The bullets stung. They hurt. The three beasts bleated and tried bewilderedly and very clumsily indeed to escape. The largest tried to climb a five-story building, and brought it down in sheer wreckage.

Before the last of them was dead—or rather, before it ceased to move its great limbs, because the tail moved jerkily for a long time and its heart was still beating spasmodically when loaded on a city dump-cart next day—before the last of them was dead they had made sheer chaos of three blocks of business buildings in the heart of Atlanta, had killed seventeen men—and the best testimony is that they made not one attempt to fight. Their whole and only thought was to escape. The destruction they wrought and the deaths they caused were due to their clumsiness and stupidity.

The leading horses floundered horribly. They sank to their fetlocks in something soft and spongy. Bertha Ketterline squawked in terror as her mount’s motion changed. Blake said crisply in the blackness:

“It feels like ploughed ground. Better use the light again, Mr. Minott!”

The sky behind them glowed redly. The forest fire still trailed them. For miles of front, now, it shot up sparks and flame and a harsh red glare which illumined the clouds of its own smoke.

The flashlight stabbed at the earth. The ground was ploughed. It was softened by the hands of men. Minott kept the light on as little gasps of thankfulness arose. Then he said sardonically:

“Do you know what this crop is? It's lentils. Are lentils grown in Virginia? Perhaps! We’ll see what sort of men these may happen to be!”

He swung to follow the line of the furrows. Tom Hunter said miserably:

“If that’s ploughed ground, it’s a dam’ shallow furrow. A one-horse plough’d throw up more dirt than that!”

A light glowed palely in the distance. Every person in the party saw it at the same instant. As if by instinct, the head of every horse swerved for it.

“We’ll want to be careful,” said Blake quietly. “These may be Chinese, too.”

The light was all of a mile distant. They moved over the ploughed ground cautiously. . . .

Suddenly the hoofs of Lucy Blair’s horse rang on stone. The noise was startlingly loud. Other horses, following hers, clattered thunderously. Minott flashed down the light again. Dressed stone. Cut stone. A roadway built of dressed stone blocks, some six or eight feet wide. Then one of the horses shivered and snorted. It pranced agitatedly, edging away from something on the road. Minott swept the flashlight beam along the narrow way.

“The only race,” he said dryly, “that ever built roads like these was the Romans. They made their military roads like this. But they didn’t discover America that we know of.”

The beam touched something dark. It came back and steadied. One of the girls uttered a stifled exclamation. The beam showed dead men. One was a man with shield and sword and a helmet such as the soldiers of ancient Rome are pictured as having worn. He was dead. Half his head had been blown off. Lying atop him there was a man in a curious gray uniform. He had died of a sword-wound.

The beam searched around. More bodies. Many Roman-accoutred figures. Four or five men in what looked remarkably like the uniform that might be worn by soldiers of the Confederate Army—if a Confederate Army could be supposed to exist.

“There’s been fighting,” said Blake, composedly. “I guess somebody from the Confederacy—that time-path, say—started to explore what must have seemed a damned strange happening. And these Romans—if they’re Romans—jumped them.”

Something came shambling through the darkness. Minott threw the flash-beam upon it. It was human, yes. But it was three parts naked, and it was chained, and it had been beaten horribly, and there were great sores upon its body from other beatings. It was bony and emaciated. The insensate ferocity of sheer despair marked it. It was brutalized by its sufferings until it was just human, barely human, and nothing more.

It squinted at the light, too dull of comprehension to be afraid.

Then Minott spoke, and at his words it automatically groveled in the dirt. Minott spoke harshly, in half-forgotten Latin, and the groveling figure mumbled words which had been barbarous Latin to begin with, and through its bruised lips were still further mutilated.

“It’s a slave,” said Minott coldly. “Strange men—

Confederates, I suppose—came from the north today. They fought and killed some of the guards at this estate. This slave denies it, but Imagine he was heading north in hopes of escaping to them. When you think of it, I suppose we’re not the only explorers to be caught out of our own time-path by some shift or another.”

He growled at the slave and rode on, still headed for the distant light.

“What—what are you going to do?” asked Maida faintly.

“Go on to the villa yonder and ask questions,” said Minott dryly. “If Confederates hold it, we’ll be well received. If they don’t, we’ll still manage to earn a welcome. I intend to camp along a time-fault and cross over whenever a time-shift brings a Norse settlement in sight. Consequently, I want exact news of places where they’ve been seen, if such news is to be had.”

Maida Haynes pressed close to Blake. He put a reassuring hand on her arm as the horses trudged on over the soft ground. The fire-light behind them grew brighter. Occasional resinous, coniferous trees flared upward and threw fugitive red glows upon the riding figures. But gradually the glare grew steadier and stronger. The white walls of a rambling stucco house became visible. Out-buildings. Barns. A monstrous structure which looked startlingly like a barracks.

It was a farm, an estate, a Roman villa transplanted to the very edge of a wilderness. It was—Blake remembered vaguely—like a picture he had once seen of a Roman villa in England, restored to look as it had looked before Rome withdrew her legions from Britain and left the island to savagery and darkness. There were small mounds of curing hay about them, through which the horses picked their way. Blake suddenly wrinkled his nostrils suspiciously. He sniffed. . . .

Maida pressed close to him. Her lips formed words. Lucy Blair rode close to Minott, glancing up at him from time to time. Harris rode apologetically beside Bertha Ketterline, and Bertha sat her horse as if she were saddle-sore. Tom Hunter clung close to Minott as if for protection, leaving Janet Thompson to look out for herself.

“J-jerry,” said Maida. “What—what do you think?”

“I don’t like it,” admitted Blake in a low tone. “But we’ve got to tag along. I think I smell—”

Then a sudden swarm of figures leaped at the horses. Wild figures, naked figures, sweaty and reeking and almost maniacal figures, some of whom clanked chains as they leaped. A voice bellowed orders at them from a distance, and a whip cracked ominously.

Before the struggle ended, there were just two shots fired. Minott fired them both and wheeled about. . . . Then a horse streaked away, and Bertha Ketterline was bawling plaintively, and Tom Hunter babbled hysterically, and Harris swore with a complete lack of his customary air of apology.

Blake seemed to be buried under a mass of foul bodies like the rest, but he rasped at his captors in an authoritative tone. They fell away from him, cringing as if by instinct. And then torches appeared suddenly and slaves appeared in their light, slaves of every possible degree of filth and degradation, of every possible racial mixture, but unanimous in a desperate abjectness before their master amid the torch-bearers.

He was a short, fat man, in an only slightly modified toga. He drew it close about his body as the torch-bearers held their flares close to the captives. The torchlight showed the captives, to be sure, but also it showed the puffy, self-indulgent and invincibly cruel features of the man who owned these slaves and the villa. By his pose and the orders he gave in a curiously corrupt Latin, he showed that he considered he owned the captives too.

The deputy from Aisne-le-Sur decided that it had been very wise indeed for him to walk in the fresh air. Paris at night is stimulating. That curious attack of vertigo had come of too much champagne. The fresh air had dispelled the fumes. But it was odd that he did not know exactly where he was, though he knew his Paris well. These streets were strange. The houses were unlike any that he remembered ever having seen before. In the light of the street-lamps—and they were unusual, too!—there was a certain unfamiliar quality about their architecture. He puzzled over it, trying to identify the peculiar flair these houses showed.

He became impatient. After all, it was necessary for him to return home some time, even though his wife . . . The deputy from Aisne-le-Sur shrugged. Then he saw bright lights ahead. He hastened his steps. A magnificent mansion, brilliantly illuminated.

The clattering of many hoofs. A cavalry escort, forming up before the house. A pale young man emerged, escorted by a tall, fat man who kissed his hand as if in an ecstasy of admiration. Dismounted cavalrymen formed a lane from the gateway to the car. Two young officers followed the pale young man. They were ablaze with decorations. The deputy from Aisne-le-Sur noted subconsciously that he did not recognize their uniforms. The car-door was open and waiting. There was some oddity about the car, but the deputy could not see clearly just what it was.

There was much clicking of heels. Steel blades at salute. The pale young man patiently allowed the fat man to kiss his hand again. He entered the car. The two bemedaled young officers climbed in after him. The car rolled away. Instantly, the cavalry escort clattered with it, before it, behind it, all around it. . . .

The fat man stood on the sidewalk, beaming and rubbing his hands together. The dismounted cavalrymen swung to their saddles and trotted briskly after the others.

The deputy from Aisne-le-Sur stared blankly. He saw another pedestrian, halted like himself to regard the spectacle. He was disturbed by the fact that this pedestrian was clothed in a fashion as perturbingly unfamiliar as these houses, and the spectacle he had witnessed.

“Pardon, visieur,” said the deputy from Aisne-le-Sur. “I do not recognize my surroundings. Would you tell me—”

“The house,” said the other, caustically, “is the hotel of M. le Duc de Montigny. Is it possible that one does not know of M. le Duc? Or more especially of Madame la Duchesse, and what she is and where she lives?”

The deputy from Aisne-le-Sur blinked.

“Montigny?—Montigny? No,” he confessed. “And the young man of the car, whose hand was kissed by—”

“Kissed by M. le Duc?” The stranger stared frankly. “Mon dieu! Where have you come from that you do not recognize Louis the Twentieth? He has but departed from a visit to Madame his mistress.”

“Louis—Louis the Twentieth!” stammered the deputy from Aisne-le-Sur. “I—I do not understand!”

“Fool!” said the stranger impatiently, “that was the King of France, who succeeded his father as a child of ten and has been free of the regency for but six months —and already ruins France!”

The long-distance operator plugged in with a shaking hand. “Number please . . . I am sorry, sir, but we are unable to connect you with Camden. . . . The lines are down. ... I am sorry, sir, but we are unable to connect you with Jenkinstown. The lines are down. . . . Very sorry, sir.”

Another call buzzed and lighted up.

“Hello . . . 1 am sorry, sir. We are unable to connect you with Dover. The lines are down. . . .” Her hands worked automatically. “Hello ... I am sorry, but we are unable to connect you with New York. The lines are down. . . . No, sir. We cannot route it by Atlantic City. The lines are down. . . . Yes, sir, I know the telegraph companies cannot guarantee delivery. . . . No, sir, we cannot reach Pittsburgh, either, to get a message through. . . .” Her voice quivered. “No, sir, the lines are down to Scranton. . . . And Harrisburg too.

Yes, sir.... I am sorry, but we cannot get a message of any sort out of Philadelphia in any direction. . . . We have tried to arrange communication by radio, but no calls are answered. . .

She covered her face with her hands for an instant. Then she plugged in and made a call herself.

“Minnie! Haven t they heard anything1 ... Not anything? . . . What? They phoned for more police? . . . The—the operator out there says there s fighting? . . . She hears a lot of shooting? . . . What is it, Minnie? Don’t they even know? . . . They—they’re using the armored cars from the banks to fight with, too! . . . But what are they fighting? What? . . . My folks are out there, Minnie! My folks are out there!”

The doorway of the slave-barracks closed and great bars slammed against its outer side. Reeking, foul, un-breathable air closed about them like a wave. Then a babbling of voices all about. The clanking of chains. The rustling of straw, as if animals moved. Someone screeched; howled above the others. He began to gain the ascendancy. There was almost some attention paid to him, though a minor babbling continued all about.

Maida said in a strained voice:

“I—I can catch a word here and there. He’s—telling these other slaves how we were captured. It’s—Latin— of sorts.”

Bertha Ketterline squalled suddenly, in the absolute dark.

“Somebody touched me!” she bawled. “A man!”

A voice spoke humorously, somewhere near. There was laughter. It was the howled laughter of animals.

Slaves were animals, according to the Roman notion. A rustling noise, as if in the noisome freedom of their barracks the utterly brutalized slaves drew nearer to the newcomers. There could be sport with new-captured folk, not yet degraded to their final status.

Lucy Blair cried out in a stifled fashion. There was a sharp, incisive “crack” Somebody fell. More laughter.

“I knocked him out!” snapped Blake. ‘‘Harris! Hunter! Feel around for something we can use as clubs! These slaves intend to haze us, and in their own den there’s no attempt to control them! Even if they kill us they’ll only be whipped for it. And the girls—”

Something, snarling, leaped for him in the darkness. The authoritative tone of Blake’s voice was hateful. A yapping sound arose. Other figures closed in. Reduced to the status of animals, the slaves of the Romans behaved as beasts when locked in their monster kennel. The newcomers were hateful if only because they had been freemen, not slaves. The women were clean and they were frightened—and they were prey. Chains clanked ominously. Foul breaths tainted the air. The reek of utter depravity, of human beings brought lower than beasts—who at least do not foul their own dens—filled the air. It was utterly dark.

Bertha Ketterline began to blubber noisily. There was the sudden savage sound of a blow meeting flesh. Then pandemonium, and battle, and the sudden terrified screams of Lucy Blair. . . . The panting of men who fought. The sound of blows. A man howled. Another shrieked curses. A women screamed shrilly. . . .

“Bang! Bang! Bang-bang!” Shots outside, a veritable fusillade of them. Running feet. Shouts. The bars at the doorway fell. The great doors opened, and men stood in the opening with whips and torches, bellowing for the slaves to come out and attack something yet unknown. They were being called from their kennel like dogs. Four of the whip-men came inside, flogging the slaves out, while the sound of shots continued. The slaves shrank away, or bounded howling for the open air. But there were three of them who would never shrink or cringe again.

Blake and Harris stood embattled in a corner of the slave-shed. Blake held a heavy beam in a desperate readiness for further battle. Harris, likewise, held a clumsy club. With torch-light upon him, his air of savage defiance turned to one of quaint apology for the dead slave at his feet. And Hunter and two of the girls competed in stark panic for a position behind him. Lucy Blair, dead-white, stood backed against a wall, a jagged fragment of gnawed bone held daggerwise.

The whips lashed out at them. Voices snarled at them. The whips again . . . Blake struck out furiously, a huge welt across his face. . . .

And revolvers cracked at the great door. Minott stood there, a revolver in each hand, his eyes blazing. A torch-bearer dropped, and the torches flared smokily in the foul mud of the flooring.

“All right,” said Minott fiercely. “Come on out!”

Hunter was the first to reach him, babbling and gasping. There was sheer uproar all about. A huge grain-shed roared upward in flames. Figures rushed crazily all about it. From the flames came another explosion, then two, then three more.

“Horses over here by the stables,” said Minott, his face dead-white and very deadly indeed. “They haven’t unsaddled them. The stable-slaves haven’t figured out the cinches yet. I put some revolver-bullets in the straw when I set fire to that grain-shed. They’re going off from time to time.”

A figure with whip and dagger raced around an out-building and confronted them. Minott shot him down. Blake said hoarsely:

“Give me a revolver, Minott! I want to—”

“Horses first!” snapped Minott.

They raced into a courtyard. Two shots. The slaves fled, howling. Out of the courtyard, bent low in the saddle. They swept close to the villa itself. On a little raised terrace before it raged a stout man in an only slightly modified toga. A slave groveled before him. He kicked the abject figure and strode out, shouting commands in a voice that cracked with his fury. The horses loomed up and he shook his fists at the riders, purple with wrath, incapable of fear because of his beastly rage.

Minott shot him dead, swung off his horse, and stripped the toga from him. He flung it to Lucy.

“Take this!” he said savagely. “By God, I could kill. . .”

There was now no question of his leadership. He led the retreat from the villa. The eight horses headed north again, straight for the luridly flaming forest.

They stopped once more. Behind them, another building of the estate had caught from the first. Sheer confusion ruled. The slaughter of the master disrupted all organization. The roof of the slave-barracks caught. Screams and howls of pure panic reached even the fugitives. Then there were racing, maddened figures rushing here and there in the glare of the fires. . . . Suddenly there was fighting. A howling ululation arose. .. .

Minott worked savagely, stripping clothing from the bodies slain in that incredible, unrecorded conflict of Confederate soldiers and Roman troops, in some un-guessable pathway of space and time. Blake watched behind, but Minott curtly commanded the salvaging of rifles and ammunition from the dead Confederates—if they were Confederates.

And as Hunter, still gasping hysterically, took the load of yet unfamiliar weapons upon his horse, the eight felt a certain incredible, intolerable vertigo and nausea. The burning forest ahead vanished from their sight. Instead, there was darkness. A noisome smell came down-wind; dampness and strange, overpowering perfumes of monstrous colored flowers. . . . Something huge and deadly bellowed, in the space before them which smelled like a monstrous swamp.

The liner City of Baltimore ploughed through the open sea in the first pale light of dawn. The skipper, up on the bridge, wore a worried frown. The radio operator came up. He carried a sheaf of radiogram forms. His eyes were blurry with loss of sleep.

“Maybe it was me, sir,” he reported heavily. “I felt awful funny for a while last night, an' then all night long I couldn’t raise a station. I checked everything an’ couldn’t find anything wrong. But just now I felt awful sick an’ funny for a minute, an’ when I come out of it the air was full o’ code. Here’s some of it. I don’t understand how I coulda been sick so I couldn’t hear code, sir, but—”

The skipper said abruptly:

“I had that sick feeling too. Dizzy. So did the man at the wheel. So did everybody. Give me the messages.”

His eyes ran swiftly over the yellow forms.

“. . . News flash. Half of London disappeared at 2:00 a.m. this morning. . . .” “. . . S.S. Manzanillo reporting. Sea-serpent which attacked this ship during the night and seized four sailors returned and was rammed five minutes ago. It seems to be dying. Our bow badly smashed. Two forward compartments flooded. . . .” “. . . Warning to all mariners. Pack ice seen floating fifty miles off New York harbor. . . .” “. . . news flash. Madrid, Spain, has undergone inexplicable change. All buildings formerly known now unrecognizable from the air. Airfields have vanished. Mosques seem to have taken the place of churches and cathedrals. A flag bearing the crescent floats. . . .” “. . . European population of Calcutta seems to have been massacred. S.S. Carib reports harbor empty, all signs of European domination vanished, and hostile mobs lining shore. . . .”

The skipper of the City of Baltimore passed his hand over his forehead. He looked uneasily at the radio operator.

“Sparks,” he said gently, “you’d better go see the ship’s doctor. Here! I’ll detail a man to go with you.”

“I know,” said Sparks bitterly. “I guess I’m nuts, all right! But that’s what came through!”

He marched away with his head hanging, escorted by a sailor. A little speck of smoke appeared dead ahead. It became swiftly larger. With the combined speed of the two vessels, in a quarter of an hour the other ship was visible. In half an hour it could be made out clearly. It was long, and low, and painted black, but the first incredible thing was that it was a paddle-steamer, with two sets of paddles instead of one, and the after set revolving more swiftly than the forward.

The skipper of the City of Baltimore looked more closely through his glasses, and nearly dropped them in stark amazement. The flag flying on the other ship was black and white only. A beam wind blew it out swiftly. A white deaths-head, with two crossed bones below it. The traditional flag of piracy!

Signal-flags fluttered up in the rigging of the other ship. The skipper of the City of Baltimore gazed at them, stunned.

“Gibberish!” he muttered. “It don’t make sense! They aren’t International Code. Not the same flags at all!”

Then a gun spoke. A monstrous puff of black-powder smoke billowed over the other ship’s bow. A heavy shot crashed into the forepart of the City of Baltimore. An instant later it exploded.

“I’m crazy too!” said the skipper dazedly.

A second shot. A third and fourth. The black steamer sheered off and started to pound the City of Baltimore in a business-like fashion. Half the bridge went overside. The forward cargo-hatch blew up with a cloud of smoke from an explosion underneath.

Then the skipper came to. He roared orders. The big ship heeled as it came around. It plunged forward at vastly more than its normal cruising speed. The guns on the other ship doubled and redoubled their rate of fire. Then the black ship tried to dodge. But it had not time.

The City of Baltimore rammed it. At the very last moment the skipper felt certain of his own insanity. But it was too late to save the other ship then. The City of Baltimore cut it in two.

The pale gray light of dawn filtered down through an incredible thickness of foliage. It was a subdued, a feeble twilight when it reached the earth where a tiny campfire burned. That fire gave off thick smoke from water-soaked wood. Hunter tended it, clad in ill-assorted remnants of a gray uniform. Harris worked patiently at a rifle, trying to understand exactly how it worked. It was unlike any rifle with which he was familiar. The bolt-action was not really a bolt-action at all, and he’d noticed that there was no rifling in the barrel. He was trying to understand how the long bullet was made to revolve. Harris, too, had substituted Confederate gray for the loin-cloth flung him for sole covering when with the others he was thrust into the slave-pen of the Roman villa. Minott sat with his head in his hands, staring at the opposite side of the stream. On his face was all bitterness.

Lucy Blair darted furtive, somehow wistful glances at him. Presently she moved to sit beside him. She asked him an anxious question. The other two girls sat by the fire. Bertha Ketterline was slouched back against a tree-fern trunk. Her head had fallen back. She snored. With the exception of Blake, all of them were barefoot. Those who had been enslaved had, of course, been plundered of all their possessions.

Blake came back to the fire. He nodded across the little stream.

“We seem to have come to the edge of a time-fault, sir,” he observed hopefully. “This side of the stream is definitely carboniferous-period vegetation. The other side isn’t as primitive, but it isn’t of our time, anyhow. Mr. Minott!”

Minott lifted his head.

“Well?” he demanded.

“We’ve been here for hours, sir,” said Blake. “And there’s been no further change in time-paths that we’ve noticed. Is it likely that the scrambling of time and space is ended, sir? If it has, and the time-paths stay jumbled, we’ll never find our world intact, of course, but as you said, we can hunt for colonies or even cities of our own kind of people.”

Minott shrugged.

“I expect,” he said deliberately, “that the oscillations of time-paths will keep up for at least two weeks—if we aren’t all annihilated.”

Lucy Blair said something in a low tone. She regarded him worshipfully.

“No,” he snapped. “I find that I am a fool—or I was!—I thought that young men, at least, even of Robinson College, would want things they did not have! But they’re already frozen into the pattern of law-abiding citizens. They’d be useless. That business at the villa was proof enough! Attacked, what did they do? They used their fists! Beautiful, civilized, tame-animal thinking! They’d be no good to me! I was the only one who fired a pistol! They didn’t have time to think—so they fought like little boys!”

Lucy murmured again. Minott glowered.

“I am a faculty member of Robinson College,” he said in exquisite sarcasm. “You students are in my care. I’d make kings of the men—I’d make them lords of men and nations!—but they want to go back and be insurance salesmen. So back they go!”

“Really, sir,” said Blake defensively.

“Hush!” said Lucy. “He’s going to explain to you so you can tell everybody what’s happened. Listen!”

Blake had already unconsciously reassumed some of his former respectful manner. His capture and scornful dismissal to the status of slave had shaken all his self-confidence. Before, he had felt himself not only a member of a superior race, but as a college student a superior member of that race. In being enslaved he had been both degraded and scorned. His vanity was still gnawed at by that memory, and his self-confidence shattered by the fact that he had been able to kill two utterly brutalized slaves in the slave-barracks, without in the least contributing to his own freedom. Now he winced at the scorn in Minott’s voice.

“We—we know that gravity warps space,” said Minott harshly. “From observation we have been able to discover the amount of warping produced by a given mass. We can calculate the mass necessary to warp space so that it will close in completely, making a closed universe which is unreachable and undetectable in any of the dimensions we know. We know, for example, that if two gigantic star-masses of a certain combined mass were to rush together, at the instant of their collision there would not be a great cataclysm.

They would simply vanish. But they would not cease to exist. They would merely cease to exist in our space and time. They would have created a space and time of their own.”

Harris said apologetically:

“Like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after you. I read something like that in a Sunday supplement, once, sir.”

Minott nodded. He went on scornfully.

“Now, imagine that two such universes have been formed. They are both invisible from the space and time in which they originated. Each exists in its own space and time, just as our universe does. But each must also exist in a certain—well—hyper-space, because if closed spaces are separated, there must be some sort of something in between them, else they would be together.”

“Really,” said Blake, “you’re talking about something we can infer, but ordinarily can’t possibly learn anything about by observation.”

“I did!” said Minott. “From published observations! If our space is closed, we must assume that there are other closed spaces. And don’t forget that other closed spaces would be as real—are as real—as our closed space is.”

“But what does it mean?” asked Blake.

“If there are other closed spaces like ours, and they exist in a common medium—the hyper-space from which they and we alike are sealed off—they might be likened to—say—stars and planets in our space, which are separated by space and yet affect each other through space. Since these various closed spaces are separated by a logically necessary hyper-space, it is at least probable that they should affect each other through that hyper-space.”

Blake said slowly:

“Then these shiftings of time-paths—well—they re the result of something on the order of tidal strains? If another star got close to the sun, our planets would crack up from tidal strains alone. You’re suggesting that another closed spaced has gotten close to our closed space in hyper-space. . . . It’s awfully confused, sir.”

“I have calculated it,” said Minott harshly. “The odds are three to one that space and time and universe, every star and every galaxy in the skies, will be obliterated in one monstrous destruction when even the past will never have been! But there is one chance in four, and I planned to take full advantage of it. I planned—I planned—”

Then he stood up suddenly. His figure straightened. He struck his hands together savagely.

“By God, it can still be done if you’re more than worms! We have arms! We have books, technical knowledge, formulas—the cream of the technical knowledge of earth packed in our saddle-bags! Listen to me! We cross this stream now! When the next change comes, we strike across whatever time-path takes the place of this. We make for the Potomac, where that aviator saw Norse ships drawn up! I have Anglo-Saxon and early Norse vocabularies in the saddle-bags! We’ll make friends with them! We’ll teach them! We’ll lead them! We’ll make ourselves masters of the world—”

Harris said apologetically:

“I’m sorry, sir, but I promised Bertha I’d take her home, if it was humanly possible. I have to do it. I can’t join you in becoming an emperor, even if the breaks are right.”

Minott scowled at him.

“Hunter?”

“I—I’ll do as the others do,” said Hunter uneasily. “I—I’d rather go home. . . .”

“Fool!” snarled Minott.

Lucy Blair said loyally:

“I—I’d like to be an empress, Mr. Minott.”

Maida Haynes stared at her. She opened her mouth to speak. Blake absently pulled a revolver from his pocket and looked at it meditatively as Minott clenched and unclenched his hands. The veins stood out on his forehead. He began to breathe heavily.

“Fools!” he roared. “Fools! You’ll never be more than shoe-clerks or professors! Yet you throw away—” Swift, sharp, agonizing vertigo smote them all. The revolver fell from Blake’s hands. He looked up. Familiar pine and fields. More—houses. Familiar ones. A dead silence fell. They hardly dared to breathe. Then Blake said shakily:

“That—” He swallowed. “That is King George Court House, in King George County, in Virginia, in our time I think— Hell! Let’s get across that stream!”

He feverishly seized Maida. He carried her toward the stream in his arms. Minott said desperately: “Wait!”

He looked at them in a sort of bitter hope.

“I offer you, for the last time—I offer riches, power —lordships—everything that any man could long for—”

Blake waded across and put Maida safely down upon the shore. Hunter was splashing frantically through the shallow water. Harris was shaking Bertha Ketterline to wake her. Blake splashed back. He rounded up the horses, in trembling haste. He loaded the salvaged weapons over a saddle. He shepherded the three remaining girls across. Hunter was out of sight. He had fled toward the painted buildings of the village. Blake drove the horses across. Minott watched. His eyes blazed with scorn.

“Better come along,” said Blake, generously.

“And be an instructor in mathematics?” Minott laughed. “No! I stay here!”

Blake considered. Minott was a strange, an unprepossessing figure. Standing against the background of a carboniferous jungle, he was even pitiable—to Blake. But he was utterly contemptuous of the younger men.

“Wait, sir,” said Blake in conscious nobility.

He stripped the saddle-bags from six of the horses. He heaped them on the remaining two. He led them back across the stream. Minott regarded him with implacable scorn.

“You’ll graduate,” he said, biting off each word separately. “You’ll get a job. You’ll spend your life paying bills, when you could have sailed a long-ship! You’ll be a pedestrian—when you could have been a king. But I won’t! I may die, but if I don’t—”

Blake shrugged. He went back across the stream and remounted. Lucy Blair looked doubtfully at the lonely figure of Minott, whom probably nobody else in all the world had ever admired.

A faint, almost imperceptible dizziness affected all of them. It passed. By instinct they looked back at the tall jungle. It stood unchanged. Minott laughed at them. Bitterly.

“I—I’ve got something to say to him!” panted Lucy Blair suddenly. “D-don’t wait for me!”

She rode for the stream. Again that faint, nearly imperceptible dizziness. Lucy slapped her horse’s flank frantically. Maida cried:

“Come back, Lucy! It’s going to shift—”

“That’s what I want,” cried Lucy joyfully, over her shoulder. “I mean to stay—”

She was half-way across the stream. More than half-way. Then the vertigo struck all of them.

Everyone knows the rest of the story. For two weeks longer there were still occasional shiftings of the time-paths. But gradually, it became noticeable that the number of “time-faults”—in Minott’s phrase—were decreasing in number. At the most drastic period, it has been estimated that no less than twenty-five per cent of the whole earth’s surface was at a given moment in some other time-path than its own. We do not know of any portion of the earth which did not vary from its own time-path at some period of the disturbance.

That means, of course, that practically one hundred per cent of the earth’s population encountered the conditions caused by the earth’s extraordinary oscillations sidewise in time. Our scientists are no longer quite as dogmatic as they used to be. The dialectics of philosophy have received a serious jolt. Basic ideas in botany, zoology, and even philology have been altered by the new facts made available by our unintended travels. Because of course it was the fourth chance which happened, and the earth survived. In our time-path, at any rate. The six survivors of Minott’s exploring-party reached King George Court House barely a quarter of an hour after the time-shift which carried Minott and Lucy Blair out of our space and time forever. Blake and Harris searched for a means of transmitting the information they possessed to the world at large. Through a lonely radio amateur a mile from the village, they sent out Minott’s theory on short waves. Shorn of Minott’s pessimistic analysis of the probabilities of survival, it went swiftly to every part of the world then in its proper relative position. It was valuable, in that it checked explorations in force which in some places had been planned. It prevented, for example, a punitive military expedition from going beyond a time-fault in Georgia, past which a scalping-party of Indians from an uncivilized America had retreated. It prevented the dispatch of a squadron of destroyers to find and seize Leifsholm, from which a Viking foray had been made upon North Centerville, Massachusetts. A squadron of mapping planes was recalled from reconnaissance work above a carboniferous swamp in West Virginia, just before the time-shift which would have isolated them forever.

Some things, though, no knowledge could prevent. It has been estimated that no less than five thousand daring persons in the United States are missing from their own space and time through having adventured into the strange landscapes which appeared so suddenly. Many must have perished. Some, we feel sure, have come in contact with one or another of the distinct civilizations we now know to exist. Conversely, we have gained inhabitants from other time-paths. Two cohorts of the Twenty-Second Roman Legion were left upon our soil near Ithaca, New York. Four families of Chinese peasants essayed to pick berries in what they considered a miraculous strawberry-patch in Virginia, and remained there when that section of ground returned to its proper milieu. A Russian village remains in Colorado. A French trading settlement in the—in their time undeveloped—Middle West. A part of the northern herd of buffalo has returned to us, two hundred thousand strong, together with a village of Cheyenne Indians who had never seen either horses or firearms. The passenger pigeon, to the number of a billion and a half birds, has returned to North America.

But our losses are heavy. Besides those daring individuals who were carried away upon the strange territories they were exploring, there are the overwhelming disasters affecting Detroit, and Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. The last two we understand. When the causes of oscillation sidewise in time were removed, most of the earth-sections returned to their proper positions in their own time-paths. But not all. There is a section of Post-Cambrian jungle left in eastern Tennessee. The Russian village in Colorado has been mentioned, and the French trading-post in the Middle West. In some cases sections of the oscillating time-paths remained in new positions, remote from their points of origin.

That is the cause of the utter disappearance of Rio and Tokyo. Where Rio stood an untouched jungle remains. It is of our own geological period, but it is simply from a path in time in which Rio de Janeiro never happened to be built. On the site of Tokyo stands a forest of extraordinarily primitive type, about which botanists and paleontologists still debate. Somewhere, in some space and time, Tokyo and Rio yet exist and their people still live on. But Detroit. . . .

We still do not understand what happened to Detroit. It was upon an oscillating segment of earth. It vanished from our time, and it returned to our time. But its inhabitants did not come back with it. The city was empty; deserted as if the hundreds of thousands of human beings who lived in it had simply evaporated into the air. There have been some few signs of struggle seen, but they may have been the result of panic. The city of Detroit returned to its own space and time untouched, unharmed, unlooted and undisturbed. But no living thing, not even a domestic animal or a caged bird, was in it when it came back. We do not understand that at all.

Perhaps if Minott had returned to us, he could have guessed at the answer to the riddle. What fragmentary papers of his that have been shown to refer to the time-upheaval have been of inestimable value. Our whole theory of what happened depends upon the papers Minott left behind as too unimportant to bother with—plus, of course, Blake’s and Harris’ account of his explanations to them. Tom Hunter can remember little that is useful. Maida Haynes has given some worth-while data, but it covers ground we have other observers for. Bertha Ketterline also reports very little.

The answers to a myriad problems yet elude us, but in the saddle-bags given to Minott by Blake as preparation for his desperate journey through space and time, the solutions to many must remain. Our scientists labor diligently to understand and to elaborate the figures Minott thought of trivial significance. And throughout the world many, many minds turn longingly to certain saddle-bags, loaded on a led horse, following Minott and Lucy Blair through unguessable landscapes, to unimaginable adventures, with revolvers and text-books as their armament for the conquest of a world.

Sail On! Sail On! by Philip José Farmer

The parallel world depicted in this high-spirited little story is so brilliantly realized, within the scope of just a few thousand words, that it needs no introduction here. It is best to enter it without a guidebook, and to find one's way around in it step by hilarious step. As a bonus, the author has supplied a postscript,written more than fifteen years after the original story, in which he explains how a science-fiction writer goes about creating the kind of world shown in “Sail On! Sail On!”

Philip José Farmer has been in the front ranks of science fiction since his startling debut in 1952 with “The Lovers.” His recent works include the Hugo-winning novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” and the controversial novels Image of the Beast and Lord Tyger.

Friar Sparks sat wedged between the wall and the realizer. He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes. From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swiveled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poop deck. Visibility was low.

Outside was dusk and a lantern by the railing. Two sailors leaned on it. Beyond them bobbed the bright lights and dark shapes of the Nina and the Pinta. And beyond them was the smooth horizon-brow of the Atlantic, edged in black and blood by the red dome of the rising moon.

The single carbon filament bulb above the monk’s tonsure showed a face lost in fat—and in concentration.

The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.

“Zzisss! So you are out of sherry already. . . . Pop!

. . . Too bad . . . Crackle . . . you hardened old winebutt.

. . . Zzz . . . May God have mercy on your sins. . . .

“Lots of gossip, news, et cetera. . . . Hisses! . . . Bend your ear instead of your neck, impious one. . . . The Turks are said to be gathering . . . crackle ... an army to march on Austria. It is rumored that the flying sausages, said by so many to have been seen over the capitals of the Christian world, are of Turkish origin. The rumor goes they have been invented by a renegade Rogerian who was converted to the Muslim religion. . . . I say . . . zziss ... to that. No one of us would do that. It is a falsity spread by our enemies in the Church to discredit us. But many people believe that. . . .

“How close does the Admiral calculate he is to Cipangu now?

“Flash! Savonarola today denounced the Pope, the wealthy of Florence, Greek art and literature, and the experiments of the disciples of Saint Roger Bacon. . . . Zzzl . . . The man is sincere but misguided and dangerous. ... I predict he’ll end up at the stake he’s always prescribing for us. . . .

“Pop. ... This will kill you.... Two Irish mercenaries by the name of Pat and Mike were walking down the street of Granada when a beautiful Saracen lady leaned out of a balcony and emptied a pot of . . . hiss! . . . and Pat looked up and . . . Crackle. . . . Good, hah? Brother Juan told that last night. . . .

“PV . . . PV .. . Are you coming in? . . . PV . . . PV . . . Yes, I know it’s dangerous to bandy such jests about, but nobody is monitoring us tonight. . . . Zzz.... I think they’re not, anyway. . . .”

And so the ether bent and warped with their messages. And presently Friar Sparks tapped out the PV that ended their talk—the “Pax vobiscum.” Then he pulled the plug out that connected his earphones to the set and, lifting them from his ears, clamped them down forward over his temples in the regulation manner.

After sidling bent-kneed from the toldilla, punishing his belly against the desk’s hard edge as he did so, he walked over to the railing. De Salcedo and de Torres were leaning there and talking in low tones. The big bulb above gleamed on the page’s red-gold hair and on the interpreter’s full black beard. It also bounced pinkishly off the priest’s smooth-shaven jowls and the light scarlet robe of the Rogerian order. His cowl, thrown back, served as a bag for scratch paper, pens, an ink bottle, tiny wrenches and screwdrivers, a book on cryptography, a slide rule, and a manual of angelic principles.

“Well, old rind,” said young de Salcedo familiarly, “what do you hear from Las Palmas?”

“Nothing now. Too much interference from that.” He pointed to the moon riding the horizon ahead of them. “What an orb!” bellowed the priest. “It’s as big and red as my revered nose!”

The two sailors laughed, and de Salcedo said, “But it will get smaller and paler as the night grows, Father. And your proboscis will, on the contrary, become larger and more sparkling in inverse proportion according to the square of the ascent—”

He stopped and grinned, for the monk had suddenly dipped his nose, like a porpoise diving into the sea, raised it again, like the same animal jumping from a wave, and then once more plunged it into the heavy currents of their breath. Nose to nose, he faced them, his twinkling little eyes seeming to emit sparks like the realizer in his toldilla.

Again, porpoiselike, he sniffed and snuffed several times, quite loudly. Then satisfied with what he had gleaned from their breaths, he winked at them. He did not, however, mention his findings at once, preferring to sidle toward the subject.

He said, “This Father Sparks on the Grand Canary is so entertaining. He stimulates me with all sorts of philosophical notions, both valid and fantastic. For instance, tonight, just before we were cut off by that” —he gestured at the huge bloodshot eye in the sky— “he was discussing what he called worlds of parallel time tracks, an idea originated by Dysphagius of Gotham. It’s his idea there may be other worlds in coincident but not contacting universes, that God, being infinite and of unlimited creative talent and ability, the Master Alchemist, in other words, has possibly—perhaps necessarily—created a plurality of continua in which every probable event has happened.”

“Huh?” grunted de Salcedo.

“Exactly. Thus, Columbus was turned down by Queen Isabella, so this attempt to reach the Indies across the Atlantic was never made. So we could not now be standing here plunging ever deeper into Oceanus in our three cockle-shells, there would be no booster buoys strung out between us and the Canaries, and Father Sparks at Las Palmas and I on the Santa Maria would not be carrying on our fascinating conversations across the ether.

“Or, say, Roger Bacon was persecuted by the Church, instead of being encouraged and giving rise to the order whose inventions have done so much to insure the monopoly of the Church on alchemy and its divinely inspired guidance of that formerly pagan and hellish practice.”

De Torres opened his mouth, but the priest silenced him with a magnificent and imperious gesture and continued.

“Or, even more ridiculous, but thought-provoking, he speculated just this evening on universes with different physical laws. One, in particular, I thought very droll. As you probably don't know, Angelo Angelei has proved, by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that different weights fall at different speeds. My delightful colleague on the Grand Canary is writing a satire which takes place in a universe where Aristotle is made out to be a liar, where all things drop with equal velocities, no matter what their size. Silly stuff, but it helps to pass the time. We keep the ether busy with our little angels.”

De Salcedo said, “Uh, I don’t want to seem too curious about the secrets of your holy and cryptic order, Friar Sparks. But these little angels your machine realizes intrigue me. Is it a sin to presume to ask about them?”

The monk’s bull roar slid to a dove cooing. “Whether it’s a sin or not depends. Let me illustrate, young fellows. If you were concealing a bottle of, say, very scarce sherry on you, and you did not offer to share it with a very thirsty old gentleman, that would be a sin. A sin of omission. But if you were to give that desert-dry, that pilgrim-weary, that devout, humble, and decrepit old soul a long, soothing, refreshing, and stimulating draught of lifegiving fluid, daughter of the vine, I would find it in my heart to pray for you for that deed of loving-kindness, of encompassing charity. And it would please me so much I might tell you a little of our realizer. Not enough to hurt you, just
enough so you might gain more respect for the intelligence and glory of my order.”

De Salcedo grinned conspiratorially and passed the monk the bottle he’d hidden under his jacket. As the friar tilted it, and the chug-chug-chug of vanishing sherry became louder, the two sailors glanced meaningfully at each other. No wonder the priest, reputed to be so brilliant in his branch of the alchemical mysteries, had yet been sent off on this halfbaked voyage to devil-knew-where. The Church had calculated that if he survived, well and good. If he didn’t, then he would sin no more.

The monk wiped his lips on his sleeve, belched loudly as a horse, and said, “Gracias, boys. From my heart, so deeply buried in this fat, I thank you. An old Irishman, dry as a camel’s hoof, choking to death with the dust of abstinence, thanks you. You have saved my life.”

‘Thank rather that magic nose of yours,” replied de Salcedo. “Now, old rind, now that you’re well greased again, would you mind explaining as much as you are allowed about that machine of yours?”

Friar Sparks took fifteen minutes. At the end of that time, his listeners asked a few permitted questions.

“. . . and you say you broadcast on a frequency of eighteen hundred k.c.?” the page asked. “What does ‘k.c.’ mean?”

“K stands for the French kilo, from a Greek word meaning thousand. And c stands for the Hebrew cherubim, the ‘little angels.’ Angel comes from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger. It is our concept that the ether is crammed with these cherubim, these little messengers. Thus, when we Friar Sparkses depress the key of our machine, we are able to realize some of the infinity of messengers’ waiting for just such a demand for service.

“So, eighteen hundred k.c. means that in a given unit of time one million, eight hundred thousand cherubim line up and hurl themselves across the ether, the nose of one being brushed by the feathertips of the cherub’s wings ahead. The height of the wing crests of each little creature is even, so that if you were to draw an outline of the whole train, there would be nothing to distinguish one cherub from the next, the whole column forming that grade of little angels known as C.W.”

“C.W.?”

“Continuous wingheight. My machine is a C.W. realizer.”

Young de Salcedo said, “My mind reels. Such a concept! Such a revelation! It almost passes comprehension. Imagine, the aerial of your realizer is cut just so long, so that the evil cherubim surging back and forth on it demand a predetermined and equal number of good angels to combat them. And this seduction coil on the realizer crowds ‘bad’ angels into the left-hand, the sinister, side. And when the bad little cherubim are crowded so closely and numerously that they can’t bear each other’s evil company, they jump the spark gap and speed around the wire to the ‘good’ plate. And in this racing back and forth they call themselves to the attention of the little messengers,’ the yea-saying cherubim. And you, Friar Sparks, by manipulating your machine thus and so, and by lifting and lowering
your key, you bring these invisible and friendly lines of carriers, your etheric and winged postmen, into reality. And you are able, thus, to communicate at great distances with your brothers of the order.”

“Great God!” said de Torres.

It was not a vain oath but a pious exclamation of wonder. His eyes bulged; it was evident that he suddenly saw that man was not alone, that on every side, piled on top of each other, flanked on every angle, stood a host. Black and white, they presented a solid chessboard of the seemingly empty cosmos, black for the nay-sayers, white for the yea-sayers, maintained by a Hand in delicate balance and subject as the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea to exploitation by man.

Yet de Torres, having seen such a vision as has made a saint of many a man, could only ask, “Perhaps you could tell me how many angels may stand on the point of a pin?”

Obviously, de Torres would never wear a halo. He was destined, if he lived, to cover his bony head with the mortar-board of a university teacher.

De Salcedo snorted. “Til tell you. Philosophically speaking, you may put as many angels on a pinhead as you want to. Actually speaking, you may put only as many as there is room for. Enough of that. Pm interested in facts, not fancies. Tell me, how could the moons rising interrupt your reception of the cherubim sent by the Sparks at Las Palmas?”

“Great Caesar, how would I know? Am I a repository of universal knowledge? No, not I! A humble and ignorant friar, I! All I can tell you is that last night it rose like a bloody tumor on the horizon, and that when it was up I had to quit marshaling my little messengers in their short and long columns. The Canary station was quite overpowered, so that both of us gave up. And the same thing happened tonight.”

“The moon sends messages?” asked de Torres.

“Not in a code I can decipher. But it sends, yes.”

“Santa Maria!”

“Perhaps,” suggested de Salcedo, “there are people on that moon, and they are sending.”

Friar Sparks blew derision through his nose. Enormous as were his nostrils, his derision was not smallbore. Artillery of contempt laid down a barrage that would have silenced any but the strongest of souls.

“Maybe”—de Torres spoke in a low tone “—maybe, if the stars are windows in heaven, as I’ve heard said, the angels of the higher hierarchy, the big ones, are realizing—uh—the smaller? And they only do it when the moon is up so we may know it is a celestial phenomenon?”

He crossed himself and looked around the vessel.

“You need not fear,” said the monk gently. “There is no Inquisitor leaning over your shoulder. Remember, I am the only priest on this expedition. Moreover, your conjecture has nothing to do with dogma. However, that’s unimportant. Here’s what I don’t understand: how can a heavenly body broadcast? Why does it have the same frequency as the one I’m restricted to? Why—”

“I could explain,” interrupted de Salcedo with all the brashness and impatience of youth. “I could say that the Admiral and the Rogerians are wrong about the earth’s shape. I could say the earth is not round but is flat. I could say the horizon exists, not because we live upon a globe, but because the earth is curved only a little ways, like a greatly flattened-out hemisphere. I could also say that the cherubim are coming, not from Luna, but from a ship such as ours, a vessel which is hanging in the void off the edge of the earth.”

“What?” gasped the other two.

“Haven’t you heard,” said de Salcedo, “that the King of Portugal secretly sent out a ship after he turned down Columbus’ proposal? How do we know he did not, that the messages are from our predecessor, that he sailed off the world’s rim and is now suspended in the air and becomes exposed at night because it follows the moon around Terra—is, in fact, a much smaller and unseen satellite?”

The monk’s laughter woke many men on the ship. “I’ll have to tell the Las Palmas operator your tale. He can put it in that novel of his. Next you’ll be telling me those messages are from one of those fire-shooting sausages so many credulous laymen have been seeing flying around. No, my dear de Salcedo, let’s not be ridiculous. Even the ancient Greeks knew the earth was round. Every university in Europe teaches that. And we Rogerians have measured the circumference. We know for sure that the Indies lie just across the Atlantic. Just as we know for sure, through mathematics, that heavier-than-air machines are impossible. Our Friar Ripskulls, our mind doctors, have assured us these flying creations are mass hallucinations or else the tricks of heretics or Turks who want to panic the populace.

“That moon radio is no delusion, I’ll grant you. What it is, I don’t know. But it’s not a Spanish or Portuguese ship. What about its different code? Even if it came from Lisbon, that ship would still have a Rogerian operator. And he would, according to our policy, be of a different nationality from the crew so he might the easier stay out of political embroilments. He wouldn’t break our laws by using a different code in order to communicate with Lisbon. We disciples of Saint Roger do not stoop to petty boundary intrigues. Moreover, that realizer would not be powerful enough to reach Europe, and must, therefore, be directed at us.”

“How can you be sure?” said de Salcedo. “Distressing though the thought may be to you, a priest could be subverted. Or a layman could learn your secrets and invent a code. I think that a Portuguese ship is sending to another, a ship perhaps not too distant from us.”

De Torres shivered and crossed himself again. “Perhaps the angels are warning us of approaching death? Perhaps?”

“Perhaps? Then why don’t they use our code? Angels would know it as well as I. No, there is no perhaps. The order does not permit perhaps. It experiments and finds out; nor does it pass judgment until it knows.”

“I doubt we’ll ever know,” said de Salcedo gloomily. “Columbus has promised the crew that if we come across no sign of land by evening tomorrow, we shall turn back. Otherwise”—he drew a finger across his throat—“kkk! Another day, and we’ll be pointed east and getting away from that evil and bloody-looking moon and its incomprehensible messages.”

“It would be a great loss to the order and to the

Church,” sighed the friar. “But I leave such things in the hands of God and inspect only what He hands me to look at.”

With which pious statement Friar Sparks lifted the bottle to ascertain the liquid level. Having determined in a scientific manner its existence, he next measured its quantity and tested its quality by putting all of it in that best of all chemistry tubes, his enormous belly.

Afterward, smacking his lips and ignoring the pained and disappointed looks on the faces of the sailors, he went on to speak enthusiastically of the water screw and the engine which turned it, both of which had been built recently at the St. Jonas College at Genoa. If Isabella’s three ships had been equipped with those, he declared, they would not have to depend upon the wind. However, so far, the fathers had forbidden its extended use because it was feared the engine’s fumes might poison the air and the terrible speeds it made possible might be fatal to the human body. After which he plunged into a tedious description of the life of his patron saint, the inventor of the first cherubim realizer and receiver, Jonas of Carcassonne, who had been martyred when he grabbed a wire he thought was insulated.

The two sailors found excuses to walk off. The monk was a good fellow, but hagiography bored them. Besides, they wanted to talk of women. . . .

If Columbus had not succeeded in persuading his crews to sail one more day, events would have been different.

At dawn the sailors were very much cheered by the sight of several large birds circling their ships. Land could not be far off; perhaps these winged creatures came from the coast of fabled Cipangu itself, the country whose houses were roofed with gold.

The birds swooped down. Closer, they were enormous and very strange. Their bodies were flattish and almost saucer-shaped and small in proportion to the wings, which had a spread of at least thirty feet. Nor did they have legs. Only a few sailors saw the significance of that fact. These birds dwelt in the air and never rested upon land or sea.

While they were meditating upon that, they heard a slight sound as of a man clearing his throat. So gentle and far off was the noise that nobody paid any attention to it, for each thought his neighbor had made it.

A few minutes later, the sound had become louder and deeper, like a lute string being twanged.

Everybody looked up. Heads were turned west.

Even yet they did not understand that the noise like a finger plucking a wire came from the line that held the earth together, and that the line was stretched to its utmost, and that the violent finger of the sea was what had plucked the line.

It was some time before they understood. They had run out of horizon.

When they saw that, they were too late.

The dawn had not only come up like thunder, it was thunder. And though the three ships heeled over at once and tried to sail close-hauled on the port tack, the suddenly speeded-up and relentless current made beating hopeless.

Then it was the Rogerian wished for the Genoese screw and the wood-burning engine that would have made them able to resist the terrible muscles of the charging and bull-like sea. Then it was that some men prayed, some raved, some tried to attack the Admiral, some jumped overboard, and some sank into a stupor.

Only the fearless Columbus and the courageous Friar Sparks stuck to their duties. All that day the fat monk crouched wedged in his little shanty, dot-dashing to his fellow on the Grand Canary. He ceased only when the moon rose like a huge red bubble from the throat of a dying giant. Then he listened intently all night and worked desperately, scribbling and swearing impiously and checking cipher books.

When the dawn came up again in a roar and a rush, he ran from the toldilla, a piece of paper clutched in his hand. His eyes were wild, and his lips were moving fast, but nobody could understand that he had cracked the code. They could not hear him shouting, “It is the Portuguese! It is the Portuguese!”

Their ears were too overwhelmed to hear a mere human voice. The throat clearing and the twanging of a string had been the noises preliminary to the concert itself. Now came the mighty overture; as compelling as the blast of Gabriel's horn was the topple of Oceanus into space.

Comment on “Sail On! Sail On!”

Three years before “Sail On! Sail On!” was written, I had a dream. I saw the tiny galleon of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460 a.d.). It was sailing along in a heavy sea and on a dark night. A small building was on the poopdeck; in it sat a very fat monk. He had earphones on and was tapping out a coded message, in Latin, on a spark-gap transmitter.

That was all. The dream ended. However, I never forgot it. And a year later, the dream came to me again, as many of my best dreams do. Six months afterward, the dream occurred again. For some reason, my unconscious insisted upon thrusting up this strange picture. Perhaps it was a rather bizarre form of warning to me. If so, I never got the message. Instead, I wondered what kind of story I could make out of it.

Before I even worked the story out, I had exchanged Columbus for Prince Henry. As a child, I had always been fascinated by the idea of Columbus falling off the edge of the world. Even when I was told that the Earth was round, I did not quite believe it. I did not want to believe it. A square flat world seemed to me to be more romantic and satisfying than an orange-shaped planet. What a great sensation it would be to sit on the edge and dangle your feet over the abyss of space and the stars! What a deliciously terrifying feeling to climb down the cliff-like sides of Earth to the very bottom, clinging to the roots of trees and projecting rocks and wondering if you would fall off and hurtle forever through the nothingness!

So I sat down (more than once) and wrote the story. It took place in a parallel universe and on an Earth with a more rapid advance of science than in the days of the Columbus of our world. At the time I wrote “Sail On! Sail On!” I had not completely worked out the universe in which it took place. All I considered were a few premises. The Earth was flat, was fixed in the center of the cosmos, other celestial objects revolved around Earth, a 50-pound cannonball fell faster than a 10-pound cannonball.

Also, Roger Bacon, instead of being persecuted by the Church, had founded an order of truly experimental scientists. This order had tried to keep science as an ecclesiastical province.

One other premise that I have now added is the simultaneous creation of the universe and of living beings. In other words, a creation which follows, more or less, the biblical account.

In Columbus’ time, very few educated people believed the Earth to be flat. There were many different theories: the Earth was a sphere, was flat, was a cylinder, was a tabernacle in shape, and so on. The Church maintained that the universe was geocentric. It does not matter how many theories or near dogmas there were or how much they conflicted. I based the story on some of the then current theories, the simple premises stated above. These are not wholly Ptolemaic, Lactantian, or entirely derived from any of the ancient or medieval cosmologists. The premises are easily expressed in the very short “Sail On! Sail On!”

At a later time, I expanded my own cosmology and at once ran into trouble. Eventually, I seemed to have solved all the problems. I forgot them until an editor asked me if I would write a sequel to the short story, preferably a short novel. As of now, I have not written the novel. However, another editor asked me for a favorite short story of mine and an essay about it. Then I did some more thinking.

Remember that, in building this universe, I am trying to be logical and also trying to make the flat Earth resemble our round planet as much as possible in all its features, that is, human beings, climate, geography, etc. Unfortunately, all these have to deviate somewhat if logical extrapolation is to be strictly followed.

One of the first things to consider is space itself. Is the tiny cosmos filled with air, as so many at that time believed? If so, how are the crushing effects of the immense amount of air avoided? Obviously, physical “laws” are different in my story. Could the ubiquitous atmosphere have properties which make it weightless? No. If air has no weight, there are no winds. If there are no winds, there are no sailships or windmills. Worse, the clouds would not be carried over the Earth to distribute their burden of rain or cooling moisture.

Another thing to consider is the Sun. What keeps it from burning up the air which fills the universe? Would not, however, this combustion create a wind in space with the air continually moving in to fill the vacuum made by the consumed air? It might, but the wind would not be the kind we know on our Earth.

As for the Sun itself, it cannot be the titanic fusion furnace that burns in our skies. It has to be a small low-grade nuclear reactor far enough from Earth so that the deadly radioactivity is absorbed by the spatial atmosphere (if it exists) or dissipated in space.

This furnace would, however, in a relatively short time use up all the air in the Lilliputian world. So I apply the Hoyle-Gold speculation of the continuous creation of matter in space. I do not have to explain how this matter is spontaneously generated any more than the two astronomers do. If matter (hydrogen atoms, the building blocks of our universe) can come from a seeming nothing in the space of our world, why not oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements in this parallel world?

I am still left with the problem of how to get the air to behave on the surface of the flat Earth as it does on our pear shape. Maybe oxygen, nitrogen, etc., have an exceedingly slight weight with the Earth piling up a denser atmosphere around it and the atmosphere thinner in interplanetary space? But if these elements are lighter than in our world, then the other elements should also be lighter. The table of chemical elements would be a different one than in that second world. The Columbus of it would not weigh as much as our Columbus. However, the objects and creatures of that second world are in an enclosed cosmos and are only weighted against each other, not against us.

As you can see, I am getting into more and more trouble as I extrapolate. It is not easy to make your own universe, not if you insist on sticking to your own rules, and I do. If I cannot adhere to the rules, I hurl the aborted universe out the front door with utter ruin and furious imprecation and try to forget about it.

So, air does have weight and concentrates around the Earth, Moon, Mars and other heavenly bodies. And it has the same weight and other properties of our air. I have to make it so because, if air were in interplanetary space, the friction would slow down the bodies revolving around the Earth. I hate to do this, since I had envisioned Columbus and his crew getting to the Moon through the cosmic atmosphere. But this idea just will not work.

The flat Earth has much less mass than ours, about one sixteenth. The lesser mass is caused by the very flatness of Earth. The molten iron core is missing. This also means that the coreless nonrotating Earth has no magnetic field.

The Moon, which is reduced in mass by one sixteenth and is flat, is tilted with one side always presented to Earth. That was my first thought, later abandoned. Why cannot the bodies orbiting about Earth be spheres? They can be. But then this means that the Earth and Moon are similar in mass, and I don’t want this. So I give Earth back its lost mass by adding to the level substructure of the planet.

The Sun remains a small body. But if it orbits around the Earth and outside the Moon, it must have a very high velocity to make the circuit in time to give Earth the night and day we know. If it goes outside all the planets, it has to travel very swiftly indeed. The only way out is to have the Sun circle between the Moon and Mars, which makes a very peculiar setup. It takes us one more step away from the Earth that we know. I am having as much trouble explaining my universe as Ptolemy had with his cycles, epicycles, and deferents.

Another thing that has to be readjusted is the mass of the other planets. Earth just does not have enough to hold the mighty giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus in orbits around it. Even though Earth is fixed in the center of the universe, it would undergo a disrupting strain from the attraction of the giants. I can postulate some force (unknown in our universe) that keeps Earth pinned to the center, but I cannot overlook the pull of the other planets. So, the giants must become midgets, and if they are to keep the same apparent size as they have in our world, they must be brought much closer to Earth.

Whew! I feel the strain of re-creation, which is beginning to require so much mental labor that ifs no longer a recreation. Challenging, yes, but exasperating because, as soon as 1 think of one facet of this little cosmos, something else contradicts it, and 1 have to go back to the beginning and do a rebalancing of forces and positions.

This rearrangement affects all sorts of natural phenomena and human factors. Both astronomy and astrology would differ considerably in the second world. Then there are the tides, the seasons, equinoxes, solstices and a hundred other things to consider. Either the sun has to have an eccentric and variable orbit or the Earth is not rigidly fixed but has a wobble or libration, or both occur.

Note also that various solar phenomena such as sunspots, flares, cosmic rays, etc., would be absent, unproduced by the low-grade nuclear furnace. Also absent would be ultraviolet radiation; in fact, the spectrum of the sun as we know it just would not exist. Thus, the lack of sun-sponsored radiations and cosmic rays, etc., could mean that mutations would be much less frequent on the flat Earth. A slower evolution of life would result.

This does not bother me, since I am assuming that the biblical story of creation is true in the parallel universe. Do not tell me that this is fantasy, non scientific, and so not science fiction. If you will exert yourself enough to discard your prejudices for just a few minutes, you will see that split-second creation is just as possible (or scientific) as a billion-year evolution of physical matter and of life.

I do not believe that our universe and the beings of our Earth originated as described in Genesis. 1 cannot believe because the weight (overwhelming) of evidence indicates that the Genesis story is only one of many ancient creation myths. Even that contains two somewhat dissimilar tales. However, I can believe that our universe could have originated in one day or a microsecond if the Creator had so desired. Why not!

Furthermore, I am not convinced that our interpretation of evidence for evolution is the correct one or the only one. I would not be surprised if, some day, the theory of evolution as we know it is not topsy-turvied by some genius. Then we will wonder how ive all could have been so blind when we had all the testimony to the truth right before our eyes. I say this because, during my forty-eight and a half years on this Earth, I have seen too many “facts” of science refuted, not once but many times. The final word is far from being in.

The adoption of the Genesis story of creation might seem to simplify matters. Actually, it complicates. If you assume (as most Orthodox Jews and Mohammedans and fundamentalist Christians do) that Adam and Eve were white and probably Semitic-speakers, then you have the problem of other races and other languages. If the universe is only six thousand years old (or even a hundred thousand), there just is not enough time for the formation of Negroes, Mongolians and Amerinds from the basic white couple. And the story of Noah and the Flood has to be a myth, even in the second world. Again, there is not nearly enough time for races and languages to develop from the little, white, and (presumably) Semitic-speaking family of Noah. Nor is there enough time to account for the distribution of animals in the continents, especially Australia.

Many things have to be altered to present a consistent and logical universe. If the Earth is flat, it cannot be entirely so. It may be level on the sides and bottom, but the top, containing the continents and oceans, has to have some curvature. Otherwise, how will the rivers flow from source to mouth? And if the Sun strikes all areas of Earth with a nearly equal intensity, humanity will be nearly uniform in color. It’s no coincidence that the dark races and stocks are in the tropical or near-tropical regions. (Exceptions can be accounted for by migration.)

I can postulate a simultaneous creation of all the races, have a white Adam and Eve, a black, a Mongolian, an Australoid, a pygmy Adam and Eve. But this does not help me in making sure that the Earth has different temperature zones.

Thus, Earth, seen sidewise from space, looks like the profile of a lens or a flattened-out dome. The continents (the Americas missing, of course) are spread out over this dome. The waters of Oceanus, the great body surrounding Eurasia, Africa and Australia, are carried over the edge of Earth by their impetus and by lack of natural barriers. The oceanic waters roar out over the edge in a cataract, curve out, then fall back onto the sides of the understructure of the planet. They then proceed to spread out on the underside. Some peculiar effects would result from the Moons drag on the top, bottom and sides of this body of water.

In time, the oceans would run dry on the upper part of the planet. However, I postulate a rocky wall along the edges to contain most of the ocean. Here and there are breaks, and through this the waters pour. But the waters, flowing “down” the side and across the flat underside, rise (or “fall”) through fissures in the body of the planet and so replenish the water on the topside. But this is the only way to account for Oceanus not emptying itself.

What keeps the gravitational attraction of the great mass of Earth from breaking up the elongated hemisphere and reforming it into a ball? Remember, the Earth was never a molten and spinning spheroid. It was created solid and does not rotate. Besides, it is only six thousand years old and has not had time to crumble in on itself, even if there were forces to cause this, which there are not.

Most of the terms used by Friar Sparks in “Sail On! Sail On!” are, I hope, self-evident. The Baconian scientists, being Churchmen, would tend to describe physical phenomena in theological phrases. Thus, radio waves are thought of as little angelic messengers and positive and negative electricity are “good” and “bad” angels. The spark-gap transmitter “realizes” the angels, which fill the ether in a chaos or disarrangment. The realizer places a number of angels in temporary order so that messages may be transmitted for the good of mankind or for the Baconians, anyway.

Friar Sparks and his society are only following their professional bent in their type of description of natural phenomena. Undoubtedly, when science becomes even more advanced on the flat Earth, quantum jumps will be described as “states of grace” A jump of an electron (or “angel”) from a high-energy level to a low will be a “fall” from grace. Gravitational attraction might be caritas, a form of love between physical objects. Since heavier things fall faster than lighter things, the heavier have more caritas.

As you can see, a full delving into the universe of the Columbus of this story would require far more wordage than in the story itself. Someday I will write a sequel. Then the full extrapolation will be done.

Meanwhile, Columbus hurtles over the edge of the world.

Philip José Farmer

Slips Take Over by Miriam Allen deFord

In our society it is considered improper to reveal a womans age—especially in print. But in the case of Miriam Allen deFord I think awe and admiration must triumph over chivalry, for she is a phenomenon of nature, and phenomena deserve close analysis. It happens that she passed her eightieth birthday several years ago; yet her mind is unblurred by time, her storytelling powers are unimpaired, and her crisp, vigorous writing is cherished as dearly by editors today as it was half a century ago. Born in Philadelphia, long a resident of San Francisco, she has written biographies, literary criticism, history, verse, mysteries, essays on criminology, and, since 1946, a great deal of superb science fiction. Regardless of what her chronological age is supposed to be, she is very much a woman of our times, as the presence of a deFord story in that conspicuously contemporary science-fiction anthology, Harlan Ellisons Dangerous Visions, demonstrates.

Here is a story written when she was merely in her mid-seventies. It has the quiet authority of the most devastating kind of nightmare— the one in which you fail to realize until much too late that you are dreaming, and that the dream is a bad one.

Davenant looked up from his beer with interest. Words were a hobby of his, and though he had often seen “Bah!” in print this was the first time he had ever heard anybody say it.

“Interviews with Martians—and photographs of them!” the man next to him had said. “Bah!”

Davenant had checked out of his hotel, frugally, to save another day's rent, and had two hours to kill before his plane left for Boston. He was through with the work that had brought him to New York, and he could think of nobody he wanted to call up or go to see. Strolling with his traveling bag in the general direction of the air terminal, he had been brought up short by this little bar he had never noticed before.

“Tim’s Place,” it said in modest neon; and it had an old-fashioned air. A good place to waste time in, he thought, if it happened to be quiet.

It was quiet enough. There was nobody in the bar at this mid-afternoon hour except the bartender and this bald middle-aged man in a tweed suit. Davenant ordered a beer and had just lifted his glass when he heard that “Bah.” He wasn’t sure whether the man was talking to the bartender or to him.

It was Davenant he was addressing. His left hand indicating a headline on a newspaper spread before him—which one, Davenant couldn’t make out—he gesticulated with a half-full highball glass in his right.

“Science has proved,” he went on to the receptive expression on Davenant’s face, “that not one of the planets of our solar system is habitable, at least not for creatures like ourselves. The best you could hope for on Mars would be a thinking mushroom. Venus, a thinking fish—a very odd kind of fish. Jupiter, a thinking salamander.”

“You don’t believe, then, that beings from other planets are watching the earth?” Davenant asked.

“I didn’t say that. This universe is full of suns, and a lot of them must have planets revolving around them. Some of those planets may very well be populated by sentient beings. But any civilized—let’s say entities—capable of traversing illimitable space would probably be so different from our pattern we wouldn’t recognize them as human, or even as individuals. They wouldn’t resemble us the least bit, let alone be able to communicate with us.

“No,” he went on reflectively, “truth is so much stranger—and so much more familiar. Like this world we’re in right now.”

“You mean—just our world?”

“I mean this world—this frame of reference parallel to the one you come from—I imagine, the same one I did—this one we’ve both slipped over to.”

Davenant gaped at him. The man seemed sober, and perfectly sane.

"I don’t get you,” he said.

“Look,” retorted the bald man. “I can tell. I’ve never missed a slipover yet. But maybe it’s just happened to you and you don’t understand.

“You seem to be an educated man. Know any higher mathematics?”

“I ought to. I’m an accountant.”

“I don’t mean arithmetic. I mean this high-up stuff. Space-time continuum, things like that.”

“Sure, I know a little.”

“Well, then, didn’t you ever hear about multidimensional worlds—parallel frames of reference? I don’t know how many there are—nobody does; innumerable ones, possibly. But I do know that in each of them, some few people are so constituted psychologically that the film between is weak—so that they can and sometimes do slip over from one to another. And I miss my guess if you aren’t one of them—just as I am.”

“I’m afraid you’re way beyond my depth,” Davenant said.

“No, I’m not. See here.” The man in tweeds emptied his glass at a gulp. “Tim!” he called down the bar. “Another of the same for me. And fill up this gentleman’s glass.”

The burly bartender did the needful, and then stood listening. Davenant nodded his thanks. The bald-headed man went on.

“Ever hear about the farmer who went to his barn to milk his cows, and the cows were found unmilked and the farmer never seen again? Or the private plane that crashed with only the owner in it, and the plane was found, but never the pilot? Or the diplomat who walked around the horses of his carriage—and vanished? Hell, Charles Fort's books are full of cases— supposing you ever heard of Charles Fort. Take Dorothy Arnold, and Judge Crater, and, away back in the early nineteenth century, Chief Justice Lansing. Where did they all go?

“And how about the people who suddenly turn up on a park bench or on some busy street, years and miles from the life they used to know? Usually they say they can't remember. But where had they been?

“Or take the universal myth, in every country and older than history, of the children stolen by the fairies, or the shepherd who finds a hole in the mountain and enters it. Or Rip Van Winkle. Or the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Myths are just attempts to explain facts without the necessary data.

“And take it another way—what about people like Kaspar Hauser, who suddenly appear—where from?

“So what did happen? In my book, they all slipped over. They slipped into the slot and the zipper closed on them.”

“You mean you think they got themselves transplanted into some other dimension?”

“Not the way you probably mean. They couldn’t walk out of locked rooms, or turn themselves inside out, or dig holes from the bottom up. But I know darned well they slipped over. I don’t know where Crater is—maybe he just got himself murdered—but I’ve met Miss Arnold—here. She’s pretty old by now. And I’ve seen plenty of others—like you. I recognized the look in your eyes the instant you stepped in here.

“Hell, I ought to know. I’m a slipover myself, as I said. So’s Tim here.”

Tim nodded solemnly.

Davenant smiled uncertainly.

“Well, it’s a good story,” he ventured.

The bald man frowned.

“Is that what you think?” he said. “Tell me, a while back, didn’t you feel a—a kind of electric shock? In your head? We usually do.”

Davenant started. That described it exactly—that funny feeling, just before he’d noticed Tim’s Place: like a minor earthquake inside his skull; and then everything seemed to right itself in a second, as if it had been—crooked, before. For a moment he had thought worriedly about high blood pressure, wondered if he’d had a slight stroke. He nodded involuntarily.

“I thought so,” said the man.

Davenant got hold of himself with an effort.

“Now wait,” he cried suddenly. “I’ve got you cornered. If this is a different world, how does it happen you speak English?”

“Why not? Don’t you? This is New York, isn’t it?”

“You mean, you think every city—every place on earth—has its—what did you call it—parallel?”

“Sure. I know they have. I’ve been in enough of them, in my native world and here.”

“So your—your New York has an Empire State Building, and a Rockefeller Center, and a Statue of Liberty, just like mine?”

“I didn’t say that. It has the equivalents, but they may not have the same names, or be in the same places, because the history is different. For instance, in our former world I remember there used to be a florist’s shop where this bar is now.”

Davenant laughed.

“All right, my friend,” he said.

“I’ll take you right up on that. I’m just down here on business—I live in Boston. Pretty soon I’ll be taking a plane home. And I’m willing to bet you anything you like that when I get there Boston will be just where it always has been.”

“You can get your plane—though the airport may not be where you expect. And you’ll reach Boston on schedule. Boston Harbor will be there, and Beacon Hill, and the Charles River—all natural objects. But they might not be called by the same names (I don’t know—I’ve never been in Boston in this world), and all the buildings will be different. And in the whole city there won’t be one human being you ever saw before—unless you meet another slipover.”

“And even if he did meet another,” the bartender interpolated, “he might not be from the same world originally, Mr. Gorham. You and me aren’t.”

“That’s right. I didn’t think of that. I’ve got a hunch, though, that you and I did come from the same place, Mr. —”

“Davenant. Charles Davenant.”

“My name’s Gorham—James B. Tell me, Mr. Davenant, did you ever hear of Aristotle, or Julius Caesar, or William the Conqueror, or Shakespeare?”

“Are you kidding?”

“O.K. Tim—you ever hear any of these names before?”

“Now, Mr. Gorham, you know I ain’t had much education.”

“All right, then tell me—who was Lincoln? Who was Washington? Ever hear of Hitler? Or Stalin? Or Eisenhower?”

“You’ve got me,” Tim said soberly.

“You see? You and I have the same history—Tim hasn’t. The great names he knows we wouldn’t recognize. But he came from his America, just as we came from ours.”

“But once in a while I do meet somebody from my own place,” Tim put in eagerly, “and then we remember the same things. Like, Randolph took Richmond in the Civil War, or Thomas Endicott was the first president. . . . It’s never anybody I ever knew before, though.”

“See?” said Gorham. “That’s the way it goes, Mr. Davenant. History gets changed a little in each world.

“Few slipovers, relatively—in numbers, many. Hell, people disappear from every big city every day. If they happen not to have friends or relatives to notice or care about them, they’re never even missed. You married?”

“No,” said Davenant uncommunicatively. He was thinking.

“That’s good. The worst part of it all, the way I see it, is the wife or husband left to wait and wonder and never know what happened. It’s worse for them than for the one that slips over, for at least he knows he isn’t dead and didn’t desert. I was lucky that way too— though I’d give anything to be able to let my mother and dad know I didn’t just run out on them.

“It’s funny—sometimes more than one member of a family is the special type that can slip over. I heard of two brothers, out in Oakland, California. They both slipped over, four years apart; both did it the same way—walked out of their house—two old bachelors they were—leaving the lights burning, the radio going, dinner on the stove. When the second one arrived, they found each other. If they’re not dead, they’re still together in Oakland—this Oakland.

“But I’ve never heard of a married couple who were both slipovers. They say opposites attract—perhaps slipover types never marry each other. Sometimes when a man or woman has been here a long time and seems likely to stay here, he or she remarries. It’s bigamy, of course—but the law will never catch up with them. I’m married now myself—but then I never was before.”

Davenant stared at the two men.

“You really believe all this stuff?” he asked slowly.

Gorham sighed.

“I know—it took me a long, hard time too. That’s why I try now to help others, when I recognize them.

“Haven’t you noticed that nobody’s walked in here since you did? It’s not that quiet, even at this hour, eh, Tim? I didn’t want us to be interrupted. I gave Tim the wink while you had your back turned and he locked the door so we could have a long talk. This is his own place—he’s boss.”

“That’s right,” said Tim. “Mr. Gorham’s been a good friend to me—helped me buy this joint. I don’t mind losing a little trade once in a while to do him a favor.”

Davenant felt the blood rushing to his head.

“Hey!” he yelled. “I don’t like this! Let me out, or—”

“Easy does it, fellow. You can walk out any time you want. We won’t stop you.

“But look, let’s discuss this quietly a little, shall we? Have another beer, and go ahead and ask me any questions you want.”

Davenant’s momentary anger left him. He could be a good sport and go along with a joke. He glanced at his watch. Plenty of time yet.

“O.K.,” he said. “What about clothes? Or this bag of mine?”

“Your clothes were on you, and they came over with you. It isn’t like teleportation. But look and see if you’ve got a return ticket to Boston. You won’t have, because you didn’t buy one here.”

Davenant pulled his fingers away from his empty pocket as if they had been bitten.

“It’s some sort of sleight-of-hand,” he muttered. “I can feel the money still in my wallet.”

“Why not? You had that on you too—though you can’t spend it here. You can exchange it for as much as you need of mine. It will look different, but it will be good, and I can keep yours as a souvenir.”

Interesting new con game, Davenant thought. Gorham seemed to read his mind.

“Listen, Mr. Davenant, if you think I’m playing a silly joke on you, I can prove to you who I am.”

He began producing identification—driver’s license, Chamber of Commerce membership, credit cards.

“I want to help you, my friend. Nobody helped me, at first, and I know how tough it is. Say you go to Boston, and for the sake of the argument say you find things the way I’ve told you. You won’t have your home or your job—they’re off somewhere in another parallel frame of reference. See here—”

He held out a business card. James B. Gorham, assistant vice-president, Bank Mutual Life Insurance Company.

“We can use another accountant in our Boston office. You’d have to qualify, of course. But you can refer to me, and that will get you over the worst hurdle for every slipover—not having any proof of degrees or experience.”

Davenant look suspiciously at the card in his hand.

“Never heard of the company,” he remarked.

“It’s an old-line one,” said Gorham equably. He pointed to a printed statement: “Established 1848.”

Something occurred to Davenant. His face brightened with triumph.

“Got you at last!” he chuckled. “So you’re a ‘slipover’ yourself, are you? You didn’t have any credentials, either, when you came. So how come all at once you’re assistant vice-president of a big insurance company?”

“Not all at once, Mr. Davenant.” Gorham’s voice was dreary. “I’ve spent half a lifetime here by now. I guess I’ll die here. I don’t know that I’d even want to go back any more—I’ve forgotten a lot, and most of the people I knew there would be dead.”

“Well, what about the people who do go back?” Davenant demanded. “Why don’t they tell what happened to them? Why do they always have amnesia, when you don’t have it here for the—for your other world?”

“Why do they always say they can’t remember, you mean. Maybe a few really do have amnesia from shock. But just consider a minute. What would happen to anybody who’d slipped over and back, and then tried to explain the truth? For that matter, what would happen to anyone, in this or any other parallel world, who would tell the truth to anybody except another slipover? How long would it take to put the raving maniac in a mental hospital? I guess plenty of them are there right now as it is, poor devils.

“And think how much worse it would have been in the days before people had any scientific concepts. Think of the fate of any poor fool then who told where he’d been or where he’d come from: chained to an iron bar on a heap of straw, or burnt at the stake as a witch.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Davenant objected. “You’re saying the civilizations are the same in all these so-called parallel worlds of yours? You mean—say this really is a different world we’re in, it’s in the same fix today as ours—threatened with nuclear war and destruction and chaos and all the rest of it?”

“I said they were parallel worlds, my friend,” Gorham replied gravely. “The history is different in detail, but in the end, like causes lead to like effects. As for your second question, unfortunately the answer is yes, at least so far as this world is concerned.

“But you’ve got a problem of your own to solve before you have time to discuss politics or sociology. Ask me anything you want to about that. And any time you say, Tim will open the door and you can walk out and try to find your way to Boston.”

“If this whole thing is an elaborate practical joke,” said Davenant painfully, “I give in; you’ve made a fool of me and let’s call it quits.

“But all right; I’ll play along with you some more.

Why do some of these people who disappear turn up again right away, in a few hours maybe, while others never come back at all?”

“I don’t know why; I just know they do. Some people slip back and forth frequently, and learn to manage it. And I’ve met a few who made such a short transition—‘translation into the positive absolute,’ Fort calls it, whatever that means—that they hardly realized it themselves. Maybe you’ll be one of the short-timers; I hope so, for your sake.

“I’ve never heard of anybody who slipped over into more than one other world, but perhaps there are some of those too. For the quick back-and-forthers, it may seem that they’ve just had a vivid dream, if it happened while they were asleep. If they were awake, the double shock might be too great and they might just blank out and forget the whole thing. Or it might even kill them. Perhaps that’s what happens to some of the people who are found dead in bed, with no evidence of disease.”

Scared and sick, Davenant stared at Gorham. He was remembering things. He groped his way to a chair by one of the little tables and sat down.

One night, when he was a very small boy, he had had a strange dream that he could still remember. In his dream, he was walking down a street, when suddenly he heard a dull rhythmic booming. He asked a woman passing by what that was, and she answered, “That’s the washerwomen who live down under the earth.”

A child’s rationalization. But he was in that period of life when illusion and reality are inextricably mixed.

So, soon afterwards, he asked his mother, “Why don’t I hear the washerwomen any more?” “What are you talking about?” she asked, and he explained. She laughed. “You just dreamed that, dear,” she said. . . . But he never forgot.

He remembered something else. Often, as he grew older, he had a strange experience just before he fell asleep. Unknown faces would suddenly flash before his consciousness, or he would catch scraps of conversation that he could never recall. Before he was grown, he had in his own mind divided both sight and hearing into three categories—ordinary vision and sound, purely imagined or remembered vision and sound, and what he called “the inbetween.” He supposed everybody shared his experience, till one day he mentioned these hypnagogic experiences casually to his chum. “Are you crazy, Chuck?” Russell wanted to know. “Why,” he answered, astonished, “don’t you have it too?” “Have what? You cuckoo or something?” After that, he never spoke of “the in-between” again.

Gorham and Tim were watching him compassionately. He rose shakily to his feet. “So that was what—” he began quaveringly.

And then all at once he recalled something. He felt his face turning white. He had never been so angry in all his life.

“Interviews, and photographs of Martians!” he choked. “Of all the dirty tricks!” How grown men could get a kick out of playing a rotten joke like that— trying to kid me into believing—

“Listen, you! It’s only a few years since those flying saucer books began to come out. You’ve been ‘here’ for years and years, have you? Then where did you learn about those nuts who think they’ve met extraterrestrials? And don’t tell me you’ve been conversing with some other ‘slipover’ that just got here and told you about it. That’s not the sort of thing that would be likely to come up in an ordinary conversation!”

“I said these were parallel worlds, Davenant,” said Gorham quietly. “They have parallel myths, too.”-“Rats! Let me out of here! Now—this minute.” “Certainly. Let him out, Tim.”

Tim walked around the bar, reached into his trousers pocket, and imperturbably unlocked the door. Then he blocked the way and held out a broad palm.

“That’ll be fifty cents, mister, for that first beer,” he announced.

Scarlet with embarrassment Davenant pulled a bill from his wallet, noted the “1” on the corner.

“Keep the change for the floor show,” he growled. For a second, then, he almost snatched the money back. “Nuts!” he mumbled. He pulled the door open and slammed it behind him, too furious to glance back at the pitying faces, too furious to do anything but march rapidly down the street toward where, he knew, the west side air terminal was.

It was right there. Did the airport bus look a little different? Everything was going to look a little different now; Gorham had thoroughly upset him with his nonsense. But the plane looked just like the one that had brought him down here, and so did the bus from the Boston airport to the city.

He needn’t go to the office till tomorrow; he’d phone
from his bachelor apartment on the wrong side of Beacon Hill. He hailed a taxi, and noted with an unpleasant shock that it was pink. Had he ever seen any pink taxis before? Well, he wasn’t very observant, and there were always new taxi companies starting up. They’d gone almost the whole distance before he realized he was keeping his eyes away from the window. At the same moment the driver spoke.

“Did you say Number 12, mister? There ain’t no Number 12 on Laurel Street.”

It was Laurel, all right; he recognized some of the houses. But where his apartment house had stood there was a parking lot.

Davenant felt a little sick. He’d sort this all out soon, but now he had to get somewhere where he could be alone and sit down and think things over. “Take me to the Copley-Plaza,” he said in a strangled voice.

“Mottley-Plaza it is,” said the driver. Davenant shuddered.

He wouldn’t look; he wouldn’t notice the differences. He got a room without difficulty and followed the bellboy numbly into the elevator and down the hall.

“Hey!” said the boy, about to leave, “what kind of funny money is this?”

Davenant dared not glance at the half dollar he had just given the boy. Whose head should be on it instead of Kennedy’s? He tried to smile but the smile turned into a grimace. The boy looked a little frightened. “Cheap skate!” he muttered under his breath, and left quickly. Davenant locked the door.

“Get hold of yourself!” he admonished himself sternly. He took off his tie and doused his head in cold water. When he stopped shaking he set his jaw and lifted the phone. He gave the operator the familiar number of his office.

He hung up, and the phone rang almost immediately. With his heart beating too fast, he said: “This is Davenant. Put George Watson on, Lucille/' A voice broke in; it was the hotel switchboard girl again.

“I'm sorry, sir, but I got a recording that the number you called is not a working number.”

Suddenly he was very angry.

“Look,” he snapped, “I'm calling Black, Watson, and Heilkrammer, in the Old State Building. Maybe they've changed their number overnight, but I don't think so. Get them for me.”

“I'm sorry, sir, it isn't my—” But he had hung up again. This time it was nearly five minutes before she called him back.

“There is no Black, Watson, and Heilkrammer listed in the phone book. And there is no Old State Building in Boston.”

Davenant cradled the phone without another word. He sat back in his chair, his head whirling.

Even supposing that preposterous nonsense of Gorham's had been the truth, then how had he been able to get here at all? Why had the man in the air terminal in New York taken his money for the ticket? Oh-oh— now he remembered. He had cashed a traveler’s check; presumably they were the same in both worlds. And the taxi driver—he must have paid him from the change he got at the terminal. But the bellboy’s tip had come from another pocket; it was money he had had on him before he—Before.

Wait: there was one way to get the thing straightened out, or as much as it could be straightened out for the present. He fished in his wallet for the card Gorham had given him. Bank Mutual Life Insurance Company, James B. Gorham, assistant vice-president. He read it aloud to see if he could talk without his voice trembling; then, his lips and fingertips cold, he lifted the phone again and gave the number on the card.

He was not surprised—only scared to his very depths. Somehow he had almost expected it.

“That isn’t a working number either, sir.” The switchboard operator hesitated. “Excuse me, but these are Boston numbers you’re calling?”

“Never mind,” he managed to breathe, and he got the receiver back in its cradle. Something had just occurred to him.

He recalled his angry exit from Tim’s Place, he recalled walking indignantly away and down the street. And now something else came back to him. Somewhere between the bar and the terminal, that strange thing had happened to him again: that tiny instantaneous explosion, like a small electric shock, piercing his brain; then suddenly things seemed to right themselves again.

But where? Into what world had he slipped then? Where in God’s name was he now?

He turned his face to the back of the armchair and clung to its sides. Dry sobs shook him and his throat felt raw.

“Help me!” cried Davenant to somebody or something, a lost child. “Help me! I want to go home!”

All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven

Infinity is a troublesome concept: there's so much of it! Open the gate that leads to the universe around us, and you find that you've let yourself in for—literally—every imaginable kind of problem. That's the uncomfortable notion pondered here, in concise and chilling fashion, by the author of World of Ptavvs, A Gift From Earth, and the Hugo-winning “Neutron Star."

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn’t understand the theory, though God knows he’d tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so
that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door. It was enough to confuse any citizen, let alone Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble, who had other problems to worry about.

Senseless suicide, senseless crime. A city-wide epidemic. It had hit other cities too. Trimble suspected that it was world wide, that other nations were simply keeping it quiet.

Trimble’s sad eyes focused on the clock. Quitting time. He stood up to go home and slowly sat down again. For he had his teeth in the problem, and he couldn’t let go.

Not that he was really accomplishing anything.

But if he left now, he’d only have to take it up again tomorrow.

Go, or stay?

And the branchings began again. Gene Trimble thought of other universes parallel to this one, and a parallel Gene Trimble in each one. Some had left early. Many had left on time, and were now halfway home to dinner, out to a movie, watching a strip show, racing to the scene of another death. Streaming out of police headquarters in all their multitudes, leaving a multitude of Trimbles behind them. Each of these trying to deal, alone, with the city’s endless, inexplicable parade of suicides.

Gene Trimble spread the morning paper on his desk. From the bottom drawer he took his gun-cleaning equipment, then his .45. He began to take the gun apart.

The gun was old but serviceable. He’d never fired it except on the target range and never expected to. To Trimble, cleaning his gun was like knitting, a way to keep his hands busy while his mind wandered off. Turn the screws, don’t lose them. Lay the parts out in order.

Through the closed door to his office came the sounds of men hurrying. Another emergency? The department couldn’t handle it all. Too many suicides, too many casual murders, not enough men.

Gun oil. Oiled rag. Wipe each part. Put it back in place.

Why would a man like Ambrose Harmon go off a building?

In the early morning light he lay, more a stain than man, thirty-six stories below the edge of his own penthouse roof. The pavement was splattered red for yards around him. The stains were still wet. Harmon had landed on his face. He wore a bright silk dressing gown and a sleeping jacket with a sash.

Others would take samples of his blood, to learn if he had acted under the influence of alcohol or drugs. There was little to be learned from seeing him in his present condition.

“But why was he up so early?” Trimble wondered. For the call had come in at 8:03, just as Trimble arrived at headquarters.

“So late, you mean.” Bentley had beaten him to the scene by twenty minutes. “We called some of his friends. He was at an all-night poker game. Broke up around six o’clock.”

“Did Harmon lose?”

“Nope. He won almost five hundred bucks.”

“That fits,” Trimble said in disgust. “No suicide note?”

“Maybe they’ve found one. Shall we go up and see?”

“We won’t find a note,” Trimble predicted.

Even three months earlier Trimble would have thought, How incredible! or Who could have pushed him? Now, riding up in the elevator, he thought only, Reporters. For Ambrose Harmon was news. Even among this past year’s epidemic of suicides, Ambrose Harmon’s death would stand out like Lyndon Johnson in a lineup.

He was a prominent member of the community, a man of dead and wealthy grandparents. Perhaps the huge inheritance, four years ago, had gone to his head. He had invested tremendous sums to back harebrained quixotic causes.

Now, because one of the harebrained causes had paid off, he was richer than ever. The Crosstime Corporation already held a score of patents on inventions imported from alternate time tracks. Already those inventions had started more than one industrial revolution. And Harmon was the money behind Crosstime. He would have been the world’s next billionaire—had he not walked off the balcony.

They found a roomy, luxuriously furnished apartment in good order, and a bed turned down for the night. The only sign of disorder was Harmon’s clothing—slacks, sweater, a silk turtleneck shirt, knee-length shoesocks, no underwear—piled on a chair in the bedroom. The toothbrush had been used.

He got ready for bed, Trimble thought. He brushed his teeth, and then he went out to look at the sunrise. A man who kept late hours like that, he wouldn’t see the sunrise very often. He watched the sunrise, and when it was over, he jumped.

“Why?”

They were all like that. Easy, spontaneous decisions. The victim-killers walked off bridges or stepped from their balconies or suddenly flung themselves in front of subway trains. They strolled halfway across a freeway, or swallowed a full bottle of laudanum. None of the methods showed previous planning. Whatever was used, the victim had had it all along; he never actually went out and bought a suicide weapon. The victim rarely dressed for the occasion, or used makeup, as an ordinary suicide would. Usually there was no note.

Harmon fit the pattern perfectly.

“Like Richard Corey,” said Bentley.

“Who?”

“Richard Corey, the man who had everything. ‘And Richard Corey, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.’ You know what I think?”

“If you’ve got an idea, let’s have it.”

“The suicides all started about a month after Crosstime got started. I think one of the Crosstime ships brought back a new bug from some alternate timeline.”

“A suicide bug?”

Bentley nodded.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I don’t think so. Gene, do you know how many Crosstime pilots have killed themselves in the last year? More than twenty percent!”

“Oh?”

“Look at the records. Crosstime has about twenty vehicles in action now, but in the past year they’ve employed sixty-two pilots. Three disappeared. Fifteen are dead, and all but two died by suicide.”

“I didn’t know that.” Trimble was shaken.

“It was bound to happen sometime. Look at the alternate worlds they’ve found so far. The Nazi world. The Red Chinese world, half bombed to death. The ones that are totally bombed, and Crosstime can’t even find out who did it. The one with the Black Plague mutation, and no penicillin until Crosstime came along. Sooner or later—”

“Maybe, maybe. I don’t buy your bug, though. If the suicides are a new kind of plague, what about the other crimes?”

“Same bug.”

“Uh, uh. But I think we’ll check up on Crosstime.”

Trimble’s hands finished with the gun and laid it on the desk. He was hardly aware of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a prodding sensation: the handle, the piece he needed to solve the puzzle.

He spent most of the day studying Crosstime, Inc. News stories, official handouts, personal interviews. The incredible suicide rate among Crosstime pilots could not be coincidence. He wondered why nobody had noticed it before.

It was slow going. With Crosstime travel, as with relativity, you had to throw away reason and use only logic. Trimble had sweated it out. Even the day’s murders had not distracted him.

They were typical, of a piece with the preceding eight months’ crime wave. A man had shot his foreman with a gun bought an hour earlier, then strolled off toward police headquarters. A woman had moved through the back row of a dark theater, using an ice pick to stab members of the audience through the backs of their seats. She had chosen only young men. They had killed without heat, without concealment; they had surrendered without fear or bravado. Perhaps it was another kind of suicide.

Time for coffee, Trimble thought, responding unconsciously to a dry throat plus a fuzziness of the mouth plus slight fatigue. He set his hands to stand up, and—

The image came to him in an endless row of Trimbles, lined up like the repeated images in facing mirrors. But each image was slightly different. He would go get the coffee and he wouldn’t and he would send somebody for it, and someone was about to bring it without being asked. Some of the images were drinking coffee, a few had tea or milk, some were smoking, some were leaning too far back with their feet on the desks (and a handful of these were toppling helplessly backward), some were, like this present Trimble, introspecting with their elbows on the desk. Damn Crosstime anyway.

He’d have had to check Harmon’s business affairs, even without the Crosstime link. There might have been a motive there, for suicide or murder, though it had never been likely.

In the first place, Harmon had cared nothing for money. The Crosstime group had been one of many.

At the time that project had looked as harebrained as the rest: a handful of engineers and physicists and philosophers determined to prove that the theory of alternate time tracks was reality.

In the second place, Harmon had no business worries.

Quite the contrary.

Eleven months ago an experimental vehicle had touched one of the worlds of the Confederate States of America and returned. The universes of alternate choice were within reach. And the pilot had brought back an artifact.

From that point on, Crosstime travel had more than financed itself. The Confederate world's “stapler,” granted an immediate patent, had bought two more ships. A dozen miracles had originated in a single, technologically advanced timeline, one in which the catastrophic Cuba War had been no more than a wet firecracker. Lasers, oxygen-hydrogen rocket motors, computers, strange plastics—the list was still growing. And Crosstime held all the patents.

In those first months the vehicles had gone off practically at random. Now the pinpointing was better. Vehicles could select any branch they preferred. Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, the Catholic Empire, the dead worlds. Some of the dead worlds were hells of radioactive dust and intact but deadly artifacts. From these worlds Crosstime pilots brought strange and beautiful works of art which had to be stored behind leaded glass.

The latest vehicles could reach worlds so like this one that it took a week of research to find the difference. In theory they could get even closer. There was a phenomenon called ‘the broadening of the bands’. . .

And that had given Trimble the shivers.

When a vehicle left its own present, a signal went on in the hangar, a signal unique to that ship. When the pilot wanted to return, he simply cruised across the appropriate band of probabilities until he found the signal. The signal marked his own unique present.

Only it didn’t. The pilot always returned to find a clump of signals, a broadened band. The longer he stayed away, the broader was the signal band. His own world had continued to divide after his departure, in a constant stream of decisions being made both ways.

Usually it didn’t matter. Any signal the pilot chose represented the world he had left. And since the pilot himself had a choice, he naturally returned to them all. But—

There was a pilot by the name of Gary Wilcox. He had been using his vehicle for experiments, to see how close he could get to his own timeline and still leave it. Once, last month, he had returned twice.

Two Gary Wilcoxes, two vehicles. The vehicles had been wrecked—their hulls intersected. For the Wilcoxes it could have been sticky, for Wilcox had a wife and family. But one of the duplicates had chosen to die almost immediately.

Trimble had tried to call the other Gary Wilcox. He was too late. Wilcox had gone skydiving a week ago. He’d neglected to open his parachute.

Small wonder, thought Trimble. At least Wilcox had had motive. It was bad enough, knowing about the other Trimbles, the ones who had gone home, the ones drinking coffee, et cetera. But—suppose someone walked into the office right now, and it was Gene Trimble?

It could happen.

Convinced as he was that Crosstime was involved in the suicides, Trimble—some other Trimble—might easily have decided to take a trip in a Crosstime vehicle. A short trip. He could land here.

Trimble closed his eyes and rubbed at the corners with his fingertips. In some timeline, very close, someone had thought to bring him coffee. Too bad this wasn’t it.

It didn’t do to think too much about these alternate timelines. There were too many of them. The close ones could drive you buggy, but the ones farther off were just as bad.

Take the Cuba War. Atomics had been used, here, and now Cuba was uninhabited, and some American cities were gone, and some Russian. It could have been worse.

Why wasn’t it? How could we luck out? Intelligent statesmen? Faulty bombs? A humane reluctance to kill indiscriminately?

No. There was no luck anywhere. Every decision was made both ways. For every wise choice you bled your heart out over, you had made all the other choices too. And so it went, all through history.

Civil wars unfought on some worlds were won by either side on others. Elsewhen, another animal had first done murder with an antelope femur. Some worlds were still all nomad; civilization had lost out. If every choice was cancelled elsewhere, why make a decision at all?

Trimble opened his eyes and saw the gun.

That gun, too, was endlessly repeated on endless desks. Some of the images were dirty with years of neglect. Some smelled of gunpowder, fired recently, a few at living targets. Some were loaded. All were as real as this one.

A number of these were about to go off by accident.

A proportion of these were pointed, in deadly coincidence, at Gene Trimble.

See the endless rows of Gene Trimble, each at his desk. Some are bleeding and cursing as men run into the room following the sound of the gunshot. Many are already dead.

Was there a bullet in there? Nonsense.

He looked anyway. The gun was empty.

Trimble loaded it. At the base of his mind he felt the touch of the handle. He would find what he was seeking.

He put the gun back on his desk, pointing away from him, and he thought of Ambrose Harmon, coming home from a late night. Ambrose Harmon, who had won five hundred dollars at poker. Ambrose Harmon, exhausted, seeing the lightening sky as he prepared for bed. Going out to watch the dawn.

Ambrose Harmon, watching the slow dawn, remembering a two thousand dollar pot. He’d bluffed. In some other branching of time, he had lost.

Thinking that in some other branching of time, that two thousand dollars included his last dime. It was certainly possible. If Crosstime hadn’t paid off, he might have gone through the remains of his fortune in the past four years. He liked to gamble.

Watching the dawn, thinking of all the Ambrose Harmons on that roof. Some were penniless this night, and they had not come out to watch the dawn.

Well, why not? If he stepped over the edge, here and now, another Ambrose Harmon would only laugh and go inside.

If he laughed and went inside, other Ambrose Harmons would fall to their deaths. Some were already on their way down. One changed his mind too late, another laughed as he fell. . . .

Well, why not? . . .

Trimble thought of another man, a nonentity, passing a firearms store. Branching of timelines, he thinks, looking in, and he thinks of the man who took his foreman’s job. Well, why not? . . .

Trimble thought of a lonely woman making herself a drink at three in the afternoon. She thinks of myriads of alter egos, with husbands, lovers, children, friends. Unbearable, to think that all the might-have-beens were as real as herself. As real as this ice pick in her hand. Well, why not? . . .

And she goes out to a movie, but she takes the ice pick.

And the honest citizen with a carefully submerged urge to commit rape, just once. Reading his newspaper at breakfast, and there’s another story from Crosstime: they’ve found a world line in which Kennedy the First was assassinated. Strolling down a street, he thinks of world lines and infinite branchings, of alter egos already dead, or jailed, or President. A girl in a miniskirt passes, and she has nice legs. Well, why not? . . .

Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.

Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not? . . .

And he ran out of the office shouting, “Bentley, listen. I’ve got the answer. . . .”

And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn’t any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would continue. . . .

And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a philosophical point! . . .

And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a sandwich and some coffee. . . .

And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one . . .

And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head and
fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

fired. The gun jerked and blasted a hole in the ceiling.

fired. The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.

fired. The bullet took off the top of his head.

Living Space by Isaac Asimov

Since the legendary Dr. Asimov is renowned for his imaginativeness, it is unsurprising that he should take an approach to the parallel-universe theme that had, I believe, never been mentioned before. Why not use the abundance of alternate worlds to solve Earth's population problem? Since the number of parallel universes is infinite, and the human population, however large it grows, must nevertheless remain finite, there should be room for everyone.

Unless, of course, some other species also wants its slice of infinity . . .

Clarence Rimbro had no objections to living in the only house on an uninhabited planet, any more than had any other of Earth’s even trillion of inhabitants.

If someone had questioned him concerning possible
objections, he would undoubtedly have stared blankly at the questioner. His house was much larger than any house could possibly be on Earth-proper, and much more modern. It had its independent air-supply and water-supply; ample food in its freezing compartments. It was isolated from the lifeless planet on which it was located by a force-field, but the rooms were built about a five-acre farm (under glass, of course) which, in the planet's beneficent sunlight, grew flowers for pleasure and vegetables for health. It even supported a few chickens. It gave Mrs. Rimbro something to do with herself afternoons, and a place for the two little Rimbros to play when they were tired of indoors.

Furthermore, if one wanted to be on Earth-proper; if one insisted on it; if one had to have people around, and air one could breathe in the open, or water to swim in—one had only to go out of the front door of the house.

So where was the difficulty?

Remember, too, that on the lifeless planet on which the Rimbro house was located, there was complete silence except for the occasional monotonous effects of wind and rain. There was absolute privacy and the feeling of absolute ownership of two hundred million square miles of planetary surface.

Clarence Rimbro appreciated all that in his distant way. He was an accountant, skilled in handling very advanced computer models; precise in his manners and clothing; not given much to smiling beneath his thin, well-kept mustache, and properly aware of his own worth. When he drove from work toward home, he passed the occasional dwelling-place on Earth-proper and he never ceased to stare at them with a certain smugness.

Well, either for business reasons or due to mental perversion, some people simply had to live on Earth-proper. It was too bad for them. After all, Earth-proper's soil had to supply the minerals and basic food supply for all the trillion of inhabitants (in fifty years, it would be two trillion) and space was at a premium. Houses on Earth-proper just couldn't be any bigger than that; and people who had to live in them had to adjust to the fact.

Even the process of entering his house had its mild pleasantness. Rimbro would enter the community twisting-place to which he was assigned (it looked, as did all such, like a rather stumpy obelisk) and there he would invariably find others waiting to use it. Still more would arrive before he reached the head of the line. It was a sociable time.

“How’s your planet?” “How’s yours?” The usual small talk. Sometimes someone would be having trouble—machinery breakdowns, or serious weather that would alter the terrain unfavorably. Not often.

But conversational cliches passed the time; then Rimbro would be at the head of the line. He would put his key into the slot; the proper combination would be punched; and he would be twisted into a new probability pattern—his own particular probability pattern. This was the one assigned him when he married and became a producing citizen—a probability pattern in which life had never developed on Earth. And twisting to this particular lifeless Earth, he would walk into his own foyer.

Just like that.

Rimbro never worried about being in another probability; why should he? He never gave it any thought. There were an infinite number of possible Earths, and each existed in its own niche, its own probability pattern. Since on a planet such as Earth, there was—according to calculation—about a fifty-fifty chance of life developing, half of all the possible Earths (still infinite, since half of infinity was infinity) possessed life, and half (still infinite) did not. And living on about three hundred billion of the unoccupied Earths were three hundred billion families, each with its own beautiful house, powered by the sun of that probability, and each securely at peace. The number of Earths so occupied grew by millions each day.

And then one day, Rimbro came home and Sandra (his wife) said to him, as he entered, “There’s been the most peculiar noise.”

Rimbro’s eyebrows shot up and he looked closely at his wife. Except for a certain restlessness of her thin hands and a pale look about the corners of her tight mouth, she looked normal.

Rimbro said, still holding his topcoat halfway toward the servette that waited patiently for it, “Noise? What noise? I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s stopped now,” Sandra said. “Really, it was like a deep thumping or rumble. You’d hear it a bit, then it would stop. Then you’d hear it a bit, and so on. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Rimbro surrendered his coat. “But that’s quite impossible.”

“I heard it.”

“I’ll look over the machinery,” he mumbled. “Something may be wrong.”

Nothing was wrong that his accountant’s eyes could discover and, with a shrug, Rimbro went to supper. He listened to the servettes hum busily about their different chores, watched one sweep up the plates and cutlery for disposal and recovery, then said, pursing his lips, “Maybe one of the servettes is out of order. I’ll check them.”

“It wasn’t anything like that, Clarence.”

Rimbro went to bed, without further concern over the matter—and wakened with his wife’s hand clutching his shoulder. His hand went automatically to the contact-patch that set the walls glowing. “What’s the matter? What time is it?”

She shook her head. “Listen! Listen/”

Good Lord, thought Rimbro, there is a noise. A definite rumbling; it came and went.

“Earthquake?” he whispered. Such things did happen, of course—though with all the planet to choose from, one could generally count on having avoided the faulted areas.

“All day long?” asked Sandra, fretfully. “I think it’s something else.” And then she voiced the secret terror of every nervous householder. “I think there’s someone on the planet with us. This Earth is inhabited”

Rimbro did the logical things. When morning came, he took his wife and children to his wife’s mother. He himself took a day off, and hurried to the Sector’s Housing Bureau.

He was quite annoyed at all this.

Bill Ching of the Housing Bureau was short, jovial, and proud of his part-Mongolian ancestry. He believed that probability patterns had solved every last one of humanity’s problems. Alec Mishnoff, also of the Housing Bureau, thought probability patterns were a snare into which humanity had been hopelessly tempted. Mishnoff had originally majored in archeology, and had studied a variety of antiquarian subjects, with which his delicately-poised head was still crammed. His face managed to look sensitive—despite overbearing eyebrows—and he lived with a pet notion that so far he had dared tell no one, though preoccupation with it had driven him out of archeology and into Housing.

Ching was fond of saying, “The hell with Malthus!” It was almost a verbal trademark of his, “The hell with Malthus; we can’t possibly overpopulate now. However frequently we double and redouble, Homo sapiens remains finite in number, and the uninhabited Earths remain infinite. And we don’t have to put one house on each planet; we can put a hundred, a thousand, a million. Plenty of room and plenty of power from each probability sun.”

“More than one on a planet?” said Mishnoff, sourly.

Ching knew exactly what Alec meant. When probability patterns had first been put to use, sole ownership of a planet had been a powerful inducement for early settlers. It appealed to the snob and despot in every one. What man so poor, ran the slogan, as not to have an empire larger than Genghis Khan’s? To introduce multiple settling now would outrage everyone.

Ching said, with a shrug, “All right, it would take psychological preparation. So what? That’s what it took to start the whole deal in the first place.”

“And food?” asked Mishnoff.

“You know were putting hydroponics works and yeast-plants in other probability patterns. And if we had to, we could cultivate their soil.”

“Wearing space-suits and importing oxygen.”

“We could reduce carbon dioxide for oxygen till the plants got going and they’d do the job after that.”

“Given a million years.”

“Mishnoff, the trouble with you,” Ching said, “is that you read too many ancient history books. You’re an obstructionist.”

Ching was too good-natured really to mean that, and Mishnoff continued to read books and to worry. Mishnoff longed for the day he could get up the courage necessary to see the Head of the Section and put right out in plain view—bang, like that—exactly what it was that was troubling him.

But now a Mr. Clarence Rimbro faced them, perspiring slightly, and toweringly angry at the fact that it had taken him the better part of two days to reach this far into the Bureau.

He reached his exposition’s climax by saying, “And I say the planet is inhabited and I don’t propose to stand for it.”

Having listened to his story in full, Ching tried the soothing approach. He said, “Noise like that is probably just some natural phenomenon.”

“What kind of natural phenomenon?” demanded

Rimbro. “I want an investigation. If it’s a natural phenomenon, I want to know what kind. I say the place is inhabited; it has life on it, by heaven, and I’m not paying rent on a planet to share it. And with dinosaurs, from the sound of it.”

‘‘Come, Mr. Rimbro, how long have you lived on your Earth?”

“Fifteen and a half years.”

“And has there ever been any evidence of life?” “There is now, and as a citizen with a production record classified as A-l, I demand an investigation.” “Of course we’ll investigate, sir; but we just want to assure you now that everything is all right. Do you realize how carefully we select our probability patterns?”

“I’m an accountant; I have a pretty good idea,” said Rimbro at once.

“Then surely you know our computers cannot fail us. They never pick a probability which has been picked before; they can’t possibly. And they’re geared to select only probability patterns in which Earth has a carbon dioxide atmosphere, one in which plant life —and therefore animal life—has never developed. Because if plants had evolved, the carbon dioxide would have been reduced to oxygen. Do you understand?”

“I understand it all very well, and I’m not here for lectures,” said Rimbro. “I want an investigation out of you, and nothing else. It is quite humiliating to think I may be sharing my world—my own world—with something or other, and I don’t propose to endure it.” “No, of course not,” muttered Ching, avoiding Mishnoff’s sardonic glance. “We’ll be there before night.”

They were on their way to the twisting-place with full equipment.

Mishnoff said, “I want to ask you something. Why do you go through that There’s no need to worry, sir’ routine? They always worry, anyway; where does it get you?”

I’ve got to try. They shouldn't worry,” said Ching, petulantly. “Ever hear of a carbon dioxide planet that was inhabited? Besides, Rimbro is the type that starts rumors; I can spot them. By the time he’s through, if he’s encouraged, he’ll say his sun went nova.”

“That happens sometimes,” said Mishnoff.

“So? One house is wiped out and one family dies. See, you’re an obstructionist. In the old times—the times you like—if there was a flood in China, or someplace, thousands of people would die. And that’s out of a population of a measly billion or two.”

Mishnoff muttered, “How do you know the Rimbro planet doesn’t have life on it?”

“Carbon dioxide atmosphere.”

“But suppose—” It was no use; Mishnoff couldn’t say it. He finished, lamely, “Suppose plant and animal life develops that can live on carbon dioxide.”

“It’s never been observed.”

“In an infinite number of worlds, anything can happen.” He finished that in a whisper. “Everything must happen.”

“Chances are one in a duodecillion,” said Ching, shrugging.

They arrived at the twisting-point then, and having utilized the freight-twist for their vehicle (thus sending it into the Rimbro storage area) they entered the Rimbro probability pattern themselves. First Ching, then Mishnoff.

“A nice house,” said Ching, with satisfaction. “Very nice model; good taste.”

“Hear anything?” asked Mishnoff.

“No.”

Ching wandered into the garden. “Hey,” he yelled; “Rhode Island Reds.”

Mishnoff followed, looking up at the glass roof. The sun looked like the sun of a trillion other Earths.

He said, absently, “There could be plant life, just starting out. The carbon dioxide might just be starting to drop in concentration. The computer would never know.”

“And it would take millions of years for animal life to begin, and millions more for it to come out of the sea.”

“It doesn’t have to follow that pattern.”

Ching put an arm about his partner’s shoulder. “You brood. Some day, you’ll tell me what’s really bothering you, instead of just hinting; then we can straighten you out.”

Mishnoff shrugged off the encircling arm with an annoyed frown. Ching’s tolerance was always hard to bear. He began, “Let’s not psychotherapize—” He broke off, then whispered, “Listen.”

There was a distant rumble. Again.

They placed the seismograph in the center of the room, and activated the force-field that penetrated downward and bound it rigidly to bed-rock. They watched the quivering needle record the shocks.

Mishnoff said, “Surface waves only; very superficial. Its not underground.”

Ching looked a little more dismal, “What is it then?”

“I think,” said Mishnoff, “we’d better find out.” His face was gray with apprehension. “We’ll have to set up a seismograph at another point and get a fix on the focus of disturbance.”

“Obviously,” said Ching. “I’ll go out with the other seismograph; you stay here.”

“No,” said Mishnoff, with energy. “I’ll go out.”

Mishnoff felt terrified, but he had no choice. If this was it, he would be prepared; he could get a warning through. Sending out an unsuspecting Ching could be disastrous. Nor could he warn Ching, who would certainly never believe him.

But since Mishnoff was not cast in the heroic mold, he trembled as he got into his oxygen suit, and fumbled the disrupter as he tried to dissolve the force-field locally in order to free the emergency exit.

“Any reason you want to go, particularly?” asked Ching, watching the other’s inept manipulations. “I’m willing.”

“It’s all right. I’m going out,” said Mishnoff, out of a dry throat, and stepped into the lock that led out onto the desolate surface of a lifeless Earth. A presumably lifeless Earth.

The sight was not unfamiliar to Mishnoff; he had seen its like dozens of times. Bare rock, weathered by wind and rain, crusted and powdered with sand in the gullies; a small and noisy brook beating itself against its stony course. All brown and gray. No sign of green; no sound of life.

Yet, the sun was the same; and when night fell, the constellations would be the same.

The situation of the dwelling place was in that region which, on Earth-proper, would be called Labrador. (It was Labrador here, too, really. It had been calculated that in not more than one out of a quadrillion or so Earths were there significant changes in the geological development. The continents were everywhere recognizable down to quite small details.)

Despite the situation and the time of the year, which was October, the temperature was sticky warm due to the hothouse effect of the carbon dioxide in this Earths dead atmosphere.

From inside his suit, through the transparent visor, Mishnoff watched it all somberly. If the epicenter of the noise was close by, adjusting the second seismograph a mile or so away would be enough for the fix. If it wasn’t, they would have to bring in an air-scooter. Well, assume the lesser complication to begin with.

Methodically, he made his way up a rocky hillside. Once at the top, he could choose his spot.

Once at the top, puffing and feeling the heat most unpleasantly, he found he didn’t have to.

His heart was pounding so that Mishnoff could scarcely hear his own voice as he yelled into his radio mouthpiece, “Hey, Ching, there’s construction going on.

“What?” came back the appalled shout in his ears.

There was no mistake. Ground was being levelled; machinery was at work; rock was being blasted out.

Mishnoff shouted, “They’re blasting. That’s the noise.”

Ching called back, “But it’s impossible. The computer would never pick the same probability pattern twice. It couldn’t.”

“You don’t understand—” began Mishnoff.

But Ching was Following his own thought processes. “Get over there, Mishnoff. I’m coming out, too.”

“No, damn it; you stay there,” cried Mishnoff in alarm. “Keep me in radio contact, and For God’s sake, be ready to leave For Earth-proper on wings if I give the word.”

“Why?” demanded Ching. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Mishnoff; “give me a chance to find out.”

To his own surprise, he noticed that his teeth were chattering.

Muttering breathless curses at the computer, at probability patterns, and at the insatiable need for living space on the part of a trillion human beings expanding in numbers like a puff of smoke, Mishnoff slithered and slipped down the other side of the slope, setting stones to rolling and rousing peculiar echoes.

A man came out to meet him, dressed in a gas-tight suit, different in many details From Mishnoff’s own, but obviously intended For the same purpose—to lead oxygen to the lungs.

Mishnoff gasped breathlessly into his mouthpiece, “Hold it, Ching; there’s a man coming. Keep in touch.”

Mishnoff felt his heart pump more easily and the bellows of his lungs labor less.

The two men were staring at one another. The other man was blond and craggy of face. The look of surprise about him was too extreme to be feigned.

He said, in a harsh voice, “Wer sind Sie? Was machen Sie hier?"

Mishnoff was thunderstruck. He’d studied ancient German for two years in the days when he expected to be an archeologist; and he followed the comment, despite the fact that the pronunciation was not what he had been taught. The stranger was asking his identity and his business there.

Stupidly, Mishnoff stammered, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” and then had to mutter reassurance to Ching, whose agitated voice in his earpiece was demanding to know what the gibberish was all about.

The German-speaking one made no direct answer. He repeated, “Wer sind Sie?" and added impatiently, “Hier ist für einen verriickten Spass keine Zeit.”

Mishnoff didn’t feel like a joke, either—particularly not a foolish one—but he continued, “Sprechen Sie Planetisch?”

He did not know the German for “Planetary Standard Language” so he had to guess. Too late, he thought he should have referred to it simply as English.

The other man stared wide-eyed at him. “Sind Sie wahnsinnig?”

Mishnoff was almost willing to settle for that; but in feeble self-defense, he said, “I’m not crazy, damn it, I mean, Auf der Erde woher Sie gekom—”

He gave it up for lack of German, but the new idea that was rattling inside his skull would not quit its nagging. He had to find some way of testing it. He said, desperately, “Welches Jahr ist es jetzt?”

Presumably, the stranger—who was questioning his sanity already—would be convinced of Mishnoff’s insanity now that he was being asked what year it was; but that was one question for which Mishnoff had the necessary German.

The other muttered something that sounded suspiciously like good German swearing and then said, “Es ist dock Zweitausenddreihundertvierundsechzig und warum—”

The stream of German that followed was completely incomprehensible to Mishnoff; but in any case he had had enough for the moment. If he translated the German correctly, the year given him was 2364, which was nearly two thousand years in the past. How could that be?

He muttered, “Zweitausenddreihundertvierwidsechzig?

“Ja, ja” said the other, with deep sarcasm. “Zweitausenddreihundertvierundsechzig. Das ganze Jahr lang ist es so gewesen.”

Mishnoff shrugged. The statement that it had been so all year long was a feeble witticism—even in German—and it gained nothing in translation. He pondered.

But then, the other’s ironical tone deepening, the German-speaking one went on. “Zweitausenddreihundertvierundsechzig nach Hitler. Hilft das Ihnen viel-leicht? Nach Hitler!”

Mishnoff yelled with delight. “That does help me.

Es hilft! Hören Sie, bitte—” He went on in broken German, interspersed with scraps of Planetary. “For heavens sake um Gottes Willen—”

Making it 2364 after Hitler was different altogether.

He put German together desperately, trying to explain.

The other frowned and grew thoughtful. He lifted his gloved hand to stroke his chin, or make some equivalent gesture, hit the transparent visor that covered his face and left his hand there uselessly, while he thought.

He said, suddenly, “Ich heisse George Fallenby.”

To Mishnoff it seemed that the name must be of Anglo-Saxon derivation, although the change in vowel form as pronounced by the other made it seem Teutonic.

“Guten Tag,” said Mishnoff, awkwardly, “Ich heisse Alec Mishnoff” and was suddenly aware of the Slavic derivation of his own name.

“Kommen Sie mit mir, Herr Mishnoff” said Fallenby.

Mishnoff followed with a strained smile, muttering into his transmitter, “It’s all right Ching; it's all right.”

Back on Earth-proper, Mishnoff faced the Sector’s Bureau head, who had grown old in the Service; whose every gray hair betokened a problem met and solved; and every missing hair a problem averted. He was a cautious man with eyes still bright and teeth that were still his own. His name was Berg.

He shook his head. “And they speak German? But the German you studied was two thousand years old.”

“True,” said Mishnoff, “but the English that Hemingway used is two thousand years old, and Planetary is close enough for anyone to be able to read it.”

“Hmp. And who’s this Hitler?”

‘‘He was a sort of tribal chief in ancient times. He led the German tribe in one of the wars of the twentieth century—just about the time the Atomic Age started, and true history began.”

“Before the Devastation, you mean?”

“Right. There were a series of wars then; the Anglo-Saxon countries won out and I suppose that’s why the Earth speaks Planetary.”

“And if Hitler and his Germans had won out, the world would speak German instead?”

“They have won out on Fallenby’s Earth, sir, and they do speak German.”

“And make their dates ‘after Hitler’ instead of a.d.?” “Right. And I suppose there’s an Earth in which the Slavic tribes won out and everyone speaks Russian.” “Somehow,” said Berg, “it seems to me we should have foreseen it; and yet, as far as I know, no one has. After all, there are an infinite number of inhabited Earths; we can’t be the only one that has decided to solve the problem of unlimited population growth by expanding into the worlds of probability.”

“Exactly,” said Mishnoff, earnestly, “and it seems to me that—if you think of it—there must be countless inhabited Earths so doing, and there must be many multiple occupations in the three hundred billion Earths we ourselves occupy. The only reason we caught this one is that, by sheer chance, they decided to build within a mile of the dwelling we had placed there. This is something we must check.”

“You imply we ought to search all our Earths.”

“I do, sir; weve got to make some settlement with other inhabited Earths. After all, there is room for all of us; to expand without agreement may result in all sorts of trouble and conflict.”

“Yes,” said Berg, thoughtfully; “I agree with you.”

Clarence Rimbro stared suspiciously at Berg’s old face, creased now into all manner of benevolence. “You’re sure now?”

“Absolutely,” said the Sector Head, “We’re sorry that you’ve had to accept temporary quarters for the last two weeks—”

“More like three.”

“—three weeks, but you will be compensated.”

“What was the noise?”

“Purely geological, sir. A rock was delicately balanced and with the wind, it made occasional contact with the rocks of the hillside. We’ve removed it and surveyed the area to make certain that nothing similar will occur again.”

Rimbro clutched his hat and said, “Well, thanks for your trouble.”

“No thanks necessary, I assure you, Mr. Rimbro. This is our job.”

Rimbro was ushered out and Berg turned to Mishnoff, who had remained a quiet spectator of this completion of the Rimbro affair.

Berg said, “The Germans were nice about it, anyway. They admitted we had priority and got off. Room for everybody, they said. Of course, as it turned out, they build any number of dwellings on each unoccupied world.—And now there’s the project of surveying our other worlds and making similar agreements with whomever we find. It’s all strictly confidential, too. It can’t be made known to the populace without plenty of preparation.—Still, none of this is what I want to speak to you about.”

“Oh?” said Mishnoff. Developments had not noticeably cheered him; his own bogey still concerned him.

Berg smiled at the younger man. “You understand, Mishnoff, that we in the Bureau—and in the Planetary Government, too—are very appreciative of your quick thinking, of your understanding of the situation. This could have developed into something very tragic, had it not been for you. This appreciation will take some tangible form.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But as I said once before, this is something many of us should have thought of. How is it you did?—Now we’ve gone into your background a little. Your coworker, Ching, tells us you have hinted in the past at some serious danger involved in our probability pattern setup, and that you insisted on going out to meet the Germans—although you were obviously frightened. You were anticipating what you actually found, were you not? How did you do it?”

Mishnoff said, confusedly “No, no. That was not in my mind at all; it came as a surprise. I—”

Suddenly, he stiffened. Why not now? They were grateful to him. He had proved that he was a man to be taken into account; one unexpected thing had already happened.

He said, firmly, “There’s something else.”

“Yes?”

(How did one begin?) “There’s no life in the Solar System other than the life on Earth.”

“That’s right,” said Berg benevolently.

“And computation has it that the probability of developing any form of interstellar travel is so low as to be infinitesimal.”

“What are you getting at?”

“That all this is so in this probability/ But there must be some probability patterns in which other life does exist in the Solar System, or in which interstellar drives are developed by dwellers in other star systems.” Berg frowned. “Theoretically.”

“In one of these probabilities, Earth may be visited by such intelligences. If it is a probability pattern in which Earth is inhabited, it won’t affect us; they’ll have no connection with us in Earth-proper. But if it is a probability pattern in which Earth is uninhabited, and they set up some sort of base, they may find, by happenstance, one of our dwelling places.” “Why ours?” demanded Berg, drily. “Why not a dwelling place of the Germans, for instance?”

“Because we spot our dwellings one to a world. The German Earth doesn’t, and probably very few others do. The odds are in favor of us by billions to one. And if extra-terrestrials do find such a dwelling, they’ll investigate and find the route to Earth-proper—a highly-developed, rich world.”

“Not if we turn off the twisting-place,” said Berg.

“Once they know that twisting-places exist, they can construct their own,” said Mishnoff. “A race intelligent enough to travel through space could do that; and from the equipment in the dwelling they would take over, they could easily spot our particular probability.—And then how would we handle extra-terrestrials? They’re not Germans, or other Earths; they would have alien psychologies and motivations. And were not even on our guard. We just keep setting up more and more worlds and increasing the chance every day that—”

His voice had risen in excitement and Berg shouted at him, “Nonsense. This is all ridiculous—”

The buzzer sounded and the communiplate brightened, and showed the face of Ching. Ching’s voice said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but—”

“What is it?” demanded Berg, savagely.

“There’s a man here I don’t know what to do with. He’s drunk or crazy; he complains that his home is surrounded, and that there are things staring through the glass-roof of his garden.”

“Things?” cried Mishnoff.

“Purple things with big red veins, three eyes, and some sort of tentacles instead of hair. They have—” But Mishnoff and Berg didn’t hear the rest; they were staring at each other in sick horror.

Translation Error by Robert Silverberg

The being from Hethivar had come back to Earth to check on the progress of his meddling. But was this the same Earth he had visited fifty years before?

Several strange objects were glittering in the amber depths of his detector plate, and Karn felt a gnawing uneasiness. It was only a few minutes after the ship’s conversion out of the null-continuum onto the world-line of Earth, after the long nullspace voyage from Karn’s distant home world.

Absent-mindedly Karn let his body cells flow into the Earther shape he had worn on his last visit, almost fifty years earlier, while he brooded over the rapidly moving objects in the detector plate. They seemed to be small bodies locked in orbit round the blue-green world below. They made no sense at all. The obvious explanation was that they were artificial planetary satellites, but surely that was impossible! Nine tiny metal moons, each in its own elliptical orbit—implications of that made Karn feel sick. Earth could not have reached this stage along the technological scale yet, he told himself flatly. His computations could not have erred.

Or could they?

Karn felt a chill invading his limbs. He went about the routine business of setting up his one-man ship for a landing, and tried to forget the annoying existence of those nine artificial satellites. Rapidly he converted to planetary drive, switching off the nullspace translator that had brought him along the mega-parsec wide gulf between his home world and Earth, and headed into the descending series of spiraling orbits that would land him.

Artificial satellites, he thought dismally. How could such a thing be?

Karn checked the flow of despair that threatened to overwhelm him. What had been done could be undone again; if Earth somehow had reached the threshold of space despite all his careful work in 1916, he would simply have to take steps to correct that trend. He wondered who it was that had put the satellites up. The Germans, obviously. Scientifically and politically, they would be dominating the Earth in the year—what was it?—1959.

Yes, it had to be the Germans. America had the technologically-inclined minds, but America, slumber-mg behind its hundred eighty years of isolation, would hardly have any interest in conquering space. The Americans hardly knew there were other nations on their own world, let alone whole other worlds.

And no other nations seemed likely candidates for ownership of the accursed satellites. Certainly not France or Britain, crushed under the Kaiser’s heel in 1916. Nor old medieval Russia, comfortably vegetating beneath the Czar. Italy? Austro-Hungary?

Possibly Japan, he thought. The Japanese might have put the things up.

But, Karn realized drearily, neither Germany nor Japan had as much as developed efficient airpower in 1916; it was incredible that in a bare forty-odd years they could have hurled orbiting satellites into space. Such a technological advance could have been stimulated only by war.

And, thought Karn, unless his computations were wrong for the first time in centuries, there had been no war on Earth since 1916, since the Treaty of Dusseldorf. He had carefully arranged things the last time. By keeping America out of the war, he had ensured German triumph, German dominion over all Western Europe. His computations had predicted at least seventy years of peace before the broken revolutionary movement in Russia at last recovered its strength, hurled the Czar from his throne, and challenged Germany’s dominance. On his last visit he had removed the stimuli of immediate war. Yet space satellites circled the Earth.

Something had gone wrong, Karn thought bleakly. But given time he could put things to rights again.

His ship sliced down into the upper layers of the atmosphere. To his surprise, he discovered that the radioactivity of Earth’s atmosphere had increased remarkably in the last forty years. Did that mean that the Earthers had unleashed nuclear energy too?

Something was very wrong. Karn feared he had plenty of work on his hands.

His original plans had called for him to make a landing in America, and for the moment he did not intend to alter those plans. He made the landing under cover of scramblers; forty years ago such pains had been unnecessary, but who knew now what sort of technology these Earthers had developed? For all he knew they had developed a detector system, too. It would be ignominious for him to be blasted out of the sky as a possible attacker. And until he had found out what the state of things was on Earth, it was madness to take risks. He landed under scramblers, totally impervious to detection. A neutrino-detector might have spotted him successfully—but, thought Karn, if they had invented neutrino-detectors, too, he might just as well turn around and go back to Hethivar with the doleful news that Terran invaders would be on their way sooner than anyone had dreamed. The neutrino screen came much later in a planet’s development. Normal races didn’t go from animal-drawn buggies to neutrino screens in fifty years, Karn thought.

Normal races didn’t go from buggies to atomics and orbital satellites in fifty years either, Karn reflected. But who said these Earthers were normal?

He landed the ship in a pleasantly green meadow in the state across the river from New York. He could remember New York, all right, but the other state’s name eluded him for the moment. New Guernsey? New Calais? Ah! New Jersey. That was it. He left the ship parked in New Jersey, having first keyed in the external scrambler that rotated the ship one-quarter turn out of the world line. It wavered and vanished. No one would find it where it was now, though Karn could restore it to the continuum with a minimal outlay of energy whenever he pleased.

His first step was to transport himself autokinetically across the river into New York City. The city had grown somewhat since 1916, but he had expected that. His extrapolation had foretold a building boom trending toward giantism. It was relieving to find one aspect of Earth following expectation.

The Hethivarian hovered invisibly over a Manhattan street long enough to pick out a likely entity for duplication. He would need a working identity while he was here.

He chose a man almost at random from a group of identically-clad humans in gray suits, and entered his mind long enough to duplicate the information he needed. Withdrawing, Karn made the necessary transformation and allowed himself to materialize.

Now he wore contemporary American clothes and the contemporary close-cropped hair style. In the trouser pocket of his flannel suit was a wallet duplicating in every respect that of the unsuspecting individual walking ahead. Karn had an ample supply of currency now—the paper money was smaller in size than it had been, Karn noted—as well as the necessary documents for survival and a ready-made familiarity with current events and contemporary slang.

He had no desire to encroach on the identity of the man he had momentarily entered, and so as he walked along he made minor alterations in the body he wore, thickening the ears, adding a mustache, deepening the facial lines. He increased the body weight by about a fifth. No one would mistake him for the other now.

All right, he thought. He could bluff the rest of the way. Now to catch up on news events since 1916, and see just how I could have been so wrong.

Karn already had a picture of the way Earth should have looked. He had spent several years on the planet already, rushing there in 1914 at the outbreak of war and rapidly healing the breaches until peace became possible two years later.

From his own extrapolations and from the computed results, he had expected the German Empire to be the world’s dominant state, fat with its network of global colonies, replete with conquest and sanely satiated. Germany had all the territory it wanted or needed; it would embark on no campaign of world conquest. The status would remain quo. America, having been kept out of the Great War by Karn’s careful intervention, would have clasped the Monroe Doctrine to itself even more firmly and would have shut itself away from the troublesome world out across the oceans. Russia would be drowning under the yoke of the Czar. Peace would pervade the Earth.

A pleasant peace, an era of good feelings.

Karn’s motive was simple. The first scouts visiting

Earth, more than a century before, had reported a vigorous and appallingly inventive race, just entering its mechanical age. The computed extrapolations had given the Hethivari Network its biggest jolt in a millennium. They showed that Earth would be twice convulsed by war in the next century, each time taking a giant stride up the technological ladder. Without external meddling, the Earthers would leap right into the space age with frightening speed. Probabilities showed a .32 chance that the quarrelsome Earthers would destroy themselves in a hundred years—and a .68 chance that they would not, but instead would channel their dynamic forces and leap outward.

Extrapolations showed that in a mere five centuries the Earthers would be, unless they managed to destroy themselves meanwhile, colonizing the stars—challenging the might of the age-old Hethivari Network itself!

It was a frightening thought indeed. In five centuries the Earthers would accomplish what it had taken Hethivar untold millennia to do. They had to be stopped, for the sake of the galactic balance.

A little study showed that there were two ways to stop the Earthers—and since one, the immediate obliteration of Earth by ultrabomb, was utterly repugnant to the highly civilized Hethivarians, there actually was only one way open. Internal intervention was called for. A trained Hethivarian agent would have to go to Earth and ease the pressures, turn down the flame under the kettle, pull back on the reins.

All that needed to be done was to remove the stimulus of war, which led to technological upspurts. A placid and untroubled Earth might sink into an amiably slothful way of life; the fierce spark that burned there might die down. So Karn was sent, and Karn engineered a peace. Not a lasting peace, of course— Earth would not be ready for that for a long time—but a stopgap, good for sixty or seventy years. When the next crisis arrived, it could be dealt with the same way. And the next, and the next, and the next—and so on into the distant future, if necessary. It was a sound plan. It would keep the Earthers from barking at the gates of the Network for centuries. It would maintain the calm balance of peace that had existed in the universe for so many thousands of years.

But, thought Karn, something had slipped up.

What?

He would have to find a library and check up on recent history. But first, he decided to purchase a newspaper. Entering his borrowed memory, he learned that newspapers could be bought with small silver coins. They were sold along the streets.

Karn pulled change from his pocket, selected a dime, and bought a Times. He scanned the front page rapidly.

Cold terror rippled through him.

Monstrous! he thought in baffled shock.

The headlines screamed incomprehensible things at him.

PRESIDENT CALLS FOR

INCREASE IN FOREIGN AID

RUSSIA TURNS DOWN

NEW PARLEY OFFER

SATELLITE LAUNCHING

POSTPONED ONE WEEK

H-BOMB TEST A SUCCESS,

WHITE HOUSE SAYS

GERMANS COOL TO

REUNIFICATION HINTS

After the first instant of disorientation was over, Karn made the necessary adjustments in his metabolism to calm himself. The newspaper was a journal of a world of nightmares. He found himself near a small park breaking up the busy streets, and on uncertain legs he made his way to a bench and sat heavily down.

Next to him a stubblefaced man said, “You look sick, buddy. Everything O.K.?”

Karn had enough control of himself to find the right words. “My horse didn’t make it, that’s all. Stay away from sure things.”

“A-men, pal!”

Karn smiled to himself. It was good to know he could handle a Terran colloquial conversation so skillfully. But the smile vanished as he returned his attention to the newspaper. He read it carefully and in detail, memorizing blocks of information as he went, and within fifteen minutes he had read his way through from end to end and could begin shaping the scattered data into a pattern.

Everything had gone completely haywire.

Germany was a fifth-rate country now, not the kingpin. Apparently there had been some sort of second Great War in the past few decades. Germany had been beaten and now lay helplessly divided. The powers on Earth today were the United States and Russia, glaring at each other menacingly in an uneasy stalemate.

Technological development had been catastrophically rapid. The infernal creatures had not only developed fission weapons but fusion ones as well, and evidently fission-fusion-fission bombs to boot. Work was progressing on control of thermonuclear energy.

And, spurred on by the threat of atomic war, a vast missile program was under way, and almost as a byproduct of the arms race space was being conquered. The unbelievable Earthers had hoisted more than a dozen space satellites into orbit, and work was advancing on the problem of reaching the Moon by rocket.

Karn’s mind automatically supplied the gloomy extrapolation. The Moon in five years or less, the other planets by the end of the century, then a lull while a nullspace drive is invented, and then the conquest of the stars. Exactly as the first scouts had foreseen a century ago, only faster. How could this be possible? All his work of 1914-16 had gone completely to waste. If anything, things were worse than they would have been if he hadn’t meddled.

None of it made any sense.

Karn knew what he had to do now. First, find a library and discover how this state of affairs had come about. Second, contact Hethivar by subradio and let them know the situation. If ever there were a case for passing the buck, this was it. Something had to be done, and fast. But Karn was in no mood for making top-level decisions. Right now it was all he could do to cling to his sanity in the face of what had happened.

He found the nearest library and located a bulky World History, and scanned it rapidly, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and working forward. When he was finished, he was as close to sheer panic as he had ever been in his long life. It was an effort simply to hang on to his physical manifestation and keep from wavering. It was necessary for him to go through all nine of the Stabilizing Exercises, one after another—a humiliating experience for one who had always prided himself on his coolness.

But yet, what he had discovered could easily have destabilized a lesser man.

Terran history ran precisely as it should have run, right up to 1914. The pressures of industrialization and the stresses of upsurging nationalism had built up conflicts certain to erupt into war, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. That was as expected. In 1914, the war had broken out. That, too, was acceptable. The Hethivari Planners had decided to permit the war to begin, as a sort of catharsis for the Earthers, but to end the war before any serious changes in the Terran way of life could be brought about.

Yet the war had not ended at Dusseldorf in 1916, Karn discovered. Maddeningly, there was no mention of the Allied surrender nor of the Treaty of Dusseldorf. Instead, the Germans had gone ahead and provoked America into entering the war in 1917; almost simultaneously, the Russian revolutionists had successfully overthrown the Czar. It was an unbelievable jolt to read of Germany’s defeat, then of the foolish and suicidal peace settlement of 1919.

Defeated Germany had rebuilt its strength, with a madman named Hitler feeding on wounded national pride. And Russia had blindingly leaped into the twentieth century, shedding its medieval past and becoming an important world power overnight. Then, a second war, America drawn once again—and this time permanently—from its isolationist shell, Germany and its new ally Japan decisively crushed, Russia advancing to dominate half the world, atomic weapons actually used in battle—

Nightmare, Karn thought.

He searched through rows of books, hoping to find but one mention of the Treaty of Dusseldorf, his masterpiece, which had brought all Terran friction to a halt. Not one index had an entry of that sort. Panic assailed him. His grip on the universe tottered.

It was as if he had never come to Earth to end the Great War. Not one of his interventions had as much as survived in the pages of history. And matters stood at a dreadful impasse right now. The Earthers had already conquered space—twenty years ahead of the original extrapolation, a century or more ahead of Karn’s revised estimate.

Earth hovered on the brink of self-destruction. That would be too bad for Earth, Karn thought. But—far worse for the galaxy as a whole—Earth also hovered at the edge of its space age. Nightmare of nightmares!

Hethivar had to be told of this: Immediately, before Karn could make another move. Hethivar had to know.

It was a simple matter to enter a washroom on the third floor of the library building and depart auto-kinetically for the New Jersey meadow. No one had seen him enter the washroom, and so no one would be perturbed by his failure to come out.

Arriving at the meadow with virtual instantaneity, Karn activated the scrambler key long enough for him to enter his ship, then once again returned to concealment. Switching on the subspace communicator, he framed a message to the Hethivari Planners:

Esteemed Sirs:

The report of Karn 1832j4, assigned to Terran Manipulation. Good sirs, matters here have reached an unaccountable state. Manipulation activity of the previous visit has been totally negated. The Earthers have fought a second war and now have developed atomic weapons and orbital satellites. Our worst fears have come to pass. Unless immediate action is taken the Earthers will be knocking at our gates within a century.

I am unable to explain the failure of the previous mission. Obviously we must restudy our entire science of probability. But one conclusion is certain; no amount of manipulation can halt the trends already set in motion. Our only course now is a drastic one. If we are to prevent the Earthers from entering space, we may no longer strive to check war on Earth, but rather now we must foment it.

It would be a simple matter of elementary tactics for me to instigate an atomic war on Earth, considering the uneasy international condition here. Such a war would probably not result in total destruction of Terran life, but would certainly set them back many hundreds of years. Of course, this drastic step contravenes our general ethical pattern, and so I dare not take action of this sort without your permission. Yet, good sirs, surely you will see that the destiny of the galaxy is at stake here. I will await your word.

He added his wavelength, so they would be able to reach him with a reply, and signed off.

There, he thought. That should make them sweat a little l

Subspace communication is not quite instantaneous. There would be a lag of several minutes before the Planners received his message, and it might be hours before they had decided on their reply. Well, a few hours were not likely to make much difference. He sat back to wait.

Touching off the atomic war would be child’s play, he thought. All it took was a spark in the tinder—an atomic explosion obliterating some large American or Russian city, preferably both. Within minutes, jittery defense bases would send the missiles flying. Karn’s nature was such that he found the idea of such a war repugnant. But still, if it was necessary—

He still could not understand how his calculations had gone so far astray. Bitterly he saw that it was a mistake to allow Earth fifty years of nonintervention; there should have been a Hethivarian agent here every moment of the time, instead of leaving the planet alone. Hethivar had complacently relied on its extrapolations. As he looked back, it seemed an enormously shortsighted way of handling the situation. But they had been so confident. Well, hindsight never helped anyone, Karn thought. The only path left was the barbarous but mandatory one of smashing Earth, or rather causing Earth to smash itself.

But—

His reflections were cut off by the whirring sound of the subradio printer. A message coming back so soon? Why, they had barely had time to consider! Obviously they had met at once and voted him carte blanche.

The message said:

Karn, you blasted idiot—

Are you out of your head? Your message makes no sense at all. Your job is to avoid that atomic war, not to touch it off. And what’s this jabber about -preventing the Earthers from entering space? Why should we do that? And why did you change your wavelength?

Since you seem to have taken leave of your sensesy you are to return to Hethivar at once. A replacement will be sent you. And if you meddle destructively in Terran affairs you’ll get immediate personality disruption when we catch you.

If this is your idea of a joke, be advised that ive aren’t amused. And you’d better have a good explanation when you get back here.

Adric

For the Planners

Bewildered, Karn let the message slip through numb fingers. He fought to restabilize himself, and had to run through the nine Stabilizing Exercises twice. This jolt, coming on top of the earlier one, left him reeling. Had the whole universe gone mad? He was dumfounded by Adric’s message. What was he talking about? What did he mean?

Karn pondered a return message. He had gotten no farther than Highly Esteemed Sirs when his mind unmistakably detected Hethivarian life-impressions somewhere on the planet.

His outlines blurred in dazed puzzlement. No other Hethivarian was supposed to be within a parsec of Earth at this time. True, Adric had said something about a replacement being shipped out—but it took many weeks to make the trip from Hethivar to Earth. Who could the stranger be? Cautiously, Karn extended a tendril of perception—

. . . Encountered another mind, a Hethivar mind . . .

. . . Touched . . .

. . . Recoiled in shock.

The stranger was himself !

There had been no doubt about it. Their minds had met for only a microsecond, but yet Karn had learned that the other one was Karn 1832j4, newly arrived on Earth to engage in manipulation. He had touched the surface of that other mind, and its thought-forms were his thought-forms.

Karn gripped the walls of his ship and waited for the universe to stop spinning around him. This was what insanity was like, he thought.

A quiet voice said, “Would you mind telling me just who the devil you are?”

Karn realized the other being had come to him. He smiled and said, “You’re an hallucination. Go away.”

I'm Karn. And so are you, it seems.”

The other wore the body of an Earther, somewhat older, paunchy, balding. But as Karn watched the Earther’s visage gave way, in an instantaneous transition, to Karn’s own. It was not like looking in the mirror, for the mirror reverses an image. This was the actual face of Karn, unfamiliar to him since he had never looked upon it in this fashion.

“We can’t both be Karn,” Karn said hoarsely.

“Have a look,” the stranger replied, and extended his mind once again. Karn was reluctant to blend a second time; he attempted a barrier, but he was too late, and their minds joined. Karn looked deep. He saw his own thoughts laid out as neatly as he kept them, all his own memories of Hethivar. Yes, the other was himself.

But yet not himself. For mingled with the familiar memories were a host of unfamiliar ones. The other had arrived on Earth only minutes before, it seemed. But this was his third or fourth visit. He came to Earth regularly; his job was to protect the planet, to keep it from doing real harm to itself, to guide Earth along into space and into brotherhood with Hethivar.

It was like looking into a distorting mirror.

“You’re here to aid Earth,” Karn said.

“Yes. And you to destroy it. Destroy or else cripple. To keep the Earthers bottled up on their own world, where they can’t harm the Network.”

“And you’re me,” Karn said. “And I’m you. But we’re opposite.”

“Curious, isn’t it? And what’s this Treaty of Dusseldorf that stands out so in your mind?”

Karn said, “I arranged it, in 1916. It was supposed to provide Earth with long-lasting peace.”

“To turn the Earthers into a bunch of sleepy vegetables, you mean. To rob Earth of the inner conflicts that would drive them into space eventually.”

“And you want Earth to spread into space?”

“Of course,” the other Karn said. “That’s been our policy ever since our scouts saw Earth’s potential. They’re potentially the finest thing the universe has ever produced—but they have flaws. So we help them overcome their flaws. You think the Hethivari Network is going to last forever?”

“No, but—”

“So why fight the inevitable? We recognize that the Earthers are potentially the next rulers of the galaxy. O.K. We take it gracefully and bow out. We don’t attempt the hopeless job of trying to hold them down forever, nor do we destroy them now while we think we can. I’m here to simmer down some of their energy —to keep them from blowing themselves up, but to make sure that they rechannel those boiling drives of theirs outward, toward space. They’re heading that way now. The Planners sent me here to make sure they get there.”

Karn had never heard such a recital of insanity before in his life. But he saw clearly what had happened now. He knew why none of the history books mentioned the Treaty of Dusseldorf.

He felt an instant of sick fear. A moment later it subsided as he regained his self-control.

“I’m in trouble,” he said.

I'll bet you are!”

“Somehow I shifted out of my own world line when leaving nullspace. I don't belong here at all.”

Brusquely Karn made his way past the other to the control chamber. Sitting down at the control panel, he ran off a quick recheck of all the factors that had governed his conversion from the null-continuum onto Earth’s world line. It took only a few moments to find the discrepancy. He looked up at the other, his heart leaden.

“Find your mistake?” the other asked.

Karns facial tendrils quivered in self-annoyance and shame. “Yes. I made a translation error of nearly one per cent. I came out along the wrong world line. This isn’t my universe.”

“Of course not.”

“And that explains why everything seemed so wrong here. The Earth I knew would never have sent up space satellites, nor discovered atomics. The Earth I knew would be a peaceful world.”

“A vegetating world,” the other snapped scornfully. Karn scowled at him. “A world that poses no threat to the Hethivari Network, at any rate. I’m glad this isn’t my world line. I’d hate to be alive when the Earthers come swarming over our world and make us slaves. And you’ll have no one to thank but yourselves.” “We’ll take the risk,” the other Karn rejoined sourly. “But what do you plan to do now?”

“Get out of this insane world line and back to my own, as fast as I can. I have important work to do.” “Suppressing Earth’s culture?”

“Ensuring Hethivar’s future,” Karn said thinly. He went on. “I sent a message back to the Planners a little while ago. They thought it came from you, and since it didn’t make any sense they ordered my recall—your recall, that is. You’d better get in touch with them and tell them what happened.”

“I’ll do that. Will you need any help in departing from Earth?”

Karn’s eye-slits narrowed contemptuously. “I’m capable of getting back to my own world line, thanks. It’s not that hard to retrace my steps. And then I can continue my work.”

“Continuing the job of bottling Earth up?”

“In my world line,” Karn said with a trace of impatience, “the preservation of Hethivar is more important to us than the coddling of Earthers. Go ahead and be altruistic—or asinine; same thing. Luckily, my world line doesn’t have to face the consequences of your actions.” He chuckled. “In fact, strictly speaking, you don’t even exist.”

The other said testily, “May I remind you that at the moment we’re both in my world line—and therefore you’re the nonexistent one?”

“I’ll grant the point,” Karn said reluctantly. “But soon I’ll be back in my own continuum—the one in which I negotiated the Treaty of Dusseldorf. The one in which the Hethivari Network will endure for eternity to come, untroubled by Earthers.”

“I wish you luck,” the other said dryly, and was gone.

What had happened to Karn was humiliating and annoying, but not irremediable. He had been guilty of hasty calculating, that was all; nullspace has infinite exits, and he had chosen the exit adjoining his own. Exploring probability-worlds was something Karn preferred to leave to philosophers, poets, and other dreamers; he liked to stick to solid reality, the one real world line. All the others were mere phantoms—including, he thought in relief, the one he had just left. Earth satellites and atomics indeed! Nightmare!

He blasted off from the New Jersey meadow immediately, and, carrying each calculation out to a dozen places this time, retraced his steps, returning the ship to orbit, then converting to nullspace, finally retranslating back into what he hoped was his own world line. He had done the routine arithmetic with scrupulous care this time. He had small fear of a second error.

He thought about the other Earth, the other Karn, as he expertly guided his ship toward Earth a second time. Karn was no narrow fool; he could understand altruism—but not suicidal altruism. It was incredible to hear someone with his own name and identity declaring solemnly and with a straight face that the proper thing to do was to help Earth attain space.

It was fantastic. But, Karn thought, that was what made probability-worlds, after all. Now, in this world line, in the real universe—

He brought the ship down toward Earth and was relieved to see no orbital satellites whirling round the planet. And his radiation detectors picked up no evidence of nuclear explosions; the particle count was comfortably normal for a world that had not yet learned to harness the power of the atom—for a world that never would learn to harness it.

Karn felt warm relief. This was the world of the Treaty of Dusseldorf, at last.

Calmly and confidently, he guided the ship through the upper atmospheric levels, down toward the same pleasantly green New Jersey meadow he had used for a landing area in that other world, the world he now wanted to forget. He landed under scramblers once again; there was quite possibly no need for them, but Karn had always been cautious and now was doubly so.

He noted the time of landing in his records and prepared to leave the ship. Suddenly he sensed another intelligence nearby. For a wild instant he thought it was another Hethivarian, that he had blundered once again and landed in yet another world line than his own. But he calmed himself and realized that this was definitely alien, definitely an Earther—

Entering the ship that was supposed to be undetectable by any method save neutrino-detector.

The Earther took form to Karn’s left, against the inner wall of the ship. He was of medium height, stocky, with untidy reddish hair and coarse features. Shocked, Karn was caught midway between his own physical form and the Earthbody he adopted when dealing with the Earthers. The Hethivarian completed the change numbly, aghast at the presence of the Earther inside his ship.

“You didn’t need to change shapes,” the Earther said mildly. “I can see you perfectly well as you really are. Short and squat, with wavy tendrils on your face, and that big eye in the middle of your skull—”

“How did you get in here?” Karn whispered hoarsely.

“Through the wall, of course. Haven’t you ever heard of intermolecular penetration? It’s a matter of judging the individual magnetic moments, and pushing aside the—”

“Never mind the explanation,” Karn said weakly. ‘I know how it’s done. But I didn’t know Earthers could autokineticize.”

“We haven’t been doing it long. I left the Institute five years ago, and I was in the first graduating class. My name is Henrichs, by the way. Are you really from another star?”

Karn didn’t answer. Terror was sweeping through him, threatening to destabilize him. It was all he could do to hang on to the Earthbody he wore, and not slip back to his own form. And he realized dimly that there was no longer any need for maintaining the pretense, that this was an Earther who could see his real identity, who could autokineticize, who could enter minds as only a Hethivarian could—

Karn’s mind reeled. It must be another world line, he thought frantically. But that’s impossible. I checked everything a dozen times.

He had to know. His mind reached toward the smiling Earther’s—and recoiled.

“You can put up a barrier, too?” Karn asked.

“Of course. Can’t you?”

“I. . . Will you let me enter your mind?” Karn asked.

“What for?”

“I want to find out . . . find out what universe I’m in,” he said in a weak, tired voice.

The Earther lifted the barrier. A moment later, Karn wished he hadn’t.

He saw the history of Earth laid out neatly for him in the Earthers mind, as neatly as it had been put in via some history course long before. The course of events followed expectation; with a touch of smugness Karn saw that the Treaty of Dusseldorf had existed in this world.

The Great War had come to a conclusion in 1916. Karn’s work had been successful; the pressures of war had been removed from Earth. But war, it seemed, was not the only stimulus to development. Karn absorbed the history of the years after 1916 with steadily mounting disbelief.

The Earthers had settled down to lives of peaceful, quiet contemplation. There had been many technological advances, of course; radio had become a commercially practicable affair early in the 1920’s, aviation had been improved, medicine had taken some steps forward. But there was none of the skyrocketing technological achievement of that other world, the one of the Earth satellite programs and atomic power. Atomics was only a hazy concept in the back of the Earther’s mind.

But—behind their national barriers, now safeguarded by the just and wise Treaty—these Earthers had developed other skills. Mental skills. Someone named Chalmers had developed the techniques of autokinetics, someone named Resslin had perfected direct communication. And—Karn was appalled—these Earthers seemed to have carried the skills of teleportation to heights undreamed of even in the Hethivari Network, which had practiced the power for centuries. On Hethivar, no one even considered making an autokinetic jaunt greater than a single planetary diameter —while these Earthers seemed to have made trips all throughout their own solar system in the past few years.

Was the technique different? Or did these Earthers use the same method, but manage it more efficiently, so that they could teleport greater distances? Karn probed deeper. The technique was the same.

That meant—

“You haven’t answered my question,” Henrichs said. “Do you really come from another star? We’ve never really tried hopping as far as even Alpha Centauri yet, but if there’s life out there—”

Karn shuddered. It took weeks for him to make the trip from Hethivar to Earth by nullspace drive. And this Earther was talking about an instantaneous auto-kinetic hop! Inconceivable!

“I’d like to know the name of your star,” Henrichs persisted. “Maybe we can visit it some day. We’re just at the beginning of this thing, you know, but there’s never any telling how far. we can travel.”

Karn felt the Earther probing at his mind, seeking to know the location of the Hethivari Network. In sudden terror he slammed down the barrier, but it was too little and too late; he felt the Earther pounce on the information.

“No, you can’t—”

Karn let his words die away. The Earther was gone.

Karn left Earth several minutes later, sending a radio message ahead to Hethivar that he was returning with very serious news. And very serious it was, indeed.

His manipulations of 1916 had worked out well— too well. Much too well. He had throttled Terran technology so splendidly that their innate drive had forced them to a breakthrough in another, and even more dangerous field. Karn had thought the phantom probability-world was a nightmare; it was a rosy daydream, compared with this!

Teleportation for billions of miles. Unstoppable entry into ships supposedly invisible. Mental barriers that could not be broken. The thought of what these Earthers had accomplished in a few years’ time chilled him—especially when he thought of the years that lay ahead. There had to be limits to what these Earthers could do, but Karn had difficulty visualizing those limits.

He fell into morbid brooding on the return voyage. He realized now that it had been futile to attempt to manipulate the Earthers at all. In that other probability-world, his alter ego had conceded the futility of holding the Earthers back, and instead was encouraging them, leading them on to the normal mechanical conquest of space.

Karn and his world had tried a different method, and succeeded so well that they had perhaps hastened their own downfall by centuries. He pictured a cosmos full of these Terrans, jaunting from world to world while the Hethivarians lumbered along in clumsy nullspace ships—

It took six weeks for him to reach his home world again. From fifty thousand miles up it looked magnificent; he thrilled at the sight of the sweeping pastel-shaded towers standing nobly in the red-and-gold sunlight of mid-afternoon. He thumbed for direct contact with the Planners. At this distance, telepathy was impossible for him; he would have to radio.

Adric answered. “About time we heard from you, Karn.”

“A thousand pardons, Esteemed One. But the news I bring—frightful! Despite our best attempt at holding them back, the Earthers have reached space anyway.” Karn scowled glumly. He and all his people had failed. But had the task been possible in the first place? Perhaps the Earthers, driven by some force beyond all logic, could not have been held back. Trying to stop them was like attempting to hold back the sea with a toothpick. “They’ve developed some form of autokinetics that lets them travel huge distances,” Karn went on. “I greatly fear—”

Adric interrupted acidly. “Karn, you blitherer, shut up and bring your ship down to land!”

“Esteemed One, I hope you don’t blame me for—”

“I’m not blaming anyone for what happened,” Adric said. The Noble Planner sounded tired, weary, defeated. “But what you’re telling me isn’t any news. I know all about it.”

“You know—”

“Yes,” the Planner said. The first Terran Ambassador showed up here six weeks ago. He didn’t need a ship to get here.” In an expressionless voice the highest lord of the Hethivari Network said, “We signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Earthers weeks ago. We signed it on their terms.”

Delenda Est by Poul Anderson

Delenda est Carthago, cried the Roman Senator Cato the Elder in 157 B.c., and in every speech he made for the next few years: “Carthage must be destroyed!” And in time Rome’s great commercial rival, the North African city of Carthage, was destroyed—making possible the development of the vast Roman Empire.

Here Poul Anderson, three times a Hugo winner and one of science fiction’s most inventive writers, speculates on the world that might have evolved if Carthage had not been destroyed. The story is one of four that he wrote in the 1950’s, dealing with the exploits of the Time Patrol, a secret corps that roams the eons diligently attempting to prevent such changes in the natural flow of human history. Many have tackled such a theme, but I think Anderson’s Time-Patrol stories are likely to hold preeminence for years to come.

The hunting is good in Europe 40,000 years ago, and the winter sports are unexcelled anywhen. So the Time Patrol, always solicitous for its highly trained personnel, maintains a lodge in the Pleistocene Pyrenees.

Agent Unattached Manse Everard (American, mid-Twentieth a.d.) stood on the glassed-in veranda and looked across ice-blue distances, toward the northern slopes where the mountains fell off into woodland, marsh and tundra. He was a big man, fairly young, with heavy homely features that had once encountered a German rifle butt and never quite straightened out again, gray eyes, and a brown crew cut. He wore loose green trousers and tunic of Twenty-Third-Century insulsynth, boots handmade by a Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian, and smoked a foul old briar of indeterminate origin. There was a vague restlessness about him, and he ignored the noise from within, where half a dozen agents were drinking and talking and playing the piano.

A Cro-Magnon guide went by across the snow-covered yard, a tall handsome fellow dressed rather like an Eskimo (why had romance never credited paleolithic man with enough sense to wear jacket, pants, and footgear in a glacial period?), his face painted, one of the steel knives which had hired him at his belt. The Patrol could act quite freely, this far back in time; there was no danger of upsetting the past, for the metal would rust away and the strangers be forgotten in a few centuries. The main nuisance was that female agents from the more libertine periods were always having affairs with the native hunters.

Piet van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early Twenty-Fourth a.d.), a slim dark young man with good looks and a smooth technique that gave the guides some stiff competition, joined Everard, and they stood for a moment in companionable silence. He was also Unattached, on call to help out in any milieu, and had worked with the American before. They had taken their vacation together.

He spoke first, in Temporal, the synthetic language of the Patrol. “I hear they’ve spotted a few mammoth near Toulouse.” The city would not be built for a long time, but habit was powerful.

I've got one,” said Everard impatiently. ‘I've also been skiing and mountain climbing and watched the native dances.”

Van Sarawak nodded, took out a cigaret, and puffed it into lighting. The bones stood out in his lean brown face as he sucked in the smoke. “A pleasant interlude,” he agreed, “but after a time the outdoor life begins to pall.”

There were still two weeks of their furlough left. In theory, since he could return almost to the moment of departure, an agent could take indefinite vacations; but actually he was supposed to devote a certain percentage of his probable lifetime to the job. (They never told you when you were scheduled to die—it wouldn’t have been certain anyhow, time being mutable. One perquisite of an agent’s office was the longevity treatment of the Daneelians, ca. one million a.d., the supermen who were the shadowy chiefs of the Patrol.)

“What I would enjoy,” continued van Sarawak, “is some bright lights, music, girls who’ve never heard of time travel— ”

“Done!” said Everard.

“Augustan Rome?” asked the other eagerly. “I’ve never been there. I could get a hypno on language and customs here.”

Everard shook his head. “It’s overrated. Unless we want to go way upstairs, the most glorious decadence available is right in my own milieu, say New York. If you know the right phone numbers, and I do.”

Van Sarawak chuckled. “I know a few places in my own sector,” he replied, “but by and large, a pioneer society has little use for the finer arts of amusement. Very good, let’s be off to New York, in—when?”

“1955. My public persona is established there already.”

They grinned at each other and went off to pack. Everard had foresightedly brought along some mid-Twentieth garments in his friend’s size.

Throwing clothes and razor into a small handbag, the American wondered if he could keep up with van Sarawak. He had never been a high-powered roisterer, and would hardly have known how to buckle a swash anywhere in space-time. A good book, a bull session, a case of beer, that was about his speed. But even the soberest of men must kick over the traces occasionally.

Briefly, he reflected on all he had seen and done. Sometimes it left him with a dreamlike feeling—that it should have happened to him, plain Manse Everard, engineer and ex-soldier; that his ostensible few months’ work for the Engineering Studies Company should only have been a blind for a total of years’ wandering through time.

Travel into the past involves an infinite discontinuity; it was the discovery of such a principle which made the travel possible in 19352 a.d. But that same discontinuity in the conservation-of-energy law permitted altering history. Not very easily; there were too many factors, the plenum tended to “return” to its “original” shape. But it could be done, and the man who changed the past which had produced him, though unaffected himself, wiped out the entire future. It had never even been; something else existed, another train of events. To protect themselves, the Daneelians had recruited the Patrol from all ages, a giant secret organization to police the time lanes. It gave assistance to legitimate traders, scientists, and tourists —that was its main function in practice; but always there was the watching for signs which meant that some mad or ambitious or careless traveler was tampering with a key event in space-time.

If it ever happened, if anyone ever got away with it . . . The room was comfortably heated, but Everard shivered. He and all his world would vanish, would not have existed at all. Language and logic broke down in the face of the paradox.

He dismissed the thought and went to join Piet van Sarawak.

Their little two-place scooter was waiting in the garage. It looked vaguely like a motorcycle mounted on skids, and an antigravity unit made it capable of flight. But the controls could be set for any place on Earth and any moment of time.

“Auprès de ma blonde

Quil fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,

Auprès de ma blonde

Quil fait bon dormir!”

Van Sarawak sang it aloud, his breath steaming from him in the frosty air, as he hopped onto the rear saddle. Everard laughed. “Down, boy!”

“Oh, come now,” warbled the younger man. “It is a beautiful continuum, a gay and gorgeous cosmos. Hurry up this machine.”

Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to write a new history. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better. . . .

He set the controls for the Engineering Studies warehouse, a good confidential place to emerge. Thereafter they’d go to his apartment, and then the fun could start.

“I trust you’ve said goodby to all your lady friends here,” he murmured.

“Oh, most gallantly, I assure you,” answered van Sarawak. “Come along there. You’re as slow as molasses on Pluto. For your information, this vehicle does not have to be rowed home.”

Everard shrugged and threw the main switch. The garage blinked out of sight. But the warehouse did not appear around them.

For a moment, pure shock held them unstirring.

The scene registered in bits and pieces. They had materialized a few inches above ground level—only later did Everard think what would have happened if they’d come out in a solid object—and hit the pavement with a teeth-rattling bump. They were in some kind of square, a fountain jetting nearby. Around it, streets led off between buildings six to ten stories high, concrete, wildly painted and ornamented. There were automobiles, big clumsy-looking things of no recognizable type, and a crowd of people.

“Ye gods!” Everard glared at the meters. The scooter had landed them in lower Manhattan, 23 October 1955, at 11:30 a.m. There was a blustery wind carrying dust and grime, the smell of chimneys, and—

Van Sarawak’s sonic stunner jumped into his fist. The crowd was milling away from them, shouting in some babble they couldn’t understand. It was a mixed lot: tall fair roundheads, with a great deal of red hair; a number of Amerinds; half-breeds in all combinations. The men wore loose colorful blouses, tartan kilts, a sort of Scotch bonnet, shoes and high stockings. Their hair was long and many favored drooping mustaches. The women had full ankle-length skirts and hair coiled under hooded cloaks. Both sexes went in for jewelry, massive bracelets and necklaces.

“What happened?” whispered the Venusian. “Where are we?”

Everard sat rigid. His mind clicked over, whirling through all the eras he had known or read about. Industrial culture—those looked like steam cars, but why the sharp prows and figureheads?—coal-burning— post-nuclear Reconstruction? No, they hadn’t worn kilts then, and they still spoke English—

It didn’t fit. There was no such milieu recorded!

“We’re getting out of here!”

His hands were on the controls when the big man jumped him. They went over on the pavement in a rage of fists and feet. Van Sarawak fired and sent someone else down unconscious; then he was seized from behind. The mob piled on top of them both, and things became hazy.

Everard had a confused impression of men in shining coppery breastplates and helmets, who shoved a billy-swinging way through the riot. He was fished out and supported while handcuffs were snapped on his wrists. Then he and van Sarawak were searched and hustled off to a big vehicle. The Black Maria is much the same in all times.

He didn’t come out of it till they were in a damp and chilly cell with an iron-barred door.

Name of a flame!” The Venusian slumped on a wooden cot and put his face in his hands.

Everard stood at the door, looking out. All he could see was a narrow concrete hall and the cell across it. The map of Ireland stared cheerfully through those bars and called something unintelligible.

“What’s happened?” Van Sarawak’s slim body shuddered.

“I don’t know,” said Everard very slowly. “I just don’t know. That machine was supposed to be foolproof, but maybe were bigger fools than they allowed for.”

“There’s no such place as this,” said van Sarawak desperately. “A dream?” He pinched himself and lifted a rueful smile. His lip was cut and swelling, and he had the start of a gorgeous shiner. “Logically, my friend, a pinch is no test of reality, but it has a certain reassuring effect.”

“I wish it didn’t,” said Everard.

He grabbed the rails, and the chain between his wrists rattled thinly. “Could the controls have been off, in spite of everything? Is there any city, anywhen on Earth—because I’m damned sure this is Earth, at least—any city, however obscure, which was ever like this?”

“Not to my knowledge,” whispered van Sarawak.

Everard hung onto his sanity and rallied all the mental training the Patrol had ever given him. That included total recall . . . and he had studied history, even the history of ages he had never seen, with a thoroughness that should have earned him several Ph.D.’s.

“No,” he said at last. “Kilted brachycephalic whites, mixed up with Indians and using steam-driven automobiles, haven’t happened.”

“Coordinator Stantel V,” said van Sarawak faintly. “Thirty-eighth century. The Great Experimenter—colonies reproducing past societies—”

“Not any like this,” said Everard.

The truth was growing in him like a cancer, and he would have traded his soul to know otherwise. It took all the will and strength he had to keep from screaming and bashing his brains out against the wall.

“We’ll have to see,” he said in a flat tone.

A policeman—Everard supposed they were in the hands of the law—brought them a meal and tried to talk to them. Van Sarawak said the language sounded Celtic, but he couldn’t make out more than a few words. The meal wasn’t bad.

Toward evening, they were led off to a washroom and got cleaned up under official guns. Everard studied the weapons: eight-shot revolvers and long-barreled rifles. The facilities and the firearms, as well as the smell, suggested a technology roughly equivalent to the 19th century. There were gas lights, and Everard noticed that the brackets were cast in an elaborate intertwined pattern of vines and snakes.

On the way back, he spied a couple of signs on the walls. The script was obviously Semitic, but though van Sarawak had some knowledge of Hebrew through dealing with the Jewish colonies on Venus, he couldn’t read it.

Locked in again, they saw the other prisoners led off to do their own washing—a surprisingly merry crowd of bums, toughs, and drunks. “Seems we get special treatment,” remarked van Sarawak.

“Hardly astonishing,” said Everard. “What would you do with total strangers who appeared out of nowhere and used unheard-of weapons?”

Van Sarawak’s face turned to him with an unaccustomed grimness. “Are you thinking what I am thinking?” he asked.

“Probably.”

The Venusian’s mouth twisted, and horror rode his voice: “Another time line. Somebody has managed to change history.”

Everard nodded. There was nothing else to do.

They spent an unhappy night. It would have been a boon to sleep, but the other cells were too noisy. Discipline seemed to be lax here. Also, there were bedbugs.

After a bleary breakfast, Everard and van Sarawak were allowed to wash again and shave. Then a ten-man guard marched them into an office and planted itself around the walls.

They sat down before a desk and waited. It was some time till the big wheels showed up. There were two: a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked man in cuirass and green tunic, presumably the chief of police; and a lean, hard-faced half-breed, gray-haired but black-mustached, wearing a blue tunic, a tarn o’shanter, and insignia of rank—a golden bull’s head. He would have had a certain hawklike dignity had it not been for the skinny hairy legs beneath his kilt. He was followed by younger men, armed and uniformed, who took up their places behind him as he sat down.

Everard leaned over and whispered: “The military, I’ll bet. We seem to be of interest.”

Van Sarawak nodded sickly.

The police chief cleared his throat with conscious importance and said something to the—general? The latter turned impatiently and addressed himself to the prisoners. He barked his words out with a clarity that helped Everard get the phonemes, but with a manner that was not exactly reassuring.

Somewhere along the line, communication would have to be established. Everard pointed to himself. “Manse Everard,” he said. Van Sarawak followed the lead and introduced himself similarly.

The general started and went into a huddle with the chief. Turning back, he snapped: “Yrn Cimberland?

“No spikka da Inglees,” said Everard.

“Gothland? Sveal Nairobi Teutonach?"

“Those names—if they are names—they sound a little Germanic, don’t they?” muttered van Sarawak.

“So do our names, come to think of it,” answered Everard tautly. “Maybe they think were Germans.” To the general: “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” Blankness rewarded him. “Taler ni svensk? Niederlands? Dönsk tunga? Parlez-vous français? Goddammit, ¿habla usted español?”

The police chief cleared his throat again and pointed to himself. “Cadwallader Mac Barca,” he said. The general hight Cynyth ap Ceorn.

“Celtic, all right,” said Everard. Sweat prickled under his arms. “But just to make sure—” He pointed inquiringly at a few other men, being rewarded with monickers like Hamilcar ap Angus, Asshur yr Cathlann, and Finn O’Carthia. “No . . . there’s a distinct Semitic element here too. That fits in with their alphabet—”

Van Sarawak’s mouth was dry. “Try Classical languages,” he urged harshly. “Maybe we can find out where this time went awry.”

"Loquerisne latine?" That drew a blank. “Ελλενιξυσ?"

Everard shook his head. “They’ve at least heard of Greek,” he said slowly. He tried a few more words, but no one knew the tongue.

Ap Ceorn growled something and spoke to one of his men, who bowed and went out. There was a long silence.

Everard found himself losing personal fear. He was in a bad spot, yes, and might not live very long; but anything that happened to him was ridiculously insignificant compared to what had been done to the entire world.

God in Heaven! To the universe!

He couldn’t grasp it. Sharp in his mind rose the land he knew, broad plains and tall mountains and prideful cities. There was the grave image of his father, and yet he remembered being a small child and lifted up skyward while his father laughed beneath him. And his mother—they had a good life together, those two.

There had been a girl he knew in college, the sweetest little wench a man could ever have been privileged to walk in the rain with; and there was Bernie Aaron-son, the long nights of beer and smoke and talk; Phil Brackney, who had picked him out of the mud in France when machine guns were raking a ruined field; Charlie and Mary Whitcomb, high tea and a low little fire in Victoria’s London; a dog he had once had; the austere cantos of Dante and the ringing thunder of Shakespeare; the glory which was York Minster and the Golden Gate Bridge—Christ, a man’s life, and the lives of who knew how many billions of human creatures, toiling and suffering and laughing and going down into dust to leave their sons behind them—It had never been!

He shook his head, dazed with grief, and sat devoid of real understanding.

The soldier came back with a map and spread it out on the desk. Ap Ceorn gestured curtly, and Everard and van Sarawak bent over it.

Yes . . . Earth, a Mercator projection, though eidetic memory showed that the mapping was rather crude. The continents and islands were there in bright colors, but the nations were something else.

“Can you read those names, Van?”

“I can make a guess, on the basis of the Hebraic alphabet,” said the Venusian. He read out the alien words, filling in the gaps of his knowledge with what sounded logical.

North America down to about Colombia was Ynys yr Afallon, seemingly one country divided into states. South America was a big realm, Huy Braseal, with some smaller countries whose names looked Indian. Australasia, Indonesia, Borneo, Burma, eastern India, and a good deal of the Pacific belonged to Hinduraj. Afghanistan and the rest of India were Punjab. Han included China, Korea, Japan, and eastern Siberia. Littorn owned the rest of Russia and reached well into Europe. The British Isles were Brittys, France and the Low Countries Gallis, the Iberian peninsula Celtan. Central Europe and the Balkans were divided into many small states, some of which had Hunnish-looking names. Switzerland and Austria made up Helve ti; Italy was Cimberland; the Scandinavian peninsula was split down the middle, Svea in the north and Gothland in the south. North Africa looked like a confederacy, reaching from Senegal to Suez and nearly to the equator under the name of Carthagalann; the southern continent was partitioned among small countries, many of which had purely African titles. The Near East held Parthia and Arabia.

Van Sarawak looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

Ap Ceorn snarled a question and waved his finger about. He wanted to know where they were from.

Everard shrugged and pointed skyward. The one thing he could not admit was the truth. He and van Sarawak had agreed to claim they were from some other planet, since this world hardly had space travel.

Ap Ceorn spoke to the chief, who nodded and replied. The prisoners were returned to their cell.

“And now what?” Van Sarawak slumped on his cot and stared at the floor.

“We play along,” said Everard grayly. “We do anything to get at our scooter and escape. Once were free, we can take stock.”

“But what happened?”

“I don’t know, I tell you! Offhand it looks as if something upset the Roman Empire and the Celts took over, but I couldn’t say what it was.” Everard prowled the room. There was a bitter determination growing in him.

“Remember your basic theory,” he said. “Events are the result of a complex. That’s why it’s so hard to change history. If I went back to, say, the Middle Ages, and shot one of FDR’s Dutch forebears, he’d still be born in the Twentieth Century—because he and his genes resulted from the entire world of his ancestors, and there’d have been compensation. The first case I ever worked on was an attempt to alter things in the Fifth Century; we spotted evidence of it in the Twentieth, and went back and stopped the scheme.

“But every so often, there must be a really key event. Only with hindsight can we tell what it was, but some one happening was a nexus of so many world lines that its outcome was decisive for the whole future.

“Somehow, for some reason, somebody has ripped up one of those events back in the past.”

“No more Hesperus City,” whispered van Sarawak. “No more sitting by the canals in the blue twilight, no more Aphrodite vintages, no more—did you know I had a sister on Venus?”

“Shut up!” Everard almost shouted it. “I know. What counts is what to do.

“Look,” he went on after a moment, “the Patrol and the Daneelians are wiped out. But such of the Patrol offices and resorts as antedate the switchpoint haven’t been affected. There must be a few hundred agents we can rally.”

“If we can get out of here.”

“We can find that key event and stop whatever interference there was with it. We’ve got to!”

“A pleasant thought,” mumbled van Sarawak, “but—”

Feet tramped outside, and a key clicked in the lock. The prisoners backed away. Then, all at once, van Sarawak was bowing and beaming and spilling gallantries. Even Everard had to gape.

The girl who entered in front of three soldiers was a knockout. She was tall, with a sweep of rusty-red hair past her shoulders to the slim waist; her eyes were green and alight, her face came from all the Irish colleens who had ever lived, the long white dress was snug around a figure meant to stand on the walls of Troy. Everard noticed vaguely that this time line used cosmetics, but she had small need of them. He paid no attention to the gold and amber of her jewelry, or to the guns behind her.

She smiled, a little timidly, and spoke: “Can you understand me? It was thought you might know Greek—”

The language was classical rather than modern. Everard, who had once had a job in Alexandrine times, could follow it through her accent if he paid close heed—which was inevitable anyway.

“Indeed I do,” he replied, his words stumbling over each other.

“What are you snakkering?” demanded van Sarawak.

“Ancient Greek,” said Everard.

“It would be,” mourned van Sarawak. His despair seemed to have vanished, and his eyes bugged.

Everard introduced himself and his companion. The girl said her name was Deirdre Mac Morn. “Oh, no,” groaned van Sarawak. “This is too much. Manse, you’ve got to teach me Greek, and fast.”

“Shut up,” said Everard. “This is serious business.”

“Well, but why should you have all the pleasure—”

Everard ignored him and invited the girl to sit down. He joined her on a cot, while the other Patrolman hovered unhappily close. The guards kept their weapons ready.

“Is Greek still a living language?” asked Everard.

“Only in Parthia, and there it is most corrupt,” said Deirdre. “I am a Classical scholar, among other things. Saorann ap Ceorn is my uncle, so he asked me to see if I could talk with you. There are not many in Afallon who know the Attic tongue.”

“Well . . .” Everard suppressed a silly grin. “I am most grateful to your uncle.”

Her eyes rested gravely on him. “Where are you from? And how does it happen that you speak only Greek, of all known languages?”

“I speak Latin too.”

“Latin?” she frowned briefly. “Oh, yes. The Roman speech, was it not? Im afraid you’ll find no one who knows much about it.”

“Greek will do,” said Everard.

“But you have not told me whence you came,” she insisted.

Everard shrugged. “We’ve not been treated very courteously,” he hinted.

“Oh . . . I’m sorry.” It seemed genuine. “But our people are so excitable—especially now, with the international situation what it is. And when you two appeared out of thin air—”

Everard nodded grimly. The international situation? That had a familiar ring. “What do you mean?” he inquired.

“Oh, surely ... of course you know. With Huy Bra-seal and Hinduraj about to go to war, and all of us wondering what will happen—It is not easy to be a small power.”

“A small power? But I saw a map, and Afallon looked big enough to me.”

“We wore ourselves out two hundred years ago, in the great war with Littorn. Now none of our confederated states can agree on a single policy.” Deirdre looked directly into his eyes. “What is this ignorance of yours?”

Everard swallowed and said: “Were from another world.”

“What?”

“Yes. A . . . planet of Sirius.”

“But Sirius is a star!”

“Of course.”

“How can a star have planets?”

“How—But it does! A star is a sun like—”

Deirdre shrank back and made a sign with her finger. “The Great Baal aid us,” she whispered. “Either you are mad, or—The stars are mounted in a crystal sphere.”

Oh, no! Everard asked slowly : “What of the planets you can see—Mars and Venus and—”

“I know not those names. If you mean Moloch, Ashtoreth, and the rest, of course they are worlds like ours. One holds the spirits of the dead, one is the home of witches, one—”

All this and steam cars too. Everard smiled shakily. “If you’ll not believe me, then what do you think?” Deirdre regarded him with large eyes. “I think you must be sorcerers,” she said.

There was no answer to that. Everard asked a few weak questions, but learned little more than that this city was Catuvellaunan, a trading and manufacturing center; Deirdre estimated its population at two million, and that of all Afallon at fifty millions, but it was only a guess—they didn’t take censuses in this world.

The prisoners’ fate was also indeterminate. Their machine and other possessions had been sequestrated by the military, but nobody dared to monkey with them, and treatment of the owners was being hotly debated. Everard got the impression that all government, including the leadership of the armed forces, was a sloppy process of individualistic wrangling. Afallon itself was the loosest of confederacies, built out of former nations—Brittic colonies and Indians who had adopted white culture—all jealous of their rights. The old Mayan Empire, destroyed in a war with Texas (Tehannach) and annexed, had not forgotten its time of glory, and sent the most rambunctious delegates of all to the Council of Suffetes.

The Mayans wanted an alliance with Huy Braseal, perhaps out of friendship for fellow Indians. The West Coast states, fearful of Hinduraj, were toadies of the Southeast Asian empire. The Middle West—of course—was isolationist, and the Eastern states were torn every which way but inclined to follow the lead of Brittys.

When he gathered that slavery existed here, though not on racial lines, Everard wondered briefly if the guilty time travelers might not have been Dixiecrats.

Enough! He had his own and Van’s necks to think about. “We are from Sirius,” he declared loftily. “Your ideas about the stars are mistaken. We came as peaceful explorers, and if we are molested there will be others of our kind to take vengeance.”

Deirdre looked so unhappy that he felt conscience-stricken. “Will you spare the children?” she whispered. “They had nothing to do with it.” Everard could imagine the frightful vision in her head, helpless captives led off in chains to the slave markets of a world of witches.

“There need be no trouble at all if we are released and our property returned,” he said.

“I shall speak to my uncle,” she promised, “but even if I can sway him, he is only one on the Council. The thought of what your weapons could mean if we had them has driven men mad.”

She rose. Everard clasped her hands, they lay warm and soft in his, and smiled crookedly at her. “Buck up, kid,” he said in English. She shivered and made the hex sign again.

“Well,” said van Sarawak when they were alone, “what did you find out?” After being told, he stroked his chin and murmured thoughtfully: “That was one sweet little collection of sinusoids. There could be worse worlds than this.”

“Or better,” said Everard bleakly. “They don’t have atomic bombs, but neither do they have penicillin. It’s not our job to play God.”

“No . . . no, I suppose not.” The Venusian sighed.

They spent a restless day. Night had fallen when lanterns glimmered in the corridor and a military guard unlocked the cell. The prisoners’ handcuffs were removed, and they were led silently to a rear exit. A car waited, with another for escort, and the whole troop drove wordlessly off.

Catuvellaunan did not have outdoor lighting, and there wasn’t much night traffic. Somehow, that made the sprawling city unreal in the dark. Everard leaned back and concentrated on the mechanics of his vehicle. Steam-powered, as he had guessed, burning powdered coal, rubber-tired wheels, a sleek body with a sharp nose and a serpent figurehead; the whole simple to operate but not too well designed. Apparently this world had gradually developed a rule-of-thumb mechanics, but no systematic science worth mentioning.

They crossed a clumsy iron bridge to Long Island, here as at home a residential section for the well-to-do. Their speed was high despite the dimness of their oil-lamp headlights, and twice they came near having an accident—no traffic signals, and seemingly no drivers who did not hold caution in contempt.

Government and traffic . . . hm. It all looked French, somehow, and even in Everard’s own Twentieth Century France was largely Celtic. He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditional attitudes so ancient that they were unconsciously accepted. A Western world in which the Celts had become dominant, the Germanic peoples reduced to two small outposts ... Yes, look at the Ireland of home; or recall how tribal politics had queered Vercingetorix’s revolt. . . . But what about Littorn? Wait a minute! In his early Middle Ages, Lithuania had been a powerful state; it had held off Germans, Poles, and Russians alike for a long time, and hadn’t even taken Christianity till the Fifteenth Century. Without German competition, Lithuania might very well have advanced eastward—

In spite of the Celtic political instability, this was a world of large states, fewer separate nations than Everard’s. That argued an older society. If his own Western civilization had developed out of the decaying Roman Empire about, say, 600 a.d., the Celts in this world must have taken over earlier than that.

Everard was beginning to realize what had happened to Rome. . . .

The cars drew up before an ornamental gate set in a long stone wall. There was an interchange with two armed guards wearing the livery of a private estate and the thin steel collars of slaves. The gate was opened, and the cars went along a graveled driveway between trees and lawns and hedgerows. At the far end, almost on the beach, stood a house. Everard and van Sarawak were gestured out and led toward it.

It was a rambling wooden structure. Gas lamps on the porch showed it painted in gaudy stripes; the gables and beam-ends were carved into dragon heads. Behind it murmured the sea, and there was enough starlight for Everard to make out a ship standing in close—presumably a freighter, with a tall smokestack and a figurehead.

Light glowed through the windows. A slave butler admitted the party. The interior was paneled in dark wood, also carved, the floors thickly carpeted. At the end of the hall there was a living room with overstuffed furniture, several paintings in a stiff conventional style, and a merry blaze in a great stone fireplace.

Saorann Cynyth ap Ceorn sat in one chair, Deirdre in another. She laid aside a book as they entered and rose, smiling. The officer puffed a cigar and glowered.

There were some words swapped, and the guards disappeared. The butler fetched in wine on a tray, and Deirdre invited the Patrolmen to sit down.

Everard sipped from his glass—the wine was an excellent Burgundy type—and asked bluntly: “Why are we here?”

Deirdre smiled, dazzlingly this time, and chuckled. “Surely you find it more pleasant than the jail.”

“Oh, yes. But I still want to know. Are we being released?”

“You are . . .” She hunted for a diplomatic answer, but there seemed to be too much frankness in her. “You are welcome here, but may not leave the estate. We had hopes you could be persuaded to help us. There would be rich reward.”

“Help? How?”

“By showing our artisans and wizards the spells to make more machines and weapons like your own.”

Everard sighed. It was no use trying to explain. They didn’t have the tools to make the tools to make what was needed, but how could he get that across to a folk who believed in witchcraft?

“Is this your uncle’s home?” he asked.

“No,” said Deirdre. “It is my own. I am the only child of my parents, who were wealthy nobles and died last year.”

Ap Ceorn snapped something, and Deirdre translated with a worried frown: “The tale of your magical advent is known to all Catuvellaunan by now; and that includes the foreign spies. We hope you can remain hidden from them here.”

Everard, remembering the pranks Axis and Allies had played in little neutral nations like Portugal, shivered. Men made desperate by approaching war would not likely be as courteous as the Afallonians.

“What is this conflict going to be about?” he inquired.

“The control of the Icenian Ocean, of course. Particularly, certain rich islands we call Yyns yr Lyon-nach—” Deirdre got up in a single flowing movement and pointed out Hawaii on a globe. “You see,” she went on earnestly, “as I told you, the western countries like Brittys, Gallis, and ourselves, fighting Littorn, have worn each other out. Our domains have shrunken, and the newer states like Huy Braseal and Hinduraj are now expanding and quarreling. They will draw in the lesser nations, for it is not only a clash of ambitions but of systems—the monarchy of Hinduraj and the sun-worshipping theocracy of Huy Braseal.”

“What is your religion?” asked Everard.

Deirdre blinked. The question seemed almost meaningless to her. “The more educated people think that there is a Great Baal who made all the lesser gods,” she answered at last, slowly. “But naturally, we pay our respects to the foreign gods too, Littorn’s Perkunas and Czernebog, the Sun of the southerners, Wotan Ammon of Cimberland, and so on. They are very powerful.”

I see.. . .

Ap Ceorn offered cigars and matches. Van Sarawak inhaled and said querulously: “Damn it, this would have to be a time line where they don’t speak any language I know.” He brightened. “But I’m pretty quick to learn, even without hypnos. I’ll get Deirdre to teach

“You and me both,” said Everard hastily. “But listen, Van—” He reported what had been said.

“Hm.” The younger man rubbed his chin. “Not so good, eh? Of course, if they'd just let us at our scooter, we could take off at once. Why not play along with them?”

“They're not such fools,” answered Everard. “They may believe in magic, but not in undiluted altruism.” “Funny . . . that they should be so backward intellectually, and still have combustion engines.”

“No. It's quite understandable. That's why I asked about their religion. It's always been purely pagan; even Judaism seems to have disappeared. As White-head pointed out, the medieval idea of one almighty God was important to science, by inculcating the notion of lawfulness in nature. And Mumford added that the early monasteries were probably responsible for the mechanical clock—a very basic invention—because of having regular hours for prayer. Clocks seem to have come late in this world.” Everard smiled wryly, but there was a twisting sadness in him. “Odd to talk that way. Whitehead and Mumford never lived. If Jesus did, his message has been lost.”

“Still—”

“Just a minute.” Everard turned to Deirdre. “When was Afallon discovered?”

“By white men? In the year 4827.”

“Um . . . when does your reckoning start from?” Deirdre seemed immune to further startlement. “The creation of the world—at least, the date some philosophers have given. That is 5959 years ago.”

4004 b.c. . . . Yes, definitely a Semitic element in this culture. The Jews had presumably gotten their traditional date from Babylon; but Everard doubted that the Jews were the Semites in question here.

“And when was steam (pnenma) first used to drive engines?”

“About a thousand years ago. The great Druid Boroihme O’Fiona—”

“Never mind.” Everard smoked his cigar and mulled his thoughts for a while. Then he turned back to van Sarawak.

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” he said. “The Gauls were anything but the barbarians most people think. They’d learned a lot from Phoenician traders and Greek colonists, as well as from the Etruscans in Cisalpine Gaul. A very energetic and enterprising race. The Romans, on the other hand, were a stolid lot, with few intellectual interests. There was very little technological progress in our world till the Dark Ages, when the Empire had been swept out of the way.

“In this history, the Romans vanished early and the Gauls got the power. They started exploring, building better ships, discovering America in the 9th century. But they weren’t so far ahead of the Indians that those couldn’t catch up . . . even be stimulated to build empires of their own, like Huy Braseal today. In the 11th century, the Celts began tinkering with steam engines. They seem to have got gunpowder too, maybe from China, and to have made several other inventions; but it’s all been cut-and-dry, with no basis of real science.”

Van Sarawak nodded. “I suppose you’re right. But what did happen to Rome?”

“I’m not sure . . . yet . . . but our key point is back there somewhere.”

Everard returned to Deirdre. “This may surprise you,” he said smoothly. “Our people visited this world about 2500 years ago. That’s why I speak Greek but don’t know what has occurred since. I would like to find out from you—I take it you’re quite a scholar.”

She flushed and lowered long dark lashes. “I will be glad to help as much as I can.” With a sudden appeal that cut at his heart: “But will you help us in return?”

“I don’t know,” said Everard heavily. “I’d like to, but I don’t know if we can.”

Because after all, my job is to condemn you and your entire world to death.

When Everard was shown to his room, he discovered that local hospitality was more than generous. He was too tired and depressed to take advantage of it . . . but at least, he thought on the edge of sleep, Van’s slave girl wouldn’t be disappointed.

They got up early here. From his upstairs window, Everard saw guards pacing the beach, but they didn’t detract from the morning’s freshness. He came down with van Sarawak to breakfast, where bacon and eggs, toast and coffee added the last incongruous note of dream. Ap Ceorn was gone back to town to confer, said Deirdre; she herself had put wistfulness aside and chattered gaily of trivia. Everard learned that she belonged to a dramatic group which sometimes gave plays in the original Greek—hence her fluency; she liked to ride, hunt, sail, swim—“And shall we?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Swim, of course!” Deirdre sprang from her chair on the lawn, where they had been sitting under flame-colored leaves in the wan autumn sunlight, and whirled innocently out of her clothes. Everard thought he heard a dull clunk as van Sarawak’s jaw hit the ground.

“Come!” she laughed. “Last one in is a Sassenach!”

She was already tumbling in the cold gray waves when Everard and van Sarawak shuddered their way down to the beach. The Venusian groaned. “I come from a warm planet,” he objected. “My ancestors were Indonesians—tropical birds.”

“There were some Dutchmen too, weren’t there?” grinned Everard.

“They had the sense to go to Indonesia.”

“All right, stay ashore.”

“Hell! If she can do it, I can!” Van Sarawak put a toe in the water and groaned again.

Everard summoned up all the psychosomatic control he had ever learned and ran in. Deirdre threw water at him. He plunged, got hold of a slender leg, and pulled her under. They tumbled about for several minutes before running back to the house. Van Sarawak followed.

“Speak about Tantalus,” he mumbled. “The most beautiful girl in the whole continuum, and I can’t talk to her and she’s half polar bear.”

Everard stood quiet before the living-room fire, while slaves toweled him dry and dressed him in the local garb. “What pattern is this?” he asked, pointing to the tartan of his kilt.

Deirdre lifted her ruddy head. “My own clan’s,” she answered. “A house guest is always taken as a clan member during his stay, even if there is a blood feud going on.” She smiled shyly. “And there is none between us, Manslach.”

It cast him back into bleakness. He remembered what his purpose was.

“I’d like to ask you about history,” he said. “It is a special interest of mine.”

She nodded, adjusted a gold fillet on her hair, and got a book from a crowded shelf. “This is the best world history, I think. I can look up details you might wish to know.”

And tell me what I must do to destroy you. Seldom had Everard felt himself so much a skunk.

He sat down with her on a couch. The butler wheeled in lunch, and he ate moodily.

To follow up his notion—“Did Rome and Carthage ever fight a war?”

“Yes. Two, in fact. They were allied at first, against Epirus. Then they fell out. Rome won the first war and tried to restrict Carthaginian enterprise.” Her clean profile bent over the pages, like a studious child. “The second war broke out twenty-three years later, and lasted . . . hm . . . eleven years all told, though the last three were only mopping up after Hannibal had taken and burned Rome.”

Ah-hah! Somehow, Everard did not feel happy about it.

The Second Punic War, or rather some key incident thereof, was the turning point. But—partly out of curiosity, partly because he feared to tip his hand—Everard did not ask for particulars. He’d first have to get straight in his mind what had actually happened, anyway. (No . . . what had not happened. The reality was here, warm and breathing beside him, and he was the ghost.)

“So what came next?” he inquired tonelessly.

“There was a Carthaginian Empire, including Spain, southern Gaul, and the toe of Italy,” she said. “The rest of Italy was impotent and chaotic, after the Roman confederacy had been broken up. But the Carthaginian government was too venal to endure; Hannibal himself was assassinated by men who thought him too honest. Meanwhile, Syria and Parthia fought for the eastern Mediterranean, with Parthia winning.

“About a hundred years after the Punic Wars, some Germanic tribes invaded and conquered Italy.” (Yes . . . that would be the Cimbri, with their allies the Teutones and Ambrones, whom Marius had stopped in Everard’s world.) “Their destructive path through Gaul set the Celts moving too, into Spain and North Africa as Carthage declined; and from Carthage the Gauls learned much.

“There followed a long period of wars, during which Parthia waned and the Celtic states grew. The Huns broke the Germans in middle Europe, but were in turn scattered by Parthia, so the Gauls moved in and the only Germans left were in Italy and Hyperborea.” (That must be the Scandinavian peninsula.) “As ships improved, there was trade around Africa with India and China. The Celtanians discovered Afallon, which they thought was an island—hence the ‘Ynys’—but were thrown out by the Mayans. The Brittle colonies farther north had better luck, and eventually won their independence.

“Meanwhile Littorn was growing vastly. It swallowed up central Europe and Hyperborea for a while, and those countries only regained their freedom as part of the peace settlement after the Hundred Years’ War you know of. The Asian countries have shaken off their European masters and modernized themselves, while the Western nations have declined in their turn.” Deirdre looked up. “But this is only the barest outline. Shall I go on?”

Everard shook his head. “No, thanks.” After a moment: “You are very honest about the situation of your own country.”

Deirdre shrugged. “Most of us won’t admit it, but I think it best to look truth in the eyes.”

With a surge of eagerness: “But tell me of your own world. This is a marvel past belief.”

Everard sighed, turned off his conscience, and began lying.

The raid took place that afternoon.

Van Sarawak had recovered himself and was busily learning the Afallonian language from Deirdre. They walked through the garden hand in hand, stopping to name objects and act out verbs. Everard followed, wondering vaguely if he was a third wheel or not, most of him bent to the problem of how to get at the scooter.

Bright sunlight spilled from a pale cloudless sky. A maple stood like a shout of scarlet, and a drift of yellow leaves scudded across sere grass. An elderly slave was raking the yard in a leisurely fashion, a young-looking guard of Indian race lounged with his rifle slung on one shoulder, a pair of wolfhounds dozed with dignity under a hedge. It was a peaceful scene— hard to believe that men schemed murder beyond these walls.

But man was man, in any history. This culture might not have the ruthless will and sophisticated cruelty of Western civilization; in some ways it looked strangely innocent. Still, that wasn’t for lack of trying; and in this world, a genuine science might never emerge, man might endlessly repeat the weary cycle of war, empire, collapse, and war. In Everard’s future, the race had finally broken out of it.

For what? He could not honestly say that this new continuum was worse or better than his own. It was different, that was all; and didn’t these people have as much right to their existence as—as his own, who were damned to nullity if he failed to act?

He shook his head and felt fists knot at his side. It was too big. No man should have to decide something like this.

In the showdown, he knew, it would be no abstract sense of duty which compelled him, but the little things and the little folk he remembered.

They rounded the house and Deirdre pointed to the sea. “Awarlann” she said. Her loose hair was flame in the wind.

“Now does that mean ‘ocean’ or ‘Atlantic’ or ‘water’?” asked van Sarawak, laughing. “Let’s go see.” He led her toward the beach.

Everard trailed. A kind of steam launch, long and fast, was skipping over the waves, a mile or so offshore. Gulls flew up in a shrieking snowstorm of wings.

He thought that if he’d been in charge, there would have been a Navy ship on picket out there.

Did he even have to decide anything? There were other Patrolmen in the pre-Roman past. They’d return to their respective eras and—

Everard stiffened. A chill ran down his back and into his belly.

They’d return, and see what had happened, and try to correct the trouble. If any of them succeeded, this world would blink out of spacetime, and he would go with it.

Deirdre paused. Everard, standing in a cold sweat, hardly noticed what she was staring at, till she cried out and pointed. Then he joined her and squinted across the sea.

The launch was coming in close, its high stack fuming smoke and sparks, the gilt snake figurehead agleam. He could see the dwarfed forms of men aboard, and something white, with wings. It rose from the poopdeck and trailed at the end of a rope, mounting. A glider! Celtic aeronautics had gotten that far, at least—

“Pretty thing,” said van Sarawak. “I suppose they have balloons too.”

The glider cast its tow and swooped inward. One of the guards on the beach shouted. The rest came running from behind the house, sunlight flashed off their guns. The launch sped for the shore and the glider landed, plowing a furrow in the beach.

An officer yelled, waving the Patrolmen back. Everard had a glimpse of Deirdre’s face, white and uncomprehending. Then a turret on the glider swiveled—a detached part of his mind assumed it was manually operated—and a cannon spoke.

Everard hit the dirt. Van Sarawak followed, dragging the girl with him. Grapeshot plowed hideously through the Afallonian soldiers.

There came a spiteful crack of guns. Men were emerging from the aircraft, dark-faced men in turbans and sarongs. Hinduraj! thought Everard. They traded shots with the surviving guards, who rallied about their captain.

That man roared and led a charge. Everard looked up to see him almost at the glider and its crew. Van Sarawak leaped up and ran to join the fight. Everard rolled over, caught his leg, and pulled him down.

“Let me go!” The Venusian writhed. There was a sobbing in his throat. The racket of battle seemed to fill the sky.

“No, you bloody fool! It’s us they’re after, and that wild Irishman did the worst thing he could have—” Everard slapped his friend’s face and looked up.

The launch, shallow-draught and screw-propelled, had run up to the beach and was retching armed men. The Afallonians realized too late that they had discharged their weapons and were being attacked from the rear.

“Come on!” Everard yanked Deirdre and van Sarawak to their feet. “We’ve got to get out of here—get to the neighbors—”

A detachment of the boat crew saw him and veered. He felt rather than heard the flat smack of a bullet into turf. Slaves were screaming around the house. The two wolfhounds charged and were gunned down.

Everard whirled to flee. Crouched, zigzag, that was the way, over the wall and out onto the road! He might have made it, but Deirdre stumbled and fell. Van Sarawak halted and stood over her with a snarl. Everard plunged to a stop, and by that time it was too late. They were covered.

The leader of the dark men snapped something at the girl. She sat up, giving him a defiant answer. He laughed shortly and jerked his thumb at the launch.

“What do they want?” asked Everard in Greek.

“You.” She looked at him with horror. “You two—” The officer spoke. “And me to translate—No!”

She twisted in the arms that held her and clawed at a man’s face. Everard’s fist traveled in a short arc that ended in a lovely squashing of nose. It was too good to last: a clubbed rifle descended on his head, and he was only dimly aware of being carried off to the launch.

The crew left the glider behind, shoved their boat into deeper water, and revved it up. They left all the guardsmen slain, but took their own casualties along.

Everard sat on a bench on the plunging deck and stared with slowly clearing eyes as the shoreline dwindled. Deirdre wept on van Sarawak’s shoulder, and the Venusian tried to console her. A chill noisy wind blew across indifferent waves, spindrift stung their faces.

It was when the two white men emerged from a cabin that Everard’s mind was jarred back into motion. Not Asians after all—these were Europeans. And the rest of the crew had Caucasian features . . . grease paint!

He regarded his new owners warily. One was a portly, middle-aged man of average height, in a red silk blouse and baggy white trousers and a sort of astrakhan hat; he was clean-shaven and his dark hair was twisted into a queue. The other was somewhat younger, a shaggy blond giant in a tunic sewn with copper links, legginged breeches, a leather cloak, and a horned helmet. Both wore revolvers at their belts and were treated deferentially.

“What the devil—” Everard looked around. They were already out of sight of land and bending north. The engine made the hull quiver, spray sheeted when the bows bit into a wave.

The older man spoke first in Afallonian. Everard shrugged. Then the bearded Nordic tried, first in a completely unrecognizable dialect but afterward: “Taelan thu Cimbric?”

Everard, who knew German, Swedish, and Anglo-Saxon, took a chance, while van Sarawak pricked up his Dutch ears. Deirdre huddled back wide-eyed, too bewildered to move.

“Ja" said Everard, “ein wenig” When Goldilocks looked uncertain, he amended it: “A little.”

“Ah, aen lift. Gode!” The big man rubbed hairy hands. “Ik hait Boierik Wulfdasson ok main gefreond heer erran Boleslav Arkonsky”

It was not any language Everard had ever heard of —it couldn’t even be the original Cimbrian, after all these centuries—but the Patrolman could follow it tolerably well. The trouble would be in speaking; he couldn’t predict how it had evolved.

“What the hell erran thu maching, anyway?” he blustered. “Ik bin aen man auf Sirius—the stern Sirius, mit planeten ok all. Set uns gebach or willen be der Teufel to pay!”

Boierik Wulfilasson looked pained and suggested that the discussion be continued inside, with the young lady for interpreter. He led the way back into the cabin, which turned out to be small but comfortably furnished. The door remained open, with an armed guard looking in and more on call.

Boleslav Arkonsky said something in Afallonian to Deirdre. She nodded, and he gave her a glass of wine. It seemed to steady her, but she spoke to Everard in a thin voice.

“We’ve been taken, Manslach. Their spies found out where you were kept. Another group is supposed to capture your machine—they know where that is, too.”

“So I imagined,” replied Everard. “But who in Baal’s name are they?”

Boierik guffawed at the question and expounded lengthily on his own cleverness. The idea was to make the Suffetes of Afallon think that Hinduraj was responsible. Actually, the secret alliance of Littorn and Cimberland had built up quite an effective spy service of its own. They were now bound for the Littornian Embassy’s summer retreat on Ynys Llangollen (Nantucket), where the wizards would be induced to explain their spells and the great powers get a surprise.

“And if we don’t. . . ?”

Deirdre translated Arkonsky’s answer word for word: “I regret the consequences to you. We are civilized men, and will pay well in gold and honor for your free cooperation; but the existence of our countries is at stake.”

Everard looked at them. Boierik seemed embarrassed and unhappy, the boastful glee evaporated from him.

Boleslav Arkonsky drummed on the table, his lips compressed but a certain mute appeal in his eyes. Don't make us do this. We have to live with ourselves.

They were probably husbands and fathers, they must enjoy a mug of beer and a friendly game of dice as well as the next man, maybe Boierik bred horses in Italy and Arkonsky was a rose fancier on the Baltic shores. But none of it would do their captives a bit of good, not when the almighty Nation locked horns with its kin.

Everard paused briefly to admire the sheer artistry of this operation and began wondering what to do. The launch was fast, but would need something like twenty hours to reach Nantucket if he remembered the trip. There was that much time at least.

“We are weary,” he said in English. “May we not rest a while?”

“Ja, deedly!" said Boierik with a clumsy graciousness. “Ok wir skallen gode gefreonds bin, ni!”

Sunset smoldered redly to the west. Deirdre and van Sarawak stood at the rail, looking across a gray waste of waters. Three crewmen, their brown paint and Asian garments removed, poised alert and weaponed on the poop; a man steered by compass; Boierik and Everard paced the quarterdeck, talking. All wore heavy cloaks against a stiff, stinging wind.

Everard was getting some proficiency in the Cimbrian language; his tongue still limped, but he could make himself understood. Mostly, though, he let Boierik do the talking.

“So you are from the stars? These matters I do not understand. I am a simple man. Had I my way, I would manage my Tuscan estate in peace and let the world rave as it will. But we of the Folk have our obligations.” The Teutons seemed to have replaced the Latins altogether in Italy, as the Saxons had done the Britons in Everard’s world.

“I know how you feel,” said the Patrolman. “It is a strange thing, that so many should fight when so few want to.”

“Oh, but it is necessary.” Almost a whine there. “You don’t understand. Carthagalann stole Egypt, our rightful possession.”

“Italia irredenta” murmured Everard.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. So you Cimbri are allied with Littorn, and hope to grab off Europe and Africa while the big powers are fighting in the East.”

“Not at all!” replied Boierik indignantly. “We are merely asserting our rightful and historic territorial claims. Why, the king himself said—” And so on and so on.

Everard braced himself against the roll of the deck. “It seems to me that you treat us wizards rather hardily,” he declared. “Beware lest we get really angered at you.”

“All of us are protected against curses and shapings.”

“Well—”

“I wish you would help us freely,” said Boierik. “I will be happy to demonstrate to you the justice of our cause, if you have a few hours to spare.”

Everard shook his head and stopped by Deirdre.

Her face was a blur in the thickening dusk, but he caught a forlorn defiance in her voice: “I hope you are telling him what to do with his plans, Manslach.”

“No,” said Everard heavily. “We are going to help them.”

She stood as if struck.

“What are you saying, Manse?” asked van Sarawak.

Everard told him.

“No!” said the Venusian.

“Yes,” said Everard.

“By God, no! Ill—”

Everard grabbed his arm and said coldly: “Be still. I know what I’m doing. We can’t take sides in this world, we’re against everybody and you’d better realize it. The only thing to do is play along with these fellows for a while. And don’t tell that to Deirdre.”

Van Sarawak bent his head and stood for a moment, thinking. “All right,” he said dully.

The Littornian resort was on the southern shore of Nantucket, near a fishing village but walled off from it. The embassy had built in the style of its homeland, long timber houses with roofs arched like a cat’s back, a main hall and its outbuildings enclosing a flagged courtyard. Everard finished a night’s sleep and a breakfast made miserable by Deirdre’s eyes by standing on deck as they came to the private pier. Another, bigger launch was already there, and the grounds swarmed with hard-looking men. Arkonsky’s eyes kindled, and he said in Afallonian: “I see the magic engine has been brought. We can go right to work.”

When Boierik interpreted, Everard felt his heart slam.

The guests, as the Cimbrian insisted on calling them, were led into a great room where Arkonsky bent the knee to an idol with four faces, that Svantevit which the Danes had chopped up for firewood in the other history. There was a blaze on the hearth against the autumn chill, and guards posted around the walls. Everard had eyes only for the scooter, where it stood gleaming on the floor.

“I hear it was a hard fight in Catuvellaunan,” remarked Boierik to him. “Many were killed, but our folk got away without being followed.” He touched a handlebar gingerly. “And this wain can truly appear anywhere it wishes, out of thin air?”

“Yes,” said Everard.

Deirdre gave him a look of scorn such as he had never known. She stood haughtily away from him and van Sarawak.

Arkonsky spoke to her, something he wanted translated. She spat at his feet. Boierik sighed and gave the word to Everard:

“We wish the engine demonstrated. You and I will go for a ride on it. I warn you, I will have a revolver at your back; you will tell me in advance everything you mean to do, and if aught untoward happens I will shoot. Your friends will remain here as hostages, also to be shot on the first suspicion. But Tm sure we will all be good friends.”

Everard nodded. There was a tautness thrumming in him, and his palms felt cold and wet. “First I must say a spell,” he answered.

His eyes flicked. One glance memorized the spatial reading of the position meters and the time reading of the clock on the scooter. Another look showed van

Sarawak seated on a bench, under Arkonsky’s drawn pistol and the rifles of the guards; Deirdre sat down too, stiffly, as far from him as she could get. Everard made a close estimate of the bench’s position relative to the scooter’s, lifted his arms, and chanted in Temporal:

“Van, I’m going to try to pull you out of here. Stay exactly where you are now; repeat, exactly. I’ll pick you up on the fly. If all goes well, that’ll happen about one minute after I blink out of here with our shaggy comrade.”

The Venusian sat wooden-faced. There was a thin beading of sweat on his forehead.

“Very good,” said Everard in his pidgin Cimbrian. “Mount on the rear saddle, Boierik, and we’ll put this magic horse through her paces.”

The big man nodded and obeyed. As Everard took the front seat, he felt a gun muzzle held shakily against his back. “Tell Arkonsky we’ll be back in half an hour,” he added; they had approximately the same time units here as in his world, both descended from the Babylonian. When that had been taken care of, Everard said: “The first thing we will do is appear in midair over the ocean and hover.”

“F-f-fine,” said Boierik. He didn’t sound very convinced.

Everard set the space controls for ten miles east and a thousand feet up and threw the main switch.

They sat like witches astride a broom, looking down on a greenish-gray sweep of waters and the distant blur which was land. The wind was high, it caught at them and Everard gripped tight with his knees. He heard Boierik’s oath and smiled wanly.

“Well,” he asked, “how do you like this?”

“It ... it is wonderful.” As he grew accustomed to the idea, the Cimbrian gathered enthusiasm. “Why, with machines like this, we can soar above enemy cities and pelt them with fire.”

Somehow, that made Everard feel better about what he was going to do.

“Now we will fly ahead,” he announced, and sent the scooter gliding through the air. Boierik whooped exuberantly. “And now we will make the instantaneous jump to your homeland.”

Everard threw the maneuver switch. The scooter looped the loop and dropped at a three-gee acceleration.

Forewarned, the Patrolman could still barely hang on. He never knew whether the curve or the dive had thrown Boierik; he only had a moment’s hideous glimpse of the man plunging down through windy spaces to the sea.

For a little while, then, Everard hung above the waves. His first reaction was a cold shudder . . . suppose Boierik had had time to shoot? His second was a gray guilt. Both he dismissed, and concentrated on the problem of rescuing van Sarawak.

He set the space verniers for one foot in front of the prisoners’ bench, the time unit for one minute after he had departed. His right hand he kept by the controls—he’d have to work fast—and his left free.

Hang on to your seats, fellahs. Here we go again.

The machine flashed into existence almost in front of van Sarawak. Everard clutched the Venusian’s tunic and hauled him close, inside the spatiotemporal field, even as his right hand spun the time dial back and snapped over the main switch.

A bullet caromed off metal. Everard had a moment’s glimpse of Arkonsky shouting. And then it was all gone and they were on a grassy hill sloping down to the beach. It was 2,000 years ago.

He collapsed shivering over the handlebars.

A cry brought him back to awareness. He twisted around, looking at van Sarawak where the Venusian sprawled on the hillside. One arm was still around Deirdre’s waist.

The wind lulled, and the sea rolled into a broad white strand, and clouds walked high in heaven.

“I can’t say I blame you, Van.” Everard paced before the scooter and looked at the ground. “But it does complicate matters greatly.”

“What was I supposed to do?” There was a raw note in the other’s voice. “Leave her there for those bastards to kill—or to be snuffed out with her entire universe?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, we’re conditioned against revealing the Patrol’s existence to unauthorized people,” said Everard. “We couldn’t tell her the truth even if we wanted to . . . and I, for one, don’t want to.”

He looked at the girl. She stood breathing heavily, with a dawn in her eyes. The wind caressed her hair and the long thin dress.

She shook her head, as if clearing a mist of nightmare, and ran over to clasp their hands. “Forgive me, Manslach,” she whispered. “I should have known you’d not betray us.”

She kissed him and van Sarawak. The Venusian responded eagerly, but Everard couldn’t bring himself to. He would have remembered Judas.

“Where are we?” she chattered. “It looks almost like Llangollen, but no men—Have you taken us to the Happy Isles?” She spun on one foot and danced among summer flowers. “Can we rest here a while before returning home?”

Everard drew a long breath. “I’ve bad news for you, Deirdre,” he said.

She grew silent, and he saw her gather herself.

“We can’t go back.”

She waited mutely.

“The—the spells I had to use, to save our lives . . . I had no choice, but those spells debar us from returning home.”

“There is no hope?” He could barely hear her.

Everard’s eyes stung. “No,” he said.

She turned and walked away. Van Sarawak moved to follow her, but thought better of it and sat down beside Everard. “What’d you tell her?” he asked.

Everard repeated his words. “It seemed the best compromise,” he finished. “I can’t send her back to— what’s waiting for this world.”

“No.” Van Sarawak sat quiet for a while, staring across the sea. Then: “What year is this? About the time of Christ? Then we’re still upstairs of the turning point.”

“Yeh. And we still have to find out what it was.”

“Let’s go back to the farther past. Lots of Patrol offices. We can recruit help there.”

“Maybe.” Everard lay back in the grass and regarded the sky. Reaction overwhelmed him. “I think I can locate the key event right here, though, with Deirdre’s help. Wake me up when she comes back.”

She returned dry-eyed, a desolate calm over her. When Everard asked if she would assist in his own mission, she nodded. “Of course. My life is yours who saved it.”

After getting you into that mess in the first place. Everard said carefully: “All I want from you is some information. Do you know about . . . about putting people to sleep, a sleep in which they may believe anything they’re told?”

“Y-yes,” she said doubtfully. “Ive seen medical Druids do that.”

“It won’t harm you. I only wish to make you sleep so you can remember everything you know, things you believe forgotten. It won’t take long.”

Her trustfulness was hard to endure. Using Patrol techniques, Everard put her in a hypnotic state of total recall and dredged out all she had ever read or heard about the Second Punic War. That added up to enough for his purposes.

Roman interference with Carthaginian enterprise south of the Ebro, in direct violation of treaty, had been the last roweling. In 219 B.c. Hannibal Barca, governor of Carthaginian Spain, laid siege to Saguntum. After eight months he took it, and thus provoked his long-planned war with Rome. At the beginning of May, 218, he crossed the Pyrenees with 90,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, and 37 elephants, marched through Gaul, and went over the Alps. His losses en route were gruesome: only 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse reached Italy late in the year. Nevertheless, near the

Ticinus River he met and broke a superior Roman force. In the course of the following year, he fought several bloodily victorious battles and advanced into Apulia and Campania.

The Apulians, Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites went over to his side. Quintus Fabius Maximus fought a grim guerrilla war, which laid Italy waste and decided nothing. But meanwhile Hasdrubal Barca was organizing Spain, and in 211 he arrived with reinforcements. In 210 Hannibal took and burned Rome, and in 207 the last cities of the confederacy surrendered to him.

“That’s it,” said Everard. He stroked the coppery hair of the girl lying beside him. “Go to sleep now. Sleep well and wake up glad of heart.”

“What’d she tell you?” asked van Sarawak.

“A lot of detail,” said Everard—the whole story had required more than an hour. “The important thing is this: her knowledge of history is good, but never mentions the Scipios.”

“The whos?”

“Publius Cornelius Scipio commanded the Roman army at Ticinus, and was beaten there. But later he had the intelligence to turn westward and gnaw away the Carthaginian base in Spain. It ended with Hannibal being effectively cut off in Italy, and the Iberian help which could be sent was annihilated. Scipio’s son of the same name also held a high command, and was the man who finally whipped Hannibal at Zama; that’s Scipio Africanus the Elder.

“Father and son were by far the best leaders Rome had—but Deirdre never heard of them.”

“So—” Van Sarawak stared eastward across the sea, where Gauls and Cimbri and Parthians were ramping through the shattered Classical world. “What happened to them in this time line?”

“My own total recall tells me that both the Scipios were at Ticinus, and very nearly killed; the son saved his father’s life during the retreat, which I imagine was more like a stampede. One gets you ten that in this history the Scipios died there.”

“Somebody must have knocked them off,” said van Sarawak on a rising note. “Some time traveler ... it could only have been that.”

“Well, it seems probable, anyhow. We’ll see.” Everard looked away from Deirdre’s slumbrous face. “We’ll see.”

At the Pleistocene resort—half an hour after having left it—the Patrolmen put the girl in charge of a sympathetic Greek-speaking matron and summoned their colleagues. Then the message capsules began jumping through space-time.

All offices prior to 218 B.c.—the closest was Alexandria, 250-230—were “still” there, two hundred or so agents altogether. Written contact with the future was confirmed to be impossible, and a few short jaunts upstairs clinched the proof. A worried conference met at the Academy, back in the Oligocene Period. Unattached agents ranked those with steady assignments but not each other; on the basis of his own experience, Everard found himself the chairman of a committee of top-bracket officers.

It was a frustrating job. These men and women had leaped centuries and wielded the weapons of gods; but they were still human, with all the ingrained orneriness of their race.

Everyone agreed that the damage would have to be repaired. But there was fear for those agents who had gone ahead into time before being warned; if they weren’t back when history was re-altered, they would never be seen again. Everard deputized parties to attempt rescue, but doubted there’d be much success; he warned them sternly to return in a day or face the consequences.

A man from the Scientific Renaissance had another point to make. Granted, it was the survivors’ plain duty to restore the original time track. But they had a duty to knowledge as well. Here was a unique chance to study a whole new phase of humankind; there should be several years’ anthropological work done before—Everard slapped him down with difficulty. There weren’t so many Patrolmen left that they could take the risk.

Study groups had to determine the exact moment and circumstances of the change. The wrangling over methods went on interminably. Everard glared out the window, into the prehuman night, and wondered if the sabertooths weren’t doing a better job after all than their simian successors.

When he had finally gotten his bands dispatched, he broke out a bottle and got drunk with van Sarawak.

Reconvening the next day, the steering committee heard from its deputies, who had run up a total of years in the future. A dozen Patrolmen had been rescued from more or less ignominious situations; another score would simply have to be written off. The spy group’s report was more interesting. It seemed that there had been two Helvetian mercenaries who joined Hannibal in the Alps and won his confidence. After the war, they had risen to high positions in Carthage; under the names of Phrontes and Himilco, they had practically run the government, engineered Hannibal’s murder, and set new records for luxurious living. One of the Patrolmen had seen their homes and the men themselves. “A lot of improvements that hadn’t been thought of in Classical times. The fellows looked to me like Neldorians, 205th millennium.”

Everard nodded. That was an age of bandits who had “already” given the Patrol a lot of work. “I think we’ve settled the matter,” he said. “It makes no difference whether they were with Hannibal before Ticinus or not. We’d have hell’s own time arresting them in the Alps without tipping our hand and changing the future ourselves. What counts is that they seem to have rubbed out the Scipios, and that’s the point we’ll have to strike at.”

A Nineteenth-Century Britisher, competent but with elements of Colonel Blimp, unrolled a map and discoursed on his aerial observations of the battle. He’d used an infra-red telescope to look through low clouds. “And here the Romans stood—”

“I know,” said Everard. “A thin red line. The moment when they took flight is the crucial one, but the confusion then also gives us our chance. Okay, we’ll want to surround the battlefield unobtrusively, but I don’t think we can get away with more than two agents actually on the scene. The Alexandria office can supply Van and me with costumes.”

“I say,” exclaimed the Englishman. “I thought I’d have the privilege.”

“No. Sorry.” Everard smiled with one corner of his mouth. “It’s no privilege, anyway. Risk your neck, and all to wipe out a world of people like yourself.”

“But dash it all—”

Everard rose. “I’ve got to go,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why, but I’ve got to.”

Van Sarawak nodded.

They left their scooter in a clump of trees and started across the field.

Around the horizon and up in the sky waited a hundred armed Patrolmen, but that was small consolation here among spears and arrows. Lowering clouds hurried before a cold whistling wind, there was a spatter of rain, sunny Italy was enjoying its late fall.

The cuirass was heavy on Everard’s shoulders as he trotted across blood-slippery mud. He had helmet, greaves, a Roman shield on his left arm and a sword at his waist; but his right hand gripped a stunner. Van Sarawak loped behind, similarly equipped, eyes shifting under the wind-ruffled officers plume.

Trumpets howled and drums stuttered. It was all but lost among the yells of men and tramp of feet, screaming horses and whining arrows. The legion of Carthage was pressing in, hammering edged metal against the buckling Roman lines. Here and there the fight was already breaking up into small knots, where men cursed and cut at strangers.

The combat had passed over this area and swayed beyond. Death lay around him. Everard hurried behind the Roman force, toward the distant gleam of the eagles. Across helmets and corpses, he made out a banner that fluttered triumphant, vivid red and purple against the unrestful sky. And there, looming gray and monstrous, lifting their trunks and bellowing, came a squad of elephants.

He had seen war before. It was always the same— not a neat affair of lines across maps, nor a hallooing gallantry, but men who gasped and sweated and bled in bewilderment.

A slight, dark-faced youth squirmed nearby, trying feebly to pull out the javelin which had pierced his stomach. He was a cavalryman from Carthage, but the burly Italian peasant who sat next to him, staring without belief at the stump of an arm, paid no attention.

A flight of crows hovered overhead, riding the wind and waiting.

“This way,” muttered Everard. “Hurry up, for God’s sake! That line’s going to break any minute.”

The breath was raw in his throat as he panted toward the standards of the Republic. It came to him that he’d always rather wished Hannibal had won. There was something repellent about the cold, unimaginative greed of Rome. And here he was, trying to save the city. Well-a-day, life was often an odd business.

It was some consolation that Scipio Africanus was one of the few decent men left after the war.

Screaming and clangor lifted, and the Italians reeled back. Everard saw something like a wave smashed against a rock. But it was the rock which advanced, crying out and stabbing, stabbing.

He began to run. A legionary went past, howling his panic. A grizzled Roman veteran spat on the ground, braced his feet, and stood where he was till they cut him down. Hannibal’s elephants squealed and lifted curving tusks. The ranks of Carthage held firm, advancing to the inhuman pulse of their drums. Cavalry skirmished on the wings in a toothpick flash of lances.

Up ahead, now! Everard saw men on horseback, Roman officers. They held the eagles aloft and shouted, but nobody could hear them above the din.

A small group of legionaries came past and halted. Their leader hailed the Patrolmen: “Over here! We’ll give them a fight, by the belly of Venus!”

Everard shook his head and tried to go past. The Roman snarled and sprang at him. “Come here, you cowardly—” A stun beam cut off his words and he crashed into the muck. His men shuddered, someone screamed, and the party broke into flight.

The Carthaginians were very near, shield to shield and swords running red. Everard could see a scar livid on the cheek of one man, and the great hook nose of another. A hurled spear clanged off his helmet, he lowered his head and ran.

A combat loomed before him. He tried to go around, and tripped on a gashed corpse. A Roman stumbled over him in turn. Van Sarawak cursed and dragged him away. A. sword furrowed the Venusian’s arm.

Beyond, Scipio’s men were surrounded and battling without hope. Everard halted, sucking air into starved lungs, and looked into the thin rain. Armor gleamed wetly, Roman horsemen galloping in with mud up to their mounts’ noses—that must be the son, Scipio

Africanus to be, hastening to his father. The hoofbeats were like thunder in the earth.

“Over there!”

Van Sarawak cried it out and pointed. Everard crouched where he was, rain dripping off his helmet and down his face. A small troop of Carthaginians was riding toward the battle around the eagles, and at their head were two men with the height and craggy features of Neldor. They were clad in the usual G.I. armor, but each of them held a slim-barreled gun.

“This way!” Everard spun on his heel and dashed toward them. The leather in his cuirass creaked as he ran.

They were close to the newcomers before they were seen. A Carthaginian face swung to them and called the warning. Everard saw how he grinned in his beard. One of the Neldorians scowled and aimed his blast-rifle.

Everard went on his stomach, and the vicious blue-white beam sizzled where he had been. He snapped a shot and one of the African horses went over in a roar of metal. Van Sarawak stood his ground and fired steadily. Two, three, four—and there went a Neldorian, down in the mud!

Men hewed at each other around the Scipios. The Neldorians’ escort yelled with terror. They must have had the blasters demonstrated, but these invisible blows were something else. They bolted. The second of the bandits got his horse under control and turned to follow.

“Take care of the one you potted,” gasped Everard. “Haul him off the battlefield—we’ll want to question —” He himself scrambled to his feet and made for a riderless horse. He was in the saddle and after the remaining Neldorian before he was fully aware of it.

They fled through chaos. Everard urged speed from his mount, but was content to pursue. Once they’d got out of sight, a scooter could swoop down and make short work of his quarry.

The same thought must have occurred to the time rover. He reined in and took aim. Everard saw the blinding flash and felt his cheek sting with a near miss. He set his pistol to wide beam and rode in shooting.

Another fire-bolt took his horse full in the breast. The animal toppled and Everard went out of the saddle. Trained reflexes softened the fall, he bounced dizzily to his feet and staggered toward his enemy. His stunner was gone, no time to look for it. Never mind, it could be salvaged later, if he lived. The widened beam had found its mark; it wasn’t strong enough to knock a man out, but the Neldorian had dropped his rifle and the horse stood swaying with closed eyes.

Rain beat in Everard’s face. He slogged up to the mount. The Neldorian jumped to earth and drew a sword. Everard’s own blade rasped forth.

“As you will,” he said in Latin. “One of us will not leave this field.”

The moon rose over mountains and turned the snow to a sudden wan glitter. Far in the north, a glacier threw back the light in broken shards, and a wolf howled. The Cro-Magnons chanted in their cave, it drifted faintly through to the veranda.

Deirdre stood in darkness, looking out. Moonlight dappled her face and caught a gleam of tears. She started as Everard and van Sarawak came up behind her.

“Are you back so soon?” she asked. “You only came here and left me this morning.”

“It didn't take long,” said van Sarawak. He had gotten a hypno in Attic Greek.

“I hope . . .” She tried to smile. “I hope you have finished your task and can rest from your labors.”

“Yes,” said Everard. “Yes, we finished it.”

They stood side by side for a while, looking out on a world of winter.

“Is it true what you said, that I can never go home?” asked Deirdre.

“I'm afraid so. The spells—” Everard shrugged and swapped a glance with van Sarawak.

They had official permission to tell the girl as much as they wished and take her wherever they thought she could live best. Van Sarawak maintained that that would be Venus in his century, and Everard was too tired to argue.

Deirdre drew a long breath. “So be it,” she said. “Til not waste a life weeping for it . . . but the Baal grant that they have it well, my people at home.”

“I'm sure they will,” said Everard.

Suddenly he could do no more. He only wanted to sleep. Let van Sarawak say what had to be said, and reap whatever rewards there might be.

He nodded at his companion. “I'm turning in,” he declared. “Carry on, Van.”

The Venusian took the girl’s arm. Everard went slowly back to his room.

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