"You make it difficult," he said. "One life for a billion lives. And
yet," he said, brightly, "you do exist; does that not prove something?"
"Only that in this world of probability and unreal existance, I am a
definite probability."
"Yes," he told her. "This is the world of probability. I am not in the
Real World, nor are you. If I do this, who is to tell me that we two
may not go on forever in our own world of probability?"
"No," she said pleadingly. "Oh Les--I do so want--"
"I'll chance it," he said. "Because I must. I--look!"
Tansie turned. There, appearing with that thickening of the substance
that characterized the arrival of a "time car" was the Blaines' ship.
And beside it was the other one. Doors emerged, and the six got out of
their ships and faced one another.
"So!" snapped Calvin Blaine. "We can finish this right here."
"Don't ask for mercy," snapped Barry Ford. "Nor expect sportsmanship.
This is for keeps, and for the permanent existance of a whole world."
Tansie shuddered. "They'll fight," she said. "Because whichever side
wins, they will prevent the others from returning to their worlds with
the information that is needed. One and one alone will survive--and it
is not fair, four to two, and Calvin Blaine an elderly man."
Tod Laplane lifted his gun; Laurie Blaine, her blonde hair a shining
halo, pointed a revolver at Joan Laplane, who raced forward like a
raven-haired fury, a gleaming knife in her hand. Barry Ford shook his
broad shoulders and leaped--just as a shot rang out from the side.
They all turned. And across the space behind the Ford-Laplane ship
there came another couple. A second Calvin and Laurie Blaine, armed.
In all, only four shots were fired before the embattled ones came to
contact blows. Then the guns were wrested from fighting hands and it
was tooth and nail.
"Come on," said Ackerman. "Because what you see is but eight people. If
we do not, there will be that many billions of people fighting to the
death."
Their motion caught eyes in the fighting crowd. Both sides were
apparently wary of more re-inforcements. None of them knew how many
would be coming back; it is conceivable that whole armies could be
built up of people returning to fight this battle.
But it was Les and Tansie Lee that they saw, and they stopped. Then Les
and Tansie were in their ship, and Les was at the control board.
* * * * *
The other crowd boiled in, behind them, the fight forgotten,
momentarily. They wanted Les Ackerman above all, for he was in a
position to nullify any of their acts, regardless of which side won. He
was not going to elude them again; they would continue this battle in
Ackerman's presence so that the winner would be able to overpower the
physicist.
Ackerman nudged the automatic controls. The "time-space" vehicle
started forward in space and backwards in "time".
Behind him the two factions eyed one another suspiciously, and moved
warily to get into fighting-position.
Les turned briefly, and shook his head. Getting into that battle
himself would be no good. _Let them fight!_ he said to himself. _Give
me "time"._ Ackerman could best win by removing the cause.
He flipped the top-hatch open and groped out of the moving ship with
his gloved hand--the temperon-coated glove--hoping to locate by sheer
luck the cyclotron target and the temperon sample. By luck aided with a
good memory of where it was. He thought for a moment that he, himself,
was not far from here in both "time" and "space". He was separated in
space by the radiation-proof barrier, and in "time" only by the few
instants of temporal fission.
Then he saw it! Vaguely, dimly, distorted by the gray-green haze that
enveloped the ship in motion.
The ship stalled. It could not penetrate the barrier of "time" to
head into the "past" which would have been previous to the fission of
"time". So Ackerman nudged the power up higher and the temporal drive
of the ship strained against the barrier like an automobile straining
against an immobile wall.
Ackerman reached for the temperon.
Tansie cried: "No, Les!" She ran to take his hands from the open hatch.
He took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. "You'll be all
right," he said softly; "it is a chance we must take!"
"But--" she said uncertainly, and stopped because of the roar that came
from behind.
"Ackerman!" bellowed Tod Laplane. "He's removing the original temperon!"
"If he does!" swore Barry Ford, "We'll not exist!"
Their private fight forgotten, both factions turned and hurled
themselves at Ackerman.
Eight people to one--and Tansie Lee still against his purpose to boot;
he shook her free and reached, missed and tried again.
The roar of noise stopped. Ackerman caught it out of the corner of one
eye. Tansie Lee still believed that the removal of the temperon and the
resulting correction of the "time-split" would make her non-existant,
but she was standing there with a wicked-looking shotgun poised across
one shapely hip. If she fired, the kick would turn her around, and
Tansie knew it, for she was pointing the gun to her left. The second
shot would sweep the right side of the room, and the chances were
excellent that no one would be much alive after the third.
Limbo--the land of non-existance--might be her lot, but until she left
here, no one was going to harm Les Ackerman.
He shook all thoughts from his mind and reached again. And this time
he touched it!
* * * * *
The gray-green haze parted in a flare of light. Ackerman saw both the
deuterium-ice target and the temperon clearly; it was the latter that
gave him pause.
For out from the temperon sample was growing a shimmering, uncertain
sphere of energy. It expanded and then hurled itself outward with
lightning rapidity. Out it went, to the ends of the infinite universe.
Then destruction, sheer and complete, broke loose. The "time-ship"
was hurled away, but not before they saw solid matter burst into a
coruscation of incandescent gas, and flame up out of its wraithlike
self into a pillar of boiling clouds that headed for the stratosphere.
Below them, the ground seared upwards and sintered downwards and fused
into an ugly gray-green glaze.
"So," said Ackerman, shaking with reaction. "So Lester Ackerman
himself is the cause of the fission in 'time'. You may stop fighting,
gentlemen. Tansie, you can stop pointing that cannon at them, too."
Calvin Blaine came forward and took it from her shaking hands. She
turned blindly, like an automaton; then she looked up at Les and
reality came once more across her face. "Les!" she cried and hurled
herself forward into his arms.
Calvin turned to his other, "time-separated" self. "Please leave," he
said. "This is most disconcerting."
One Laurie Blaine shrugged at the other. "I don't even like myself as
competition," she said.
One pair of Blaines left the ship; the other Calvin Blaine looked out
of the window and chuckled. "They left," he said, "just in time to get
into that fight!"
"Then this," replied his daughter, "is the ship they came in."
"Ours is over there," said Blaine; "let's go."
"But what about them--and him?" asked Laurie indicating the others in
Ackerman's ship.
"I think," said Blaine, "that nothing we do can change much right now;
Ackerman himself is the one that must be moving next."
Barry Ford grunted angrily. It was quite apparent that a sudden thought
had occurred to him. He herded his friends out and into their own ship.
"Hell!" said Blaine, taking Laurie by the arm and almost hurling her
out.
"What's got into them?" asked Tansie.
"It has occurred to them that there is one more very definite danger
for them all. They've got to go there to prevent it. Foolishly, they're
hurrying when they know that I've got a lot of work to do first, and
still will end up where they are at the proper instant."
"Work?" asked Tansie.
"Uh-huh," he said. "I've some correcting to do. Will you drive us along
the Blaines' side of this 'Time-stream'. I'm going to peck at the
typewriter a bit."
* * * * *
It was a long time later. Ackerman had written several thousand words
on the subject, and was now peering through one of the ship windows at
the laboratory through which the "time-space" ship was parked. Then,
satisfied, he nodded. "Push here," he said cryptically.
"Huh?" asked Tansie.
"Part of my corrective work," he said. "So help me, I started this
mess; I'm going to be the one that cleans it up."
He used the projector to drag a few odd items into the "time-space"
from the "real world" laboratory.
"On the other side of that barrier," he told Tansie, "there are a
couple of characters bootlegging a bit of private research."
"What are you going to do?"
"They are going to have themselves a high-grade atomic explosion."
"Won't that be dangerous? And how will it cause corrective measures?"
Les grinned with self-satisfaction. "This," he said waving his hands,
"is the world of throttled research. Like all times of prohibition,
there are people who will bootleg, whether it be liquor, dope, or
knowledge. This explosion, however, will do two things to that world.
They will understand that there are a lot of people doing the same
thing--and will also know that this same thing might happen again and
again, because no one has the faintest idea of what anybody else is
doing! When the first chemist mixed gunpowder, he was able to warn
other chemists not to mix more than so much--or else. But after this
atomic blow-up, no one will be able to do any warning--and they'll not
know what line of research these people were taking."
"Yes," said Tansie uncertainly.
"Then, in order to bring it all out in the clear and the open, they
must repeal their laws that throttle and forbid research. This will
make Blaine's world less divergent."
He reached forward with his temperon-clad glove and took firm hold of
the temperon sample in the "Real" world cyclotron.
During the boiling, coruscating roar of the atomic hell, Tansie held
her breath. The ship was driven away before she spoke.
"Temperon again," she said. "Isn't that likely to cause another
'time-split'?"
He shook his head. "No," he said. "'Time' splits only when there is
two very definite possibilities for a future. Individual and minute
acts such as might be called a major catastrophe on earth do nothing
to disturb the 'temporal' advance. You see, Tansie, Man is an animal
possessing free will, and he can do as he pleases. But his every act
is based upon his past experience, and therefore whatever he does is
reasonably predictable. Therefore, while it is possible to state that
a tree might grow in two possible ways, the fact is that it grows only
one way and therefore we have no multiplicity of worlds of probability.
There is no Wheel of If."
10
"But what about the people who were running that thing?" asked Tansie.
"Tough," said Ackerman, "But better them than--"
"No," said Tansie, taking his arm and shaking it pleadingly. "Not
murder, Les."
"Okay," he said. "But you are making me a lot of trouble. By insisting,
I mean."
"How?"
"Watch," he said. He drove the "time-space" ship back towards the
"past", and stopped it previous to the explosion. He plied the
projector in the operating chamber of the cyclotron, and two people
solidified and came to the unreal world. "Meet Calvin and Laurie
Blaine," said Ackerman.
Tansie gulped and sat down hard.