Worlds of Maybe Read online

  “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.