Worlds of Maybe Read online

  “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 carr
ying 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.