Worlds of Maybe Read online

  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 w
hich 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 Ce
nterville, 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.