"The continuum of multi-ordinal reality is a complex structure, but for purposes of simplicity we can consider it as a bundle of lines stretching from the remote past toward the unimaginable future. Each line is a world, a universe, with its own infinitude of space and stars, separated from its sister worlds by the uncrossable barriers of energy that we know as entropy.
"Uncrossable, that is, until the year 1897, when two Italian scientists, Maxoni and Cocini, stumbled on a principle which changed the course of history—of a billion histories. They created a field in which the energy of normal temporal flow was deflected at what we may consider right angles to the normal direction. Objects and individuals enclosed in the field then moved, not forward in time as in nature, but across the lines of alternate reality. From that beginning grew the Imperium—the government claiming sovereignty over the entire Net of alternate worlds. Your world—which is known to us as Blight Insular Three—is but one of the uncountable parallel universes, each differing only infinitesimally from its neighbors. Like this world, it lies within the vast disaster area we call the Blight, a desert formed when an unfortunate miscarriage in early experimentation with the M-C principle led to the utter destruction of a vast complex of worlds, to the abortion of their destinies into the chaos which you no doubt saw as you crossed that area coming here.
"Among the relationships existing between parallel lines are those linking individuals, Mr. Curlon. Think for a moment: If two worlds differ by only the disposition of two grains of sand on a beach—or of two molecules within a grain of sand—then it follows that analogues of individuals will exist in all those world-lines whose date of common history—the date at which their histories diverged—is later than the birth date of the individual in question. Your case, Mr. Curlon, is an exception—and that fact is at the root of the problem. Your world is an island in the Blight, surrounded not by viable parallel worlds, but by a desert empty of normal life. You are unique, Mr. Curlon—which renders the present situation all the more poignant."
"That's a mild adjective, General," I said. "I'm still listening for what's going to make sinking my boat sound like a friendly move."
"As I said, Major Renata made a number of errors—but his intentions were good. He'd been working here with me, under great strain, for many weeks. As for his mission, consider, Mr. Curlon: You are a man destined for a role in great affairs—yet what did I know of you? Nothing. And time was short. It was necessary—unfortunate, but absolutely necessary—to put you to the test. I apologize for the Major's excessive zeal. Of course, he wasn't aware of the full ramifications of the situation—of your importance to the present contretemps."
"That makes a pair of us."
Roosevelt's expression flickered; there were emotions boiling under that bland façade, but he wasn't the man to show them.
"In the lost worlds of the Blight, your family loomed like a colossus, Mr. Curlon. Now, of all that mighty stock, only you remain." His eyes held me. "The destinies of many men died in the holocaust of the Blight—and human destiny is a force equal to the evolutionary pressure of the Universe itself. Remember: the vast energies choked off by the disaster were not destroyed, but instead shunted into the orgy of patternless vitality that characterizes the Blight. Now those energies seek to reorient themselves, to force a pattern on reality. Unless this power is channeled, guided, given form—our worlds will be engulfed in the cancer of the Blight. Already, signs of the coming plague are here!"
He waved a hand at the gold and royal blue seal on the wall behind him. There were flecks of green on the gilding, and at one corner a tiny crust of mold had formed.
"That crest was polished this morning, Mr. Curlon. And observe this." He pointed to the gold wire insignia on his collar: it was pitted by tarnish. "And this!" he pushed a leather-bound folder across the table. The regal coat of arms embossed on it in silver was bubbly with corrosion.
"Symbols—but symbols that represent the fixed parameters of our cosmos—and those parameters are being eroded, Mr. Curlon!" He leaned back, forced the fire out of his eyes, his voice.
"Unless something is done now, at once, to reinforce the present reality, existence as we know it is doomed, Mr. Curlon."
"All right, General," I said. "I've listened. I don't understand all this, but I've seen enough in the last few hours to keep me from calling you crazy to your face. What is it you want from me? What do you expect me to do about the toadstools growing in your corridors?"
He stood and walked the length of the room, turned and paced back, stopped beside me.
"My plan is a dangerous one; you may think it fantastic, Captain Curlon. . . " I looked the question at him; he nodded and smiled. "I've ordered that you be commissioned in the Imperial Service, and gazetted to my staff," he said casually.
"Thanks, General," I said. "But you can skip the fancies. I'll settle for facts."
He looked disturbed for an instant. "This isn't intended as a bribe," he said, and picked up a thick parchment from the desk. "It's already accomplished—"
"Not without some kind of commitment on my part, it isn't," I said. "Not in any army I ever heard of."
"The oath is required, of course," he said. "A mere formality—"
"A symbol, I believe you said, General. For what it's worth, I'm still a civilian."
"Very well," he tossed the fancy commission aside in a way that I sensed wasn't quite as casual as it looked. "As you wish. Perhaps something Colonel Bayard said has prejudiced you—"
"By the way, where is Bayard now? The last I saw of him he was having a set of stomach cramps brought on by Major Renata's itchy trigger finger."
"Colonel Bayard was misguided. His intentions were good, no doubt, but he was uninformed. I don't wonder that he formed a false impression of the operation on the basis of the few facts he stumbled on."
"I'd like to see him."
"That won't be possible at present; he's in the hospital. However, I contemplate no action against him for breach of discipline, if that's what concerns you. He has an excellent record—until now. He was merely overzealous in this instance."
"You said something about working together. What is it you want from me?"
He stood, came around the desk and clapped me on the shoulder.
Come along, Captain," he said. "I'll show you."
The room he took me to was an underground vault, guarded by three relays of white-jacketed troopers with guns in their hands. One high wall was filled by a ground-glass screen, on which lines and points of light twinkled.
"This is a chart of the Net, covering the area lying within the hundred-thousand-year CH range," Roosevelt said. He picked up a pointer, indicated a red light at the exact center. "This is the Zero-zero world-line of the Imperium. Here"—he showed me another glowing point, not far away—"is your home-line, B-I Three. Note that all around these isolated lines, for a vast area, there is nothing—a desert. This, Mr. Curlon, is the Blight. Calculations by our physicists tell us that the probability imbalance, dating from the original cataclysm that formed the Blight some seventy years ago, is now seeking equilibrium. Fantastic energies are trapped there in a precarious stasis; energies of the kind that generate reality instant by instant as normal entropy progresses. I needn't tell you of the inconceivable potency of such powers. Consider only that in each instant of time the Universe is destroyed and recreated—and that here, in this blighted region, that process has been aborted, blocked like a choked volcano. For seven decades the pressure has mounted. Now it will no longer be denied. A great probability storm rages at the centroidal point of the Blight. When it blasts through, unless we take some action first, it will carry our world—and all other worlds within a vast range—with it into a limbo of probability disaster which beggars the imagination. Even now, probability waves are moving outward from the holocaust, with results that anyone can see—a mere hint of the holocaust to come."
He grounded the pointer, looked at me long and hard.
"Your destiny is interwoven with that of your world, Mr. Curlon—your fate, your history, are a part of the basic warp of the fabric of the reality we know. We have to seize on that thread—and every other thread we know of, few though they are—and from them, attempt to reweave a viable matrix into which the trapped energies can drain."
I had the feeling he was oversimplifying the problem; but even so, it was too dense for me.
"Keep talking, General," I said. "I'm trying to grope along with you."
"Our lives don't exist in a vacuum, Curlon. We have pasts, roots, antecedents. Actions of men of a thousand years ago affect our lives today, just as our actions of today will repercuss down the ages that come after. Napoleon, Hitler, Caesar, effected their times and all the times to follow. But we stand at a moment where the very texture of existence is strained to the breaking point. What we do, far beyond the ordinary measure of the potency of key individuals, will determine the shape of the world to come. We must act promptly, decisively, correctly. We can afford no weakness, no mistake."
"You're building up to something, General. Why not come to the point."
He pushed a button on a console and the map winked out and another diagram took its place. This one showed an amoeba of pink and red lines twitching and writhing over a grid dotted with glowing points.
"This is a close-range energy chart of the Blight," he said. "Here you see the shifting of the lines of quantum demarcation, as they seek to adjust to the abnormal pressures exerted by the probability storm. In every world-line adjoining the Blight, objective reality is in flux. Objects, people, landscapes, are shifting, changing from moment to moment, day to day. I need not detail for you the pandemonium thus produced. So far we've felt the effects less, here; the Zero-zero line is a stable one firmly rooted in past history by a series of powerful key events. The same is true of your line, B-I Three. For the Blight to engulf these lines would entail the obliteration of basics of human cultural development as powerful as the discovery of fire."
He switched again, this time to a view of a blazing roil like a close-up of the sun.
"This is the center of the probability storm, Mr. Curlon. We've pinpointed its location, in a world-line that was once the seat of a great culture. This is where the key to the crisis will be found. I propose to go there, Mr. Curlon, to find that key."
"It looks as though that would be a lot like jumping down the throat of a live volcano."
"This diagram represents the turmoil of probability energies," Roosevelt said. "On the surface, to an observer within the A-line itself, the storm is not directly apparent. Abnormalities, freaks, impossibilities, the suspension of natural law, the distortion of reality under your very eyes, yes; but the tempest itself rages at a level of energy detectible only to specialized instruments. A man can go there, Mr. Curlon; the dangers he faces will be beyond description—but not perhaps beyond overcoming."
"Once there, then what?"
"Somewhere in that line is a key object, an artifact so inextricably interwoven with the past and future of the line, and of the quantum it controls, that all major probability lines must pass through it, in the way that lines of magnetic force flow through the poles of a magnet. I propose to find and identify that object, and remove it to a safe place."
"Go ahead," I said. "Spell the rest of it out."
"What more is there to say, Mr. Curlon?" Roosevelt gave me the sunny smile again, and his eyes had that dangerous twinkle of a man in love with danger. "I want you with me. I need you—the powers you represent—at my side."
"What makes you think I'll go?"
"I ask you to go—I can't, wouldn't attempt to force you. That would be worse than useless. But remembering the greatness of your line, I believe you'll know where your duty lies."
"Now it's my duty, eh?"
"I think it is, Captain Curlon." He rose and gave me the smile again. This was a man I would have to love or hate; there'd be no middle ground.
"You needn't make your decision now," he said easily. "I've arranged for quarters for you here in my apartments. Get a night's rest; then we'll talk again." His eyes strayed down over my sweater and dungarees, fixed on the knife stuck through my belt.
"I shall have to ask that you leave the, er, weapon with me," he said. "Technically, you're under what is known as RIA—routine interrogational arrest. No point in causing talk."
"I'll keep it," I said. I don't know why. He had an army at his disposal to take it away from me if he felt like it. He leaned forward and frowned at me. His eyes were showing a little controlled anger now.
"Be kind enough to save unpleasantness by placing the knife on my desk," he said.
I shook my head. "It's a sentimental hang-up I have, General. I've carried it so long I'd feel naked without it."
His eyes locked on mine like electronic gun-pointers; then he relaxed and smiled.
"Keep it, then. Now go along and think over what I've said to you. And by tomorrow I hope you've decided to do as I ask."
The room they took me to was a little small for a diplomatic reception, but otherwise would have filled the bill OK. After my escort left I poked into a dressing room fit for a Broadway star, a closet that could have slept six with room left over for an all-night poker game, stuck a finger in a bed that looked like an Olympic wrestling mat with tassels. It was fancier than my usual style, but I had an idea I'd be able to sleep on it all right.
I took a shower in a bathroom full of gold faucets and pink marble, and put on the fresh clothes that were laid out for me, after which a waiter in black knee pants and a gold vest arrived with a cart loaded with pheasant on translucent china and wine and paper-thin glasses. While I tucked away I thought about what I'd learned from Roosevelt. The surface part—the story about parallel worlds and the disaster hanging over them unless he and I did something about it—was all right; as all right as insanity ever is. I didn't understand it, would never understand it—but the evidence was here, all around me. It was the other parts of the general's presentation that bothered me.
Once, when time hung heavy on my hands in a flat-top ready room, I spent some time reading up on games theory. The present situation seemed susceptible to analysis in the light of what I learned then. Roosevelt had tried three gambits: First, when he'd eased the commission at me. Second, when he'd tried to get my agreement to go along with him, in the blind, on a mission into the Blight. And third, when he'd tried to separate me from the knife. I'd resisted all three moves, more by instinct than any logic or plan.
I walked over to the window and looked down at a wall and a cobbled street. The big trees threw shadow patterns over the grass strips and flowerbeds, and the wide sidewalks were full of pretty women and men in bright uniforms with horsetail plumes and buttons that sparked under the lights. Across the park there were shops with bright-lit windows full of plush merchandise, and cafés with open-air terraces and awnings and tables and an odor of fresh-ground coffee and fresh-baked bread. From a bandstand somewhere you could hear an orchestra playing a Straussy sort of waltz—one that had never been heard, back where I came from.
I wondered what Bayard was doing now and what he'd have to say about the latest developments. I'd accepted him at face value, mostly on the basis of the fact that he'd snatched me off my boat just before I started the long swim. But if Roosevelt was telling the truth—if the whole thing had been designed just to test my reactions before pulling me into a key role in world-shaking events. . .
In that case I should tell Roosevelt all I'd seen at Chateau Gaillard. Maybe there was a clue there for someone who knew how to use it. Or misuse it.
Bayard had known a lot more about the situation than I did, and he hadn't trusted Renata, or Renata's boss. I wished he could have heard Roosevelt's pitch and given me the other side of the story.
What I needed now was information about Roosevelt, about Bayard, about what was going on and most of all, information about my place in all this—and the meaning of the old piece of steel with the magical property of pointing to other old pieces of steel.
I went to the door and eased it open; there was a guard in a white and gold uniform standing at a rigid parade rest at the far end of the passage. He looked my way and I gave him an offhand wave and he went back to eyes-front. I wasn't exactly under arrest, but they were keeping an eye on me. I started to close the door—and heard a scream like a gutted horse from the room next to mine. The sentry yanked a shiny chrome-plated gun from a polished holster and came on at a run. I took two jumps to the door the yell had come from and jerked at the knob, then stepped back and kicked it open and was looking at a white worm the size of a fire hose looped like a boa constrictor around the crushed body of a man.
He was an old man with a purple face and white hair and popped-out eyes and tongue. I was holding the broken sword in my hand; I didn't remember drawing it. It made a sound like an ax hitting a saddle when I brought it down on the worm. It cut through it like cheese, and the severed end whipped around, splattering foul-smelling juices. Something boomed like a cannon behind my ear, and a chunk of worm flew. A ten-foot piece was flapping across the floor and the gun boomed again and it flew up in the air, whipping, while I hacked at another loop that was weaving around on end like a charmed snake. There were four pieces of the thing now and more boiling out through the bathroom door. I heard a gun click on an empty chamber and the guard swore and ended on a gurgling note. I chopped my way through to him, but I was too late. He was wrapped like a mummy and his head was at an angle that meant he'd made his last formation. There were yells from the passage, and the sound of running feet and shots. I cut my way across and into the bathroom. The jade green marble tub was full of worm, writhing up through the drain. I hacked it off, grabbed up a long-handled bath brush and rammed it down the drain, then chopped my way back through the flopping sections and into the hall. What was there was worse than the worm. It looked like a mass of raw meat, bulging up from the stairwell halfway down the corridor. Two men were firing into it, but it didn't seem to mind that much. I came up on it from the side and carved a slice off, and the mass of rubbery stuff recoiled, oozing pink blood. It didn't like cold steel.
"Get knives and swords!" I yelled. "You're wasting time firing slugs in it!"
The mass had bulged along the hall far enough to half cover a door. It burst inward, and I got a glimpse of a woman standing there before it welled through and blocked the opening. I caught just a faint echo of her scream. It took a half a dozen good chops to amputate the mass in the door, but I was too late again. All I could see of the girl was a pair of slippered feet sticking out from under the thing like a careless mechanic under a slipped jack.
Back in the hall I saw Roosevelt, in his shirt-sleeves, his teeth bared in what might have been a grin, hewing away at the thing with a two-handed sword. He saw me and yelled, "Curlon, to me!"
Uniformed men were doing what damage they could with ceremonial short-swords, but it was Roosevelt who was driving the thing back. It had bulged in to form a pocket, and he was wading into the pocket, while the rest of the thing bulged alongside, flanking him. I hit it on his left, hacked away a chunk the size of a Shetland pony just as the other side folded in, almost caught him. He stabbed at it, and I cut a swath through and got a stance back to back with him. He seemed to be trying to cut his way to a door that was two-thirds covered and starting to sag. We cleared it, and by then there were a dozen men working on the outer perimeter with swords they'd pulled off walls somewhere. We were ankle-deep in the thin pink blood that drained from every cut we made. I smelled smoke, and saw a pair of firemen in protective suits coming up the stair with oversized blowtorches. The thing flowed away ahead of them, turning black and shriveling. In another minute or two it was all over. I looked at Roosevelt through the smoke and the stink, past him along the corridor that was splashed to the ceiling and reeking like a slaughterhouse.
"Nice," I said, and discovered I was as winded as if I'd just run the four-minute mile. "What was it?"
Roosevelt grinned at me. He was breathing hard, and there was blood on his face, but incredibly, he looked like a man having fun.
"A brisk hour and a quarter," he said. "I congratulate you, Captain. You matched me blow for blow. Not many could have done it." It was a brag, but somehow it didn't sound arrogant. Just truthful.
"You didn't answer the question, General," I said.
His eyes went past me to the foul bulk spread across the blue Oriental carpeting.
"I don't really know," he said. "This was the worst attack so far. The periodicity has decayed to ninety-one hours and the intensity is increasing logarithmically. It doesn't seem to be an animal, in the normal sense of the word—merely a mass of flesh, growing wild."
"What kind of flesh?" I growled. It made my skin crawl to look at it.
His eyes met mine. "Human flesh, Mr. Curlon," he said.
I nodded. "I'm still not sure about all this, General; but if this is what you're fighting, I'm with you."
He gave me the smile, reached out and caught my hand with a grip like a rock-crusher.
"With you behind me—"
"Beside you," I cut in.
He nodded, still smiling. "Beside me, then. Perhaps we can yet prevail."
I didn't get much sleep for the next couple of nights. When I wasn't busy bone-bending with an unarmed combat master named Lind, I was listening to lectures on field operation, and doing my napping with a hypnotaper strapped to my skull, pumping me full of background data on the history of the Blight.
There were a few other trainees around. One was a beautiful Oriental-looking girl from an A-line where the Chinese had settled America back in the ninth century, and had met the Romans head-on along the Mississippi in 1776. She was headed for a place where a horde of backward, matriarchal Mongols were getting ready to sweep across a feudal Europe. It seemed that she fitted the bill of particulars for the incarnation of the goddess Chiu-Ki, a sort of celestial Dragon Lady. And a big coal-black man with a fierce look—maybe because of the stainless steel peg through his nose—had been recruited from a Zulu-ruled African empire to help organize a grass-roots resistance to a murder-suicide cult that was decimating the enslaved blacks in a line where the Greeks had developed science in the pre-Christian era and used it to conquer the known world before stagnation set in. I met one fellow who was a classic example of the Australian Bushman—but in his line his tribe had made it big on the mainland. He had a hard time not wrinkling his flat nose at the strange odors, but he was a gentleman. He treated us like equals.
During the week, I tried several times to see Bayard, but Roosevelt always put me off. The colonel was a sick man, he said. Pneumonia had set in, as it often did after a taste of the neurac. He was in an oxygen tent, and no visitors allowed.
Then the day came when the general came down and watched for half an hour while Lind tried to throw me on my ear; but I got lucky and threw him instead.
"You're ready," Roosevelt said. "We'll leave at midnight."
The shuttle terminus was a huge bright-lit room with a polished white floor marked off in orange lines, with shuttles ranked between the lines. There were little one-man scouts and big twenty-man passenger transports, some bare, functional boxes, some fancy VIP jobs, some armored, some fitted up to look like moving vans or delivery trucks. There was a steady, high-pitched whine, and a constant booming and buffeting from air displacement as shuttles came and went. I'd never seen any of it before, but it was all familiar from the sessions under the hypnotaper.
Technicians in white coveralls worked over machines, standing at little desks that were spaced along the aisles. Across the room I saw a party of men in costumes like Spanish conquistadors, and another group in Puritan black.
"Protective coloration," Roosevelt said. "Our agents always try to blend with the background. In our case, no disguises are necessary. As far as I know, there's no human life left where we're going."
The technicians fitted us into our suits—old-fashioned flyers' outfits with lightweight diving helmets. They checked us over with a minimum of formality, and we strapped in and closed the hatch. Roosevelt looked sideways at me and gave me the thumbs-up sign. "Ready?"
"It's your show, General," I said. He nodded and threw in the drive control. The whining hum started up; the light outside faded. The walls and roof quivered and disappeared, and we were perched two feet above a vacant lot full of weeds and blown dust under the open sky.