Destiny Times Three

By FRITZ LEIBER, Jr.

Illustrated by Orban

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science Fiction March, April 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I.

The ash Yggdrasil great evil suffers,

Far more than men do know;

The hart bites its top, its trunk is rotting,

And Nidhogg gnaws beneath.

Elder Edda.

In ghostly, shivering streamers of green and blue, like northern lights, the closing hues of the fourth Hoderson symchromy, called "the Yggdrasil," shuddered down toward visual silence. Once more the ancient myth, antedating even the Dawn Civilization, had been told—of the tree of life with its roots in heaven and hell and the land of the frost giants, and serpents gnawing at those roots and the gods fighting to preserve it. Transmuted into significant color by Hoderson's genius, interpreted by the world's greatest color instrumentalists, the primeval legend of cosmic dread and rottenness and mystery, of wheels within cosmic wheels, had once more enthralled its beholders.

In the grip of an unearthly excitement, Thorn crouched forward, one hand jammed against the grassy earth beyond his outspread cloak. The lean wrist shook. It burst upon him, as never before, how the Yggdrasil legend paralleled the hypothesis which Clawly and he were going to present later this night to the World Executive Committee.

More roots of reality than one, all right, and worse than serpents gnawing, if that hypothesis were true.

And no gods to oppose them—only two fumbling, overmatched men.

Thorn stole a glance at the audience scattered across the hillside. The upturned faces of utopia's sane, healthy citizenry seemed bloodless and cruel and infinitely alien. Like masks. Thorn shuddered.

A dark, stooped figure slipped between him and Clawly. In the last dying upflare of the symchromy—the last wan lightning stroke as the storm called life departed from the universe—Thorn made out a majestic, ancient face shadowed by a black hood. Its age put him in mind of a fancy he had once heard someone advance, presumably in jest—that a few men of the Dawn Civilization's twentieth century had somehow secretly survived into the present. The stranger and Clawly seemed to be conversing in earnest, low-pitched whispers.

Thorn's inward excitement reached a peak. It was as if his mind had become a thin, taut membrane, against which, from the farthest reaches of infinity, beat unknown pulses. He seemed to sense the presence of stars beyond the stars, time-streams beyond time.

The symchromy closed. There began a long moment of complete blackness. Then—

Thorn sensed what could only be described as something from a region beyond the stars beyond the stars, from an existence beyond the time-streams beyond time. A blind but purposeful fumbling that for a moment closed on him and made him its agent.

No longer his to control, his hand stole sideways, touched some soft fabric, brushed along it with infinite delicacy, slipped beneath a layer of similar fabric, closed lightly on a round, hard, smooth something about as big as a hen's egg. Then his hand came swiftly back and thrust the something into his pocket.

Gentle groundlight flooded the hillside, though hardly touching the black false-sky above. The audience burst into applause. Cloaks were waved, making the hillside a crazy sea of color. Thorn blinked stupidly. Like a flimsy but brightly-painted screen switched abruptly into place, the scene around him cut off his vision of many-layered infinities. And the groping power that a moment before had commanded his movements, now vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving him with the realization that he had just committed an utterly unmotivated, irrational theft.

He looked around. The old man in black was already striding toward the amphitheater's rim, threading his way between applauding groups. Thorn half-withdrew from his pocket the object he had stolen. It was about two inches in diameter and of a bafflingly gray texture, neither a gem, nor a metal, nor a stone, nor an egg, though faintly suggestive of all four.

It would be easy to run after the man, to say, "You dropped this." But he didn't.

The applause became patchy, erratic, surged up again as members of the orchestra began to emerge from the pit. There was a lot of confused activity in that direction. Shouts and laughter.

A familiar sardonic voice remarked, "Quite a gaudy show they put on. Though perhaps a bit too close for comfort to our business of the evening."

Thorn became aware that Clawly was studying him speculatively. He asked, "Who was that you were talking to?"

Clawly hesitated a moment. "A psychologist I consulted some months back when I had insomnia. You remember."

Thorn nodded vaguely, stood sunk in thought. Clawly prodded him out of it with, "It's late. There are quite a few arrangements to check, and we haven't much time."

Together they started up the hillside.

Especially as a pair, they presented a striking appearance—they were such a study in similarities and contrasts. Certainly they both seemed spiritually akin to some wilder and more troubled age than safe, satisfied, wholesome utopia. Clawly was a small man, but dapper and almost dancingly lithe, with gleamingly alert, subtle features. He might have been some Borgia or Medici from that dark, glittering, twisted core of the Dawn Civilization, when by modern standards mankind was more than half insane. He looked like a small, red-haired, devil-may-care satan, harnessed for good purposes.

Thorn, on the other hand, seemed like a somewhat disheveled and reckless saint, lured by evil. His tall, gaunt frame increased the illusion. He, too, would have fitted into that history-twisted black dawn, perhaps as a Savonarola or da Vinci.

In that age they might have been the bitterest and most vindictive of enemies, but it was obvious that in this they were the most unshakably loyal of friends.

One also sensed that more than friendship linked them. Some secret, shared purpose that demanded the utmost of their abilities and put upon their shoulders crushing responsibilities.

They looked tired. Clawly's features were too nervously mobile, Thorn's eyes too darkly circled, even allowing for the shadows cast by the groundlight, which waned as the false-sky faded, became ragged, showed the stars.

They reached the amphitheater's grassy rim, walked along a row of neatly piled flying togs with distinctive luminescent monograms, spotted their own. Already members of the audience were launching like bats into the summary darkness, filling it with the faint gusty hum of subtronic power, that basic force underlying electric, magnetic, and gravitational phenomena, that titan, potentially earth-destroying power, chained for human use.

As he climbed into his flying togs, Thorn kept looking around. False-sky and groundlight had both dissolved, opening a view to the far horizon, although a little weather, kept electronically at bay for the symchromy, was beginning to drift in—thin streamers of cloud. He felt as never before a poignancy in the beauty of utopia, because he knew as never before how near it might be to disaster, how closely it was pressed upon by alien infinities. There was something spectral about the grandeur of the lonely, softly-glowing skylons, lofty and distant as mountains, thrusting up from the dark rolling countryside. Those vertical, one-building cities of his people, focuses of communal activity, gleaming pegs sparsely studding the whole earth—the Mauve Z peering over the next hill, seeming to top it but actually miles away; beyond it the Gray Twins, linked by a fantastically delicate aerial bridge; off to the left the pearly finger of the Opal Cross; last, farther left, thirty miles away but jutting boldly above the curve of the earth, the mountainous Blue Lorraine—all these majestic skylons seemed to Thorn like the last pinnacles of some fairy city engulfed by a rising black tide. And the streams of flying men and women, with their softly winking identification lights, no more than fireflies doomed to drown.

His fingers adjusted the last fastening of his togs, paused there. Clawly only said, "Well?" but there was in that one word the sense of a leave-taking from all this beauty and comfort and safety—an ultimate embarkation.

They pulled down their visors. From their feelings, it might have been Mars toward which they launched themselves—a sullen ember halfway up the sky, even now being tentatively probed by the First Interplanetary Expedition. But their actual destination was the Opal Cross.

II.

Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters.

Nyarlathotep, H. P. Lovecraft.

Suppressing the fatigue that surged up in him disconcertingly, Clawly rose to address the World Executive Committee. He found it less easy to suppress the feeling that had in part caused the surge of fatigue: the illusion that he was a charlatan seeking to persuade sane men of the truth of fabricated legends of the supernatural. His smile was characteristic of him—friendly, but faintly diabolic, mocking himself as well as others. Then the smile faded.

He summed up, "Well, gentlemen, you've heard the experts. And by now you've guessed why, with the exception of Thorn, they were asked to testify separately. Also, for better or worse"—he grimaced grayly—"you've guessed the astounding nature of the danger which Thorn and I believe over-hangs the world. You know what we want—the means for continuing our research on a vastly extended and accelerated scale, along with a program of confidential detective investigation throughout the world's citizenry. So nothing remains but to ask your verdict. There are a few points, however, which perhaps will bear stressing."

There was noncommittal silence in the Sky Room of the Opal Cross. It was a huge chamber and seemed no less huge because the ceiling was at present opaque—a great gray span arching from the World Map on the south wall to the Space Map on the north. Yet the few men gathered in an uneven horseshoe of armchairs near the center in no way suggested political leaders seeking a prestige-enhancing background for their deliberations, but rather a group of ordinary men who for various practical reasons had chosen to meet in a ballroom. Any other group than the World Executive Committee might just as well have reserved the Sky Room. Indeed, others had danced here earlier this night, as was mutely testified by a scattering of lost gloves, scarves, and slippers, along with half-emptied glasses and other flotsam of gaiety.

Yet in the faces of the gathered few there was apparent a wisdom and a penetrating understanding and a leisurely efficiency in action that it would have been hard to find the equal of, in any similar group in earlier times. And a good thing, thought Clawly, for what he was trying to convince them of was something not calculated to appeal to the intelligence of practical administrators—it was doubtful if any earlier culture would have granted him and Thorn any hearing at all.

He surveyed the faces unobtrusively, his dark glance flitting like a shadow, and was relieved to note that only in Conjerly's and perhaps Tempelmar's was a completely unfavorable reaction apparent. Firemoor, on the contrary, registered feverish and unquestioning belief, but that was to be expected in the volatile, easily-swayed chief of the Extraterrestrial Service—and a man who was Clawly's admiring friend. Firemoor was alone in this open expression of credulity. Chairman Shielding, whose opinion mattered most, looked on the whole skeptical and perhaps a shade disapproving; though that, fortunately, was the heavy-set man's normal expression.

The rest, reserving judgment, were watchful and attentive. With the unexpected exception of Thorn, who seemed scarcely to be listening, lost in some strange fatigued abstraction since he had finished making his report.

A still-wavering audience, Clawly decided. What he said now, and how he said it, would count heavily.

He touched a small box. Instantly some tens of thousands of pinpricks of green light twinkled from the World Map.

He said, "The nightmare-frequency for an average night a hundred years ago, as extrapolated from random samplings. Each dot—a bad dream. A dream bad enough to make the dreamer wake in fright."

Again he touched the box. The twinkling pattern changed slightly—there were different clusterings—but the total number of pinpricks seemed not to change.

"The same, for fifty years ago," he said. "Next—forty." Again there was merely a slight alteration in the grouping.

"And now—thirty." This time the total number of pinpricks seemed slightly to increase.

Clawly paused. He said, "I'd like to remind you, gentlemen, that Thorn proved conclusively that his method of sampling was not responsible for any changes in the frequency. He met all the objections you raised—that his subjects were reporting their dreams more fully, that he wasn't switching subjects often enough to avoid cultivating a nightmare-dreaming tendency, and so on."

Once more his hand moved toward the box. "Twenty-five." This time there was no arguing about the increase.

"Twenty."

"Fifteen."

"Ten."

"Five."

Each time the total greenness jumped, until now it was a general glow emanating from all the continental areas. Only the seas still showed widely scattered points, where men dreamed in supra- or sub-surface craft, and a few heavy clusters, where ocean-based skylons rose through the waves.

"And now, gentlemen, the present."

The evil radiance swamped the continents, reached out and touched the faces of the armchair observers.

"There you have it, gentlemen. A restful night in utopia," said Clawly quietly. The green glow unwholesomely emphasized his tired pallor and the creases of strain around eyes and mouth. He went on, "Of course it's obvious that if nightmares are as common as all that, you and yours can hardly have escaped. Each of you knows the answer to that question. As for myself—my nightly experiences provide one more small confirmation of Thorn's report."

He switched off the map. The carefully noncommittal faces turned back to him.

Clawly noted that the faint, creeping dawn-line on the World Map was hardly two hours away from the Opal Cross. He said, "I pass over the corroborating evidence—the slight steady decrease in average sleeping time, the increase in day sleeping and nocturnal social activity, the unprecedented growth of art and fiction dealing with supernatural terror, and so on—in order to emphasize as strongly as possible Thorn's secondary discovery: the similarity between the nightmare landscapes of his dreamers. A similarity so astonishing that, to me, the wonder is that it wasn't noticed sooner, though of course Thorn wasn't looking for it and he tells me that most of his earlier subjects were unable, or disinclined, to describe in detail the landscapes of their nightmares." He looked around. "Frankly, that similarity is unbelievable. I don't think even Thorn did full justice to it in the time he had for his report—you'd have to visit his offices, see his charts and dream-sketches, inspect his monumental tables of correlation. Think: hundreds of dreamers, to take only Thorn's samples, thousands of miles apart, and all of them dreaming—not the same nightmare, which might be explained by assuming telepathy or some subtle form of mass suggestion—but nightmares with the same landscape, the same general landscape. As if each dreamer were looking through a different window at a consistently distorted version of our own world. A dream world so real that when I recently suggested to Thorn he try to make a map of it, he did not dismiss my notion as nonsensical."

The absence of a stir among his listeners was more impressive than any stir could have been. Clawly noted that Conjerly's frown had deepened, become almost angry. He seemed about to speak, when Tempelmar casually forestalled him.

"I don't think telepathy can be counted out as an explanation," said the tall, long-featured, sleepy-eyed man. "It's still a purely hypothetic field—we don't know how it would operate. And there may have been contacts between Thorn's subjects that he didn't know about. They may have told each other their nightmares and so started a train of suggestion."

"I don't believe so," said Clawly slowly. "His precautions were thorough. Moreover, it wouldn't fit with the reluctance of the dreamers to describe their nightmares."

"Also," Tempelmar continued, "we still aren't a step nearer the underlying cause of the phenomenon. It might be anything—for instance, some unpredictable physiological effect of subtronic power, since it came into use about thirty years ago."

"Precisely," said Clawly. "And so for the present we'll leave it at that—vastly more frequent nightmares with strangely similar landscapes, cause unknown—while I"—he again gauged the position of the dawn-line—"while I hurry on to those matters which I consider the core of our case: the incidence of cryptic amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition. The latter first."

Again Conjerly seemed about to interrupt, and again something stopped him. Clawly got the impression it was a slight deterring movement from Tempelmar.

He touched the box. Some hundreds of yellow dots appeared on the World Map, a considerable portion of them in close clusters of two and three.

He said, "This time, remember, we can't go back any fifty years. These are such recent matters that there wasn't any hint of them even in last year's Report on the Psychological State of the World. As the experts agreed, we are dealing with an entirely new kind of mental disturbance. At least, no cases can be established prior to the last two years, which is the period covered by this projection."

He looked toward the map. "Each yellow dot is a case of delusions of nonrecognition. An otherwise normal individual fails to recognize a family member or friend, maintains in the face of all evidence that he is an alien and impostor—a frequent accusation, quite baseless, is that his place has been taken by an unknown identical twin. This delusion persists, attended by emotional disturbances of such magnitude that the sufferer seeks the services of a psychiatrist—in those cases we know about. With the psychiatrist's assistance, one of two adjustments is achieved: the delusions fade and the avowed alien is accepted as the true individual, or they persist and there is a separation—where husband and wife are involved, a divorce. In either case, the sufferer recovers completely.

"And now—cryptic amnesia. For a reason that will soon become apparent, I'll first switch off the other projection."

The yellow dots vanished, and in their place glowed a somewhat smaller number of violet pinpoints. These showed no tendency to form clusters.

"It is called cryptic, I'll remind you, because the victim makes a very determined and intelligently executed effort to conceal his memory lapse—frequently shutting himself up for several days on some pretext and feverishly studying all materials and documents relating to himself he can lay hands on. Undoubtedly sometimes he succeeds. The cases we hear about are those in which he makes such major slips—as being mistaken as to what his business is, who he is married to, who his friends are, what is going on in the world—that he is forced, against his will, to go to a psychiatrist. Whereupon, realizing that his efforts have failed, he generally confesses his amnesia, but is unable to offer any information as to its cause, or any convincing explanation of his attempt at concealment. Thereafter, readjustment is rapid."

He looked around. "And now, gentlemen, a matter which the experts didn't bring out, because I arranged it that way. I have saved it in order to impress it upon your minds as forcibly as possible—the correlation between cryptic amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition."

He paused with his hand near the box, aware that there was something of the conjurer about his movements and trying to minimize it. "I'm going to switch on both projections at once. Where cases of cryptic amnesia and delusions of nonrecognition coincide—I mean, where it is the cryptic amnesiac about whom the other person or persons had delusions of nonrecognition—the dots will likewise coincide; and you know what happens when violet and yellow light mix. I'll remind you that in ordinary cases of amnesia there are no delusions of nonrecognition—family and friends are aware of the victim's memory lapse, but they do not mistake him for a stranger."

His hand moved. Except for a sprinkling of yellow, the dots that glowed on the map were pure white.

"Complementary colors," said Clawly quietly. "The yellow has blanked out all the violet. In some cases one violet has accounted for a cluster of yellows—where more than one individual had delusions of nonrecognition about the same cryptic amnesiac. Except for the surplus cases of nonrecognition—which almost certainly correspond to cases of successfully concealed cryptic amnesia—the nonrecognitions and cryptic amnesias are shown to be dual manifestations of a single underlying phenomenon."

He paused. The tension in the Sky Room deepened. He leaned forward. "It is that underlying phenomenon, gentlemen, which I believe constitutes a threat to the security of the world, and demands the most immediate and thorough-going investigation. Though staggering, the implications are obvious."

The tautness continued, but slowly Conjerly got to his feet. His compact, stubby frame, bald bullet-head, and uncompromisingly impassive features were in striking contrast with Clawly's mobile, half-haggard, debonair visage.

Leashed anger deepened Conjerly's voice, enhanced its authority.

"We have come a long way from the Dawn Era, gentlemen. One might think we would never again have to grapple with civilization's old enemy superstition. But I am forced to that regretful conclusion when I hear this gentleman, to whom we have granted the privilege of an audience, advancing theories of demoniac possession to explain cases of amnesia and nonrecognition." He looked at Clawly. "Unless I wholly misunderstood?"

Clawly decisively shook his head. "You didn't. It is my contention—I might as well put it in plain words—that alien minds are displacing the minds of our citizens, that they are infiltering Earth, seeking to gain a foothold here. As to what minds they are, where they come from—I can't answer that, except to remind you that Thorn's studies of dream landscapes hint at a world strangely like our own, though strangely distorted. But the secrecy of the invaders implies that their purpose is hostile—at best, suspect. And I need not remind you that, in this age of subtronic power, the presence of even a tiny hostile group could become a threat to Earth's very existence."

Slowly Conjerly clenched his stub fingers, unclenched them. When he spoke, it was as if he were reciting a creed.

"Materialism is our bedrock, gentlemen—the firm belief that every phenomenon must have a real existence and a real cause. It has made possible science technology, unbiased self-understanding. I am open-minded. I will go as far as any in granting a hearing to new theories. But when those theories are a revival of the oldest and most ignorant superstitions, when this gentleman seeks to frighten us with nightmares and tales of evil spirits stealing human bodies, when he asks us on this evidence to institute a gigantic witch-hunt, when he raises the old bogey of subtronic power breaking loose, when he brings in a colleague"—he glared at Thorn—"who takes seriously to the idea of surveying dream worlds with transit and theodolite—then I say, gentlemen, that if we yield to such suggestions, we might as well throw materialism overboard and, as for safeguarding the future of mankind, ask the advice of fortunetellers!"

At the last word Clawly started, recovered himself. He dared not look around to see if anyone had noticed.

The anger in Conjerly's voice strained at its leash, threatened to break it.

"I presume, sir, that your confidential investigators will go out with wolfsbane to test for werewolves, garlic to uncover vampires, and cross and holy water to exorcise demons!"

"They will go out with nothing but open minds," Clawly answered quietly.

Conjerly breathed deeply, his face reddened slightly, he squared himself for a fresh and more uncompromising assault. But just at that moment Tempelmar eased himself out of his chair. As if by accident, his elbow brushed Conjerly's.

"No need to quarrel," Tempelmar drawled pleasantly, "though our visitor's suggestions do sound rather peculiar to minds tempered to a realistic materialism. Nevertheless, it is our duty to safeguard the world from any real dangers, no matter how improbable or remote. So, considering the evidence, we must not pass lightly over our visitor's theory that alien minds are usurping those of Earth—at least not until there has been an opportunity to advance alternate theories."

"Alternate theories have been advanced, tested, and discarded," said Clawly sharply.

"Of course," Tempelmar agreed smilingly. "But in science that's a process that never quite ends, isn't it?"

He sat down, Conjerly following suit as if drawn. Clawly was irascibly conscious of having got the worst of the interchange—and the lanky, sleepy-eyed Tempelmar's quiet skepticism had been more damaging than Conjerly's blunt opposition, though both had told. He felt, emanating from the two of them, a weight of personal hostility that bothered and oppressed him. For a moment they seemed like utter strangers.

He was conscious of standing too much alone. In every face he could suddenly see skepticism. Shielding was the worst—his expression had become that of a man who suddenly sees through the tricks of a sleight-of-hand artist masquerading as a true magician. And Thorn, who should have been mentally at his side, lending him support, was sunk in some strange reverie.

He realized that even in his own mind there was a growing doubt of the things he was saying.

Then, utterly unexpectedly, adding immeasurably to his dismay, Thorn got up, and without even a muttered excuse to the men beside him, left the room. He moved a little stiffly, like a sleepwalker. Several glanced after him curiously. Conjerly nodded. Tempelmar smiled.

Clawly noted it. He rallied himself. He said, "Well, gentlemen?"

III.

But who will reveal to our waking ken

The forms that swim and the shapes that creep

Under the waters of sleep?

The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.

Like a dreamer who falls head-foremost for giddy miles and then is wafted to a stop as gently as a leaf, Thorn plunged down the main vertical levitator of the Opal Cross and swam out of it at ground level, before its descent into the half mile of basements. At this hour the great gravity-less tube was relatively empty, except for the ceaseless silent plunge and ascent of the graduated subtronic currents and the air they swept along. There were a few other down-and-up swimmers—distant leaflike swirls of color afloat in the contracting white perspective of the tube—but, like a dreamer, Thorn did not seem to take note of them.

Another levitating current carried him along some hundred yards of mural-faced corridor to one of the pedestrian entrances of the Opal Cross. A group of revelers stopped their crazy, squealing dance in the current to watch him. They looked like figures swum out of the potently realistic murals—but with a more hectic, troubled gaiety on their faces. There was something about the way he plunged past them unseeing, his sleepwalker's eyes fixed on something a dozen yards ahead, that awakened unpleasant personal thoughts and spoiled their feverish fun-making.

The pedestrian entrance was really a city-limits. Here the one-building metropolis ended, and there began the horizontal miles of half-wild countryside, dark as the ancient past, trackless and roadless in the main, dotted in many areas with small private dwellings, but liberally brushed with forests.

A pair of lovers on the terrace, pausing for a kiss as they adjusted their flying togs, broke off to look curiously after Thorn as he hurried down the ramp and across the close-cropped lawn, following one of the palely-glowing pathways. The up-slanting pathlight, throwing into gaunt relief his angular cheek-bones and chin, made him resemble some ancient pilgrim or crusader in the grip of a religious compulsion.

Then the forest had swallowed him up.

A strange mixture of trance and willfullness, of dream and waking, of aimless wandering and purposeful tramping, gripped Thorn as he adventured down that black-fringed ghost-trail. Odd memories of childhood, of old hopes and desires, of student days with Clawly, of his work and the bewildering speculations it had led to, drifted across his mind, poignant but meaningless. Among these, but drained of significance, like the background of a dream, there was a lingering picture of the scene he had left behind him in the Sky Room. He was conscious of somehow having deserted a friend, abandoned a world, betrayed a great purpose—but it was a blurred consciousness and he had forgotten what the great purpose was.

Nothing seemed to matter any longer but the impulse pulling him forward, the sense of an unknown but definite destination.

He had the feeling that if he looked long enough at that receding, beckoning point a dozen yards ahead, something would grow there.

The forest path was narrow and twisting. Its faint glow silhouetted weeds and brambles partly over-growing it. His hands pushed aside encroaching twigs.

He felt something tugging at his mind from ahead, as if there were other avenues leading to his subconscious than that which went through his consciousness. As if his subconscious were the core of two or more minds, of which his was the only one.

Under the influence of that tugging, imagination awoke.

Instantly it began to recreate the world of his nightmares. The world which had obscurely dominated his life and turned him to dream-research, where he had found similar nightmares. The world where danger lay. The blue-litten world in which a mushroom growth of ugly squat buildings, like the factories and tenements and barracks of ancient times, blotched the utopian countryside, and along whose sluice-like avenues great crowds of people ceaselessly drifted, unhappy but unable to rest—among them that other, dream Thorn, who hated and envied him, deluged him with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.

For almost as long as he could remember, that dream Thorn had tainted his life—the specter at his feasts, the suppliant at his gates, the eternal accuser in the courts of inmost thought—drifting phantom-wise across his days, rising up starkly real and terrible in his nights. During the long, busy holiday of youth, when every day had been a new adventure and every thought a revelation, that dream Thorn had been painfully discovering the meaning of oppression and fear, had been security swept away and parents exiled, had attended schools in which knowledge was forbidden and all a man learned was his place. When he was discovering happiness and love, that dream Thorn had been rebelliously grieving for a young wife snatched away from him forever because of some autocratic government's arbitrary decrees. And while he was accomplishing his life's work, building new knowledge stone by stone, that dream Thorn had toiled monotonously at meaningless jobs, slunk away to brood and plot with others of his kind, been harried by a fiendishly efficient secret police, become a hater and a killer.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, the dark-stranded dream life had paralleled his own.

He knew the other Thorn's emotions almost better than his own, but the actual conditions and specific details of the dream Thorn's life were blurred and confused in a characteristically dreamlike fashion. It was as if he were dreaming that other Thorn's dreams—while, by some devilish exchange, that other Thorn dreamed his dreams and hated him for his good fortune.

A sense of guilt toward his dream-twin was the dominant fact in Thorn's inner life.

And now, pushing through the forest, he began to fancy that he could see something at the receding focus of his vision a dozen yards ahead, something that kept flickering and fading, so that he could scarcely be sure that he saw it, and that yet seemed an embodiment of all the unseen forces dragging him along—a pale, wraithlike face, horribly like his own.

The sense of a destination grew stronger and more urgent. The mile wall of the Opal Cross, a pale cataract of stone glimpsed now and then through overhanging branches, still seemed to rise almost at his heels, creating the maddening illusion that he was making no progress. The wraith-face blacked out. He began to run.

Twigs lashed him. A root caught at his foot. He stumbled, checked himself, and went on more slowly, relieved to find that he could at least govern the rate of his progress.

The forces tugging at him were both like and infinitely unlike those which had for a moment controlled his movements at the symchromy. Whereas those had seemed to have a wholly alien source, these seemed to have come from a single human mind.

He felt in his pocket for the object he had stolen from Clawly's mysterious confidant. He could not see much of its color now, but that made its baffling texture stand out. It seemed to have a little more inertia than its weight would account for. He was certain he had never touched anything quite like it before.

He couldn't say where the notion came from, but he suddenly found himself wondering if the thing could be a single molecule. Fantastic! And yet, was there anything to absolutely prevent atoms from assembling, or being assembled, in such a giant structure?

Such a molecule would have more atoms than the universe had suns.

Oversize molecules were the keys of life—the hormones, the activators, the carriers of heredity. What doors might not a supergiant molecule unlock?

The merest fancy—yet frightening. He started to throw the thing away, but instead tucked it back in his pocket.

There was a rush in the leaves. A large cat paused for an instant in the pathlight to snarl and stare at him. Such cats were common pets, for centuries bred for intelligence and for centuries tame. Yet now, on the prowl, it seemed all wild—with an added, evil insight gained from long association with man.

The path branched. He took a sharp turn, picking his way over bulbous roots. The pathlight grew dim and diffuse, its substance dissolved and spread by erosion. At places the vegetation had absorbed some of the luminescence. Leaves and stems glowed faintly.

But beyond, on either side, the forest was a black, choked infinity.

It had come inscrutably alive.

The sense of a thousand infinities pressing upon him, experienced briefly at the Yggdrasil, now returned with redoubled force.

The Yggdrasil was true. Reality was not what it seemed on the surface. It had many roots, some strong and true, some twisted and gnarled, nourished in many worlds.

He quickened his pace. Again something seemed to be growing at the focus of his vision—a flitting, pulsating, bluish glow. It was like the Yggdrasil's Nidhogg motif. Nidhogg, the worm gnawing ceaselessly at the root of the tree of life that goes down to hell. It droned against his vision—an unshakable color-tune.

Then, gradually, it became a face. His own face, but seared by unfamiliar emotions, haggard with unknown miseries, hard, vengeful, accusing—the face of the dream Thorn, beckoning, commanding, luring him toward some unknown destination in the maze of unknown, unseen worlds.

With a sob of courage and fear, he plunged toward it.

He must come to grips with that other Thorn, settle accounts with him, even the balance of pleasure and pain between them, right the wrong of their unequal lives. For in some sense he must be that other Thorn, and that other Thorn must be he. And a man could not be untrue to himself.

The wraithlike face receded as swiftly as he advanced.

His progress through the forest became a nightmarish running of the gauntlet, through a double row of giant black trees that slashed him with their branches.

The face kept always a few yards ahead.

Fear came, but too late—he could not stop.

The dreamy veils that had been drawn across his thoughts and memories during the first stages of his flight from the Opal Cross, were torn away. He realized that what was happening to him was the same thing that had happened to hundreds of other individuals. He realized that an alien mind was displacing his own, that another invader and potential cryptic amnesiac was gaining a foothold on Earth.

The thought hit him hard that he was deserting Clawly, leaving the whole world in the lurch.

But he was only a will-less thing that ran with outclutched hands.

Once he crossed a bare hilltop and for a moment caught a glimpse of the lonely glowing skylons—the Blue Lorraine, the Gray Twins, the Myrtle Y—but distant beyond reach, like a farewell.

He was near the end of his strength.

The sense of a destination grew overpoweringly strong.

Now it was something just around the next turn in the path.

He plunged through a giddy stretch of darkness thick as ink—and came to a desperate halt, digging in his heels, flailing his arms.

From somewhere, perhaps from deep within his own mind, came a faint echo of mocking laughter.

IV.

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not—

Macbeth

Like a mote in the grip of an intangible whirlwind, Clawly whipped through the gray dawn on a steady surge of subtronic power toward the upper levels of the Blue Lorraine. The brighter stars, and Mars, were winking out. Through the visor of his flying togs the rushing air sent a chill to which his blood could not quite respond. He should be home, recuperating from defeat, planning new lines of attack. He should be letting fatigue poisons drain normally from his plasma, instead of knocking them out with stimulol. He should be giving his thoughts a chance to unwind. Or he should have given way to lurking apprehensions and be making a frantic search for Thorn. But the itch of a larger worry was upon him, and until he had done a certain thing, he could not pursue personal interests, or rest.

With Thorn gone, his rebuff in the Sky Room loomed as a black and paralyzingly insurmountable obstacle that grew momently higher. They were lucky, he told himself, not to have had their present research funds curtailed—let alone having them increased, or being given a large staff of assistants, or being granted access to the closely guarded files of confidential information on cryptic amnesiacs and other citizens. Any earlier culture would probably have forbidden their research entirely, as a menace to the mental stability of the public. Only an almost fetishlike reverence for individual liberty and the inviolability of personal pursuits, had saved them.

The Committee's adverse decision had even shaken his own beliefs. He felt himself a puny little man, beset by uncertainties and doubts, quite incompetent to protect the world from dangers as shadowy, vast, and inscrutable as the gloom-drenched woodlands a mile below.

Why the devil had Thorn left the meeting like that, of necessity creating a bad impression? Surely he couldn't have given way to any luring hypnotic impulse—he of all men ought to know the danger of that. Still, there had been that unpleasant suggestion of sleepwalking in his departure—an impression that Clawly's memory kept magnifying. And Thorn was a strange fellow. After all these years, Clawly still found him unpredictable. Thorn had a spiritual recklessness, an urge to plumb all mental deeps. And God knows there were deeps enough for plumbing these days, if one were foolish. Clawly felt them in himself—the faint touch of a darker, less pleasant version of his own personality, against which he must keep constantly on guard.

If he had let something happen to Thorn—!

A variation in the terrestrial magnetic field, not responded to soon enough, sent him spinning sideways a dozen yards, forced his attention back on his trip.

He wondered if he had managed to slip away as unobtrusively as he had thought. A few of the committee members had wanted to talk. Firemoor, who had voted against the others and supported Clawly's views rather too excitedly, had been particularly insistent. But he had managed to put them off. Still, what if he were followed? Surely Conjerly's reference to "fortunetellers" had been mere chance, although it had given him a nasty turn. But if Conjerly and Tempelmar should find out where he was going now—What a handle that would give them against him!

It would be wiser to drop the whole business, at least for a time.

No use. The vice of the thing—if vice it be—was in his blood. The Blue Lorraine drew him as a magnet flicks up a grain of iron.

A host of images fought for possession of his tired mind, as he plunged through thin streamers of paling cloud. Green dots on the World Map. The greens and blues of the Yggdrasil—and in what nightmare worlds had Hoderson found his inspiration? The blue-tinted sketches one of Thorn's dreamers had made of the world of his nightmares. A sallow image of Thorn's face altered and drawn by pain, such an image as might float into the mind of one who watches too long by a sickbed. The looks on the faces of Conjerly and Tempelmar—that fleeting impression of a hostile strangeness. The hint of a dark alien presence in the depths of his own mind.

The Blue Lorraine grew gigantic, loomed as a vast, shadow-girt cliff, its topmost pinnacles white with frost although the night below had been summery. There were already signs of a new day beginning. Here and there freighters clung like beetles to the wall, discharging or receiving cargo through unseen ports. Some distance below a stream of foodstuffs for the great dining halls, partly packaged, partly not, was coming in on a subtronic current. Off to one side an attendant shepherded a small swarm of arriving schoolchildren, although it was too early yet for the big crowds.

Clawly swooped to a landing stage, hovered for a moment like a bird, then dropped. In the ante-room he and another early arriver helped each other remove and check their flying togs.

He was breathing hard, there was a deafness and a ringing in his ears, he rubbed his chilled fingers. He should not have made such a steep and swift ascent. It would have been easier to land at a lower stage and come up by levitator. But this way was more satisfying to his impatience. And there was less chance of someone following him unseen.

A levitating current wafted him down a quarter mile of mainstem corridor to the district of the psychologists. From there he walked.

He looked around uneasily. Only now did real doubt hit him. What if Conjerly were right? What if he were merely dragging up ancient superstitions, foisting them on a group of overspecialized experts, Thorn included? What if the world-threat he had tried to sell to the World Executive Committee were just so much morbid nonsense, elaborately bastioned by a vast array of misinterpreted evidence? What if the darker, crueler, deviltry-loving side of his mind were more in control than he realized? He felt uncomfortably like a charlatan, a mountebank trying to pipe the whole world down a sinister side street, a chaos-loving jester seeking to perpetrate a vast and unpleasant hoax. It was all such a crazy business, with origins far more dubious than he had dared reveal even to Thorn, from whom he had no other secrets. Best back down now, at least quit stirring up any more dark currents.

But the other urge was irresistible. There were things he had to know, no matter the way of knowing.

Stealing himself, he paraphrased Conjerly. "If the evidence seems to point that way, if the safety of mankind seems to demand it, then I will throw materialism overboard and ask the advice of fortunetellers!"

He stopped. A door faced him. Abruptly it was a doorway. He went in, approached the desk and the motionless, black-robed figure behind it.

As always, there was in Oktav's face that overpowering suggestion of age—age far greater than could be accounted for by filmy white hair, sunken cheeks, skin tight-drawn and wrinkle-etched. Unwilled, Clawly's thoughts turned toward the Dawn Civilization with its knights in armor and aircraft winged like birds, its whispered tales of elixirs of eternal life—and toward that oddly long-lived superstition, rumor, hallucination, that men clad in the antique garments of the Late Middle Dawn Civilization occasionally appeared on Earth for brief periods at remote places.

Oktav's garb, at any rate, was just an ordinary houserobe. But in their wrinkle-meshed orbits, his eyes seemed to burn with the hopes and fears and sorrows of centuries. They took no note of Clawly as he edged into a chair.

"I see suspense and controversy," intoned the seer abruptly. "All night it has surged around you. It regards that matter whereof we spoke at the Yggdrasil. I see others doubting and you seeking to persuade them. I see two in particular in grim opposition to you, but I cannot see their minds or motives. I see you in the end losing your grip, partly because of a friend's seeming desertion, and going down in defeat."

Of course, thought Clawly, he could learn all this by fairly simple spying. Still, it impressed him, as it always had since he first chanced—But was it wholly chance?—to contact Oktav in the guise of an ordinary psychologist.

Not looking at the seer, with a shyness he showed toward no one else, Clawly asked, "What about the world's future? Do you see anything more there?"

There was a faint drumming in the seer's voice. "Only thickening dreams, more alien spirits stalking the world in human mask, doom overhanging, great claws readying to pounce—but whence or when I cannot tell, only that your recent effort to convince others of the danger has brought the danger closer."

Clawly shivered. Then he sat straighter. He was no longer shy. Docketing the question about Thorn that was pushing at his lips, he said, "Look, Oktav, I've got to know more. It's obvious that you're hiding things from me. If I map the best course I can from the hints you give me, and then you tell me that it is the wrong course, you tie my hands. For the good of mankind, you've got to describe the overhanging danger more definitely."

"And bring down upon us forces that will destroy us both?" The seer's eyes stabbed at him. "There are worlds within worlds, wheels within wheels. Already I have told you too much for our safety. Moreover, there are things I honestly do not know, things hidden even from the Great Experimenters—and my guesses might be worse than yours."

Taut with a sense of feverish unreality, Clawly's mind wandered. What was Oktav—what lay behind that ancient mask? Were all faces only masks? What lay behind Conjerly's and Tempelmar's? Thorn's? His own? Could your own mind be a mask, too, hiding things from your own consciousness? What was the world—this brief masquerade of inexplicable events, flaring up from the future to be instantly extinguished in the past?

"But then what am I to do, Oktav?" he heard his tired voice ask.

The seer replied, "I have told you before. Prepare your world for any eventuality. Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it wait supine for the hunter."

"But how can I, Oktav? My request for a mere program of investigation was balked. How can I ask the world to arm—for no reason?"

The seer paused. When he finally answered there drummed in his voice, stronger than ever, the bitter wisdom of centuries.

"Then you must give it a reason. Always governments have provided appropriate motives for action, when the real motives would be unpalatable to the many, or beyond their belief. You must extemporize a danger that fits the trend of their short-range thinking. Now let me see—Mars—"

There was a slight sound. The seer wheeled around with a serpentine rapidity, one skinny hand plunged in the breast of his robe. It fumbled wildly, agitating the black, weightless fabric, then came out empty. A look of extreme consternation contorted his features.

Clawly's eyes shifted with his to the inner doorway.

The figure stayed there peering at Oktav for only a moment. Then, with an impatient, peremptory flirt of its head, it turned and moved out of sight. But it was indelibly etched, down to the very last detail, on Clawly's panic-shaken vision.

Most immediately frightening was the impression of age—age greater than Oktav's, although, or perhaps because, the man's physical appearance was that of thirty-odd, with dark hair, low forehead, vigorous jaw. But in the eyes, in the general expression—centuries of knowledge. Yet knowledge without wisdom, or with only a narrow-minded, puritanic, unsympathetic, overweening simulacrum of wisdom. A disturbing blend of unconscious ignorance and consciousness of power. The animal man turned god, without transfiguration.

But the most lingering impression, oddly repellent, was of its clothing. Crampingly unwieldly upper and nether garments of tight-woven, compressed, tortured animal-hair, fastened by bits of bone or horn. The upper garment had an underduplicate of some sort of bleached vegetable fiber, confined at the throat by two devices—one a tightly knotted scarf of crudely woven and colored insect spinnings, the other a high and unyielding white neckband, either of the same fiber as the shirt, glazed and stiffened, or some primitive plastic.

It gave Clawly an added, anti-climactic start to realize that the clothing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he had seen pictured in history albums, would have just this appearance, if actually prepared according to the ancient processes and worn by a human being.

Without explanation, Oktav rose and moved toward the inner doorway. His hand fumbled again in his robe, but it was merely an idle repetition of the earlier gesture. In the last glimpse he had of his face, Clawly saw continued consternation, frantic memory-searching, and the frozen intentness of a competent mind scanning every possible avenue of escape from a deadly trap.

Oktav went through the doorway.

There was no sound.

Clawly waited.

Time spun on. Clawly shifted his position, caught himself, coughed, waited, coughed again, got up, moved toward the inner doorway, came back and sat down.

There was time, too much time. Time to think again and again of that odd superstition about fleeting appearances of men in Dawn-Civilization garb. Time to make a thousand nightmarish deductions from the age in Oktav's, and that other's, eyes.

Finally he got up and walked to the inner doorway.

There was a tiny unfurnished room, without windows or another door, the typical secondary compartment of offices like this. Its walls were bare and seamless.

There was no one.

V.

... and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses had told of the presence of consciousness and will.

The Haunter of the Dark, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

With a sickening ultimate plunge, that seemed to plumb in instants distances greater than the diameter of the cosmos—a plunge in which more than flesh and bones were stripped away, transformed—Oktav followed his summoner into a region of not only visual night.

Here in the Zone, outside the bubble of space-time, on the borders of eternity, even the atoms were still. Only thought moved—but thought powered beyond description or belief, thought that could make or mar universes, thought not unbefitting gods.

Most strange, then, to realize that it was human thought, with all its homely biases and foibles. Like finding, on another planet in another universe, a peasant's cottage with smoke wreathing above the thatched roof and an axe wedged in a half-chopped log.

Mice scurrying at midnight in a vast cathedral—and the faint suggestion that the cathedral might not be otherwise wholly empty.

Oktav, or that which had been Oktav, oriented itself—himself—making use of the sole means of perception that functioned in the Zone. It was most akin to touch, but touch strangely extended and sensitive only to projected thought or processes akin to thought.

Groping like a man shut in an infinite closet, Oktav felt the eternal hum of the Probability Engine, the lesser hum of the seven unlocked talismans. He felt the seven human minds in their stations around the engine, felt six of them stiffen with cold disapproval as Ters made report. Then he took his own station, the last and eighth.

Ters concluded.

Prim thought, "We summoned you, Oktav, to hear your explanation of certain highly questionable activities in which you have recently indulged—only to learn that you have additionally committed an act of unprecedented negligence. Never before has a talisman been lost. And only twice has it been necessary to make an expedition to recover one—when its possessor met accidental death in a space-time world. How can you have permitted this to happen, since a talisman gives infallible warning if it is in any way spatially or temporarily parted from its owner?"

"I am myself deeply puzzled," Oktav admitted. "Some obscure influence must have been operative, inhibiting the warning or closing my mind to it. I did not become aware of the loss until I was summoned. However, casting my mind back across the last Earth-day's events, I believe I can now discern the identity of the individual into whose hands it fell—or who stole it."

"Was the talisman inert at the time?" thought Prim quickly.

"Yes," thought Oktav. "A Key-idea known only to myself would be necessary to unlock its powers."

"That is one small point in your favor," thought Prim.

"I am gravely at fault," thought Oktav, "but it can easily be mended. Lend me another talisman and I will return to the world and recover it."

"It will not be permitted," thought Prim. "You have already spent too much time in the world, Oktav. Although you are the youngest of us, your body is senile."

Before he could check himself, or at least avoid projection, Oktav thought, "Yes, and by so doing I have learned much that you, in your snug retreat, would do well to become aware of."

"The world and its emotions have corrupted you," thought Prim. "And that brings me to the second and major point of our complaint."

Oktav felt the seven minds converge hostilely upon him. Careful to mask his ideational processes, Oktav probed the others for possible sympathy or weakness. Lack of a talisman put him at a great disadvantage. His hopes fell.

Prim thought, "It has come to our attention that you have been telling secrets. Moved by some corrupt emotionality, and under the astounding primitive guise of fortunetelling, you have been disbursing forbidden knowledge—cloudily perhaps, but none the less unequivocally—to earthlings of the main-trunk world."

"I do not deny it," thought Oktav, crossing his Rubicon. "The main-trunk world needs to know more. It has been your spoiled brat. And as often happens to a spoiled brat, you now push it, unprepared and unaided, into a dubious future."

Prim's answering thought, amplified by his talisman, thundered in the measureless dark. "We are the best judges of what is good for the world. Our minds are dedicated far more selflessly than yours to the world's welfare, and we have chosen the only sound scientific method for insuring its continued and ultimate happiness. One of the unalterable conditions of that method is that no Earthling have the slightest concrete hint of our activities. Has your mind departed so far from scientific clarity—influenced perhaps by bodily decay due to injudicious exposure to space-time—that I must recount to you our purpose and our rules?"

The darkness pulsed. Oktav projected no answering thought. Prim continued, thinking in a careful step-by-step way, as if for a child.

"No scientific experiment is possible without controls—set-ups in which the conditions are unaltered, as a comparison, in order to gauge the exact effects of the alteration. There is, under natural conditions, only one world. Hence no experiments can be performed upon it. One can never test scientifically which form of social organization, government, and so forth, is best for it. But the creation of alternate worlds by the Probability Engine changes all that."

Prim's thought beat at Oktav.

"Can it be that the underlying logic of our procedure has somehow always escaped you? From our vantage point we observe the world as it rides into the cone of the future—a cone that always narrows towards the present, because in the remote future there are many major possibilities still realizable, in the near future only a relative few. We note the approach of crucial epochs, when the world must make some great choice, as between democracy and totalitarianism, managerialism and servicism, benevolent elitism and enforced equalism and so on. Then, carefully choosing the right moment and focussing the Probability Engine chiefly upon the minds of the world's leaders, we widen the cone of the future. Two or more major possibilities are then realized instead of just one. Time is bifurcated, or trifurcated. We have alternate worlds, at first containing many objects and people in common, but diverging more and more—bifurcating more and more completely—as the consequences of the alternate decisions make themselves felt."

"I criticize," thought Oktav, plunging into uncharted waters. "You are thinking in generalities. You are personifying the world, and forgetting that major possibilities are merely an accumulation of minor ones. I do not believe that the distinction between the two major alternate possibilities in a bifurcation is at all clear-cut."

The idea was too novel to make any immediate impression, except that Oktav's mind was indeed being hazy and disordered. As if Oktav had not thought, Prim continued, "For example, we last split the time-stream thirty Earth-years ago. Discovery of subtronic power had provided the world with a practically unlimited source of space-time energy. The benevolent elite governing the world was faced with three clear-cut alternatives: It could suppress the discovery completely, killing its inventors. It could keep it a Party secret, make it a Party asset. It could impart it to the world at large, which would destroy the authority of the Party and be tantamount to dissolving it, since it would put into the hands of any person, or at least any small group of persons, the power to destroy the world. In a natural state, only one of these possibilities could be realized. Earth would only have one chance in three of guessing right. As we arranged it, all three possibilities were realized. A few years' continued observation sufficed to show us that the third alternative—that of making subtronic power common property—was the right one. The other two had already resulted in untold unendurable miseries and horrors."

"Yes, the botched worlds," Oktav interrupted bitterly. "How many of them have there been, Prim? How many, since the beginning?"

"In creating the best of all possible worlds, we of necessity also created the worst," Prim replied with a strained patience.

"Yes—worlds of horror that might have never been, had you not insisted on materializing all the possibilities, good and evil lurking in men's minds. If you had not interfered, man still might have achieved that best world—suppressing the evil possibilities."

"Do you suggest that we should leave all to chance?" Prim exploded angrily. "Become fatalists? We, who are masters of fate?"

"And then," Oktav continued, brushing aside the interruption, "having created those worst or near-worlds—but still human, living ones, with happiness as well as horror in them, populated by individuals honestly striving to make the best of bad guesses—you destroy them."

"Of course!" Prim thought back in righteous indignation. "As soon as we were sure they were the less desirable alternatives, we put them out of their misery."

"Yes." Oktav's bitterness was like an acid drench. "Drowning the unwanted kittens. While you lavish affection on one, putting the rest in the sack."

"It was the most merciful thing to do," Prim retorted. "There was no pain—only instantaneous obliteration."

Oktav reacted. All his earlier doubts and flashes of rebellion were suddenly consolidated into a burning desire to shake the complacency of the others. He gave his ironic thoughts their head, sent them whipping through the dark.

"Who are you to tell whether or not there's pain in instantaneous obliteration? Oh yes, the botched worlds, the controls, the experiments that failed—they don't matter, let's put them out of their misery, let's get rid of the evidence of our mistakes, let's obliterate them because we can't stand their mute accusations. As if the Earthlings of the botched worlds didn't have as much right to their future, no matter how sorry and troubled, as the Earthlings of the main trunk. What crime have they committed save that of guessing wrong, when, by your admission, all was guess-work? What difference is there between the main trunk and the lopped branches, except your judgment that the former seems happier, more successful? Let me tell you something. You've coddled the main-trunk world for so long, you've tied your limited human affections to it so tightly, that you've gotten to believing that it's the only real world, the only world that counts—that the others are merely ghosts, object lessons, hypothetics. But in actuality they're just as throbbingly alive, just as deserving of consideration, just as real."

"They no longer exist," thought Prim crushingly. "It is obvious that your mind, tainted by Earth-bound emotions, has become hopelessly disordered. You are pleading the cause of that which no longer is."

"Are you so sure?" Oktav could feel his questioning thought hang in the dark, like a great black bubble, coercing attention. "What if the botched worlds still live? What if, in thinking to obliterate them, you have merely put them beyond the reach of your observation, cut them loose from the main-trunk time-stream, set them adrift in the oceans of eternity? I've told you that you ought to visit the world more often in the flesh. You'd find out that your beloved main-trunkers are becoming conscious of a shadowy, overhanging danger, that they're uncovering evidences of an infiltration, a silent and mystery-shrouded invasion across mental boundaries. Here and there in your main-trunk world, minds are being displaced by minds from somewhere else. What if that invasion comes from one of the botched worlds—say from one of the worlds of the last trifurcation? That split occurred so recently that the alternate worlds would still contain many duplicate individuals, and between duplicate individuals there may be subtle bonds that reach even across the intertime void—on your admission, time-splits are never at first complete, and there may be unchanging shared deeps in the subconscious minds of duplicate individuals, opening the way for forced interchanges of consciousness. What if the botched worlds have continued to develop in the everlasting dark, outside the range of your knowledge, spawning who knows what abnormalities and horrors, like mutant monsters confined in caves? What if, with a tortured genius resulting from their misery, they've discovered things about time that even you do not know? What if they're out there—waiting, watching, devoured by resentment, preparing to leap upon your pet?"

Oktav paused and probed the darkness. Faint, but unmistakable, came the pulse of fear. He had shaken their complacency all right—but not to his advantage.

"You're thinking nonsense," Prim thundered at him coldly, in thought-tones in which there was no longer any hope of mercy or reprieve. "It is laughable even to consider that we could be guilty of such a glaring error as you suggest. We know every crevice of space-time, every twig and leaflet. We are the masters of the Probability Engine."

"Are you?" Reckless now of all consequences, Oktav asked the unprecedented, forbidden, ultimate question. "I know when I was initiated, and presumably when the rest of you were initiated, it was always assumed and strongly suggested, though never stated with absolute definiteness, that Prim, the first of us, a mental mutant and supergenius of the nineteenth century, invented the Probability Engine. I, an awestruck neophyte, accepted this attitude. But now I know that I never really believed it. No human mind could ever have conceived the Probability Engine. Prim did not invent it. He merely found it, probably by chancing on a lost talisman. Thereafter some peculiarity of the Engine permitted him to take it out of reach of its true owners, hide it from them. Then he took us in with him, one by one, because a single mind was insufficient to operate the Engine in all its phases and potentialities. But Prim never invented it. He stole it."

With a sense of exultation, Oktav realized that he had touched their primal vulnerability—though at the same time insuring his own doom. He felt the seven resentful, frightened minds converge upon him suffocatingly. He probed now for one thing only—any relaxing of watchfulness, any faltering of awareness, on the part of any one of them. And as he probed, he kept choking out additional insults against the resistance.

"Is there any one of you, Prim included, who even understands the Probability Engine, let alone having the capacity to devise it?

"You prate of science, but do you understand even the science of modern Earthlings? Can any one of you outline to me the theoretic background of subtronic physics? Even your puppets have outstripped you. You're atavisms, relics of the Dawn Civilization, mental mummies, apes crept into a factory at night and monkeying with the machinery.

"You're sorcerer's apprentices—and what will happen when the sorcerer comes back? What if I should stop this eternal whispering and send a call winging clear and unhampered through eternity: 'Oh sorcerer, True Owners, here is your stolen Engine'?"

They pressed on him frantically, frightenedly, as if by sheer mental weight to prevent any such call being sent. He felt that he would go down under the pressure, cease to be. But at the same time his probing uncovered a certain muddiness in Kart's thinking, a certain wandering due to doubt and fear, and he clutched at it, desperately but subtly.

Prim finished reading sentence. "—and so Ters and Septem will escort Oktav back to the world, and when he is in the flesh, make disposition of him." He paused, continued. "Meanwhile, Sikst will make an expedition to recover the lost talisman, calling for aid if not immediately successful. At the same time, since the functioning of the Probability Engine is seriously hampered so long as there is an empty station, Sekond, Kart and Kant will visit the world in order to select a suitable successor for Oktav. I will remain here and—"

He was interrupted by a flurry of startled thought from Kart, which rose swiftly to a peak of dismay.

"My talisman! Oktav has stolen it! He is gone!"

VI.

By her battened hatch I leaned and caught

Sounds from the noisome hold—

Cursing and sighing of souls distraught

And cries too sad to be told.

Gloucester Moors, William Vaughn Moody.

Thorn teetered on the dark edge. His footgear made sudden grating noises against it as he fought for balance. He was vaguely conscious of shouts and of a needle of green light swinging down at him.

Unavailingly he wrenched the muscles of his calves, flailed the air with his arms.

Yet as he lurched over, as the edge receded upward—so slowly at first!—he became glad that he had fallen, for the down-chopping green needle made a red-hot splash of the place where he had been standing.

He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of flying togs he was not wearing.

There was time for a futile, spasmodic effort to get clear in his mind how, plunging through the forest, he should find himself on that dark edge.

Indistinct funnel-mouths shot past, so close he almost brushed them. Then he was into something tangly that impeded his fall—slowly at first, then swiftly, as pressures ahead were built up. His motion was sickeningly reversed. He was flung upward and to one side, and came down with a bone-shaking jolt.

He was knee-deep in the stuff that had broken his fall. It made a rustling, faintly skirring noise as he ploughed his way out of it.

He stumbled around what must have been a corner of the dark building from whose roof he had fallen. The shouts from above were shut off.

He dazedly headed for one of the bluish glows. It faintly outlined scrawny trees and rubbish-littered ground between him and it.

He was conscious of something strange about his body. Through the twinges and numbness caused by his fall, it obtruded itself—a feeling of pervasive ill-health and at the same time a sense of light, lean toughness of muscular fiber—both disturbingly unfamiliar.

He picked his way through the last of the rubbish and came out at the top of a terrace. The bluish glow was very strong now. It came from the nearest of a line of illuminators set on poles along a broad avenue at the foot of the terrace. A crowd of people were moving along the avenue, but a straggly hedge obscured his view.

He started down, then hesitated. The tangly stuff was still clinging to him. He automatically started to brush it off, and noted that it consisted of thin, springy spirals of plastic and metal—identical with the shavings from an old-style, presubtronic hyperlathe. Presumably a huge heap of the stuff had been vented from the funnel-mouths he had passed in his fall. Though it bewildered him to think how many hyperlathes must be in the dark building he was skirting, to produce so much scrap. Hyperlathes were obsolete, almost a curiosity. And to gather so many engines of any sort into one building was unthought of.

His mind was jarred off this problem by sight of his hands and clothing. They seemed strange—the former pallid, thin, heavy-jointed, almost clawlike.

Sharp but far away, as if viewed through a reducing glass, came memories of the evening's events. Clawly, the symchromy, the old man in black, the conference in the Sky Room, his plunge through the forest.

There was something clenched in his left hand—so tightly that the fingers opened with difficulty. It was the small gray sphere he had stolen at the Yggdrasil. He looked at it disturbedly. Surely, if he still had that thing with him, it meant that he couldn't have changed. And yet—

His mind filled with a formless but mounting foreboding.

Under the compulsion of that foreboding, he thrust the sphere into his pocket—a pocket that wasn't quite where it should be and that contained a metallic cylinder of unfamiliar feel. Then he ran down the terrace, pushed through the straggly hedge, and joined the crowd surging along the blue-litten avenue.