The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (48 page)

Star may not be the most beautiful woman in all her many universes but she may be the sexiest—in a sultry. Girl Scout fashion. Just walking through a room she is in should change a boy into a man.

“Woodrow Wilson Smith, Senior of the Howard Families, time line two, code ‘Leslie LeCroix.’” Lazarus and I again exchanged nods.

“Dr. Jubal Harshaw, time line three, code ‘Neil Armstrong.’”

Dr. Harshaw raised his hand in a half salute and smiled; I answered the same way—and made a note to buttonhole him, back in Boondock perhaps, about the many legends of the “Man from Mars.” How much was truth, how much was fiction?

“Dr. Hilda Mac Burroughs, time line four, code ‘Ballox O’Malley.’” Hilda and I exchanged smiles.

“Commander Ted Smith, time line five, code ‘DuQuesne.’” Commander Smith was a square-jawed athlete with ice-blue eyes. He was dressed in an undecorated gray uniform, carrying a bolstered hand gun, and wearing a bejeweled heavy bracelet.

“Captain John Sterling, time line six, code ‘Neil Armstrong alternate time line.’” I looked at my boyhood hero and considered the possibility that I was asleep and having a vivid dream. Hazel had told me and told me again that the hero of her space opera was real…but not even the repeated use of the code phrase “Operation Galactic Overlord” had convinced me…and now here he was: the foe of the Overlord.

Or was it he? What proof?

“Sky Marshal Samuel Beaux, time line seven, code ‘Fair-acre.’” Marshal Beaux was over two meters tall, massed at least a hundred and ten kilos, all of it muscle and rhinoceros hide. He was dressed in a midnight black uniform and a frown, and was as beautiful as a black panther. He stared at me with jungle eyes.

Lazarus announced, “I declare quorum. The Circle is closed. Dr. Hilda Burroughs now speaks for the Circle.”

Hilda smiled at me and said, “Colonel Campbell, I have been conscripted to explain to you our purposes and enough of our methods to enable you to see how the job you are being asked to do fits into the master plan, and why it must be done. Don’t hesitate to interrupt, or to argue, or to demand more details. We can continue this discussion from now until lunch-time. Or for the next ten years. Or for a truly long time. As long as necessary.”

Sky Marshal Beaux cut in with: “Speak for yourself, Mrs. Burroughs. I’m leaving in thirty minutes.”

Hilda said, “Sambo, you really should address the chair. I can’t let you leave until you speak your piece, but, if you need to leave, you can speak now. Please explain what you do and why.”

“Why is this man being coddled? I’ve never been asked to explain my duties to a raw recruit before. This is ridiculous.”

“Nevertheless I ask you to do so.”

The sky marshal settled back in his chair and said nothing.

Lazarus said, “Sambo, I know this is without precedent but all the Companions including the three who are not here have agreed that Task Adam Selene is essential to Operation Galactic Overlord, that Overlord is essential to Campaign Boskone, that Boskone is essential to our Plan Long View…and that Colonel Campbell is essential to Task Adam Selene. The Circle is closed on this, no dissent. We need Campbell’s services, given fully and freely. So we must persuade him. You need not go first…but, if you expect to be excused from the Circle in thirty minutes, you had better speak up.”

“And if I don’t choose to?”

“Your problem. You are free to resign; all of us are, anytime. And the Circle is free to terminate you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No.” Lazarus glanced at his wrist. “You’ve stalled for four minutes against the unanimous decision of the Circle. If you expect to comply with the Circle’s decision, you are running out of minutes.”

“Oh, very well. Campbell, I am commanding officer of the armed forces of the Time Corps—”

“Correction,” Lazarus Long interrupted. “Sky Marshal Beaux is the chief of staff of—”

“It’s the same thing!”

“It is not the same thing and I knew exactly what I was doing when I set it up that way. Colonel Campbell, the Time Corps sometimes intervenes in key battles in history. Histories. The Corps’ board of historians seeks to identify cusps where judicious use of force might change history in fashions that we believe, in our limited wisdom, would be better for the human race—and this policy strongly affects and is affected by Task Adam Selene, I must add. If the Circle closes on a recommendation by the historians, military action is mounted, and a commander in chief for that operation is selected by the Circle.”

Lazarus turned and looked directly at Beaux. “Sky Marshal Beaux is a highly skilled military commander, perhaps the best in all history. He is usually selected to command. But the Circle picks the commander of each task force. This policy keeps ultimate power out of the hands of military commanders. I must add that the Chief of Staff is an auditor without a vote; he is not a Companion of this Circle. Sambo, do you have anything to add?”

“You seem to have made my speech.”

“Because you were stalling. You are free to correct, amend, and elaborate.”

“Oh, never mind. You should give elocution lessons.”

“Do you now wish to be excused?”

“Are you telling me to leave?”

“No.”

“I’ll hang around awhile as I want to see what you do with this joker. Why didn’t you simply conscript him and assign him to Task Selene? He’s an obvious criminal type; look at his skull, note his attitude toward authority. On my home planet we never use anything as sloppy and unreliable as volunteers…and we don’t have a criminal class because we draft them into the forces as fast as they show their heads. There are no better fighters than the criminal type if you catch ’em young, rule them with iron discipline, and keep them more scared of their sergeants than they can possibly be of the enemy.”

“That will do. Sambo. Please refrain from expressing opinion uninvited.”

“I thought you were the great champion of free speech?”

“I am. But there is no free lunch. If you want to make a speech, you can hire your own hall; this one is paid for by the Circle. Hilda. Speak up, dear.”

“Very well. Richard, most interventions recommended by our historians and mathematicians are not brute force, but actions far more subtle, carried out by individual field operatives…such as your gal Hazel, who is a real fox when it comes to robbing a henhouse. You know what we are trying to do in Task Adam Selene; you don’t know what it is for, I believe. Our methods of prognosticating the results of a change introduced into history are less than perfect. Whether it’s digging in on one side in a key battle, or something as simple as supplying a high school student with a condom some midnight and thereby avoiding the birth of a Hitler or a Napoleon, we can never predict the results as well as we need to. Usually we have to do it, then send a field operative down that new time line to report the changes.”

“Hilda,” said Lazarus, “may I offer a horrible example?”

“Certainly, Woodie. But make it march. I plan to finish before lunch.”

“Colonel Campbell, I come from a world identical with yours to about 1939. Divergence, as usual, showed most at the start of space flight. Both your world and mine showed a tendency toward religious hysteria. In mine it peaked with a television evangelist named Nehemiah Scudder. His brand of fire and brimstone and scapegoatism—Jews of course; no novelty—peaked at a time when unemployment also peaked and public debt and inflation got out of hand; the result was a religious dictatorship, a totalitarian government as brutal as my world has ever seen.

“So this Circle set up an operation to get rid of Nehemiah Scudder. Nothing as crass as assassination; the specific method Hilda mentioned was used. A high school boy without a rubber was provided with one by a field operative, and the little bastard who became Nehemiah Scudder was never born. So time line two—mine—was split and time line eleven was created
,
allee samee but without Nehemiah Scudder, the Prophet. Bound to be better, right?

“Wrong. In my time line World War Three, the nuclear war—sometimes known by other names—badly damaged Europe but did not spread; North America under the Prophet had opted out of international affairs. In time line eleven the war started a little sooner, in the Middle East, spread to all the world overnight…and a hundred years later it was still impossible to find any life superior to cockroaches on the land masses of what had once been the cool green hills of Earth. Take it, Hilda.”

“Thank you, too much! Lazarus leaves me with a planet glowing in the dark to show why we need better prediction methods. We hope to use Adam Selene—supervising computer Holmes IV known as ‘Mike’—the programs and memories that make him unique—to tie the best computers of Tertius and some other planets into a mammoth logic that can correctly project the results of a defined change in history…so that we won’t swap Nehemiah Scudder—who can be endured—for a ruined planet that cannot be endured. Lazarus, should I mention the supersnooperscope?”

“You just did, so you had better.”

“Richard, I’m way out of my depth; I’m just a simple housewife—”

A groan went up in that hall. Lazarus may have led it but it seemed to be unanimous.

“—who lacks a technical background. But I do know that engineering progress depends on accurate instruments, and that accurate instruments ever since the twentieth century—my century—have depended on progress in electronics. My number-one husband Jake Burroughs and Dr. Libby Long and Dr. Deety Carter are whipping up a little doozy combining Jake’s space-time twister with television and the ordinary snooper-scope. With it you will be able not only to watch what your wife is doing while you are away overnight but also to watch what she will be doing ten years from now. Or fifty. Or five hundred.

“Or it could let the Circle of Ouroboros see what would be the result of an intervention before it is too late to refrain. Maybe. With the unique power of Holmes IV—maybe yes. We’ll see. But it is as certain as anything can be in this quicksand world that Mike Holmes IV can improve the performance of the Circle of Ouroboros enormously even if the supersnooperscope never comes on line.

“Since we are trying hard to make things better, more decent, happier for everyone, I hope that you will see that Task Adam Selene is worth doing. Any questions?”

“I have one, Hilda.”

“Yes, Jubal?”

“Has our friend Richard been indoctrinated in the concept of the World as Myth?”

“I barely mentioned it, once, in telling him how we four—Zeb and Deety, Jake and I—were hounded off our planet and erased out of the script. I think Hazel has done better. Richard?”

“Not anything I could get my teeth into. Nothing that made sense. And—forgive me, Hilda—I found your story hard to swallow.”

“Of course, dear; I don’t believe it myself. Except late at night. Jubal, you had better take it.”

Dr. Harshaw answered, “Very well. The World as Myth is a subtle concept. It has sometimes been called multiperson solipsism, despite the internal illogic of that phrase. Yet illogic may be necessary, as the concept denies logic. For many centuries religion held sway as the explanation of the universe—or multiverse. The details of revealed religions differed wildly but were essentially the same: Somewhere up in the sky—or down in the earth—or in a volcano—any inaccessible place—there was an old man in a nightshirt who knew everything and was all powerful and created everything and rewarded and punished…and could be bribed.

“Sometimes this Almighty was female but not often because human males are usually bigger, stronger, and more belligerent; God was created in Pop’s image.

“The Almighty-God idea came under attack because it explained nothing; it simply pushed all explanations one stage farther away. In the nineteenth century atheistic positivism started displacing the Almighty-God notion in that minority of the population that bathed regularly.

“Atheism had a limited run, as it, too, explains nothing, being merely Godism turned upside down. Logical positivism was based on the physical science of the nineteenth century which, physicists of that century honestly believed, fully explained the universe as a piece of clockwork.

“The physicists of the twentieth century made short work of that idea. Quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s cat tossed out the clockwork world of 1890 and replaced it with a fog of probability in which anything could happen. Of course the intellectual class did not notice this for many decades, as an intellectual is a highly educated man who can’t do arithmetic with his shoes on, and is proud of his lack. Nevertheless, with the death of positivism, Godism and Creationism came back stronger than ever.

“In the late twentieth century—correct me when I’m wrong, Hilda—Hilda and her family were driven off Earth by a devil, one they dubbed ‘the Beast.’ They fled in a vehicle you have met. Gay Deceiver, and in their search for safety they visited many dimensions, many universes…and Hilda made the greatest philosophical discovery of all time.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls!”

“Quiet, dear. They visited, among more mundane places, the Land of Oz—”

I sat up with a jerk. Not too much sleep last night and Dr. Harshaw’s lecture was sleep—inducing. “Did you say ‘Oz’?”

“I tell you three times. Oz, Oz, Oz. They did indeed visit the fairyland dreamed up by L. Frank Baum. And the Wonderland invented by the Reverend Mr. Dodgson to please Alice. And other places known only to fiction. Hilda discovered what none of us had noticed before because we were inside it: The World
is
Myth. We create it ourselves—and we change it ourselves. A truly strong myth maker, such as Homer, such as Baum, such as the creator of Tarzan, creates substantial and lasting worlds…whereas the fiddlin’, unimaginative liars and fabulists shape nothing new and their tedious dreams are forgotten. On this observed fact, Richard—not religion but verifiable fact—is based the work of the Circle of Ouroboros. Hilda?”

“Only a short time until we should break for lunch. Richard, do you have any comment now?”

“You won’t like it.”

Lazarus said, “Spill it, Bub.”

“I not only will not risk my life on wordy nonsense, I will do all that I can to keep Hazel from doing so. If you really want, and need, the programs and memories of that out-of-date Lunar computer there are at least two better ways to get them.”