The Mind Spider and Other Stories (12 page)

So this time he set the board so he’d arrive just a few minutes before the tragedy. He lifted the guri, bullets and all, and waited around to make sure it stayed lifted. He figured —rightly—that if he left this space-time sector the gun would reappear in the dresser drawer, and he .didn’t want his wife getting hold of any gun, even one with a broken lifeline. Afterwards—after his own death was averted, that is—he figured he'd put the gun back in his wife’s hand.

Two tilings reassured
him
a lot, although he’d been expecting the one and hoping for the other: his wife didn’t notice his presence as a Doubleganger and when she went to grab the gun she acted as if it weren’t gone and held her right hand as if there were a gun in it. If he’d studied philosophy, he’d have realized he was witnessing a proof of Leibniz’s theory of Pre-established harmony: that neither atoms nor human beings really affect each other, they just look as if they did.

But anyway he had no time for theories. Still holding the gun, he drifted out into the living room to get a box seat right next to Himself for the big act. Himself didn’t notice him any more than his wife had.

His wife came out and spoke her piece same as ever. Himself cringed as if she still had the gun and started to babble about the inheritance, his wife sneered and made as if she were shooting Himself.

Sure enough, there was no shot this time,
and
no mysteriously appearing bullet hole—which was something he’d been afraid of. Himself just stood there dully while his wife made as if she were looking down at a dead body and went back to her bedroom.

He was pretty pleased: this time he actually
hdd
changed the past. Then Himself slowly glanced around at him, still with that dull look, and slowly came toward him. He was more pleased than ever because he figured now they’d melt together into one man and one lifeline again, and he’d be able to hurry out somewhere and establish an alibi, just to be on the safe side, while his wife suicided.

But it didn’t quite happen that way. Himselfs look changed from dull to desperate, he came up close . . . and suddenly grabbed the gun and quick as a wink put a thumb to the trigger and shot himself between the eyes. And flopped, same as ever.

Right there he was starting to learn a little—and it was an unpleasant shivery sort of learning—about the Law of Conservation of Reality. The four-dimentional space-time universe doesn’t
like
to be changed, any more than it likes to lose or gain energy or matter. If it has to be changed, it’ll adjust itself just enough to accept that change and no more. The Conservation of Reality is a sort of Law of Least Action, too. It doesn’t matter how improbable the events involved in the adjustment are, just so long as they’re possible at all and can be used to patch the established pattern. His death, at this point, was part of the established pattern. If he lived on instead of dying, billions of other compensatory changes would have to be made, covering many years, perhaps centuries, before the old pattern could be re-established, the snarled lifelines woven back into it—and the universe finally go on the same as if his wife had shot him on schedule.

This
way the pattern was hardly effected at all. There were powder bums on his forehead that weren’t there before, but there weren’t any witnesses to the shooting in the first place, so the presence or absence of powder bums didn’t matter The gun was lying on the floor instead of being in his wife’s hands, but he had the feeling that when the time came for her to die, she’d wake enough from the Pre-established Harmony trance to find it, just as Himself did.

So he’d learned a little about the Conservation of Reality.

He also had learned a little about his own character, ex-pecially from Himself s last look and act. He’d got a hint that he had been trying to destroy himself for years by the way he’d lived, so that inherited fortune or accidental success couldn’t save him, and if his wife hadn’t shot him he’d have done it himself in any case. He’d got a hint that Himself hadn’t merely been acting as an agent for a self-correcting universe when he grabbed the gun, he’d been acting on his own account, too—the universe, you know, operates by getting people to co-operate.

But although these ideas occurred to him, he didn’t dwell on them, for he figured he’d had a partial success the second time if he kept the gun away from Himself, if he dominated Himself, as it were, the melting-together would take place and everything else go forward as planned.

He had the dim realization that the universe, like a huge sleepy animal, knew what he was trying to do and was trying to thwart him. This feeling of opposition made him determined to outmaneuver the universe—not the first guy to yield to such a temptation, of course.

And up to a point his tactics worked. The third time he gimmicked the past, everything started to happen just as it did the second time. Himself dragged miserably over to him, looking for the gun, but he had it tucked away and was prepared to hold onto it. Encouragingly, Himself didn’t grapple, the look of desperation changed to one of utter hopelessness, and Himself turned away from him and very slowly walked to the French doors and stood looking out into the sweating night. He figured Himself was just getting used to the idea of not dying. There wasn’t a breath of air. A couple of meteors streaked across the sky. Then, mixed with the upseeping night sounds of the city, there was a low whirring whistle.

Himself shook a bit, as if he’d had a sudden chill. Then Himself turned around and slumped to the floor in one movement. Between his eyes was a black hole.

Then and there this Snake I’m telling you about decided never again to try and change the past, at least not his personal past. He’d had it, and he’d also acquired a healthy respect for a High Command able to change the past, albeit with difficulty. He scooted back to the Dispatching Room, where a sleepy and surprised Snake gave him a terrific chewing out and confined him to quarters. The chewing-out didn’t bother him too much—he’d .acquired a certain fatalism about things. A person’s got to leam to accept reality as it is, you know—just as you’d best not be surprised at the way I disappear in a moment or two—I’m a Snake too, remember.

If a statistician is looking for an example of a highly improbable event, he can. hardly pick a more vivid one than the chance of a man being hit by a meteorite. And, if he adds the condition that the meteorite hit him between the eyes so as to counterfeit the wound made by a 32-caliber bullet, the improbability becomes astronomical cubed. So how’s a person going to outmaneuver a universe that finds it easier to drill a man through the head that way rather than postpone the date of his death?

“I wish,” said the Young Captain, police chief of High Chicago, the turbulent satellite that hangs over the meridian of the midwestem groundside city, “I wish that sometimes the telephathic races of the Galaxy weren’t such consistent truth-tellers and silence-keepers.”

“Your four suspects are all telepaths?” the Old Lieutenant asked.

“Yes. I also wish I had more than half an hour to decide which one to accuse. But Earthside has muscled into the case and the pressure is on. If I can’t reason it out, I must make a guess. A bare half-hour they give me.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t waste it with a pensioned-off old louey.”

The Young Captain shook his head decisively. “No. You think. You have time to now.”

The Old Lieutenant smiled. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. And I doubt if I can give you any special angles on telepaths, Jim. It’s true I’ve lately been whiling away the time on informal study of alien thought systems with Khla-Khla the Martian, but—”

“I didn’t come to you looking for a specialist on telepathy,” the Young Captain asserted sharply.

“Very well then, Jim. You know what you’re doing. Let’s hear your case. And give me background. I don’t keep up with the news.”

The Young Captain looked skeptical. “Everyone in High

Chicago has heard about the murder—not two furlongs from here—of the representative of the Arcturian peace party.”

“I haven’t,” the Old Lieutenant said. “Who are the Arc-turians? I tell you, for an oldster like me, the Now is just one more historical period. Better consult someone else, Jim.”

“No. The Arcturians are the first non-related humanoid race to turn up in the Galaxy. Non-related to Earth humans, that is. True, they have three eyes, and six fingers on each hand, but they are hairless mammalian bipeds just the same. One of their females is the current burlesque sensation of the Star and Garter.”

“The police found that a good spot to keep their eyes on in my day too,” the Old Lieutenant recalled, nodding. “Are the Arcturians telepaths?”

“No. I’ll come to the telepathy angle later. The Arcturians are slpit into two parties: those who want to enter the Commerce Union and open their planets to alien starships, including Earth’s—the peace party, in short—and those who favor a policy of strict non-intercourse which, as far as we know, always ultimately leads to war. The war party is rather the stronger of the two. Any event may tip the balance.”

“Such as a representative of the peace party coming quietly to Earth and getting himself bumped before he even gets down from High Chicago?”

“Exactly. It looks bad, Sean. It looks as if
we
wanted war. The other member peoples of the Commerce Union are skeptical enough already about the ultimate peacefulness of Earth’s intentions toward the whole Galaxy. They look on the Arcturian situation as a test. They say that we accepted the Polarians and Antareans and all the rest as equals simply be-cuse they
are
so different from us in form and culture—it’s easy to admit theoretical equality with a bumblebee, say, and then perhaps do him dirt afterward.

“But, our galactic critics ask, will Earthmen be so ready or willing to admit equality with a humanoid race? It’s sometimes harder, you know, to agree that your own brother is a human being than to grant the title to an anonymous peasant on the other side of the globe. They say—I continue to speak for our galactic critics—that Earthmen will openly work for peace with Arcturus while secretly sabotaging it.”

“Including murder.”

“Right, Sean. So unless we can pin this crime on aliens— best of all on extremists in the Arcturian war party (something I believe but can in no way prove)—the rumor will go through the Union that Earth wants war, while the Arcturian Earth-haters will have everything their own way.”

“Leave off the background, Jim. How was the murder done?”

Permitting himself a bitter smile, the Young Captain said wistfully, “With the whole Galaxy for a poison cabinet and a weapon shop, with almost every means available of subtle disguise, of sudden approach and instantaneous getaway— everything but a time machine, and some crook will come along with that any day now—the murder had to be done with a blunt instrument and by one of four aliens domiciled in the same caravansary as the Arcturian peace-party man.

“There’s something very ugly, don’t you think, in the vision of a blackjack gripped by the tentacle of an octopoid or in the pinchers of a black Martian? To be frank, Sean, I’d rather the killer had been fancier in his
modus operandi.
It would have let me dump the heavy end of the case in the laps of the science boys.”

“I was always grateful myself when I could invoke the physicists,” the Old Lieutenant agreed. “It’s marvelous what colored lights and the crackle of Geiger counters do to take the pressure off a plain policeman. These four aliens you mention are the telepaths?”

“Right, Sean. Shady characters, too, all four of them, criminals for hire, which makes it harder. And each of them takes the typical telepath point of view—Almighty, how it exasperates me!—that we ought to
know
which one of them is guilty without asking questions! They know well enough that Earthmen aren’t telepathic, but still they hide behind the lofty pretense that every intelligent inhabitant of the Cosmos
mu.it
be telepathic.

"If you come right out and tell them that your mind is absolutely deaf-dumb-and-blind to the thoughts of others, they act as if you’d made a dreadful social blunder and they cover up for you by pretending not to have heard you. Talk about patronizing—! Why, they’re like a woman who is forever expecting you to know what it is she’s angry about without ever giving you a hint what it is. They’re like—”

“Now, now, I’ve dealt with a few telepaths in my time, Jim. I take it that the other prong of your dilemma is that if you officially accuse one of them,
and you hit it right,
then he will up and confess like a good little animal, using the ritual of speech to tell you who commissioned the murder and all the rest of it, and everything will be rosy.

“But
if you hit it wrong,
it will be a mortal insult to his whole race—to all telepaths, for that matter—and there will be whole solar systems moving to resign from the Union and all manner of other devils to pay. Because, continuing the telepath’s fiction, that you are a telepath yourself, you must have known he was innocent and yet you accused him.”

“Most right, Sean,” the Young Captain admitted ruefully. “As I said at the beginning, truth-tellers and silence-keepers —intellectual prigs, all of them! Refusing to betray each other’s thoughts to a non-telepath, I can understand that— though just one telepathic stoolpigeon would make police work ten mountains easier. But all these other lofty idealistic fictions do get my goat! If I were running the Union—”

“Jim, your time is running short. I take it you want help in deciding which one to accuse. That is, if you
do
decide to chance it rather than shut your mouth, lbse face and play for time.”

“I’ve got to chance it, Sean—Earthside demands it. But as things stand, I’ll be backing no better than a three-to-one shot. For you see, Sean, every single suspect of the four is just as suspect as the others. In my book, they’re four equally bad boys.”

“Sketch me your suspects then, quickly.” The Old Lieutenant closed his eyes.