The Universe Maker Read online

  The man had been at the point of telling him what he, Cargill, must do so that the Tweeners would win. It was strange that the entire Merlica scene had faded at the precise moment when those words were spoken.

  The question was, had he, in fact, heard the words? Was it possible that he knew what the method was by which the Tweeners could win? Could all that he had done to insure that the Tweeners did not win be undone at this late stage by some unexpected event?

  Cargill assured himself that no change was likely. But as the voice of the "therapist" projected into the air near his head, Cargill thought: "If I can recall how those geometric designs looked, maybe I can get close enough to Merlica to remember exactly what Lan Bruch said."

  19

  Eerily, Cargill appeared to be detached from his real self and able to watch the scene below him. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, he was still part of it. He would have liked to withdraw the billions of energy flows that connected him with the inanimate thing down there. But he knew the body wasn't as yet really dead, although the major motion had ceased. The heart, the lungs, all the organs had stopped functioning.

  The holding effect of the body was highly disturbing because there was some place he was supposed to go. He realized that this experience was different than others he had had. In the past he had not questioned the need to go, had not questioned where he should go, had simply gone there. Now, he thought: "Why should I go anywhere?"

  And that was, indeed, a new idea. There was confidence in it: as a concept, not as an emotion. Curiously, he observed the body that had been Morton Cargill; dispassionately, he watched what was being done. He directed a flow through the wall toward the energy tube that had effected the body's death, and was now forcing alterations. Some of the alterations interfered with the long-established all-wave flow that interrelated him with the space-time-energy complex below, which he suddenly realized was just a part of his own universe. The interference was interesting in that it seemed to be armed at enturbulated areas, which looked black from where he was.

  As the tube did its work, the disturbed flow in the area under attack slowly took on a whitish hue. Interested, Cargill looked around for black areas, and, finding some outside of the body somewhat to his left, turned them white, also. He was still busily engaged in turning even more distant black spots white when he remembered the geometric design that had led him to the lake and the statue, and to- Merlica. He had come upon Merlica as if by chance, he recalled. The "fabric" of the design had moved, as if someone other than he himself were controlling it. He conjured it up, to one side, near him. And there was the movement! The fabric shook and twisted, and would not hold still.

  Somehow, he knew exactly what to do. He picked first a small area of the design, blotted out the rest, and exaggerated all of the automatic movements of the tiny area, periodically trying to hold it still. On his third try he held it completely motionless without effort.

  Immediately, he brought the entire design into view and began to exaggerate the automatic motions in the larger area. And this, also, he strove every few moments to hold still.

  It took four tries. Then he succeeded.

  "What have I accomplished?" he wondered.

  He was still somehow hovering above the dead body of Morton Cargill, above the white-faced descendant of Marie Chanette. He looked around and saw that several dozen energy flows came out of the distance, and connected to the body. He knew, without thinking about it, that their sources, were far away in space-time.

  Cargill reached down firmly with a complex flow of his own and disconnected the intruding "lines," one by one. The first one had a startled thought behind it. It was the thought of Lan Bruch, saying: "He's defeated us." -The second line went down, and a thought came along it, which stated: "I doubt if the cities of space should interfere."

  The messages that came along the other lines were more difficult to translate into words, but the meaning of the thoughts was that such disconnection had never occurred before. Laughter came along one of the lines. There was no humor in it, but there was sardonic understanding. The meaning of the laughter and of the understanding came to Cargill. They implied that he had learned some of the rules of the game, and therefore had become a sub-player, at least.

  Somewhere, a strong voice said: "Let's change the rules of that universe."

  The answer echoed along the same line: "He's already making his own rules."

  — "That," was the reply, "is the quickest way to become a broken piece."

  Cargill thought grimly: "So Lan Bruch thinks I've defeated him. Good." Then he wouldn't need to know what the man had said. That control was broken at an energy level.

  Cargill thought tensely: "There isn't redly anybody else in my universe. All those thoughts are my own. I'm playing this game, and I'm all the pieces, and all the players, and I'm the—"

  He couldn't quite let that last idea come to full flowering.

  He made the effort not to know what he had thought. He made an agreement with himself that he would not remember. He reinforced those rules of the game that made it necessary for him to hide the memory from himself. He considered several methods by which he could punish himself for all future time for having even momentarily revealed—what? He couldn't remember.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at the two Shadows who had performed the therapy. One of them walked away almost immediately. The other gazed down at Cargill with inscrutable dull eyes, and then made an unmistakable gesture: Sit up!

  As he obeyed, he realized the difference within himself. He felt refreshed and energized, wonderfully alert and alive. The million-tube had probably been used on him to educate him, to explain why he passed through this experience. For he knew with a sharper understanding that he had been relaxed while Betty Lane had had the equivalent of a cathartic experience.

  Old, old was that pattern. Punishment is known among animals and when there is none, neurosis strikes as deeply into the mind of the beast as any comparable situation in man. A bull elephant, nursing along his females, is attacked by a larger bull and is driven into the jungle. The injustice of it tears him to pieces, and after a time a dangerous rogue elephant roams the forest There was a hell before heaven was thought of. Once people were hanged for stealing a shilling—until twenty-five cents ceased to be an important sum. Morality changed, of course. The crime of one generation was common practice in the next and so a thousand easements came automatically to the tensed descendants of people who did not have the satisfaction of catharsis. But there were eternal verities. Murder would be paid for by someone. Gross obscenities left their impress on the protoplasm. Revolutions and wars conducted without regard for the humanities—ah, but how they would be paid for! Disaster shocked the universe and the impulse went on and on. The shock waves of the collapse of vanished empires continued for ages.

  The victim gains catharsis when the thief is captured and imprisoned. The prisoner, his guilt expiated by his imprisonment, also gains easement. . . . There was only one thing wrong with that. As Cargill sat up, relaxed and free, he realized for the first time that there was still another thing he must do.

  This "prisoner" had not yet committed the crime which would make it possible for Morton Cargill to come to the twenty-fourth century.

  It was 1953. A Shadow moved along a street of Los Angeles. It took a little while to locate the exact cocktail bar. He couldn't remember clearly where he had been that night at the beginning of the chain of events. Suddenly, however, he saw the sign that jarred his memory: ELBOW ROOM. A glance through the wall showed him Morton Cargill inside. He caught no sight of Marie Chanette.

  That puzzled Shadow Grannis-Cargill. He stepped back into the darkness of a doorway across the street from the bar and for the first time seriously considered what he was about to do. He realized that in the back of his mind all this time he had deliberately forgotten the incident. Somehow he had known that sooner or later he would have to come to the twentieth century and make sure that everyt
hing happened as it had happened. He had to be certain that Marie Chanette did indeed die.

  Cargill thought shakily, "Am I really going to let her be killed, knowing that I can stop it at any time up to the actual moment of the accident?"

  Having put the question so sharply he had a sense of a desperate crisis. It had to be done, he argued with himself. If he faltered now everything might be disarranged. He had been warned about trying to alter events. Alteration required a closed circle of occurrences. Single changes could be made over a great period of time, but tests carried out by teams of Shadows had established that objects could be moved without apparent dislocation. Human beings, and other life forms, could be transferred from one place to another, or from one time period to the past or future. But one could not, must not, and should not interfere with a life cycle that was known to have ended. After a man had been dead hundreds of years, or scores, or long enough to decompose, no interference should be attempted.

  Marie Chanette was known to have died. The record of her death had already resulted in a diagnosis which had caused Morton Cargill to have a series of experiences. More Important, she was the first event in what he was endeavoring to make a complete cycle of events where everything fitted logically.

  Grannis-Cargill stood in the dim light and realized unhappily that he was not really thinking logically about the matter. After all, what could happen? So many changes had already taken place. It seemed ridiculous that one more would matter. The Shadow experimenters were simply being careful.

  He could imagine that before any really scientific investigation had been made, things had happened which would now be frowned upon by the experts. . . . Well, maybe that wasn't quite true. The entire Shadow phenomenon must always have been carried on by scientists. No one else would have had the opportunity.

  He was still undecided when the drunken Lieutenant Cargill, still yet to return from service overseas a captain, staggered to his feet and came out of the bar into the darkness.

  But where was the girl?

  The Shadow Grannis-Cargill had a sudden flash of insight. In abrupt excitement he projected himself to the scene of the accident. He saw the wrecked car against a tree almost immediately. Inside was Marie Chanette. He examined her. Judging from her condition she had been dead nearly an hour.

  "I didn't do it," said Grannis-Cargill aloud into the night. "I never even met the girl. She had the accident all by herself."

  He was genuinely amazed. It was a totally unexpected outcome. It made complicated what he must do now: he had to make certain that everything occurred exactly as up to now he himself had believed.

  The "earlier" Cargill must be convinced that he was partly responsible for the death of Marie Chanette. Why Marie had been selected at all, where she fitted in, seemed to grow more obscure by the minute.

  Reluctant, and yet relieved by what he had discovered of his own innocence, he hastened back to where Lieutenant Cargill was standing, swaying. The drunk Cargill was unaware of the being who hovered behind him, directing on him the power of a million-tube. Without his being aware of it, the belief was impressed on his mind that at this moment he was meeting Marie Chanette.

  The hallucination firmly established, Grannis-Cargill was about to transport the earlier Cargill to the wreck when he thought: "All I've got to do is go back an hour and a half in time and I can save Marie Chanette's life."

  Suddenly, he said aloud, "No!" It was not really a rejection, he realized wretchedly. He tried to argue with himself. "If I once get started on a thing like this, I could spend the rest of my life just preventing accidents."

  "Besides," he reasoned, "she did it herself. I'm not responsible in any way." Abruptly he realized he was not convincing himself. General truths simply did not apply. Marie Chanette was one woman in the vast universe, one bewildered human being on the drift of time. In the moment before her death she must have cried out in sudden agonized awareness of her fate.

  Shadow Grannis-Cargill made his choice: life for Marie Chanette. He stood grimly a few minutes later, watching her car come towards the scene of the accident.

  He noted the direction from which she was coming, went back in time and space—and so by jumps traced her to the point where she came out of a night club accompanied by a soldier. The two were quarreling bitterly in drunken fashion. Cargill decided not to wait. Before the girl could get into her car he transported her to her bedroom.

  Then he returned to what would normally have been the time and the scene of the accident. "I'll wait here till the moment for it is past," he decided.

  The instant arrived when, earlier, Marie Chanette would have died.

  In space-time, an energy thread "broke." In a certain area, the illusion that was space collapsed. It instantly ceased to have energy flow, and so instantly ceased to be a part of the universe of doing. Facsimiles of "dead" space automatically mocked-up hi the disorganized area, and moment by moment were unlocked by the violence of the energy flows that poured in upon them. Several times, facsimiles of space, that were almost like what had been destroyed, held against the chaos for a measurable time in terms of billionths of seconds.

  The space-time continuum in its grandeur had just about one second of existence left to it.

  Cargill was already dead. At the very split-instant of the first "break," his body had all the space pulled out of it, and it ceased to be except as a body facsimile of something that continued to think like Cargill, and had Cargill's memories, and was Cargill in the sense that the entire body is the cell, and whole is the part.

  The being who had for thirty-odd years been Morton Cargill looked out upon the universe with his thousands of perceptions. What had happened this time was clearly different. Somehow, his awareness had been stirred, and he knew who he was.

  Mirror-wise, he reflected the entire material universe, reflected all universe, reflected First Cause, reflected being. He glanced back over the seventy trillion years of that mirror-picture, and saw where he had agreed to participate in the Game of the Material Universe.

  And why!

  The timeless static that had been Morton Cargill decided to renew the agreement; and the question was, should it be done through a change of the rules of the Game, or by adherence to them?

  He did a magical thing. He mocked up the entire material universe, and changed the rules one by one, and two by two, and in intricate combinations. And then, he unmocked that universe, and mocked up a duplicate of the material universe. He put Marie Chanette into various positions, and had her die in consecutive moments, each time observing the effect on the mirror image that reflected in the static that was himself.

  He saw that the illusion of life could be maintained only by having. And that implicit in having was losing. All the life-discards—like the lake and the statue—were meaningless developments because that one vital fact had not been known—then.

  Marie Chanette must die.

  But an attempt should be made to have her contact reality.

  The static, in its mirror wisdom, reflecting as it did thought, magic, illusion and beauty, created a small amount of space.

  The broken energy thread re-fused. A series of flows started. Dazed, Marie Chanette shook her head and climbed into her car. What puzzled her was the momentary conviction that she had been in her own bedroom. She was so intent on the thought that she forgot the soldier and drove away even as he was stumbling around to the other side to get in.

  Grimly, Shadow Grannis-Cargill waited for the crash. When it was over, he transported the earlier Cargill to the wrecked car and put him into the seat beside Marie Chanette. He took the pictures that would "later"—in 1954—shock Captain Cargill.

  He waited there, then, until the terrible tensions in him let up, waited till he could think, "I've broken through the barriers of life and death. The whole sidereal universe is open to me now that I know the truth."

  Satisfied, he returned to Shadow City. The cycle was complete.

  THE END

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