At the Narrow Passage (20 page)

Then they repeated the whole introductory chorus again before ending
the song.
I'm not sure why that particular song impressed me so. It may have been
that its jingoistic fervor showed more than any other the dedicated
militancy of the American rebels which I was coming to understand.
I'm not sure. But the song did stick with me.
When the song was finished, the costumed retinue retired, and two men
carried a microphoned rostrum to the center of the stage. Moments later
a clergyman carrying a huge black Bible under his arm came out, placed
the Bible on the rostrum, opened it and began reading something from Moses
that I can't seem to recall at the moment.
He then asked the Christian God for His blessing on this assembly and
on the proceedings and asked His guidance in making the right choice
of nominees for the council. During his prayer he alluded to men and
events I was unfamiliar with, but which must have had some meaning to
the native Americans. Then he retired from the stage, and the convention
got down to business.
I won't try to relate the convention at all. There was too much of it,
too many things happening at once, and I was never quite sure just what
was really going on. In a way it reminded me of the way some elections
are held back in my own Homeline -- since we Greeks invented the idea,
anyway -- but there were a lot of differences too.
One thing I do remember, though, was when a man I didn't know got up and
nominated Sally for a position on the city's governing council. Sally
immediately rose, told them that she couldn't accept; she had been gone
too long and was out of touch with things in Staunton, but she certainly
did appreciate the gesture. She received a standing ovation.
Then there were other nominations and secondings and acceptance speeches,
and sometime long after midnight on Saturday, when my eyelids weighed a ton
each, the voting got started in earnest, with more yelling and cheering
and calls to order and just about everything else you can think of.
I managed to slip away while Sally was making some parliamentary point
and at last got some of the sleep I so badly needed -- and I was grateful
that Mica didn't send someone to keep me company that night. I wouldn't
have been up to it.
"I don't think anyone before us really understood the principles behind
the sautierboat, or skudder, as you call it," the gray-clad technician
told me, pointing toward the huge craft that now occupied fully half of
the hangar. "I mean, the Kriths could skud, but they never really knew
how they did it. It was just something they did. I mean, men have been
able to think for thousands of years, but we're only now really learning
how we think."
I nodded.
Sally had brought me to the hangar, introduced me to the technician,
and then gone on her way, saying she'd be back later to get me. In the
meantime, he was trying to help me understand how their Transtemporal
sautierboats worked.
"Well," the technician said, "when the Kriths had human beings start
building skudders for them, they did it pretty much on an empirical
basis. The human engineers learned the mechanics behind Krithian skudding
and reproduced them in a machine without really learning the fundamental
laws that govern this sort of thing. They didn't have to since all they
had to do was reproduce a mechanical model of the skudding mechanism
inside the Kriths. Follow me?"
"Yes, I believe so."
"I don't pretend to understand it all myself," the technician said,
gesturing toward a shelf of technical manuals and reference books above
his elaborate workbench. "I just know enough to repair these things when
something goes wrong, but despite that I think I know a hell of a lot
more about it than any of
your
people." The way he put an emphasis on
"your" gave me the impression that he, for one, didn't really trust me,
but he was going to give me a rundown of their sautierboats as Sally
had requested and Mica had approved.
"I wouldn't doubt it," I said, hoping that would put him more at ease.
"I've seen your boats do things I thought were impossible."
"That's exactly what I mean," the technician said. "How about a cup
of coffee?"
"Okay. I could stand one."
While he dropped coins into the vending machine and waited for the hot
coffee to come gurgling out, he went on talking. "The engineers say that
you can't really talk about sautiering in words; they say you need a
special set of mathematics for it. And I guess that it's true, but I'm
doing well just to follow the math when it's on paper and explained for
me. I can't tell you much about it."
"That's okay," I said. "I probably wouldn't understand any of it anyway.
Cigarette?"
"Thanks," he said, taking my offered pack and knocking a cigarette into
his hand.
I got the two cups of coffee from the machine, handed him one of them.
"Go on," I said. "Explain to me what you can."
"All right," he said, taking a light from my lighter. "It all has to do
with what they call probability potentials and probability indices. It's
as if nothing
really
is; everything is just
might be
. Like, ah, the
universe can't make up its mind. Follow me?"
"Not really."
"That's okay. I don't think anyone does really. Well, they say that back
when the universe first started there was just one Paratime, one Line,
the Original Line, and it had a probability of 1.0000 forever. It was
real
. Then the first uncertainty happened. I mean, something came up
that could have gone one way or the other. And the universe couldn't
decide which. So both happened. Each new Paratime had a probability
of 0.5000.
"Okay, so far?" he asked.
I nodded, sipped my coffee, puffed my cigarette.
"Well, when it all started, the Original Paratime had a probability
index of 1.0000, like I said. When there were two Paratimes, one had a
probability of -0.5000 and the other had a probability of +0.5000. The
plus
and
minus
represent what you call T-West and
T-East. Well, let's say that the
plus
Line came to a fork and
two new Paratimes were
formed, each with a probability index of 0.2500. One was a ++0.2500 and
the other was a -+0.2500. Still with me?"
"I guess so."
"Okay. The
double plus
Line hit another fork, and the result was now
a +++0.1250 and a -++0.1250. And this would go on and on and on toward
infinity, with each new fork lowering the probability and increasing the
number of signs. They figure that the probability of any given Line is
now somewhere on the order of 10^-85."
I tried to visualize the number, but all I got was a string of zeros
running across a sheet of paper and dribbling off the side. I couldn't
comprehend it.
"That's an oversimplification, way over. The way I understand it,"
the technician was saying, "is that the probabilities don't break apart
even. I mean, it isn't
always
a fifty-fifty chance. You might come to
a fork with, say, a thirty percent probability one way and a seventy
percent probability the other, but that only confuses the probability
values that much more. But you get the basic picture, don't you?"
"I think so," I said. None of this was very new to me. The Kriths had
been able to tell me this much a long time ago.
"Okay, then, every Paratime had its own particular value in
pluses
and
minuses
and its own numerical index. It's kind of like a fingerprint;
there's no two alike."
"I understand that."
"Well, that's how we travel across the Paratimes," the technician
said smugly. "The sautier generator, well, creates its own probability
potential. We adjust it to -- well, to whatever we want to adjust it to
and then the boat and everything within the field of the generator sort
of seeks its own level."
"I'm with you."
"I guess that's the best I can do to explain it."
"That's good enough," I said, "but I still don't understand how you can
move about in space. The Kriths can't do that."
"Okay. As I said before, you and the Kriths don't really understand what
it's all about," he said. "Oh, they're right about the relationship of
probability generators and most other types of machinery. You can't fly
a sautierboat with a jet engine, but we've found out how to turn that
into a positive advantage.
"Now, the Kriths have a vague idea that there are two, well, dimensions
to sautiering, skudding, I mean plus and minus, but what they don't
understand is that there are three more. I mean, as well as having
Transtemporal plus and minus probability, there are three spatial
coordinates involved in probability. That is, even within a given Paratime
the probability of one thing or place varies from all the others."
"You've lost me," I said. This was something new to me. The Kriths had
never talked about anything like this.
"Me too," the technician said, smiling. "Look, you're familiar with the
mass displacement phenomenon, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"Okay, the Kriths know that an object entering a Paratime from Outtime
cannot occupy the same place as an object already in existence in a
Paratime. The newcomer, since it has a much lower probability within
the Paratime, must give way to the one that's already there. Its mass
is displaced in space a sufficient distance to avoid coming in physical
contact with the thing that's already there. Right?"
"Right," I said. I guess if that weren't so, skudding would have been
next to impossible.
"Well, whereas your people and the Kriths seem to accept this and go on,
our people wanted to find out why, and when they did, they learned about
probability interactions. The best I can tell you is that there are some
kinds of interactions between the separate Paratimes. Some things are,
well, more probable than others even in the same Paratimes. Take Here
and Now for example. Going
plus
and
minus
across the Paratimes, we'd
find a number of worlds almost identical to this one, but each slightly
different in some respects. Even though this hangar isn't native to
these Paratimes and doesn't exist on any other, let's pretend that it
does, okay?"
"I guess."
"Well then, if we were to take the nearest five Paratimes in either
direction and built a composite picture of the hangar, we'd find some
things identical in some, but different in others.
"All right, they all add together in a sense. Let's say, in the totality,
that this building has the highest order of probability, then the tools
on the bench, then me, then you with the lowest. Okay, then each item in
this room has an order of probability in relation to each other item as
a part of the total probability index of this Paratime because of the,
well, interaction of the other ten Paratimes. Still with me?"
"I think so."
"Okay. Suppose the index of this Paratine is 5^25 x 5^-25. Now everything
in this Paratine has varying potentials. If we assign 1.000 to the most
likely thing, the hangar itself, the sautierboat might be, say, 0.7500
and the tools on the bench 0.5000 and me 0.2500 and you, say, 0.1250.
Now each of these things here has a value, call it a field, that centers
on the object itself, but extends outward, diminishing in force, still
with a probability focal point."
"I'm getting a headache."
The technician smiled. "I'll cut it short. Take this sautierboat. We can
adjust the generator to take us to a given Paratime. Right?"
"Granted."
"Now within that Paratime we can subtly vary the sautier field, alter
the probability potential just a little. Well, if we can move from
Paratime to Paratime by seeking the level of the generator, it follows
that within a given Paratime we can move from place to place by varying
the field within that Paratime. Got me?"
I nodded. "That sounds awkward, though. How do you know which way you're
going to go when you vary the field? And how can you be sure that you're
not going to jump right out of this Line into another?"
"As I said, all this is oversimplification," he said. "We've got instruments
that can detect the variations of probability within a Paratime. And these
instruments feed into the boat's computer. I guess you know that most
electronic devices, like most living organisms, don't seem to be bothered
by probability fields. Don't ask me why. I don't know." He paused.
"Anyhow, a human being never has to worry about any of these things anyway.
All he does is set the controls to take him to a certain spot. The
instruments gauge the probability potentials around the boat, find the
levels that will take the boat where the pilot wants to go, and the
computer varies the generator's potential accordingly."
"I see," I said, "and that would also prevent the boat from slipping
into another Line by accident, I guess."
"Right," the technician said. "Say, if you can get permission from Mica,
I'll take you for a ride sometime and show you how it works.
"I'd like that," I said, thinking that I had overcome the technician's
initial distrust of me -- and also thinking that his sautierboat would
be sure to have a radio in it.
But I was sure that it would take some time before I could persuade Mica
to allow me to take the offered ride, and I just might not have that time.
The arsenal of the Paratimers under the West Florida earth contained
weapons of every imaginable type, from crossbows to thermonuclear bombs
big enough to sterilize half the planet. And I wondered why they had
weapons that big and if they would really use them if it appeared that
the Kriths were winning on this Line.
"Now this is one of my favorites," Scoti said to me, taking a well-oiled
handgun down from its wall cradle. It was a big, heavy six-shot revolver
that reminded me a little of the Harling that Scoti had taken from me.
I wondered where it was now.
"This is from a fairly nearby Paratime," Scoti was saying. "And it's one
of the most efficient pistols I've ever seen. It's called a .44 Magnum,
and it packs one hell of a punch."
"Single-action, isn't it?" I asked to keep up my end of the conversation.
"Yes" Scoti agreed, "but I'm partial to them."
"They're dependable."
"This one sure is. Notice the construction of the cylinder." He snapped
the weapon open. "Rugged as hell. There's virtually no way in the world to
foul it up. And the hammer spring, well, it just won't wear out. That's
the beauty of it -- simple, efficient, and it's one of the most accurate
big-bore pistols you'll ever find."