The Chalice of Death (45 page)

He walked over and sat down, without being asked. The man at the table favored him with a smile—cold, precise, the very sort of smile Ewing himself would have used in this situation. Ewing moistened his lips. He felt dizzy.

He said, “I don't know quite where to begin. Who are you?”

“I told you. Yourself. I'm Baird Ewing.”

The accent, the tone, the sardonic smile—they all fitted. Ewing felt the room swirl crazily around him. He stared levelly at the mirror image on the other side of the table.

“I thought you were dead,” Ewing said. “The note you left me—”

“I didn't leave any notes,” the other interrupted immediately.

“Hold on there.” It was a conversation taking place in a world of nightmare. Ewing felt as if he were stifling. “You rescued me from Firnik, didn't you?”

The other nodded.

“And you took me to the hotel, put me to bed, and wrote me a note explaining things; you finished off by saying you were going downstairs to blow yourself up in an energitron booth—”

Eyes wide in surprise, the other said, “No, not at all! I took you to the hotel and left. I didn't write any notes, or threaten to commit suicide.”

“You didn't leave me money? Or a blaster?”

The man across the table shook his head vehemently. Ewing closed his eyes for a moment. “If you didn't leave me that note,
who did
?”

“Tell me about this note,” the other said.

Briefly Ewing summarized the contents of the note as well as he could from memory. The other listened, tapping his finger against the table as each point was made. When Ewing was through, the other remained deep in thought, brow furrowed. Finally he said:

“I see it. There were four of us.”

“What?”

“I'll put it slowly: I'm the first one of us to go through all this. It begins with a closed-circle paradox, the way any time distortion would have to: me, in the torture chamber, and a future me coming back to rescue me. There were four separate splits in the continuum—creating a Ewing who died in Firnik's torture chamber, a Ewing who rescued the tortured Ewing and left a note and committed suicide, a Ewing who rescued the tortured Ewing and did
not
commit suicide, and a Ewing who was rescued and did not himself go back to become the rescuer, thereby breaking the chain. Two of these are still alive—the third and the fourth. You and me.”

Very quietly Ewing said, “I guess that makes sense, in an impossible sort of way. But that leaves an extra Baird Ewing, doesn't it? After you carried out the rescue, why did you decide to stay alive?”

The other shrugged. “I couldn't risk killing myself. I didn't know what would happen.”

“You did,” Ewing said accusingly. “You knew that the next man in sequence would stay alive. You could have left him a note, but you didn't. So he went through the chain, left
me
a note, and removed himself.”

The other scowled unhappily. “Perhaps he represented a braver facet of us than I do.”

“How could that be? We're all the same?”

“True.” The other smiled sadly. “But a human being is made of complex stuff. Life isn't a procession of clear-cut events; it's a progression from one tough decision to the next. The seeds of my decision were in the proto-Ewing; so were the bases for the suicide. I picked things one way;
he
picked them the other. And I'm here.”

Ewing realized it was impossible to be angry. The man he faced was himself, and he knew only too well the bundle of inner contradictions, of strengths and weaknesses, that was Baird Ewing—or any human being. This was no time to condemn. But he foresaw grave problems arising.

He said, “What do we do now—
both of us
?”

“There was a reason why I called you off the ship. And it wasn't simply that I didn't want to be left behind on Earth.”

“What was it, then?”

“The time machine Myreck has can save Corwin from the Klodni,” the other Ewing said flatly.

Ewing sat back and let that soak in. “How?”

“I went to see Myreck this morning and he greeted me with open arms. Said he was so glad I had come back for a look at the time machine. That was when I realized you'd been there yesterday and hadn't gone back on the merry-go-round.” He shook his head. “I was counting on that, you see—on being the only Ewing that actually went forward on the time-track, while all the others went round and round between Fourday and Twoday, chasing themselves. But you broke the sequence and fouled things up.”

“
You
fouled things up,” Ewing snapped. “You aren't supposed to be alive.”

“And you aren't supposed to be existing in Fiveday.”

“This isn't helping things,” Ewing said more calmly. “You say the Earther time machine can save Corwin. How?”

“I was getting to that. This morning Myreck showed me all the applications of the machine. It can be converted into an exterior-operating scanner—a beam that can be used to hurl objects of any size backward into time.”

“The Klodni fleet,” Ewing said instantly.

“Exactly! We set up the projector on Corwin and wait for the Klodni to arrive—and shoot them back five billion years or so, with no return-trip ticket!”

Ewing smiled. “And I was running away. I was on my way home, while you were finding all this out.”

The other shrugged. “You had no reason to suspect it. You never had a firsthand demonstration of the way the time machine functioned. I did—and I guessed this might be possible. You guessed so, too.”

“Me?”

“Right after Myreck told you he had temporal control, the thought came to you that something like this might be worked out. But you forgot about it. I didn't.”

It was eerie, Ewing thought, to sit across a table from a man who knew every thought of his, every secret deed, from childhood up to a point three days ago in Absolute Time. After that, of course, their lives diverged as if they were different people.

“What do you suggest we do now?” Ewing asked.

“Go back to Myreck. Team up to get the plans for the device away from him. Then high-tail it back here, get aboard …”

His voice trailed off. Ewing stared blankly at his alter ego and said, “Yes? What then? I'm waiting.”

“It's—it's a one-man ship isn't it?” the other asked in a thin voice.

“Yes,” Ewing said. “Damned right it is. After we've taken the plans, how do we decide who goes back to Corwin and who stays here?”

He knew the other's anguished frown was mirrored by his own. He felt sick, and knew the other sensed the same unease. He felt the frustration of a man staring into a mirror, trying desperately to make some maneuver that would not be imitated by the imprisoned image.

“We'll worry about that later,” said the other Ewing uncertainly. “First let's get the plans from Myreck. Time to settle other problems later.”

They took a robot-operated cab to the surburban district where the College of Abstract Science was located. On the way, Ewing turned to the other and said, “How did you know I was on my way home?”

“I didn't. As soon as I found out from Myreck both that you existed and that his machine could help Corwin, I got back to the Grand Valloin. I went straight up to your room, but the identity plate didn't work—and that door was geared to my identity just as much as yours. So I went downstairs, phoned the desk from the lobby, and asked for you. They told me you had checked out and were on your way to the spaceport. So I followed—and got there just in time.”

“And suppose I had refused to come out of the ship and meet you?” Ewing asked.

“There would have been a mess. I would have insisted I was Ewing and you were stealing my ship—which would be true, in a way—and would have demanded they check me against their records of Ewing. They would have found out
I
was Ewing, of course, and they would have wondered who the deuce
you
were. There would have been an investigation, and you would have been grounded, But either way it would have been risky—either if they had discovered there actually was an extra Ewing, or if you had ignored the grounding orders and blasted off. They'd have sent an interceptor after you and we'd really be in trouble.”

The cab pulled up near the empty lot that was the College of Abstract Science. Ewing let his alternate pay the bill. They got out.

“You wait here,” the other said. “I'll put myself within their receptor field and wait for them to let me in. You wait ten minutes and follow me through.”

“I don't have a watch,” Ewing said. “Firnik took it.”

“Here—take mine,” said the other impatiently. He unstrapped it and handed it over. It looked costly.

“Where'd you get this?” Ewing said.

“I borrowed it from some Earther, along with about five hundred credits, early Threeday morning. You—no, not you, but the Ewing who became your rescuer later—was asleep in our hotel room, so I had to find another place to stay. And all I had was about ten credits left over after buying the mask and the gun.”

The ten credits someone left for me
, Ewing thought. The paradoxes multiplied. The best he could do was ignore them.

He donned the watch—the time was 1850, Fivenight—and watched his companion stroll down the street toward the empty lot, wander with seeming aimlessness over the vacant area, and suddenly vanish. The College of Abstract Sciences had swallowed him up.

Ewing waited for the minutes to pass. They crept by. Five … six … seven.

At eight, he began to stroll with what he hoped looked like complete casualness toward the empty lot. At nine he was only a few yards away from the borders of the lot. He forced himself to remain quite still, letting the final minute pass. The stun-gun was at his hip. He had noticed that the other Ewing also wore a stun-gun—the twin of his own.

At nine minutes and forty-five seconds he resumed his stroll toward the lot, reaching it exactly at the ten-minute mark. He looked around the way the other Ewing had—and felt the transition from
now-minus-three-microseconds
sweep over him once again. He was inside the College of Abstract Science, having vanished abruptly from the tardy world outside.

He was facing an odd tableau. The other Ewing stood with his back to one wall, the stun-gun drawn and in activated position. Facing him were seven or eight members of the College, their faces pale, their eyes reflecting fright. They stood as if at bay.

Ewing found himself looking down at the accusing eyes of Scholar Myreck, who had admitted him.

“Thank you for letting my—ah—brother in,” the other Ewing said. For a moment the two Ewings stared at each other. Ewing saw in his alter ego's eyes deep guilt, and knew that the other man was more than a twin to him than any brother could have been. The kinship was soul-deep.

“We're sorry for this,” he said to Myreck. “Believe us, it pains us to do this to you.”

“I've already explained what we came for,” the other Ewing said. “There's a scale model and a full set of schematics downstairs, plus a few notebooks of theoretical work. It's more than one man can carry.”

“The notebooks are irreplaceable,” Myreck said in a softly bitter voice.

“We'll take good care of them,” Ewing promised. “But we need them more than you. Believe us.”

The other Ewing said, “You stay here, and keep your gun on them. I'm going below with Myreck to fetch the things we're taking.”

Ewing nodded. Drawing his gun, he replaced the other against the wall, holding the unfortunate Earthers at bay. It was nearly five minutes before Ewing's alternate and Myreck returned, bearing papers, notebooks, and a model that looked to weigh about fifty pounds.

“It's all here,” the other said. “Myreck, you're going to let me through your time-phase field and out of the building. My brother here will keep his gun on you all the time. Please don't try to trick us.”

Ten minutes later, both Ewings stood outside the College of Abstract Science, with a nearly man-high stack of plunder between them.

“I hated to do that,” Ewing said.

The other nodded. “It hurt me, too. They're so gentle—and it's a miserable way to repay hospitality. But we need that generator, if we want to save everything we hold dear.”

“Yes,” Ewing said in a strained voice. “Everything
we
hold dear.” He shook his head. Trouble was approaching. “Come on,” he said, looking back at the vacant lot. “Let's get out of here. We have to load all this stuff on the ship.”

Chapter Fifteen

They made the trip back to the spaceport in tight silence. Each man had kept a hand atop the teetering stack on the floor of the cab; occasionally, Ewing's eyes met those of his double, and glanced guiltily away.

Which one of us goes back
? he wondered.

Which one is really Baird Ewing? And what becomes of the other
?

At the spaceport, Ewing requisitioned a porter-robot and turned the stolen schematics, notes, and model over to it, to be placed aboard the ship. That done, the two men looked strangely at each other. The time had come for departure. Who left?

Ewing scratched his chin uneasily and said, “One of us has to go up to the departure desk and reconfirm his blastoff plans. The other—”

“Yes. I know.”

“How do we decide? Do we flip a coin?” Ewing wanted to know.

“One of us goes back to Laira and Blade. And it looks as if the other—”

There was no need to say it. The dilemma was insoluble. Each Ewing had firmly believed he was the only one still in the time-track, and each still partially believed that it was the other's duty to yield.

The spaceport lights flickered dizzily. Ewing felt dryness grow in his throat. The time for decision was now. But how to decide?

“Let's go get a drink,” he suggested.