The Universe Maker (20 page)

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 everything 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