Jack L. Chalker - And the Devil Will Drag You Under
VIP免费
2024-12-19
0
0
1.06MB
148 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
For my father, Lloyd Allen Chalker, Sr., who will never read it, and probably wouldn't like it
anyway, and for my mother, Nancy Hopkins Chalker, who will but might not like it, in minor
payment for letting a crazy kid Iike me have such weird habits and com-ing out a writer. No one
who enjoys my books will ever know the contributions we all owe these two people.
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1979 by Jack L. Chalker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto, Canada.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-84749 ISBN 0-345-27926-3
Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition: August 1979
Cover art by Darrell Sweet
Contents
Main Line +2076 1
Main Line +1130, Zolkar 21
Main Line +2076 61
Main Line + 1502, "Here" 63
Main Line +2076 96
Main Line +1302, Makiva ,97
Main Line +2076 134
Main Line +2000, Training Ground #4 136
Main Line +2076 177
Main Line + 1076, Chicago 179
Main Line +2076 250
Epilogue 273
Main Line +2076
WHEN THE END OF THE WORLD IS NEAR, SPEND THE remaining time in a bar.
The little man looked out the slightly frosted win-dows of the bar and scowled. Although it was
closer to noon than to evening time, it was dark out there, and there was a reddish color that made
the scene more ominous. The frosting twisted; distorted, and bent the coloration, making it a
deep, sparkling red wine.
That reminded the little man of what he had started out to do, and he turned back to the bar
itself. "Another double," he ordered, his voice high and raspy, with a trace of accent that seemed
to belong vaguely to Europe but to no particular language.
The double arrived and he surveyed it critically, sniffed at it, then started to sip. He looked
around at the others in the bar.
Not many. The bar was near the University, but there were no classes now, hadn't been since
The Accident. The only people still around these days were the ones working on research
projects, trying desperately to find some way to stop or reverse what was happening, or, in the
worst case, to cope with the terror that was rapidly approaching-too rapidly, the little man knew.
Some might survive, at least for a time. Some, but only a very few.
And only for a time.
Those others here-these few. He looked at them carefully. A couple of old drunks; several
tired-looking middle-aged men and women, some in lab whites, sit-ting, not talking, trying to take
some sort of break from nonstop work before they dropped. They'd be sleeping now, he knew,
but for the fact that they were too tired to do even that.
Who could sleep now, anyway? he reflected.
None of them fit, though. None were what he wanted, what he had to have. That disturbed him;
he had been sending the summons out for days now, and there had been little or no response.
People who would do, who would fulfill his needs, were about here, somewhere. He could feel
them, sense their auras-not per-fect, of course, but adequate.
He sighed, drained the double, and fumbled in his pocket. From it he brought a small object
that seemed to blaze with a life of its own, a large precious jewel of absolute precision.
He put it in front of him on the bar and stared at it hard, stroking it with his right hand as if
caressing a loved pet. The barman glanced over, looked curiously at the thing and the equally odd
little man, and started to go over to him.
The man felt it, felt the disturbance. He slowly took his eyes off the gleaming jewel and stared at
the bartender. The curious man suddenly had an odd expres-sion on his face, then turned to
continue wiping the glasses. The little man returned to concentrating on the jewel.
His mind went out. Yes, he could feel them, Yin and Yang, male and female. Close by, so
close, yet not here, not in proximity. He concentrated hard on them, locked in on them, called
them hither.
Not perfect, no, but they would do. They would do -if they would just come to him.
A terrible, cold wind was sweeping through the streets of Reno, Nevada. The woman shivered
and pulled her coat closer, trying to ward off some of the icy effects. It didn't help much.
She shouldn't be out in this, she knew. She shouldn't be anywhere near this place-and she didn't
know why she was here now, or where she was going, either, yet she kept walking, kept fighting
the wind and the cold, barely looking where she was going.
Her mind seemed fogged, slightly confused. She had resolved to end it by the sea, with the
Pacific now lapping at the Sierra Nevada, and had prepared for it- yet she was here, in Reno, a
mountainous desert that no longer had much of a purpose. Most of the people were gone, or
huddling inside, or praying in churches for some sort of deliverance. Although she'd never been
religious, she had considered joining them at the last. With all other hope gone, the church was the
only thing left to cling to.
That was what she had started out to do, out from the fairly comfortable room in a
now-deserted motel, out to find a nearby church.
And yet, now the church didn't seem so important any more. Only walking, making her way
through the byways and back alleys of this low and spread-out city, going somewhere, it seemed,
but she had no idea where. Her legs seemed to have a mind of their own.
The only traffic left now was some military vehicles making their way along streets where only
the howls of lonely and deserted animals were heard and an oc-casional rat would scamper.
She rounded a corner and suddenly felt the full force of the strong wind; it bit into her, and she
low-ered her head to try to protect her face from the new blast.
She wished she knew where she was going, and why.
He was a strong, strikingly handsome man dressed much like a lumberjack. He, too, had no
idea why he was here. He had been going to New Zealand, he recalled. That was where they said
the best chance would be. He had been ready to go, had gotten a corporate jet authorized, and
gotten into his fancy sports car in Denver for a ride out to the airport.
But he hadn't gone to the airport, a short distance away. He had continued, as if in a dream,
driving all-out like a maniac for this place a day ago.
And now he found himself wandering the cold, wind-blown streets strewn with litter and
garbage and the remains of civilization in which nobody cares any more. Wandering, still not
knowing why.
Wind whipped and buffeted him, and he pulled up his collar and wished idly that he'd thought
to pack a ski mask. It was getting hard to see, like skiing without goggles.
He bumped into the woman before he saw her. It was a hard bump, and they both tumbled over
and gave out oaths which, once composure returned, turned into mutual apologies.
Both were back on their feet so quickly that neither could offer the other assistance.
"Hey, look, I'm sorry," they both said at once, stopped, and laughed at their synchronisticity.
The woman suddenly stopped laughing and a strange look replaced that of mirth.
"You know," she said wonderingly, "that's the first time I've heard laughter since The
Accident."
He was suddenly serious, too, and nodded for a moment. "I'm Mac Walters," he told her.
"Jill McCulloch," she responded.
He looked around. "Hey! It looks like that little bar is open over there! Let's get out of this crap
and relax," he suggested, then added, "That is, unless you have something more important to do."
She chuckled dryly. "Does anybody these days? Lead on."
They quickly crossed and walked past the few' aban-doned storefronts down to the place. THE
LIGHTHOUSE, the small sign announced.
A blast of warmth greeted them as they entered and shut the door behind them. Electricity was
getting to be an intermittent rarity; to find a place such as this, with everything working and all
looking so normal, was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It couldn't exist, not
in these times, but it did. They didn't question it, just found an empty booth and sat down,
exhausted, across from each other.
The barman spotted them. "What'll it be, folks?" he called.
"Double bourbon and water," Walters called back, then looked over at the woman just now
getting out of her heavy fur-lined coat. She is damned good-looking, he thought.
"Scotch and water," she told him, and he relayed the order to the barman. The drinks were
there in less than two minutes; in the meantime they just sat there, more or less looking at each
other.
She was small-no more than one hundred and sixty centimeters, maybe shorter-but she seemed
ex-ceptionally-solid? He struggled for a word. Athletic, he decided. Like a gymnast or a dancer.
Her hair was cut short and seemed just right for her face, a sexy oval that seemed somehow
almost perfectly childlike. She has green eyes, he thought suddenly.
While surveying, he was being surveyed. He was a big man, not much under two meters in
height, but there was no fat. He was in excellent condition, and his ruggedly handsome face was
complemented by a rich, full red beard and long but professionally styled matching hair.
And while they looked at each other, they were in turn being looked over by a strange-looking
little man sitting on a bar stool.
The woman seemed to sense his intrusion and turned to look at him for a moment. He averted
her gaze and turned back to his drink, but he had caught the look in her eyes. Haunted eyes. Both
of them. They know the score. They've given up hope.
The song oh the radio was over, and an announcer's voice was on.
"The massive flooding has pretty well wiped out the Midwest; the Great Plains are once again
covered by a sea, as in prehistoric days," he told his rapidly dwindling listening audience.
"Refugee shelters were established but the panic in recent days blocked the highways, and the
massive distances involved were too great for most. Like those in most lowland plains areas, the
people were trapped with no place to go."
Chalk one up for Reno, the little man thought smugly. No ocean was going to get between the
Cas-cades and the Rockies, certainly not to this elevation.
He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, found an empty pack, and cursed under his breath.
Funny, these people, he thought. Money was still important to them even when the world ended.
He sighed, got up, and went over to the slot machine, then fumbled in his pockets. Finally his
hand seized on a quarter, his last. He put it in the machine, pulled the handle, and didn't even
bother to look at the spinning wheels. There was a chunk, chunk, chunk of tumblers falling into
locked places; it came up three bars and clinked ten quarters into the little tray. He scooped them
up mechanically, went over to the cigarette machine, and fed four of them in.
It suddenly occurred to him that he could have done that with the cigarette machine and nobody
would have cared or noticed. Protective reaction, he decided. Never do the obvious.
. . estimate the asteroid will strike within the next seventy-two to eighty-four hours," the radio
was saying. "It is believed that some will survive the im-pact, even those not at a tangent to the
strike area or its opposite position. Your local Civil Defense units will be giving instructions on
impact and post-impact procedures. Please pick up these instructions and as-sociated equipment
at local-disaster relief stations as soon as possible."
The little man chuckled. He knew the rules. The thing was being attracted to Earth like a bee to
honey; it was on a dead-straight collision course, and it was picking up speed. There had been
some talk that it might hit the Moon, but calculations quickly showed that a vain hope. Wouldn't
have mattered, anyway, he knew. The rogue asteroid that was now looming in the sky, blocking
heat and light and causing massive up-heavals in the Earth, wasn't any bigger than the Moon,
anyway. A direct hit on the satellite, forcing it into the Earth, would have the same effect as the
asteroid's strike.
The worst part of it was that they'd done it to themselves. A little glitch, that was all. A huge,
juicy, fat rogue asteroid, coming very close to Earth. What a nice chance! Go up, discover that it
has tremendous mineral resources on it-a treasure house, they called it. Headed toward the sun in
an ill-fated parabolic orbit that would bring it too close to the burning orb. It would have been
incinerated, all that wealth a waste. How nice instead to take the challenge to make it a new satellite
of Earth, far enough out so that it didn't do much harm, of course, but close enough to be easily
and cheaply worked by the plundered Earth.
Just a few special kinds of superbombs planted here, a few others there, on the asteroid, a
nicely timed and coordinated detonation, and it would miss the sun, whip around, and come back.
More bombs to brake it and park it. Just so.
Just so.
Only all the bombs hadn't gone off. The special things had to be individually and carefully built,
but there had been no way to field-test an individual bomb, only a design. And the values were too
critical-no redundancy. They had shot their wad on it in their stupid optimism, and it hadn't
worked. It wouldn't work. The initial explosions had gone fine, and the asteroid had whipped
around the sun and was now on its way back at tremendous speed. Time to put on the brakes.
Oops! No brakes? And the dumb bastards had actually gone into those bombs, to try to fire them
manually!
Some of them did fire. Some, not all. Enough to point the damned thing straight at the Earth.
From an orbit a few million kilometers out, the gravitational effects would have been annoying
but not serious-and slow. More than made up for by the riches of the place.
But now the thing was a bullet, and even though it raced at thousands of kilometers per hour to
its target, it seemed to move in slow motion, like a bullet creep-ing toward someone in front of a
firing squad.
It didn't matter now. Three, four days, the radio had said. Not true, he knew-and he knew that
the people still around, the people in this bar even, didn't believe it, either. Hours. A day or two at
most. The Earth had already started to wobble, to crack. There would be little left when the thing
hit, anyway.
The barman wanted two bucks before he'd give him any more doubles. He sighed, got up, and
went back over to the three lonely slot machines. He had six quarters, but he didn't need them. He
put a quarter in the first one, and before it came up three oranges he had already put a quarter in
the second one. By the time the third one was spinning, the second had come up three bells, and
now the third one had three cherries.
He returned to the bar with a handful of quarters and plopped them down on top the bar. The
barman had an almost stricken expression on his face; he shook his head incredulously and
poured a double for the little man and one for himself.
Even the young couple seemed distracted by his little display. The machines rang an electric
bell whenever a jackpot came up, and the din from all three going off within seconds of one
another had been im-possible to ignore.
He turned on his stool, looked straight at them, and smiled. Picking up his drink, he hopped off
the stool and wandered over to their booth. "Might I join you for a moment?" he asked pleasantly.
They seemed to hesitate for a second, glancing first at him and then at each other, but both
were also fascinated, and it was something that took their minds off the reality outside.
Jill McCulloch and Mac Walters shrugged at each other, and Mac said, "Why not? Have a
seat?" He scooted over to allow the little man to sit next to him, opposite Jill.
The man looked something like a skid-row bum-tiny, frail, with an unkempt growth of gray
beard and a stained suit that might really have been brown but was definitely slept in. He reeked of
whiskey and stale cigarettes.
"You are from the University?" he asked them pleasantly in his slightly accented tones, his
voice un-slurred by the prodigious amounts of alcohol he'd been consuming.
Jill shook her head negatively. "Not me. I don't even know why I'm in this crazy city."
Mac nodded. "Same here." They introduced themselves by name.
The little man seemed pleased. "I am Asmodeus Mogart," he responded, then paused and
pulled out a cigarette, ignoring Jill's obvious distaste for both the smoke and him. He looked at
them seriously.
"You know we only have one more day," he said softly, matter-of-factly. "And you know that
no one in the end can survive."
They both gave involuntary starts, not only from the assurance and authority with which he
spoke, but also because his words brought their attention back to the one thing that they had, for a
brief moment, managed to put at the back of their minds.
Walters looked anew at the strange little man. "Are you from the University yourself?" he asked,
thinking that the stranger's condition could easily be explained by current events.
The little man smiled. "Yes, in a way I am. Not in the same way as some of the others around,
though. A different one."
Jill's eyebrows rose. "Oh? Which? I didn't know any of them were still going."
He grinned now, revealing nasty, yellow-stained teeth that seemed somehow inhuman. They all
came to a point. She decided that, overall, he was the most repulsive-looking man she had ever
seen.
"Not any one that you would have heard of, I assure you," Mogart told them. "And not one that
you could pronounce in any event." His expression grew grave. "Look, would you save this world
if you could? Par-ticularly if it meant the only way to save your own lives?"
They looked at him strangely. "What kind of ques-tion is that?" Walters wanted to know.
The little man looked thoughtful for a moment, then drained his double and crushed the glass
beneath his foot. The barman didn't see this. They watched as Mogart reached down and picked
up a long splinter of glass and unhesitatingly pricked his thumb with it. He squeezed on the thumb,
in no apparent pain, until a drop of blood appeared.
The other two gasped.
"A true blueblood, as you can see," Mogart said lightly. And it was true. Unless there were
some kind of trick involved, his blood was blue-and not a dark blue, either. A nice, pretty
sky-blue.
He reached up and pushed back his long gray hair, revealing his ears. They were small, and
back flush against the side of his head. They were basically rec-tangular, except that the outer
edge of the top of the rectangle had a sort of S-shaped curve. They were not human ears,
anyway-more like those seen on gar-goyles and demons.
Mac Walters edged a little away from the strange man, almost pressing himself against the wall
of the booth. Jill could only stare at the little man, or whatever he was, in horrid fascination.
"I have a tail, too," the little man told them. "But pardon me if I do not disrobe. It is enough to
show you that I am not human. I trust you are convinced of that?"
"Who-what-are you, then?" Jill demanded.
The little man sucked on the thumb he'd penetrated. "I told you-Asmodeus Mogart. At least this
week, anyway." He looked sadly at the crushed glass. "I am, as you might have guessed, an
alcoholic. Things tend to blur a bit when you have that problem." He sighed, considered calling
for another double, discarded the idea for the moment, and continued.
"As to what I am, well, you might think of me as a University professor on leave. A behavioral
scientist, you might say, studying the charming little civilization you have-ah, had here."
"But not from any University on this world," Wal-ters responded. "Are you here to study us at
the end or something?" That thought suddenly became the most important thing to both of the
humans, far more so than what the little fellow was.
Mogart shrugged, a wistful look on his face. "No, no. I was-ah, terminated, you see. Drinking.
There was a scandal. Since I was on the project that created this research run, they decided to
stick me here."
"Research run?" Jill prodded.
He nodded. "Oh, yes. Probabilities Department, you know. Get yourself a nice hypothesis, and
they con-struct a working model. This universe of yours, for example. One of hundreds they've
done. Maybe still do. I'm out of touch after so long, you see."
Mac Walters was horrified. "Construct? Universe?"
"Oh, yes," Mogart replied casually. "Easy to do, they tell me. Lots of machines and data and all
that, but not really difficult. Just expensive." He gave a mournful sigh. "That's the problem, you
see. It's the whole universe they've built, not just this little planet. I actually took pride in hand and
tried to talk them into saving it. Actually made the trip-first time in I can't remember how many
centuries. They didn't care." He looked at each of their faces in turn. "Face it. If you had a rat
colony, observing how it worked, and one of the rats died, wouldn't that be part of the
ex-periment?"
Jill McCulloch shook her head disbelievingly. "I can't accept all this. Here it is the end of the
world and I'm sitting in a bar talking to a madman."
The little man heard her comment but ignored it.
"You see, this thing has caused me a problem. Stay here and die with you all, or go home."
"That's a problem?" Mac asked him, thinking there'd be no choice.
He nodded sadly. "They'll put me out to pasture in some nice little place, but it's a cold little
world and there's no booze. None." His tone was sad and tinged with self-pity, and there seemed
to be tears in his dark, slanted eyes. "I couldn't stand it. So, you see, I must go for the third
alternative, try it, anyway."
They looked at hint curiously, expectantly. In other circumstances they would have beaten
hasty exits, dismissing him as an imaginative drunk or a drunken madman-which, in fact, they still
really thought he was, deep down. But in other circumstances they wouldn't be there, not now,
and they certainly would not have invited him to sit down with them. When the end of the world
was nigh, and you had exhausted all hope, you sat in a bar and listened to a drunken madman and
took him seriously. It didn't hurt in the least, and they were getting more than slightly tipsy
themselves.
"What alternative?" Jill McCulloch wanted to know.
The little man seemed to forget himself for a mo-ment, then suddenly animation gripped him
again.
"Oh, yes, yes," he mumbled apologetically. "But, you see, that's why I didn't do this sooner.
Too many drinks, too much lost time. Now I can no longer pick and choose the best people to
send. Now I must feed the broadest possible requirements into my, ah, computer, let's call it, and
take what I can get. I sent out the call, and here you both are. See?"
They didn't see at all.
He looked at Jill McCulloch. "How old are you? Tell me a little about yourself." His hand went
into his pocket, and he seemed to be touching or rubbing something inside that pocket. Neither Jill
nor Mac could see him doing it.
Jill suddenly found herself wanting to talk. "I'm twenty-five. I was born in Encino, California,
and lived most of my life in Los Angeles. My father was a former Olympic team member, and
from the start he decided I was going to be a star, too. Bigger than he was, since he never won a
medal. I was put into gymnastics training before I can even remember. When Mom died-I was
only seven-that only increased my father's determination. I got special treatment, special schools,
coaches, all that. I barely missed the Olympic team when I was fourteen, but made the U.S. meet.
I did it at eighteen and won a bronze medal. But shortly after that, the drive started to go. I just
didn't seem as sure of myself as I was. I knew I'd had it, and Dad seemed to accept it. I went to
USC, taking a phys. ed. major-after all, it was all I knew how to do. Maybe become a coach, find
the next gold medal-ist. I got bored, though. After all, I'd had all that stuff since I was born. I
dropped out when I was twenty and got a job doing some disco dancing, got a little place near the
ocean, and spent my time swimming, surfing, hang-gliding, and generally drifting."
Mogart nodded. "But you have kept yourself in excellent physical condition, I see."
She nodded back. "Oh, yes. When you do it for your whole life, it just becomes second nature
to you."
Mogart sat back in the booth for a moment,, thinking. The pattern had been youth, athletics,
bright mind, and guts. This one looked all right. He turned to Mac, his hand still in his pocket.
"You?"
Now it was Walters' turn to feel talkative.
"Ever since I was small, I wanted to be a football player," he told them. "I worked at it, trained
for it, did everything I could to make the grade. Hell, my father was a West Virginia coal miner-I
saw what that life did to him and Ma. No way. And I did it, I really did. Big high-school play got
me scouted by Nebraska, and they signed me as a running back. I was good-real good. But after a
friend of mine was hurt on the field and they told him he'd never play again, I got smart in other
ways, too. I took my degree in business. I was signed by the Eagles and played almost five years
with them and the Broncos, until my knee really started in on me. They told me there was a risk of
permanent damage if I kept playing, and I started looking around. Kerricott Corp.-the big
restaurant-and-hotel chain-made me an offer. I'd been working with them in the off season after I
got my M.B.A. from Colorado. I took it. Junior executive. I was on the way up when this stuff
happened. Me and a few of the others were going to take a plane to New Zealand, but somehow I
wound up here."
Mogart seemed extraordinarily pleased. Another good fit. "You would never have made it to
New Zea-land," he consoled. "No fuel stops, most of the islands gone or the volcanoes erupting.
Same with New Zea-land. It's gone." He shifted. "How's your knee now?"
"Fine," Walters responded unhesitatingly. "I think I got out in time."
"Either of you married?" Mogart prodded. "Fam-ily?"
"I was married once," Walters told him. "We busted up a year and a half ago. I guess she's
dead now. I don't know about West Virginia-I haven't been able to get a line east of the Rockies. I
guess they're all gone, too.
Mogart turned his head to look at Jill McCulloch. "You?"
She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Dad wouldn't move out. We tried, but by the
time he de-cided to do anything it was too late. The tidal waves, you know. He was all I
had-close, anyway. Gone now." That last was said so softly it could hardly be heard, as if for the
first time she was suddenly facing up to what "gone" really meant.
"Do either of you have any experience with wea-pons?" Mogart continued his questioning.
"I'm pretty good with a rifle and did some deer hunting with a bow and arrow when I was a
teen-ager, but nothing else," Walters told him.
"I-this might seem silly," Jill said hesitantly. "I'm a pretty good fencer. It was one of the
secondary sports I took up that helped build up my reflexes and timing."
"Ever kill anyone, either of you?" Mogart pressed.
They both looked startled. "Of course not!" Jill huffed. Mac treated it like a joke; he smiled and
shook his head negatively.
"Do you think you could do so? Could you kill if, by doing so, you could stop that thing up
there from hitting the Earth, maybe even reverse a lot of what has happened here?" Mogart's tone
grew serious, almost anxious, and there was no doubt in either of the others' minds that the
question was not being asked from a purely theoretical point of view.
"I-I'm not sure," the woman replied.
"Depends," was Walters' response. "If somebody was trying to kill me, maybe I could."
The little man sighed and lit another cigarette. He needed a drink, but didn't dare right now.
"Well, that's not exactly what we have here. But some killing might be necessary-and, in fact, you
might be killed instead." He paused, lapsing again into that daze, but only for a moment.
"Look," he continued earnestly. "Here's the situa-tion. I told you how the University sets up
these uni-verses. The processes used and the equipment required would seem like black magic to
you. I should know-I think I'm the model for most of the devils and de-mons on this world. So
let's think of it as magic, com-plete magic. Your science is devoted to finding the laws by which
things work, and it's a comfortable wayto do things-but all of it, necessarily, is simply de-fining the
laws established artificially for this universe by the Department of Probabilities. Those laws don't
apply everywhere. So let's take nothing for granted, and just accept it as magic. It works about the
same way, anyway."
He reached into his tattered coat pocket and pulled out something, placing it on the vinyl
tabletop for them to see. It was a huge stone, like a perfect giant ruby, multifaceted and shining,
almost as if it were on fire with a life source of its own.
"A device-an amplifier-no, check that, a magic stone," Mogart explained. "A link with my own
world, and with all the others, too. A vessel of great power during the setup stages, drawing
power from outside your universe. With it I have enormous power by your standards. I make
people do things against their will, change minds, put on funny shows, transport myself where I
will. It's still not very powerful comparatively speaking. Its limits are -too great-it cannot handle
enough power to do a big job."
"It does pretty well against the laws of probabili-ties," Walters noted, nodding toward the slot
machines.
Mogart smiled. "Oh, dear me! No! You presuppose that the machines are random. Most people
do. Actu-ally, they have a system of weights and pins in them, governed mechanically by the coins
put in. That's how they set the payoffs. The more coins in, the more weights depressed, the more
pins go out longer to catch the elusive payoffs. I merely increase the weight so that the pins come
out all the way. I win nine out of ten times that way."
"Psychokinesis," Jill guessed. "I saw a TV show on it once."
Mogart nodded. "If you will. I've been using the power to try and slow our unfriendly asteroid
out there. There has been some effect, but it's very slight on an object of such mass."
"Perhaps you could add more mind power by add-ing more people," Walters suggested, not
even con-sidering the fact that he was taking all that the little man had said at face value.
Mogart shook his head from side to side. "No, no. The number of inputs actually decreases the
output power. More drain. You'd need matched minds, and that would be impossible unless there
were more exact duplicates of me-and one of me is too much for most people. No, it's not more
input, but more amplification that's needed. The stone just doesn't have sufficient power to do
what it's being asked to do."
"Then you need more stones," Jill put in, thinking aloud. "How many?"
"Five," Mogart replied. "Five more, that is. The progression is exponential. Two stones joined
together have ten times the power of one; three, ten times two, and so on. It's a neat solution.
Nobody in the field has enough power to change the rules of the world, let alone the universe, he
or she is in-but a lot of us can get together if something monstrous goes wrong and fix it."
"And the end of the world isn't monstrous?" Wal-ters asked incredulously.
The little man sighed. "The end of your world, of this planet, yes. One world in a vast universe,
and only one of many universes. Planets and suns die all the time. No, you wouldn't comprehend
the nature of a catastrophe enormous enough to cause a bunch of us getting together. So we have
a problem. How do we get enough of the stones and get them into my hands in time to stop this
crash? I can't get them from the University; Probabilities has them too well guarded for that. That
means we have to get them from others of my own kind in the field."
"Steal them, you mean," Jill put in.
He nodded. "If you will."
"Any more of your kind on Earth?" Mac asked.
"No, there's usually only one per civilization, and this one in particular is not highly thought of,
which is why they chose me for the job. And we can't get the stones from legitimate research
personnel, either. They would be more than willing to destroy their little worlds rather than give up
their stones, and may have University security helping them. No, we'll have to pluck them from the
rogues like me."
"Rogues?" Jill echoed questioningly.
He nodded. "Ones who, like myself, got into trouble and were exiled to various little-used and
unimpor-tant places where they could cause no real harm out-side their own prison. Most choose
it, like myself, rather than face the alternatives of an eternally dull retire-ment or a mindwipe." He
looked at them both seri-ously. "We can't die, you see. We reached that point and passed it eons
ago. We neither die nor reproduce. And that, of course, brings up the other problem-the ones you
must steal the stones from, they are immortal, too. They can kill you, but you can't kill them."
"Then how . . . ?" both of the humans asked to-gether, letting the question trail off.
"We must find the agent, then somehow steal the magic jewel. Not once, which is hard enough,
but five times. And we haven't any room for failure, either. Time isn't consistent on the various
levels-some run at this time rate, some run much faster than we, some run much slower. Which is
good, for otherwise we'd never have the time to do the job. So, with time press-ing, we are limited
to universes running at a much faster clip than here-say an hour here equals a day there, or even
faster rates. That narrows us down to only a couple of dozen. Now, add to that problem the fact
that we must use only rogues, not anyplace with a project going on where security could be
around. When I put all those requirements together, I come up with only five possibilities. Five!
Thus, we must enter each of those worlds and steal the magic jewel-and we cannot fail even once,
or we won't have enough power to knock that damned rock out of reality. And, with time so short
here, we alone must do it. I can help, but the two of you must do the real work. There is no one
else, nor is there likely to be."
Mac Walters gulped, and Jill McCulloch again ex-perienced that sense of total unreality about
the con-versation.
"Do you both agree to try?" Mogart pressed. Walters nodded dully.
McCulloch sighed, not believing a word of what she was hearing. "Why not?"
The little man nodded. "Now, indulge me here. I know you both think this is end-of-the-world
madness, so this little bit extra will not hurt, either. Just believe me that, for various reasons, it's
necessary."
He reached out and picked up the jewel, holding it in his outstretched right hand, palm open and
up in the center of the table.
"You first, young woman. Just place your hand over mine and the jewel-no, palm down, on top
of mine. That's it." His tone grew strange; even his voice started to take on a hollow, echoey
quality.
"Repeat after me," he instructed. She nodded, and he said, "I, Jill McCulloch, freely and of my
own will, accept the geas and all others which shall be placed upon me." Then he stopped. She
repeated it, forgetting the word "geas" until prompted. "And I accept this one as my liege lord in
摘要：
展开>>
收起<<
Formyfather,LloydAllenChalker,Sr.,whowillneverreadit,andprobablywouldn'tlikeitanyway,andformymother,NancyHopkinsChalker,whowillbutmightnotlikeit,inminorpaymentforlettingacrazykidIikemehavesuchweirdhabitsandcomingoutawriter.Noonewhoenjoysmybookswilleverknowthecontributionsweallowethesetwopeople.ADel...
声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！
相关推荐
-
工程建设招标投标合同（附件）VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程建设招标投标合同（动员预付款银行保证书）VIP免费
2024-11-15 8 -
工程建设招标设标合同条件（第1部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设招标设标合同合同条件（第3部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 8 -
工程建设招标设标合同合同条件（第2部分）VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设监理委托合同VIP免费
2024-11-15 9 -
工程建设监理合同标准条件VIP免费
2024-11-15 5 -
工程技术资料目录VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程技术咨询服务合同VIP免费
2024-11-15 10 -
工程建设招标投标合同（投标邀请书）VIP免费
2024-11-15 31
分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：148 页
大小：1.06MB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-12-19
渝公网安备50010702506394
