Robert Silverberg - Stepsons of Terra

“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 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 to 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 of 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 do. 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.”

They made the trip back to the spaceport in tight silence. Each man 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.

The entrance to the refreshment booth was congested with a mob of evening travelers hoping to get a last drink down before blasting off. Ewing ordered drinks for both of them and they toasted grimly: “To Baird Ewing—whichever he may be.”

Ewing drank, but the drink did not soothe him. It seemed at that moment that the impasse might last forever, that they would remain on Earth eternally while determining which one of them was to return with Corwin’s salvation and which to remain behind. But an instant later, all that was changed.

The public address system blared: “ Attention, please! Your attention! Will everyone kindly remain precisely where he is right at this moment!”

Ewing exchanged a troubled glance with his counterpart. The loud-speaker voice continued, “There is no cause for alarm. It is believed that a dangerous criminal is at large somewhere in the spaceport area. He may be armed. He is six feet two inches in height, with reddish-brown hair, dark eyes, and out-of-fashion clothing. Please remain precisely where you are at this moment while peace officers circulate among you. Have your identification papers ready to be examined on request. That is all.”

A burst of conversation greeted the announcement. The two Ewings huddled into the comer of the room and stared in anguish at each other.

“Someone turned us in,” Ewing said. “Myreck, perhaps. Or the man you burgled. Probably Myreck.”