Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

The soldiers move in sinister columns through the streets. They pause outside the building where I live; they confer; then a detachment bursts into the house. I hear them on the stairs. No use trying to hide. They throw open the door, shouting my name. I greet them, hands raised. I smile and tell them I’ll go peacefully. But then — who knows why? — one of them, a very young one, in fact, only a boy, swings suddenly around, aiming his crossbowlike weapon at me. I have time only to gasp. Then the green radiance comes, and darkness afterward.

“This is the one!” someone yells, raising a club high above my head and bringing it down with terrible force.

Sundara and I watch nightfall engulf the Pacific. The lights of Santa Monica sparkle before us. Tentatively, timidly, I cover her hand with mine. And in that moment I feel a stabbing pain in my chest. I crumple, I topple, I kick frantically, knocking the table over, I pound my fists against the thick carpet, I struggle to hold on to life. There is the taste of blood in my mouth. I fight to live, and I lose.

I stand on a parapet eighty stories above Broadway. With a quick, easy motion I push myself outward into the cool spring air. I float, I make graceful swimming gestures with my arms, I dive serenely toward the pavement.

“Look out!” a woman close beside me cries. “He’s got a bomb!”

The surf is rough today. Gray waves rise and crash, rise and crash. Yet I wade out, I force my way through the breakers, I swim with lunatic dedication toward the horizon, cleaving the bleak sea as though out to set an endurance record, swimming on and on despite the throbbing in my temples and the pounding at the base of my throat, and the sea grows more tempestuous, its surface heaving and swelling even out here, so far from shore. The water hits me in the face and I go under, choking, and battle my way to the surface, and I am hit again, again, again …

“This is the one!” someone yells.

I see myself again in that great plane, and we are swooping toward the hexagonal artificial island.

“Look out!” a woman close beside me cries.

The soldiers move in sinister columns through the streets. They pause outside the building where I live.

The surf is rough today. Gray waves rise and crash, rise and crash. Yet I wade out, I force my way through the breakers, I swim with lunatic dedication toward the horizon.

“This is the one!” someone yells.

Sundara and I watch nightfall engulf the Pacific. The lights of Santa Monica sparkle before us.

I stand on a parapet eighty stories above Broadway. With a quick, easy motion I push myself outward into the cool spring air.

“This is the one!” someone yells.

And so. Death, again and again, coming to me in many forms. The scenes recurring, unvarying, contradicting and nullifying one another. Which is the true vision? What of that old man fading peacefully in his hospital bed? What am I to believe? I am dizzied with an overload of data; I stumble about in a schizophrenic fever, seeing more than I can comprehend, integrating nothing, and constantly my pulsating brain drenches me with scenes and images. I am coming apart. I huddle on the floor next to my bed, trembling, waiting for new confusions to seize me. How shall I perish next? The torturer’s rack? A plague of botulism!? A knife in a dark alleyway? What does all this mean? What’s happening to me? I need help. Desperate, terrified, I rush to see Carvajal.

It was months since I had last seen him, half a year, from late November to late April, and he had evidently been through some changes. He looked smaller, almost doll-like, a miniature of his old self, all surplus pared away, the skin drawn back tightly over his cheekbones, his color a peculiar off-yellow, as though he were turning into an elderly Japanese, one of those desiccated little ancients in blue suits and bowties that can sometimes be seen sitting calmly beside the tickers in downtown brokerage houses. There was an unfamiliar Oriental calmness about Carvajal, too, an eerie Buddha-tranquillity that seemed to say he had reached a place beyond all storms, a peace that was, happily, contagious: moments after I arrived, full of panic and bewilderment, I felt the charge of tension leaving me. Graciously he seated me in his dismal living room, graciously he brought me the traditional glass of water.

He waited for me to speak.

How to begin? What to say? I decided to vault completely over our last conversation, putting it away, making no reference to my anger, to my accusations, to my repudiation of him. “I’ve been seeing, ” I blurted.

“Yes?” Quizzical, unsurprised, faintly bored.

“Disturbing things.”

“Oh?”

Carvajal studied me incuriously, waiting, waiting. How placid he was, how self-contained! Like something carved from ivory, beautiful, glossy, immobile.

“Weird scenes. Melodramatic, chaotic, contradictory, bizarre. I don’t know what’s clairvoyance and what’s schizophrenia.”

“Contradictory?” he asked.

“Sometimes. I can’t trust what I see. ”

“What sort of things?”

“Quinn, for one. He recurs almost daily. Images of Quinn as a tyrant, a dictator, some sort of monster, manipulating the entire nation, not so much a President as a generalissimo. His face is all over the future. Quinn this, Quinn that, everyone talking about him, everyone afraid of him. It can’t be real.”

“Whatever you see is real.”

“No. That’s not the real Quinn. That’s a paranoid fantasy. I know Paul Quinn.”

“Do you?” Carvajal asked, his voice reaching me from a distance of fifty thousand light-years.

“Look, I was dedicated to that man. In a real sense I loved that man. And loved what he stood for. Why do I get these visions of him as a dictator? Why have I become afraid of him? He isn’t like that. I know he isn’t.”

“Whatever you see is real,” Carvajal repeated.

“Then there’s a Quinn dictatorship coming in this country?”

Carvajal shrugged. “Perhaps. Very likely. How would I know?”

“How would I? How can I believe what I see? ”

Carvajal smiled and held up one hand, palm toward me. “Believe,” he urged in the weary, mocking tone of some old Mexican priest advising a troubled boy to have faith in the goodness of the angels and the charity of the Virgin. “Have no doubts. Believe.”

“I can’t. There are too many contradictions.” I shook my head fiercely. “It isn’t just the Quinn visions. I’ve been seeing my own death, too.”

“Yes, one must expect that.”

“Many times. In many different ways. A plane crash. A suicide. A heart attack. A drowning. And more.”

“You find it strange, eh?”

“Strange? I find it absurd. Which one is the reality?”

“They all are.”

“That’s crazy!”

“There are many levels of reality, Lew.”

“They can’t all be real. That violates everything you’ve told me about one fixed and unalterable future.”

“There’s one future that must occur,” Carvajal said. “There are many that do not. In the early stages of the seeing experience the mind is unfocused, and reality becomes contaminated with hallucination, and the spirit is bombarded with extraneous data.”

“But—”

“Perhaps there are many time lines,” Carvajal said. “One true one, and many potential ones, abortive lines, lines that have their existence only in the gray borderlands of probability. Sometimes information from those time lines crowds in on one if one’s mind is open enough, if it is vulnerable enough. I’ve experienced that.”

“You never said a word about it.”