Keith Laumer: Zone Yellow

“You called them ‘rat-men,’ ” I reminded him.

He sniffed and nodded. “I’ve smelled enough ship-rats to recognize the stink,” he grunted. “Look here,” he went on urgently. “This has to be reported to the authorities.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “I was on my way to Imperial Intelligence.”

“Why them?” he wanted to know. “Why not the police?”

“It’s only a block or two,” I countered. “And the cops wouldn’t know any more about this than we do. I think it’s an item for Net Surveillance.”

“You mean that spook outfit that explores ‘alternate realities’ or something?”

“Certainly.” I confirmed the obvious. “And in this case a very distant one, where the primates lost out to the rodents back in the Cretaceous.”

“I’m just a simple nuclear engineer,” my new friend objected. “I don’t know anything about all that ‘Net’ business―and the little I do know, I doubt! ‘Alternate worlds,’ hah! One is enough! It doesn’t make sense, from an engineering viewpoint!”

“Then the viewpoint needs work.”

“It doesn’t work,” he stated, like a fellow getting set for a pub debate. “If there are alternate realities, we’d be surrounded by them, and if they differed from one A-line to its neighbor if only in some detail, like, in one the ship sank, and in another it reached Iceland―” (I realized he’d read more about the Net than he was letting on) “―they’d have the same technology you say we have, and our analogs would be swarming all over the place, running into each other―or even themselves!”

I shook my head, “No, because the Net technology involves meddling with the basic energies that generate what we think of as reality―”

“Think of, hell!” he cut in. “Reality is reality; not a matter of opinion!”

“Is yesterday ‘reality’?” I asked him. He started to give a quick answer, but paused instead, and I said, “ ‘Tomorrow’?”

He frowned at me. “Ja visst!” he said uncertainly. “It’s just that yesterday is past and tomorrow hasn’t happened yet.”

“What about now?” I hit him with next.

“No doubt about it!” he stated flatly, still frowning as he looked down at the dead thing at our feet. “I think,’’ he amended.

“The present moment,” I pointed out, “is merely the intersection of the past and the future; it has no temporal dimension. Everything is in either the past or the future, like a sheet of paper cut in two: every molecule of paper is in one half or the other.”

“What’s that got to do―?” he began.

I waved that away. “Maxoni and Cocini were lucky, in our continuum. Amazingly lucky. They didn’t blow our line out of existence. In all the nearby lines, they did, or they failed completely, so we’re not bumping into our alternate selves bent on the same errand. Though I did meet my alter ego once in a place we call Blight-Insular Two.

“It’s a region where the experiments went awry,” I told him, “it dissolved the temporal fabric so as to destroy causality, disrupt the regular entropic flow, and so on. Disasters of every kind befell the affected lines. But there are a couple of surviving islands in the Blight. More or less normal lines very close to and similar to this, the Zero-zero line.”

He nodded, not as if he was convinced. “How do you happen to know about all this?” he thought to ask.

“I’m Colonel Bayard of Imperial Intelligence. I’ve been in some of those A-lines. Crossed the Blight more than once. I assure you it’s true. This Stockholm―” I glanced across the plaza at the solid, real, clearly-the-only-one-of-its-kind city. “Stockholm Zero-zero―is only one of a literally infinite manifold of parallel universes, each differing from the adjacent lines in perhaps no more than the relative positions of two grains of sand on the beach―or even of two molecules within one grain of sand. Don’t worry, your analogs in the closely adjacent lines are just as sure as you are that what my analogs are telling them is nonsense.”

“You mean…”he stammered, the dead thing at his feet forgotten, “that I―that there are―?” He couldn’t quite say it. It was understandable: he was just a normal citizen, who’d heard vaguely of Net Operations, without ever really boning up on the subject, any more than the average citizen pokes into the details of space technology.

“Exactly,” I told him. “As choices between alternatives come up, both occur; the lines split, and each probability-line carries on independently. When you last had to make a decision at a crossroads, you went both ways―and on to separate destinies. So did everybody else. The amount of difference that develops depends on the time since the Common History date. I spent some time in one of the lines where Napoleon won at Waterloo. C.H. date 1815.”

“But . . . how―?” He couldn’t seem to complete a sentence, but I understood; I had felt the same way, all those years ago when poor Captain Winter had grabbed me off the street a few blocks from here and told me the same crazy story.

Since then I’d learned to accept it, even become a part of the organization that maintained surveillance over the vast continuum of worlds opened up by the M-C drive, which enabled us to move at will across the lines. The drive is the basis for the Imperium itself, the government centered here at the Zero-zero coordinates of the Net, maintaining peace and order among the lines.

I resumed my explanation. “There were many Net-traveling lines, of course, those very close to the Zero-zero, where Maxoni and Cocini had perfected their strange device without incurring the disaster that had created the Blight―”

“I’ve heard of ‘the Blight.’ ” My new pal broke in on my explanation. “Some kind of desert, isn’t it, where everything’s gone wrong?”

“That’s putting it mildly. The energies involved in the drive are the same ones that power the eternal creation/destruction cycle of reality. If they’re not tightly channeled, chaos results: cinder worlds where all life was destroyed when the suns exploded; hell-worlds of radiation and earthquakes, and even worse, lines where life went awry, and great masses of protoplasm, some human, grow like immense tumors, spreading across the land, or where horribly mutated plants and animals engage in a never-ending struggle to eat each other―all the way down to pleasant places you’d mistake for home, except that the United Colonies were absorbed by Spain in 1898. Or perhaps where the Kaiser formed an alliance with his cousins Czar Alexander and King Edward the Seventh, destroyed the French Republic, and restored the Bourbon dynasty in 1914. Or even a line where you missed a streetcar and never met your wife and went on to become a world-famous movie star, or―”

“I understand,” he cut me off. “I mean, I don’t understand, but―” His eyes went to the sprawled animal in the overcoat. “How could a thing like this exist?”

“Way back,” I guessed, “the Cretaceous, the beginning of the Age of Mammals, our small, shrewlike progenitor apparently lost the competition for the tree-habitat to the smaller rat-like critters, and a hundred million years later, this”―I prodded the corpse with my foot―”is the result.”

“But how did it get here ? By the way”―he interrupted himself to thrust out a hand to me, as if he felt a sudden need to reestablish contact with the human race―”I’m Lars Burman. I was just on my way home, and…” He let that one die, too. I shook his hand.

“His species clearly has a drive like the M-C,” I said. “Why he’s here, so far from his native climes, is a tough one. He’s not alone, you know. I saw a mob of at least a hundred or so; this fellow fell out to do some killing and got himself killed.”