The Corianis Disaster

XI

As a matter-of-fact precaution, the police of Maninea removed the signal-rockets from both Corianis during the forenoon of the next day. The signal-rockets carried fission bombs. The police also mounted guns that could be used if either Corianis took off without authority. The occupants of both ships visibly teetered on the edge of crackups. It was simple reason to disarm them as far as possible, after a mass attempt by the men of one ship to invade the other. The authorities of Maninea, withholding authority from the Planetary President because there were two of him, behaved with conspicuous sanity.

But sanity did not make matters easier for anybody. There were rumblings and mutterings everywhere. Science could not explain how duplicate ships and duplicate persons had come into being; so the man on the street either tried to think for himself-without much success-or else accepted the most dramatic explanation suggested by anybody else.

The most alarming suggestion was, of course, that protean, monstrous creatures from far-away worlds of horror, able to assume the forms of men, had come to Maninea to pass as humans and practise their grisly amusements with humans as victims and subjects.

An ill-advised humorist presented himself in a small city a hundred miles from the capital. As a practical joke, he pretended to have been a passenger on the Corianis.

To increase the effect of his jest, he was so unwise as to pretend an ill-concealed appetite for human flesh. To bring his practical joke to its peak, he put what appeared to be bloodstains on his linen where he could pretend to be unaware of them. He saw the horror and the terror he inspired. He was enormously amused. In fact, he was in a visiphone booth, hilariously telling a distant friend about the joke he'd played on the simple yokels, when he found them congregating about the booth.

He opened the door and, chortling, made terrifying noises.

They tore him to pieces.

A child was missed by its mother half a thousand miles from the spaceport. She screamed that the monsters from space had taken it. A mob formed and went surging here and there looking for somebody to kill. Fortunately, they found nobody.

A horror-broadcast impresario misguidedly took advantage of the public absorption in monsters. He produced a broadcast play dealing with the invasion of a planet by creatures which could take the forms of men, at will. The production simulated a newscast, but it was fiction. It was announced as such, and three times during its presentation the audience was reminded that it was make-believe. But the audience saw characters in the drama- of perfectly human aspect-let themselves relax and flow into horrible, shapeless slugs, which crawled over and devoured other members of the dramatis personae. It was not a good play, but its audience panicked because it had the form of a news broadcast. Citizens armed themselves desperately. They overwhelmed the police with demands for instruction and protection. Many sober-sided, civilized men fled with their families to the wilds.

And nobody seemed ashamed, afterwards. Two ships still rested at the spaceport. There were two duplicate sets of people. But this could not be, so one set could not be human. Therefore the other set…

A sullenness came over the population of Maninea.

There was not one single person who'd arrived on the Corianis-either of her-who had not returned to the ship. A few had left the first-arrived Corianis before the second appeared. They came back and asked to come on board. People looked at them with ominous eyes. Everywhere they went, conversations stopped; small mobs tended to gather before their houses. They weren't safe away from the ship they'd come on.

They weren't safe there.

Raging, rumbling, aimless congregations of people seemed to roam the streets of the capital city. Hours passed and night fell and they did not disperse. There were many people who were literally afraid to go to their own homes. They felt safe only when among many others. Now and again men gathered around someone who talked in a low tone. Presently there were orators with sweating, earnest faces, shouting about the monsters at the spaceport. Some of the people there were human- maybe. But there were others who were aliens, who weren't human, who passed as human… It was too bad if human people had to be killed to make sure that all the monsters died, but…

These things were reported to the two ships by the police. The police gathered strong forces at the spaceport. Jack Bedell worked feverishly, with a continuous vision-phone connection to the Astrophysical Institute. On a certain morning the Institute reported that identical metal plates from inside the two ships acted differently at blue-white temperature. One vanished on reaching an apparently critical heat.

Kathy took notes for Bedell, these days. She gathered that it proved that the situation of one of the two Corianis was inherently unstable. If it got the right kind of a nudge, it would shift to a stable condition. Kathy had no idea what a stable condition would be, but she was beginning to imagine a satisfactory state of things for herself.

Bedell depended on her. That stout and wistful Mr. Brunn, who was her official boss, took no interest in anything but the liquids which enabled him to face fate and chance and destiny from a roseate haze. But Jack Bedell talked absorbedly to her in the rare moments when he was not working by remote control with the staff of the Astrophysical Institute.

On the second night after the delegation demanded an answer from him to prove the other ship's company impostors-three hours after dark-Bedell was restless.

"Everything seems stalled," he said irritably. "They're getting worried over at the Institute. They found a high-temperature difference in the hull-materials' reaction, but that's hardly a practical answer. And time's running out. There's contagious hysterical hatred of us building up. Something's got to happen!"

Kathy waited, watching his expression as he frowned.

"In one sense, our being here-and the other Corianis too-does nobody any harm. But they believe one set of us isn't human. They figure we can't be! They figure every duplicate may be-must be-something alien and horrible that's only pretending to be a man. So that hate."

"You and I-we aren't duplicates," said Kathy forlornly.

"We've duplicates back on Kholar," said Bedell. "By the way, I wrote to my duplicate to look your duplicate up. I told him he'll like you."

Kathy writhed internally. It was not pleasant to think of another self who knew all she knew and thought exactly as she did and could do anything she thought of. It was frightening, even six light-years away.

"I'm bothered about that hatred," said Bedell again. He paced jerkily up and down the room. "There've been mobs formed to storm the spaceport and kill us. The police headed them off. Trucks have been found loaded with explosives, hauled by men desperate enough to run them under the ships and set them off. But the police won't always be able to hold the mobs back. There'll come a time when they'll have to kill, to protect us. I doubt we're worth it."

"Couldn't we go somewhere else?" asked Kathy.

"Where? If they went off, we'd know where they went. We think alike. If we went off… No."

Kathy said unhappily, "But you talk as if they were- real! You talk as if the people on the other ship were as real as the people on this! As if they weren't-monsters or impostors."

He checked in his pacing to stare at her in astonishment.

"Haven't you realized? Don't you remember looking out of a port between worlds and seeing the stars, and great black masses floating about. Didn't you realize what they meant at least when you saw the other Corianis?"

Kathy shook her head. It occurred to her that Bedell would always talk about ideas-even to her-when there were much more satisfying things to talk about. She suddenly had a forlorn little daydream in which Jack Bedell would look at her with shining, adoring eyes, and they'd be close together and neither one say a word for a long time.

But she heard phrases "… In overdrive a ship skips from one place where it can't stay to another place where it can't stay either… much faster than light… But it can't skip into a place where there's something else… a meteor… Then…"

She looked at him dutifully and tried to understand.

"… We ran into some debris that was rolling through space. We ran into a clump too big to be skipped. We couldn't skip beyond it, or to the right or left or up or down. But we had to skip! It wasn't possible for us to stay long enough to be destroyed by the collision! We had to skip somewhere. And we did!"

Kathy blinked. Her hands twisted, one inside the other.

"We skipped into another sequence of events. This sequence," said Bedell triumphantly-"I'm not talking about another place. It isn't places that count. It's events. We started out in a sequence in which I caught the Corianis and you had the job another girl gave up to get married.

We skipped to a sequence of events in which I hadn't caught the Corianis and you hadn't gotten the job. We made that skip when we ran into stuff in space."

The visiphone called. He swung to answer it. Kathy tried to figure out what he'd just said. Places didn't matter. Events did… Suddenly she caught her breath, realizing.

"Hell's broken loose," said Bedell grimly. "The Institute just called. Mobs were roaming around the city, and there weren't enough police to keep them apart. They joined up. They're coming out here to kill us."

"But…"

"We'll have to take off," said Bedell vexedly. "And just when our experimental results were so good! But we have to take the chance…"

He started for the door.

"Wh-what'll you do?" asked Kathy in alarm.

"Unfortunately I'm not a hero," said Bedell, "so I have to act like a scoundrel. Maybe I can persuade the skipper to commit suicide for all of us. That's the only chance we've got. But I don't really think it's very risky!"