The Corianis Disaster

IX

The confusion on Maninea already made for jumpiness. When a mail-ship came in from Kholar and called down for landing-permission, panic began. But this was not a third Corianis; it was an ordinary small mail-ship. It brought new and confidential instructions for the diplomatic party from Kholar.

The skipper of the mail-ship landed. He saw the Corianis, then he saw her duplicate. He did not believe his eyes. He had diplomatic mail for the Minister of State for Kholar. Shaking his head, he asked questions. He learned that there were two Ministers of State for Kholar hereabouts. He did not know to which he should deliver the diplomatic pouch. He tried to find out from lesser officials-from Kholar. There were two Ministers of Commerce. There were two Chairman of the Lower House Committee on Extra-Planetary Affairs. There were two of everybody that had left Kholar. Everybody…

He learned of the gibbering mix-up that defied all possibility and all reason. He saw the armed guards placed to keep the two ships isolated from each other. He heard of the freak discovery of a criminal in the Corianis' crew. In the ordinary course of events this man-an oiler -would never have been detected; he had only to stay aboardship and nobody would pay any attention to him. But everybody on both Corianis had been fingerprinted. This murderer was identified by his fingerprints; the police wanted him badly.

But they didn't want two of them-which they had. He was taken from both ships and put in jail. The cells to which the two copies of one man were assigned happened to face each other. When a lawyer was appointed, he verified certain crucial items, and the crewmen in their cells howled with laughter.

Two men, obviously, could not be punished for a crime that only one had committed. So far as any conceivable test could determine, these two men were identical; they were the same man. But they could not both be punished; they could not even be kept in jail. They would have to be freed, because there was no way to assign guilt to one rather than the other; both were the criminal meriting punishment.

The upsetting fact was that they could now go out and commit any conceivable crime-and provided only one had committed it, and they contrived to mix themselves together so that one couldn't be picked out, the law could not touch them.

The mail-skipper went back to Kholar for instructions. He carried a painstaking account of the confusion on Maninea, and carefully-written documents by each person involved, claiming his identity and beseeching help to establish it past question. There was only one person whose letter was addressed to his own counterpart on Kholar; that was Jack Bedell. He wrote to a person of his own name in the Grampion Hotel; he was quite certain that he would receive informed and cheerful cooperation.

Two men from the Astrophysical Institute came to talk to Bedell on the Corianis. He was with Kathy when they arrived. The atmosphere in the ship was that of advanced neurosis, and Kathy could not bear the bright-eyed, indignant tension which led everybody to try to buttonhole everybody else and insist that they were who they had always been, and that their doubles were impostors and criminals. There is nothing more mortifying than to be uncertain who one is. And these people had faced other people who claimed their names and possessions and pasts, their personalities and their futures.

Kathy kept close to Bedell.

The talk with the astrophysicists, though, was technical to a degree that Kathy found impenetrable. The two spectacled men recognized Bedell. One of them remembered a conversation, on Hume three years before; they had no doubt of him. So they plunged into talk, and Kathy heard stray phrases. "Obviously there could be no impact, but…" "The effect is of replication, of course."- That was the shorter astrophysicist's contribution. Bedell demurred. "Replication," he said carefully, "implies the idea of folding. I don't think it's that. I think we have multiple reality with true simultaniety in the different sequences."

Kathy could make nothing of it. She stopped listening, though relatively simple terms like "trans-chronal" and "alternative presents" and "tangential displacement" followed and sounded as if they might mean something.

She did notice with some surprise that presently they were talking absorbedly about the sacks of mail the two ships had brought with them.

The astrophysicists went away, still talking enthusiastically to each other. Bedell shrugged. "Maybe we'll work out something practical. They're going to try to get permission to read the mail."

"Why?" asked Kathy. She felt horribly stupid.

"We've agreed on a tentative hypothesis," he explained. "It seems that the mail, like the people, should be almost but not quite identical in the two ships. Some letters will be exactly alike, but some should differ a little."

This, also, did not register with Kathy.

"What's tangential displacement?" she asked. "I felt so stupid!"

"It's what they're going to look for in the letters," said Bedell. "If the postal authorities permit it, they'll send some of it to me."

The postal authorities did permit. A creditable reaction had begun among the persons on Maninea actually concerned with the problem the duplication of the Corianis had produced. At first, the sheer, stark impossibility of the facts made everybody's thinking chaotic. But the officials of the spaceport and the government developed a dogged, unhopeful, resolute point of view. This was no ordinary affair, but they would act as if it were. They would go through the motions of a normal investigation, using their brains as sanely as possible upon what had to be delusion. They were not sure that they would get anywhere; it did not seem that anybody could. But to act rationally about even a lunatic occurrence would be better than mere dithering or howling at the nearest of Maninea's two moons.

The head of the spaceport police interviewed the skipper of the Corianis-one Corianis. His answers made sense; if there hadn't been a second Corianis in port he'd have made an excellent impression. He seemed a truthful and conscientious man. But then the same spaceport officer interviewed the second skipper.

"You graduated from the Merchant Space Academy on Ghalt?"

"Yes," said the skipper of the Coran/s'-with-the-burned-out overdrive.

"You were fourth officer on the Ulysses?"

"Yes."

"Third on the Panurge and second on the Dhombula?"

"Yes," said the skipper.

"You got your first command as recognition of your behavior in an emergency the Dhombula ran into on Astris IV?"

"No," said the skipper.

The spaceport officer looked at the record of the other talk. "It says here you did."

"I didn't," insisted the skipper. "I remember putting in to Astris IV while I was second on the Dhombula, but there wasn't any emergency."

The interviewer made a memo and observed, "You skippered the Contessa, the Ellen Trent, and the Cas-siopia before you took over the Corianis."

"No," said the skipper doggedly. "The Cassiopia was my first command. I went from her to the Corianis."

The spaceport man chewed on his pencil. "This happens all the time!" he said distastefully. "The other skipper-the other you, you might say-did nearly everything you've done. But not quite! Each two people who are absolutely identical make nearly identical statements, but never completely identical ones. It can be checked whether you skippered the Contessa and the Ellen Trent! We can find out whether you're stating the facts. But when you're identical in every way but a part of your professional history, why do you differ on that? And even if we find out one of you is wrong-what then? You'll still be identical!"

The skipper looked at him numbly.

"Haven't you any idea, however unlikely, to explain the-this mess?" demanded the official.

"I don't know what's happened," said the skipper in a dull voice, "unless I'm dead and in hell."

The spaceport man could have asked, "Why dead?" He might have gotten a suggestive answer. But instead, he asked, "Why hell?"

The skipper said heavily, "I've got a wife and kids. He says they're his. I know they're mine. I've seen -him. I don't know how to prove he isn't me! But I know he's not!-Do you think I'm going to let him go back to my family, and my wife not able to know he isn't me, and my kids thinking he's their father? Will I let that happen?"

His hands clenched and unclenched. The spaceport official said very tiredly, "I give up, skipper.-Maybe you'll be interested to know that he said exactly what you just said, in nearly the same words and with apparently the same sincerity."

He waved a hand in dismissal, and then watched out the window of his office to make sure the skipper went back to his own ship and not the other. There'd been one deplorable incident. An aide to the Minister of Commerce had met his duplicate and his duplicate's wife while both were taking exercise between the two grounded ships, and there was very nearly a murder there and then. One of the two men had made the trip alone, his wife having sprained her ankle two days before the take-off. The other had brought his wife along. She'd tripped, but not quite sprained her ankle.

The man who'd come alone went into a murderous rage when he saw his wife with the other man. She was living with the other man on the other Corianis! Openly! She was his wife and the other man was himself. The man who'd traveled alone tried desperately to kill his duplicate-who as determinedly tried to destroy him. The wife screamed in horror because she could not tell which of the two was her husband.

But not all minor non-correspondences produced so much emotion as, in that case, the fact that one woman had sprained her ankle while her duplicate had not.

There was the mail. In some dozens of sacks from each Corianis, less than a score of letters were not twinned. In many cases the twin missives were exactly alike, down to the last and least and most unconsidered comma. In others, a word or an occasional phrase differed from one counterpart to the other. One personal letter, however, mentioned in one copy that a certain person had died, and in the other copy that he had made an unexpected recovery.

Kathy said desperately, "But it's all so-so impossible! Things like this… I feel as if we'd all gone insane! We, and the people in the other ship, and the people on Maninea who believe in the people of the other ship- everybody!"

Bedell nodded. "Yes. It's like walking up to a big mirror, and suddenly you find that there isn't any glass there, and the people can walk out of the mirror-or maybe we've walked into it. We don't know."

"But it's-impossible!"

"Hmmm…" said Bedell. "There was a time when people thought you couldn't talk to anybody a mile away, and people couldn't fly, and nobody could travel faster than light. All these things are still impossible. You still can't do them. But you can do things that have the same consequences. We use those other things as substitutes for things that can't happen. In a way, this apparently impossible state of things may be a substitute for something that couldn't happen."

"Such," demanded Kathy, "such as what?"

"Such as the wrecking of the Corianis," he suggested. "Maybe all this has happened as the alternative to the Corianis exploded to vapor from some collision, with all of us floating around as gas-particles in space."

Kathy didn't believe it. Still Bedell acted more like a sane man than anybody else on the Corianis. The nervous strain inside the ship was nerve-racking.