“You’re on the other ship,” he said. And he knew with a sadness that it was not her, only his dream of her. This Rita was too willing, too ready for him. This was his world, and he knew that he could not let it go on.

  But she persisted. She got up from the sand and came to him and said, “Oh Frank, I miss the exertion of it with you!” She folded herself into his arms like a child and put her cheek against his chest.

  He held her briefly, then pushed her away. He had to end it, unless he wanted to talk only to himself and leave other persons out of it; most of the reasons for living demanded that there be other people, other minds. He was suddenly afraid of Hoyt. The temptation was great, and he knew what the other man must be struggling with. He gathered his will. It would have to be a public universe, to make any sense. The three of them would have to will it so, and make provision for others to enter it later on. He hoped that the officers on the two other starships felt the same way, or he would never see Rita again. When the three expanding fields met, what would happen then? And when would they meet?

  “I suppose it is possible for the three realities—one for each ship—to integrate,” Dunn was saying. “And in that case we would be able to communicate with them. But there is no reason to think that it will necessarily happen, Captain.”

  Rescher was back in the control room. Had he ever left it? Captain Hoyt was on his feet, standing next to Jay. Both men were looking at the active forward screen, waiting.

  Rescher was glad that he had broken the continuity of his dream, insuring that it would not become permanent. He was glad to be sharing a reality with Dunn and Hoyt again. Silently he went over to where they stood and joined their watch. A sense of comradeship became their reality as they watched the screen, and Rescher knew that each had faced the same temptation . . . and had resisted.

  They watched the screen in silence, watched the new bodies rushing past them, knowing that their bubble of reality was expanding and would perhaps meet with two others. Would the others be radically different? Rescher wondered what he would feel when the time came. A man continues to function because his mind strikes a balance between order and chaos, between the known and unknown; if sanity prevailed in the other two ships then the new cosmology would be acceptable. Each of the other six movers, the waking officers aboard the other starships, were educated, trained men with similar outlooks. How much conflict of probabilities would there be when the expanding bubbles met? As much conflict as there normally is among human beings, he told himself. But still, perhaps each bubble had to be an individual cosmos . . . and could they ever merge?

  Human minds, souls—any word would do—were now the only objectively certain facts besides the flux-like nature of the unformed plenitude which could become an infinity of possible worlds; and human minds would inevitably choose a certain range of possibilities. Wouldn’t they?

  What if each other ship chose a totally personal universe?

  He would never see Rita again. . . .

  The mind was a fairly constant thing, he told himself, a source of order and directing capacity; about them was the irrational, which here and there in the multidimensional stretches of infinite gray “stuff”, the mind would succeed in shaping for a time and setting upon a course. The ruling principle of any viable cosmos was evolutionary, but not only in the sense of strict derivation of one thing from the thing coming before it, but also in the possibility of discontinuity, unpredictable emergence: novelty, true creation. He felt uncertain again. If this essentially irrational possibility was stifled no change would be possible; and yet if this possibility were stronger than stability, anomalies of a serious order would set in, playing havoc with physical regularities and ending with the total cancellation of the continuum.

  What is needed, Rescher thought as he watched the screen, is the attitude that our universe might just become the best of all possible worlds, but never be certain about it. This kind of thinking might just provide the open sequence of combinations which would produce new things without end, thus avoiding the boredom of certainty and the chaos of uncertainty.

  “Hey, Frank.” Dunn nudged him with his arm. “I think the computer may have something for us.” They both looked at Hoyt The Captains face was strangely drawn as he stared at the screen, as if a shadow had been drawn across his face.

  The computer sang what seemed to Rescher a row of twelve notes, and said:

  PROBABLE NATURE OF EMERGENT CONTINUUM EVOLUTIONARY MATTER ENERGY DISTINCT EXPANDING SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF MATTER STARPLANET-GALAXY-METAGALAXY GROUPINGS SEQUENCE INORGANIC-ORGANIC-EPIORGANIC EXPANSION-CONTRACTION AND EVOLUTIONARY TIME SCALES CANNOT BE DETERMINED AT PRESENT

  Briefly, Rescher thought of old sol, discarded now like an empty nautilus shell when its living center has fled. Perhaps it would be washed up somewhere.

  The computer said:

  TIME OF MAXIMUM INDETERMINACY IMMINENT.

  The darkness was complete.

  The handprint in the cement was being made.

  But whose?

  In his aloneness Rescher thought he heard the screams of all the possible creations which had now been excluded. Were the other ships and Rita forever beyond him now?

  Why the darkness?

  Deep inside himself he felt a shuddering, a shaking, as if a great mass had slammed into him. Space became white, then black in a rapid sequence of black-white-black-white-black-white-black-white . . . A question came and its meaning terrified him . . . blackness buried him . . . white blinded him . . . but he knew he would have to give an answer before the darkness could claim him for itself, and he would spend eternity in its embrace.

  Why should there be anything?

  Why should there be not only . . . nothing?

  Rescher screamed his defiance, as the darkness crept into his being and caressed him.

  He hated it.

  Because it wanted to keep him from Rita, from his future, from the sight of his sons and daughters, from the feel of clean air in his lungs, the sight of sky and sea. There was only one answer to the darkness which could ever work.

  It is my will that there be something.

  He imagined he saw three bubbles of force merge, and the great edge of reality fled from him like the skin of an expanding balloon, growing larger with infinite speed. He felt a rocking motion, a tearing, the inner-outer sensation of three realities trying to merge, and failing. Three bubbles of force pushing at each other like three Portuguese Men-of-War trying to become one, three jellyfish trying to absorb one another, and at last failing, content now to be together but still distinct: three precious stones in the same setting, they would never be one.

  The screens in the control room were lit with the splendour of vast starfields, of stars very close together, some perhaps only a light-year apart. Rescher looked at the color filled expanse and a great surge of emotion swept through him. This was what they had aimed for when they had left the stricken solar system: the dream made real. Here would be born a civilization which would easily span a thousand worlds.

  “Frank, come here,” Dunn said sharply.

  He turned to look at him kneeling beside Captain Hoyt on the floor.

  “He’s dead!”

  Rescher took a step and knelt next to Dunn. Hoyt’s eyes were still open, staring into the darkness to which he had not been able to give an answer; the action of a prideful man who in the end had been unable to believe that so much depended on his will. The authority of reality had always come to him from outside himself, the strictures of duty and so-called hard facts. The face was pale, as if a shadow was draped over it On earth he had left no one, and there was no one for him on any of the other ships.

  Dunn reached over and closed the eyes, and touched him affectionately on the right shoulder. Then he stood up. “Do you think we can raise one of the other ships? Will it be possible?”

  Rescher looked up at him briefly. The man was looking for something to do, to avoid revealing the tears in his eyes.

  “Hey, Frank,” Dunn said, “all the stiffs below, they’ve slept through the Creation. What are we going to tell them?” And he went off toward the main control console by the forward screen.

  Rescher stood up and looked down at the body of Hoyt, who had stopped . . . living. His huge frame seemed a bit too small for his green coveralls.

  He looked up at the forward screen. It would be a common universe after all. At least tor Dunn and himself and all those who would waken to see it They would be talking with the other two ships soon . . .

  Ana he would see Rita. But would it be her? Even if the three bubbles had not merged, there would be a Rita and there would be two other ships. His mind had seen to that She would be a Rita, permanent now despite himself. In time perhaps her personality might diverge from the original who existed somewhere in one of the two other universes—he would love her just the same.

  And doubt her.

  Elsewhere the real Rita might have her version of himself; would she doubt him?

  Everything in all three universes, he thought, would be just a bit off. Lovers would be just a little too much like what each expected, but perhaps that wasn’t such a bad idea. But again, he reminded himself, everyone would begin to diverge after the creation, and would become different.

  At least there would be other people, real people. What did a man really want but the happiness of those he loved? Growth; a little bit of difference, a lot of the familiar, the unexpected, the effectiveness of one’s will, mystery and a little more than he could ever know. A man could be a small divinity in his own realm. Poised between the infinity of the large and small he could grasp both.

  Almost.

  He could share the unfolding variety of a myriad things with other-minds, companions who like himself were set like the interlocking faces of diamonds in the fabric of eternity.

  The History Machine

  The statement in this box

  is false

  The statement in this box

  is false only if it

  is true

  The history machine is instant history.

  But the history machine tells lies. When you look at the screen, everything happens because of everything that comes before it. Every event has a cause, which is as it should be; except that we never experience it quite that way. At any point (a strange word because history is an unbroken flow) history might have been different and the history machine can’t show that—what it feels like to balance on the edge and not know which way things will go. It’s all very clear to hindsight, but the inside of things is opaque. What is the feel from behind the eyes on the faces on the history machine?

  The moment when things could have been otherwise, the moment of freedom as I feel it from the inside, the underside of reality which is human consciousness, is the only interesting thing about any history. The trembling sense that things are always anybody’s ballgame.

  I was looking at my history machine (at home naturally) and I kept noticing the editing; and I knew all the while that I could take the copy tape out and edit it all my own way and no one would be able to stop me. Things would still be the result of previous things (I’d see to that), except that it wouldn’t be our history anymore.

  If anything is our history to begin with. If only one thing is missing from recorded history, it has to be false. And the inside of things is always missing. The perception of the present as it happens is always missing; so nothing is our history to begin with. Maybe the history machine is no damn good for anything.

  I dreamed for a moment of another kind of history machine, one which would show me the only real events there are—the timeless motions of atoms and molecules and subatomic particles, the interactions of basic forces, the eternal vibrations which are always the same no matter what happens on the visible macro-level, no matter how individual or free it may seem. I knew I might be able to programme the computer to simulate such a display; the real thing would be impossible except in a very indirect sort of way. The computer would take its cues from a recorded body of indirect perceptions of what might be going on, and then it would map the events on to a visual display screen. Any direct perception of events on the subatomic level would result in a distortion of those same events; that is, if true perceptions were possible to begin with. At least the history I was getting was the result of some degree of direct viewing.

  I wondered about the observer in history.

  Then I went to bed, but the history machine wouldn’t let me sleep. Time stands still at night; from midnight to morning is an eternity.

  Everything is history.

  Absolute truth.

  Time begins at dawn.

  I already knew everything “historical” I had down on tape, but still I could not shut down and sleep. I got up and went down into the living room and looked at my south wall.

  It was covered from floor to ceiling with thousands of history tapes, almost eleven thousand, many of them dating back to when I first began to do history. The north wall was covered with all my private history tapes, the ones of my life since I qualified to own a history machine. I have tried to recover some of my life before that, but the process takes time.

  The tapes on the walls. Collage. The elimination of consecutive time. Simultaneous events occuring in the same geometric space. Unroll the tapes and time is born.

  The east wall was a blank: the screen, my peepshow into time, expensive to have with the computer and wave scanner and all; and difficult to obtain a professional permit for; but well worth the trouble.

  I got out the tape I made the first day I got the history machine. It was the kind of thing which was beginning to interest me now. I dropped the tape into the slot on the console and went and sat down in my form-fitted reclining chair . . .

  I was suddenly on the wall, watching the history machine on the wall in the picture on the wall.

  To record human history accurately, in its completeness, would take as much time as it took the original events to take place. My conventional human history was reasonably complete, essentially correct. Unless, of course, my selective bias was far off the normal one held by most historians in my time.

  Historians, the third class of persons eligible for a licence to operate and benefit from the history machine. The first class consists of heads of state; the second class are the police. There are only three eligible classes. Certain persons in the first class keep a check on all permit holders.

  Nothing can ever escape the gaze of the history machine; every event leaves its residue of atomic and molecular vibrations and can be retrieved and reconstructed; every stirring of a leaf, the monstrous flappings of strange wings in some forgotten corner of the galaxy, can be rerepresented on the field of the history machine if its eye be turned there. Even the faintest echoes still stir somewhere in the great iron bell of space-time.

  Everything is history.

  Except the flip side of reality, our thoughts, sensations. The outside we wear like clothing.

  I watched myself on the wall. That was a long time ago and it made me feel content not to have lost that moment forever; but then, nothing since that time would ever be lost to me. I remembered my dark bushy eyebrows, now white on my face, but still the same on the monitor. Somewhere the wavelength of that colour (they were very black then) would continue to exist, immortally vibrant. The history machine would always give me the outside of things, I would remember the inside . . . I would lose nothing, ever.

  Nothing.

  My wife came into the room on the wall (she’s been dead eight years now) and I watched her watching me watch the history machine. She looked good. The darkness of her pubic hair on her naked body drew my eyes, blurring the rest of the picture. Then I was watching myself watch myself copulating with my wife. Was that me on the screen? Or was it me sitting there on the screen watching? Was that me? Looking over my own shoulder to the screen on the screen all I could see of my wife was two legs on either side of myself, and her arms thrashing around on the bed. A two legged biped with hair between its legs. And another. The colour on the history machine has always been very good.

  Black and white, I was watching World War II on the wall, but it was far more interesting to watch myself watching myself watch the war on the wall. Of course I could always pull out my straight copy of the war, but I always liked to get a fresh reaction to my previous reactions. Time is mastered by awareness and sense of connection. Lose that and go mad, break the chain of your self’s genesis and perpetuation.

  History is all point of view and events, and my own reactions, a shrug here, a laugh there, no movement, a grimace, fascinated me. And the further my motion into time away from that first moment when I watched myself watching WWII the more interesting it would all become . . .

  Other things to see, I am the astronomer who turns his gaze into his neighbour’s windows when the stars have grown tedious and oppressive with their night grandeur . . .

  I closed my eyes and heard the girl’s high pitched screaming, faintly, in the centre of my brain, faintly, coming from the centre of my head—outward . . .

  The mushroom over Nagasaki was beautiful on the screen on the screen on the wall. Those vibrations were still etched sharply into the fabric of eternity and most good history machines could still pick them up well. Deep red washes of colour, like light playing on the open wound guts of a disembowelled man, I leaned forward to see how many mushrooms there were in the regression of screens on the wall. Most of my other selves leaned forward, except one. I have always preferred the Nagasaki mushroom to the one at Hiroshima.

  There were a few faint faces in the picture, repeated within themselves again and again to the vanishing point. Expressionless faces. I never knew when they would appear, these quirks in the continuum of fluttering reality. I knew a few historians who specialized in them, but they were more like artists than historians.

  I have learned to ignore the faces.