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pilots could not be coincidence. He wondered why nobody had noticed it before.
It was slow going. With Crosstime travel, as with relativity, you had to throw
away reason and use only logic. Trimble had sweated it out. Even the day s
murders had not distracted him.
They were typical, of a piece with the preceding eight months crime wave. A
man had shot his foreman with a gun bought an hour earlier, then strolled off
toward police headquarters. A woman had moved through the back row of a dark
theater, using an ice pick to stab members of the audience through the backs
of their seats. She had chosen only young men. They had killed without heat,
without concealment; they had surrendered without fear or bravado. Perhaps it
was another kind of suicide.
Time for coffee, Trimble thought, responding unconsciously to dry throat plus
a muzziness in the mouth plus slight fatigue. He set his hands to stand up,
and
The image came to him of an endless row of Trimbles, lined up like the
repeated images in facing mirrors. But each image was slightly different. He
would go get the coffee and he wouldn t and he would send somebody for it and
someone was about to bring it without being asked. Some of the images were
drinking coffee, a few had tea or milk, some were smoking, some were leaning
too far back with their feet on the desks (and a handful of these were
toppling helplessly backward), some were, like this present Trimble,
introspecting with their elbows on the desk.
Damn Crosstime anyway.
He d have had to check Harmon s business affairs, even without the Crosstime
link. There might have been a motive there, for suicide or for murder, though
it had never been likely.
In the first place, Harmon had cared nothing for money. The Crosstime group
had been one of many. At the time that project had looked as harebrained as
the rest: a handful of engineers and physicists and philosophers determined to
prove that the theory of alternate time tracks was reality.
In the second place, Harmon had no business worries.
Quite the contrary.
Eleven months ago an experimental vehicle had touched one of the worlds of the
Confederate States of America, and returned. The universes of alternate choice
were within reach. And the pilot had brought back an artifact.
From that point on, Crosstime travel had more than financed itself. The
Confederate world s
 stapler, granted an immediate patent, had bought two more ships. A dozen
miracles had originated in a single, technologically advanced timeline, one in
which the catastrophic Cuba War had been no more than a wet firecracker.
Lasers, oxygen-hydrogen rocket motors, computers, strange plastics the list
was still growing. And Crosstime held all the patents.
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In those first months the vehicles had gone off practically at random. Now the
pinpointing was better. Vehicles could select any branch they preferred.
Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, the
Catholic Empire, the dead worlds. Some of the dead worlds were hells of
radioactive dust and intact but deadly artifacts. From these worlds Crosstime
pilots brought strange and beautiful works of art which had to be stored
behind leaded glass.
The latest vehicles could reach worlds so like this one that it took a week of
research to find the difference. In theory they could get even closer. There
was a phenomenon called  the broadening of the bands. . . .
And that had given Trimble the shivers.
When a vehicle left its own present, a signal went on in the hangar, a signal
unique to that ship.
When the pilot wanted to return, he simply cruised across the appropriate band
of probabilities until he found the signal. The signal marked his own unique
present.
Only it didn t. The pilot always returned to find a clump of signals, a
broadened band. The longer he stayed away, the broader was the signal band.
His own world had continued to divide after his departure, in a constant
stream of decisions being made both ways.
Usually it didn t matter. Any signal the pilot chose represented the world he
had left. And since the pilot himself had a choice, he naturally returned to
them all. But
There was a pilot by the name of Gary Wilcox. He had been using his vehicle
for experiments, to see how close he could get to his own timeline and still
leave it. Once, last month, he had returned twice.
Two Gary Wilcoxes, two vehicles. The vehicles had been wrecked: their hulls
intersected. For the
Wilcoxes it could have been sticky, for Wilcox had a wife and family. But one
of the duplicates had chosen to die almost immediately. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]