Complete Fiction by Fox B. Holden

Author:Fox B. Holden [Holden, Fox B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2022-07-29T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XV

AS Doug marched, he thought.

There was less than an hour yet of marching to complete the great circle, to devise a plan.

Two boys in five hundred thousand. An impersonation now demanding so complex a knowledge of the situation of which it was the center that to carry it to successful conclusion would be impossible. Even a moment’s belief otherwise was rank stupidity. Escape? Yes, by himself somehow, perhaps he could escape in one of the two sleek ships even now being serviced on the plaza; that had been the basis for his original plan. But the plan was junk now. Junk, unless he could find Terry and Mike first. Two boys, in a halfmillion!

Aircraft were being rolled out on the plaza. The immense aircraft in which he and Tayne would fly as they directed the maneuvers of their quadrants, and the aircraft of the tabulation and evacuation specialists. They were huge, and there were fully a hundred of them. But for all their size and number, they offered no hope. It was like being in a nightmare wherein one had to run for life, but the ground beneath was a sucking, miring bog.

His reason hinted temptingly that the voice he had heard might well not have been that of his son. How many voices were there in all creation that were precise echoes of each other? Thousands? Millions, even. But among them, there was of course the one. And he must know. He had to know.

The Contraption. Again, what had it done? It had transmitted himself and Dot into their physical counterparts on a parallel time-track. If the blue glow of the contraption had touched Terry and Mike, then they too would have been transmitted. But because they had not appeared in the cellar when the transmission was complete, he and Dot had assumed that they had been just outside the Contraption’s limited range.

That was it, of course—the cellar. That was what had thrown them off, confused their logic. Through some quirk of coincidence, the other Blair, Senior Quadrate Blair and his wife had been in their cellar at the time of the switch. Had they been anywhere else—anywhere else at all, even just upstairs, the mistake in logic would not have been made. And if Madame Blair had no sons, Terry and Mike would not have been transmitted at all. But Quadrate and Madame Blair had had sons. Two, ten years old. He remembered when Tayne had told him of their transfer from his quadrant to Tayne’s own . . . Ordered by Gundar Tayne, Director. He remembered. He remembered how thankful he had been that they had not been his. But now—now, fantastically, they were. Because when the switch happened, Ronal and Kurt Blair had not been in the cellar. They had been on Venus.

But it was too much, the coincidences—the marriage of two counterparts; their children, same sex, same age.

And then he remembered what he had told Grayson so terribly long ago. There’s a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl .

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