The Probability Pad: The Greenwich Village Trilogy Book Three
128
The Probability Pad: The Greenwich Village Trilogy Book Three
128eBook
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Overview
Originally published in 1970 as “a freaked-out science-fiction fantasy — blasting the outer limits of your mind!” The Probability Pad is the third book in the Greenwich Village Trilogy, a shared-world scenario written by three different authors, all of whom appear in the books as characters. Dover Publications returns this psychedelic adventure to print for the first time in nearly 40 years, along with its predecessors, The Butterfly Kid and The Unicorn Girl. This edition features a new Foreword by Barbara Hambly, former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486845029 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 854 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Time was, as people used to say, and so was reality; things had got back to normal in the Village.
This, the astute reader will realize, is a highly relativistic statement. Both time and reality have always been regarded suspiciously in the Village, and various pharmaceutical concoctions are purveyed to those who wish to circumvent them. Such natural leanings sometimes complicate things, such as the Reality Pills and the Time Bubble bath.
There are situations, however, when this perversity of Village/ hippie/mod/beat/uncertain types can be their saving grace. The saving of all of us, I learned, and this was the way of it ...
It was the spring after the Time Bubble. Having saved humanity for the second time, Chester and Michael were in a state of Extreme Smug. I could've copped a little Smug myself, having had a hand in the second of these adventures, but there had been so many side issues of varying morality that I had opted to abstain completely.
A guilty bystander, as it were.
Michael sauntered into the Pentalpha, our replacement hangout after the Garden of Eden had been crated up and sent to Marrakech, along with its manager. He squinted through the emptiness toward the stage where I was sitting.
"Look!" he cried to the lack of audience. "Waters is holding his ball!"
"That's the thirty-seventh time, Michael," I reminded him gently, and hefted the prop crystal experimentally.
Hmm?
No, I decided regretfully. I had to have the crystal for my mindreading act. I presented — exhibited would be a better word — a combination of blab and chicanery every night at the Pentalpha. It was my then successful method of avoiding work, and gave me a curious reputation quite superior to some of my prior curious reputations.
Michael Kurland, former spy, raconteur, bookie, editor, NBC vassal — Michael, currently very freelance writer — Michael the Theodore Bear/M.T. Bear, the Empty Bear — Michael sat down.
"Hot," he pronounced.
"Very hot," he expanded, quite understandable to those with a scientific turn of mind.
"Don't," he contracted when I brandished a diet tamarindo ice at him. "I'm giving up everything I can't stand for Lent."
I drank it myself, as penance for having failed to foist it off on Michael. It wasn't nearly as bad as I had intended it to be; I felt doubly cheated.
"Chester," said Michael, eyeing the glare of spring sunlight beyond the windows as though it were part of a plot against him, "has disappeared."
"He might have gone above Fourteenth Street," I suggested as an alternative. Village types are very provincial.
Michael shook his eyes, apparently because shaking his head was beyond him at the moment. "You don't understand," he said, "I mean disappeared disappeared."
"You mean poof like that disappeared?"
Michael's eyes nodded.
"Into thin air? Optical wipe? Blip?"
The eyes confirmed this.
"Michael, what're you on?"
The eyes faced each other for a moment to make some sort of agreement, and then reset to triangulate on me. "You know me better than that; I never have anything stronger than Chemex with Jello. Why not ask Chester what he's on? He's the one that disappeared."
I could see that Michael was a bit shook, since logic was usually his strong suit.
"Where did this special effect take place?" Urgh! The tamarindo was beginning to turn on me.
"Down at the loft on Broome Street." Michael seemed to come out of the slight trance, and went into his Occurrences, Unusual, Reporting Of voice. "I woke him up about an hour ago, since I know how to get around his Vidiphone null circuit, and went over to pick him up. After two fugues on the electric harpsichord and a bit of Vivaldi on the recorders I finally got him moving. We were heading down the last flight — the one to the main landing — Chester was in front of me."
"And?" I prodded.
"Blip."
"Blip?"
"Blip. He just wasn't there any more. There was only afternoon where there had been all of Chester."
I tried the unlikely suggestion. "Do you suppose Chester pulled some sort of stunt on you as revenge for bestirring him while the sun was still up?"
"There isn't a gimmick made that could produce that effect, and you, as an ex-jongleur, damn well know it," Michael grumped. "Besides" — he made a professorial gesture — "it just isn't Chesterian. Too un-subtle for him, just ceasing to be like that."
"Quit copping from old Saint stories," I said sternly, "and let me go down there and take a look around." It was a bit annoying to think that a neophyte in the field like Chester could pull off so baffling a trick. I was still thinking in these terms and wasn't going to give up so easily.
Michael's watch told him, in a dull monotone, that it had only been twenty minutes since Minus Chester — not much time to move the kind of props you'd need, but there was no sign of wires, mirrors, or laser holograms. It was certainly puzzling. We moped about and shook our heads for some time, and then I finally gave up. If Chester really had disappeared, he'd done it in a way that was Unknown To Modern Science.
About fifteen feet later Michael suddenly stopped and put his hands gingerly out from his sides, as though feeling for an antique hula hoop.
"It'll never fly," I offered.
"Quiet." Michael gave me his Force Two glower. "I'm trying to think."
Overcoming the temptations that this straight line presented occupied me for some moments, until, "the bannister."
"What?"
"The bannister," Michael repeated, saying it louder and more truculently so I would understand. "The railing. There was one on the wall side of the stairs as well as the well side."
"So?" Monosyllables were my forte that year. "There was never a railing on the wall side before." We raced back into the building.
There was no extra railing now, but a serpentine dust trail wound down to the landing from the wall at the upper end. We gazed at this for some time in silence.
"Disappearing Chester," I moped.
"Appearing and disappearing railings," Michael fretted.
"What," we chorused at each other in unison, "does it all mean?"
We were so irrationally pleased with the dramatic effect of this that we started to do a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo back out on to Broome Street. At this point, during our momentary silence, The Sound came from above.
As sounds go, it wasn't particularly loud; no, its paralytic quality lay in the fact that it was something that neither of us had ever heard before, but which we could quite clearly identify.
Michael looked up at the ceiling, the source of The Sound, and then back at me. "No," he said after what was for us an almost indecent pause. "No, it's your turn — you'll have to say it."
"It sounded," I finally admitted to myself, Michael and the cockroaches, "— it sounded like a stair railing crawling across a floor."
CHAPTER 2We were getting very good at pauses.
This one, while not quite pregnant, had certainly been fooled around with. It was a full ten seconds, with that indescribable skitter-sliding above us, before we broke formation and raced upstairs. I noted abstractedly that I was in the lead. This seemed to happen often in these situations, and I'm still not quite sure whether it was stupidity or ambition.
Just before I reached the second landing a new and much noisier clatter reached our ears, which we were still (spookily) able to interpret as the railing climbing? crawling? hopping? up the next flight of stairs. And me with only a tamarindo ...
At the fourth floor there was no sound, and no extra railing. It had quite efficiently given us whatever a railing would call the slip.
"Humiliating," said Michael.
"A railing managing to lose two ex-spies of our caliber."
"What will people say?"
"Who," I asked, "is going to tell them?"
Michael smiled, for the first time that day. "A touch," he said, "a very distinct touch."
We wended our way back toward the Pentalpha. It was a lengthy wend, for Michael encountered one of his paramours-in-progress on Houston Street. I stood by silently counting gas stations while he went through his catalogue of ploys. He had reached Ploy G, Variant III when I ran out of petroleum outlets, and I tapped him unobtrusively on the shoulder. "What about Chester?"
Michael gnurphed and grumped, but my interjection had broken his dramatic flow, and I knew he wouldn't be up to starting again. Nameless Uptown Girl went through an elaborately mimed goodbye, and disappeared stage left toward Broadway.
"You're interfering with what could've been some very nice sublimating," Michael muttered as we trudged up Sullivan Street. "The least of our worries." We rounded the corner and headed for the inviting coolness of the Pentalpha. "We spend the morning — the afternoon — chasing railings, and unsuccessfully at that, after your
dearest oldest strangest most ephemeral none of the above
(check one)
friend
disappears before your very eyes, and all you can think about is the gratification of your base desires."
"It wasn't all that base," Michael explained, "she'd read all my books."
"Oh." This put an entirely different light on the matter.
I now felt properly sad and ashamed about having deprived Michael of an Audience. Audiences for writers, which can consist of as few people as one and usually do, are essential to a leisurely and pleasured way of life. If the writer is without an Audience to marvel at the galaxy of bon mots that flow from his lips in endless profusion, there is really little left that he can do except write — actually write — which is rather an extreme solution to the problem.
We two-by-twoed into the Pentalpha and stopped short, a position we were getting used to.
Sitting on the stage, briefcase and notebooks forming a protective wall about him, and playing The Carman's Whistle on his battle-scarred alto recorder, was Chester Anderson.
He looked quite as though he hadn't been disappearing much at all, and both Michael and I felt this to be somewhat inconsiderate.
"Ah, Michael, Thomas. I have been awaiting you."
"That isn't all you've been doing," Michael growled.
"True," confirmed Chester. "I have also been (a) doing some I Ching correlations, (b) plotting the final volume of our octology, (c) trying to obtain some hashish of at least middling quality — the level has certainly gone down since the stuff became legal, (d) looking for Steve Netley, who's supposed to use some of these arrangements in his barock group, (e) plotting social revolution, and therefore (f) putting The Carman's Whistle into march time."
"And disappearing," I appended.
"Ah, hmm?" Chester looked from me to Michael and back, apprehending that something might be a bit amiss. After all, it had been fully thirty seconds since our arrival and we hadn't yet done even one Thirties vaudeville bit.
"Where did you go this morning?" asked Michael in intelligence-officer high style.
"To the Bridgeport monorail station," Chester replied equably. "When I arrived in Manhattan there were a few things I had to do uptown, and then I came down here about —" Chester had a short colloquy with his watch — "about twenty minutes ago. Guilty or Not Guilty?" "Not Guilty, by reason of uncertainty," I offered, to cover from any available audience the fact that I was as rattled as Mike. These were deep waters, and so was I.
"You mean," Michael said, filling out an old Department of Defense form in his head, "that you haven't been here all day? You weren't at your loft this morning?"
Chester did a Thunder-And-Lightning trill on the recorder, and broke off to give my fellow interrogator a professorial peer. He turned to me. "Is Michael by any chance psychopharmacologically enchanted?"
"Don't ask me. I've been spending the day chasing stair railings."
"Oh."
We gave Chester a rundown on the events of the day in which he hadn't apparently figured, using our best stichomythia method of presentation. His eyes swung back and forth as we talked, somewhat like a lethargic tennis spectator.
"Someone's been imitating me?" he asked at the conclusion of our Huntley-Brinkley presentation.
"It seems that way," said Michael, "unless you were dreaming that you were in Bridgeport or we were dreaming that we were here."
"But we are here," I reminded Michael. It was quite possible that in view of the day's events he had chosen to forget. "Besides, even if Chester was here that still wouldn't explain how he could've not been here when he vanished." I was proud at being able to spot Michael's error of logic.
"How's that again?" Mike wasn't quite ready to concede the point.
"Someone's been imitating me," stated Chester, as though for the benefit of a reporter from the Encyclopedia Britannica.
People had begun to drift in from the Midway, our code term for the Third Street-MacDougal-Bleecker area, and I ushered a genuinely bewildered Mike and a genuinely genuine Chester into the back room. A single lumipanel lit the room, and for this we were thankful; our manager had the idea that sanitation was a Communist plot.
There were strange electronic twangings beginning to filter in from the front as we sat down to talk; Piltdown and His Primates, our then house barock group, was tuning up. After a particularly tortuous sequence of semi-ascending chords from Piltdown's guitar there was scattered applause from the audience, some of whom were under the impression that he'd just finished an experimental solo.
Michael suddenly jumped up from his seat. A cockroach, poised in the center of the chair, glared up at him and moved its antennae threateningly. Then, possibly thinking of some more devious revenge, it stomped off.
There are people, I understand, who have never lived on the Lower East Side or in the Village, and who therefore are disinclined to believe that a cockroach can stomp. Hard to believe. But I digress ...
"Someone's been imitating me," Chester stated flatly, glancing around in steely paranoia.
There was a pause, while the three of us listened to the leaden footfalls of the departing cockroach. Then Michael took the floor, and he was welcome to it.
"It's a plot." Michael always laid his groundwork carefully. "It's a plot, and it breaks itself down into a number of subdivisions, i.e., (a) who's doing it? (b) why are they doing it to us? (c) cui, as they yet may be saying in detective stories, bono? AND (d) why Chester, of all people?"
"I am not at all sure that either pleasure or annoyance should be my response to your point (d)," said Chester, "and I will therefore let it pass." He was fitting a brass mouthpiece on to one end of the recorder and a little screened bowl on to the other. "That (c) on the other hand is certainly suggestive. I can't imagine anyone we either know or could conceive of going to this much trouble for the sake of a bit of obscurantist humor. We could therefore assume that whatever this whole thing is, it isn't connected with any of us directly, and that the fact that this ersatz whatever-it-was happens to be an ersatz me is but a result of random selection."
Michael disagreed. "For our mystery people to be able to duplicate so exactly just anybody they happened to encounter would take a hell of a technology, with techniques like nothing on Earth."
"Like nothing on Earth," I echoed, and the two of them turned to stare at me.
"Uh — uh. Nertz. Gnurph," said Michael.
"I refuse," said Chester, "I absolutely refuse."
"Well, it was only a thought," I said. "After all, by this time we could think of it as traditional. And another point; we know it's happened at least once before, and it might have happened more often than that — invasion, that is. I mean, around here, who would notice?"
"Several people might," said Chester, "such as us. The real point is, who around here would care?"
Pause number 40-A-3, with us all thinking that one over for a bit. We were interrupted at our devotions by the King of the Gnomes, as we called the manager of the Pentalpha, who came back to tell me that a passel of the faithful had managed to endure a set of Piltdown and his group — or mob — and it was time for me to do the mindreading bit. "Working the ball" was what the manager called it, and my head was so far out in those days that it was some time before I realized he was referring to the crystal. Strange, strange. I dropped the ring-mike over my head and went out onto the stage to survey the somewhat choppy sea of faces.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Probability Pad"
by .
Copyright © 1970 T. A. Waters.
Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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