“Oh, I say, I don’t mean to intrude.”
“You aren’t intruding.” Deety took him by the hand, firmly. Since my treasure is stronger than most men, he came along…and let go her hand hastily as soon as she loosened her grip. We men got to our feet; Hilda remained in lotus.
“Aunt Hilda, this is Mr. Dodgson, Lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. My stepmother, Mrs. Burroughs.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Burroughs. Oh dear, I am intruding!”
“Not at all, Mr. Dodgson. Do sit down.”
“And this is my father, Dr. Burroughs, Professor of Mathematics. And my husband Captain Carter. Aunt Hilda, will you find a clean plate for Mr. Dodgson?”
The young don relaxed once introductions had been made but he was still far more formal than Deety intended to permit. He sat down on the turf, placed his hat carefully beside him, and said, “Truly, Mrs. Burroughs, I’ve just finished tea with three little girls.”
Deety ignored his protests while she piled his plate with little sandwiches and cakes. Sharpie poured tea from a Thermos jug. They nailed him down with cup and plate. Jake advised, “Don’t fight it, son, unless you really must leave. Are Alice’s sisters safe?”
“Why, yes, Professor; they are napping in the shade of a hayrick nearby. But—”
“Then relax. In any case, you must wait for Alice. What branch of mathematics do you pursue?”
“Algebraic logic, usually, sir, with some attention to its applications to geometry.” The Reverend Mr. Dodgson was seated so that he faced Gay Deceiver and sat in the shadow of her port wing but nothing in his manner showed that he noticed the anachronism.
“Have your studies led you into multidimensional non-Euclidean geometries?” Jake asked.
Dodgson blinked. “I fear that I tend to be conservative in geometry, rathuh.”
“Father, Mr. Dodgson doesn’t work in your field; he works in mine.”
Dodgson raised his eyebrows slightly. Jake said, “My daughter did not introduce herself fully. She is Mrs. Carter but her maiden name is Doctor D. T. Burroughs. Her field is mathematical logic.”
“That is why I am so pleased that you are here, Mr. Dodgson. Your book ‘Symbolic Logic’ is a milestone in our field.”
“But, my dear lady, I have not written a work titled ‘Symbolic Logic.’”
“I’ve confused things. Again it is matter of selection of coordinates. At the end of the reign of Queen Victoria you will have published it five years earlier. Is that clear?”
He answered very solemnly, “Quite clear. All I need do is to ask Her Majesty how much longer she is going to reign and subtract five years.”
“That should do it. Do you like to play with sorites?”
For the first time, he smiled. “Oh, very much!”
“Shall we make up some? Then trade and solve them?”
“Well…not too lengthy. I really must get back to my young charges.”
“We can’t stay long, either. Anyone else want to play?”
No one else elected to play. I stretched out on the grass with a handkerchief over my face; Jake and Sharpie went for a walk. “Shall we hold the statements down to groups of six?” Dodgson suggested.
“All right. But the conclusion must be true. Not nonsense. Agreed?” (Deety had taught me this game; she’s good at it. I decided to be a silent witness.)
They kept quiet while I snored convincingly, Deety was a “lady” for a while, then sprawled on her belly and chewed her pencil. I watched with one eye from under my handkerchief.
First she covered several pages with scratch work in developing statements incomplete in themselves but intended to arrive at only one possible conclusion. Having done so, she tested them by symbolic logic, then wrote out her list of statements, mixing them randomly—looked up.
The young mathematician was looking at her solemnly, note pad in hand. “Finished?” my wife asked.
“Just finished. Mrs. Carter, you remind me of my little friend Alice Liddell.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s how I recognized her. Shall we trade?”
Dodgson tore a sheet from his pad. “This is to be solved in the first person; its conclusion applies to you.”
“All right, I’ll try it.” Deety read aloud:
“1) Every idea of mine, that cannot be expressed as a syllogism, is really ridiculous;
“2) None of my ideas about Bath-buns are worth writing down;
“3) No idea of mine, that fails to come true, can be expressed as a syllogism;
“4) I never have any really ridiculous idea, that I do not at once refer to my solicitor;
“5) My dreams are all about Bath-buns;
“6) I never refer any idea of mine to my solicitor, unless it is worth writing down.”
Deety chortled. “How sweet of you! It is true; all my dreams do come true!”
“You solved it so quickly?”
“But it’s only six statements. Have you solved mine?”
“I haven’t read it yet.” He also read aloud:
“1) Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing room;
“2) Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry;
“3) Nothing should be kept in a drawing room, unless it is free from damp;
“4) Time-traveling machines are always kept near the sea;
“5) Nothing, that is what you expect it to be, can be absolutely ugly;
“6) Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt.”
He blinked at the list. “The conclusion is true?” he asked.
“Yes.”
For the first time he stared openly at Gay Deceiver. “That, then—I infer—is a ‘time-traveling machine.’”
“Yes…although it does other things as well.”
“It is not what I expected it to be…although I am not sure what I expected a time-traveling machine to be.”
I pulled his handkerchief off my face. “Do you want to take a ride, Mr. Dodgson?”
The young don looked wistful. “I am sorely tempted, Captain. But I am responsible for three little girls. So I must thank you for your hospitality and bid you good-bye. Will you offer my apologies to Professor and Mrs. Burroughs and explain that duty calls me?”
XXXV
“It’s a disturbing idea—”
Jake:
“Deety, how does it feel to say good-bye without getting kissed?”
“Zebadiah, I didn’t make it possible. Lewis Carroll was terrified by females over the age of puberty.”
“That’s why I stayed close. Deety hon, if I had gone with Jake and Hilda, he would have left at once.”
“I can’t figure out how he got here in the first place,” said my dear wife Hilda. “Lewis Carroll was never in Wonderland; he simply wrote about it. But this is Wonderland—unless rabbits in England wear waistcoats and watches.”
“Aunt Hilda, who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?”
“Hmm—I’ll have to study that.”
“Later, Sharpie,” Zeb said. “Stand by to rotate. Mars, isn’t it?”
“Right, Zebbie,” Hilda agreed.
“Gay…Sagan!”
Mars-zero lay ahead, in half phase at the proper distance.
“Set!” Hilda reported. “To tenth universe, third group.”
“Execute.” It was another starry void with no familiar groupings; we ran through routine, Zeb logged it as “possible” and we moved on to the second of the third group—and I found myself facing the Big and Little Dippers. Again we ran through a routine tumble—but failed to find the Sun or any planets. I don’t know the southern constellations too well but I spotted Crux and the Magellanic Clouds. To the north there could be no doubt about Cygnus and a dozen others.
Zeb said, “Where is Sol? Deety? Sharpie?”
“I haven’t seen it, Zebadiah.”
“Zebbie, don’t go blaming me. I put it right back where I found it.”
“Jake, I don’t like this. Sharpie, are you set?”
“Set. Standing orders. Third group, third of three.”
“Keep your finger near the button. How does this fit your theory? I don’t recall listing a story that doesn’t have the Solar System in it.”
“Zebbie, it can’t fit two of those left, could fit the others, and could fit half a dozen or more that got three votes. You said that about a dozen were tied in your mind. Were any of them space-travel stories?”
“Almost all.”
“Then we could be in any world that takes our universe as a model but far enough from the Sun so that it appears as second or third magnitude. That wouldn’t have to be far; our Sun is pretty faint. So this could be the Darkover universe, or Niven’s Known Space, or Dr. Williamson’s Legion of Space universe, or the Star Trek universe, or Anderson’s world of the Polesotechnic League, or Dr. Smith’s Galactic Patrol world. Or several more.”
“Sharpie, what were two that this could not be?”
“King Arthur and his Knights, and the World of the Hobbits.”
“If we find ourselves in either of those, we leave. No obstetricians. Jake, any reason to stay here longer?”
“None that I see,” I answered.
“Captain Deety, I advise scram. Those space-opera universes can be sticky. I don’t care to catch a photon torpedo or a vortex bomb or a negative-matter projectile, just through failure to identify ourselves promptly.”
So we rotated.
This time we weren’t merely close; we were on the ground. Charging straight at us was a knight in armour, lance couched in attack. I think it unlikely that a lance could damage Gay. But this “gentle knight” was unfriendly; I shouted, “Gay!—Zoom!”
Sighed with relief at sudden darkness and at the Captain’s next words: “Thanks, Pop. You were on your toes.”
“Thank you. End of group three. Back to Mars? S, A, G, A, N?”
“Let’s get on with it,” Zeb agreed. “All Hands—”
“Zebadiah!” my daughter interrupted. “Is that all you wish to see of King Arthur and his Knights?”
“Captain Deety, that wasn’t one of King Arthur’s Knights. He was wearing plated mail.”
“That’s my impression,” my beloved agreed. “But I gave more attention to his shield. Field sable, argent bend sinister, in chief sun proper with crown, both or.”
“Sir Modred,” my daughter decided. “I knew he was a baddie! Zebadiah, we should have hit him with your L-gun.”
“Killed that beautiful beer-wagon horse? Deety, that sort of armor wasn’t made earlier than the fifteenth century, eight or nine centuries after the days of King Arthur.”
“Then why was he carrying Sir Modred’s shield?”
“Sharpie, was that Sir Modred’s coat of arms?”
“I don’t know; I blazoned what I saw. Aren’t you nit-picking in objecting to plate armor merely because it’s anachronistic?”
“But history shows that—”
“That’s the point, Zebbie. Camelot isn’t history; it’s fiction.”
Zeb said slowly, “Shut my big mouth.”
“Zebbie, I venture to guess that the version of Camelot we blundered into is a patchwork of all our concepts of King Arthur and the Round Table. I picked up mine from Tennyson, revised them when I read ‘Le Morte d’Arthur.’ Where did you get yours?”
“Mark Twain gave me mine—‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’ Add some Prince Valiant. Jake?”
I said, “Zeb, there seems little doubt that there was a king or a general named Arthur or Arturius. But most people think of King Arthur from stories having little connection with any historical person. ‘The Sword in the Stone’ and ‘The Once and Future King’ are my favorites.”
My daughter persisted, “I do believe in the Round Table, I do! We should go back and look! Instead of guessing.”
“Captain Deety,” her husband said gently, “the jolly, murderous roughnecks called the Knights of the Round Table are fun to read about but not to know socially. Nor are people the only dangers. There would be honest-to-God dragons, and wyverns, and malevolent magic—not the Glinda-the-Good variety. We’ve learned that these alternate worlds are as real as the one we came from. We don’t need to relearn it by getting suddenly dead. That’s my official advice. If you don’t agree, will you please relieve me at the conn… Ma’am?”
“Zebadiah, you’re being logical—a most unfair way to argue!”
“Jacob,” said my wife, “suppose we were people who don’t like fanciful stories. What sort of worlds would we find?”
“I don’t know, Hilda. Probably only humdrum slice-of-life universes indistinguishable from the real world. Correction: Substitute ‘Universe-zero’ for ‘real world’—because, as your theory requires, all worlds are equally real. Or unreal.”
“Jacob, why do you call our universe ‘universe-zero?’”
“Eh…for convenience. Our point of origin.”
“Didn’t you tell me that no frame is preferred over any other? Each one to the Number of the Beast is equally zero in six axes?”
“Well…theory requires it.”
“Then we are fiction in other universes. Have I reasoned correctly?”
I was slow in answering. “That seems to be a necessary corollary. It’s a disturbing idea: that we ourselves are figments of imagination.”
“I’m nobody’s figment!” my daughter protested. “I’m real, I am! Pinch me!…Ouch! Zebadiah, not so hard!”
“You asked for it, dear,” Zeb told her.
“My husband is a brute. And I’ve got a cruel stepmother just like Snow White. I mean ‘Cinderella.’ And my Pop thinks I’m imaginary! But I love you anyway because you’re all I’ve got.”
“If you fictional characters will pipe down, we’ll get this show on the road. Stand by to rotate. Gay Sagan!”
Mars was where it should be. I felt more real.
XXXVI
“Pipe down and do your job.”
Hilda:
“Set, Captain,” I reported. “Thirteenth rotation. Correct, Zebbie?”
“Check, Sharpie. Captain?”
Deety answered, “Let’s catch our breaths.” She stared out at the ruddy barrenness of Mars-zero. “That rock looks downright homelike. I feel like a tourist who tries to see thirty countries in two weeks. Shock. Not ‘future shock’ but something like it.”
“Homesickness,” I told her. “Knowing that we can’t go back. Deety, somewhere, somewhen, we’ll build another Snug Harbor. Won’t we, Jacob?”
Jacob patted my knee. “We will, dearest.”
Deety said wistfully, “Will we really find another Snug Harbor?”
“Deety, are you over your pioneer-mother jag?”
“No, Zebadiah. But I can get homesick. Like you. Like Hilda. Like everybody but Pop.”
“Correction, Daughter. I don’t miss Logan, and I don’t think Hilda misses California—”
“Not a bit!” I agreed.
“Nor me,” agreed Zeb. “I had a rented flat. But Snug Harbor was home.”
“Agreed,” Jacob answered. “I didn’t really hate these vermin until they bombed our home.” Jacob added, “We’ve got to find a new Snug Harbor. Comfortable as this car is, we can’t live in it indefinitely.”
“Check. Sharpie, your theory seems to be checking out. Is there any reason to finish this schedule? Should we go directly to Teh axis?”
“Zebbie, granted that most rotations didn’t amount to more than sightseeing, if we hadn’t followed this schedule, this car would not be nearly so comfortable. Do you know of another Ford that has two bathrooms?”
“Sharpie, I don’t know of one that has one bathroom. Our space-warp special lets us stay in space as long as our air holds out. And food. But air is the critical factor.”
I said, “Zebbie, have you noticed that our air does not get stuffy?”
“It will soon.”
“It need not,” Jacob pointed
out. “We can scram-code to Oz, or to Wonderland, in seconds. Sweet air, no danger.”
Zebbie looked sheepish. “I’m still learning what our wonder buggy will do.”
“So am I.”
“Gentlemen, you missed my point. You might check the juice. I haven’t mentioned another asset. Zebbie, would you like a banana?”
“Sharpie, I ate the last before I buried garbage. While you and Deety were washing dishes before we left Wonderland.”
“Tell him, Deety.”
“Zebadiah, Hilda and I salvaged and put everything into the basket. Hilda started to put it into our wardrobe—and it was heavy. So we looked. Packed as tight as when we left Oz. Six bananas—and everything else. Cross my heart. No, go look.”
“Hmmm—Jake, can you write equations for a picnic basket that refills itself? Will it go on doing so?”
“Zeb, equations can be written to describe anything. The description would be simpler for a basket that replenishes itself indefinitely than for one that does it once and stops—I would have to describe the discontinuity. But I am no longer troubled by natural—or ‘unnatural’—laws that don’t apply in Universe-zero.”
“Mmmm… Science Officer, I suggest that you check on that basket now that we have returned to Universe-zero.”
“Zebbie, make that an order in writing and sign your name—if you want to look foolish. Deety, will you order it logged?”
“Sharpie, if you weren’t such good company, I’d strangle you. Your earlier answer recommended that we complete the rotations.”
“No, I noted that the first twelve had not been unprofitable. We could have completed the last three by now had we not spent time debating it.”
“Hilda honey, our cowardly Astrogator needed time to get his nerve back. By yumpin’ yiminy, once you’re all trained, I’m going to retire.”
“We would simply recall you, Zebbie. Each will go on doing what she can do best.”
“Time is out of joint. O curséd spite, that I was ever picked to set it right.”
“You misquoted.”
“I always do. What universe do we hit next?”
“Zebbie, we have three rotations to go, with four left on the four-votes list. One is useless but amusing and safe. The other three are places to live but each has its own dangers. As the chief of surgery used to say: ‘I dunno, let’s operate and find out.’”