The Probability Broach

  J. M. BROWNING’S SONS’, PERSONAL WEAPONS, LTD.

  MFG. NAUVOO, N.A.C.

  “Nauvoo—I’ve heard that somewhere before, but what does it prove?”

  “Your Browning,” Ed said, “is made of steel, smaller, but heavier than mine, which is almost entirely titanium. The last steel firearms were made in this country over sixty years ago—I looked it up. Mine was manufactured by molecular deposition, electron discharge—processes that don’t leave toolmarks. Yours, though they’ve done a first-class job, was obviously cut from a solid slab, another method obsolete for generations. No offense.”

  “None taken. You’re way ahead of us technologically, that’s obvious. Anyway, it’s not really my gun. It belonged to one of the people who attacked me.”

  Ed nodded. “I see. Well this morning while you were sleeping, I ’commed Browning and took the liberty of showing them this thing. Made by antiquated methods, yet no antique. It caused quite a sensation. I suspect they’d offer you a pretty tenth-piece for it.”

  I laughed. “Might need a grubstake at that. I can’t go on being a charity case forever. Kind of tickles me, though. For once in my life, doing business with the government turns out to be profitable!”

  He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry about charity. Just take it easy so your bones will knit straight.”

  “Thanks. Listen, Ed, that ‘Nauvoo’—I remember now: John Moses Browning was brought up Mormon. Had two or three mothers, as I recall—”

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “Lots of Mormons practice polygamy, although it’s not too popular anywhere else, especially out west, here.”

  “Yeah? Well in my history, the Mormons are out west! Trekked out here after their settlement was burned—Nauvoo, Illinois. Illinois is a state, like the thirteen colonies—you know, Chicago?”

  Ed grinned. “I’ll say I do. It’s the biggest city in the world! Nauvoo, though—let’s take a look.” He removed an object from the bookcase, fourteen inches long, maybe ten wide, half an inch thick. Sort of an overweight clipboard with a screen and keyboard. At the foot of my bed, the mountain glade disappeared, replaced by a map of North America.

  “A bit southwest of Chicago,” Ed confirmed. “I guess in my history, they never got—Win?”

  “Hunh?” I blinked, a bit preoccupied. All of North America, from the Isthmus to the Arctic, seemed to be one country: the North American Confederacy—no state or provincial boundaries. Chicago was indeed the biggest apple, rivaled closely by Los Angeles and Mexico City. There wasn’t any Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, in tiny, barely visible letters, seemed nothing more than a sleepy Indian village. Laporte was a major urban area half the size of Chicago, and Ed was right—no Denver. That sickening chill wrapped itself around my guts again. “—Sorry, Ed. This’ll take some getting used to. Same history up through the Revolution, different afterward … or some strange mixture, anyhow.”

  Ed looked at me with concern. “Don’t let a few little differences get to you. It’s still the same old continent.”

  “Ed, I never heard of half the cities on that map! And in my world, Hollywood’s in California. Something big is going on here. If I don’t find out what, I’m gonna go stark raving batty!”

  “I see.” He reloaded his pistol and shucked it into his holster. “Win, my friend, something else is driving me … ‘batty’?”

  “Yeah.” I returned his gaze. “Us.”

  “In a shell case—”

  “Make that a nutshell and I’ll second the motion.”

  “We look alike, have the same name, pursue much the same vocation. In some sense we might be the same person. Each of us is what the other might have been. We’re twin brothers of some kind.”

  I looked away, uncomfortably aware of his dark shaggy hair, perfect teeth, unwrinkled face, and slim, youthful bearing. “I’m touched, Ed, but think again—look again. How old are you?”

  “Forty-eight last May twelfth.”

  “Shit. Remind me to ask who does your hair! Okay, I got another one: I was born right there.” I pointed to the Denverless spot on the map. “How could we be twins if my hometown’s nonexistent?”

  He looked puzzled briefly. “I was born right about where you’re pointing.” He fiddled with the controls and zoomed in close. Laporte was now at the top, a little south of where Wyoming ought to be, and in the middle, in still-tiny print, the townships of Saint Charles and Auraria, the South Platte River winding between them. A sudden tension swept my body.

  “Your parents. What were their names?”

  “My parents are both living,” he said firmly. “William and Edna Bear. They moved up to the northwest coast near Tlingit a few years ago, but they’re both from this area originally.”

  I forged onward. “And they’re both full-blooded Ute Indians—that’s where the name Utah comes from.”

  “I hadn’t made the connection. But you’re right, they’re from Indian stock. Doesn’t mean very much, does it?”

  “It never did to me,” I said, “but to some …” I thought about Watts and of the Arab-Vietnamese gang rumbles on my own beat. “Where I come from, people kill each other about it, sometimes.”

  “Another difference between our histories?”

  “Or between our people. That makes you lucky on two counts, Ed. Dad got his in a B-17—a kind of military bomber—over Germany in 1943. Mom passed away in 1957, the day I graduated from high school. I wish I understood what all this means.”

  “So do I. It gives me a very strange, unwholesome feeling. How would you feel about meeting my folks?”

  I shuddered and he saw it.

  “Just take your time.” He replaced the map with another scenic view, the Royal Gorge this time, then spent a long while looking out into the back garden. “Win, why should we … I mean, why should both our worlds, if they diverged so long ago, have produced—”

  “A pair of identical gumshoes? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe because we’re both Indians.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, I never set much store in being ‘Native American’—neolithically ignorant while the rest of the world was out inventing the wheel, gunpowder, carbon steel. Hell, if our esteemed ancestors had been able to get along with one another thirty days running, they could have thrown Pizarro and Cortez out on their hairy asses and developed a real civilization.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “I don’t know exactly where our histories diverged. I’d sleep better tonight if I did. But those histories are mostly white people’s histories, right? I mean, George Washington got killed in the Whiskey Rebellion, that’s what Clarissa tells me.”

  “And she’s correct. Right between the eyes, like he deserved!”

  “Splendid. Well in my history, old George—whom we think pretty highly of—died in bed from a bad case of the quacks. He had a head cold and they bled him to death for it.”

  “Seems only just; he was bleeding everybody else with Hamilton’s taxes.”

  “All right, funny man, suppose he’d had a child after the Rebellion.”

  “In your history? But he was an old man.”

  “Never stopped Ben Franklin, did it?”

  “Franklin? Oh, yes, the turncoat Federalist.”

  “Okay, okay. Now George couldn’t have had another kid in your history, because he was dead, see? But my hypothetical kid—an extra one, from your vantage point—would have had kids of its own, right? And they’d have had kids. Pretty soon the whole population would be substantially different.”

  Ed saw some light. “By now there’d hardly be anyone like us, with close counterparts in each world. But that just makes it harder to explain our—”

  “Not at all! Look—whatever the White-Eyes were up to back East, that wouldn’t affect what our ancestors were doing!”

  He nodded. “Not until much later, and by that time—”

  “By that time our heredity—in each world—would be pretty much unaltered!??
? I was proud of that theory. For the first time I began to feel on top of things. The feeling was good, while it lasted.

  Ed tipped the chair back again and relaxed. “That still leaves a number of things to figure out, though. For example, how you got here in the first place, and—”

  “And who’s trying to fill me full of bullet holes while I’m here. I thought I’d left the bad guys behind. You got any enemies?”

  He shrugged. “You thinking that the Frontenac people mistook you for me? Anything is possible, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But couldn’t your bad guys have arrived the same way you did?”

  “That’s a cheerful thought. Got any more?”

  “Now that you mention it: I still don’t understand one thing … I gather that, in your capacity as an investigator, you work for the government. Why that should be so, I—”

  “That’s right, the city government of Denver. What of it?”

  “Cities with their own governments? Well, let it pass. Now the pistol you took in the laboratory is marked ‘government property,’ yet you find it perfectly reasonable to assume it was in the hands of its rightful owner, correct?”

  “Sure, the United States Government—not the same thing at all. Look, I know it sounds strange—hell, it sounds pretty strange to me—but sometimes the interests of various governments—local, state, national—conflict. That’s—”

  “A good indication,” he said with a sour look, “that you have too many governments!”

  “Let’s skip politics. All I seem to run into lately is anarchists—and garage doors.”

  Ed got up and looked at my Browning again. “I wonder about your theory, Win. About us both being Indians. You figure we’re here because changes in history reached our ancestors too late to prevent us being born?”

  “That’s right—setting aside the question of whose history is changed.”

  “Very well, but can you account for us both being detectives—or even for us having the same name? And something else: these firearms—the Utah and the Nauvoo Brownings—both invented, presumably, by John Moses Browning?”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “John Moses Browning wasn’t an Indian.”

  “Damn you, Ed! Just when I’m getting things figured out, you have to confuse me with logic!”

  “Not logic,” he laughed, “just the Bear facts!”

  “Ugh. Well, where does that put us now?”

  He thought a moment. “If we knew how your bad guys got here—assuming they’re not just local talent—that might tell us how to get you back to your own world.”

  There it was again, that stomach-wrenching thought. “Wrong,” I said, unable to hold back my fears any longer. “Look, something caused this divergence, some event between the Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion that wound up with Washington getting prematurely dead, I—”

  “What are you driving at? I thought all of this was—”

  “Critical! Suppose time travel is possible, Ed, not sideways time travel, but the good old-fashioned linear, back-and-forth kind. Suppose somebody went back—maybe Vaughn Meiss, maybe the government—and killed the wrong dinosaur or his own grandfather! Suppose history has been fouled up for good!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All along, I’ve been assuming that I traveled to get here. Suppose Meiss’s machine just sort of held me in place while my own world was ripped out from under me and yours slipped in to take its place! Ed, I’m really scared! How do I know that whatever change in history created your world didn’t destroy mine?”

  VIII: Night of the Long Knife

  Listen t’me, kid, ‘n’ listen tight. Y’won’t do yerself no good goin’ t’pieces every time y’fill some train robber fulla holes. Wasn’t you made ’im try fer our payroll, he decided that fer ‘imself. You mighta shot ’im, but the way I see it, it was his finger on your trigger, all along. Look, we’re th’ best Wells-Mulligan’s got: anybody’d break intuh our boxcar’s just committin’ suicide. An’ everybody’s gotta right t’commit suicide, ain’t they, kid?

  —Mike Morrison as “Singin’ Sandy”

  in Lone Star Gunmen

  I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was exhausted, and not only from exertion and gunshot wounds. Clarissa’s wonderful machines were healing me at a rate that taxed my reserves and made me ravenous about every forty-five minutes. But sleepy I was not. Lying around in bed all day wired up like Donovan’s brain is not exactly conducive to a solid night’s hibernation.

  I’m not the warm-milk type, and booze has never helped me sleep. This anarchist’s Disneyland apparently hadn’t any prescription laws. Ed’s medicine cabinets contained everything from aspirin to morphine. Ironically, the dozen plastic bottles Clarissa had left contained mostly vitamin E, bone meal, and ascorbic acid tabs the size of my badge. For inducing sleep, she preferred using a cross between voodoo and electronics she called electronarcosis. But it wasn’t working very well for me.

  Lying restlessly in the dark, I tried arguing Ed’s terminal out of something to read. Then I heard it: a humming, soft but unmistakable. I might have slept through it. I turned. In the dim backlight of distant street lamps, I could make out a shadow against the windowpane.

  My Smith & Wesson lay on the bureau, but I’d insisted on keeping the derringer under my pillow, and that made me mad. It was likely to ruin my hand, and all I needed now was another set of Basset coils. Nevertheless, I reached slowly behind my head, found the tiny, inadequate handle, and cocked the contraption under the pillow. One shot. I’d better make it a good close one.

  The window, hinged at the top, opened outward. A shadow silently threw its leg over the sill. One step across the floor, two, three. Starlight glinted on naked steel.

  He was on me! A huge knife swung in a glittering arc and I twisted the gun to bear as his blade tangled in the wiring around me, skittered along the cast on my arm, and was deflected. The derringer went off in a blinding explosion, missing his face by a handspan. I dropped the gun from stinging fingers, grabbing at his wrist. He jerked it back—I let him, pushing the razor-sharp edge toward his face. It caught under his jaw, pivoting where it bit, slicing flesh and corded muscle, spraying us both with blood. He fought the blade as it trembled a quarter-inch from his carotid, both of us weakening fast in the deadlock. I heard bones breaking in his wrist.

  Suddenly he let go, ripped himself from my failing grasp, and dived head-first out the window as—Slap! Slap! The glazing dissolved in a million crystalline shards.

  The lights came on. Ed slumped against the door frame, a spidery wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of his .375. I sagged back into the sweat-soaked bed; Clarissa’s careful circuitry a dangling ruin. The bloody knife lay on the blanket, millimeters from my shaking, gun-bruised hand. Ed’s glance traveled from my blood-streaked face to the foot-long blade. “Don’t you know better than to try shaving in the dark?”

  “The gore belongs to the other guy.” I mopped my face with the sheet. There was dampness lower down, too—trust my bladder in a crisis. “Think you hit him?”

  “I doubt it.” He examined the empty window frame, leaning outward for a moment. “He left his ladder behind. Wait a minute … something here just below the sill.” He held up a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack, hanging from a skein of wires. “A defeater. Damps the vibrations caused by forced entry. Complicated, and very expensive. Only the second one I’ve seen since—”

  “If that thing makes a humming sound, he should demand his money back. That’s what gave him away.”

  “Excess energy has to be given off somewhere—heat or sonics. Maybe it just wasn’t his day.”

  I snorted, surveying the shambles. “You didn’t see him lying on the ground out there?”

  “No. Missed him by a mile. He probably picked up a fanny full of splinters, though.” He nodded toward the shattered window.

  I grinned. There was an odd, oily gleam around the edges of the frame. Maybe just an odd effect of the
light. “How’d he survive the fall?” I looked again. The amoeboid glistening was still there.

  “Simple, with ten-foot juniper bushes packed around the base of the house. Think you’ll be all right if I look around a bit?”

  I hesitated. “Before you go out … it’s the sheets—I’ve kind of embarrassed myself, it seems.”

  He didn’t laugh. “My fault, really. I considered putting on extra security, but decided the autodefenses would be enough. Now I’ve let you get attacked again, in my own home.”

  “It all worked out okay, didn’t it?”

  He shook his lowered head. “You don’t understand,” he said softly, “You’re my guest, ill and gravely wounded—and not, as it appears, adequately—”

  “You didn’t invite me to bleed all over your driveway! You saved my life then, and showed up just in time tonight. The sheets will wash, but all this bullshit won’t!”

  He breathed deeply. “Nevertheless, I’ll hear nothing more about charity. I’ve shown how much my charity is worth!” He started for the door, but the knife caught his eye and he paused, then reached for it.

  “Fingerprints!” I hollered, “Don’t screw up the evidence!” I flipped a corner of the blanket over and picked it up by the blade. The damned thing was almost a short sword, fully eighteen inches from pommel to point, razor-sharp to the hilt and halfway along the back. It must have weighed two pounds.

  “Fingerprints?” Ed protested. “What kind of evidence is that?”

  I sat, trying to take it in. “Look—our worlds may have differences, but this ain’t one of ’em! No two fingerprints are—”

  “I’ve heard that theory, but what good does it do? We still have to catch the culprit, and if he’s already caught, what’s the point?”

  “Jesus Christ! Don’t you people keep any kind of records, licenses, anything that uses fingerprints for identification?”

  “People wouldn’t stand for such a thing. I wouldn’t.”