Part 1

DESTINY UNCERTAIN

By Rog Phillips

Is Fate a robot typing out the destiny of the world? Lin knew it was true so with his own future at stake--he stole a page from history!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy May 1952 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"I'm never going to take my last breath," Lin said with a gloating tone that implied some deep secret. He waited until his remark had had its full dramatic moment, then added, "I'm simply going to take my next to last breath and hold it."

Jerry Myer's voice emerged from the wave of laughter, serious. "But there does often seem to be something predestined about death. Even seemingly accidental death." He shuddered. "There were five hundred and sixty-nine traffic deaths last Labor Day weekend. I wonder how those victims would have felt if they had been told, say, a week before they died? And been unable to avoid it, no matter what they did?"

"Nonsense!" Phil Arnoff said. "What about surgery, serums, and safety devices? They get demonstrable results in saving lives. A man has an enlarged aorta. Ten years ago he would have been a goner. Today he has an operation. They transplant a section of the aorta of a dead person, and he lives another twenty years."

Jerry sighed. "You're getting into a meaningless argument. It could be answered that destiny brought the operation into the realm of actuality to save him _because it wasn't his time to die_. There's a lot of evidence to support predestination. Some of the oldest of philosophies and religions are based on it. _It is written_ is a concept as old as man."

"And maybe as mistaken as the ancient belief in a god of thunder," Lin scoffed.

"And maybe not," Jerry said. "You read a book. Unless you cheat and look at the ending first it's like life. Unpredictable. But you _can_ skip to the end and see how it will come out, and then start in at the beginning and read with that knowledge. And when you again reach the end it's still the same, because it was already written and unchangeable when you began reading the first page. Sometimes I think real life is like that."

Phil and Lin winked at each other. Then Phil said, "Let's suppose that's true for the moment. Who does the writing?"

Jerry shrugged. "What difference would that make? There's the old tale of the Fates as weavers, weaving a cloth that becomes the events of men's lives as it is woven. And there's another one I heard once, or read someplace...."

"What's that?" Lin prodded.

"I was trying to remember where I got it," Jerry said. "It doesn't matter. The way it goes, Fate is an old man with sightless eyes, sitting at a typewriter, pecking out the events that will happen. Beside him is a wastebasket affair with an eternal flame in it. When the sightless old man finishes one page he yanks it out and drops it in the wastebasket. The flame consumes it, and as it is consumed it becomes the reality of life."

"Say!" Phil said. "That's a darned cute idea. Writing on paper, burning, and in the process of burning it transforms into reality by some strange alchemy. I hope you can remember where you read that."

Lin snorted. "Maybe he wrote it himself and burned the pages as they were finished," he suggested. He glanced at the clock on the wall. His eyes widened in surprise. "I didn't know it was that late," he said, rising. "I've got to get to the city before the bank closes. Have to really step on it."

"Take it easy," Phil called after him. "Don't get killed."

"Nothing to worry about," Lin called back. "If it isn't written it won't happen, you know."

"Don't tempt Fate!" Jerry said warningly.

But Lin was out the door beyond hearing.

* * * * *

The sign read SLOW TO 35. Lin smiled. That was for ordinary cars. His Hudson had a low center of gravity. But he took his foot off the gas and the uphill drag slowed his car to seventy, sixty-five, sixty, then fifty-five as he entered the first bend of the S curve.

The pines were tall right to the edge of the shoulder, hiding what was ahead. It was a bad gamble, he decided, but the dashboard clock told him it was one he would have to take. Twenty-four miles to go yet and in twenty-two minutes. Even fifty-five was going to make him late. He edged up to fifty-eight, leaning his head over so he could see farther around the bend of the two lane highway.

A car was coming toward him. It was over on its side of the pavement, which was well. There was a woman in it. The color and shape of the hat, which was about all he could really see, told him that.

The oncoming car vanished for a moment on the curve. Then it was rushing toward him on the short stretch of straightaway between the two curved sections of the S.

Lin relaxed. There wasn't a thing to worry about. He'd taken the first curve easily. The oncoming car was thirty yards away, then ten. Then--

It was one of those absolutely incredible instants of time. Something had happened to his Hudson. A blowout? A wheel off? Whatever it was, he had veered straight toward the oncoming car.

Instinctively he turned his wheel to get back into his own lane. The car responded by lifting into the air and turning over.

There was a brief, photographic still picture of the other car poised at a crazy angle scant inches in front of him. He could see the girl's features clearly, etched in lines of horror. She was nice looking. Her eyes were wide blue pools, and there were two sharp vertical lines between them.

She looked at him then, accusingly, reproachfully. He shook his head in mute apology and wished he could do it over and go slower.

Quite calmly, though, he knew they would probably both be killed. And it was strange that time could speed up so quickly in the moment before death. Even now, in this instant that hung poised in eternity he could find time left to wonder what had happened. It couldn't have been a tire. All four tires were less than five thousand miles old. It couldn't have been a wheel either.

It could have been something in the road. He had been looking at the female hat behind the windshield of that car and could have missed seeing something on the road.

Forgetting what was in front of him, he started to turn his head to look back.

* * * * *

He blinked his eyes. There was something wrong. It came to him. He had been about to have a head-on collision with another car. He looked down at the ground where he stood. His feet were resting on a well packed dirt path that went forward across the grass and curved behind a clump of large leaved shade trees.

He looked around him. No one was in sight. The place was strange to him. He'd never been here before.

He closed his eyes and thought back. He was quite certain he had been about to be killed in an accident. It couldn't have been a dream. He opened his eyes again and looked about him curiously. This could be a dream. Or was he dead and was this something after life?

There was a test he could make. He tried to remember having reached this point on the path. He turned around and looked back the way it came up the gentle slope of the hill. He couldn't remember having reached this spot at all.

There was another test. He used the edge of his shoe to scrape a line on the path. Then he got down on his haunches and studied the ground. There was no sign of his footsteps. But the ground was well packed.

He straightened up. There was no use just standing here, he decided. So he started walking, the way he had been facing originally.

Suddenly he thought of another test. Stopping, he went through his pockets. Everything was where it should be. His billfold held his identification cards and currency. He studied the currency. It was too perfect in detail to be a figment of a dream.

He shook his head in perplexity. Whatever had happened, it was beyond his grasp. Shoving things back in his pockets he started forward again.

The sky was blue, with billowing white clouds drifting lazily high above the treetops. Ahead there was the sound of water. Shortly he came to a foot bridge that spanned a small and turbulent stream.

* * * * *

The path followed the bank of the stream for a hundred yards, then turned sharply and cut through the woods. The trees seemed to be some kind of Maple. The ground was covered with short cropped meadow, as though cattle had grazed here. But there was no sign of movement anywhere.

But there was. Something small and black was drifting down toward him in the air. He stopped and waited until he could reach out and seize it between his fingers.

It crumpled at his touch. He rubbed it between thumb and finger, examining its texture. It seemed to be a flake of burnt paper, as though someone had tossed a piece of paper in a campfire, and a charred piece of it had floated away on the breeze.

He went forward more eagerly now. Undoubtedly someone was ahead of him. Probably on a picnic. He could find out from them where he was.

And there was a sensible explanation of things now. He had probably been thrown clear of the car and knocked out. That could have lasted for hours while he wandered through the woods.

Of course that was it, he decided with relief. Now all he had to do was find someone and tell them about it, and they would take him back to the scene of the accident.

Ahead through the trees he could see the steep bank of a tableland that rose above the treetops. While he watched, there was a flurry of motion that swept downward from up there. Black flakes that turned and tossed in the breeze. More charred bits of paper. That was obviously where the campfire was.

"Hello up there!" he called. There was no answer. No sound at all.

He broke into a trot, marvelling that he didn't feel groggy or upset. The path turned in toward the steep bank and terminated at the foot of concrete steps that went upward. When he reached them he paused to get his breath, then started up the steps at a more leisurely pace.

They zigzagged up the face of the steep bank, twelve steps to each section.

He paused half way up and looked over the treetops, which sloped gently for several hundred yards, then dropped away. In the far distance was the hazy panorama of a valley with two lakes that were irregular blue splotches on a carpet of greens and browns.

He resumed his upward climb. Finally there was only one more section of steps before the top.

* * * * *

He sighed with relief and paused to look downward, almost regretting that he hadn't chosen to go the other way on the path. He would almost certainly have run into someone before this, going the other way, and then he wouldn't have had all this climb. But.... He shrugged and climbed the last of the steps.

He was on a flat table of jigsaw design, flagstone cemented together. Twenty feet away was a man. The man, his back to him, was seated on a stone bench before a small stone table, intent on something he was doing that was concealed by his back and hunched shoulders.

In the incredible stillness came the staccato click of what sounded exactly like typewriter keys. As Lin watched, the man jerked something. A piece of paper appeared briefly, then was dropped into a wire basket where almost invisible blue flames immediately licked at it and began to consume it.

Blackened bits floated upward and away. And even as they floated over the edge of the table the rapid click of the typewriter began again.

"Hello!" Lin said in good natured greeting.

The head didn't turn. The clack of the typewriter continued without pause.

Lin hesitated a moment, then approached the man slowly, debating whether he should speak to him again or wait until he paused to rest. The man must not be doing so well with his writing, to toss a finished page into the fire so casually.

Lin's lips quirked into a smile. He would sneak up and glance over the man's shoulder and read what he was typing.

As he stole forward he studied what he could see of the man. Instead of conventional attire he was wearing what seemed to be a heavy gray robe. If he had any hair it was concealed under the black skull cap he was wearing. The back of his neck was deeply wrinkled like that of a man well past the prime of life. His ears were well formed, but stuck out a trifle too much. And from the speed at which he was typing he was probably completely unaware of his surroundings.

Lin paused above him and admired the typewriter. It was the most beautiful machine he had ever seen, and electric, he decided as the man's fingers touched a key and the carriage swung back to starting position on a new line.

* * * * *

The type on the paper wasn't standard. In fact, some of it didn't even seem to be ordinary letters, but some strange type of symbols. Others were almost ordinary.

Lin leaned forward cautiously in order to make out what was already typed. He saw only two words that were recognizable. One was _force_ in the middle of the second line. The other was _late_ in the line that had just been written.

It was a foreign language. Lin decided. But the two words he could recognize gave no clue to what language it might be.

The page was finished. The man's hand seized it and jerked it from the machine, dropping it into the flame in the wire wastebasket.

And from some automatic feed a new sheet came into view on the platen, and the man continued his typing, his fingers moving with great rapidity and without letup.

Lin straightened and stepped back a bit so as not to startle the man. He coughed loudly and said, "Hello, there."

The rhythm of the man's typing didn't vary. He gave no indication of having heard.

Slightly annoyed, Lin reached out and tapped him firmly on the shoulder. Still no result.

"Hey there!" Lin shouted, clamping fingers over the man's shoulders and starling to shake him. "Hey!" he started to say again, then his voice died away.

The shoulder under his fingers was unyielding. Too unyielding. His lips took on a stubborn line. He applied force. The shoulder was immovable.

He released it and stared down, mystified. The fingers continued their typing without pause, a blur of movement over the keys.

With abrupt decision Lin stepped around so he could see the man's face. He caught an impression of a lean face, intellectual and relaxed, with firm lips and thin high bridged nose. But these were only vaguely noticed, because his attention was immediately dominated by the man's eyes.

Or lack of eyes, that is. For where his eyes should have been was nothing but tightly closed lids that, from their sunken contours, covered no eyes at all, but only empty sockets.

* * * * *

Experimentally Lin reached out and touched the face. The pale skin was as unyielding as rock. He pressed his finger against the right cheek until his nail bent over. It should have left a mark on any living skin and brought an exclamation of pain from any living person. But it left no perceptible mark, and the man gave no sign of having noticed. And the fingers continued their rapid movement over the typewriter keyboard.

Incredulously Lin reached out and tried to remove the skullcap. It wouldn't budge, and was as unyieldingly hard as the face.

"A robot!" The exclamation escaped Lin's lips in a hoarse whisper. "Or--a statue?"

In desperation he seized one of the man's arms at the elbow and tried to interrupt the smooth flow of movement. All his strength couldn't vary the motion of that arm enough to cause a finger to miss a key on the typewriter.

"Not a millionth of an inch of play in the joints!" he said, marvelling.

For the first time he turned his attention from the figure before him and examined his surroundings. The robot or statue or whatever it was was seated at a spot practically perched on the edge of a cliff that went down much farther than the stairs on the other side. Here there was a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet, and probably more nearly two thousand.

Below, an immense valley stretched out toward the far horizon.

Lin looked out over the valley with a puzzled frown, trying to recall if there were any high mountains in this section of the country. There were hills, but no real mountains. Nothing to compare with this.

"How long have I been unconscious?" he muttered.

His attention jerked back to the typist in time to see another sheet of paper go into the flames. He watched it burn. The flame itself seemed to come out of a round hole in the rock inside the area of the bottom of the wire basket. From its color it was a gas flame. In the dark it would be a bright blue.

His attention turned to the typewriter and the stone table on which it rested. An inscription was embossed on the smooth face of the front of the table.

Lin nodded in grim understanding. This was a statue. But a statue such as never had existed on the Earth he lived in, or it would have been considered the eighth wonder of the world and known to every school child.

An urgency possessed him to seize the next sheet of paper before the flame could get it, and try to read it. He waited while the robot statue typed, and when the hand jerked out the sheet to throw it into the flames, he grabbed it, though part of it tore away and dropped into the flame before he could rescue it.

He examined the texture of the paper. It had the feel of plastic more than paper. He studied the typing. It was sharp and clear, and completely unintelligible.

Or was it unintelligible? He could almost make sense out of the words. Some of the letters that had been strange were taking on a feel of familiarity.

* * * * *

He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head, then opened them and looked again. It did make sense, but the sense was just beyond his reach.

He looked at the figure bent over the typewriter again, and it struck a chord of familiarity somewhere in his mind. He had heard of this statue somewhere....

He remembered now! This statue, or whatever it was, was the embodiment of Fate. It was writing all that was in store for each individual, and when it tossed the sheets that were written on in the flame their burning brought what was written into being, and it happened, somewhere, just as it had been written.

He stared at the fragment of paper he held in his hand, and wondered what was written on it, and what events he was holding up by not tossing the sheet in the flame.

A smile curved his lips. He held it over the basket. By releasing it, it would drop down and burn. Then whatever event he was holding up would happen.

His fingers relaxed. The paper slipped a fraction of an inch. Suddenly he clutched it tightly and drew it to safety. His forehead prickled. Beads of perspiration dampened it. This puzzled him. It was almost as though somewhere in his mind was terrible anxiety. But he was quite calm.

He stared at the torn sheet of paper again, the smile playing about his lips. Slowly and deliberately he folded it and, taking out his billfold, stored it safely away.

He took a last look at the silent robot, the clicking typewriter, then crossed the tablerock to the stairs and went down them to the path.

Again he saw no sign of movement except for the occasional bit of floating charred paper that came from above. He recrossed the stream at the footbridge. He went slower then, looking for the mark he had made in the hard packed path with the edge of his shoe.

He nearly missed it, seeing it only as he stepped over it. Stopping, he turned and looked back the way he had come. Ahead were the broad leaved trees that looked so much like Maples, the path over which he had come.

He started to turn--and the world turned topsy turvy around him. There was the white face of the girl through the windshield of a car, dropping away suddenly and rotating in a mad gyration until the face was upside down, and then was gone past him.

A dull booming sound exploded on his bewildered mind. Wild forces were tossing him about inside the car so rapidly that there was no way to tell which was up and which was down.

As abruptly as it began, it ended. In the dead silence he heard the screech of brakes. He wondered if it was the girl stopping her car to come back, but he didn't turn his head to look.

He was trying to reconcile the sequence of events brought by his senses. It was impossible. He had spent at least two hours walking up that path, watching the robot statue, and walking back down again to where he had first appeared.

Yet, if it had happened at all, it had happened in less than a split second, for events in the collision had taken up _at the exact point where they had left off_.

* * * * *

He opened his eyes and saw the creamy gloss surface of a ceiling and knew at once he was in a hospital. Without moving his head he let his fingers explore the clean smelling sheets, the hospital bed gown tied around his neck.

A footstep sounded. A nurse looked down at him with a quiet smile. "Feel all right?" she asked.

He dipped his head in an almost imperceptible nod. The nurse went away. There was a swish of wind as the door closed behind her, but he didn't bother to turn his head to look.

After several minutes the swish of the door sounded again. More than one pair of footsteps came toward the bed. Two men, probably doctors, looked down at him.

"How's the patient today?" one of them asked.

"Today?" Lin echoed. "How long have I been here?"

"Almost a week."

It came flooding in. He could remember hours of torturous pain during which he cried for them to put him out of his misery, of at least two terrible nightmarish scenes where he was surrounded by gleaming chrome things, and the awful odor of ether.

"I remember now," he said weakly. "Will--will I live?"

"If you'd asked us that yesterday we'd have said no," the doctor said, "but--" He shrugged.

"How badly am I hurt?" Lin asked the doctors.

"Pretty badly," one of them said with grave frankness. "Broken back. Severed spine. If you live you'll never walk again."

"But I probably won't live?" Lin said.

The doctors didn't reply.

"The girl," Lin said, "the one who was driving the other car? Was she hurt?"

"Yes. Pretty badly. But she'll live."

"What's her name?"

The two doctors looked at each other. One of them said, "I believe she gave her name as Dorothy Lake."

"Tell me, what was it that caused my car to go out of control?" Lin asked suddenly.

"I can tell you that," one of the doctors said. "The mechanic reported that your tierod, the rod that connects the front wheels together so they stay in line, had come off one of its moorings."

"Oh." Lin said vaguely. He was beginning to feel strange. The memory of that interlude atop the mountain had come back. He was remembering that bit of paper he had snatched from the flames. But of course there was nothing in that.... "Are my things here?" he asked abruptly. "My billfold?"

"Yes," the nurse said. "Your billfold is in the drawer here."

"Get it," Lin said.

She opened the drawer and brought out the billfold.

"Open it and see if there's a folded piece of paper that's torn off on one corner," he demanded.

He watched while she explored the contents. He recognized the texture of the paper as it came to view. "That's it!" he said tensely. "Give it to me!"

He tried to lift an arm. He had to be content with taking it in his fingers while his elbows rested on the bed. With shaking fingers he opened it, and saw the typing that was so different from ordinary typing.