At last I was allowed to see the Inspector General’s adjutant. He was a colonel, a thin, gray, no-nonsense type. He’d already been briefed on my case, and he wasted no time on me. It was a short interview.
“Private,” he said, “I’m sorry about this, but new orders have been issued. The Reds have increased their rebirth rate, and we have to match them. The standing order now is six revivals before retirement.”
“But that order hadn’t been issued at the time I was killed.”
“It’s retroactive,” he said. “You have two deaths to go. Good-bye and good luck, Private.”
And that was it. I should have known you can’t get anywhere with top brass. They don’t know how things are. They rarely get killed more than once, and they just don’t understand how a man feels after four times. So I went back to my trench.
I walked back slowly, past the poisoned barbed wire, thinking hard. I walked past something covered with a khaki tarpaulin stenciled Secret Weapon. Our sector is filled with secret weapons. They come out about once a week, and maybe one of them will win the war.
But right now I didn’t care. I was thinking about the next stanza of that Emerson poem. It goes:
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
Old Emerson got it pretty right, because that’s how it is after your fourth death. Nothing makes any difference, and everything seems pretty much the same. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no cynic. I’m just saying that a man’s viewpoint is bound to change after he’s died four times.
At last I reached good old Trench 2645B-4, and greeted all the boys. I found out we were attacking again at dawn. I was still thinking.
I’m no quitter, but I figured four times dead was enough. In this attack, I decided I’d make sure I stayed dead. There would be no mistakes this time.
We moved out at first light, past the barbed wire and the rolling mines, into the no-man’s-land between our trench and 2645B-5. This attack was being carried out in battalion strength, and we were all armed with the new homing bullets. We moved along pretty briskly for a while. Then the enemy really opened up.
We kept on gaining ground. Stuff was blowing up all around me, but I hadn’t a scratch yet. I started to think we would make it this time. Maybe I wouldn’t get killed.
Then I got it. An explosive bullet through the chest. Definitely a mortal wound. Usually after something like that hits you, you stay down. But not me. I wanted to make sure of staying dead this time. So I picked myself up and staggered forward, using my rifle as a crutch. I made another fifteen yards in the face of the damnedest cross-fire you’ve ever seen. Then I got it, and got it right. There was no mistaking it on this round.
I felt the explosive bullet slam into my forehead. There was the tiniest fraction of a second in which I could feel my brains boiling out, and I knew I was safe this time. The brahmins couldn’t do anything about serious head injuries, and mine was really serious.
Then I died.
I recovered consciousness and looked up at the brahmins in their white gowns and gauze masks.
“How long was I dead?” I asked.
“Two hours.”
Then I remembered. “But I got it in the head!”
The gauze masks wrinkled, and I knew they were grinning. “Secret weapon,” one of them told me. “It’s been in the works for close to three years. At last we and the engineers perfected a descrambler. Tremendous invention!”
“Yeah?” I said.
“At last medical science can treat serious head injuries,” the brahmin told me. “Or any other kind of injury. We can bring any man back now, just as long as we can collect seventy percent of his pieces and feed them to the descrambler. This is really going to cut down our losses. It may turn the tide of the whole war!”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“By the way,” the brahmin told me, “you’ve been awarded a medal for your heroic advance under fire after receiving a mortal wound.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Did we take 2645B-5?”
“We took it this time. We’re massing for an assault against Trench 2645B-6.”
I nodded, and in a little while I was given my clothes and sent back to the front. Things have quieted down now, and I must admit it’s kind of pleasant to be alive. Still, I think I’ve had all I want of it.
Now I’ve got just one more death to go before I’ll have my six.
If they don’t change the orders again.
THE STORE OF THE WORLDS
Mr. Wayne came to the end of the long, shoulder-high mound of gray rubble, and there was the Store of the Worlds. It was exactly as his friends had described; a small shack constructed of bits of lumber, parts of cars, a piece of galvanized iron, and a few rows of crumbling bricks, all daubed over with a watery blue paint.
Mr. Wayne glanced back down the long lane of rubble to make sure he hadn’t been followed. He tucked his parcel more firmly under his arm; then, with a little shiver at his own audacity, he opened the door and slipped inside.
“Good morning,” the proprietor said.
He, too, was exactly as described; a tall, crafty-looking old fellow with narrow eyes and a downcast mouth. His name was Tompkins. He sat in an old rocking chair, and perched on the back of it was a blue and green parrot. There was one other chair in the store, and a table. On the table was a rusted hypodermic.
“I’ve heard about your store from friends,” Mr. Wayne said.
“Then you know my price,” Tompkins said. “Have you brought it?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Wayne, holding up his parcel. “But I want to ask first—”
“They always want to ask,” Tompkins said to the parrot, who blinked. “Go ahead, ask.”
“I want to know what really happens.”
Tompkins sighed. “What happens is this. You pay me my fee. I give you an injection which knocks you out. Then, with the aid of certain gadgets which I have in the back of the store, I liberate your mind.”
Tompkins smiled as he said that, and his silent parrot seemed to smile, too.
“What happens then?” Mr. Wayne asked.
“Your mind, liberated from its body, is able to choose from the countless probability-worlds which the Earth casts off in every second of its existence.”
Grinning now, Tompkins sat up in his rocking chair and began to show signs of enthusiasm.
“Yes, my friend, though you might not have suspected it, from the moment this battered Earth was born out of the sun’s fiery womb, it cast off its alternate-probability worlds. Worlds without end, emanating from events large and small; every Alexander and every amoeba creating worlds, just as ripples will spread in a pond no matter how big or how small the stone you throw. Doesn’t every object cast a shadow? Well, my friend, the Earth itself is four-dimensional; therefore it casts three-dimensional shadows, solid reflections of itself through every moment of its being. Millions, billions of Earths! An infinity of Earths! And your mind, liberated by me, will be able to select any of these worlds, and to live upon it for a while.”
Mr. Wayne was uncomfortably aware that Tompkins sounded like a circus barker, proclaiming marvels that simply couldn’t exist. But, Mr. Wayne reminded himself, things had happened within his own lifetime which he would never have believed possible. Never! So perhaps the wonders that Tompkins spoke of were possible, too.
Mr. Wayne said, “My friends also told me—”
“That I was an out-and-out fraud?” Tompkins asked.
“Some of them implied that,” Mr. Wayne said cautiously. “But I try to keep an open mind. They also said—”
“I know what your dirty-minded friends said. They told you about the fulfillment of desire. Is that what you want to hear about?”