“Dancing on the rainbow,” Carmichael snapped, and departed. He had switched over from rye to whisky sours, and the cold night air naturally did not sober him. Swaying slightly, watching the sidewalk move a little as he blinked at it, he stood on the curb and pondered.
“I’m sorry, Tim,” Worth said. “It’s too late now, though. There won’t be any trouble. You’ve got a right to go by our office records.”
“Stop me now,” Carmichael said. “Lousy little—” He was angry and drunk On impulse he got another taxi and sped to the printer’s, still trailing a somewhat confused Jerry Worth.
There was rhythmic thunder in the building. The swift movement of the taxi had given Carmichael a slight nausea; his head ached, and alcohol was in solution in his blood. The hot, inky air was unpleasant. The great Linotypes thumped and growled. Men were moving about. It was all slightly nightmarish, and Carmichael doggedly hunched his shoulders and lurched on until something jerked him back and began to strangle him.
Worth started yelling. His face showed drunken terror. He made ineffectual gestures.
But this was all part of the nightmare. Carmichael saw what had happened. The ends of his scarf had caught in the moving gears somewhere and he was being drawn inexorably into meshing metal cogs.
Men were running. The clanking, thumping, rolling sounds were deafening. He pulled at the scarf.
Worth screamed, “… knife! Cut it!”
The warping of relative values that intoxication gives saved Carmichael. Sober, he would have been helpless with panic. As it was, each thought was hard to capture, but clear and lucid when he finally got it. He remembered the shears, and he put his hand in his pocket. The blades slipped out of their cardboard sheath, and he snipped through the scarf with fumbling, hasty movements.
The white silk disappeared. Carmichael fingered the ragged edge at his throat and smiled stiffly.
Mr. Peter Talley had been hoping that Carmichael would not come back. The probability lines had shown two possible variants; in one, all was well; in the other…
Carmichael walked into the shop the next morning and held out a five-dollar bill. Talley took it.
“Thank you. But you could have mailed me a check”
“I could have. Only that wouldn’t have told me what I wanted to know.”
“No,” Talley said, and sighed. “You’ve decided, haven’t you?”
“Do you blame me?” Carmichael asked. “Last night-do you know what happened?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I might as well tell you,” Talley said. “You’d find out anyway. That’s certain, anyhow.”
Carmichael sat down, lit a cigarette and nodded. “Logic. You couldn’t have arranged that little accident, by any manner of means. Betsy Hoag decided to break our date early yesterday morning.
Before I saw you. That was the beginning of the chain of incidents that led up to the accident. Ergo, you must have known what was going to happen.”
“I did know.”
“Prescience?”
“Mechanical. I saw that you would be crushed in the machine—”
“Which implies an alterable future.”
“Certainly,” Talley said, his shoulders slumping. “There are innumerable possible variants to the future. Different lines of probability. All depending on the outcome of various crises as they arise. I happen to be skilled in certain branches of electronics. Some years ago, almost by accident, I stumbled on the principle of seeing the future.”
“How?”
“Chiefly it involves a personal focus on the individual. The moment you enter this place”-he gestured—“you’re in the beam of my scanner. In my back room I have the machine itself. By turning a calibrated dial, I check the possible futures. Sometimes there are many. Sometimes only a few. As though at times certain stations weren’t broadcasting. I look into my scanner and see what you need-and supply it.”
Carmichael let smoke drift from his nostrils. He watched the blue coils through narrowed eyes.
“You follow a man’s whole life-in triplicate or quadruplicate or whatever?”
“No,” Talley said. “I’ve got my device focused so it’s sensitive to crisis curves. When those occur, I follow them farther and see what probability paths involve the man’s safe and happy survival.”
“The sunglasses, the egg and the gloves—”
Talley said, “Mr.-uh-Smith is one of my regular clients. Whenever he passes a crisis successfully, with my aid, he comes back for another checkup. I locate his next crisis and supply him with what he needs to meet it. I gave him the asbestos gloves. In about a month, a situation will arise where he must-under the circumstances-move a red-hot bar of metal. He’s an artist. His hands—”
“I see. So it isn’t always saving a man’s life.”
“Of course not,” Talley said. “Life isn’t the only vital factor. An apparently minor crisis may lead to-well, a divorce, a neurosis, a wrong decision and the loss of hundreds of lives indirectly. I insure life, health and happiness.”
“You’re an altruist. Only why doesn’t the world storm your doors? Why limit your trade to a few?”
“I haven’t got the time or the equipment.”
“More machines could be built.”
“Well,” Talley said, “most of my customers are wealthy. I must live.”
“YOU could read tomorrow’s stock-market reports if you wanted dough,” Cannichael said. “We get back to that old question. If a guy has miraculous powers, why is he satisfied to run a hole-in-the-wall store?”
“Economic reasons. I-ah-I’m averse to gambling.”
“It wouldn’t be gambling,” Carmichael pointed out. “I often wonder what the vintners buy…’ Just what do you get out of this?”
“Satisfaction,” Talley said. “Call it that.”
But Carmichael wasn’t satisfied. His mind veered from the question and turned to the possibilities.
Insurance, eh? Life, health and happiness.
“What about me? Won’t there be another crisis in my life sometime?”
“Probably. Not necessarily one involving personal danger.”
“Then I’m a permanent customer.” I-don t- “Listen,” Carmichael said, “I’m not trying to shake you down. I’ll pay.
I’ll pay plenty. I’m not rich, but I know exactly what a service like this would be worth to me. No worries—”
“It couldn’t be—”
“Oh, come off it. I’m not a blackmailer or anything. I’m not threatening you with publicity, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I’m an ordinary guy, not a melodramatic villain. Do I look dangerous? What are you afraid of?”
“You’re an ordinary guy, yes,” Talley admitted. “Only—”
“Why not?” Carmichael argued. “I won’t bother you. I passed one crisis successfully, with your help.
There’ll be another one due sometime. Give me what I need for that. Charge me anything you like. I’ll get the dough somehow. Borrow it, if necessary. I won’t disturb you at all. All I ask is that you let me come in whenever I’ve passed a crisis, and get ammunition for the next one. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Talley said soberly.
“Well, then. I’m an ordinary guy. There’s a girl-it’s Betsy Hoag. I want to marry her. Settle down somewhere in the country, raise kids and have security. There’s nothing wrong with that either, is there?”
Talley said, “It was too late the moment you entered this shop today.”
Carmichael looked up. “Why?” he asked sharply.
A buzzer rang in the back. Talley went through the curtains and came back almost immediately with a wrapped parcel. He gave it to Carmichael.
Carmichael smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. Do you have any idea when my next crisis will come?”
“In a week.”
“Mind if I—” Carmichael was unwrapping the package. He took out a pair of plastic-soled shoes and looked at Talley, bewildered.
“Like that, eh? I’ll need-shoes?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose—” Carmichael hesitated. “I guess you wouldn’t tell me why?”
“No, I won’t do that. But be sure to wear them whenever you go out.”
“Don’t worry about that. And-I’ll mail you a check. It may take me a few days to scrape up the dough, but I’ll do it. How much?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“I’ll mail a check today.”
“I prefer not to accept a fee until the client has been satisfied,” Talley said. He had grown more reserved, his blue eyes cool and withdrawn.
“Suit yourself,” Carmichael said. “I’m going out and celebrate. You-don’t drink?”
“I can’t leave the shop.”
“Well, goodbye. And thanks again. I won’t be any trouble to you, you know. I promise that!” He turned away.
Looking after him, Talley smiled a wry, unhappy smile. He did not answer Carmichael’s goodbye.
Not then.
When the door had closed behind him, Talley turned to the back of his shop and went through the door where the scanner was.
The lapse of ten years can cover a multitude of changes. A man with the possibility of tremendous power almost within his grasp can alter, in that time, from a man who will not reach for it to a man who will-and moral values be damned.
The change did not come quickly to Carmichael. It speaks well for his integrity that it took ten years to work such an alteration in all he had been taught. On the day he first went into Talley’s shop there was little evil in him. But the temptation grew stronger week by week, visit by visit. Talley, for reasons of his own, was content to sit idly by, waiting for customers, smothering the inconceivable potentialities of his machine under a blanket of trivial functions. But Carmichael was not content.
It took him ten years to reach the day, but the day came at last.
Talley sat in the inner room, his back to the door. He was slumped low in an ancient rocker, facing the machine. It had changed little in the space of a decade. It still covered most of two walls, and the eyepiece of its scanner glittered under amber fluorescents.
Carmichael looked covetously at the eyepiece. It was window and doorway to a power beyond any man’s dreams. Wealth beyond imagining lay just within that tiny opening. The rights over the life and death of every man alive. And nothing between that fabulous future and himself except the man who sat looking at the machine.
Talley did not seem to hear the careful footsteps or the creak of the door behind him. He did not stir as Carmichael lifted the gun slowly. One might think that he never guessed what was coming, or why, or from whom, as Carmichael shot him through the head.
Talley sighed and shivered a little, and twisted the scanner dial. It was not the first time that the eyepiece had shown him his own lifeless body, glimpsed down some vista of probability, but he never saw the slumping of that familiar figure without feeling a breath of indescribable coolness blow backwards upon him out of the future.
He straightened from the eyepiece and sat back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at a pair of rough-soled shoes lying beside him on a table. He sat quietly for a while, his eyes upon the shoes, his mind following Carmichael down the street and into the evening, and the morrow, and on toward that coming crisis which would depend on his secure footing on a subway platform as a train thundered by the place where Carmichael would be standing one day next week.
Talley had sent his messenger boy out this time for two pairs of shoes. He had hesitated long, an hour ago, between the rough-soled pair and the smooth. For Talley was a humane man, and there were many times when his job was distasteful to him. But in the end, this time, it had been the smooth-soled pair he had wrapped for Carmichael.
Now he sighed and bent to the scanner again, twisting the dial to bring into view a scene he had watched before.
Carmichael, standing on a crowded subway platform, glittering with oily wetness from some overflow. Carmichael, in the slick-soled shoes Talley had chosen for him. A commotion in the crowd, a surge toward the platform edge. Carmichael’s feet slipping frantically as the train roared by.
“Goodbye, Mr. Carmichael,” Talley murmured. It was the farewell he had not spoken when Carmichael left the shop. He spoke it regretfully, and the regret was for the Carmichael of today, who did not yet deserve that end. He was not now a melodramatic villain whose death one could watch unmoved. But the Tim Carmichael of today had atonement to make for the Carmichael of ten years ahead, and the payment must be exacted.
It is not a good thing to have the power of life and death over one’s fellow humans. Peter Talley knew it was not a good thing-but the power had been put into his hands. He had not sought it. It seemed to him that the machine had grown almost by accident to its tremendous completion under his trained fingers and trained mind.
At first it had puzzled him. How ought such a device to be used? What dangers, what terrible potentialities, lay in that Eye that could see through the veil of tomorrow? His was the responsibility, and it had weighed heavily upon him until the answer came. And after he knew the answer-well, the weight was heavier still. For Talley was a mild man.
He could not have told anyone the real reason why he was a shopkeeper. Satisfaction, he had said to Carmichael. And sometiI~ies, indeed, there was deep satisfaction. But at other times-at times like this-there was only dismay and humility. Especially humility.
We have what you need. Only Talley knew that message was not for the individuals who came to his shop. The pronoun was plural, not singular. It was a message for the world-the world whose future was being carefully, lovingly reshaped under Peter Talley’s guidance.
The main line of the future was not easy to alter. The future is a pyramid shaping slowly, brick by brick, and brick by brick Talley had to change it. There were some men who were necessary-men who would create and build-men who should be saved.
Talley gave them what they needed.
But inevitably there were others whose ends were evil. Talley gave them, too, what the world needed-death.
Peter Talley had not asked for this terrible power. But the key had been put in his hands, and he dared not delegate such authority as this to any other man alive. Sometimes he made mistakes.
He had felt a little surer since the simile of the key had occurred to him. The key to the future. A key that had been laid in his hands.
Remembering that, he leaned back in his chair and reached for an old and well-worn book. It fell open easily at a familiar passage. Peter Talley’s lips moved as he read the passage once again, in his room behind the shop on Park Avenue.
“And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter…. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven…