She heard a scream—two screams—from Star. She saw him, blending with the space-black cloud in her vision, staggering in the officers'
quarters, yawing wildly from side to side, trying to clutch at a stanchion or a chair. She saw two Stars, sometimes superimposed, sometimes both blurred, staggering wildly.
She saw Will Archer drag himself across the floor—both of him, their faces grim. The two Will Archers blended somehow with the space-blackness, waveringly. They methodically picked up a cabinet from the desk and clubbed at the raving figures of Star Macduff.
The two Archers connected with one of the Macduffs, stretching it out on the floor.
Yancey saw the other Macduff, distance-obscured, stop short and rub its head amazedly, heard it say in a thin, faraway voice: 'Sorry I made a fool of myself, Will …' then look about in terror, collapsing into a chair.
Only Madame Tung was composed. Only Madame Tung crossed legs on a chair, shut her eyes and went into a deep, complicated meditation.
'Close your eyes, everybody,' she called in two voices. 'If you value your sanity, close your eyes and rest quietly.'
The Clericalist tried to walk across the floor to a chair, had the utterly horrifying sensation of walking across the floor in two different directions and sitting down in two different chairs. Realizing only that there were two of her, she tried to make one rise and join the other, found that she could not.
'Stop it, Yancey,' said the two voices of Madame Tung. 'Sit down. Shut your eyes.' Yancey Mears sat down and shut her eyes—all four of them.
She was trembling with shock, did her best not to show it.
'Will,' called the Psychologist. 'You have the best motor control of any of us. Will you try very hard to coordinate sufficiently to prop up Star?'
The Executive Officer grimly, carefully stepped across the two floors. As vertigo overcame him he fell sprawling and hitched the rest of the way.
The problem loomed enormously in his mind: Which one was him?
Which of the two Stars he saw was real? Which Will had knocked down which Star?
He tried to reach out and touch the Star that lay on the floor as the other Star watched, horrified, from against a stanchion.
He tried to reach out and touch this Star, snatched back his hand as though coals of fire had burned it, for there swept over him the blackness of space, the dead-black nothingness of something unspeakable and destroying.
Madame Tung, watching his every move, snapped: 'No—the other you—see if you can control and differentiate.'
Will reached out again, again he recoiled. He tried to blank out his mind completely, feeling that he was losing himself in a welter of contradictions impossible for anyone in his confused state to handle.
Lying on the floor, breathing deeply, he succeeded in calming himself a little—enough to send the slow oblivion of self-hypnosis flowing through his mind. He forced the Nepenthe on himself, leaving only a thin thread of consciousness by which to govern his actions.
When it was over, he remembered that one of his duplex person had remained on the floor and that the other had carried the unconscious Star to a seat.
'Good work, Will. Very good. Now see if you can superimpose yourself.'
He tried, tried like a madman to bring those two parts of himself together. He tried, though a world of blackness lay between them and the very attempt was full of horror and dark mystery. By the same technique as before, he succeeded—at a cost that nearly left him shattered in mind. He breathed heavily and sweated from every square inch of skin.
Mamie Tung focused her eyes on the two figures, noted that there was the feeling of strabismus. As closely as she could figure it, the two into which everything had separated were divided by some unimaginable gulf. It was not space, for all the sense of blackness and cold. It could not be time; the mind rejected the insane paradoxes of 'time travel'
instinctively, and there was a certain definite grasp that one had on this phenomenon, something just out of the range of human comprehension …
'Star,' she snapped. 'Star, will you stop your sniveling for a while?'
'Yes. Oh, oh yes,' yammered the Calculator senselessly, his fear-struck eyes clinging to her bowed, black ones.
'Star, can you calculate the way you feel?' There was no answer but terror; she cursed briefly and violently, then fixed her eyes again on the computator, herself fighting the weird sensation of duality.
'I'm going to cure you, Star,' she said in a droning, insistent voice.
Macduff stared helplessly; he was in no condition either to resist the hypnosis or to cooperate.
In two minutes of fearful concentration she had put him under and well into the secondary stage. His body stiffened cateleptically against the wall. At that moment his other body, laid out in the chair, chose to moan and stir.
'Club it again, Will!' she snapped, not letting her gaze swerve from her patient. 'Put it out for good if you can!'
She did not see the heroic effort of the Executive Officer, but it was an epic in the few feet of space he traversed to the spot on the floor where he had dropped the case. It was a feat of arms equal to any Arthurian myth, how he picked the thing up with hands that would not behave, and eyes that would not see straight, and a mind that reeled under horrible vistas.
The Executive Officer, feeling his grip going, moved too quickly and blundered into half a dozen obstacles— chairs and desks that should not be in his path—before he reached the moaning figure of the second Star. Twice he struck and missed, bringing the case down on an empty chair. With the last dyne of his psychological reserve he raised the case, brought it down with a solid chunk, brought it down biting into the skull of the mathematician.
Mamie Tung smiled grim satisfaction and proceeded with the treatment. It was a technique of her own, something fearfully obscure and delicate, unbearably complicated by the duality imposed on her.
But the drive of the woman brought about nearly an elimination of one of her components, drove it into the back of her mind where it stood as little more than a shadow. The other Madame Tung was coldly, stonily, picking over the brain of Star Macduff.
She drove a tentacle of consciousness into the hypnotized man, tapped his personal memory-store. She had no interest in that at the moment; drove deeper, reached one obscure group of neurones specialized in the calculus of relationships, alias symbolic logic, alias the scientific method, alias common sense.
Vampirish, she drew at the neurones, what they held, how they worked, what they did, why they did it so much better than any of the other officers' corresponding groups. And it came like a flood of golden light, like the ever- new sensation that comes when an old thing looks different.
She let go of the cataleptic figure completely, let it crumple to the floor, while she busied herself with the unfamiliar tools of the Calculator. It was all new to her, and it is to be remarked greatly to her credit that she did not go mad.
'I've worked it, Will,' she said. 'Slick as a whistle.'
'Speak up then.' The E.O. was very near collapse; Yancey Mears—one of them—had fallen to the floor and was big-eyed and heaving in the chest while the other wandered about distraitly raving under her breath, sounding very far away.
'It's probabilities, Will. Those people—they worked space around for us so that when we came to some decision-point we took not one course or another but both. Since we aren't used to that kind of thinking, it didn't pan out—and a couple of us are nearly done in by it.
'Star's math says it's completely plausible, and the wonder is that they don't do it on Earth for difficult situations, social and otherwise.
Imagine the joy of attending on the same night a necessary academic banquet and taking out a lover. I must be raving. But it's the goods, Will.
Everything fits.'
'What was the decision-point?'
'It was when Star made that fool remark about what our boarders really looked like. You called him down, torn
