Free The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook by Paul Pipkin Page A

in any “grand design,” either. The world of their god is a hideous game
     of dungeons and dragons; one false step and even the most worthy are lost forever. Not least my little red-haired angel, JJ—was
     there not a time when another path could have been taken, a wholly different kind of life that could have saved us all? In
     the bright, empty morning light, I prayed more fervently than I had since boyhood. To whom or what, I was clueless as any
     modern man.
    I could sense nothing about me but the soulless surfaces of my kitchen. In the abandonment of the material world, I longed
     for the comfort of my dream-angel. Of what value were my silly bits of precognition if they had done nothing for the lost
     ones, the gone ones? Was such a weak faculty anything more than just an ironic footnote to a cruel cosmos?
    Other nights of lucid dreams and synchronistic events pertaining to my past had marked the route leading to my sleepy ruminations,
     lying beside this decidedly out-of-the-ordinary babe. The strangest had been of a ritual dance around a glyph drawn on the
     ground. Later, I couldn’t remember the symbol, but did recall drums in some far-off jungle. I do not find it in my journal.
     As happens with unrecorded dreams, while recalling the content, I’ve lost track of exactly when I experienced it.
    The dance, moving around points on the circumference, seemed like life-and-death struggles in linear time, but was revealed
     as simply a ritual when time was seen as “collapsed” into the design. It reminded me of Dunne’s explanation of the formula,
     based on the square root of minus one, for collapsing the temporal into a spatial dimension. I knew that the ritual applied
     to a variety of immortal beings and human families who were under their charge—and something about the relationships among
     those entities. Might I have revisited that dance, which seemed to have begun from before always, when I would finally drift
     off to sleep there beside Justine?
    It is possible. Certain impressions attending events, as well as my studies of the science and the literary anomaly, took
     place concurrently—though you will be reading about them sequentially. I might believe that what was coming, with measured,
     inexorable steps, had all the definitude of that ritual dance. However, the next discoveries, when experienced, had been perceived
     in a quite linear history as major revelations.
    At the far end of the history, there had remained no decisive additional source between 1927, when Dunne had offered a partial
     but useful theoretical context to which the branching paths might be grafted, and Leinster’s first fictional exposition of
     their function in 1934. Leinster’s treatment required something more, and the same might be said for all—on down to that of
     Borges, the most elegant of them all, and beyond. What was the essential ingredient added between 1927 and 1934?
    During 1940, the writers L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt had their collaboration, “The Incomplete Enchanter,” serialized.
     De Camp would soon be working, together with Heinlein, at an experimental facility in the Philadelphia Naval Yards for the
     duration of the war.
    Along with another coworker, Isaac Asimov, they would establish a “problem-solving group” that submitted suggestions to the
     Navy on classified matters. I would soon learn that this “Philadelphia experiment” included the informal participation of
     Murray Leinster. I’d wondered at how we could only speculate as to what might have been going on there, or how it may have
     related to the “real” Philadelphia Experiment of 1943. De Camp and Pratt wrote:
    … there is an infinity of possible worlds, and if the senses can be attuned to receive a different set of impressions, we
     should infallibly find ourselves living in a different world… In a world where everyone firmly believed in these laws, that
     is, in one where all minds were attuned to receive the