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

proper impressions, the laws of magic would conceivably work, as one
     hears of witch-doctors’ spells working in Africa today.
Frazer and Seabrook have worked out some of these magical laws.
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    I N THE SPRING OF 1947, a pulp magazine had published the first story by Horace Beam Piper, a selfeducated forty-three year-old employee at
     the Altoona Yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad. This commenced a career obsessed with alternate worlds that, sadly, was largely
     distinguished posthumously. Like Seabrook—the source to whom, as far as I know, only Piper and a very few others ever had
     the courtesy to tip their hats—he would take his own life at about age sixty.
    Some held that Piper believed in the transmigration of souls, more precisely rendered in Greek as
metempsychosis,
and believed that he knew where he was destined to go. What is a known fact is that, at a science fiction convention in the
     early sixties, he told writer Jerry Pournelle that another of his alternateworld tales was a true story. Pournelle affirmed
     that Piper told him, in utter seriousness, that he knew because he had been born on another timeline. 13
    With a reverence that you will later understand, I quote H. Beam Piper, “The Last Cavalier,” 14 from his first story, “Time and Time Again.” A casualty of a future war had awakened in his twelve-year-old body. With the
     help of books by Dunne, among others, he was trying to work out a theory:
    “If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind.” Piper followed through
     with the questions that Dunne had posed. If there had ever been so much as one actual instance of precognition, then “every
     moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment.”
    He went on to ruminate as to whether some part of the self might not be free of temporal limitations, able to access perceptions
     from those coexisting instants. He speculated on their generally limited nature and why few provable cases were observed.
     But suppose one could act on such perceptions, to change an outcome? Would not then some minds, by definition, have observed
     alternate, actually existing, realities?
    Piper, writing in 1947, knew nothing of communication among the branches of a wave function, much less about notions of counterpart
     “qubits,” from universes nearly the same, entering into some kind of shared, “covalent”-like relationships. Yet, following
     Dunne’s logic, he had gone further:
    “There must be additional dimensions of time; lines of alternate probabilities.
Something like William Seabrook’s witch-doctor friend’s Fan-Shaped Destiny.
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    Within days, I’d believed that I had confirmation of my source from publication dates alone. Separating the apples and oranges,
     it’s true that generic alternate realities had a long tradition in mythology and folktales. Their general use in science fiction
     went as far back as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Merritt. But the quest for the specific concept of the branching paths,
     which so eerily presaged the theory that Everett would formalize only by the year of Sputnik, had channeled down to one question:
     What was the Fan-Shaped Destiny?

III
    Seabrook
    B Y LATE IN THE REMAINING WEEKS OF THAT BLAZING Texas summer, I had believed that I was becoming well acquainted with Mr. William Seabrook. Possibly the oddest component
     had been added in late July, when I happened across his autobiography in an antiquarian bookstore. Its tall shelves and musty
     stacks returned nostalgic recollection of the store in Fort Worth, where I had purloined my
I Ching
so many years before. The dealer, distinctively enough for a younger man, was familiar with Seabrook’s name, but assured
     me that none of his books had come through the store for some time.
    Browsing a closed case inside the front door, my first impulse was to be somewhat irked to discover nothing other than