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number did the rest.
    The point was that to apply his Principle Tacket needed only power and a comparatively simple, inexpensive device for controlling that power. He built the device. It generated a field within which the value of
pi
altered. So did other characteristics of space. Tacket looked through his new toy. He didn’t intend it to be much more than a toy. Then he
went
through it. Then the news burst upon the world that there were hundreds—possibly thousands—of sister Earths circling old Sol. While the world was still going “ooh!” and “aah!” over the discovery, other people built the same device, powered it, went adventuring.
    Those were Tacket’s Expeditions.
    Of course, Tacket himself never knew about the majority of them. It was even questionable whether he personally hadanything to do with the most infamous expedition of all, the fatal one—though tradition later insisted that he did.
    News came pouring back. Civilizations! All different from one another! Almost all founded on the same root that was later to underpin the thousand-story tower of The Market: greed. Where there was greed, there was trade. People began to trade immediately, randomly, and the word “imported” suddenly reappeared in languages from which the century-old World Economic Union had banished it.
    Even in the first frenzy of discovery and exploitation, some hard facts were established. There were probably thousands of adjacent Earths in which other Tackets had made similar discoveries. There, however, the value of
pi
—used as a convenient basis for identifying and cataloguing the sister Earths—differed from the familiar one only after some hundreds of decimal places. The world accordingly decided that time would take care of the difference; meanwhile there were about a hundred thousand worlds more or less readily accessible, and there was business to be done.
    For a short while, the world shared Tacket’s elation and jubilation. For a long while, it cursed his name and all he stood for.
    The White Death was a virus disease—that was established—which originated beyond the Tacket threshold, and killed by the millions.
    It rose apparently simultaneously in scores of places, though afterwards all the outbreaks were traced to a common source. It raged for the better part of a year without check. The first signs appeared at the extremities; the toes and little fingers paled and lost all sensation. Within forty-eight hours, symptoms similar to GPI set in—the victims staggered, spoke with difficulty, suffered fits of causeless rage. Eyesight began to blur. Then the limbs paled like the toes and fingers to deathly whiteness, and at about the time motor co-ordinationfailed completely—a week or two after the onset—the brain tissues started to degenerate.
    About a hundred million people died. So completely did the White Death disrupt communications and government that registration of deaths broke down over whole states. It was more certain that approximately a thousand million people were more or less badly affected, from paralysis and insanity to apparent complete recovery. The ones who recovered were infected late, when the virus appeared to have mutated into a less lethal strain.
    No cure had been found when the death toll dropped to nil.
    In the chaos of the White Death, many things happened. Tacket was killed, for instance. Fanatical avengers blew his laboratory up, with him in it, and his portals. Innocent explorers returning from innocent Tacket trips found welcoming parties waiting for them with noose, gun or knife. Their equipment was usually smashed or burned.
    Certain cults appeared. Some vanished quickly; some endured.
    And the economy of the planet threatened to fall to bits.
    When the worst was over, and government was being restored, the governors found themselves faced with a terrible paradox. On the one hand, it was known that the White Death had come from one of the sister Earths, and that Tacket’s