Time Storm

12

Marie objected to the whole idea. Her own instinct was to head away from the mistwall; and I could not blame her.

“All right,” I said, turning away. “You go on. I should catch up to you in a couple of days. If not, you’d better not wait for me.”

I took perhaps a half a dozen steps away from her before she made a sound; and then I heard her behind me.

“What can I do? What can I do?”

It was an aching, tearing sort of cry. I turned around and saw her, her eyes squeezed shut, her face white, her fists clenched at her sides, and all her body rigid. I went back to her.

Suddenly, I understood how it was with her. From her point of view, she had contributed to our partnership everything she had to contribute. She had abandoned what little security she still had left, following the time storm, to go with me—more for Wendy’s sake, I suspected, than for her own. She had been adjustable, faithful and hardworking, a good partner by day and night. She had trusted her dogs, herself—and even her daughter—to me. And still, here on some reasonless whim, as it seemed to her, I was going to risk everything on a chance that could just as easily be avoided.

I put my arms around her and tried to get her to soften up; but she was as rigid as ever the girl had been in one of her states of shock. But I simply stood there and kept holding her, as I had kept holding the girl in those instances, and after a while, I thought I felt some yielding in her. She shuddered and began to cry, in great, inward, throaty, tearing sobs that were almost tearless.

However, after a while, even these began to quiet down; and I began to talk, quietly, into her ear while I held her.

“Listen to me,” I said. “There only were three things I might not have gone along with you on; and now that Sunday and the girl are gone, there’s only one. But that’s something I’ve been stuck with all my life. Now that I’ve taken on the question of figuring out the time storm, I don’t have any choice. I’ve got to go through any mistwalls I find and see what’s on the other side of them—I’ve got to, you understand? There’s no choice for me when I come to something like this. There never has been.”

“I know you don’t love me,” she said into my chest. “I never asked for that. But where will we go if you don’t come back? What will we do?”

“You’ll do just fine,” I said. “All you have to do is sit down for half an hour and wait, while I step through the mistwall and take a look at what’s beyond it before I come back out.”

“All!” she said.

“That’s right. All,” I told her. “You’ll have to take my word for it; but with most of the mistwalls I’ve seen, the two sides of them were pretty much the same, front and back. The odds are against anything being there that’s either very good or very bad. If it’s bad, I’ll duck back right away. If it’s good, it could mean a new, safe future for all of us. You ought to be pushing me to go and look, not holding me back!”

“Oh, you’ll do what you want,” she said and pulled away from me. But evidently it was settled; we set off for the mistwall.

At the point where we came up to it, the mistwall crossed a little hollow crowned by trees on both sides, so that there was a sort of natural trough some sixty yards wide and perhaps a hundred long leading to it. I had picked this point as one where Marie, Wendy and the dogs could stay more or less hidden from anyone observing from the higher level of land surrounding them. We had spotted the mistwall early, and we reached the trough, or hollow, perhaps an hour before noon. The mistwall itself was completely unmoving—now that I thought of it, I had never seen a motionless mistwall begin to travel, or a moving one stop. It could be that there were two different varieties of time lines involved... now that was a new thought.

I got everyone down in the hollow and climbed back out to the surrounding level to make sure they were invisible from anyone looking across the outside plain. They were, and using the binoculars reassured me that there was no sign of movement between the clumps of trees on the plain itself. They should be perfectly safe for an hour or so while I was on the other side of the mistwall— certainly they would be safe for the time it would take me to go, turn around and. come back, if I found something on the other side I did not like.

Going back down into the hollow, I found myself trying to remember if I had ever seen anyone or anything alive moving voluntarily through one of the mistwalls. But I could remember none.

Marie held me tightly for a long moment before she would let me leave them for the mistwall itself—and even Wendy clung to me. The little girl had been getting over her shyness where I was concerned, these last few days since the girl and Sunday had been gone. I felt a sudden touch of discomfort at the realization that I had not reacted to the small overtures the child had been making in my direction. It came to me suddenly and heavily that it was some obscure connection between her presence and the absence of the other two, the girl and Sunday, that had kept me cool to her. Now, suddenly, I felt guilty. It was not Wendy’s fault that things were happening as they were.

At any rate, I broke away from Marie and her at last and walked into the dust and the mist, as tense as one of the dogs walking into a strange backyard. The physical and emotional feeling of upset took me before I had a chance to close my eyes against the dust—but again, as on that earlier time I had gone through the mistwall to find Marie’s place, the sensations were less than I had felt before. I found myself wondering if it was possible either to build up an immunity to going through the walls, or else simply to get used to the reactions they triggered in living bodies.

I pushed ahead blindly, the ground becoming a little rough and uneven under my feet, until the lessening of the dust-sting against the skin of my face told me I must be coming out on the other side of the time change line. I opened my eyes.

I stood now in rugged territory. If I was not among mountains, then certainly I was in the midst of some steep hills. Directly ahead of me was some sort of massive concrete structure, too large for me to see in its entirety. The part I was able to see was a mass of ruins, with new grass sprouting at odd points among the tumbled blocks of what had evidently been walls and ceilings.

What had smashed it up so thoroughly was hard to imagine. It didn’t look so much as if it had been bombed as if it had been picked up and twisted, the way you might twist a wet towel to wring it dry. About it, the steep slopes, covered with gravel and a few fir and spruce trees, looked deserted under the cloudless, midday sky. The air temperature was perceptibly cooler than it had been on the other side of the mistwall, as if I was now at a noticeably higher altitude—though I had not felt the elevator-sort of inner ear sensations that would suggest a sudden change to a lower air pressure. There were no birds visible and no sounds of insects. Of course, if this new land was high enough it could be above the flight zone of most insects.

However, whatever the structure before me had been at one time, now it was a ruin only. There was no sign of life anywhere. It was far-fetched to think that there could be anyone in that pile of rubble who might have a greater understanding of the time storm than I did, let alone ideas on how to live with it or deal with it. I might as well go back through the mistwall to Marie, Wendy and the dogs.

But I hesitated. There was a reluctance in me to cut short this business of being off on my own—almost as much reluctance as there was in me to face Marie and admit the whole experiment of going through the mistwall had been profitless. I compromised with myself finally; it would do no harm to go around the ruin and a little farther into this new territory, until I could see the whole extent of it and perhaps make some guess as to what it had once been. The concrete of what was left of it appeared as modern, or more so, than anything in my native time—it might even have come from a few years beyond my original present.

It was an odd feeling that was pushing me to explore farther—a small feeling, but a powerful one. There was something about that jumble of concrete that plucked at my problem-solving mental machinery and beckoned it.

I swung to the right, approaching the ruin and circling it at the same time. As I got closer, the building turned out to be larger even than it had looked at first, and it was not possible to see it all at once. After a while, however, I got to where I could get a sight down one long side line of it. I still could not really see it as a whole, because it curved away from me, following the contours of the hill on which it was built; but it seemed to become progressively less of a ruin as its structure receded from me, and its interest to me grew. It reminded me a little of my own life, beginning as a wreck and developing into something with a shape, purposeful, but too big to see and know as a whole. I felt almost as if the building was something familiar, like an old friend built out of concrete; and I prowled further on alongside it.

It continued to sprawl out and curve away from me as I went; and after I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile, I realized that I never would be able to see the thing as a whole. It was simply too big, and it spread out in too many directions.

I might have turned back then; but I noticed that the building was relatively undamaged in the further area of it I had now reached. Facing me were some windows that were whole, in sections of grey concrete wall that looked untouched. Farther on, there was even a door that looked slightly ajar—as if it needed only to be pushed to open to let anyone into the interior.

I went toward the door. It was a heavy, fire-door type; and when I put my weight into it and pulled, it swung outward slowly. Inside was a flight of bare concrete stairs with black iron pipe railing, leading upward. I mounted the stairs slowly and quietly, the rifle balanced in my hands, ready to use, even while the sensible front of my mind told me that this was ridiculous. I was wasting my time on a deserted and destroyed artifact; and it was high time I was heading back to Marie and Wendy, who would be worrying about me by now.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I let myself through another door into a long corridor, with only a bare white wall and window to my left, windows through which the sun was now striking brilliantly, but aglitter with glass doors and interior windows to my right, through which I could see what seemed to be row on row of offices and laboratories.

I took a step down the corridor, and something plucked lightly at the cuff of my left pantleg. I looked down. What appeared to be a small black thread had been fastened to the wall of each side of the corridor and now lay broken on the floor where my leg had snapped it.

“Who’s there?” asked a voice over my head.

I looked up and saw the grille of a speaker—obviously of some public address system that had been built into this corridor when the whole structure had been put up.

“Hello?” said the voice. It was tenor-weight, a young man’s voice. “Who is it? Just speak up. I can hear you.”

Cautiously, I took a step backward. I was as careful as I could be in picking up my foot and putting it down again. But still, when the sole of my boot touched the corridor surface, there was a faint, gritting noise.

“If you’re thinking of going back out the way you came in,” said the voice, “don’t bother. The doors are locked now. It’s part of the original security system of this installation; and I’ve still got power to run it.”

I took two more quick, quiet steps back and tried the door to the stairway. The door handle was immovable and the door itself stood motionless against my strongest push.

“You see?” said the voice. “Now, I don’t mean to keep you prisoner against your will. If you want to leave, I can let you out. I just thought we might talk.”

“Can you see me?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “But I’ve got instruments. Let’s see... you’re about two hundred and ninety centimeters tall and weigh eighty-two point five three plus kilos. On the basis of voice tone and body odors, you’re male, blood temperature approximately half a degree above normal, heartbeat fifty-eight—cool-headed customer, plainly—blood pressure a hundred and eight over eighty-seven. You’re wearing some synthetics, but mostly wool and leather by weight—outdoor clothes. My mechanical nose also reports you as carrying a combination of metal, wood, oil and other odors that imply a rifle of some kind, plus some other metal that may be a knife; and according to the other scents you carry, you’ve been outside this building only a little while after coming from some place with a lot of grass, few trees and a warmer, moister climate.”

He stopped talking.

“I’m impressed,” I said, to start him up again. I did not trust his promise to let me go just for the asking; and I was looking around for some way out besides the locked door. There were the windows—how many stairs had I climbed on the way up? If I could break through a window, and the drop was not far to the ground....

“Thank you,” said the voice. “But it’s no credit to me. It’s the equipment. At any rate, reading from what I have here, you’re out exploring rather than looking for trouble. You aren’t carrying equipment or supplies for living outdoors, even though the odors on you say that’s how you’ve been living. That means such equipment and supplies you have must be elsewhere. You wouldn’t be likely to leave them unattended—some animal might chew them up to get at whatever food you were carrying, so you probably have others with you. They aren’t in view anywhere around the area outside the building, or I’d know about them, and you’re the only one inside, besides me; so that means you just about had to come through that stationary line of temporal discontinuity, out there.”

I stopped looking for windows. Now I actually was impressed. The equipment had been remarkable enough in what it could tell him about me; but any idiot could sit and read results from gauges and dials, if he had been trained well enough. This kind of hard, conscious reasoning from evidence, on the other hand, was something else again.

“What did you call it—a temporal discontinuity?” I asked.

“That’s right. Have you got another name for it?” said the voice. “It really doesn’t matter what it’s called. We both know what we’re talking about.”

“What do you call it when it moves?” I asked.

There was a long second of silence.

“Moves?” said the voice.

I damn near grinned.

“All right,” I said, “now I’ll do a little deducing. I’ll deduce you haven’t left this building since the time storm struck.”

“Time storm?”

“The overall pattern of your temporal discontinuities,” I said. “I call that a time storm. I call individual discontinuities like the one out there, time lines. I call the haze in the air where one is, a mistwall.”

There was a pause.

“I see,” he said.

“And you haven’t left this building since that mistwall appeared out there, or since whatever it was, first happened to this building?”

“That’s not quite the way it’s been,” he answered. “I’ve gone outside a few times. But you’re right, essentially. I’ve been here since the first wave of disruption hit, studying that discontinuity you came through. But you—you’ve been moving around. And you say there’re discontinuities that move?”

“Some of them travel across country,” I said. “Where they’ve gone by, the land’s changed. It’s either changed into what it’s going to be sometime in the future, or into what it was, once, in the past.”

“Very interesting...” the voice was thoughtful. “Tell me, are there many people out there, where the moving dis—time lines are?”

“No,” I said. “It’s been some weeks and I’ve covered a lot of ground. But I’ve only found a handful. The Hawaiian Islands seem to have come through pretty well. You can hear broadcasting regularly from there on short wave and other stations on the radio, now and then—”

“Yes, I know,” the voice was still thoughtful. “I thought it was the discontinuities cutting off most of the reception.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think there just aren’t many people still left in the world. What was this place?”

“A federal installation. Research and testing,” said the voice, absently. “What’s it like out there?”

“It’s like a world-sized crazy quilt, cut up into all sorts of different time areas, marked off one from each other by the mistwalls—by the time lines or discontinuities. The big problem is the situation’s still changing. Every moving time line changes everything where it passes.”

I stopped talking. His voice did not pick up the conversation. I was busy thinking about the words “research and testing.”

“You said you’d been studying the time line, there,” I said. “What have you learned so far?”

“Not much,” his voice was more distant now, as if he had moved away from the microphone over which he had been speaking, or was caught up in some other activity, so that he was giving me only a part of his attention. “What you call the mistwall appearance seems to be a matter of conflicting air currents and temperature differentials between the two zones. But there doesn’t seem to be any material barrier... you say they sometimes move?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Any reason why they shouldn’t?”

“No, I suppose... yes,” he said. “There’s a reason. As far as I’ve been able to measure, these lines of discontinuity stretch out beyond the reach of any instruments I have. In other words, they go right off into space. You’d assume any network of forces that massive would have to be in balance. But if certain of the lines are moving, then it has to be a dynamic, not a static, balance; and that means....”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just letting my human ideas of size and distance influence me. But I’ve got trouble imagining something that big, shifting around internally.”

He stopped talking. I waited for him to start up again. But he did not.

“Look,” I said. “I just sort of ran from this overall situation, the way you’d run for shelter from a thunderstorm, for the first few weeks. But now I’m trying to find out if there isn’t some way to get on top of the situation—to control it—”

“Control?”

I waited a second; but he did not say any more.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I say some kind of dirty word?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “If the whole disturbance is bigger than our planet, possibly system-wide—and in some sort of dynamic balance, the idea of controlling it is....” He hesitated. For the first time there was something like emotion in his voice. “Don’t you realize we never have been able to control even a hurricane—no, not even a thunderstorm like the one you were talking about—when this first hit us. Have you any idea of the magnitude of the forces involved in something like this, if it’s stretching all over the solar system?”

“What makes you think it is?” I asked.

He did not answer.

“All right,” I said, after a moment. “If you’re not going to talk, let me out of here and we’ll say goodby. I was going to invite you to come along with me—out where you can study the moving lines as well as this static one. But I gather that’s not the way you like to work.”

I turned on my heel, went back to the stairway door and pushed. But it was still locked.

“Wait,” he said. “Do you have other people with you?”

“Yes,” I told him. “How about you? Are you alone here?”

“That’s right,” he said. “There were a couple of hundred people in the installation here, when the disruption first hit. When I got my senses back, I was the only one left. I was in the hyperbaric chamber at the time—not that I can figure out why that should have made a difference.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” I said. “I think some of us are just naturally immune—statistical survivors.”

“Survivors.”

“Of the time changes. It’s only a thought. Don’t ask me for details.”

“An interesting thought....”

The voice trailed off. Down the long inner wall of the corridor, one of the doors opened, and a short, lightly-boned figure in white slacks and white shirt stepped out and came toward me. He was so small that my first thought was that he could not be more than twelve or fourteen years old in spite of his adult voice; but when he got closer, I saw that his face was the face of a man in his late teens or early twenties. He came up to me and offered me his hand.

“Bill Gault,” he said. It was a strong name for someone that light.

I shook hands with him.

“Marc Despard,” I answered.

“I think I’d like to go with you, after all,” he said.

I studied him. He was in no way frail or abnormal, just light and small. At the same time, his lack of size and the spurious air of being half-grown about him, made me hesitate now at the thought of adding him to our party. I had just not expected anyone so... so physically insignificant, to be the person behind the voice I had been talking with. For a moment I felt a touch of exasperation. All my life, until I had run into the girl and the crazy cat, I had gotten by nicely with no responsibility for anyone but myself. But since this damned time storm started, it seemed I had done nothing else but play guardian and protector—to girls, leopards, women and children—and from the look of Bill Gault, I now had another responsibility on my hands. I could imagine what would happen if this featherweight should try to stand up alone to one of Tek’s men, for example.

“Well, you can’t just walk out there like that,” I said. “Haven’t you got some heavier clothes and some hiking boots? And if you’ve got a gun of any kind around, bring that along, too, with whatever in the way of a pack and extra clothing you can scrape up.”

“Oh, I’m all prepared,” Bill Gault said. “I’ve had things ready for some time, in case I did decide to leave.”

And you know—he had. He took me down the corridor to a room where he outfitted himself in synthetic wool and leather gear that filled me with envy. Evidently, this installation had been testing, among other things, various kinds of special-duty outerwear for the armed services. When he was done, he looked like an officer in the ski troops, lacking only the skis. The well-stuffed backpack he wore was a marvel; and he had both a revolver and the latest in army lightweight, automatic rifles.

I looked at the rifle particularly.

“You don’t have another one like that lying around, do you?” I asked.

“This is the only one,” he said. “But there’s a machine pistol, if you’d like it.”

I looked at him. He had looked so ready in his outdoor garb, it had been hard for me to remember that he had been boxed up here since the time storm had started. But one good innocent sentence like that brought back the realization in a hurry.

“You’ve got ammunition for it?”

“Lots of ammunition,” he said.

“And,” I said, “you were actually going to let us walk off without it? You were going to leave it behind?”

“Well, you’ve already got a rifle,” he said, nodding at the 30.06. “And a machine pistol’s not very practical for hunting.”

I shook my head.

“Get it,” I said, “and as much ammunition for it as you think I can reasonably carry.”

He did. It was an Uzi. And the damn fool would have left it behind.

“Let’s go,” I said, loading my pockets and belt with the spare clips he had brought, until I felt heavy enough to walk bow-legged. “That is, unless you’ve got some other useful surprises to spring on me.”

“Nothing I can think of,” he said. “Food-”

“Food’s no real problem,” I said. “There seems to be canned goods enough to last the few of us who’re left for the rest of our lifetimes. Come on.”

He led me out. The door opened this time when I pushed on it. We went down the stairs and out of the building; and I led him back to the mistwall.

“What should I expect?” he asked, as we came up to it.

His tone was so casual that, for a second, I did not understand. Then I looked at him and saw that his face was pale. Calm, but pale.

“You’re thinking of how it was when the time storm first caught you?” I said. He nodded. “It won’t be that bad. It seems to get easier with experience. Hang on to my belt, though, if you want; and if I feel you let go, I’ll put down the rifle and lug you through myself. But try and stay on your feet if you can, because we can use both these guns if we can get them out.”

He nodded again and reached out to hook fingers in my belt.

“You’ll have to close your eyes against the dust when we get close,” I said. “Just concentrate on keeping on your feet, and staying with me.”

We went into the mistwall then. It was not bad at all for me, this time; but I could imagine how it might be for him. I was so undisturbed by the passage through that I had attention to spare when I heard Marie’s voice on the far side of the mistwall, as we started to come out of the far side of it.

“…shoot it!” Marie was crying, almost hysterically. “No,” said another voice. “If you make them hurt him at all, I’ll shoot you!”

It was the girl talking and making the longest speech I had ever heard her utter.