Time Storm

13

I took a few more steps forward out of the dust and opened my eyes. There was a regular convention in session in the hollow where I had left just Marie, Wendy and the dogs. They, of course, were still there; and all the dogs were on guard position, not making a sound. Wendy was holding tight to her mother, and Marie was facing away from me.

Beyond Marie were the girl and Sunday. The girl sat cross-legged on the ground, with the .22 rifle aimed at Marie. The girl’s back was against the back of Sunday. He also was seated, on his haunches, and looking bored-but the tip of his tail was twitching ominously. He faced outward at a half-ring of figures, all with their rifles facing in Sunday’s direction but looking momentarily baffled. Tek and his gang had come visiting us again and, apparently, encountered a problem.

The appearance of myself and Bill Gault out of the mistwall did nothing to make their problem any easier. In fact, clearly it came as a severe jolt. They stared at us as if Bill and I were ghosts materializing before their eyes; and a sudden intuitive conclusion clicked into place in the back of my mind. Just as I once had, obviously they were in the habit of avoiding mistwalls. No doubt, everybody still on the face of the earth today avoided them, instinctively, remembering the emotional upset and discomfort of their first experience with any part of the time storm. And here were Bill and I, strolling out of this particular mistwall as casually as walking from one room into another.

Hard on the heels of that bit of understanding came another. The scrap of overheard conversation I had heard suddenly resolved itself. Clearly, the “it” Marie had been telling Tek and his men to shoot had been Sunday; and, just as clearly, Sunday and the girl had come here hunting me—which meant that Tek and company had probably been following them, as well as the dogs and us, all this time.

I had gotten this far with my thoughts, when the frozen moment in which the girl and Tek’s gang stared at me was abruptly and joyously smashed asunder by Sunday. Plainly, he heard, smelled, or otherwise recognized me in spite of his back being turned. He jumped to his feet, turned about, and came bounding at me like a kitten, purring like an outboard motor and stropping himself up against me with unrestrained enthusiasm.

I had a second to brace myself, but being braced did not help much. When a hundred and forty pound leopard throws an affectionate shoulder block into your midsection, you realize the advantages of four legs over two. At least when one cat makes loving demonstrations to another, the recipient has a couple of spare feet to prop himself upright with. I staggered and nearly went down. Meanwhile, Marie had turned around to see what was going on and saw me.

“Marc!” she cried.

There was so much desperate relief in her voice, I was almost ready to forget that she had seemed on the verge of entering into partnership with the enemy to get rid of Sunday and the girl. But our difficulties were not at an end, because now she also came to throw her arms around me.

“You’ve been gone for hours!” she said.

I had no time to point out that I had not even been gone one hour, at the most; because Sunday, seeing her coming, had already classed her as a potential attacker and finally decided to do something about her. I fended her off with one arm, while just managing to slap Sunday hard on the nose to check the lethal paw-swipe with which he would have turned our little reunion into a very real tragedy.

I succeeded—but of course, success left me with a rebuffed woman and a rebuffed leopard at once, on my hands. Marie was hurt that I should shove her off. Sunday was destroyed. I tried to soothe the leopard with my hands and the woman with my voice at the same time.

“Marie—no!” I said. “Bless you! I love you—but stand back, will you? Sunday’s likely to claw you in half.”

“Then what are you doing petting the animal?” cried Marie.

“So he won’t get loose and claw somebody else! For Christ’s sake—” I yelled at her, “stand back, will you? Keep Wendy back-”

I was running out of breath. Sunday had forgiven me and was once more trying to throw frantic, affectionate shoulder blocks into me.

“Down, Sunday!” I managed, finally, to wrestle the leopard to the ground and lie on him while he licked cheerfully and lovingly at any part of my person that was within tongue-reach. I looked up and glared at the girl.

“What are you doing on this side of the river?” I snarled.

“He pulled himself loose!” she said.

I went on glaring at her. She was an absolute, bare-faced liar. Sunday would have choked himself to death on those chains I had used to restrain him before he would have been able to pull himself free. Of course, the girl had turned him loose herself, deliberately, so that they could both follow me. I knew it, and she knew I knew it; and I could see she didn’t care a hoot that I knew it.

Girl, leopard and woman—I could not do a thing with any of them. I looked around for something in my own class to tie into; and my gaze lighted on Tek. The man was two axe-handles across the shoulders and besides being six years or more younger than I, had that easy, muscular balance of movement that signals the natural athlete. He could, almost undoubtedly, have held me off with one hand while beating me to death with the other; but just at that moment, if I had not been occupied with the absolute necessity of keeping Sunday flattened out, I would have picked a fight with Tek for the simple joy of having something legitimate to hit.

I had dropped both the machine pistol and the rifle, necessarily, needing both hands to handle Sunday and Marie. But the pistol was only a short arms-length from me. I scooped it up, now, pointing it at Tek, and noticed that Bill Gault had maintained enough presence of mind to lift his army automatic rifle into firing position under his arm. In terms of sheer firepower, we two more than matched up to the hunting rifles carried by Tek and his men, and the dogs could mop up any other difference that existed. But then, Tek took me completely by surprise.

“Hold it!” he shouted, before I could say anything more. “Hold it—I’m with you!”

To my astonishment, he threw his rifle toward Marie and walked unarmed up to us and turned around to face his former crew. He grinned at Marie and nodded pleasantly to me.

“Just give the orders,” he said to me. “I won’t pick up my gun unless you say so.”

There had been a moment of frozen disbelief on the part of his men when he had switched sides. But now there was a general outcry from them.

“Tek!”

“Tek, you bastard—what are you doing to us?”

“Tek, damn it!”

“Tek…”

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling at them. “I can tell when I’ve run into a better team, that’s all. If you’re bright, you’ll come over on their side, too. If you’re not, don’t blame me.”

Three of the five of them began to argue with him all at once. He said nothing, though, and gradually their voices died down. One of the two men who had not tried to argue him out of it finally spoke. He was a narrow-bodied, balding man in his late thirties or early forties, with a sharp, hard face.

“That was all pretty quick and easy,” he said. “Almost like it was planned, the quick way he went over to them. Come on, the rest of you. Let’s clear out and leave Tek with them, if that’s what he wants.”

The men shifted uneasily. I looked at Tek, but he was staring off at the horizon, ignoring the whole matter with an indifference as sublime as Sunday’s could be on occasion. But the other man who had not argued with Tek now spoke up.

“Sure, Garney,” he said. “Let’s all go off and let you run things instead of Tek—is that it? I’m sticking with him. Come on, everybody.”

He walked across to us and laid his rifle down beside Tek’s. But I noticed he laid it down carefully. It was a bolt action, and he had the bolt uppermost; and when he stepped back from it, he was only a couple of feet away from a quick grab to regain it.

Slowly, one by one, the others came over. All except the man called Garney, who had suggested they leave Tek behind. When at last they were all standing with us, leaving Garney alone, Tek took his eyes off the horizon slowly and gazed at him.

“Well,” he said, gently. “So long then, Garney. Maybe you better head off in a different direction from where we’re going.”

“All right, Tek,” said Garney, “that’s all right. I wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with any of you.”

He backed up a few steps, watching us. Then, evidently deciding that it was simply not practical to back the long distance it would take to get him out of our rifles’ range, he turned his back and walked swiftly away. He went off, up over the lip of the hollow and disappeared.

Tek’s men who had joined us moved to pick up their rifles.

“Leave them lay!” said Tek.

They stopped, staring at him; and he nodded in my direction. “Leave them, until the chief here tells us what to do.”

I became suddenly conscious of the fact that they were all staring at me; and that I was still lying sprawled out on Sunday, trying to control him with one hand, while I clung to the Uzi and attempted to keep it pointed, with the other. Sunday had quieted down somewhat by this time; so I scrambled to my feet, cuffed him lightly when he tried to recommence his greetings to me and faced Tek with his men.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about this. I don’t remember hanging out any sign asking for volunteers.”

Tek shrugged.

“All I can do is try,” he said.

“Marc!” said Marie, sharply. She looked at me for a second as if she was going to say something then and there, then closed her mouth and crossed the little distance between us. This time, I was glad to see, she made it a point to approach me on the opposite side from Sunday. She came up to me and took hold of my arm, whispering in my ear.

“Marc, are you crazy?” she demanded. “Isn’t it better to have these men as friends, instead of enemies?”

I was about to answer sharply, when I thought better of it. I nodded to Tek.

“Ask him how he’d answer that,” I said out loud. “Go ahead.”

Something like a dark shadow seemed to pass across Marie’s face; and she looked at me oddly. But she stepped back from me without a word and turned to face Tek.

“I asked Marc if it wasn’t better to have you as friends instead of enemies,” she said, loudly and clearly. “He said to ask you how you’d answer that.”

“Sure,” said Tek, “if I was him, I’d want to know how you’d know you could trust us.”

She stared at him. He smiled back.

“You see, now,” he said, “I’m not trying to put anything over on anybody. I volunteered to join you all on my own. It’s up to chief there—what did you say his name was? Marc? It’s up to Marc.”

“And up to me, too!” said Marie, sharply.

“And you, too, of course, ma’am,” said Tek. “But—no offense to you and your dogs—but I’d worry a bit more about Marc, here, if it came right down to picking one of you over the other to have trouble with. Him, his pet leopard, and his friend there.”

He nodded to Bill Gault. I had almost forgotten Bill. Now, I called him over and introduced him to Marie, Wendy, and the girl, while still keeping a cautious eye on Tek and the others. All the time, the back of my mind was working. The truth of the matter was, if Bill and I were to dig into this business of the time storm seriously, we would need troops to take the ordinary work and fighting off our hands. Plus the fact that we might well be adventuring through a mistwall into a situation where a number of people with guns were needed.

Also, something Tek had just said had sparked off a notion in the back of my mind. While listing the things that might worry him about having me for an enemy, Tek had specified Sunday as one of them. I had grown so used to Sunday that I had almost forgotten how unnatural it was to other people to see a full grown leopard tagging after me like a kitten. The tendency was for the watchers to assume I had a lot more control over him than I actually did—as well as to assume that he was a great deal brighter and more responsive than his cat brain would ordinarily allow. There was a bluff I could run.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you what we can do. We can take all of you on a probation, and see how you’ll do. Leave your guns piled where they are; and if any of you have to go someplace away from the camp, where you might run into trouble, one or two of the dogs can go with you. Meanwhile, I’ll set the leopard to watch you. He may not be able to tell me what you talk about; but if any of you make any move that looks as if you mean to hurt one of us, he can tear you apart before you’ll know what hit you.”

I looked them over.

“Well?” I said. “How about it? Want to join us on those terms?”

They looked at me hesitantly—all but Tek. Then they looked at Tek.

“Marc—” began Marie, and then checked herself.

“What?” I looked at her.

“Nothing,” she said. I looked back at the men.

“How about it?”

“Speaking, just for myself, of course,” said Tek, “I think that’s fine—real fine. I’ve got no intentions of being anything but a good friend to you all anyway, so your leopard doesn’t worry me a bit. But that’s just me. The others are going to make their deals with you on their own.”

“All right,” I said. “Suppose the seven of you find a place to sit down together over there about ten yards away from your guns and the rest of us. I’ve got some things to do.”

Tek led off agreeably. He sat down, and the rest followed.

I turned my attention to the girl, who was now getting to her feet. She had been holding her rifle grimly aimed at Marie, all the while, but now she lowered it.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. “You haven’t been hurt or anything? Have you been getting enough to eat?”

She looked at me with a very strange expression. For a moment I swore she was going to answer me. But habit took over. She turned without a word and walked away from me to where Sunday was, a few steps away, and began petting him, with her back to me.

“I take it that means ‘yes’!” I called after her. She did not reply, of course. The voice of Marie spoke in low, but tight, tones in my ear.

“Marc, she’s not staying, she or that leopard, either.”

I turned to stare at her. She looked ready to fight.

“Of course they’re staying,” I said.

“Then I’m leaving, with Wendy and the dogs.”

“And Tek and his men right behind you,” I said. I had not meant to put it that bluntly; but I was just about out of patience. “Go ahead.”

She glared at me fiercely for a moment, then turned and went to Wendy. But she made no move to begin a departure.

I looked around for Bill Gault, saw him standing waiting a little distance away and beckoned him over to me. He came and I led him off out of low-voiced earshot of the rest.

“I didn’t mean to lead you into a touchy situation like this,” I said. “You can go back to your installation, if you feel like it, and I won’t blame you.”

“No,” he said. “You were right. I couldn’t really learn anything more, shut up there. The only way to study the situation is to look at as many of the discontinuities as I can find. We ought to keep on the move and, every time we get near one, have a look at it.”

“Good,” I told him. “By the way, you never did tell me what your field is. Were you a research scientist, a lab man, or what?”

“Well, no,” he said. “I do have a degree in physics... but actually, I was just technical editor for the installation.”

He gazed at me uncomfortably.

“Technical editor!” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, what the hell can you do, then?” I demanded. I was about at the end of my temper, anyway; and this last disappointment threatened to cut me loose. I had taken it for granted he was some sort of scientific expert, at least.

“I can do a lot!” Bill said, swiftly. “I can observe, make tests and record—and I know something about physics, as I said. Also, I’ve been up to my eyebrows in everything we worked on at the installation for the five years I’ve been there. I’m not helpless.”

“All right,” I answered. “But you’re going to have to show me.

He did. During the two weeks that followed, my opinion of him, starting from the sub-basement level of that moment, went steadily up. He had brought with him in his backpack some remarkably small, but durable instruments to measure temperature, air pressure, wind velocity and humidity, plus a few less common things like electrostatic levels and magnetic flows. He also designed a number of long rods for pushing these into and through a mistwall, while we stood safely outside.

This is not to say we did not enter the walls. In the final essential, it was necessary to go through them. As we moved across country in the days following the addition of Tek and his men to our group—to say nothing of Bill himself, and the rejoining of the girl and Sunday—we ran into at least one, and sometimes more, mistwalls a day. We would make all the tests on them that Bill could think of; but once he had the results noted down, it was a matter of he and I going through them, that is, unless it were a moving mistwall we were investigating, in which case we spotted them early through binoculars and moved to outflank and see behind them.

We did not go into them as blindly as I had gone into earlier ones. Among other designs of Bill’s were rod or rope devices to be thrown through the mistwall and dragged back, to give us an idea of the ground situation and atmosphere beyond. The third time we used them, what we learned kept us from walking off a cliff on the far side of the mistwall, before we would have had a chance to open our eyes. But, in the end, in almost every instance, we still had to go through personally.

We found a number of different situations, from raw desert to empty city, on the far sides of these walls; and we profited from what we found. Fourteen days after our group had come to its full size, we were riding in a sort of motorcade, all of us, including the dogs. Our vehicles consisted of a couple of brand new motor homes for sleeping and living quarters, preceded by a couple of jeep carryalls and followed by a pickup truck, all three smaller vehicles with four-wheel drive, carrying the armed members of the party while we were on the move. With wheels under us, outflanking the moving mistwalls became not only easier, but more certain.

There were four of us who carried weapons to start with— myself, Marie, Bill, and also the girl. She had become attached to that .22 of hers. In fact, she refused to give it up, and when I had her fire it for me, I found that she had not merely kept it in good condition, she was developing into a good shot. At short to medium range in rough country, a light gun like a .22 could be as effective as an elephant gun, in every way but impact, if the person shooting it was accurate enough; and I was glad to have her able to use it.

By the end of the first week we added a fifth gunner—Tek. The man had worked hard to do anything that was asked of him; until he had begun finally to make a believer even out of me. The conclusion I came to at last was that whatever it was he wanted, for the moment, at least, it included cooperation with the rest of us. I walked him off a short distance from our night camp on the end of our seventh day together and asked him a lot of questions about himself.

The answers were unhesitating and interesting. His full name was Techner, pronounced “Tek-ner,” Wilson Ambervoy—he had been named for a couple of grandparents. He had been good enough as a high school football player to get a scholarship to the University of Indiana—and Indiana had fielded a Big Ten team which did not play mediocre football. However, he had not taken the study end of college seriously and had flunked out midway through his sophomore year. Luckily—he was usually lucky, Tek told me frankly—he got a job immediately with an uncle who owned a paint store. The uncle was in poor health and inside of half a year, Tek was managing the store. About that time, he got into real estate. With the cosignature of his paint store uncle, Tek swung a mortgage and bought a twelve-unit apartment building. To run it, he brought in a friend named Ricky, a drinking buddy the same age as himself, who had a knack for card games and was in the habit of having a poker session in his former bachelor apartment every night after the bars closed.

He and Tek remodeled two of the apartment units of their building into one large one to make, as Tek put it, “a pretty impressive-looking cave”; and the after-hours card games expanded. Meanwhile, they made it a point to rent the rest of the units to girl friends of Tek’s; and a number of these would also drop in on the card game after hours to make sandwiches, pour drinks and watch the game. If the supply of these girls ran short, Tek went out prospecting and found some more.

The result was that there were always a number of good-looking girls around the card game, and young male strangers began dropping in for a hand or two, just to meet them. Tek’s buddy did well with his cards. He paid Tek a percentage of his winnings as rent for the apartment; and the other units became very much in demand among Tek’s girl friends, so that he was able to raise the rent several times and still keep every unit filled.

“You understand,” Tek said to me. “Nobody cheated in the card games. There was nothing professional about the girls. Just everybody had a good time, and Ricky and me had it for free —well, maybe we came out a little bit ahead, but when we did, we just spent it on more good stuff....”

And then the time storm had come along; Tek had been taking a nap. When he woke, he was alone in the apartment building. Alone in an empty town. He ended up going out adventuring, and one by one, he ran into the other men of his gang, whom he recruited out of a sort of pack-instinct for leadership.

“But that wasn’t really what I was after,” Tek said to me as we walked together, with the camp and the fire we always built for it distant in the twilight before the small town on the outskirts of which we had stopped for the night. “You know, even before this time storm, or whatever you call it, came along, I was beginning to get a little filled up on the apartment, the fun and games, and all the rest of it. I was beginning to want to do something—I don’t know what. I still don’t know. But just roaming around, living off the country, isn’t it either.”

Tek stopped and looked at me in the growing dimness.

“They’re not bright, you know,” he said, “those five back there I picked up. Garney was the brightest of them all; and he was nothing you could build on. Now, little old Bill Gault there, he’s bright; and you are, too. Someday maybe you’ll tell me what you did before this happened and where you came from; and I’ll bet it’ll be interesting. And this business of yours with the mistwalls—it might lead to something. That’s what I want. Something.”

He stopped talking.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s head back.”

Halfway back to the camp, I came to a conclusion.

“You can start carrying a rifle tomorrow,” I told him. “But don’t forget you’re still under orders. Mine.”

“Right,” he said. “But I’d be on your side anyway.”

“For now, you would,” I said dryly.

He laughed.

“Come on, man,” he said. “Anything can happen if you look far enough into the future. If anything comes along to change the situation that much, you’ll know about it as soon as I will.”

So we moved on with five gunners instead of four, and things went almost suspiciously well. The plan Bill and I had evolved was based on our theory that our best chance to get on top of the time storm was to keep looking for the most advanced future segment we could find. Hopefully the more advanced an area we could hit, the more likely we were to find the equipment or the people to help us deal with the time storm. If we were going to be able to do something about it, that was where we were most likely to find the means. If we were going to be forced to live with it—perhaps we could find the techniques and patterns we needed in something beyond our present time slot.

As I had discovered earlier, however, the time changes seemed to be weighed toward the past, rather than toward the future. We found three futuristic-looking segments behind mistwalls; but they were either apparently stripped of anything or anyone useful, or else their very futureness was in doubt. It was two weeks and two days before we found a segment that was undeniably part of a city belonging to a time yet to come—a far future time, we thought at first. Though of course, there was no way we might tell how much time would have been necessary to make changes.

This particular segment was behind the second mistwall we had encountered that day. The first had showed us nothing but unrelieved forest, stretched out over descending hills to a horizon that was lost in haze, but which must have been many miles off. Such a landscape might be part of a future segment, but it was not passable by our wheeled vehicles, and it promised nothing. We pulled back through the mistwall—it was then about ten in the morning—paused for an early lunch and went on.

About 2:30 P.M., we saw a second, stationary mistwall and moved up to it. We were travelling along a gravel road at the time, through what seemed like an area of small farms. The mistwall sliced across a cornfield and obliterated the corner of what had once been a tall, white and severely narrow farmhouse—an American Gothic among farmhouses.

We left our motorcade in the road, and Bill and I walked up the farm road into the farmyard, carrying most of the instruments. The rest straggled along behind us but stayed back, as I had repeatedly warned them to, a good twenty yards from where we were working.

I said the rest stayed back—I should have said all the rest but Sunday. The leopard had put up with seeing me go through mist-walls for about two days after he and the girl had rejoined us and had contented himself with overwhelming me with pleased greetings when I returned. Like all our humans, he obviously had a powerfully remembered fear of the time lines, in spite of having crossed one at Marie’s place. But after Bill and I had penetrated through the third wall we had encountered, I had heard something odd behind me and looked to see Sunday coming through the mistwall behind us, tossing his head, his eyes closed and mewling like a lost kitten. He broke out and came to me—still with his eyes closed and evidently depending on nose alone—and it had taken me fifteen minutes to soothe him back to quietness. However, going back through the mistwall later, he had been much less upset; and two days later he was accompanying us with the indifference of a veteran. Of course, as soon as he started coming through the mist-walls after us, the girl did too. But it was possible to order her not to; Sunday could not be kept back.

So, in this case, as had become his habit, Sunday followed Bill and me up to the mistwall and waited while we made our measurements and tests. These showed it to be little different from the many other walls we had tested. But when we finally went through this time, we found a difference.

We came out in a—what? A courtyard, a square, a plaza... take your pick. It was an oval of pure white surface and behind, all about it, rose a city of equal whiteness. Not the whiteness of new concrete, but the whiteness of veinless, milk-colored marble. And there was no sound about it. Not even the cries of birds or insects. No sound at all.