Time Storm

14

“…We were the first,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner—

“Whoever burst,

Into that silent sea...”

If you know that bit of poetry, if you love poetry the way I do, you will be able to feel something like the feeling that hit Bill and me when we emerged from the mistwall into that city. Those lines give it to you. It was with us and that city beyond our time, as it had been with that sea and Coleridge’s Mariner. It was a city of silence, silence such as neither of us had ever heard, and such as we had never suspected could exist—until that moment. We were trapped by that silence, held by it, suddenly motionless and fixed, for fear of intruding one tiny noise into that vast, encompassing and majestic void of soundlessness, like flower petals suddenly encased in plastic. It held us both, frozen; and the fear of being the first to break it was like a sudden hypnotic clutch on our minds, too great for us to resist.

We were locked in place; and perhaps we might have stood there until we dropped, if it had been left to our own wills alone to save us.

But we were rescued. Shatteringly and suddenly, echoing and reechoing off to infinity among the white towers and ways before us, came the loud scrape of claws on a hard surface; and a broad, warm, hard, leopard-head butted me in the ribs, knocking me off my frozen balance to fall with a deafening clatter to the pavement, as my gun and my equipment went spilling all around me.

With that, the spell was smashed. It had only been that first, perfect silence that operated so powerfully on our emotions, and that, once destroyed, could never be recreated. It was an awesome, echoing place, that city—like some vast, magnificent tomb. But it was just a place once its first grip on us had been loosed. I picked myself up.

“Let’s have a look around,” I said to Bill.

He nodded. He was not, as I was, a razor addict; and over the two weeks or more since I had met him, he had been letting his beard go with only occasional scrapings. Now a faint soft fuzz darkened his lower face. Back beyond the mistwall, with his young features, this had looked more ridiculous than anything else; but here against the pure whiteness all around us and under a cloudless, windless sky, the beard, his outdoor clothing, his rifle and instruments, all combined to give him a savage intruder’s look. And if he looked so, just from being unshaved, I could only guess how I might appear, here in this unnaturally perfect place.

We went forward, across the level floor of the plaza, or whatever, on which we had entered. At its far side were paths leading on into the city; and as we stepped on one, it began to move, carrying us along with it. Sunday went straight up in the air, cat-fashion, the moment he felt it stir under his feet, and hopped back off it. But when he saw it carrying me away from him, he leaped back on and came forward to press hard against me as we rode—it was the way he had pressed against me on the raft during the storm, before he, the girl and I had had to swim for shore.

The walkway carried us in among the buildings, and we were completely surrounded by milky whiteness. I had thought at first that the buildings had no windows; but apparently they had—only of a different sort than anything I had ever imagined. Seeing the windows was apparently all a matter of angle. One moment it seemed I would be looking at a blank wall—the next I would have a glimpse of some shadowed or oddly angled interior. It was exactly the same sort of glimpse that you get of the mercury line in a fever thermometer when you rotate the thermometer to just the proper position. But there was no indication of life, anywhere.

Around us, over us, the city was lifeless. This was more than a fact of visual observation. We could feel the lack of anything living in all the structures around us like an empty ache in the mind. It was not a painful or an ugly feeling, but it was an unpleasant feeling just for the reason that it was not a natural one. That much massive construction, empty, ready and waiting, was an anomaly that ground against the human spirit. The animal spirit as well, for that matter; because Sunday continued to press against me for reassurance as we went. We stepped off the walkway at last—it stopped at once as we did so—and looked around at a solid mass of white walls, all without visible windows or doors.

“Nothing here,” said Bill Gault after a while. “Let’s go back now.”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

I could not have explained to him just why I did not want to give up. It was the old reflex at the back of my head, working and working away at something, and feeling that it was almost on top of that missing clue for which it searched. There had to be something here in this empty city that tied in with our search to make reason out of the time storm, the time lines, and all the business of trying to handle them or live with them. I could feel it.

“There’s no one here,” Bill said.

I shook my head.

“Let’s get inside,” I said. “Any one of these buildings will do.”

“Get inside? How?” He looked around us at the marble-white, unbroken walls.

“Smash our way in somehow,” I said. I was looking around myself for something to use as a tool. “If nothing else, the machine pistol ought to make a hole we can enlarge—”

“Never mind,” he said, in a sort of sigh. I turned back to look at him and saw him already rummaging in his pack. He came out with what looked like a grey cardboard package, about ten inches long and two wide, two deep. He opened one end and pulled out part of a whitish cylinder wrapped in what looked like wax paper.

The cylinder of stuff was, evidently, about the same consistency as modeling clay. With its wax paper covering off, it turned out to be marked in sections, each about two inches long. Bill pulled off a couple of sections, rewrapped the rest and put it away, back in his pack. The two sections he had pulled out squeezed between his hands into a sort of thin pancake, which he stepped over and pressed against one of the white walls. It clung there, about three feet above the ground.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Explosive,” he said. “A form of plastic—” He pronounced it plas-teek, with the emphasis on the second syllable—“but improved. It doesn’t need any fuse. You can do anything with it safely, even shoot a bullet into it. Nothing happens until it’s spread out like that, thin enough so that sufficient area can react to the oxygen in the air.”

He moved back from the wall where he had spread out the pancake, beckoning me along with him. I came, without hesitating.

We stood about thirty feet off, waiting. For several minutes nothing happened. Then there was an insignificant little poof that would hardly have done credit to a one inch firecracker; but an area of the white wall at least six feet in diameter seemed to suck itself inward and disappear. Beyond, there was a momentary patch of blackness; and then we were looking into a brightly lit chamber or room of some sort, with several large solid-looking shapes sitting on its floor area, shapes too awkwardly formed to be furniture and too purposelessly angular to seem as if they were machinery.

Like the room, like the walls, they were milky white in color. But that appearance did not last long.

Without warning, the damaged wall blushed. I don’t know how else to describe it. From white it turned blood-red, the reddishness most intense around the edges of the hole blown in the wall and toning down from there as it spread outward. And it spread with unbelievable speed. In a moment, the color change had swept over all the walls and pavement around us and raced on to turn the city, the whole city, to red.

Far off among the buildings, a faint, siren sound began. It was uncomfortably as if the city was a living thing we had wounded, and now it was not only bleeding internally but crying.

But this was just the beginning of the change.

“Look!” said Bill.

I turned back from gaping at the city to see Bill pointing once more at the hole in the wall. The red around the ragged rim of broken material had darkened and deepened until it was almost black—a thick and angry color of red. But now, as I watched, that dark-red edge began to develop a hairline of white—glowing white-hot-looking brightness beyond the edge of darkest red. And this tiny edge of white thickened and widened, tinged with pink where it came up against the dark red, but continuing to thicken in whiteness on its other, broken edge that touched only air.

“It’s healing itself,” said Bill.

I had not realized it until he put it into words, but that was exactly what was happening. The white that was appearing was new wall surface, growing down and inward, beginning to fill the hole that we had blown in the wall.

I took a step -forward as soon as I realized this, then stopped. The hole was already too small for me to go through, easily; and those white-glowing edges did not look like anything I would want to brush up against on my way past.

“All right,” I said to Bill, “let’s try it someplace else, and next time be a little quicker about going through, once we’ve opened it up.”

“No. Wait,” he said, catching hold of my arm as I started off to a further section of the wall. “Listen!”

I stopped and listened. The distant, wailing, siren-sound had been continuing steadily, but without any indication of coming any closer to us and the scene of the action. But now that Bill had my attention, I heard another sound superimposed on the first. It was the noise of a faint, dull-toned but regular clanking. The sort of thing you might hear from a large toy tractor, if it had been constructed, with its movable parts, out of plastic rather than metal. And this sound was coming toward us.

I had the machine pistol up and aimed without thinking; and Bill had his gun also pointed, when the source of the noise came around the corner of the same building where we had blown the opening in the wall. It came toward us, apparently either not understanding, or understanding but ignoring, the menace of our guns. I stared at it, unbelievingly, because I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was creature or machine.

By the time I had reluctantly concluded it was a creature, it was less than a dozen feet from us and it stopped. A machine I might have risked pumping a few slugs into. A creature was another matter entirely. Aside from the fact that killing another living thing has some emotional overtones to it, there were a great many more dangerous possibilities involved for us if it was alive, and our hostile response was not successful. So we simply stood and looked it over, and it looked us over.

It looked—it’s hard to say how it looked in that first minute. Something like a Saint Bernard-sized, very short-limbed, very heavy-headed, bulldog shape, with a clump of three tails or tentacles, about two feet in length, sprouting from each shoulder. The whole body was covered with rectangular bony plates about a couple of inches at their widest, which flexed at their jointures with the plates surrounding them to allow the body beneath them to move. Smaller plates even covered most of the massive head. The two eyes were brown and large.

“Don’t shoot!” I said to Bill, without taking my eyes off the creature.

I don’t know what movement of his, if any, triggered off that reaction in me. At the moment, I only knew two things. I had been searching from the very beginning, for an x-factor, a Game Warden, a missing piece to the puzzle of the time storm; and the old reliable search-reflex in the back of my mind now was practically shouting at me that this might be it. And—second, but no less important—the whole improbable being radiated an impression of non-enmity. That impressive armor, that ferocious head, somehow added up, not so much to something threatening, as to something rather clumsy and comic—even lovable, like the bulldog it faintly resembled.

Still, I would have had trouble convincing Bill of any of that alone—but luckily, just at that moment, I got corroborative testimony from a completely unexpected source—Sunday. Up until now the leopard had not moved; but now, suddenly, he strolled past me, right up to the creature, and proceeded to strop himself in a friendly manner up one side of it and down the other. He then sniffed it over a few times and gravely returned to me. That did it. Bill lowered his gun.

“Hello,” I said to the creature. The word sounded almost ridiculous in the context of our confrontation, here in this silent, strange place. The creature said nothing.

“I’m Marc Despard,” I said. “This is Bill Gault.”

Still no answer.

“Marc,” said Bill, in a strained, thin voice. “Let’s start backing up, slowly. If it lets us go, we can back right into the mistwall, and maybe it won’t follow us—”

He broke off because some sounds were finally beginning to come from the creature. Sounds that were something like a cross between the internal rumblings of indigestion and the creaking of machinery that had not been used in a long time.

“Due....” said the creature, in a deep-tone, grating voice. “Yanglish.”

It fell silent. We waited for more sounds, but none came.

“Start backing if you want,” I answered Bill, still keeping my gaze, however, on the creature. “I’m going to stay and see if I can’t find out something about this.”

“I....” said the creature, loudly, before Bill could answer me. There was a pause while we waited for more.

“I am....” it said, after a second. Another pause. Then it continued, in jerks, almost as if it were holding a conversation with itself, except that the pauses between bits of conversation became shorter and shorter until they approached ordinary sentence-length human speech.

“I am....” said the creature again.

“... Porniarsk.

“Porniarsk. I am... an of....

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three... of... an....

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three, an... avatar... of Porniarsk....

“... Expert in Temporals General. I am the... third... avatar of Porniarsk... who is an... expert on the Temporal Question.”

“It’s a robot of some sort,” said Bill, staring at Porniarsk’s avatar.

“No,” it said. “I am Porniarsk. Avatar, secondarily only. I am living—... alive. As you are.”

“Do we call you Porniarsk?” I asked.

There was a pause, then a new sort of creaking, unused machinery noise; and the heavy head was nodding up and down, so slowly, awkwardly and deliberately that the creature called Porniarsk looked even more comic than before. It broke off its head-movements abruptly at the top of a nod.

“Yes,” it said. “Porniarsk Prime Three is... a full name. Call me Porniarsk. Also, he. I am... male.”

“We’ll do that,” I said. “Porniarsk, I’m sorry about damaging your city here. We didn’t think there was anyone still around.”

“It is not... it isn’t my city,” said Porniarsk. “I mean it’s neither mine as avatar, nor is it something that belongs to me as Porniarsk. I come from...

He had been going great guns, but all at once he was blocked again. We waited, while he struggled with his verbal problem.

“I come from many... stellar distances away,” he said, finally. “Also from a large temporal... time... distance. But I should say also that, in another measure, I am... from close to here.”

“Close to this world?” Bill asked.

“Not...” Porniarsk broke off in order to work at the process of shaking his head this time, “to this world, generally. Just to... here, this place, and a few other places on your Earth.”

“Is this place—this city or whatever it is...” asked Bill, “from the same time as the time you come from?”

“No,” said Porniarsk. “No two times can be alike—no more than two grains of sand be identical.”

“We aren’t stupid, you know,” said Bill. For the first time I’d known him, there was an edge in his voice. “If you can tell us that much, you can do a better job of explaining things than you’re doing.”

“Not stupid... ignorant,” said Porniarsk. “Later, perhaps? I am from far off, spatially; from far off, temporally; but from close, distance-wise. When you broke the wall here, this city signalled; I had been for a long period of my own time on the watch for some such happening at any one of the many spots I could monitor; and when the city signalled, I came.”

“Why is the city so important?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” said Porniarsk, swinging his heavy head to look at me. “You are important. I believe. I’ll go with you now unless you reject me; and at last, perhaps we can be of use to ourselves and to the universe.”

I looked at Bill. Bill looked at me.

“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to look this place over. It’s from out of our future, if my guess is right. There may be a lot of things here we can use.”

“Nothing,” said Porniarsk. “It is only a museum—with all its exhibits taken away long since.”

He made no visible move that my eyes could catch, but suddenly, all the walls about us seemed to suck themselves in and produce circular doorways.

“If you would like to look, do so,” Porniarsk said. He folded his short legs inward under him and went down like a large coffee table with its four supports chopped away by four axemen at once. “I will wait. Use-time is subjective.”

I was half-ready to take him at his words that the “city” was no use to us; but Bill was beckoning me away. I followed him away and around a corner, with Sunday trailing along after me, out of sight of Porniarsk. Bill stopped, then, and I stopped. Sunday went on to sniff at an open doorway.

“Listen,” whispered Bill, “I don’t trust it.”

“Him,” I said, absently. “Porniarsk—he said he was male.”

“He also said he was an avatar,” said Bill. “The incarnation of a deity.”

Bill’s carping pricked me the wrong way.

“—Or the incarnation of an idea, or a philosophy, or an attitude!” I said. “Why don’t you read all of the entry in the dictionary next time?” Abruptly, I realized that he was scared; and my jumping on him was the last sort of move likely to help matters. “Look, he’s just the sort of thing we’ve been hunting for. Someone out of the future who might be able to help us handle this time storm business.”

“I don’t trust... him,” said Bill stubbornly. “I think he’s just planning to use us.”

“He can’t,” I said, without thinking.

“Why not?” Bill stared at me.

He had me, of course. I had responded out of my feelings rather than out of my head—or, to be truthful, out of my reflex for pattern-hunting, which was still yelling that I might have found the missing piece necessary to complete the jigsaw puzzle. I did not know why I was so unthinkingly sure of the fact that while we might be able to use Porniarsk, he could not use us. I had thought that the end result of my certainty about Swannee’s survival had taught me some healthy self-doubt. But here I was, certain as hell, all over again.

“I’ve just got a hunch,” I said to Bill then. “But in any case, we can’t pass him up. We’ve got to, at least, try to get the information we need out of him. Now, you can see the sense of that, can’t you?”

He hesitated in answering. I had hit him on his weak side—the side that believed in scientific question and experimentation.

“Of course you can,” I went on. “There’s no point to anything if we throw away the first good lead we’ve found to making sense out of things. Let’s go back now and take Porniarsk along with us to the rest of them. There’ll be plenty of time to find out what he’s after personally, once we’ve got him back in camp. Whatever he’s got, I’ll feel a lot safer when he’s got the dogs, Sunday and the rest of our guns all around him—don’t you agree?”

Bill nodded reluctantly.

“All right,” he said. “But I want to look into a few of these buildings, anyway.”

“We’ll do that, then.” I could afford to give in on a small point, now that he’d yielded on the large one. “But I’ve got a hunch Porniarsk’s right, and there’s nothing to find.”

So, accompanied by Sunday, we searched through a couple of the now-open buildings. But it was just as I’d thought. Porniarsk had not been lying so far as we could discover. The buildings were nothing but a lot of empty rooms—in immaculate condition, without a trace of dust or damage—but empty. Echo-empty.

In the end we went back and collected Porniarsk. He clattered to his feet as we came up and fell in step with us when I told him we were headed back through the mistwall to the rest of our people. However, I stopped when we came to the nearer edge of the wall.

“I’d like you to wait here, Porniarsk,” I told him, “while Bill and I go through first. Give us a chance to tell the rest of our people about you and tone down the surprise when you show up. Is that all right with you?”

“All right,” said Porniarsk, clunking down into lying position again. “Call when you want me to come after you.”

“We will,” I said.

I led Bill and Sunday back through the mist. When we opened our eyes on the other side, it was to find a deserted, if cozy-looking, farmyard. The cooktent had been set up in the yard and Marie had both charcoal grilles going, but no one was on duty except the dogs. Clearly, the others were all inside the farmhouse—the very sort of place I had ordered them never to go into unless I told them it was safe, and only after a couple of us had done a room-by-room search with guns, first. There were too many nasty surprises, from booby traps to ambushes, that could be set up in a place like an abandoned building.

“Get out here!” I shouted. “Get out here, all of you!”

I had the satisfaction of seeing them come scrambling out of the door and even out of a couple of windows, white-faced, possibly thinking we were under attack from somewhere, or perhaps another mistwall was bearing down on us. It was not the best of all possible times to rub a lesson in; but I took a few minutes once they were outside to read them out for what they had done.

“Well, it’s ridiculous!” said Marie. “It isn’t as if we walked in there blind. Tek and the girl took their guns and checked it out first.”

Of course that put a different face on the matter, but I was hardly in a position to admit so at the moment. I looked over at Tek and the girl. He, of course, had been too smart from the beginning to make his own excuses; while the girl, of course, was simply following her usual practice of not talking. But I met her eyes now; and grim, angry eyes they were.

“They did, did they?” I said. “And who ordered them to do that?”

“I asked them to,” said Marie.

“You did?”

“Yes, I did!” said Marie. “For God’s sake, Marc, the rest of us have to start doing things on our own, sooner or later, don’t we?”

I was finding myself slipping into a public argument with my people—not the best thing for a leader, if he wants to hold his position.

“Right! And I’ll tell you when. Meanwhile—” I went on before she, or any of the rest of them could say something more, “Bill and I brought back someone for you all to meet. Brace yourself— he’s not human. Bill, do you want to call him?”

“Porniarsk!” shouted Bill, turning to the mistwall.

Marie and the rest also turned toward the mistwall, with a swiftness that cheered me up somewhat. I had meant what I had said to Porniarsk about preparing them for the shock of meeting him. Now the thought in my mind was that a little shock might have a salutary effect on them. We were not an army of world-conquerers, after all. Half a dozen determined adults with decent rifles could wipe us out, or make slaves of us at a moment’s notice, if we took no precautions.

Porniarsk came clanking through the mistwall into view and stopped before us.

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three,” he announced, in exactly the same tones in which he had introduced himself to Bill and me. “The third avatar of Porniarsk, an expert in temporal science. I hope to work together with you so that we all may benefit the universe.”

“Yes,” said Bill dryly. “Only, of course we’ve a little more interest in helping ourselves first.”

Porniarsk swiveled his heavy head to look at Bill.

“It is the same thing,” Porniarsk said.

“Is it?” said Bill.

Porniarsk creaked off a nod.

“What you’ve observed as local phenomena,” he said, “are essentially micro-echoes of the larger disturbance, which began roughly half a billion years ago, according to your original time pattern.”

“Oh?” said Bill. He was trying to be indifferent, but I could catch the ring of interest in his voice that he was trying to hide. “Well, just as long as it can be fixed.”

“It cannot be fixed,” said Porniarsk. “The knowledge is not available to fix it.”

“It isn’t?” I said. “Then what’s all this about helping the universe?”

“The whole problem is beyond my time pattern and any other time pattern I know,” said Porniarsk. “Yet, our responsibility remains. Though we cannot solve, we can attack the problem, each of us like the ants of which you know, trying to level a mountain such as you are familiar with. With each micro-echo, each infinitesimal node attacked, we approach a solution, even if it is not for us to reach it.”

“Wait a minute—” began Tek.

He had not liked my blowup over their going into the house without my orders, even though he had said nothing. And now, the note of potential rebellion was clear in his voice.

“Hold it!” I said, hastily. “Let me get to the bottom of this first. Porniarsk, just how far does the whole problem extend—this problem of which our troubles here are a micro-echo?”

“I thought,” said Porniarsk, “I had made clear the answer to that question. The temporal maladjustments are symptoms of the destruction of an entropic balance which has become omnipresent. The chaos in temporal patterns is universal.”

None of us said anything. Porniarsk stood waiting for a moment and then realized he had not yet reached our basic levels of understanding.

“More simply put,” he said, “all time and space are affected. The universe has been fragmented from one order into a wild pattern of smaller orders, each with its own direction and rate of creation or decay. We can’t cure that situation, but we can work against it. We must work against it; otherwise, the process will continue and the fragmentation will increase, tending toward smaller and smaller orders, until each individual particle becomes a universe unto itself.”

... And that’s all of what he said then that I remember, because about at that point my mind seemed to explode with what it had just discovered—go into overdrive with the possibilities developing from that—on a scale that made any past mental work I had ever done seem like kindergarten-level playtime, by comparison. At last, my hungry rat’s teeth had found something they could tear into.