Time Storm

16

So we drove back to camp in the last of the twilight and in silence. I only asked him one question on the way back.

“Do you really give a damn about any of us?” I said. “Or are you just interested in the time storm?”

“Porniarsk cares for all life,” his steady voice answered. “If he didn’t, he’d have no concern with the time storm. And I am Porniarsk, only in an additional body.”

It was cold comfort. I believed him; but at the same time, I got the feeling that there was something more he was withholding from me.

In any case, there was nothing to do now but keep going. Oddly, I trusted him. Something had happened to me since The Dream; and that was that, in a strange way, I had come to feel an affection and responsibility for him, along with all the others. It was as if a corner of my soul’s house had put up a blind on one window to let in a little sunshine. I did take Bill aside the next day and gave him a rough briefing on my conversation with Porniarsk. Bill fulfilled Porniarsk’s prediction by being highly skeptical of the avatar’s motives and implications.

“It sounds to me like a con game,” he said. “It’s part of a con game to flatter your mark. Did you feel you were headed any place in particular, these last three weeks?”

I hesitated. Somehow, I didn’t get the feeling that Bill was ripe right now for hearing an account of The Dream, and how it had been with me. But there was no way to answer his questions fully without telling him about my back-of-the-brain spiderwork.

“I had a feeling I was tied into something important,” I said. “That’s as far as it went.”

“Hmm,” said Bill, half to himself. “I wonder if Porniarsk’s telepathic?”

“That’s as far-fetched as me supposed to be knowing where we’re going, when I didn’t know where we’re going,” I said.

Bill shrugged.

“If we hit this trigger area place soon, you’ll have known where we’re going,” he said. “No reason there shouldn’t be as much truth to telepathy. When did Porniarsk say we’d reach the area?”

Of course, wound up as I had been by what he’d had to say about me personally, I’d forgotten to ask him.

“I’ll find out,” I said and went off to look for the avatar.

Porniarsk politely informed me that we should hit the trigger area in about a day and a half the way we were travelling; and, yes, it would be behind a mistwall like all the other mistwalls we’d seen. As to what was inside, it was best I experienced that for myself first, before Porniarsk did any explaining.

He was not wrong. Late in the afternoon of the following day, we spotted a stationary mistwall dead ahead; and two hours later we set up evening camp a couple of hundred yards from it.

The countryside here was open pastureland, rolling hills with only an occasional tree but small strands of brush and marshy ponds. Here and there a farmer’s fence straggled across the landscape; and the two-lane blacktop road we had been following, since its sudden appearance out of nowhere ten miles before, ran at an angle into the mistwall and disappeared. The day had been cool. Our campfires felt good. Autumn would be along before long, I thought, and with that began to turn over ideas for the winter; whether to find secure shelter in this climate or head south.

I made one more attempt to get Porniarsk to tell me what lay on the other side of the mistwall; but he was still not being helpful.

“You could at least tell us if we’re liable to fall off a cliff before we come out of the wall, or step into a few hundred feet of deep water,” I growled at him.

“You won’t encounter any cliffs, lakes, or rivers before you have a chance to see them,” Porniarsk said. “As far as the terrain goes, it’s not that dissimilar from the land around us here.”

“Then why not tell us about it?”

“The gestalt will be of importance to you later.”

That was all I could get out of him. After dinner, I called a meeting. Porniarsk attended. I told the others that Porniarsk believed that, beyond this particular mistwall, there was an area different from any we’d run into so far. We might find equipment there that would let us do something about the time storm and the moving mistwalls. Bill and I, in particular, were interested in the chance of doing so, as they all knew. For one thing, if we could somehow stop the mistwalls from moving, we could feel safe setting down someplace permanently. Perhaps we could start rebuilding a civilization.

It was quite a little speech. When I was done, they all looked at me, looked at Porniarsk, who had neither moved nor spoken, and then looked back at me again. None of them said anything. But looking back at them, I got the clear impression that there were as many different reactions to what I had just said as there were heads there to contain the reactions.

“All right then,” I said, after a reasonable wait to give anyone else a chance to speak. “We’ll be going in, in the morning. The ones going will be Bill, me, and three others, all with rifles and shotguns both, in one of the jeeps. Anybody particularly want to be in on the expedition, or shall I pick out the ones to go?”

“I’ll go,” said Tek.

“No,” I said. “I want you to stay here.”

I looked around the firelit circle of faces, but there were no other volunteers.

“All right then,” I said. “It’ll be Richie, Alan, and Waite. Starting with the best shot and working down the list.”

The fourth man, Hector Monsanto, whom everybody called “Zig,” did not look too unhappy at being left out. He was the oldest of the four men we had acquired along with Tek, a short, wiry, leathery-featured individual in his late thirties, who looked as if most of his life had been spent outdoors. Actually, according to Tek, he had grown up in a small town and had been a barber who spent most of his time in the local bars.

He was the oldest of the four and the least agile. The other three were in their early to mid-twenties and could move fast if they needed to.

So, the following morning we tried it. It took about an hour or so for Bill to satisfy himself, by throwing a weighted line through the mistwall and pushing pipe lengths screwed together to beyond the mistwall’s far edge, that the terrain beyond was both level and safe. Then we brought the jeep we were going to use up to the wall and got in with our weapons. I climbed in behind the wheel with Bill on the other front seat. Alan, Richie, and Waite got into the back. We made a pretty full load.

Then Sunday, purring loudly, as if congratulating us all on a permission no one had given him, leaped up into Bill’s lap and settled down for the ride; and, before I could shove him out, the girl began to climb into the back seat holding a rifle.

“Hold it!” I roared. “Everybody out!”

We off-loaded, everybody except the girl and Sunday, who took advantage of the available empty space to settle down that much more firmly.

“Now, look—” I began to the girl.

“I’m going,” she said. Sunday purred loudly and cleaned the fur on top of one of his forepaws. It was a double declaration of insubordination.

Of course, there was no way I could stop them. I could put them out of the vehicle, but they could walk in right behind us. Sunday had proved that, unlimited times. In fact, I had known— everybody had known—that he would be coming along. I had not counted on the girl.

I glared around me. This particular expedition was sorting itself out in exactly the wrong way. I don’t know what made me so convinced that there might be danger beyond this mistwall. I’d gone into a number of others confidently enough. Perhaps it was Porniarsk’s refusal to tell me exactly what was beyond the wall. At any rate, I felt the way I felt; and for that type of feeling, I was taking all the wrong people and leaving all the wrong people behind.

An ideal expeditionary group would have been myself, Tek, and a couple of the men, none of whom meant a great deal to me—except myself; and I was too much of an egotist to think that I couldn’t survive whatever mystery lay in front of me. Sunday, the girl, Bill, even to a certain extent, Marie and little Wendy, were people I cared about to one degree or another and would just as soon have kept safely in the rear area.

But Bill could not be left behind, in justice. The quest to understand the time storm was as much his as mine. Sunday could not be kept out, in practice; and now the girl had proclaimed her intention to go in with us whether I wanted her to or not. Meanwhile Tek, who outside of myself was the one person fit to take charge of those left behind, if enemies of some kind suddenly appeared over the horizon behind us, could, by no stretch of common sense, be taken. Ever since Marie, Wendy, and I had run into him and his group, I had been half-expecting that any day, we might bump into another such armed and predatory gang.

“All right!” I said. “If everybody’s going to go, we’ll have to use the pickup. Let’s get it cleared out!”

The pickup was our main transport. In the back, it had all our camping equipment, food, fuel, and other supplies. We had unloaded part of what it contained to set up camp the night before; but if it was to be used as a battle wagon, the rest of the box had to be cleared. We moved back and went to work.

Twenty minutes later, we once more approached the mistwall; this time in the pickup, in low gear. The girl and Bill and I were in the front seat with the windows rolled up, with me as driver. In the open box behind were Alan and Waite and Richie, holding a disgruntled Sunday on a leash. I’d shut the leopard out of the cab by main force and snapped his leash around his neck when he tried to join the three of us in the cab. As I pushed the nose of the pickup slowly into the first dust of the mistwall, there was a heavy thud on the roof of the cab. I stopped, rolled down the window and stuck my head out to glimpse Sunday, now lying on the cab top. I rolled the window back up and went on.

The mist surrounded us. The dust hissed on the metal of the pickup’s body, as the motor of the truck grumbled in low gear. We were surrounded by an undeviating whiteness in which it was impossible to tell if we were moving. Then the whiteness lightened, thinned, and suddenly we rolled out into sunlight again. I stopped the truck.

We were in a rocky, hilly section of country. The thin, clear air that made everything stand out with sudden sharpness signalled that we were at a higher altitude, and the sparseness of vegetation —no trees and only an occasional green, spiny bush—suggested a high, desert country, like the altiplano of inland Mexico. The landscape was mainly rock, from hard dirt and gravel, to boulders of all sizes. Rough, but not too rough for the jeeps to get through; and, if a clear route could be found between the boulders, probably even the pickup could be nursed along.

The ground before us was fairly clear and level, but boulder-strewn slopes rose sharply to the right and left of us. Directly ahead, the level space dipped down into a cup-shaped depression holding what appeared to be a small village. The buildings in the village were odd; dome-shaped, with floorless, front-porch extensions, consisting simply of projecting roofs upheld at each end by supporting poles. Under those roofs, out in the open, there seemed to be a few machines or equipment—mechanical constructs of some kind. No human beings were visible. Beyond the village, the ground rose sharply into a small mountain—it was too steep to be called a hill—wearing a belt of trees halfway up its several hundred feet of height. On one side of the mountain, the bare peak sloped at an angle the jeeps could possibly manage. But the other slopes were all boulder-strewn and climbable only by someone on foot.

On top, crowning the peak, was a large, solid, circular building, looking as if it had been poured out of fresh white concrete ten seconds before we appeared on the scene. That was as much as I had a chance to notice, because then everything started to happen.

A number of objects hit loudly on the body and cab of the truck, one shattering the window next to Bill. At the same time, there was a yowl of rage from Sunday and I caught sight, fleetingly, of the leopard leaping off the roof of the cab to the right, with his leash trailing in the air behind him. Suddenly the rocks around us were speckled by the visages of dark-furred, ape-like creatures.

The guns of the men in the box were firing. The girl, who had been seated between Bill and myself, scrambled over Bill crying out Sunday’s name, opened the door of the pickup on that side, and disappeared. Bill exited after her; and I heard the machine pistol yammering. I jerked open the door on my side, rolled out on to the hard-pebbled earth, and began firing from a prone position at any furry head I could see.

There was a timeless moment of noise and confusion—and then without warning, it was over. There were no longer any creatures visible to shoot at, except for perhaps four or five who lay still, or barely stirring, on the ground. I fired a few more rounds out of reflex and then quit. The other guns fell silent.

I got to my feet. Sunday stalked back into my line of vision, his tail high in self-congratulation. He headed for one of the two furry figures that still moved. I opened my mouth to call him back; but before he could have reached the creature, a rifle in the box behind me began to sound again, and both the moving bodies went motionless.

“Quit that!” I shouted, spinning around. “I want one alive—”

I broke off, suddenly realizing I was talking to a man who wasn’t listening. Richie, his round face contorted, was kneeling behind the metal side of the pickup box, firing steadily at the dark-furred shapes; and he kept at it until his rifle was empty.

I climbed into the box and took the gun away from him as he tried to reload it.

“Simmer down!” I said.

He looked at me glassy-eyed, but sat without moving. There wasn’t a mark on him.

But the other two were hit. Alan had one side of his face streaming blood from what seemed to be a scalp wound. He was holding up Waite, who was breathing in an ugly, rattling way with his face as white as the building on the peak. His right hand was trapped behind Alan; but he kept trying to bring his left hand up to his chest, and Alan kept holding it away.

My head cleared. I remembered now that the barrage that had come at us had contained not only thrown rocks but a few leaf-shaped, hiltless knives. One of the knives was now sticking in Waite’s chest low on the left side. It was in perhaps a third the length of its blade; and evidently it had slid in horizontally between two ribs.

Waite coughed, and a little pink froth came out the corners of his mouth.

“He wants to get the knife out,” said Alan, pleadingly to me. “Should we just pull it out, do you think?”

I looked down at Waite. It did not matter, clearly, whether we took the knife out or not. The blade had gone into his lungs and now they were filling up with blood. Waite looked back up at me with panic in his eyes. He was the quiet one of Tek’s four men and possibly the youngest. I had never been sure if he was really like the others, or whether he had simply gotten swept up and tried to be like them.

There was nothing I or anyone else in our group could do for him. I stood looking down at him, feeling my helplessness, like something in my own chest being raggedly cut. This was one of the people I had been thinking meant little or nothing to me and would be easily expendable. I had not stopped to realize how close a group like ours could come to be, living together like a family, moving together, facing a possibly dangerous world together. Maybe he would die more quickly without the knife blade in him and removing it would be the kindest thing we could do for him.

“If he wants it out, he might as well have it out,” I said.

Alan let go of Waite’s arm. The arm came up, and its hand grasped the handle of the knife but could not pull it out. Alan half-reached for the knife himself, hesitated, tried again, hesitated, and looked appealingly at me.

I reached down and took hold of the handle. The blade stuck at first, then slid out easily. Waite yelled—or rather, he tried to yell, but it was a sound that ended in a sort of gargle. He pulled away a little from Alan and leaned over forward, face tilted down intently toward the bed of the box, as if he was going to be sick. But he was not. He merely hung there sagging against the grip of Alan’s arms, his gaze calm and intent on the metal flooring; and then, as we watched, he began to die.

It was like watching him dwindle away from us. His face relaxed and relaxed, and the focus in his eyes became more and more general, until all at once there was no focus at all and he was dead. Alan let him down quickly but softly on the bed of the box.

I turned and climbed out of the box back on to the ground. I saw Bill standing on this side of the truck now and Sunday nosing curiously at one of the bodies. Suddenly, it struck me.

“Girl!” I shouted at Bill. “The girl! Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill.

I ran around the front of the truck and the bouldered slope on the side I’d seen her disappear.

“Girl!” I kept shouting. “GIRL!”

I couldn’t find her. I found one of the dead ape-creatures, but I couldn’t find her. I started threading back and forth among the rocks as I worked up the slope; and then, suddenly, I almost fell over her. She was in a little open space, half-sitting up with her back against a boulder and a torn-off strip of her shirt tied around one leg above the knee.

For a moment I thought she was already dead, like Waite—and I couldn’t take it. It was like being cut in half. Then she turned her head to look at me, and I saw she was alive.

“Oh, my God!” I said.

I knelt down beside her and wrapped her up in my arms, telling myself I would never let go of her again. Never. But she was as stiff and unresponsive in my grasp as a wild animal caught in a trap. She did not move; but she did not relax either, and finally, this brought me more or less back to my senses; I didn’t want to let her go, but I stopped holding her quite so tightly.

“Are you all right?” I said. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

“My name’s Ellen,” she said.

“Is that all!” I hugged her again. “All right! You’ll be Ellen from now on. I won’t ever call you anything else!”

“It doesn’t matter what you call me,” she said. “I’m not going to be here anyway.”

She was still stiff and cold. I let go of her and sat back on my knees so that I could see her face; and it was as unyielding as the rest of her.

“What do you mean, you aren’t going to be here?” She was talking nonsense. She had evidently been hurt or wounded in the leg, but that could hardly be serious.

“Tek and I are going away by ourselves. It’s already decided,” she said. “We were just waiting to make sure you got through this last mistwall all right. You can keep Sunday. He only gets in the way all the time anyway.”

She turned, grabbed hold of the boulder against which she had been leaning, and pulled herself up on one leg.

“Help me back to the pickup,” she said.

My head was whirling with that crazy announcement of hers. I stared down at her bandaged leg.

“What happened to you?” I said, automatically.

“I got hit by a rock, that’s all. It scraped the skin off and bled a little, so I wrapped it up; but it’s only a bruise.”

“Try putting your weight on it.” Something automatic in me was doing the talking. “Maybe it’s broken.”

“It’s not broken. I already tried.” She took hold of my arm with both her hands. “It just hurts to walk on it. Help me.”

I put an arm around her, and she hopped back down the slope on one leg, by my side, until we reached the cab of the pickup, and I helped her up on to the seat. I was operating on reflex. I could not believe what she had said; particularly, just now, when I had just realized how important she was to me. It was the way I had found myself feeling about Waite, multiplied something like a million times. But there were things demanding decisions from me.

Richie and Alan were still in the back of the truck with the body of Waite. I looked at them. Somebody had to take the pickup back through the mistwall with the girl and Waite. Richie was the unhurt one, but his eyes still did not look right.

“How badly are you hurt?” I asked Alan.

“Hurt?” he said. “I didn’t get hurt.”

“You could fool me,” I said dryly. He didn’t seem to get it. “Your head! How bad’s the damage to your head?”

“My head?”

He put up a hand and brought it down covered with blood. His face whitened.

“What is it?” he said. “How bad....” His bloody hand was fluttering up toward the head wound, wanting to touch it, but afraid of what it might feel.

“That’s what I want to know,” I said.

I climbed into the cab and bent over him, gingerly parting the hair over the bloody scalp. It was such a mess I couldn’t see anything.

“Feel anything?” I asked, probing with my fingertips.

“No... no... yes!” he yelped.

I pulled my hands away.

“How bad did that feel?” I asked him. He looked embarrassed.

“Not too bad—I guess,” he said. “But I felt it, where you touched it.”

“All right,” I told him. “Hang on, because I’m going to have to touch it some more.”

I probed around with my fingers, wishing I’d had the sense to bring bandages and water with us. He said nothing to indicate that I was giving him any important amount of pain; and all my fingers could find was a swelling and a relatively small cut.

“It’s really not bad at all,” he said sheepishly, when I’d finished. “I think I just got hit by a rock, come to think of it.”

“All right,” I said. My own hands were a mess now. I wiped them as best I could on the levis I was wearing. “Looks like a bump and a scratch, only. It just put out a lot of blood. If you’re up to it, I want you to stay.”

“I can stay,” he said.

“All right, then. Richie!”

Richie looked at me slowly as if I was someone calling him from a distance.

“Richie! I want you to drive the pickup back through the mistwall. You’re to take the girl and Waite back, then pick up some bandages, some antibiotics and a jerry can of drinking water and bring it back to us. Understand me?”

“Yeah....” said Richie, thickly.

“Come on, then,” I said.

I climbed out of the box of the pickup and he came after me. I saw him into the cab and behind the wheel.

“He’ll take you back to the camp,” I told the girl and closed the door on the driver’s side before she could answer—assuming, that is, that she had intended to answer. The pickup’s motor, which had been idling all this time, growled into gear. Richie swung it about and drove out of sight into the mistwall, headed back.

I looked around. Bill was standing about twenty yards ahead of me. Beside him was Porniarsk, who must have followed us through the mistwall at some time when I wasn’t looking. They seemed to be talking together, looking down into the village, the machine pistol hanging by its strap, carelessly, from Bill’s right arm. It was incautious of him to be so relaxed, I thought. We had driven off one attack, but there was no way of knowing we might not have another at any minute.

I went toward them. As I did, I had to detour around the body of one of the attackers, who had apparently been trying to rush the pickup. It lay face-down, the apelike features hidden, and it reminded me of Waite, somehow. For a moment I wondered if there were others among its fellows that were feeling the impact of this one’s death, as I had felt that of Waite. My mind—it was not quite under control right then, my mind—skittered off to think of the girl again. Of Ellen—I must remember to think of her as Ellen from now on.

It was so strange. She was small and skinny and cantankerous. How could I love her like this? Where did it come from, what I was feeling? Somehow, when I wasn’t paying any attention, she had grown inside me, and now, she took up all the available space there. Another thought came by, blown on the wandering breeze of my not-quite-in-control mind. What about Marie? I couldn’t just kick her out. But maybe there was no need for worry. All Marie had ever seemed to want was the protection inherent in our partnership. It might be she would be completely satisfied with the name of consort alone. After all, there were no laws now, no reason that I couldn’t apparently have two wives instead of one. No one but us three need know Marie was a wife in name only... of course, the girl would have to agree....

I stopped thinking, having reached Bill and Porniarsk. They were still looking down at the village. I looked down, too, and, to my surprise, saw it populated and busy. Black, furry, apelike figures were visible all through its streets and moving in and out of the dome-shaped houses. Most, in fact, seemed to be busy with whatever objects they had under the porch-like roofs before the entrances of their buildings. But a fair number were visible simply sitting in the dust, singly or in pairs, doing nothing; and a small group were in transit from one spot to another.

They were within easy rifle shot of where we stood, and the three of us must have been plainly visible to them; but they paid us no attention whatsoever.

“What the hell?” I said. “Is that the same tribe that hit us just now?”

“Yes,” said Bill.

I looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he nodded at Porniarsk instead.

“Let him tell you.”

Porniarsk creaked his head around to look sideways and up at me.

“They’re experimental animals,” Porniarsk said, “from a time less than a hundred years ahead of that you were in originally when the time storm reached you.”

“You knew about them?” The thought of Waite made my throat tight. “You knew about them waiting to kill us, and you didn’t warn us?”

“I knew only they were experimental animals,” said Porniarsk. “Apparently part of their conditioning is to attack. But if the attack fails, they go back to other activities.”

“It could be...” said Bill slowly and thoughtfully, “it could be their attack reflex was established to be used against animals, instead of the people of the time that set them up here; and they just didn’t recognize us as belonging to the people level, as they’d been trained to recognize it.”

“It’s possible,” said Porniarsk. “And then, if they attacked and failed, they might be conditioned to stop attacking, as a fail-safe reflex.”

“That’s damned cool of the both of you,” I said, my throat free again. “Waite’s dead and you’re holding a parlor discussion on the reasons.”

Bill looked at me, concerned.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Forget I said that. I’m still a little shook up from all this. So, they’re experimental animals down there, are they?”

“Yes,” said Porniarsk, “experimental animals, created by genetic engineering to test certain patterns of behavior. Up there on the height behind their community is the laboratory building from which they were observed and studied. The equipment in that structure that was designed for working with this problem is equipment that, with some changes and improvements, may be able to aid in controlling the effects of the time storm, locally.”

Bill was staring straight at me. His face was calm, but I could hear the excitement under the level note he tried to speak in.

“Let’s take a look, Marc.”

“All right,” I said. “As soon as the pickup comes back, we’ll go get a jeep and try that long slope on the right of the peak.”