Time Storm

17

The only vehicle-possible route to the peak led down through the main street of the village. When Alan got back with a jeep, we left him there; and Porniarsk, Bill and I drove down the slope and in between the buildings. We had perhaps twenty feet to spare on either side of us as we went through the village, for the central street —if you could call it that—was twice the width of the other lanes between buildings. The furry faces we passed did not bother to look at us, with a single exception. A slightly grizzled, large, and obviously male individual—none of them wore anything but a sort of Sam Browne belt, to which were clipped the sheaths that held their knives and some things which looked like small hand tools-sat in front of one building and stared from under thick tufts of hair where his brows should be, his long fingers playing with the knife he held on his knees. But he made no threatening moves, with the knife or anything else.

“Look at that old man,” said Bill, pointing with the muzzle of his machine pistol at the watcher.

“I see him,” I said. “What do you want me to do about him?”

“Nothing, I’d suggest,” said Porniarsk. My question had not really called for an answer, but perhaps he had not understood that. “That one’s the Alpha Prime of the males’ community. The name ‘Old Man’ fits him very well. As Alpha Prime, his reflexes, or conditioning, dictate a somewhat different pattern of action for him alone. But I don’t think he or the others will act inimically again, unless you deliberately trigger some antagonistic reaction.”

“What are they all doing?” Bill asked.

I looked in the direction he was staring. There were a number of porches along the left side of the street, each with one or two of the experimentals under them. I picked out one who was operating what was clearly a spinning wheel. Another was cutting up a large sheet of the leathery material their harnesses were made out of, plainly engaged in constructing Sam Browne belts. But the rest were working with machines I did not recognize and either getting no visible results, or results that made no sense to me. One, in particular, was typing away energetically at a sort of double keyboard, with no noticeable effect, except for a small red tab that the machine spat out at odd intervals into a wire basket. The worker paid no attention to the tabs he was accumulating, seeming to be completely wound up in the typing process itself.

“They’re self-supporting, after a fashion,” said Porniarsk. “Some of what they do provides them with what they need to live. Other specific activities are merely for study purposes—for the studies of the people who put them here.”

“Where are those people?” I asked. “Can we get in touch with them?”

“No.” Porniarsk swiveled his neck once more to look at me from the seat beside me. “They are not here.”

“Where did they go?”

“They no longer exist,” said Porniarsk. “No more than all the people you knew before your first experience with the time storm. Yoij and Bill and the rest of you here, including these experimental creatures, are the ones who have gone places.”

I took my attention off the street for a second to stare at him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you, and those with you, are people the time storm has moved, rather than eliminated,” Porniarsk answered. “I’m sorry, that can’t be explained properly to you yet, by someone like me, not until you understand more fully what has been involved and is involved in the temporal displacements. Remember, I told you that this disturbance began roughly half a billion years in your past?”

I remembered. But it had only been a figure to me at the time. Who can imagine a time-span of half a billion years?

“Yes,” I said.

“It also began several million years in your future,” said Porniarsk. “Perhaps it might help you to think, provisionally, of the time storm as a wave-front intersecting the linear time you know—the time you imagine stretching from past to future—at an angle, so that your past, present and future are all affected at once by the same action.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” demanded Bill.

“Unfortunately, the image I just gave you isn’t really a true one,” said Porniarsk. “You forget the matter of scale. If the time storm is like a wave-front on a beach, we and our worlds are less than individual atoms in the grains of sand that make up that beach. What we experience as local effects appear as phenomena having very little resemblance to the true picture of the wave-front as a whole. I only mention this because it’s now become important for Marc to be able to imagine something of the forces at work here.”

The front wheels of the jeep jolted and shuddered over some small rocks. We were moving beyond the end of the village street and up over open ground again. I gave my attention back to my driving.

The drive up even the easy side of the peak was rough enough, but the jeep was equal to it. With enough foresight, it was possible to pick a route among the really heavy boulders that would otherwise have barred our way. A little more than halfway up, we hit a relatively level area of hard earth, surrounding the basin of a natural spring coming out of the cliff; and we stopped to rest and taste the water, which was cold enough to set our teeth on edge. I had not been conscious of being thirsty, except for a fleeting moment when I told Richie to bring back a jerry can of water with the other things. He had; and I had forgotten to get a drink then. Now I felt a thirst like that of someone lost in the desert for two days. I drank until my jaws ached, paused, drank, paused, and drank again.

After a bit we went the rest of the way up to the top of the peak, where the building was. Seen up close, it turned out to be a structure maybe sixty feet in diameter, with only one entrance and no windows. Like a blockhouse at a firing range, only larger.

The entrance had a door, which slid aside as we came within a stride of it. We had a glimpse of darkness beyond, then lighting awoke within, and we stepped into a brightly illuminated, circular interior, with a raised platform in the center and open cubicles all around the exterior wall, each cubicle with a padded chair, its back toward the center of the room and its cushions facing a sort of console fixed to the wall.

“What is it?” asked Bill, almost in a whisper. He was standing with Porniarsk and me on the raised platform but, unlike us, turning continually on his heel as if he wanted to get a view of all hundred and eighty degrees of the room at once.

“It is,” said Porniarsk, “something you might think of as a computer, in your terms. It’s a multiple facility for the use of observers who’d wish to draw conclusions from their observations of the inhabitants in the village.”

“Computer?” Bill’s voice was louder and sharper. “That’s all?”

“It’s working principle isn’t that of the computers you’re familiar with,” said Porniarsk. “This uses the same principle that’s found in constructs from the further future, those I’ve referred to as devices-of-assistance. You’ll have to trust me to put this construct into that future mode so it’ll be useful in the way we need.”

“How’ll we use it?” Bill asked.

“You won’t use it,” said Porniarsk. “Marc will use it.”

They both turned their heads toward me.

“And you’ll teach me how?” I said to Porniarsk.

“No. You’ll have to teach yourself,” Porniarsk answered. “If you can’t, then there’s nothing anyone can do.”

“If he can’t, I’ll try,” said Bill tightly.

“I don’t think the device will work for you if it fails for Marc,” said Porniarsk to him. “Tell me, do you feel anything at this moment? Anything unusual at all?”

“Feel?” Bill stared at him.

“You don’t feel anything, then,” said Porniarsk. “I was right. Marc should be much more attuned. Marc, what do you feel?”

“Feel? Me?” I said, echoing Bill. But I already knew what he was talking about.

I had thought, at first, I must be feeling a hangover from the fight with the inhabitants of the village. Then I’d thought the feeling was my curiosity about what was inside this building, until I saw what was there. Now, standing on the platform in the center of the structure, I knew it was something else—something like a massive excitement from everywhere, that was surrounding me, pressing in on me.

“I feel geared-up,” I said.

“More than just geared-up, I think,” Porniarsk said. “It was a guess I made only on the basis of Marc’s heading for this area; but I was right. Porniarsk hoped only that a small oasis of stability might be established on the surface of this world, in this immediate locality. With anyone else, such as you, Bill, that’d be all we could do. But with Marc, maybe we can try something more. There’s a chance he has an aptitude for using a device-of-assistance.”

“Can’t you come up with a better name for it than that?” said Bill. His voice was tight—tight enough to shake just a little.

“What would you suggest?” asked Porniarsk.

I turned and walked away from them, out of the building through the door that opened before me and shut after me. I walked into the solitude of the thin, clean air and the high sunlight. There was something working in me; and for the moment, it had driven everything else, even Ellen, out of my mind. It was like a burning, but beneficent, fever, like a great hunger about to be satisfied, like the feeling of standing on the threshold of a cavern filled with treasure beyond counting.

It was all this, and still it was indescribable. I did not yet have it, but I could almost touch it and taste it; and I knew that it was only a matter of time now until my grasp closed on it. Knowing that was everything, I could wait now. I could work. I could do anything. The keys of my kingdom were at hand.