Time Storm

18

Then began a bittersweet time for me, the several weeks that Porniarsk worked on the equipment in what we were now calling the “roundhouse.” It was sweet because, day by day, I felt the device-of-assistance coming to life under the touch of those three tentacle-fingers Porniarsk had growing out of his shoulders. The avatar had been right about me. The original Porniarsk had not suspected there would be anyone on our Earth who could use the device without being physically connected to it. But evidently I was a freak. I had already had some kind of mental connection with this place, if only subconsciously, during the days of The Dream in which I had pushed us all in this direction and to this location. I said as much to Porniarsk one day.

“No,” he shook his head, “before that, I’d think. You must have felt its existence, here, and been searching for it from the time you woke to find your world changed.”

“I was looking,” I said. “But I didn’t have any idea what for.”

“Perhaps,” said Porniarsk. “But you might find, after the device is ready and you can look back over all you’ve done, that you unconsciously directed each step along the way toward this place and this moment, from the beginning.”

I shook my head. There was no use trying to explain to him, I thought, how I had never been able to let a problem alone. But I did not argue the point any further.

I was too intensely wrapped up in what I could feel growing about me—the assistance of the device. It was only partly mechanical. Porniarsk would not, or could not, explain its workings to me, although I could watch him as he worked with the small colored cubes that made up the inner parts of seven of the consoles. The cubes were about a quarter the size of children’s blocks and seemed to be made of some hard, translucent material. They clung together naturally in the arrangement in which they occurred behind the face of the console; and Porniarsk’s work, apparently, was to rearrange their order and get them to cling together again. Apparently, the rearrangement was different with each console; and Porniarsk had to try any number of combinations before he found it. It looked like a random procedure but, evidently, was not; and when I asked about that, Porniarsk relaxed his no-information rule enough to tell me that what he was doing was checking arrangements of the cubes in accordance with “sets” he already carried in his memory center, to find patterns that would resonate with the monad that was me. It was not the cubes that were the working parts, evidently, but the patterns.

Whatever he was doing, and however it was effective, when he got a collection of cubes to hang together in a different order, I felt the effect immediately. It was as if another psychic generator had come on-line in my mind. With each addition of power, or strength, or whatever you want to call it, I saw more clearly and more deeply into all things around me.

—Including the people. And from this came the bitter to join with the sweet of my life. For as, step by step, my perceptions increased, I came to perceive that Ellen was indeed intending to leave with Tek as soon as my work with the device had been achieved. She was staying for the moment and had talked Tek into staying, only so that he and she could hold down two of the consoles, as Porniarsk had said all of the adults in our party would need to do when I made my effort to do something about the time storm. After that, they would go; and nothing I could say would stop her.

The reasons why she had turned to Tek as she had, I could not read in her. Her personal feelings were beyond the reach of my perception. Something shut me out. Porniarsk told me, when I finally asked him, that the reason I could not know how she felt was because my own emotions were involved with her. Had I been able to force myself to see, I would have seen not what was, but what I wanted to see. I would have perceived falsely; and since the perception and understanding I was gaining with the help of the device were part of a true reflection of the universe, the device could give only accurate information; consequently, it gave nothing where only inaccuracy was possible.

So, I was split down the middle; and the division between the triumph and the despair in me grew sharper with the activation of each new console. After the fourth one, the avatar warned me that there was a limit to the step-up I could endure from the device.

“If you feel you’re being pushed too hard,” he said, “tell me quickly. Too much stimulus, and you could destroy yourself before you had a chance to use the device properly.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about.” And I did. I could feel myself being stretched daily, closer and closer toward a snapping point. But that point was still not reached; and I wanted to go to the limit no matter what would happen afterwards.

It was the pain of Ellen’s imminent leaving that drove me more than anything else. With the device beginning to work, I was partly out of the ordinary world already. I did not have to test myself by sticking burning splinters in my flesh to know that the physical side of me was much dwindled in importance lately. It was easy to forget that I had a body. But the awareness of my immaterial self was correspondingly amplified to several times its normal sensitivity; and it was in this immaterial area that I was feeling the loss of Ellen more keenly than the amputation of an arm and a leg together.

There was no relief from that feeling of loss except to concentrate on the expansion of my awareness. So, psychically, I pushed out and out, running from what I could not bear to face—and then, without warning, came rescue from an unexpected direction.

It was late afternoon, the sunlight slanting in at a low angle through the door to the roundhouse, which we had propped open while Porniarsk worked on the last console. Bill and I were the only other ones there. We had opened the door to let a little of the natural breeze and outer sun-warmth into the perfectly controlled climate of the interior; and in my case, this had brought the thought of my outside concerns with it, so that for a moment my mind had wandered again to thinking of Ellen.

I came back to awareness of the roundhouse, to see Bill and Porniarsk both looking at me. Porniarsk had just said something. I could hear the echo of it still in my ear, but without, its meaning had vanished.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s ready,” said Porniarsk. “How do you feel—able to take this seventh assistance? You’ll remember what I told you about the past increases not being limited? They each enlarge again with each new adaptation you make to the device. If you’re near your limit of tolerance now, the effect of this last increase could be many times greater than what it is presently; and you might find yourself crippled in this vital, non-physical area before you had time to pull yourself back from it.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I will, then,” said Porniarsk. He reached with one of his shoulder tentacles to the console half behind him and touched a colored square.

For a second there was nothing. Then things began to expand dramatically. I mean that literally. It was as if the sides of my head were rushing out and out, enclosing everything about me... the roundhouse, the peak, the village, the whole area between the mistwalls that now enclosed me, all the other areas touching that area, the continent, the planet... there was no end. In addition, not only was I encompassing these things, but all of them were also growing and expanding. Not physically, but with meaning-acquiring many and many times their original aspects, properties, and values. So that I understood all of them in three dimensions, as it were, where I before had never seen more than a single facet of their true shape. Now, seen this way, all of them—all things, including me—were interconnected.

So I found my way back. With the thought of interconnection, I was once more in The Dream, back in the spider web spanning the universe. Only now there were patterns to its strands. I read those patterns clearly; and they brought me an inner peace for the first time. Because, at last, I saw what I could do, and how to do it, to still the storm locally. Not just in this little section of the earth around me, but all around our planet and moon and out into space for a distance beyond us, into the general temporal holocaust. I saw clearly that I would need more strength than I presently had; and the pattern I read showed that success would carry a price. A death-price. The uncaring laws of the philosophical universe, in this situation, could balance gain against loss in only one unique equation. And that equation involved a cost of life.

But I was not afraid of death, I told myself, if the results could be achieved. After all, in a sense, I had been living on borrowed time since that first heart attack. I turned away from the patterns I was studying and looked deeper into the structure of the web itself, reaching for understanding of the laws by which it operated.

Gradually, that understanding came. Porniarsk had used the word “gestalt” in referring to that which he hoped I would perceive if I came to the situation here with a free and unprejudiced mind; and the word had jarred on me at the time. The avatar, we had all assumed, came from a race more advanced than ours— whether it was advanced in time or otherwise. I had taken it for granted that any twentieth century human terms would be inadequate to explain whatever Porniarsk dealt with, and that he would avoid them for fear of creating misunderstandings.

—Besides, “gestalt” came close to having been one of the cant words of twentieth century psychology; the sort of word that had been used and misused by people I knew, who wanted to sound knowledgeable about a highly specialized subject they would never take the time to study properly and understand. Granted, the avatar was probably using the human word nearest in meaning to what he wanted to say, I had still felt he could have explained himself in more hard-edged technical or scientific terms.

But then, later, he had also used the word “monad”; and, remembering that, I now began to comprehend one important fact. The forces of the time storm and the device he was building so I could come to grips with them, belonged not so much to a physical, or even a psychological, but to a philosophical universe. I was far from understanding why this should be. In fact, with regard to the whole business, I was still like a child in kindergarten, learning about traffic lights without really comprehending the social and legal machinery behind the fact of their existence. But with the aid of the device, I had finally begun, at least, to get into the proper arena of perception.

Briefly and clumsily, in the area in which I would have to deal with the time storm, the only monads—that is, the only basic, indestructible, building blocks or operators—were individual minds. Each monad was capable of reflecting or expressing the whole universe from its individual point of view. In fact, each monad had always potentially expressed it; but the ability to do so had always been a possible function, unless the individual monad-mind had possessed something like a device-of-assistance to implement or execute changes in what it expressed.

Of course, expressing a change in the universe, and causing that change to take place, was not quite as simple as wishing and making it so. For one thing, all monads involved in a particular expression of some part of the universe at a particular moment were also involved with each other and had to be in agreement on any change they wished to express. For another, the change had to originate in the point of view of a monad capable of reflecting all the physical—not just the philosophical—universe as plastic and controllable.

The time storm itself was a phenomenon of the physical universe. In the limited terms to which Porniarsk was restricted by our language, he had explained to me that it was the result of en-tropic anarchy. The expanding universe had continued its expansion until a point of intolerable strain on the network of forces that made up the space-time fabric had been reached and passed. Then, a breakdown had occurred. In effect, the space-time bubble had begun to disintegrate. Some of the galaxies that had been moving outward, away from each other and the universal center, producing a state of diminishing entropy, began, in spot fashion, to fall back, contracting the universe and creating isolated states of increasing entropy.

The conflict between opposed entropic states had spawned the time storm. As Porniarsk had said, the storm as a whole was too massive for control by action of the monads belonging to our original time, or even to his. But a delaying action could be fought. The forces set loose by the entropic conflict could be balanced against each other here and there, thereby slowing down the general anarchies enough to buy some breathing time, until the minds of those concerned with the straggle could develop more powerful forces to put in play across the connection between the philosophical and physical universes.

I was a single monad (though, of course, reinforced with the other seven at their altered consoles), and not a particularly capable one basically. But I was also something of a freak, a lucky freak in that my freakiness apparently fitted the necessity of the moment. That was why I could think, as I was privately doing now, of creating an enclave in the time storm that would include the whole earth and its natural satellite, instead of merely an enclave containing just the few square miles surrounding us, which had been Porniarsk’s hope.

“I’ll need one more console adapted,” I said to Porniarsk. “Don’t worry, now. I can handle it.”

“But there’s no one to sit at it,” said Bill.

“That’s correct,” said Porniarsk patiently. “There are only seven other adults in your party. I haven’t any effectiveness as a monad. Neither has the little girl.”

“She hasn’t?” I looked hard at the avatar.

“Not... in effect,” he said, with a rare second of hesitation. “A monad is required to have more than just a living intelligence and a personality. It has to have the capability of reflecting the universe. Wendy hasn’t matured enough to do that. If you could ask her about it, and she could answer you, she’d say something to the effect that to her the universe isn’t a defined entity. It’s amorphous, unpredictable, capable of changing and surprising her at any moment. For her, the universe as she now sees it is more like a god or devil than a mechanism of natural laws—something she’s got no hope of understanding or controlling.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll settle for the fact she’s at least partially a monad.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Porniarsk. “A monad either is, or is not. In any case, even if she was a partial monad, a partial monad is incapable of helping you.”

“What about when it’s combined with another partial monad?”

“What other partial monad?” Bill asked.

“The Old Man, down at the village.”

“This is even worse than your idea of using Wendy,” said Porniarsk. For the first time since we’d met him, the tone of his voice came close to betraying irritation with one of us. “The experimental down below us are artificially created animals. The very concept of ‘universe’ is beyond them. They’re only bundles of reflexes, conditioned and trained.”

“All but one of them,” I said. “Porniarsk, don’t forget there’re a lot of things I can see now with the help of the seven sets you’ve already produced, even if they don’t have monads in connection with them yet. One of those things is that the Old Man may have been bred in a test-tube—or whatever they all came from—but he’s got some kind of concept of ‘universe,’ even if it’s limited to his village and a mile or so of the rock around it. When we first came in here and passed the initial test of their attack, all the rest of them immediately took us for granted. Not the Old Man. By design or chance, he’s got something individual to measure new things against, plus whatever it takes to make new decisions on the basis of that measurement. And you can’t deny he’s adult.”

No one said anything for a moment.

“I don’t think,” said Bill at last, “that Marie’s going to like Wendy being hooked up to something like the Old Man.”

“Wendy won’t be. They’ll both just be hooked in with all the rest of us. Anyway, I’ll explain it to Marie.”

“How’ll you get the Old Man to cooperate?”

“He doesn’t have to cooperate,” I said. “I’ll bring him up here, connect him to one of the consoles and chain him to it with Sunday’s chain. Then give him a day or two to get used to the feel of assistance, and his being in connection with my mind. Once he feels the advantages these things give him, my bet is he’ll get over being scared and become interested.”

“If you use force to bring him up here,” said Porniarsk, “you’ll undoubtedly trigger off the antagonisms of his fellow experimentals.”

“I think I can do it without,” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

With that, I left the two of them and went back down to our camp, which was set up at the foot of the peak. I unchained Sunday and went looking for Marie. Sunday could only be trusted to stick around the camp when I was there. He had shown no particularly strong hunting instincts before in all the time I had known him; but for some reason the experimentals seemed to fascinate him. Since the first day of our camp at the foot of the hill, when I had caught him stalking one of the village inhabitants who was out hunting among the rocks, we had kept him chained up when I was up on the peak. It was possible he might not have hurt the experimental, but the sight I had had of him, creeping softly along, belly almost dragging the ground and tail a-twitch, was too vivid to forget.

At any rate, now I let him loose, and he butted his head against me and rubbed himself against my legs all the time I was looking for Marie. I found her, with Wendy, down at the creek by the foot of the peak, doing some washing.

It was not the time to mention that I wanted Wendy at one of the consoles. The little girl had come to trust me; and—I don’t care how male and solitary you are—if a small child decides to take to you, you have to carry your own instincts somewhere outside the normal spectrum not to feel some sort of emotional response. Anything unexpected or new tended to frighten Wendy; and any concern or doubt about it by her mother made the fright certain. The idea would have to be presented to Wendy gently, and with Marie’s cooperation. I spoke to Marie now, instead, about the other matter I had in mind.

“Have you got any of that brandy left?” I asked.

She put down in a roaster pan some jeans of Wendy’s she was wringing out and shook her hands to get the excess water off. She had her own slacks rolled up above her knees and her legs and feet bare so that she could wade into the creek. The work had pinkened her face and tousled her hair. She looked, not exactly younger, but more relaxed and happy than usual; and for a second I felt sad that I had not been able to love her after all, instead of Ellen.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked.

“No occasion,” I said. “I’m hoping to bait the Old Man in the village down there, so I can get him up to the roundhouse. We want to try him with the consoles. You do have some brandy left?”

“Yes,” she said. “How much do you want?”

“One full bottle ought to be plenty,” I said. “Is there that much?”

“I’ve got several full bottles,” she said. “Do you want it right away, or can I finish up here first?”

“I’d like to get down to the village before dark.”

“I’ll be done in five minutes.”

“Fine, then,” I said and sat down on a boulder to wait. It took her closer to fifteen than five minutes, as it turned out, but there was still at least an hour or so of sunset left. We went back to the camper; she got me an unopened bottle of brandy, and I walked down to the village with it.

The whole thing was a gamble. I had no idea what kind of body chemistry the experimentals had. From what Porniarsk had said, they had evidently been developed by future humans from ape stock; chimpanzee at a guess. The larger part of their diet seemed to be some sort of artificially prepared eatable in a cube form that came from inside one of the dome-shaped buildings. But since the building was small, and the supply of the cubes seemed to be inexhaustible, I had guessed that there was some kind of underground warehouse to which the building was merely an entrance. However, in addition to the cubes, the experimentals were at least partly carnivorous. They went out into the rocks around the village in the daytime to hunt small rodent-like animals with their throwing knives; and these they either ate raw on the spot or carried back into their buildings at the village to be eaten at leisure.

All these things seemed to add up to the strong possibility that they had digestive systems and metabolisms pretty similar to a human’s. But there was no way of being sure. All I could do was try.

The Old Man was not out in the open when I first walked into the village, but before I was half a dozen steps down the main street, he had emerged from his dwelling to hunker down in front of his doorway and stare at me steadily as I approached. I de-toured along the way to pick up a couple of handleless cups or small bowls that one of the local workmen was turning out on his machine. I’d thought earlier of bringing a couple of containers from our camp, then decided the Old Man would be more likely to trust utensils that were familiar to him. I came up to within ten feet of him, sat down cross-legged on the hard-packed, stony dirt of the street, and got my bottle from the inner jacket pocket in which I had been carrying it.

I put both cups down, poured a little brandy into both of them, picked up one, sipped from it and started staring back at him.

It was not the most lively cocktail hour on record. I pretended to drink, pouring as little as possible into my cup each time, and putting somewhat more into the other cup, which slowly began to fill. The Old Man kept staring at me; apparently, he was capable of keeping it up without blinking as long as the daylight lasted. Eventually, even the small amounts of liquor with which I was wetting my tongue began to make themselves felt. I found myself talking. I told the Old Man what fine stuff it was I was drinking, and I invited him to help himself. I speculated on the interesting discoveries he would make if he only joined me and became friendly.

He continued to stare.

Eventually, the other cup was as full as it could safely be, and the sun was almost down. There was nothing more I could do. I left the cups and the bottle with the top off and got to my feet.

“Pleasant dreams,” I said to him, and left. Back once more in the rocks a safe distance from the village, I got out my field glasses and peered down in the direction of his building. It was almost dark, and one thing the experimentals did not have was artificial lighting. They all disappeared into their buildings at dusk and only reappeared with the dawn. But by straining my vision now, I was able to make out a dim figure still in front of the Old Man’s building. I squinted through the binoculars, my eyes beginning to water; and, just as I was about to give up, I caught a tiny glint of light on something moving.

It was the bottle, being upended in the general area of the Old Man’s head. I gave an inward, silent whoop of joy. Unless he had decided to use the brandy for a shampoo, or unless he turned out to have a body that reacted to alcohol as if it was so much branch water, I had him.

I waited until the moon came up, then got the pickup and drove by moonlight down through the main street of the village to the Old Man’s building. I took an unlit flashlight and went in the building entrance. Inside, I turned the flashlight on and found the Old Man. He was curled up in the corner of the single room that was the building’s interior on a sort of thick rug. He reeked of brandy, and was dead drunk.

He was also no lightweight. I had not thought it to look at him, for all the experimentals looked small and skinny by human standards; but apparently they were nothing but bone and muscle. Still, I managed to carry him out to the pickup and get him inside the cab. Then I drove back out of the village to the camp.

At the camp, I took him out of the pickup, unchained Sunday and put him in the pickup, put the chain and collar on the Old Man and lifted him, still snoozing, into one of the jeeps. By this time, I was surrounded by people wanting to know what I was doing.

“I want to try him out on the equipment up at the roundhouse,” I said. “He drank almost a full bottle of brandy, and he ought to sleep until morning, but with all this noise he may just wake up. Now, will you let me get him put away up there? Then I’ll come down and tell you all about it.”

“We already had dinner,” said Wendy.

“Hush,” said Marie to her, “Marc’ll have his dinner when he gets back. You’re coming right back down?”

“In twenty minutes at the outside,” I said.

I turned on the lights of the jeep and growled up the hillside in low gear. The partitions between the consoles had supports that were anchored in the concrete floor of the roundhouse; and I chained the sleeping Old Man to one of these. As an afterthought, I took from the jeep the canteen of drinking water we always kept with each of the vehicles and left it beside him. If he got drunk like a human, he was likely to have a hangover like a human.

Then I growled my way back down again to the camp to turn Sunday loose, answer questions, and have my dinner.

To everybody except Porniarsk and Bill, who already knew what I had in mind, I explained my capture of the Old Man with a half-truth, saying I wanted to see if he could be useful as a partial monad when we tried to use the equipment in the roundhouse, the day after tomorrow. It was not until later that evening, in the privacy of the camper, after Wendy was asleep, that I talked to Marie about using the little girl at one of the consoles. Surprisingly, Marie thought it was a very good idea. She said Wendy had no one to play with but the dogs, and she had been wanting badly to get in on what the adults were doing.