Time Storm

19

I slept that night, but I did not rest. As soon as I closed my eyes I was off among the strands of the spider web, riding the shifting forces of the time storm about our world. I scuttled about, studying them. I already knew what I would have to do. Every so often, for a transitory moment, the forces in this area I had chosen came close to a situation of internal balance. If, at just the right moment, I could throw all the force controlled by the eight other monads and myself against the tangle of conflicting forces that was the storm, hopefully I could nudge this tiny corner of the storm into a state of dynamic balance.

Why do I say “hopefully”? I knew I could do it—if only Wendy and the Old Man, under the assistance of the device, would give me amplification enough to act as an eighth monad. For it was not power I needed but understanding. As clearly as I could see the forces now, I needed to see them many times more clearly, in much finer detail. Close in, focused down to the local area which was all that Porniarsk had envisioned me bringing into balance, my vision was sharp enough. But on wider focus, when I looked further out into the time storm, the fine detail was lost. One more monad and I could bring those distant, fuzzy forces into clarity.

It was merely a matter of waiting until morning, I told myself, finally, and made myself put the whole problem out of my head.

At my bidding, it went; which was something such a problem would never have done a week before. But then another thought came to perch on my mind like a black crow.

I was aware I had never been what the world used to call a kind or moral man, a “good” man, as my grandfather would have said. I had always let myself do pretty much what I wanted, within practical limits; and I had never been particularly caring, or concerned for other people. But ethical laws are a part of any philosophical universe; they have to be. And was it entirely in agreement with those laws, now, my carrying these eight other people—nine, if you counted the Old Man as being in the people category—into a joust with something as monstrous as the time storm, only because of my own hunger to know and do?

Granted, I could not see any way in which they could be hurt. The only one I was putting on the line, as far as I knew, was myself. But there are always understandings beyond understandings. Perhaps there was some vital bit of information I did not have.

On the other hand, perhaps that was not really what was bothering me. I looked a little deeper into myself and found the real fishhook in my conscience; the unanswered question of whether, even if I knew there was real danger to the others, I would let that be reason enough to stop me. Perhaps I would go ahead anyway, prepared to sacrifice them to my own desires, my own will.

This question was harder to put out of my mind than the time storm problem, but in the end, I managed. I lay, open-eyed and without moving, until the dawn whitened the shade drawn over the window on the side of the camper across from the bunk on which I lay with Marie.

I got up and dressed quietly. Marie slept on, but Wendy opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Go back to sleep,” I told her. She closed her eyes again without argument. (Probably only humoring me, I thought.)

Dressed, I glanced at Marie, half-tempted to wake her and say a few words to her. But there was no good reason for that, I realized, unless I only wanted to leave her with some enigmatic, but portentous, statement she could remember afterwards and worry over, wondering if she could have done something more for me in some way; and things might have been different. I was a little ashamed of myself and let myself out of the camper as softly as I could.

Outside, the morning air was dry and cold. I shivered, even under the leather jacket I was wearing, and fired up the coleman stove to make a pot of coffee. All the time I was making it, I could feel the Old Man’s presence in the back of my mind. He was connected to the console, which meant he was in connection with me. I could feel that he was awake now and suffering from the hangover I had anticipated. The discomfort was making him savage—I could tell that, too. But underneath the savagery he was beginning to wonder a little at what his mind could now sense of me, and through me, of tile larger universe.

I made my coffee, drank it, and drove one of the jeeps to the roundhouse. Inside, around where the Old Man had been, it was a mess. He had been sick—I should have thought of the possibility of that. In addition, he had urinated copiously.

I cleaned up, cautiously. Now that he was awake, I had enough respect for those ape-like arms of his not to let him get a grip on me. But he let me work on until I was right next to him, without making any move in my direction. He was still staring at me all the time, but now there was a speculative gleam in his brown eyes. He had now realized who it was his mind connected to. I could feel him in my head, exploring the connection and the situation. I had guessed right. Now, he was interested. But his mind was still alien to me, much more alien than Porniarsk’s.

I took a chance, disconnected him from the console, unhooked his chain from the stanchion, and led him outside, to ensure that any further eliminations he was moved to would take place somewhere else than in the roundhouse. I found a boulder too heavy for him to move and with a lower half that was narrower than the top, so that the loop of chain I looked around it could not be pulled off over the top. I rechained him to this. The boulder was on the far side of the roundhouse, so that he could neither see his village nor be seen from it, assuming that his fellows down there had distance vision good enough to pick him out. Then I left him with some bread, an opened can of corned beef and a refilled canteen of water, and went down to my own breakfast. He let me go without a sound, but his eyes followed me with their speculative look as long as I was in sight. All the way down the mountain, I could feel his mind trying to explore mine.

Once back at the camp, I got out the binoculars and looked over the village. Its inhabitants were out of their homes and about their daily activities. None of them seemed to be missing the Old Man or showing any curiosity about the lack of his presence. That much was all right, then. I went back, put the binoculars away and ate breakfast. All the others were up and also breakfasting; but there was a tension, a taut feeling in the very air of the camp.

I did not feel like talking to anyone; and the rest seemed to understand this. They left me alone while I was eating—all but Sunday, who clearly sensed that something unusual was up. He did not rub against me in his usual fashion, but prowled around and around me, his tail twitching as if his nerves were on fire. He made such an ominous demonstration that I was alarmed for Bill, when at last, he started to come toward me.

But Sunday drew back just enough to let him get close, although he circled the two of us, eyeing Bill steadily and making little occasional singing noises in his throat.

“I don’t want to bother you,” Bill said. His voice was hardly more than a murmur, too low for any of the others to overhear.

“It’s all right,” I said. “What is it?”

“I just wanted you to know,” he said, “you can count on me.”

“Well,” I said, “thanks.”

“No, I really mean count on me,” he insisted.

“I hear you,” I said. “Thanks. But all you’ll have to do today is sit at that console and let me use you.”

He looked back at me for a second in a way that was almost as keyed-up and strange as Sunday’s present behavior.

“Right,” he said and went off.

I had no time to puzzle over him. There was Sunday to get into the cab of the pickup and the doors safely closed on him; and the leopard was just not agreeable to going in this morning. In the end I had to haul him in as a dead weight, swearing at him, with one fist closed on the scruff of his neck and my other arm around his wedge-shaped cat chest below his forelegs. I didn’t dare have any of the others help me in the mood the leopard was in—even the girl. Though, in fact, she was busy at the moment, doing something in the motorhome with Marie—and she probably would not have come anyway if I’d called.

I finally got Sunday in and the door closed. Immediately he found himself trapped, he began to thrash around and call to me. I closed my ears to the sounds he was making and got my party into the jeeps and headed up the side of the peak. I was already at work with the back of my head, monitoring the present interplay of the forces in the storm, as far as I could pick them out. A real picture of the pattern out as far as the Moon’s orbit would have to wait until the others were all at their consoles and connected with me. I thought I was gaining some advantage from them already, which was a very good sign. Either I had been building psychic muscle since the last two consoles had been finished, or the Old Man was proving to be even more useful than I had hoped. Actually, in one way, he had already exceeded expectations; because I was still as strongly linked to him as I had been when he had been connected to the console and chained inside the roundhouse.

Wendy, who had been chattering away merry and bright in the back of the jeep I was driving, fell into dubious silence as we pulled up to the level spot where the roundhouse stood and she saw the Old Man staring at us. But he only gave her and the others a single surveying glance and then came back to concentrate on me as I got out of the jeep and came back toward him.

He knew where I was going to take him. He came along almost eagerly when I unlocked the chain and led him to the roundhouse door. It slid aside automatically as we got within arm’s length of it, and he went over the threshold ahead of me with a bound, headed toward his console. I took him to it and chained him on a short length of the chain, so that he could not reach around the partition to whoever would be at the console next to him.

Bill followed me in and blocked the door open to the outer air, as we had got in the habit of doing. The others followed him. They began to take their places under Porniarsk’s direction and let themselves be connected to their consoles. The dark material clung to itself when one end of it was loosely wrapped around the throat. The further end of it reached through the face of the console to touch the pattern of blocks inside. It was so simple as to seem unbelievable, except for the fact that the strap had a mild, built-in warmth to it. It was a semi-living thing, Porniarsk had told me. All the connections in the roundhouse were made with such semi-living objects. They operated like psychic channels. If you imagine the tube through which a blood transfusion is being given, as being alive and capable of making its own connection with the blood systems of the two people involved in the transfusion, you have an analogous picture.

The straps were vaguely comforting to wear, like a security blanket. I noticed Wendy brighten up for the first time since seeing the Old Man, when hers was wrapped around her throat by Bill. There was one waiting for me at the monitoring station in the middle of the room; but I wanted to try seeing what kind of connection I could have with the other monads without it, before I strapped myself in.

Bill and Porniarsk strapped in the others, then Bill strapped himself in, and Porniarsk went to the monitoring station. He reached with one tentacle for the colored square on the console there that activated all connections. His tentacle flicked down to touch the square, and the connection already established between myself and the Old Man suddenly came alive with our mutual understanding of what would happen when activation took place.

The Old Man howled.

His vocal capabilities were tremendous. All of us in the roundhouse were half-deafened by the sound, which rang like a fire siren in our ears, and broadcast itself outward from the propped-open door. In that same second, Porniarsk’s tentacle touched the surface of the square, and the connections were activated. Full contact with all the other monads there erupted around me; and full perception of the time storm forces out of Moon orbit distance smashed down on me like a massive wall of water. The Old Man’s howl was cut off in mid-utterance. I found my body running for the roundhouse door.

For with contact had come full understanding of what the Alpha Prime had done, and what he had been trying to do. I burst out of the roundhouse and looked down the steep, bouldered face of the peak that fell toward the village. The lower edge of it was alive with black, climbing bodies.

How the Old Man had contacted them, I did not know. His connection with me and the console had made it possible, that was obvious; but he had used channels of identity with his own people that were not part of my own, human machinery. The most I could understand was that he had not actually called them, in a true sense. He had only been able to provoke an uneasiness in them that had sent most of them out hunting among the lower rocks, in the direction of the peak.

But now they had heard him. Lost somewhere in the gestalt of the monad group of which he and I were a part—Porniarsk had been right in his use of that word, for the group, myself and this place were all integrated into a whole now—the Old Man’s mind was triumphant. He knew that he had called in time, that his people had heard and were coming.

I whirled around and stared back into the roundhouse through the open door, though I already knew what I would see. Inside, all the figures were motionless and silent. There was not even a chest-movement of breathing to be seen in any of them, for they were caught in a timeless moment—the moment in which we had contacted the storm and I had paused to examine the pattern of its forces. Even Porniarsk was frozen into immobility with his tentacle-tip touching his activation square on the monitor console. The square itself glowed now, with a soft, pink light.

I was still unconnected and mobile. But the Old Man’s people would be here in twenty minutes; and all our weapons were down at the camp.

I watched my body turn and run for the nearest jeep, leap into it, start it, turn it, and get it going down the slope toward camp. I had the advantage of a vehicle, but the distance was twice as much, down to camp, than it was up the slope the experimentals were climbing, and twice as far back up again. The jeep bounced and slid down the shallower slope on this side of the peak, skidding and slewing around the larger boulders in the way. My body drove it; but my mind could not stay with it, because I had already seen enough of the present moment’s pattern to locate the upcoming pressure point I searched for. That pressure point would be coming into existence in no more time than it would take the villagers to climb to the roundhouse, possibly, even in less time. I had that long only to study all the force lines involved and make sure that my one chance to produce a state of balance was taken exactly on the mark.