Time Storm

22

We had won. In fact, the world had won, for the freezing of the movement of the time lines into a state of dynamic balance was complete for the immediate area of our planet. But for me, personally, after that there followed a strange time, the first part of which I was not really all there in my head and the second part of which, I was most earnestly trying to get out of my head.

It was left to the others to pick up the pieces and deal with the period of adjustment to the new physical state of affairs, which they did by themselves. Of the months immediately following the moment of change at the station, I have no clear memory. It was a period of time in which days and nights shuttered about me, light and dark, light and dark, like frames on a film strip. Spring ran into summer, summer into fall, and fall into winter, without any real meaning for me. When the cold months came, I would have still sat outside in jeans and a tank top if the girl or Marie had not dressed me to suit the temperature; and I would probably have starved to death if they had not put food in front of me and stood over me to see that I ate it.

My reality during that time was all inside my skull, in a universe where the grey fog of indifference only lifted to a sharp awareness of psychic pain and guilt. Sunday had loved me—the only thing in the world that ever had—and I had killed him.

Porniarsk had worked a piece of technological magic almost immediately, out of knowledge from the time and place of his original avatar; but it did not help the way I felt. He had created some kind of force-field enclosure, in which Sunday’s stabbed and slain body was held in stasis—a sort of non-cryogenic preserving chamber. He could not bring Sunday back to life, Porniarsk told me; but as long as time had become a variable for us, there was always the chance that, eventually, we would contact someone with the knowledge to do it. He told me this many times, repeating himself patiently to get the information through the fog about me. But I did not believe him; and, after the first time, I refused to go anywhere near the black-furred body lying still, inside its glass-like energy shell.

The core of my guilt, though none of the rest suspected it, lay in the knowledge of my responsibility for Sunday’s death—and something more. The further element was part of the knowledge that I had always failed with any person or thing who had tried to get close to me. It was a fact of my experience; and, buried behind it all this time, had been the darker suspicion that when I could not turn love away from me, I would always at least manage to destroy its vehicle. Now, in my awareness of my own responsibility for the death of Sunday, I had confirmed that suspicion.

The confirmation was my own private purgatory. No one, not even Porniarsk, seemed to suspect that I might have, subconsciously, used the moment of coming to grips with the time storm to rid myself of the one creature who embarrassed me with an affection I lacked the personal machinery to return. But I myself knew the truth. I knew—and I woke fresh to the knowledge every morning. I sat with it through days of the months that followed and went to sleep with it at night.

As I saw it, my sin was not one of simple, but of calculated, omission. Which made it one of commission instead. It printed itself as a damning question on the clouds above me in the daytime and glowed, invisible to all eyes but mine, on the darkness of the ceiling above me, at night. If I could read the factors of the time storm, the question ran—and I had been able—then why hadn’t I also taken a moment to puzzle out the factors of human and animal interaction that had led to the deaths of Tek and Sunday?

I had not done so, the whisper inside me repeated night and day, because I had wanted them dead. Particularly, I had wanted Sunday dead; for if he continued to exist and follow me about, eventually the other humans would discover that there was an emptiness in me where a heart ought to be. Then it would strike them that I could never care two cents for them either; and they would turn on me because who could be safe with someone like me around?

So, I told myself all this through something like a year and a half following the time storm; and in the telling I skirted the grey edge of insanity, because I could not stand myself as I now knew myself to be. It was a grim trick of fate that had sent me into life lacking the one necessary, invisible part that would have made me human, rather than some flesh and blood robot. Inside my mind, I pounded on walls, screaming at the unfairness of circumstances, that had taken me out of a situation where I had not known what an emotional cripple I was and brought me face to face with the fact of it.

For that was what had happened. Beginning with my mental explosion, when I had found out that Swannee was gone—dead and gone, gone forever—there had been a string of small confrontations. A series of little turns which gradually turned me about one hundred and eighty degrees, until at last I saw myself full-on in the mirror of my mind and stared at the metal bones shining through my plastic skin, the glow of the light bulbs artificially illuminating the polished caverns of my eyesockets. It was then I realized what had been going on in my unconscious all along.

Only Swannee had known me for the essentially nonhuman I was. Her reaction to that had been a sort of proof that I was human; but with all hope of finding her gone, I ran the risk of being recognized. At first, I had believed that the two with me—the crazy girl and the insane cat—were no threat to my secret. No one could expect me to have to prove myself to them. But then had come Marie and the unrecognized, but nagging, suspicion that she sensed the lack in me. Then Bill, another real person to watch me and draw conclusions. Then Porniarsk, who, perhaps, was too alienly knowledgeable; and after him, the experimentals, who, by definition, must also be creatures without souls, so that at any moment any one of the other people, the real people, might say to themselves—look at the way he acts with Sunday! Doesn’t that strike you as being like the way you’d expect the experimentals to respond to any affection or kindness?

But the greatest danger had come from the girl outgrowing her craziness after all. She had known me too long; and she had known Sunday. There had been signs in her to show that she knew me better than I had thought she did. I wanted to keep her around; but unless I did something, she would be the very one who would watch me with Sunday and put two and two together-after which she would have no use for me, and I would lose her forever.

Of course, Tek had threatened to take her away anyway, which would have solved things in a way I did not want. But deep inside me, I knew Tek was no match for me. He had never really been a threat. There were a dozen ways in which I could have eliminated him from the situation, right down to following him and the girl, killing him and bringing her back by force. No, Sunday had been the one to eliminate, and now I had taken care of him. Sitting around by myself as the days and nights went past, I mourned—not for him, but for the bitterness of having to face what I was, when I had been so successful at hiding it from myself before.

The others were very patient with me. I would have shot me, dug a grave, tumbled myself in and got rid of the extra mouth to feed, the extra clothes to wash. But they were different. So they endured me, letting me roam around as I liked, only coming to collect me when it was time for a meal or bedtime; and I had the privacy I wanted.

Or at least, I had it for a long time. But then my isolation began to be invaded. I don’t know when I first became conscious of it; perhaps I had been seeing his dark, lean figure around, but ignoring it for some time. But the day came when I noticed the Old Man sitting watching me, hunkered down in the shade of a boulder (it was summer again by that time) about thirty yards off along the hillside where I sat by myself.

I remember wondering then how he had gotten loose. In the back of my mind, he had been still chained up, all this time, in the station. Possibly, I thought, they had turned him loose some time since to go back down with his fellow experimentals. I did not want to come out of my grey fog to the effort of asking any of the others about him, so I decided to ignore him. He was simply sitting, watching me; and his limited mind, I thought, should get tired of that after a while, and I would be rid of him.

I decided to ignore him.

But he did not grow tired of watching and go away. Gradually, I began to be aware that he would always be around somewhere close, even if he was not plainly visible. Not only would he be there, but after some weeks, it became obvious that he was gradually lessening the distance at which he sat from me.

I had no idea what he was after; but I wanted him gone. I wanted to be left alone, even by imitation subhumans. One day-he was now in the habit of sitting less than twenty feet from me—I let one hand that was hidden from him by my body drop casually on a stone about the size of a medium hen’s egg, gathered it in, and waited. Sometime later, when I thought I saw his attention distracted for a moment—as it turned out I was wrong—I scooped it up and threw it at him as hard as I could.

He lifted a hand and caught it before it reached him.

The catch he made was so effortless that I never tried to throw another thing at him. Nothing except his arm had moved, not even his shoulder. His long, skinny arm had simply lifted and let the stone fly into the palm of it. Then he had dropped it, discarding it with a disinterested opening of his fingers; and all the while, his eyes had stayed unmoving on mine.

Sour fury boiled in me at that; and it was enough to bring me partway back to life. My first reaction was that I would tell Bill or one of the others to take him away and chain him up again. But then, it struck me that if I betrayed the fact that I was no longer pretty much out of things, the others would want me to come back to being human with them again-which would put me once more on the way to having my secret discovered.

I decided I would have to get rid of the Old Man myself; and I began to plot how to do it. Eventually, I worked out a simple, but effective, plan. I would take one of the handguns when no one was looking and hide it in my shirt until I had a shot at him that a blind man could not miss. Then when the others came to find out who had fired, I would tell them he had made threats of attacking me for some time now; and finally, I had been forced to kill him in self-defense.

The business of getting the gun was simple enough. The handguns and most of the rifles were still kept in the motorhome where I lived with the girl, Marie and little Wendy. I helped myself to a Snubnose .32 revolver the morning after I had concocted my scheme and tucked it inside my shirt into the waistband of my slacks. The shirt was loose enough so that it hid any outlines that might have shown through. Then I went about my daily business of leaving the others as soon as I had eaten breakfast and going off to sit among the rocks of the hillside about half a mile from camp.

I had been tempted to go even farther than usual from the camp —far enough so that the sound of my shot could not be heard. But, now that I had made up my mind to kill the Old Man, I was afraid of doing anything out of the ordinary that might make him suspicious. Therefore, I went to my usual place and sat down in the morning sunlight. Shortly I spotted him, squatting less than thirty yards off in a patch of shadow.

I sat where I was, ostensibly ignoring him. After a little while, I made an excuse to glance in his direction and saw that he was a good deal closer than before—perhaps half the distance. It was curious, but I had never been able to actually catch him in the process of moving. Whenever I looked, he was always seated and still, as if he had been there for several hours.

The morning wore on. He came close—but close was still not close enough. He was less than fifteen feet from me at last and would come no closer, but he was off to my left side behind me, so that I would have to turn about to face him and pull the gun at the same time—two movements that, I was sure, would startle him into leaping for protection behind one of the large boulders that were all around us.

That particular day ended with nothing happening. I sat. He sat. The only difference from the many days we had spent, together but apart, before was that for the first time, my mind was not concentrated on my inner fog, but on stealthily observing him and calculating the possibility of luring him within certain range of my weapon.

However, he did not cooperate. The next day, it was the same thing. The next day, again the same. I finally realized that he was either too wary or too diffident to approach me except from an oblique angle. I would have to resign myself to waiting until he came almost close enough to be touched, or otherwise put himself in some other completely vulnerable position.

I consoled myself with the fact that all I needed was patience. He would be bound to come close eventually, since every day he inched a little nearer. In fact, it took him nearly three weeks before he did come near enough to provide the target I wanted; and in those three weeks, something strange began to happen to me. I found myself actually enjoying the situation we were both in. I was still trapped in my own miseries like a fly in a forest of flypaper, but at the moment, I was navigating between the sticky strands under the impetus of the excitement of the hunt. I was reminded one day of a poem I had not thought of for years, or read since I was a boy, by Rudyard Kipling and called “The Ballad Of Boh Da Thon.” It was about a bandit who had been chased by an English army unit weeks on end, and it had a pair of lines that applied nicely to the Old Man and me:

And sure if pursuit in possession ends, the Boh and his trackers were best of friends....

For the first time I found myself beginning to like the Old Man, if for no other reason than that he was giving me something to want.

However, the day finally came in which—glancing out of the corners of my eyes—I felt, rather than saw, him squatting almost within the reach of one of my arms and certainly within the reach of one of his.

There was no way I could miss with the revolver or he could dodge, at this distance. But, strangely enough, now that I had him exactly where I wanted him, I was more than ever fearful of frightening him off, of missing him somehow. I was as shy as a kid on his first date. I wanted to turn and look at him; but it took all my will to do so. For a long time I could not manage to turn my head towards him at all. Then, as the sun began to climb higher in the sky, I began to swivel my head on my neck so slowly that it felt like the movement a stone statue might make over centuries. When the sun was directly over our heads, I was still not looking squarely at him, although now I was conscious of his dark shape as a sort of cloud, or presence, at the corner of my left eye.

All this time I had been sliding my hand gradually in between the two lowest buttons of my shirt. I slid it in until my cold fingers lay flat on the warm skin of my belly, and the tips of those same fingers touched the hard curve of the polished butt of the revolver.

It was now noon, lunchtime; but I was afraid of breaking the spell. So I continued to sit without going back to camp, and the Old Man continued to sit, and the sun moved on while the slow, agonizing, almost involuntary turning of my neck continued. I was like someone under a spell or curse. I began to be afraid that the day would end, and I would have not turned enough to catch his eyes with my own, to hold his attention for the seconds I would need to draw the gun and shoot him. Strangely, in this moment, I had finally lost all connection with my reason for killing him. It was simply something to which I was committed, as a tightrope walker might be committed to cross a narrow wire stretched from one cliff to another.

Then—I don’t know why—but there was an abrupt snapping of the tension. Suddenly, I was free to turn my head as swiftly as I wanted.

I turned and looked directly at him.

It was a shock. I had completely forgotten that I had never looked closely into his features before. The black-haired anthropoid face, with something of the immutable sadness of the gorilla, looked back at me. It looked back at me from as close a distance as the features of some human companion might face me across a table in a restaurant. But the Old Man’s face was all black fur, red nostrils, yellow teeth and yellower eyes—eyes as yellow as Sunday’s had been.

For a moment, those eyes froze me. They placed a new paralysis upon my soul, one that, for a moment, I did not believe I could throw off. Then, with a fierce effort, I told myself that this was not Sunday or anything like him; and I felt my hand reaching automatically for the revolver.

My fingers closed upon the butt. I pulled it loose from the pressure of the waistband of my pants—and all the time I was looking directly into his face, which did not alter its expression, but gazed steadily back at me.

It was a moment outside of time. We were caught together in a tableau, flies in amber both of us, frozen and incapable of move-merit—except for that gun-hand of mine which continued to move with a life of its own, closing about the gun butt and lifting it to clear the muzzle toward the face before me. There was something inevitable about its movements. I could have felt no more trapped by circumstances if I had been tied down in the path of a juggernaut.

In a second it would have been over—but in that second, the Old Man reached out and placed a hand on both my shirt and the hand holding the gun, arresting my movement.

The pressure of his hand was a calm, almost a gentle touch. I could feel the unexerted strength behind his fingers; but he was not gripping my hand, merely laying his own on top of it, just as, once, I might have stopped some business guest reaching for the check of a lunch to which I had just taken him. It was not the kind of touch that could have checked me from continuing to draw the gun and shoot him if I had decided to. But somehow, I was stopped.

For the first time I looked directly into—deeply into—those eyes of his.

I had gone to zoos once and looked into the eyes of some of the animals there. There were no more zoos now, nor was it likely that there would ever be again. But once there had been; and in their cages, particularly in the cages of the big cats, the apes, and bears and the wolves, I had looked into wild animal eyes from only a few feet of distance. And there had been something in those eyes that was not to be found in the eyes of my fellow humans. There were eyes that looked at me from the other side of the universe. Perhaps they could be loving, perhaps, under stress, they could be filled with fury and anger; but now, to me, a human, they were remote—separated from me by a gulf neither man nor beast could cross. They looked at me, without judgment and without hope.

If they lived and it was their fate to encounter me in the open, they would deal with me as best their strength allowed. If I died they would watch me die, simply because there was nothing else they could do, whether I was their deepest enemy or their dearest friend. Their eyes were the eyes of creatures locked up alone in their own individual skulls all the hours and minutes of their life. As animals, they neither knew nor expected the communication every human takes for granted, even if he or she is surrounded by mortal foes.

The eyes of the Old Man were like that—they were the fettered eyes of an animal. But mixed in with that, there was something more—for me alone. It was not love such as Sunday had had for me. But it was something in its own way, perhaps, as strong. I recognized it without being able to put a name to it—although suddenly, I knew what it was.

The Old Man and his tribe, who had been born from test tubes, had been created on the brink of humanity. They teetered on the nice edge of having souls. Of these, the most aware was the Alpha Prime, Old Man himself, because he was the most intelligent, the strongest and the most questioning. Also, he had shared the monad with me in that moment in which we had brought the local effects of the time storm to a halt. In fact, he had shared it alone with me, before any of the other humans had joined in. He had been exposed then to communication for the first time in his life; and it must have awakened a terrible hunger in him. I realized that, all this time, he had been trying to get back into communication with me.

So, that is why as soon as he had been let free again—whenever that was—he had begun to search me out, to approach me little by little, day by day, until now, at last, he sat at arm’s length from me. He not only sat at arm’s length from me, but with his hand in a gesture that was almost pleading, arresting the gun with which he must know I had planned to kill him.

My own soul turned over in me. Because I suddenly understood what he had understood. From the beginning, because of what we had shared in the moment of the taming of the time storm, he had been much more understanding of me than I had suspected. He had known that I did not want him near me. He had known that my desire to be free of him could be murderous. And he had known what I was doing when my hand went inside my shirt.

I had had enough experience with him to know that my strength was like a baby’s compared to his—for all that we probably weighed about the same. It would have been no effort for him to have taken the gun from me. He could have easily broken the arm that held it or throttled me with one hand. But he had done none of these. Instead he had merely come as close as he ever must have come in his life to pleading with someone to spare him, to accept him, to be his fellow, if not his friend.

In that same moment I realized that he—strange as it seemed and incredible as it was that he should have the capability, just from that solitary shared moment in the monad—understood better than any of them how Sunday had felt about me, and how I had felt about Sunday. In his animal-human eyes I read it, how I had really felt about Sunday; and at last—at last—I fell apart.

I had been right both ways. I had been right in that I was someone who did not know how to love. But I had been wrong, in spite of this, when I told myself I had not loved the crazy cat. All this I understood suddenly, at last, in the moment in which the Old Man squatted before me, with one long hand still laid flat against my shirt, over the spot where my fist and the revolver that was to have killed him were concealed. The floodgates within me went down suddenly and I was washed halfway back again once more to the shores of humanity. Only halfway, but this was farther than I had ever been before.