Time Storm

23

I sat there and cried for a long time; and the Old Man waited me out as he might have waited out a storm, squatting in a cave in the hills. When it was over, I was sane again; or at least as close to sanity as I could expect to be, under the circumstances. Together we went back to the camp, and from then on, he was openly at my side most of the daylight hours.

What he had done, of course, was to crack the protective shell I had grown about myself in reaction to the massive internal effort of controlled power that had been involved in using the monad. In doing that, I had discovered muscles of the inner self that I had not known I owned, and I had also tuned myself up emotionally with a vengeance. In self-defense, with Sunday’s death, my mind had closed itself off until it could heal the psychic tearings these stresses had created. Now that I was back in my skull, however, these things were suddenly very obvious to me; and some other things as well. Chief of these was that there was a great deal I needed to do with myself if I wanted to continue my joust with the time storm and the universe.

Meanwhile, I was faced with reentering the world of the living. To my pleasure and to the feeding of a new humbleness inside me, the others had been doing very well without my guiding hand. I found that I was now ruler of what might well be called a small kingdom—and that was only the beginning of the discoveries awaiting me.

A great deal had happened in the year and a half that I had been obsessed with myself. For one thing, the world was a world again. With the interference from the moving time lines ended, short-wave radio communication had tied the continents back together, to the mutual discovery of all us survivors that there were more of us than we had suspected. The North American continent was now a patchwork of relatively small kingdoms, like my own, with the exception of the west coast, from Baja California northward halfway into British Columbia, Canada. That west coast strip, as far east as Denver and in some cases beyond, was now a single sovereignty under a woman who called herself the Empress. The Empress was from the Hawaiian Islands—which appeared to have suffered less than any other part of the world from the moving mistwalls and the time changes of the time storm. The islands had lost no more than two-thirds of their population, as opposed to a figure that must be much closer to ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent for most of the rest of the world. The Empress was a woman from the island of Hawaii itself, who had seized control there with a ragtag, impromptu army, and then gone on to take over the other islands and the west coast of North America.

England and Ireland, apparently, were nearly deserted. Most of northern Europe also was a wasteland because of a brief ice age that had come with some of the time changes and covered most of that continent with an ice sheet from the Arctic Circle as far south as the middle of France. This ice sheet was now gone; but the human life that was left was now all below the former ice line. Stretching around the Mediterranean and into the north of Africa were essentially nothing more than scattered, single family households. The rest of Africa, like South America, was largely non-communicating, from which Bill assumed that those areas had been pretty well depopulated by the time storm also.

Russia, India and the whole Oriental area had also been hard hit. As a result they appeared to have fallen back into a sort of peaceful medieval, agricultural condition, with small villages scattered sparsely across the immensity of land. Australia and New Zealand had lost almost all of their cities, but had a surprising number of families surviving pretty much as they always had in the interior and on the rest of that island continent. However, these people, although articulate and largely supplied with their own radios, were so widely scattered that they were also, in effect, no more than individual families living in isolation.

Bill had made a large map on one wall of the rambling, continually building structure that my group had come to call the summer palace. The place was a strange construction, being composed partly of lumber, partly of native rocks cemented together, and partly of cement blocks trucked in from a half-obliterated town thirty miles away, that had owned a cement block factory. The palace had poured concrete floors and bare walls for the most part; but Bill had been a good enough architect to see that it was adequately wired and equipped with ductwork, not only for heating, but for summer air conditioning. I think that I had been conscious of the existence of his map in it, during my nonparticipating period; but I had never looked at the map with any degree of interest until the Old Man cracked me out of my shell. Now that I did, I found myself marveling that what was left of the world could have gotten its scattered parts back into contact with each other in such a short time.

I discovered something else, as a byproduct of reawakening to what was going on around me. This was that our new world was a world hungry for news, and I myself was a piece of that news. By this time, all the people on earth who had radio receivers knew who it was who had brought the local effects of the time storm into balance. They knew what I looked like, who my lieutenants were, and what our local situation here was. I was, I discovered, regarded as a sort of combination of Einstein and Napoleon—and the planet’s number one celebrity. This attention might ordinarily have given me a large opinion of myself. However, under the circumstances, it had a hollow ring to it. It was rather like being crowned King of the Earth on the stage of the empty Hollywood Bowl, while an audience of five sat in the middle of the front row seats and applauded energetically. After discovering what it was like, I put my position in the world-wide, public eye out of my mind and concentrated on matters close to home.

It was curious that I, who had once believed that I could never endure to be married, now had two wives. Of course, legally, I was married to neither one of them; but wives they were in every practical sense of the word, and particularly in the eyes of the community surrounding us. Marie and Ellen—I would have bet anyone that if there were ever two women likely not to get on with each other at all, it would be those two. Marie was talkative, conventional and probably—she had never told me her age—older than I was. The girl was certainly still well under twenty, close-mouthed to an almost abnormal degree, and recognized no convention or rules but her own. What the two of them could have in common was beyond me. I puzzled over it from time to time but never succeeded in getting an answer.

But they joined forces magnificently when it came to lining up in opposition to me. One of the typical examples of this appeared directly after I had come back to my senses and rejoined the world of the living. All the time that I had been more or less out of my head, they had taken care of me as if I had been three years old. Now that I had my ordinary wits back, rather than just getting back to normal ways, they both apparently decided, without a word, that I should get it through my head that my days of being waited upon were over.

This would have been all right if they had merely returned to the normal pattern of affairs that had existed before we got the time storm forced into balance. But they now moved as far in the direction of leaving me to my own devices as they had gone previously in watching over me. In fact, the whole matter went to what I considered ridiculous limits.

For example, during the time I had been obsessed with my inner problems, I had been, except for rare intervals, as sexless as a eunuch. When I came back to myself, of course, that changed. The day the Old Man helped me break me loose, I found myself waiting for the evening and the hours of privacy in the motorhome. I had never been one to want more than one woman in my bed at a time; and I was not at all sure whether it was the girl or Marie I wanted that night. But I definitely knew that I wanted one or the other. I gave them time to get settled first; but when I came to the motorhome, Ellen was nowhere to be seen and Marie was a mound under covers on her own bed, her back towards me.

I blew gently into her ear to wake her up and get her to turn toward me. She came to, but not satisfactorily.

“Not tonight,” she murmured sleepily, and pulled the blanket up to where it almost covered her head.

Annoyed, I left the motorhome and went out to look for Ellen. I found her after some search, in a sleeping bag at the foot of a tree, with her rifle leaning up against it in arm’s reach. The rebuff from Marie had taken some of the rosy glow off my feelings. I poked the sleeping bag and her eyes opened.

“What are you doing out here?” I said.

“Sleeping,” she said. “Goodnight.”

She closed her eyes and pulled her head down into the sleeping bag.

Angry, and not a little hurt, I wandered off. Was this all the two of them cared for me after all? Here I was back to normalcy and neither one seemed to give a damn. It was almost as if they had preferred me as the mindless near-idiot I had been for the past eighteen months.

I went back into the motorhome, opened the cupboards that held our bottled goods and took out a bottle of sour mash bourbon. I made myself a solitary campfire off into the woods, at the edge of the clearing holding the motorhome and the half-finished shape of the summer palace, and set out to get myself drunk by way of solitary celebration. But it did not work. I got thickheaded without feeling any better and finally gave up, going back to the motorhome and falling into my own lonely bunk without bothering to do much more than take off my boots.

If that was all they cared for how it had been with me this past year and a half, I thought resentfully as I dropped off.

It was not until late the next morning, when I woke up to a dry mouth, a headache and the sunlight streaming through the windows of the motorhome, that it occurred to me to think how it might have been for them too. If I had been essentially without a woman all that time, they had been essentially without a man. Or had they? That was a question I found I really didn’t want to consider, although I made a mental note to find the answer sometime later. (I never did find out as a matter of fact.) I got up, washed, shaved, changed clothes and went out.

Not only had they forsaken my bed, there was no sign of any breakfast made for me. Not that I was incapable of cooking for myself, but I had gotten used to having the spoon all but put in my mouth, and I felt the transition to the present state of neglect to be unnecessarily harsh and abrupt. However, the motorhome refrigerator, run from the standby oil generator outside it, had cold juice, eggs and canned sausage. I made myself a pretty decent meal, scrupulously washed up after myself—just to rub their noses in the fact that I could be independent too—and went outside to see what was going on.

There was no one around outside the summer palace, not the girl or Marie—not even Wendy. Now that I began to think of it, I had a vague impression from the past months that Wendy was ceasing to be the timid little creature she had been when I first saw her and was beginning to develop into a lively young girl, busy every hour of the day all over the place.

I went into the summer palace, prowled through its rooms and discovered Bill busily at work at a large draftsman’s table in the same room that had the map on the wall. Besides those two items, the room had three large filing cabinets, a regular desk covered with papers, and one wall entirely in bookcases.

“Hello,” I said to Bill.

He glanced at me over the top of whatever it was he was drawing, put down his pen and ruler and got off the high stool he had been sitting on. We shook hands with awkward formality.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Just fine.”

I glanced around the room.

“You’ve all been pretty busy,” I said.

“Oh well,” answered Bill, “there’s always a lot to do.”

“And you’ve been doing most of it, I’d guess,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he shook his head, “I couldn’t have carried most of the responsibility here if I’d wanted to. Actually, all I’ve been doing is handling the instruction, the maintenance and supply, and things like that. Marie and Ellen have been doing most of the everyday work of running things. Marie’s a natural manager, and Ellen-”

He paused.

“Go on,” I said, interested. “You’re about to say that Ellen is-”

“Well, I was going to say—sort of a natural general,” he said awkwardly. “Maybe I ought to say, a natural war leader. She’s been the one who’s been making sure that all our people know how to use their guns and that none of our neighbors think they can walk in here and help themselves to anything we’ve got.”

“Neighbors? What neighbors?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “to the north and northwest of us it’s the Ryans, and the TvLostChord. To the west, it’s Wallinstadt. South and moving around to the east, it’s Billy Projec and his tribe. Not that we’ve anything really to worry about, even if they all took it into their heads to combine against us.”

He shot me a quick glance.

“We’ve now got over six hundred people,” he said.

“Six hundred people!”

I was rocked back on my heels. I had vaguely gathered during the last year and a half that the numbers of my small community were growing; but I had guessed that, at the most, we would have somewhere between thirty and fifty people. Six hundred under these conditions was a small nation.

“Where did they all come from?” I asked.

“Some of them knew about us back when the mistwalls were still operating,” said Bill. “Or they heard about us from others they ran into. We were a pretty good-sized party—and a well-equipped party—to be moving around back then. After the time changes stopped locally, they began gradually to drift in, either out of curiosity or because they’d always wanted to join us.”

He waved a hand at the filing cabinets.

“I’ve got each one down on the census rolls,” he said. “In fact, if you’d like, you can read each one’s life history up to the time they’ve joined us. About nine months ago, I made everybody fill out a complete file on themselves; and now we make every new person do that before we accept them here. I’ve got not only the facts of the life, but blood type, medical history, occupational skills and everything else that might be useful information for us.”

I shook my head. His mind and mine were two different constructs. The last thing I would have thought about with a group that size would be getting into their former occupations and blood-types. It had probably been the first thing that Bill had thought of. He had an orderly brain.

“You don’t need me,” I said. “From what I can see you’ve all been doing fine on your own.”

Now he shook his head.

“All we’ve been doing is keeping the machinery running, idling, waiting for you to do something with it,” he said. “Do you want to look around at things?”

“Yes,” I said.

He led me out of the room and down a corridor of the summer palace that I had not been in before—or if I had, I didn’t remember having been through it—and out another door. A jeep and a station wagon were parked there. He got in behind the wheel of the jeep and I climbed in beside him.

“Porniarsk’s got his working area back here behind the summer palace,” Bill said as he started up the motor of the jeep and backed it away from the building, to swing it around to head down the hillside. “But I thought we’d end up with him. Let me show you the rest of it first.”

We drove down through the belt of trees into the lower area where the village of the experimentals had stood. I had not been down here since we had halted the effects of the time storm, and what I saw was startling. The village of the experimentals was still there; although it was now enclosed in cyclone fencing and the gates wide enough to drive a truck through were standing ajar. Sprawling out on the open space beyond and slightly downhill from the village was what could only be described as a town—a new town of everything from prefab houses to tents.

“Eventually,” Bill spoke in my ear over the noise of the motor as we negotiated the now clearly marked, if unsurfaced, road downward from the tree belt, “we’ll set up some uniform construction. For the present, however, we’ve been giving anyone who’s accepted here a free hand, provided their housing and their habits conform with our sanitary regulations and local laws.”

“Who enforces our local laws?” I asked, bemused.

“Everybody belongs to the militia, and everybody who belongs to the militia pulls police duty on a regular rotation,” said Bill. “That’s Ellen’s department. You should ask her about it. She’s on top of it all the time; and she makes it work without a hitch. From what I can gather, we’ve got a much more organized community here than they have almost anyplace else in the world. Of course, the people who are here badly want to be here. They all think that you’re going to go on pulling miracles out of your hat and that they’ll end up, either on top of things, or with all the luxuries of former civilization back again.”

“All that, just because we managed to stop the time storm?” I said.

“It’s a function of the situation,” Bill said, with his precise pronunciation of each word. “Think of it this way. You’re the sorcerer. Porniarsk’s your demon assistant.”

“You’re my Grand Vizier, Ellen’s General of the Armies and Marie’s the Number One Queen—is that it?” I asked.

Bill laughed.

“Yup,” he said.