Time Storm

24

By this time we were almost down level with the gates of the experimentals’ village.

“How come you’ve got them penned up?” I said.

“They’re not penned,” Bill answered. “That fence is there for their own protection, in case some of our newcomers don’t have the sense to leave them alone. Or in case there’s a sudden surprise attack on us from somewhere. They can lock their gates and have a certain amount of protection until we drive the attackers off. They seem to understand that perfectly well.”

He looked at me briefly.

“I think the Old Man can communicate with them all right,” he said. “Anyway, things have gone pretty smoothly with all of them since we stopped the effects of the time storm.”

There were a few of the experimentals out in front of their buildings; and these watched us solemnly as we passed, but made no move either to come toward us or to retreat inside. The jeep roared on and we drove down what seemed to be a sort of center street between the heterogeneous buildings of the human community. Eight or nine young children were flying kites in a clearing half-surrounded by trees, just beyond the village. The picture they made was so normal and so pre-time storm that it jolted me.

“Where did all the kids come from?” I asked.

“Some of the people coming in had them,” Bill said, braking the jeep to a halt before one large Quonset hut. “And we’ve had several babies born here during the past year. Of course, those are too young to play yet. Still, the proportion of children to adults isn’t that large. I don’t think we’ve got more than twenty of them.”

I shaded my eyes and tried to make out a familiar figure among the darting young bodies.

“Is that Wendy out there?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” said Bill without turning around. “She’s probably out with the dogs somewhere. She handles them now most of the time, instead of Marie; and they’ve gotten so that they follow her wherever she goes. Generally, Marie thinks it’s a good thing; and I agree. The dogs are good protection for her. This is our government building here. Come on in.”

He got out of the jeep. I followed him and we went up three wooden steps and in the front door of the Quonset. It was like stepping into any busy office. Behind a low barrier of wooden fencing, there were five desks at which three men and two women were sitting, typing or engaged in other paperwork. File cabinets occupied one wall and there was a large copying machine in a corner.

“Where are you getting the power to run all this?” I asked Bill. For the typewriters were all electric, and the copier looked as if it had to require at least a 220 volt line.

“We put in a much larger gas generator,” said Bill, leading me through a gate in the wooden fence. “Before fall, we ought to finish a dam on the river and have a waterpowered generator that’ll take care of all our needs for the next five years.”

He led me into a corridor with two doors on each side and opened the first one on the right briefly.

“Supplies,” he said.

I looked in. It was, as he had said, a supply room. Most of the supplies were clerical; but I saw some stacks of blankets and other material for household living. A chained and locked gunrack against the far wall of the room held rifles, and there was a rack of handguns below it, also chained and locked. I shut the door again and turned open the door across the way.

“Communications,” he said briefly, and led me into a radio room containing two women, one young and one middle-aged. It was filled with radio equipment that even to my amateur eye seemed impressive.

“Bebe, Jill,” Bill said, “this is Marc Despard.”

The two looked up from their panels, smiled and nodded to me. Bill led me out of the room again.

“Now,” said Bill, moving down to knock on the second door on the left, “this is-”

“Come in,” said Marie’s voice.

Bill smiled at me and led me in. Marie was seated behind a large desk in a very businesslike office, with papers in front of her. She was looking over the papers at a lean, big-boned man who must have stood about six feet six when he was on his feet. Right now he was sitting down, dressed in a white shirt and what seemed to be white duck pants.

“I’ll be right with you, Marc,” she said, and picked up what was apparently an interrupted conversation with the man in white.

“What you’ve got to make them understand, Abe, is that if they want to draw supplies and cook their own meals, they have to do it according to our rules. At our convenience, not theirs. I’m not going to put up with anyone either wasting food or not eating adequately—any more than I’d put up with their breaking any of the other laws. That means they submit their menu for the week in advance to you, you approve it, and then—only then—you authorize one of your own people to give them supplies for just exactly what they’ve planned to serve. You understand?”

“Sure,” said Abe, in a deep slow voice. He had a touch of some Eastern European accent.

Marie looked away from him over to me again.

“Marc,” she said, “this is Abe Budner, our Director of Food Services and chef for the community kitchen. I’m hoping we can train people to take the chef’s job off his hands before long.”

Abe Budner got up as slowly and solemnly as he had spoken, shook hands with me and sat down again.

“We’re just looking around,” Bill said.

“Good,” said Marie briskly. “Because I really don’t have time to stop and talk now. I can tell you all about this work this evening, Marc.”

We were dismissed. Bill and I left.

“And this,” said Bill, knocking on the remaining door in the corridor, “is Ellen’s.”

We waited, but there was no answer to his knock.

The door at the far end of the corridor opened behind us.

“Something?” said a voice. We turned and I saw what looked like a boy of about eighteen, wearing dark pants and a khaki shirt with two brass buttons pinned on the left side of his shirt collar.

“Ellen’s out checking the Ryan boundary,” this individual said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

He looked questioningly at me.

“This is Marc Despard, Doc,” said Bill.

“Marc Despard? I’m really glad to meet you, sir,” said Doc flusteredly and energetically, shaking my hand. “I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”

“Well, now you have,” I said. I was not exactly taken with him.

“Doc is Ellen’s second in command,” said Bill. “His full name’s Kurt Dockwiler, but we all call him Doc. His militia rank is captain.”

“Oh?” I said.

“I was just going to show Marc Ellen’s office,” Bill added.

“You bet. Come in,” said Doc, stepping past us, throwing open the door and leading us in. I followed him and Bill brought up the rear.

I don’t know what I had expected; but Ellen’s office was simply a tidy, utilitarian place with the usual filing cabinets, a perfectly clean desk and a few extra chairs facing the desk as if she had been holding a conference recently.

“If you’d like to wait,” said Doc, “she ought to be back in about twenty minutes. I can send over to the kitchen for coffee—or anything else.”

“No, I’m just looking around,” I said. “I’ll see her tonight.”

“Of course!” Doc followed Bill and myself back down the corridor and out through the outer office. “If I can ever be useful in any way, Mr. Despard, the message center can reach me at any time.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said getting in the jeep.

Bill started up and we drove off.

“How old is he, anyway?” I said.

“I don’t know exactly,” answered Bill. “Twenty or twenty-one, I think.”

“He looks more like Ellen’s age.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Bill said.

I looked at him. But his face was perfectly innocent of any particular expression.

“I’m just surprised there aren’t any older men around to hold down a job like that,” I told him. “That’s all.”

“We’ve got older men, of course,” said Bill. He was heading the jeep back up into the trees in the direction of the summer palace. “Most of them have families, or at least somebody, who make them a bad choice for a high risk occupation. Then again, none of them have Doc’s qualifications.”

“Qualifications?”

“His father was career army,” Bill said. “He absorbed a lot of the military art, just by growing up in various bases. That and other things. He’s a black belt in judo and he’s taught survival classes. Also he’s a mountain climber.”

There was not much to say to that. I sat quiet during most of the ride back up to the summer palace, and in that time I came around to feeling that I might have been a little unfair to Doc.

“We’ll go see Porniarsk now,” Bill said, stopping the jeep once more at the palace. “I didn’t take you to him right away because I thought either Marie or Ellen might have things they’d want to show you in their areas; and their schedule is pretty well tied in with other things. Porniarsk, you can see any time.”

I felt a warmth of old affection at the thought of the alien avatar. Porniarsk, with his ugly bull-dog shape and unemotional responses, was a particularly stable point in my pyrotechnic and shifting universe. I followed Bill into the palace, thinking with surprise that, in all the last year and a half, I had not sought out Porniarsk once and had seen him in total perhaps no more than half a dozen times.

The room in the summer palace that Bill led me into, eventually, must have had as much floor space as the Quonset hut down in the village we had just left. It was a rectangular room with floor, walls and ceiling painted white and a row of windows all down one side. The other walls were occupied mainly by equipment that had once been in the station. Apparently, Porniarsk had had it all transported down here.

However, what caught my eye immediately was not this, nor even the friendly sight of Porniarsk himself, but a box shape with transparent sides perhaps twenty feet long by six wide and three deep, almost filled with some greyish-blue substance. When I got closer, I saw that whatever it was seemed to be a liquid. There was a noticeable meniscus, and a black tube running over the edge of one of the sides and down into the box showed the apparent angular distortion at the surface that a stick does, poked down into water. Porniarsk had been doing something with the tank; but he turned and came to meet us as we entered.

“How are you, Marc?” he said as we met, his easy speech at odds, as always, with the curious mechanical sound of his voice, and his manner of speaking.

“I’m fine—now,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

“There’s been no reason for me to be other than I always am,” Porniarsk said.

“Of course,” I said. “Well, then, how have things been going?”

“I’ve been getting a few things done,” Porniarsk said. “But nothing with any great success. But then, real progress isn’t often dramatic, being a matter of small steps taken daily that add up to a total accomplishment over a period of time.”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of the experience it had taken me a year and a half to come to terms with. “There’s a lot of things I’d like to talk to you about.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Porniarsk. “On my part, I’ve been looking forward to talking to you. I can progress much more rapidly if I’ve got a primary mind to work with; and the only primary mind we’ve produced so far is you.”

“Only me?” I said. It jarred me slightly to hear it—at the same time I felt a small ego-pleasure.

“Primary minds can only be developed or uncovered by monad activity,” he said. “All the other minds involved in the gestalt only resonated and amplified yours, without developing. So I’ve been restricted to doing what I can with the resonating minds. In fact, I’ve been restricted to the one resonating mind that had no other duties to occupy it.”

He turned his head and nodded ponderously toward a corner. I looked and saw the Old Man, perched on the seat before one of the consoles taken from the station, the helmet on his head.

“The Alpha Prime,” said Porniarsk. “He’s been my main subject. Happily, he seems eager for the experience of being connected with the equipment here. Daytimes, he’s generally unavailable. I understand he’s been with you most of the time. But at night, he often comes here on his own initiative to work with me.”

I gazed at the Old Man. He squatted utterly still on the chair before the console, with a curious assurance—almost as if it was a throne and he was a king.

“What could you learn from him?” I asked.

“It’s not what I can learn from him,” said Porniarsk deliberately, “but what I could learn through him. Just as I want to learn and discover matters through you—though since you’re a primary mind, I’d expect that you’d also learn, and be able to add the knowledge you personally gain to what I can gain.”

He stopped speaking for a second, then started again.

“In fact,” he said, “I ought to point out that what I can learn is limited by the kind of instrument I am, myself—personally. As an avatar of Porniarsk I’ve got only so much conceptual range. On the other hand, Marc, your conceptual range is something I don’t know. It could be less than Porniarsk’s—that is to say, mine—or it might be a great deal greater. It could be limitless, in that you might be able to go on increasing it, as long as you want to make the effort to extend its grasp. Which brings me to an important point.”

He stopped again. But this time he did not continue immediately.

“What point?” asked Bill, finally.

“The point,” said Porniarsk in his unvarying accent, “of whether Marc, after his one experience with the monad, really wants to explore further into an area where mind becomes reality and where it’s impossible to draw a line where the definitive change occurs.”

“I’ll answer that,” I said.

It came to me suddenly, that while I’d never really come to doubt that I wanted to dig deeper into the time storm and everything connected with it, for the last year and a half, I’d been hiding from the fact that I’d eventually have to get back to that work.

“I don’t have any reverse gear,” I said. “The only way for me to go is straight ahead. Even standing still doesn’t work.”

“In that case,” said Porniarsk, “you and I have a big job ahead of us.”

“Fine with me,” I said.

“I guessed so from the beginning,” said Porniarsk. “So, in that case, maybe we might talk right now about the basic principles involved here, and how you can be involved also.”

“Absolutely,” I said. I meant every word I said. “This all ties in with something I want to do—something I’m going to do.”

“If you’ll forgive me,” said Porniarsk, “I felt that about you from the first time we met. However, it’s a lot bigger universe than you, or the entities of your time, seem to realize. If you were anything else than a rather unusual individual, I’d have to say you’re presumptuous to have the ambition I think you’re entertaining.”

“I told you I’ve got something to do,” I said. “In any case, we both want the same thing, don’t we? To control this runaway situation with time?”

“Quite correct. But remember what I said—if you weren’t an unusual individual, I wouldn’t be devoting this much energy to you. Not because I wasn’t interested; but because it’d be a waste of time. By your own standards, Marc, you’re arrogant. Partly, this is simply because you recognize your own ability. Part of it is a prickliness, what you’d call a chip on the shoulder, because other people don’t see what you see. I can sympathize with this. But it’s still something you’ll have to overcome, if you’re going to achieve the full primary identity you’ll need.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

I had been looking forward to talking to him. I had a great deal, I had thought, to tell him. What I most wanted to talk about was how it could be that, just as it had been back in the days when I had been playing the stock market, I could almost taste—almost feel—what it was I wanted to take hold of in the time storm. But his sudden criticism put me off.

“You said this was some sort of representation of the storm?” I said, turning to the tank.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It’s not operating right now,” said Porniarsk. “But I can turn it on for you.”

He went to a control panel on the far wall and touched several studs and dials there with the tips of his shoulder tentacles.

“What you’ll see,” he said, coming back to Bill and me, “isn’t actually a view of the time storm. What it is, is a representation produced by the same equipment that was in the station. Look into the tank. Not at it, into it.”

I’d already been looking—but now I realized my error. I had been staring the same way you might stare at a fish tank from entirely outside it. But what this piece of equipment apparently required—and require it did, for it was evidently already warming up, and I could feel it drawing my attention psychically the way a rope might have pulled me physically—was for an observer to put his point of view completely inside it.

There was nothing remarkable about the first signs of its activation. All I saw were little flickerings like miniature lightning, or, even less, like the small jitterings of light that register on the optic nerves when you close your eyes and press your fingers against the outside of the eyelids. These small lights will-o-the-wisped here and there through the blueness of whatever filled the tank; and I suddenly woke to the fact that what I had taken to be a sort of blue-grey liquid was not liquid at all. It was something entirely different, a heavy gas perhaps. Actually, I realized, it had no color at all. It was any shade the subjective attitude of the viewer thought it was. For me, now, it had become almost purely black, the black of lightless space; and I was abruptly, completely lost in it, as if it was actually the total universe and I stood invisible at the center of it.

The little flickerings were the forces of the time storm at work. They had been multiplying to my eye as my point of view moved their centerpoint; and now they filled the tank in every direction, their number finite, but so large as to baffle my perception of them. I understood then that I was watching all the vectors of the full time storm at work at once; and, as I watched, I began slowly to sort their movements into patterns.

It was like watching, with the eyes of a Stone Age savage, a message printing itself on a wall in front of you; and gradually, as you watched, you acquired the skill of reading and the understanding of the language in which the message was set down, so that random marks began to orient themselves into information-bearing code. So, as I watched, the time storm began to make sense to me—but too much sense, too large a sense for my mind to handle. It was as if I could now read the message, but what it told was of things too vast for my understanding and experience.

Two things, I saw, were happening. Two separate movements were characteristic of the patterns of the still-expanding storm. One was a wave-front sort of motion, like the spreading of ripples created by a stone dropped in a pond, interacting and spreading; and the other was like the spreading of cracks in some crystalline matrix. Both these patterns of development were taking place at the same time and both were complex. The wave-fronts were multiple and occurring at several levels and intensities. They created eddies at points along their own line of advance where they encountered solid matter, and particularly, when they encountered gravitational bodies like stars. Earth had had its own eddy, and it had been only the forces within that eddy that we had been able to bring into dynamic balance.

The crystalline cracking effect also intensified itself around gravity wells. It was this effect that threatened the final result of the storm that Porniarsk had first warned us about—a situation in which each particle would finally be at timal variance with the particles surrounding it. The cracking extended and divided the universe into patterns of greater and greater complexities until all matter eventually would be reduced to indivisible elements....

So much I saw and understood of what the tank showed. But in the process of understanding so much, my comprehension stretched, stretched, and finally broke. I had a brief confused sensation of a universe on fire, whirling about me faster than I could see... and I woke up on the floor of the room, feeling as if I had just been levelled by an iron bar in the hands of a giant. The heavy, gargoyle head of Porniarsk hung above me, inches from my eyes.

“You see why you need to develop yourself?” he asked.

I started to get up.

“Lie still,” said the voice of Bill, urgently; and I looked to see him on the other side of me. “We’ve got a real doctor, now. I can get him on the radio from the communications room here and have him up here in twenty minutes—”

“I’m all right,” I said.

I finished climbing to my feet. Looking beyond Porniarsk, I saw a huddled mass of black fur at the base of the console, a helmet still on its head.

“Hey—the Old Man!” I said, leading the way to him. Porniarsk and Bill followed.

He was still on the floor by the time I reached him and took the helmet off; but apparently he, too, was coming out of it. His brown eyes were open and looked up into mine.

“Yes,” said Porniarsk, “of course. He’ll have been in monad with you just now.”

The Old Man was all right. He continued to stare at me for a second after I took his helmet off; then he got to his feet as if nothing had happened. I thought that if he really felt as little jarred as he looked, by what had decked us both, he was made of stronger stuff than I. My knees were trembling.

“I just want to sit down,” I said.

“This way,” Bill answered.

He led me out of the room and down a corridor, the Old Man tagging after us. We came to a solid, heavy-looking door I had never seen before in the palace. He produced a key, looked at me for a second with a shyness I’d never seen in him before, then unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“Come in,” he said.

I stepped through, feeling the Old Man crowding close behind me—and stopped.

The room Bill had opened for us was narrow and long; and one of its lengthier walls was all windows. They were double windows, one row above the other so that, in effect, that wall of the room was almost all glass; and the view through them was breathtaking. I had seen what was to be seen through them, but not from this particular viewpoint.

From where I stood in the room, my gaze went out and down the open slope just below the palace, over the tops of the tree belt below to a familiar view, the village of the experimentals and the human town beyond. But then it went further—for the angle of this room looked out, between a gap in the lower vegetation, to the open land beyond, stretching to the horizon and divided by a road that had not been there a year and a half ago. Now this road stretched like a brown line to where earth and sky met, with some small vehicle on it a mile or so out, moving toward us with its dust plume, like a squirrel’s tail in the air behind it.

“How do you like it?” I heard Bill asking.

“Wonderful!” I said—and meant it.

I turned to talk to him, and for the first time focused in on the interior of the room itself. There was a rug underfoot and a half a dozen armchairs—overstuffed armchairs, comfortable armchairs. I had not realized until now that I had not seen a comfortable piece of furniture in months. The kind of furniture that we tended to accumulate was that which was most portable, utilitarian straight chairs and tables of wood or metal. Those in this room were massive, opulent things meant for hours of comfortable sitting.

But there was more than furniture here. Most of the available floorspace was stacked with books and boxes containing books. All in all, there must have been several thousand of them, stacked around us. The piles of them stretched between the armchairs and right up to a massive stone fireplace set in the middle of the wall opposite the windows. There was no fire in the fireplace at the moment, but kindling and logs had been laid ready for one. At the far end of the wall in which the fireplace was set, I saw what the ultimate destination of the books would be, for the first two vertical floor-to-ceiling shelves of built-in bookcases were completed and filled with volumes, and framing for the rest of the shelves stretched toward me what would eventually be four solid walls of reading matter.

“Sit down,” said Bill.

I took one of the armchairs, one that faced the windows, so that I could gaze at the view. The small vehicle I had seen—a pickup truck—was now close to the town. Without warning, the music of The Great Gate of Kiev from Moussorgsky’s Pictures At An Expedition poured forth around me into the room.

“I thought,” said Bill from behind me, “that we ought to have some place just for sitting....”

He was still being shy. The tones of his voice carried half an apology, half an entreaty to me to like what I saw around me.

“It’s really magnificent, Bill,” I told him and turning, saw him standing at one end of the windows, looking out himself. “Who’s been building all this for you?”

“I’ve been doing it myself,” he said.

I took a long look at him. I had known he was a good man in many ways; but I had never thought of him as a carpenter, mason, or general man of his hands. He looked back at me stiffly.

“I wanted to surprise people,” he said. “Only just now you seemed jolted by what happened, so... I actually wasn’t going to tell anyone until I had it all finished, the books on the shelves, and all that.”

“Look. This room’s the best idea you could have had,” I told him.

I meant it. God knows, if anyone ever loved reading, it was me. I was no longer looking at the view now, I was looking at the books, beginning to feel in me a stirring of excitement that I would not have guessed was still possible. The books were suggesting a million things to me, calling to me with a million voices. Maybe only a handful of those voices had anything to tell me about the things I really needed to know; but the possible smallness of their number did not matter. It was me against the time storm and I was humankind; and what was humankind was locked up in those codes of black marks on white paper that had once filled libraries all over the earth.

Suddenly, I wanted to know a million things, very strongly. There was the dry ache in my throat and the fever in my head of someone athirst and lost in a desert.