Time Storm

25

I was reading the last paragraph of Joyce’s short story “The Dead” in his collection Dubliners:

“Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead.”

There was something there I told myself, tight with certainty. There was something there. A certain part of humankind and the All. A tiny something; but something.

I put down that book and went to find the words of Ernest Hemingway, in the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year...

Something... I went looking further.

Hui-Nan Tzu, in the second century before Christ, had written:

“Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous. Therefore it was called the Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the universe.... The combined essences of heaven and earth became the yin and yang...

Sigmund Freud:

“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast...

Tennyson, in The Passing of Arthur:

Last, as by some one deathbed after wail

Of suffering silence follows, or thro’ death

Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,

Save for some whisper of the seething seas,

A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day

Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came

A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew

The mist aside, and with that wind the tide

Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field

Of battle, but no man was moving there....

Einstein, What I Believe:

“It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings. Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations...”

“Do you feel it?” I asked, looking at the Old Man as the two of us sat alone in Bill’s library. “Do you feel it, too, there— someplace?”

He looked back at me out of his fathomless, savage brown eyes without answering. He was not my companion in the search for what I sought. Only a sort of trailer or rider who hoped I would carry him to the place which would satisfy his own hunger for understanding—that hunger which being part of the monad had awakened in him. It was his curse not to be quite human—but still not to be simply a beast, like Sunday, who could love, suffer and even die, unquestioningly. It was something I could see, like a heavy load on him; how he knew he was dependent on me. After a second, he put a long hand lightly on my knee, in a nearly beseeching gesture that had become habitual with him lately and stirred my guts each time he did it.

So we continued; he with me, and I poring over the books in the library, along with many more Bill had since brought me from the surrounding territory. What I was after was still undefined, only a feeling in me of something that must be there, hidden in the vast warehouse of human philosophy and literature. But I kept finding clues, bits and pieces of thought that were like gold dust and stray gems spilled from the caravan of knowledge I tracked.

I had not concerned myself about it during the first few days of this. But after a week or two, it occurred to me to wonder that no one, not Marie, or Bill, or even Ellen, had been after me to take charge of our community, once more. The wonder brought with it both a touch of annoyance and a sneaking feeling of relief. I was bothered that they did not miss my help more; but at the same time, I felt in my guts that what I was doing was by all measures more important than being an administrator. So, the summer colors outside the window dried and brightened to fall ones, then faded to the drab brown of winter grass and the occasional white of snow, with only the different hues of evergreen to relieve the scene; and I came to understand that my presence was required, so to speak, only on state occasions.

One of these was called Thanksgiving, although for convenience it was held on the tenth of December and began three weeks of general celebration that ended with New Year’s Day. At Thanksgiving dinner that year we had as guests in the summer palace the leaders and chieftains of the surrounding communities Bill had listed for me.

The leaders themselves were a mixed bunch. Merry Water of the TvLostChord was in his early twenties, thin, stooped, black, and intense. He had the look of someone about to fly into a rage at a word; and in fact, the three wives and five children he brought with him walked around him, so to speak, on tiptoes. He was the only really young man among the leaders present, and the rest of his semi-communal group, Bill told me, were about the same age.

Bill Projec was in his late thirties. He claimed to be pure-blooded Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota; but he did not have the look of the Sioux I had seen around Minnesota, although otherwise he looked undeniably Indian. He had a face that looked as if he could walk through a steel wall without a change of expression. Actually, he was almost exclusively a political leader for his colony, of whom only a few were also Indian. Petr Wallinstadt was in his mid-fifties, a tall post of a man with iron grey hair, large hands and a heavy-boned face. He was a limited-minded man whose quality of leadership lay in an utter steadfastness of attitude and purpose. Whatever Wallinstadt said he would do, he would do, Bill had told me in the briefing he had given me on the leaders before their arrival, and calling him stub-bora was a weak way to describe him. Once he had made up his mind, it was not merely no use to try to argue further with him, he literally did not hear you if you tried to talk about it.

Old Ryan—otherwise called Gramps—was the patriarch among the leaders, and the patriarch of his own group as well. He may have been only a few years older than Wallinstadt, or he may have been as much as twenty years older. He was white-haired, as wide as a wall, bright, tricky, domineering, and explosive. He and Merry Water did not hide their intentions about steering clear of each other; and there had been bets made in the other communities for some time now as to when the two would hit head on and over what. One possible reason why this had been avoided so far may have been the fact that the young Ryans (anyone in Gramps’ group was labelled a Ryan, whether he or she was one by blood or not) sneakingly admired the more esoteric freedoms of the TvLostChord people; and there was a good deal of fraternization—and sororization, to coin a word-going on. Meanwhile, the two leaders stayed close to home and ran into each other in person only on occasions such as this Thanksgiving bash at our place.

There had been considerable jockeying by the four leaders from the moment they showed up to see who could get the most of my attention. Not surprisingly, Old Man Ryan was the clear winner. He could not monopolize my time, but he could and did get half again as much of it as anyone else. I found myself with a sneaking liking for the old bastard, a title he came by honestly both in the ancestral and moral sense and was, if anything, rather proud of. For one thing, he had both brains and experience; and he was not the monomaniac that Merry was, the taciturn farmer that Petr Wallinstadt was and had been before the time storm, or the suspicious chip-on-the-shoulder character that Billy was. Ryan could talk about many things and did, and his sense of humor was well-developed, though raunchy to the point of unbelievability.

It was he who brought up the matter of the Empress, after about a week or so of celebrating. We were standing in the library, brandy snifters half-full of beer in our hands, looking down the slope in the late-winter afternoon sunlight to the river, where a skating party was in progress on the ice that stretched out from the banks to the black, open water of midchannel.

“What’ll you do if she comes?” Ryan asked, without warning, in the midst of a talk about spring planting.

“Who?” I asked, absently.

My attention and my mind were only partly on the discussion we had been having about storing root vegetables; and it seemed to me I had missed something he had said. Actually, I had been concentrating on the skaters. In the early twilight, some of them had put on hard hats with miner’s lamps attached to them and these, now lit, were glinting like fireflies in the approach of the early twilight. The little lights circled and wove figures above the grey of the ice. Patterns of all kinds had been a fascination to me from my beginning. It had been the patterns I saw in the movements of the stock market that had been the basis of my success there. Similarly, with the management of my snowmobile company and everything else right up to our duel with the time storm, in which my ability to see the force-patterns was crucial. Now, I was beginning to make out a pattern in the encircling lights. It was a fragile, creative pattern, built as it developed, but determined by the available space of ice, the social patterns of the occasion, and the affections or dislikes of the individuals involved. I felt that if I could just study the swirl of lights long enough, I would finally be able to identify, by his or her movements, each invisible individual beneath a light source.

“Who?” I asked again.

“Who? The Empress! Beer getting to you, Despard? I said, what’ll you do if she comes this way? And she’ll be coming, all right, if she lives that long; because she’s out to take over the world. You’ve got a pretty good little part-time combat force but you can’t fight three hundred full-time soldier-kids, equipped with transports, planes, helicopters and all sorts of weapons right up to fly-in light artillery.”

“What’ll you do if she comes?” I asked, still not really with him.

“Christ! Me? I’ll wheel and deal with her, of course,” he grunted into his glass, drinking deeply from it. “I know I can’t fight her. But you might be sucker enough to try.”

He tickled me. I finally pulled my attention entirely from the skater patterns on the ice.

“So?” I said, mimicking his own trick of argument. When he got serious like this, he talked with the explosiveness of a nineteen-twenties car backfiring. “I better not plan to ask you for help if I’m crazy enough to take her on, then? That it?”

“Damnright!” He stopped backfiring suddenly, turned full on to face me, and switched to purring like an asthmatic alley cat. “But you’re smart. You know well as I do how many ways there are to peel a grape like that. Now, if you’d just let old Gramps do the talking-for your bunch and mine only—I tell you I can deal with someone like her....”

“Sure you can,” I said. “And with you dealing with her for your people and mine, all the other groups would be forced into joining us, in their own self-defense. Which would leave her with the idea —particularly since you could help it along while you were doing the dealing—that you were the real power in this area, the man to settle with; and, like all the rest, I was in your pocket.”

“Screw you!” He swung away from me to stare out the window at the skating party. The cold afternoon was darkening fast; and his fat profile, against the dimming light, showed panting and angry. “Let her take your balls then. See if I make you a neighborly offer like that a second time!”

I grinned. He could not help himself. It was simply in him to push for an advantage as long as he had the strength to do it. If I ever really needed an alliance with him, I knew he would jump at the thinnest offer. From what Bill had told me, we would have had very little trouble conquering all our neighbors, including Gramps and his clan, if we took the notion.

But all this did not alter the facts that the Empress was nothing to grin about and that the old man had a head on his shoulders. I sobered.

“What’s this about her having three hundred full-time soldiers, aircraft and artillery?” I asked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“One of my boys came back from the west coast,” he said.

“Back from the west coast?” I said. “When did any one of your people go out there?”

“Ah, it’s some time back,” he said, taking a drink from his snifter. He was lying and I knew it, but I couldn’t waste half an hour pinning him down to the truth. “The point is, he was in San Luis Obispo. There’s an old army camp outside that town, and she’s been using it as a training area. All the people in town know about the planes and the helicopters and the guns. And the soldiers come into San Luis Obispo every night to hit the bars. They’ve got four actual bars in there.”

“She’s got half the world to go after down to the top of South America, and the other half clear up to Alaska,” I said. “What makes you think she’d be coming this way?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” grunted Ryan. “It’s not country you take over nowadays. It’s people. The important places. And this place is important enough. It’s got you here.”

Unfortunately, he was right. It had gradually begun to dawn on me, since I came from living exclusively inside my own skull, how much I was considered some sort of post-time storm wizard, not only among the people of our own community, but generally around the globe. Why they had settled on me and not on Porniarsk—or even on Bill, for that matter—puzzled me. Possibly Bill was not colorful enough to make good myth and legend; and Porniarsk could be considered too inhuman to be judged the wizard rather than the wizard’s familiar. But it was a fact that this impression of me seemed to be spreading all over the world, according to the shortwave talk we heard, no doubt growing more wild and hairy the greater its distance from anyone who had ever seen me in person.

That being the case, it suddenly made sense why the Empress might mount an expedition in my direction. She could hardly lose.

If I was as magical as rumor had it, she would be acquiring a valuable sort of Merlin. If I was not, she could still keep me close under wraps and maintain the legend, threatening people with my powers, and gaining the sort of credit anyone acquires by owning a pet sorcerer.

A corner of that situation suddenly opened up into innumerable corridors of possibilities; and the pattern-seeking portion of my mind began to gallop along them to map out the territory to my own advantage.

Ryan was still talking to me.

“What?” I asked.

“Got through to you with that, didn’t I?” he said.

“That’s right, Gramps,” I told him, “you got through to me.”

I turned to face him.

“I want to talk to that boy of yours,” I said. “I want to hear him tell me about everything he saw.”

“Well, now I don’t know “We can dicker over your price for letting him talk to me later. Is he here with the people you brought along?”

“No,” said Ryan, frowning. “Now, where did he say he was going? Seems to me he said something about going east this time....”

But, of course, this was only his way of making sure he gave nothing away for nothing. I had to promise him I’d send someone over to do welding for him on a windmill generator he was putting up—none of his group could weld for sour apples; and then of course, it turned out that the relative who’d been on the west coast was out on the ice right now, together with the others we were watching from the window.

I had the boy in—he was only eighteen—and with Ryan, Bill, and Ellen standing by, we shook him down for everything he could remember about the Empress and her armed forces. He was a little reticent about why he had gone away to the Pacific coast in the first place. I got the impression he had had a fight with Gramps and run off before the old man could have him beaten up by some of the more loyal sons and daughters of the clan. He kept moving because he ran into no one who particularly wanted him to stay; and so he had ended up somewhere around San Bernardino, where he found work as a wagon-driver (the west coast was short of petroleum products, and horse breeding was becoming a way of life). As a teamster he had eventually driven a load of freight north to San Luis Obispo and spent a week or so in the town before selling his freight goods to someone other than the person he was supposed to deliver them to, and cutting and running with the sale price.

Once safely away from San Luis Obispo, he had decided to head home. Not only because San Bernardino was now an unhealthy place for him, but because he thought he could probably buy his way back into Gramps’ favor with the stories he had to tell, if not with his newly acquired possessions. For he had used the value of the goods he had stolen to buy himself the best horse, saddle and rifle he could find. Besides, as he told us, he was more than a little homesick by that time.

It turned out, however, he did not have that much more of value to add to what Gramps had already told me, except that his description of the planes used to transport the Empress’ troops revealed them to me to be VTOL’s, vertical-take-off-and-landing craft. That bit of information explained how the Empress could plan to airlift her soldiers into potential battlefields around a world where airports and landing strips were either no longer in existence or in bad states of repair. With VTOL’s, she would be able to land just about anywhere.

But—there was a joker in the deck at the same time. My mind went click and put the matter of the petroleum shortages and the horse breeding together, in a military context. Her aircraft would need fuel to operate. That meant that to come as far east as we were, she either had to be sure of finding refueling spots along the way—the remains of cities with fuel still in storage somewhere—or carry her fuel along. To carry it along in the aircraft themselves would leave no room for the troops. It was an equation in supply that had only one sensible solution. Before she went anywhere, she would need to send the fuel ahead of her overland, for which horse-drawn wagons were the only answer. Not only that, but her soldiers must necessarily hoof it to within a few miles of their objective. Meanwhile, the pilots of the aircraft would undoubtedly fly them empty, except perhaps for the Empress herself and her immediate staff, to a rendezvous with the soldiers on foot, when those were at last within striking distance of their objective.

I sent Gramps and his wandering relative away and laid the matter, as I saw it, before Bill and Ellen.

“What it means,” I told them, “is that we’ve got a cushion of a few months between the time when she decides to come this way and when she actually gets here. Not only that, but we ought to be able to set up some sort of agreement with communities west of us to warn us when her soldiers and wagons start to come through. Is there someone around here we could send off to do that for us?”

Bill looked at Ellen.

“There’s Doc. He’d be good at it,” Bill said, “if you could spare him for a couple of weeks.”

“Doc?” I echoed; and then I saw them looking at me. “All right, all right I just can’t get over how young he is.”

That was not the right thing to say. Ellen’s face did not change an inch, but I could feel her reaction.

“Once they get to know him,” Bill said, “Doc can command a lot of respect. And it isn’t exactly like taking a stroll in the park, travelling around like that these days. The number of things that still might have kept somebody like young Ryan from coming back alive might surprise you, Marc. With Doc, we’d have the best possible chance of getting our envoy back.”

“All right,” I said. It was a time for giving in. “I was just thinking how he’d strike other people who’d see him the way I see him. But you know better than I do. I suppose I ought to get to know him better myself.”

Ellen grinned, a thing she did rarely.

“You’ll learn,” she said.

I was left with the feeling that while I was forgiven, I had lost a point to her, nonetheless.

Well, as I told myself after they left, all that was mainly in her, Bill and Marie’s department My department, right now, was tracking down that something I searched for in the library and in my own head. I had not been able to do much while the holiday season was still on, with the guests around; but as soon as all that nonsense was over, I went back to work.

The search I returned to kept producing the same results as it had before, only more of them. I kept picking up clues, bits, indications, tingles—call them what you like. What they all really added up to was evidence that what I searched for was not just in my imagination. At the same time, they were no more than evidence. I began to lie awake nights, listening to the breathing of the woman-body beside me, staring at the moon-shadowed ceiling over the bed and trying to stretch my mind to form an image of what I was after. But all I could come up with was that whatever its nature, it was something of a kind with the time storm. Not akin to the time storm, but something belonging to the same aspect of the universe.

What I searched for had to deal with the total universe, no matter what else it did. If nothing else, the track of its footsteps was undeniably there, like the track of some giant’s passing, all through the thought and creativity of the literary world.

I became avaricious, impatient to close on the quarry I hunted. My reading speed, which had been fast to begin with, increased four or five times over. I galloped through books furiously, swallowing their information in huge gulps, making a pile of unread volumes at the right of my chair in the library every morning, mentally ripping out the information they contained in chunks, and dropping the empty to the left of the same chair, in the same second that I was picking up the next book. As the winter wore on toward spring, I became like an ogre in a cave—I turned into a blind Polyphemus, made drunk by Ulysses, bellowing for books, more books.

Nonetheless, I did not lose myself in this, the way I had lost myself after Sunday’s death. I continued to dress, shower, shave, and eat my meals on time. I even pulled myself out of my search now and then when there was an administrative or social matter that needed the attention of Marc Despard. But, essentially, the winter snows and the waking year that took place around me this year were like some scene painted fresh daily on a wall at which I barely looked; and it came as a shock to me one morning to look out on the fields of April and see that the snow was gone and there was a fuzz of new green everywhere.

I had made a fresh stack of books at the end of the previous day on the right side of my chair; but the morning I first noticed the new green of the landscape, I did not reach out, as usual, to pick up the top volume and start devouring it. For some reason the Old Man was not keeping me company that day. Lately the sun, through the wall of windows, had been so warm that I had gotten out of the habit of making the fire in the fireplace. That morning a curious stillness and peace seemed to hold all the room, piled and cluttered and jumbled as it now was with the books I had demanded and discarded until it looked like a warehouse.

But out beyond the window was warm yellow sunlight; and where I sat was like a small bubble of timelessness, a moment out of eternity where anyone could catch his breath, without the moment wasted being charged against his life. Instead of reading, I found myself just sitting, looking out down the slope and over the town and the plain beyond.

I had been reading a great deal of writing on religion in the past few weeks, on yoga and Zen and all the martial arts, trying to pin down what the Chinese called Ch’i and the Japanese Ki, and which was usually translated by the English word “spirit.” As I sat staring out the window, a male cardinal flew down and perched on a feeding platform for birds which Bill had set up during the winter without my hardly noticing it. I stared at the cardinal; and it came to me that I had never seen such a beautiful color in my life as the rich red of his body feathers leading up to the black ones at his throat. He balanced on the feeder, pecked at some seeds Bill had put there, then lifted his head and was perfectly still against the high blue sky of spring.

Something happened.

Without warning, the timeless moment that enclosed me also reached out through the glass pane of the window to encompass the cardinal as well. It was not a physical thing happening, it was a moment of perception on my part—but all the same it was real. Suddenly I and the cardinal were together. We were the same, we were identical.

I reached down and picked up not one of the unread books, but the last volume that had been in my hands the evening before. It fell open near the beginning, where I had laid it face down, open, for a minute yesterday; and under the influence of the timeless moment, the words I had read before stood forward to speak to me with a voice as large as the world. They were the words of the opening paragraph of Chapter 2: THE VALUE OF OUR EXISTENCE, in the book Aikido in Daily Life by Koichi Tohei, who had founded Ki Society International, and who had himself studied under Master Morihei Ueshiba, the founder and creator of the art of Aikido.

“Our lives are a part of the life of the universal. If we understand that our life came from the universal and that we have come to exist in this world, we must then ask ourselves why the universal gave us life. In Japanese we use the phrase suisei-mushi, which means to be born drunk and to die while still dreaming, to describe the state of being born without understanding the meaning of it and to die still not understanding...

With that it all came together; not suddenly, but at once, so that it was as if it had always been together. I had been like someone born drunk, doomed to die drunk—and now I was sober. The cardinal was still on the feeder; the timeless moment still held the library; but it was as if a strange golden light had come out to flow over everything. All at once I understood that what I had been after was not just in the scraps of lines I had read in the books that had passed so hotly through my hands. It was not the fragments of ideas, the shards of wisdoms I had studied that alone were precious bits of what I sought; but that everything I had read, everything I had experienced, the world and all in it—all time and all space—were what I hunted and needed to grasp. And now I could grasp it, not by making my hands big enough to cup the universe in my palms, but by taking hold anywhere, in anything as small as a moment, a sentence, or the sight of a bird on a feeder.

With that understanding, it seemed to me that the golden light was suddenly everywhere; and I was abruptly aware of life around me as far as my mind could stretch to picture it. I could feel the rapid beating of the heart of the cardinal on the feeder. I could feel the beating hearts of the experimentals and the humans at the foot of the slope. I could feel the slow, true life in the firs and the oaks and the grasses and flowers. I could feel the blind stirring of the earthworms in the newly warmed earth. My new sensitivity ranged on and out without limit, beyond the horizon and over the whole world. I could feel life stirring everywhere, from the shark cruising the hot tropical seas, to the Weddell seal sun-bathing on the south Polar ice. The whole globe beat to the rhythms of existence, and below that beat were the quieter, more massive rhythms of the inanimate, of the soil, rock, water, wind, and sunlight. Gravity pulled. The Coriolis force spun, clockwise to the north, counterclockwise to the south. The intermixing patterns of weather sounded together like the disciplined instruments of an orchestra rendering a symphony.

I do not remember the golden light leaving and the sensitivity it had brought me. Just, after a while, it was gone and the cardinal had vanished from the feeder. I was back to feeling with merely the ordinary sensitivities of my body and mind; but within those I felt alive as I never had before. Everything seemed as if seen under a very bright light, clear and sharp. My mind was racing. I seethed with energy. I could not wait to put what I had just found to practical use. I bolted from the chair and went out of the summer palace by the entrance where the vehicles stood. There was a jeep sitting in the parking area. I climbed behind its wheel and sent it bouncing down the slope toward the town. I did not quite know where or how I was going to take hold of the universe in the new way of doing so that had just become clear to me; but now it seemed impossible that I could not find a place and a means.

But oddly, as I got close to the flat ground and the houses, a strange shyness came over me. I had been down there only briefly before on half a dozen separate occasions, and each time I had gone directly to City Hall to see Ellen, Marie, or someone else, then left again in less than an hour. It came home to me that I really had never met those who lived in the town; and I was abruptly as conscious of my stranger status as a grade school child on a first day at a new school.

I parked the jeep in some bushes that hid it several hundred yards from the closest of the buildings, got out and went ahead on foot.

The first building I found myself heading for was a temporary one with a platform floor, plank walls and a canvas tent roof. To this was being added a more permanent structure of cement block walls and gable roof, already shingled. There was no glazing as yet in the window opening, and outside the door aperture, a white pickup truck was parked, from which a man in blue jeans and sweater was carrying in various lengths of lumber.

I reached the pickup while he was still inside and waited by it until he came out again. He was a lean, black-haired type in his late twenties or early thirties with a long, straight nose.

“Hi,” I said.

He glanced at me indifferently.

“Hullo,” he said, went to the truck, and began pulling off some twelve-foot lengths of two by four.

“Can I give you a hand?”

He looked at me again, not quite so indifferently.

“All right,” he said. “Thanks.”

I went over to the truck as he backed off from it with his two by fours, picked up several of my own and followed him through into the building.

There was no light inside except what came through the window openings, but this was enough to see that the building would be illuminated well enough with natural light, even on dark days, once it was finished. The two by fours were apparently for wall studs, for he had several partitions already framed up.

I carried my load over to where he was piling his. A cement floor had been poured, but not professionally finished, and the footing was both gritty and a little uneven. But it, like the wall framing and the block laying of the outer shell was good enough for security and use. We worked together at unloading the truck for some time without saying anything to each other.

I found myself getting an odd pleasure out of being useful in this ordinary way. The feeling was above and in addition to the pleasure of the physical exertion which, once I warmed up to it, was body-enjoyable, the way such efforts usually are. I was conscious of the housebuilder eyeing me as we worked, but that was as much reaction as he showed until we had finished getting all the two by fours into the building. I came out from carrying in the last two lengths of lumber and found him standing, considering what was left on the truck—mostly nails and odds and ends of hardware.

“What next?” I asked him.

“I forgot to pick up conduit for the wiring,” he said, without looking at me. “Well, let’s get the rest of it in. You and I better take the nail cartons together, one by one. They’re heavy.”

We pulled a nail carton to the open tailgate, took it each on a side and carried it in. As we went toward the door opening, he spoke.

“You’re Marc Despard, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

He stared hard at me for a second.

“No, you’re not,” he said, as we stepped into the semigloom of the interior.

“I’m afraid I am.”

“You can’t be.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“Look, he’s got a long beard and he’s six inches taller than you are.”

We laid the carton of nails down and went out after another.

“I tell you,” he said, as we went in carrying the second carton, “you can’t be. I know. I know what Despard looks like.”

I grinned. I couldn’t help myself.

“So do I,” I said.

“Then you admit you aren’t him.”

“No,” I said. “I’m him. What makes you think I’ve got a beard and I’m six inches taller?”

“Everybody knows that. Besides, you never come down from that mountain.”

“I do now.”

“Shit!”

We carried in the other cartons without words. It occurred to me suddenly that he might think I had been laughing at him and that all this was some sort of practical joke on my part. I was distressed.

“If I don’t look like Marc Despard,” I asked him, “why’d you ask me if that’s who I was?”

He did not answer me immediately. It was not until we had made one more delivery inside and were back out in the sunlight that he spoke again, without looking directly into my face.

“I don’t know why you’d want to help me.”

“You had this truck here to be unloaded,” I said. “It goes faster with two people than with one.”

“There’s got to be more to it than that.” He stopped dead and faced me. “What’s up? What is it? What’s going on? Is there some kind of law here or something like that I’ve broken?”

“Man—” I began, and then broke off. “Look, I don’t even know your name.”

“Orrin Elscher.”

“Orrin—” I held out my hand. “Marc Despard. Glad to meet you.”

He stared at my hand as if it had a mousetrap in it, then slowly put out his own hand and we shook.

“Orrin,” I said, “it was just such a fine day I thought I’d come down, and when I got here I saw you unloading the truck, so I thought I’d offer you a hand. That’s all there is to it.”

He said nothing, only took his hand back.

We finished unloading the truck. It was strange, but once upon a time it would have bothered me that he was bothered. I would have geared up emotionally in response to his emotions. But now all I could think of was what a nice day it was and the enjoyment of using my body to some practical and useful purpose. I was getting the same sort of pleasure from unloading that truck that I might have gotten from engaging in a favorite sport; and I was grateful to Orrin Elscher for providing me with the opportunity for that pleasure. As far as his puzzle about me went, I felt no pressure to explain it. In his own time he would understand; and if that time never came, it would not make any real difference to the world. All that really mattered was that his truck was unloaded, he had been saved some work, and I had enjoyed myself.

I had gotten this far in my thinking when I remembered I had left the summer palace intending to put my new insight to work; and here I had forgotten about it completely.

But of course I hadn’t. I saw the connection now between the insight and what I was presently doing. I had set out to take hold of the universe; and I had done that. There was no such thing as an unrelated action; and the act of my helping Orrin to unload his truck connected with the necessary completion of his house, the development of the whole town, the future of the people here, plus their effect and interrelation with all the rest of the people in the world. In fact, it connected with the whole future pattern in a way I could see building and stretching out until it became part of the great spider web of interacting forces that contained the time storm itself. As for me, in enunciating that connection by being part of it and recognizing it, I had expanded my own awareness that I needed to stretch before I could take the next step against the storm.

We finished unloading the truck.

“Well, take care of yourself,” I said to Orrin and turned away.

I was perhaps five steps from him, headed back toward where I had hidden the jeep, when I heard him call me.

“Mr. Despard—”

I turned to find him right behind me.

“I—thank you,” he said.

“Nothing to thank me for,” I answered. “I enjoyed the workout. I suppose I’ll be seeing you around?”

“Sure,” he said—and then, more strongly, added, “Sure. You will!”

“Good.”

I turned and went. I had gotten a good echo from him, like the unblurred ring of uncracked metal when you tap a bronze vase with a fingernail. I went back to the jeep, got behind the wheel, and after a moment’s thought headed on into City Hall.

But there was no one around when I got there. Even the typists were not at their desks. I looked at my watch and saw it was just after ten in the morning. Coffee break time, perhaps. I went out, got back in the jeep and headed back up toward the summer palace, enjoying the bright day, the sight of the buildings and people I passed, as if the whole world was something marvelous invented yesterday that I had never seen before.

When I got to the summer palace there were eight vehicles of various kinds parked in the parking area. As I climbed out of the jeep, Bill came out of the door with a rush.

“There you are,” he said. “We’ve been looking all over for you. The Empress is on her way. We just got word.”