Time Storm

26

We were not surprised to see the helicopters ignore the town and head directly toward the summer palace. There were three of them, all the size of aircraft I had flown in between airports like LaGuardia and Kennedy in New York. They could each hold at least thirty people comfortably.

We stood in the parking area and watched them come—a baker’s dozen of us, including the Old Man and Porniarsk. There was nothing much else we could do. Our advance warnings from the communities farther west had earlier confirmed the fact that Paula Mirador, the Empress, was indeed moving toward us with at least five hundred armed bodies (about one-third of them women) plus three .155 millimeter howitzers. She had apparently merely passed through these other communities, pausing just long enough to accept their formal submissions on her way. Wisely, no one had tried to oppose her, and we ourselves were hardly in a position to do so, even though we were probably the strongest single social unit between our territory and the Rockies.

According to her usual battle plan, which our scouts had confirmed, she had the main body of her troops standing off just over the horizon, with the VTOL transports ready and waiting. The howitzers were with them, ready to be moved in close to pound flat any property we owned before the troops followed to mop up any still-living defenders. It was a strong military argument she proposed.

We had not given in to it—yet. Our town was evacuated, except for a half-dozen fortified positions with .50 caliber machine guns, hidden among the buildings. These, if they survived the artillery, could make it something less than a picnic for the troops advancing on the wreckage. Whether the Empress knew about our machine guns was a question. She apparently knew a good deal about us, but possibly not the full extent of our weapons and supplies.

The rest of our noncombatants were scattered, back in the hills, with a light force to guard them and weapons of their own, as well as enough food and other basic supplies to last a year. She could not hunt them all down, even if she wished to spend the time trying. Aside from all this, there were three more heavy machine guns and gun crews camouflaged and dug in to cover this parking area from the surrounding rocks and trees—and one other machine gun nest hidden inside the palace. Even if she were bringing as many as sixty or eighty soldiers in her helicopters, it would not be a wise idea for her to simply try and make the thirteen of us prisoners by head-on force.

But of course all this was beside the point. She did not really want to waste trained people and ammunition on us, any more than we wanted to fight a small war with her. She and we were both lining up our resources face-to-face for a bargaining session. The helicopters sidled in, looking very dramatic against the blue sky with its few patches of high clouds, and settled to earth with a good deal of noise and raised dust.

The doors of the two furthest from us opened, and uniformed men with rifles and mortars and a couple of light machine guns jumped out and set up a sort of perimeter, facing the surrounding country. They did not, however, move too far away from their planes and seemed to be making the point that they were there to protect the helicopters and themselves primarily.

After they had settled down, there was a wait of two or three more minutes, then the door to the helicopter closest to us opened, the steps were run down, and a dozen men and women in civilian clothes came out to range themselves like an honor guard in a double line ending at the foot of the steps.

Another brief wait, and a single figure came out. There was no doubt that this was Paula Mirador, even if the rest of the proceedings had been designed to leave any doubt. I stared, myself. I had not seen anything like this since before the time storm; nor had any of us, I was willing to bet. We had grown so used to living and dressing with practicality and utility in mind that we had forgotten how people had used to wear clothes, and what sort of clothes they might wear.

Paula Mirador was a page out of some ghostly fashion magazine, from her dainty, high-heeled, cream-colored boots to an elaborately casual coiffure. She looked like she had just walked out of a beauty shop. In between was a tall, slim woman who only missed being very beautiful by virtue of a nose that was a little short and a little sharp. -Besides the boots and the warm brown hair of her coiffure, she wore a carefully tailored white pants suit over an open-throated polka-dotted blouse, with the wide collar of the blouse lying over the collar of the suit. A grey suede shoulderbag with an elaborately worked silver clasp hung from one shoulder.

She took my breath away—and not by virtue of her band-box perfection alone. Her hair was not that blonde, her face was not that perfect, but something about her rang an echo of Swannee in my mind.

She walked down the steps, not looking at us yokels, and gazed around at the general scenery, then said something to one of her civies-dressed attendants, who popped to and turned away to peel off an escort of eight armed troopers to come toward us.

Once upon a time, I would have credited the attendant with a prior knowledge of what I looked like, seeing him come directly towards me, alone. Lately, however, I had begun to realize how much the way in which human beings instinctively position themselves gives out signals. The group pattern of those standing around me amounted to a sign with an arrow pointing to me and the words here is our leader.

At any rate, the envoy, a round-faced young man in his mid-twenties, who looked something like a taller version of Bill, came up within a dozen feet of me and stopped. His troopers stopped with him.

“Mr. Despard?” he said. “You are Mr. Despard, aren’t you, sir? I’m Yneho Johnson. The Empress would like to speak to you. Will you follow me, please?”

I did not move.

“That makes two of us,” I said. “I’d like to talk to her. I’d like to know what the hell she’s doing here on my property without my invitation. I’ll wait here five minutes. If she hasn’t come personally to explain by that time, I’ll blow the whole batch of you apart. You’re parked on top of enough buried industrial dynamite to leave nothing but dust.”

He blinked. Whether because of my tone and attitude, or because of the information about the dynamite, was hard to tell. Probably both. The dynamite, of course, was a bluff. It would have taken twenty truckloads of that explosive to mine the whole parking area even sparsely. But there was no way he and the rest of Paula’s party could be sure we did not have that much; and in any case, I had nothing to lose by bluffing since they outgunned us anyway.

He hesitated. I turned away.

“Bill,” I said, “see he doesn’t waste time.”

I walked back a few steps toward the palace, hearing Bill’s voice behind me.

“You’ve lost fifteen seconds already,” Bill was saying. “Do you want to try for more?”

I turned around and saw Johnson, with his escort, retreating at a fair pace toward his mistress. He rejoined her and spoke animatedly. She, on the other hand, as far as we could tell from this distance, was the picture of cool indifference. She waved a hand gracefully on the end of one slim wrist, and he came back to us with his bodyguards.

“Mr. Despard,” he said. “The Empress warns you. If you’re bluffing, you’ll be shot down by our escort troops as soon as the five minutes are up. If you’re not bluffing, whether you kill us or not, her troops, who love her, will catch you and roast you over a slow fire. She, herself, never bluffs.”

I turned toward Doc.

“Doc,” I said, “shoot him.”

Doc unslung the machine pistol he had hanging from his right shoulder.

“Stop. Stop—” shouted Yneho Johnson. “Don’t! Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Just under two minutes left,” I reminded him, and watched him gallop back across to his Empress.

They were still talking a minute later.

“Four minutes up,” said Bill, behind me.

“Let it get down to thirty seconds,” I told him.

We waited.

“Coming up on four and a half minutes,” Bill said.

I stepped out in front of the others and made an elaborate show of looking at my watch.

“Now,” I said to Bill, under my breath.

He had a small detonator switch in his pocket, with a wire running from it back into the palace and from there out again to a spot in the parking area near its west edge. He reached into the pocket, pressed the detonator button; and a fountain of dirt exploded very satisfactorily to about thirty feet in the air, thereby cleaning us out of dynamite almost completely—and not industrial dynamite at that, but the sort of explosive that used to be available in hardware stores in mining areas. I made a large show of looking at my watch again.

“Maybe they won’t realize it’s a warning,” said Marie, tightly.

“They’ll realize,” Ellen said.

They had. The Empress was at last on the move toward me—not by herself, but with her whole entourage surrounding her. Mentally, I docked her a couple of points for not coming sooner. It should have been obvious to her that if there was one patch of ground in the parking area not likely to be mined, it would be the space where I and my own people were standing. She came on until her group merged with mine, and she walked up to stand face to face with me, smiling.

“Marc,” she said, “you and I have to have a private talk.”

“I can talk out here,” I said.

“You probably can.” She was very pleasant. “I find it works better for me if I don’t take my own staff into my confidence exclusively. But don’t you think we could both be a little more relaxed and free if it was just the two of us chatting?”

It was not an unreasonable argument; and I had already made my point—which was that I was not about to make any deal behind the back of my associates. I could afford to give in gracefully.

“All right. Come inside,” I said.

I took her into the palace. On the still air indoors, I could catch a hint of perfume about her that had not been noticeable outside. I was suddenly very conscious of her physically—both of her female presence and her bandbox costuming. The ghost of Swannee moved momentarily between us, once more. On impulse I took her to the library, cleared the books off one of the other chairs for her, and we sat down facing each other.

“You must have somebody around who cares about preserving information,” she said, looking about the room.

“Yes,” I said. “What did you want to talk about?”

She crossed one leg over the other.

“I need your help, Marc.”

“You could have written me a letter, Paula.”

She laughed.

“Of course—if it’d just been a matter of you and me. But I’m the Empress and you’re Marc Despard, the man who controls the time storm. When two people like us get together, it has to be a state visit.”

“Aside from the fact that I don’t begin to control the time storm,” I said, “what about this state visit of yours? A state visit with an army and three howitzers?”

“Don’t pretend to be something other than the intelligent man I know you are,” she answered. “All this show of force is an excuse for you, Marc—an excuse for you to agree to work with me because that’s the only way you can keep the people you have around you now from being hurt.”

“I’m that valuable?”

“I said, don’t pretend to be less bright than you are. Of course you’re that valuable.”

“All right. But why should I take advantage of your excuse? Why should I want to work with you, in any case?”

“Wouldn’t you rather have the resources of the whole world at your fingertips, than just what you can reach here, locally?”

“I don’t need any more than I have here,” I said.

She leaned forward. There was an intensity, a vibrancy about her that was very real, unique. She had to know I knew she was using it deliberately to influence me.

“Marc, this world still has got a lot of people in it who need putting back together into a single working community. Don’t tell me you don’t want to have a hand in that. You’re a natural leader. That’s obvious, aside from the time storm and what you’ve done with it. Can you really tell me you’d turn your back on the chance to set the world right?”

She either had a touch of the occult about her, or she was capable of reading patterns from behavior almost as accurately as I might have myself. My deep drive to defeat the time storm reached out with its left hand to touch the basic human hunger to conquer and rule. Mentally, I gave her back the two points I had docked her earlier—and a couple more besides. But I did not answer her right away; like a good salesman, she knew when to close.

“Say you’ll at least talk it over with me in the next few days,” she added.

“I suppose I can do that,” I told her.

So it turned out that her appearance became a state visit in reality. The main body of her troops and the howitzers stayed out of sight over the horizon, although none of us, including me, ever forgot they were there; and she, with her immediate official family, slipped into the role of guests, as old Ryan and the others had been over the Thanksgiving holidays.

She was a good deal more entertaining than my neighbors had been, and much more persuasive. She had a mind like a skinning knife. But the most effective argument she brought to bear on me in the next five days was the pretense that she was putting her military strength aside and trying to convince me by argument alone. I knew better, of course. As I just said, none of us could forget those troops and the artillery just beyond field glass range. But her refusal to bring her military muscle directly into the discussion left me to argue silently with my own conscience over whether it was not just personal pride or stubbornness on my part that made me so willing to expose my wives and friends to death or maiming rather than join forces with her.

She had another lever to use on me, although at the time I did not rate its effectiveness with that of the argument-only ploy. She was reputed to have the kind of legendary sexiness that made her troops dream of her at night and consider all other women as watered-down substitutes; but I got no such signals from her at all. Except for the odd moments in which she reminded me of Swan-nee, she was good company and interesting, that was all. At the same time, by contrast, she did seem to make Marie look limited and unworldly, and Ellen juvenile.

Of course, she and I had very little time out of each other’s company. We were the two heads of state and if she was to be entertained by us, I usually had to be on stage myself. The time I had with my own people was what was left over, usually either the early hours in the morning, before Paula had put in an appearance from the several rooms—suite was too pretentious a word for them —we had turned over to her and her several personal attendants— or late at night after she had tired out.

It was a situation that put both Ellen and Marie, particularly, at some distance from Paula and myself, but perhaps this was not a bad arrangement. It developed that neither of them liked her or saw anything but serious trouble coming from any extended association with her.

“She really doesn’t like you, either, you know,” Marie told me, the evening of the third day Paula had spent with us. “She doesn’t like anyone.”

“She can’t afford to,” I said. “She’s a ruler. She’s got to keep her head clear of likes and dislikes for individuals so she can make her decisions strictly on the basis of whether something is a good thing for her people, or not.”

“A good thing for her or not, you mean,” said Marie.

That was unusually outspoken for Marie. But the more I thought over what I had said to her, the more I liked the ring of my own words. I went to Ellen’s room and tried the same speech on her.

Ellen snorted.

“Is that supposed to be an answer?” I said. “All right, tell me. Exactly what is it that’s wrong with Paula?”

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” said Ellen.

“Well, you must think something’s wrong or you wouldn’t be acting this way. What is it?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You want to be a damn fool, go ahead and be one.”

I lost my temper.

“How can I be a damn fool? I’ve got to find some way to deal with her and do it with gloves on. She can wipe us all off the map if I don’t!”

Ellen got up out of bed, put on her clothes and went for a walk —at three in the morning. Nobody but she could have done something like that with such finality and emphasis. Her back was an exclamation mark going out the door.

Bill did not like her either. Neither did Doc. For that matter, neither did the Old Man, who always disappeared when Paula came on the scene. I began to feel like the tragic hero in a Greek play with the chorus in unison warning me of disaster at every step. I did not mention any of this to Paula; but she evidently sensed some of it at least, because along about the end of the week she got off on a subject that was particularly timely in view of the situation.

“... It is a lonely life,” she said, apropos of something I had said. We were taking a stroll through the woods below the summer palace early in the morning. “Rank does more than isolate you socially. Do you realize, Marc, you’re essentially the only person in the world I can talk to on the level, so to speak? With everyone else, I have to remember I’m the Empress. But it’s not even that so much as having to put myself in the balance sometimes against everyone around me when it comes to making decisions. Every so often, all the advice I get is one-sided; and sometimes I have to brace myself to turn it all down and go just the opposite way, because when it gets down to it I have to trust my own decision more than all of theirs or else I’m not a fit ruler.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Sure you do.” She glanced at me for a moment, then looked ahead the way we were walking. “You can’t take on responsibility without taking on everything else that goes with it.”

She stopped and turned to face me. I stopped also, necessarily, and turned toward her.

“That’s why it would mean so much to have you with me, Marc,” she said. “I know you’ve got your own work with the time storm. I’ve only just begun to realize these last few days how important that is. But what you’re needed more for, now, is to help me unify this torn-up Earth we’ve got and put it on a single, working community basis. That’s your higher responsibility, at the moment”

“And if I’m not with you, I’m against you?”

“Oh, Marc!” she said, sadly. “I’m not a monster.”

I felt slightly ashamed of myself. It was a fact that, so far, I had seen nothing in her that was not reasonable to the point of being admirable. The only evidence I had ever had that contradicted this was contained in the large body of rumor about her; and I had some experience with rumors, having heard some of the ones that circulated about me.

“Well,” I said, “how much time are you asking me to invest?”

“A couple of years at the most.” She looked sideways at me as we walked. “Certainly no more than that.”

“You think you can take over the world in two years? That’s better than Alexander’s record, and he was only thinking about the Asian continent.”

“There aren’t that many people nowadays. You know that as well as I do,” she said. “And it’s a matter of contacting just the large population centers. Once those are organized, the small communities in each area and the individuals will want to adjust to the situation on their own.”

“Two years...” I said. All at once, it seemed like a long time away from here, away from the library and Porniarsk’s workroom.

“Look,” she said, stopping again. Once more we faced each other and, for the first time since I had known her, she touched me, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “Let’s forget about it for today. Why don’t we do something different? You let me entertain you for a change.”

“How?”

“We’ll fly to my base camp and have lunch there. You can see for yourself what my regular soldiers are like and why I think it won’t take even two years to bring order to the world.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The others may worry....”

“Even if they do, it’ll do them good,” she said. “When they see you coming back safe and sound after going off alone with me, they’ll understand I’m no one to be afraid of.”

“All right.”

We went back up to the palace. I did not quite feel like telling Ellen or Marie I was taking a solo jaunt into Paula’s armed camp, so I looked for Bill or Doc. Doc was the one I found first; and he took the idea of my going calmly enough. In fact, it seemed to me his eyes even lit up a bit at the idea.

“Want me to come?” he asked.

“It’s not necessary—” I checked myself. “Come to think of it, why not? You may be able to see some things there I won’t.”

I sent him to tell Bill we were both going and went back to explain to Paula that there would be two of us, feeling somewhat smug with the notion that I had taken some of the force out of the objections the others would have to my going entirely alone.

“Of course, bring him,” said Paula graciously, when I mentioned that I couldn’t come after all, unless I had someone like Doc along with me. It had occurred to me that, just as I had, she might be underestimating Doc because of his youth. I had learned better during the past few months; but if she was making the same initial error, it could do us no harm and might turn out to our advantage. On the helicopter ride to her camp, accordingly, I watched her closely for any sign that this was the case, but saw no clear signals either way. She was friendly but a little condescending to him, which could mean that she did not, in fact, recognize his worth, or simply that she lumped him in with all those human bodies she looked down on from her status as Empress.

The camp, when we got there, was impressive enough. Paula’s soldiers might or might not love her, as rumor had it, but they were well-uniformed, well-armed, and under good discipline. Their field tents were pitched in a hollow square with Paula’s clump of larger tents at the center, so that these were protected on all sides. The helicopter that brought us put us down in the open space outside this interior clump of tents and within the camp area. If Paula had been intending to make me prisoner once she had me here, she would have had no difficulty once we had landed. There were armed guards ten deep around me in all directions.

But as it was, our visit was nothing but pleasant. Paula evidently travelled with a full complement of personal servants—I estimated at least two full helicopter-loads worth, which meant that she might not have needed to be so saving of fuel as I had guessed —including a number of younger women, none of them quite as good-looking as she was, but close enough. These were dressed as unpractically as she was, with an eye to appearance rather than practicality; and this puzzled me until I began to realize that their primary job, or at least their highly important secondary job, was to act as ornaments and geishas. They were all over Doc and me while we were having cocktails before lunch, and they both served and joined us at the meal itself.

I did not at all mind being fussed over by these attendants; and I could all but see Doc’s ears wiggling. I say, I could all tout see his ears wiggling. What I saw, of course, was that they did not wiggle at all, and he was so poker-faced and determinedly indifferent to the attentions he was getting that it was almost painful to watch. Being a little more case-hardened by years than Doc, I had a corner of my mind free to note that it was a shrewd move of Paula’s to provide herself with such courtiers. Not only did they act as a setting to show her off and emphasize her authority, they added an extra level between her and ordinary female humanity. Perhaps her troops did worship her, after all, seeing her set off this way, in the same way that they might worship a god or a demigod.

After lunch, Paula called in the commander of her soldiers, a small, lean, grey-haired man named Aruba with three stars on each shoulder strap of his impeccable uniform. General Aruba and Paula together took us out to look over the camp and observe her troops. Those in uniform were all young. I saw some boys and girls I could swear were no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. They were all cheerful, bright-looking and had the air of individuals aware of themselves as members of an elite group. There was a curious uniformity among them, too, which puzzled me for a while before I realized that I saw no tall bodies among them, either female or male. Like the general, they were short, and most tended to a squareness of body.

Aside from their size, though, they were impressive. They were apparently spending their time in active training while awaiting the results of Paula’s negotiations with us. They had set up an obstacle course outside their camp, and we watched as some thirty or forty of them ran through it, looking like trained athletes. They were, as Gramps Ryan had hinted, a far cry from my part-time militia.

After the inspection tour, we stepped into Paula’s largest tent once more for drinks and then were flown back to the summer palace. I was itching to know what Doc’s reaction was to everything we had seen; but I was back in host position again and could not abandon Paula to plunge immediately into conference with one of my staff. So it was nine that night before I had a chance to get together with him and the others. We held a staff meeting down in the City Hall, safely away from the summer palace and the view or hearing of any of Paula’s attendants.

“Well,” I said to Doc, when we were at last gathered over the coffee cups in Ellen’s office—he and I, Ellen, Marie, and Bill— “how about it? What did you think of those soldiers of hers?”

“Well,” Doc scratched his right ear, “they’re in good shape physically. They’re well-trained. They’re young and bouncy and they’ve learned to obey orders. I’d guess they know their jobs—”

“Tough as we’ve heard they are, then,” said Ellen.

“Maybe,” said Doc.

“Why maybe?” I demanded.

“Well,” said Doc, “they’re not veterans. My dad and the other officers used to talk a lot about that; and it was a fact. I mean, I could see it too. The ones who’d actually been shot at somewhere along the line knew what it was like; but there was no way the ones who hadn’t been shot at could know what it was like. My dad and the others used to say there was no telling what a man who hadn’t been shot at was going to do the first time he was.”

“What makes you so sure the ones we saw haven’t been shot at?” Bill asked.

Doc shrugged.

“They just look like they haven’t. I mean, it shows.”

“How?” I said. “For example?”

“Well...” he frowned into his coffee cup for a second, then looked back at me. “They’re too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Too gung ho. You understand? If they were veterans, they wouldn’t be wasting energy except when they had to. For example, when they were off duty, you’d see them off their feet, sitting or lying down somewhere. That sort of thing.”

We thought about it for a moment.

“You try to remember,” Doc said, “when it was you last heard of the Empress actually fighting anyone. Maybe on the Islands, where she started, there was some fighting. But ever since she landed on the west coast, it seems she just shows up with all those guns and whoever she’s dealing with surrenders.”

“Then you think we might have a chance, fighting her?” Bill asked. “Is that it?”

“We might have a chance,” Doc said. “One thing for sure, the people we’ve got carrying guns are going to use them and keep on using them when the fighting starts.”

There was another short silence, full of thought.

“I don’t like it,” said Marie finally. “There’s still too many of them compared to us.”

“I think so too,” I said. “Even if we were sure of winning, I don’t want our town wrecked and even one of our people killed. Now, Paula’s been after me to join her for the next year or two while she brings the rest of the world under control—”

They all started to talk at once.

“All right, now just hang on there for a moment!” I told them. “If I do decide to go with her, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to stay for two years, or even one year. But if that’s the best way, or the only way, to get her to leave everybody else alone here, then my spending some time with her is a cheap way to buy her off.”

“But what sort of a place will this be without you?” said Marie fiercely.

“Come on, now,” I said. “The rest of you run everything here. All I’ve been doing is sitting around and reading books. You can spare me, all right.”

“Marc,” said Bill, “you aren’t needed here because you’ve got duties. You’re needed here because you’re the pivot point of the whole settlement.”

“Let him go,” said Ellen. “It’s what he wants to do.”

Bill looked at her quickly.

“You don’t mean that.”

“All right, I don’t,” said Ellen. “But it gripes me.”

She folded her arms and looked hard-eyed at me.

“And what about the time storm?” Bill said to me. “How can you keep on working toward a way to do something permanent about that, if you go off with Paula? What if the balance of temporal forces we set up breaks down sometime in the time you’re gone? What if it breaks down tomorrow?”

“If it breaks down tomorrow, I can’t do a thing more about it but try to reestablish the balance again, the way I did the first time.”

“You can’t do that if you’re not here,” Marie said.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Marie,” I said to her. “Paula needs a stable Earth as much as we do. She’d send me back in a hurry to reestablish a balance of forces if that balance broke down and mist-walls started moving again.”

“It might not be so easy to reestablish next time, Porniarsk says,” Bill put in. “What about that?”

“If it’s not as easy, it’s not as easy,” I told them all. “I tell you I’m not yet ready to take on the time storm again to produce any more permanent state of balance than I did before.”

For a second, nobody said anything. The silence was as prickly as a fistful of needles.

“Anyway,” said Ellen, “have you checked with Porniarsk? You owe him that much before you do anything like going off.”

As a matter of fact, I had completely forgotten about Porniarsk. The avatar was never concerned or consulted in any of our purely human councils about community matters; and as a result, I had fallen out of the habit of thinking about him when decisions like this were to be made. Ellen was quite right. I could not do anything with the time storm if I lost the help of Porniarsk. If I simply went off with Paula and he should think I’d given up on the storm....

“I haven’t checked with him yet,” I said. “Of course I will. I’ll go talk to him now. I suppose he’s in the lab?”

“I think so,” said Bill.

“Yes, he is,” said Ellen. “I was just in there.”

That bit of information caught at my attention. As far back as I could remember, Ellen had never paid any particular attention to Porniarsk. I went out and down the corridors toward the lab. On the way, I passed the little interior courtyard where Sunday lay preserved; and on impulse I checked, turned, and went in to look at him.

I had not come to see him in months. It had been a painful thing even to think of him for a long time; and while now the pain was understood and largely gone, the habit of avoidance was still strong in me. But at this moment, there was a feeling in me almost as if I should let the crazy cat know that I was going—as if he was still alive and would worry when I did not come back immediately. The roofless courtyard was dark, except for starglow, when I stepped into it, and cold with the spring night. I closed the door by which I had come out and reached out to thumb on the light switch controlling the floodlights around the walls. Suddenly the courtyard was illuminated so brightly it hurt my eyes; there, to my right, was the transparent box in which Sunday lay.

It was like a rectangular fish tank a little longer than the leopard and perhaps three feet deep, set up on a wooden support about coffee table height and dimensions. Within, it held that same fluid-looking stuff that filled Porniarsk’s universe viewing tank and which he had given me to understand was actually something like an altered state of space—if you could picture nothingness as having variable states. At any rate, what he told me it did was to hold Sunday’s body in a condition outside of the movement of time, any time. As a result, his body was even now in exactly the same condition it had been in less than two hours after his death, when Porniarsk had surrounded it with a jury-rigged version of this non-temporal space tank.

Nearly two hours, of course, was far too long for him to have been dead if we had been hoping for any sort of biological revival. If it had been possible to mend his wounds and start his life processes in the present state of his dead body, there would have been nothing to bring to life. His brain cells had died within minutes without oxygen, and the information contained in them was lost. A body in perpetual coma would have been all we could have achieved.

But what Porniarsk had hopes of was something entirely different. It was his expectation that, if we could learn to control the time storm even a little, we might be able to either acquire the knowledge directly, or contact others farther up the temporal line who had it, so that we could return the temporal moment of Sunday’s body back to a few seconds before he had been wounded. It was a far-fetched hope and one that I, myself, had never really been able to hold. But if Porniarsk could believe in it, I was willing to go along with him as far as his faith could take us.

Perhaps at that, I thought to myself as I stood looking at Sunday’s silent form lying there with its eyes closed and its wounds hidden under bandages, I had indeed had some secret and sneaking hope of my own, after all. I needed to hope. Because Sunday was still there in my mind like a chunk of jagged ice that would not melt. He represented unfinished business on my part. He had died before I could show him that I appreciated what he had given me—and the fact that the gift was an unthinking animal’s one did nothing to lessen the obligation. What I owed to the others, to Ellen, to Marie perhaps, and Bill—or even to Porniarsk himself—I still had time to pay, because they were still alive and around. But the invoice for Sunday’s love, and his death, which had come about because he had rushed to rescue and protect me, still hung pinned to the wall of my soul with the dagger of my late-born conscience.

No—it was not because of how he had died that I was in debt to him, I thought now, watching his motionless body in the floodlights. It was what he had done for me while he was alive. He had cracked open the hard shell that cased my emotions, so that now I walked through the world feeling things whether I wanted to or not; which was sometimes painful, but which was also a part of living. No, regardless of what happened with Paula, I could never be diverted permanently from work with the time storm, if only for my hope of seeing Sunday alive again, so that I could let him know how I felt about him.

I turned off the lights. Suddenly, in the dark and the starlight, I began to shiver, great shuddering, racking shivers. I had become chilled, standing there in the raw spring night in my shirtsleeves. I went back to the warmth inside and down the hall a little farther to Porniarsk’s lab.

He was there when I stepped through its door and the Old Man was with him, squatting silently against one of the walls and watching, as the avatar stood gazing into the universe tank. They both turned to me as I came toward them.

“I thought I’d drop by,” I said; and the social words sounded foolish in this working room, spoken to the alien avatar and the experimental, near-human animal. I hurried to say something more to cover up the fatuous sound of it. “Have you found out anything new?”

“I’ve made no great gain in knowledge or perception,” Porniarsk said, quite as if I had last spoken to him only an hour or two before, instead of something like months since.

“Do you think you will?” I said.

“I have doubts I will,” he said. “I’m self-limited by what I am, as this one here—” he pointed to the Old Man, who turned to gaze at him for a second before looking back at me, “is self-limited by what he is. Porniarsk himself might do a great deal more. Or you might.”

“You’re sure there’s no hope of getting Porniarsk here?” I asked. I had asked that before; but I could not help trying it again, iii the hope that this time the answer would be different.

“I’m sure. There’s a chance of something large being accomplished here. But there’s a certainty of something not so large, but nonetheless important, being accomplished where Porniarsk is now. He will never leave that certainty for this possibility.”

“And you can’t tell me where he is, even?”

“Not,” said the avatar, “in terms that would make any sense to you.”

“What if things change? Could you then?”

“If things change, anything is possible.”

“Yes,” I said. I was suddenly very aware that we were at the end of a long and full day. I would have sat down just then if there had been a chair nearby; but since neither Porniarsk nor the Old Man used chairs, the nearest one at the moment was at a far end of the room, and it was not worth my going and bringing it back.

“I haven’t been getting anywhere myself, I’m afraid,” I said— and immediately, having said it, remembered that this was not quite true. I hesitated, wondering if my experience of several days past with the cardinal that had come to perch on the bird feeder, and all that had followed, would mean anything to the avatar. “Well, there has been something.”

He waited. The Old Man waited. If they had been two humans, at least one of them would have asked me what that something had been.

“I’ve been doing a lot of reading for some time now...” I went on after a moment; and I proceeded to tell Porniarsk how the Old Man had cracked me loose from the mental fog I’d been in ever since Sunday’s death, and how I had started on my search through everything I could lay my hands on between book covers. I had never told him this before; and, hearing the words coming from my mouth now, I found myself wondering why I had not.

Porniarsk listened in silence, and the Old Man also listened. How much the Old Man comprehended I had no way of telling. He certainly understood a fair amount of what we humans said to each other, apparently being limited, not so much by vocabulary, as by what was within his conceptual abilities. Certainly he knew I was talking about him part of the time, and almost certainly, he must have understood when I was talking about that moment on the mountainside when I was ready to kill him and the touch of his hand stopped me.

Porniarsk let me go through the whole thing, right down to the description of the golden light and my helping Orrin Elscher unload his pickup truck. When I was finally done, I waited for him to say something, but still he did not.

“Well,” I said, at last. “What do you think? Did I really break through to something, or didn’t I?”

“I’ve no way to answer that question,” Porniarsk said. “Any discovery can be valuable. Whether it’s valuable in the way we need it to be, valuable toward learning how to control the time storm, I’ve no way of knowing. Basically, I’d say that anything that expands your awareness would have to be useful.”

I found myself less than happy with him. It had been a great thing to me, that episode with the cardinal and the golden light and the passage with Elscher; and the avatar’s treating it so calmly rubbed me the wrong way. I was on the edge of snapping at him; then it came to me that I was having one of the suspect emotions —anger.

So—why was I angry? I asked myself that, and the answer came back quickly and clearly. I was angry because I had been expecting to be patted on the back. Subconsciously, I had been cooking in the back of my head all this time a neat little argument for him, to the effect that I had made this large step forward, working on my own; so going off with Paula would not waste any time, since I could continue working toward more large steps while I was away. But now Porniarsk had shot the whole scheme down by not showing the proper astonishment and awe at my accomplishment; and I was left without the necessary springboard for my argument.

All right. So it was a case of going back and starting over again —with honesty this time.

“We’re up against a situation,” I said. “I may have to leave here for a time. I don’t know how long.”

“Leave?” Porniarsk asked.

I told him about Paula.

“You see?” I said, when I was done. “The only safe way for the people here—and for that matter, for what you have in this room and any work with the time storm—is for me to go along with her, for a while anyway. But it’s temporary. I’ll only be gone for a while. I want you to know that.”

“I can understand your intentions,” said Porniarsk. “Can I ask if you’ve weighed the importance of what you want to protect here against the importance of what you may be able to do eventually in combatting the time storm? If nothing else, an accident could destroy you while you’re away from here.”

“Accident could destroy me here.”

“It’s much less likely to do so here, however; isn’t that so? With this Paula, you’ll be moving into an area of higher physical risk?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said. “No. No guess about it. You’re right, of course.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t go.”

“God help me, Porniarsk!” I said. “I’ve got to! Don’t you understand? We can’t fight her and survive. And we’ve got to survive first and get our work with the time storm done after, because there’s no way to do it the other way around.”

“You’re sure we couldn’t survive if you stayed?”

“As sure as I am of anything.”

He stood, the heavy mask of his features facing me silently for a second.

“Do one thing, please,” he said. “It’s been some time since you looked into the viewer here. Will you look again now, and tell me if there’s any difference in what you see?”

“Of course,” I told him.

I stepped up to the tank and looked into it. Now that I focused in on the space contained by it, I once more saw the myriad of tiny lights moving about in it. I looked at them, feeling a strange disappointment; and it took me a second or two to realize the reason. I had unconsciously bought my own story about having accomplished some breakthrough in understanding, the moment with the cardinal. I had really expected to see something more than I ever had, the next time I looked into this device; and now came disappointment.

Identified, the disappointment grew to a sharp pang. It was against all reason. I did not want to discover evidence that would be against my going with Paula. I wanted evidence that I should go, and it was exactly that sort of evidence that I was getting. But I realized that this was not what I really wanted—it was not what my heart wanted.

I reached into my memory to recapture the moment with the cardinal and the golden light that had been everywhere. But it slipped away from my imagination. I could not evoke it. A bitter anger began to rise in me. My mind beat against the iron bars of its own inability, and what I reached for went further and further from me.

I may have said something. I may have snarled, or sworn, or made some sound. I think I remember doing something like that, though I am not sure. But suddenly, there was a touch on my left hand. My mind cleared. I looked down and saw the Old Man beside me. He had taken hold of my fingers, and he was looking up at me.

My mind cleared. Suddenly, Sunday and the cardinal and all things at once came back together again. All the angry emotion washed out of me and I remembered that it was not by pushing out, but by taking in, that I had finally found the common pattern that connected me with all things else. I let go then, opened up my mind to anything and everything, and looked into the universe tank once more.

There were the lights again. But now, as I watched, I began to pick up rhythms in their movements, and identify patterns. Forces were at work to shift them about, and those forces were revealed in the patterns I saw. As I identified more and more of them, their number grew until they began to interact, until larger and larger clusters of lights were locking together in interrelated movements. There was no golden illumination around me this time; but there was an intensity—not a tension, but an intensity—that mounted like music rising in volume until it reached a certain peak, and I broke through. All at once, I was there.

I was no longer standing looking into a viewing device. I was afloat in the actual universe. I was a point of view great enough to see from one end of the universe to the other and, at the same time, able to focus in on single stars, single worlds. Now I observed not the representation, but the reality; and for the first time I perceived it as a single, working whole. From particle to atom, to star, to galaxy, to the full universe itself, I saw all the parts working together like one massive living organism moving in response to the pressure of entropy....

“My God!” I said—and I heard my own voice through the bones of my skull, very small and far away, for I was still out there in the universe. “My God, it’s collapsing! It’s contracting!”

For it was. What I looked at were the patterns of a universe that had been uniformly expanding, all its galaxies spreading out from each other, creating an entropy that was running down at a uniform rate. But now the pattern had been expanded too far. It had been stretched too thin, and now it was beginning to break down in places. Here and there, galaxies were beginning to fall back into the pattern, to reapproach each other; and where this was happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those places, entropy was increasing, side by side and conflicting with those still-expanding patterns in which entropy continued to decrease.

The result was stress; a chaos of laws in conflict, spreading like a network of cracks fracturing a crystal, spreading through the universal space, riding the tides of movement of the solid bodies through space. It was stress that concentrated and generated new fractures at the points of greatest mass, primarily at the centers of the galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran, time states changed, forward or back, one way or another.

Four billion years ago, the first stress crack had touched our galaxy. My point of view turned time back to that point and I saw it happen. An accumulation of entropic conflict near the galaxy center. A massive star that went nova—but unnaturally, implosion nova.

There was a collapse of great mass. A collapse of space and time, followed by an outburst of radiating time faults, riding the wave patterns of the stellar and planetary movements within the galaxy, until at last the time storm reached far out into the galactic arms and touched our own solar system.

What had gone wrong was everything. What was falling apart was not merely this galaxy, but the universe itself. There was nothing to tie to, no place to stand while the process could be halted, the damage checked and mended. It was too big. It was everything, all interconnected, from the particles within my own body to the all-encompassing universe. There was no way I or anyone else could stop something like that. It was beyond mending by me, by humanity, beyond mending by all living intelligent beings. Facing it, we were less than transitory motes of dust caught up in a tornado, helpless to even dream of controlling what hurled us about and would destroy us at its whim....