Time Storm

27

I woke in my own bed and with the feeling that I had been through this once before. For a moment, I could not remember when; then I recalled my earlier experience with the universe tank and how I had passed out after getting caught up in what I saw there. I felt a momentary quirk of annoyance. If I was going to fold up every time I tried to see things in that tank....

But the annoyance faded as I remembered what I had seen. Here, lying in the familiar bed in the familiar room with everything simple and usual about me, the memory seemed impossible, like nothing more than some bad dream. But it was not a bad dream. It was reality; and in spite of the comfortable appearance of everyday security that surrounded me, the fact of the time storm as I had seen it loomed over us all like some giant, indifferent mountain that might crumble and bury us at any moment, or might let us live a thousand years in peace.

But still... for all that I could feel the shadow of the storm still dark on me, I was not quite as destroyed by it as I had been when I had first seen it in its full dimensions, imaged in the tank. A reaction had taken place inside me, a stubborn reflex against utter despair and hopelessness. There was no way I could even begin to dream, as I had for so long, of controlling the storm. And still... and still... something inside me was refusing to give up. Some strange and snorky part of my being was insisting that the situation could still be fought and perhaps overcome.

It was impossible. Perhaps a thousand more individuals like myself, armed with powers beyond the powers of gods, might have stood a chance of achieving control, but I was alone and had no such powers. Only, there it was. I could not let go. Something in me refused to do it.

Ellen came in, carrying a glass of water.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m all right,” I said.

The shade was pulled down on the bedroom’s one window and a light was on. But now that I looked, I saw the paler, but brighter, gleam of daylight around the edge and bottom of the shade.

“How long have I been here?” I asked, as she came over to me. She handed me the glass of water and also, two white pills.

“Take these,” she said.

“What are they?” I asked, looking at the pills in my hand.

“She didn’t tell me, but Marie said you should take them when you woke up.”

“Now damn it, I’m not taking some medication I don’t know about just because you say Marie says I should take them.”

“I think they’re only aspirin.”

“Aspirin?”

I looked at them closely. Sure enough, they had the little cross stamped on one side that was the trademark of the brand we had been able to get our hands on locally; and when I held them close to my nose, I could catch a faint whiff of the acid smell that was the sign of aspirin when it was getting old. Overage drugs were one of our problems since we were restricted to stocks from time periods all antedating at least the time when we had balanced the forces of the time storm. These two tablets were really fresher than most of their kind that I had encountered in the last half year. Marie must have been hoarding these against some emergency. I felt ashamed of myself. I did not need the pills, but they would only keep on aging toward uselessness if I did not take them, while swallowing them would do me no harm and make Marie feel her efforts had not been wasted.

I took them.

“Porniarsk wants to talk to you if you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it, all right.” I threw the covers back and sat up on the edge of the bed. They had undressed me. “Where are my pants?”

“Closet,” said Ellen. “Maybe you’d better not get up.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. She looked unconvinced and I decided to lie a little. “I had a headache but it seems to be getting better already.”

“If you’re sure,” said Ellen. “I’ll go tell him then.”

She went out, and I had time to get dressed before Porniarsk trundled into the room.

“Are you well?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said. “No problems. I’m not even particularly tired.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Do you remember what you said before you collapsed?”

“I’m not sure....”

“You said ‘My God...’ and then you said ‘It’s impossible. I can’t do it. It can’t be done...’ Can you tell me what you meant and what made you say that?”

“What I saw in the tank,” I said.

I told him what that had been. When I was through he stood for a second, then creaked off one of his heavy-headed nods.

“So you believe now that further effort to control the storm is useless?” he asked.

“That’s the way those patterns looked,” I said. “But now... I’m not sure. I still don’t see any hope in them, but at the same time, I don’t seem to be able to bring myself to give up.”

“I’m glad of that,” said the avatar. “With no will to succeed, you’d fail even if there was good reason to expect success. But with will, there’s always hope. Porniarsk himself has always believed that the apparent is only the possible. Therefore failure, like success, can always be only a possibility, never a certainty.”

“Good,” I said. “But what do we do now?”

“That’s my question to you,” said Porniarsk. “My earlier guess was right. Your capabilities are far beyond mine. It’s up to you to find the answer.”

For the next three days I tried, while holding Paula in play as well as I could. But the evening of the fourth day her impatience came out in the open.

“I’ll need an answer tomorrow, Marc,” she said, as she went back to her own rooms. “I’ve spent more time here now than I planned.”

It was the eleventh hour, clearly. I thought of calling Porniarsk, Ellen, and Marie together for a brainstorming session and rejected the notion. There was nothing they could do to help me. As Porniarsk had said, it was up to me—alone.

I isolated myself in the library, paced the floor for a while, and came up with absolutely nothing. My mind kept sliding off the problem, like a beetle on a slope of oily glass. Finally, I gave up and went to bed alone, hoping that something might come to me in my sleep.

I woke about three hours later, still without a solution. My mind was spinning feverishly; but only with worries. What was to become of Ellen and Marie, and for that matter, our whole community, if I went off as Paula’s captive-servant and either died or did not come back? What could help the world if the local forces of the storm broke out of balance again? There was no answer anywhere except the hope of doing something with the storm after all and using control of its forces to somehow break the hold that Paula’s superior army gave her over us all.

And I could not find such a hope. Every possibility seemed bleak and dry and worn out. There was only one way to unlock the door confronting me—with some kind of a key; and there was no key. My thoughts had spun around in a circle so long they were exhausted. I threw on the topcoat that I used as a bathrobe and went back to the library to get away from my own circular idea-dance.

Under the artificial lights, the library was still and comfortless. I sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs and closed my eyes. My mind skittered off at all angles, throwing up pictures of everyone for whom I felt responsible... Marie, Wendy, Ellen, the avatar....

Their images chased each other before the vision of my imagination, like movie film played on the inner surfaces of my closed eyelids. Even the shapes of people who were not around anymore. I watched Tek, going down from the bullets of the machine pistol in Ellen’s hands; Samuelson, waiting with his rocket launcher for the outsize toy-like attackers of his small town; Sunday, as I had first seen him; Sunday again, with Ellen, back when I had called her only “the girl”; Sunday....

Sunday.

Suddenly, with the thought of him, it all came together. My mind opened up like a flower at sunrise, and life flowed back into me. The light and all things in the still room seemed to change. Once more, I felt my identity with all my people and the cat who slumbered; and I saw at once what could perhaps be done if there was time enough. I got to my feet with my idea still in me and went as quickly as I could to Porniarsk’s lab.

Porniarsk was standing immobile beside the vision tank, his eyes fastened on nothing, when I turned the lights on in the dark room. It was impossible to tell whether he slept at times like this, or whether in fact he slept at all. We had all asked him about that at one time or another, and he had always answered that the question was meaningless in his terms and unanswerable in ours. Now, when the lights went on, he stayed as he was for a second, then turned his head to look at me.

“What is it, Marc?” he asked.

“I think I might have it!” I said. “It just came to me. Look, you can run this tank like a computer, can’t you? I mean you can extrapolate the storm forward and back?”

“Yes.”

“How far forward?”

“Until extrapolation’s no longer possible,” he said. “Until the time storm destroys the universe, or the capacity of the tank’s logical sequencing is exceeded.”

“Look,” I said. My vocal cords were tight and my voice bounced loudly off the bare, white-painted concrete walls. “There’s always been the chance we might be able to get help with the storm up forward, but I’ve never thought about that in terms of a really long way forward. I remember now, when I was seeing the patterns in the tank, I thought that if I could find a thousand like me something might, just might, be done. We’d never find anything like that in the reasonably near future. But, if we went as far forward as we could—maybe way up there, there really are a thousand others like that. Away up there. As far into the future as we can reach.”

“And if there were,” said Porniarsk. “How could we contact them?”

“We might be able to go to them.” The words were galloping out of me and my brain felt wrapped in flames. “If I could just see what the storm patterns were, up in that time—just the patterns affecting this immediate area, the area right around this house, maybe just even around this lab—I might be able to unbalance the present forces enough so they’d correspond. I might be able to produce a time change line; one single mistwall to move just us, far down the future-line to them.”

He neither moved nor made a sound for five or six seconds, while my heart beat heavily inside me, shaking my chest.

“Perhaps,” he said.

The breath I had not realized I was holding went out of me in something like a grunt.

“We can do it?”

“I can show you the ultimate pattern possible to this device— perhaps,” he said. “Are you sure you can make use of it, if I do?”

“No,” I said, “I can try, though.”

“Yes,” he said. His head went up, his head went down, in one of his nods. “I’ll need time to work out the storm patterns that far forward.”

“How much time?”

He looked at me steadily, “I don’t know. Maybe days. Maybe, some years.”

“Years!” I said. But then the sense of what he was saying sank into me. The furthest pattern perceivable by the vision tank could only be reached by going through all preceding patterns.

“When I’ve reached the limits of the device’s capacity,” he said, “I can call you in to see it.”

“Then we need to buy whatever time that takes,” I said. “That settles it. I’ll tell Paula I’ll go with her.”

“Probably that’s best. But you’ll have to be able to come back here when I’ve found the final pattern.”

“I’ll get back,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

I felt wonderful. All my frustration had vanished in a burst of energy and certainty. I would not have gone back to bed even if I could have slept. I looked at my wristwatch, and it was five-thirty in the morning.

“I’ll wake up everyone who needs to know and tell them,” I said, “right now. Will you come along?”

“You don’t need me,” he said, “and any time wasted from now on delays the final moment of achievement.”

“All right.”

I went out and started waking up the others. A little under an hour later I had them all sitting around the dining room of the summer palace, drinking coffee to get their eyes open and waiting for an explanation. I had run into the meeting all those whom I thought must know what would be going on, but nobody else. At the table were Ellen, Marie, Bill, Doc, and Wendy—Wendy looking particularly sullen. She was grown up enough now to have a fourteen-year-old boyfriend—or thought she was. I thought ten years old ridiculously young for anything like that, though it was a fact she was beginning to develop physically; and she had asked to have him take part in this council as well. Naturally, I had spiked the notion. It was merely the last in a series of efforts she had made recently to get her mother and the rest of us to adopt the boyfriend into our inner family.

For the rest, Doc looked unperturbed, as if he was the only person there, besides myself, who was wide awake. Ellen looked concerned, Marie looked drawn and older than I had ever seen her look, and Bill was still white-faced and shrunken-looking from interrupted slumber.

“I’m going to tell Paula today I’ll go with her,” I said, without preamble. “We’ll probably take off later today.”

I told them about my hope, my talk with Porniarsk and about what he was already at work on at this moment “... The point is,” I wound up, “Porniarsk and the rest of you are probably safe here as long as Paula still considers me a friend and coworker. If that changes, she might think of keeping me under control by picking up some of you as hostages for my good behavior. So, if things get prickly between the two of us I’ll send you warning of it; and I want you all to clear out of here immediately and scatter. Scatter all over the place, each one by yourself— and don’t let the rest of the community know you’re going.”

Wendy looked grim.

“I mean that,” I said, looking her in the eye. “Nobody. Wendy, you can stay with your mother; but everybody else take off alone.”

“Marc,” said Marie, “do you really need the rest of us to go into the far future with you, if this works? Can’t you just go alone, tell the people there what you want to tell them, and then come back?”

“How can I?” I said. “You know I need a monad gestalt to control the storm forces; and that’ll take all of you. So, listen. What I’ll do is take the Old Man with me. If I send him back to you or if he comes back under any conditions, that’s your signal. Take off and scatter.”

“Marc,” said Doc, “you’ll need some way of getting the message from us in a hurry when Porniarsk finds what he’s after. How’s about I make regular runs to you, just to bring in letters from the home folks and a box of cookies and such, so Paula’s people won’t think anything of it when I pop in with the word?”

I looked over at him gratefully. It was nice to hear a sensible mind at work around the table that morning.

“Good,” said Ellen. “Then if you need help getting away from wherever you are, Doc can help you.”

Another sensible mind.

“Fine idea, Doc,” I said. “You’re right, Ellen. Anybody else have any suggestions?”

“How long will you be gone altogether?” Marie asked.

“I can’t tell,” I said. “It depends on how fast Porniarsk can reach the ultimate configuration in his tank. Why?”

I knew why. She was having more and more trouble controlling Wendy and was leaning on me more and more for that task.

“Maybe Wendy could go with you. She could see something of the rest of the world that way.”

“No!” said Wendy and I, simultaneously. That was all I needed, to have Wendy on my hands, while I was trying to keep Paula happy and unsuspecting. I thought quickly. “Too dangerous for her.”

“I don’t want to,” whimpered Wendy, who was no slouch herself at picking up cues. Marie looked from the girl to me, helplessly. She knew she was being doubleteamed, but she was helpless to do anything about it.

“All right,” I said. “Then, if nobody’s got any more suggestions, you can get busy putting together what I’ll need to take with me and spreading the word that I’ll be going. I’ll break the news myself to Paula over breakfast in an hour or so.”