Time Storm

29

The aircraft out of the future did not seem to need any serious attention. I asked it for a map of the country, and it was displayed on the screen in front of me. On the map, I picked out the general area of our community, asked to have it enlarged for me, and so continued zeroing in and enlarging until I could identify our destination to the craft. Once this was done, I simply told it to take us there and land by the summer palace-which I described-and my duties were done. I would have liked, then, to curl up and sleep like Doc; but I could not. I could not even imitate the Old Man, who was half-dozing, opening his eyes every so often to blink at me, as if to make sure I was still there.

Instead, I just sat, watching the empty, clean sky and the slowly moving landscape far below. There was no sound of passage inside the plane and I felt like a fly trapped under an overturned water glass.

As long as we had been working to escape, my mind had been clear and sharp and purposeful. But now, the effect of the body adrenalin began to die out in me, leaving me feeling empty, dull, and ugly. The thought of the soldiers on guard who had undoubtedly died so the three of us could go free came back to my mind whether I wanted to think of them or not. God knows I had never wanted to be the cause of anyone’s death, particularly now, since I had found that at least part of myself could blend with the rest of the universe. It was, in fact, that specific, blendable part of myself that I now felt I had betrayed, misused like a fine-edged tool put to some wrong purpose.

But what else could Doc and I and the Old Man have done, I kept asking myself? We had to escape, and the only route open to us lay over the dead or incapacitated bodies of at least some of Paula’s warriors.

Did it? a jeering little voice in the back of my mind nagged at me.

All right, I told myself, what other way was there?

You tell me. You’re the man who can see patterns.

I couldn’t see one here that didn’t involve violence.

Then you’re not much good, are you?

Leave me alone, I told it. Get out of my head.

How can I leave you alone? I’m you. You’re stuck with me.

There’s a way out, I thought. And I became very cold when I thought it.

You haven’t got the guts. And even if you did, what about Ellen and Marie and all the rest you’d be leaving for Paula to take her revenge on? You want their deaths on your conscience, too?

Paula—I forced myself to think of Paula instead. But that brought no relief either. Her image summoned up another sort of sick feeling inside me. Because I had been attracted to her. I actually had. The fact that she had challenged me with her unavailability had been a cloak for the fact that I wanted her anyway, had wanted her, in fact, from the moment I had first seen her getting out of her helicopter looking like a page out of a fashion magazine in a world now vanished forever. Having her would have been almost like getting that world back again.

Of course, I had known she had dressed like that deliberately, that the whole matter of her entrance on the scene had been cool-headedly calculated to produce the effect on all of us that it had. But knowing this didn’t alter the emotional leap I had felt. Seeing her like that, I had been lifted out of the raw and dusty reality of my present into a gilded dream of a memory. I had suddenly been reminded of the tawdriness of the little world I was about to defend with my life. I had felt suddenly embarrassed by the workaday plainness of the two women who shared my life with me, and my handful of loyal friends. They were like coarse brown bread compared to angel food cake. They were like flat homebrew beer compared to champagne.

I had been attracted to Paula all right—from that moment. I could have convinced myself I was in love with her, given time. Given enough time, time enough to hang myself with, I could even have gradually forgotten my duty to go back and finish what I had begun with the time storm. Maybe, I thought now, there had been the thought of not returning in the back of my mind all along. So that when I raged at the possibility of Paula not being able to get her army—and me—across to Europe this fall, I was really raging against the delay of the excuse that being on the other side of the Atlantic would have given me, the excuse to put off escaping from Paula if and when word came that Porniarsk had succeeded in accomplishing the very large task I had set him to do.

Yes, it had all been there, hidden inside me, the impulse to throw away the golden light I had found for the gaining of an enameled tin ring. How purely tin, I had finally discovered when I had seen her in her tent that dawn, and she had directed me to sign the letter she had written for me.

At that moment, the last piece of her personal pattern had clicked into place for me; and I was forced to see her as she innately was. I had thought that there must be at least a touch of something Napoleonic under the display brightness that was her surface. After all, she conquered the larger part of the North American continent. She had a government, a standing army, and more accumulated resources than any other half-dozen communities in the world combined. Above and beyond this, she had an Alexandrian dream of conquering the whole world. There must, I thought, be something there that was unique and powerful.

But there was not. When I had stepped into her tent that morning, when I saw her appearance and the letter she had for me to sign, her pattern had been completed for me; and I realized that what I was looking at was an individual who momentarily, at least, had gone irrational under the pressures of defeat and disappointment. With the evidence of that irrationality, everything about her had fallen into place. She was neither Napoleonic nor Alexandrian. She was a borderline psychotic who had fallen into a chain of circumstances which allowed her to ride forward triumphantly on the crest of a mounting wave—as long as everything went her way. While luck was with her, she appeared to be inspired by genius. But when things went wrong, she had 110 plan.

Literally.

Those who were on her side were people. Those who were not were rag dolls to be thrown at the wall or have the sawdust ripped out of them if she was in a temper. She could wade in blood up to her elbows and it would not matter; because, of course, it was not real blood. It could not be real blood, because it belonged to those who were against her. That was the psychotic side of her; that was what had hit me like a swinging barn door in the face when I had stepped into her tent.

All the communities who had given in to her on her way here were composed of real people, of course. But Capitol had chosen to refuse her. Therefore, its population were not real people and she told her soldiers to kill them. But some of her soldiers had not distinguished between those she wanted killed and those she did not, and so obviously those soldiers were not real people either. Therefore, she would have Marc Despard find them and kill them. But Marc Despard would know that the idea to kill had come from her in the first place, which might make him think wrong things about her—things no real person would think. Therefore, it should be arranged so that it looked as if the soldiers’ punishment were Marc’s own idea, and then later she would use some new soldiers to kill him for doing such a thing. Then everyone would be happy again; because there would be nobody left but people who agreed with her. Real people.

Of course, this pattern explained why she had never let me or anyone else get close to her. Experience would have taught her that anyone she let get too close to her might end up disagreeing with her about something or other. I had thought I was beyond the point where any other single human being could scare the hell out of me; but she had done that, this morning in the tent. It had been like finding myself locked in a cage with a wounded tiger.

So it was someone like Paula that I had been willing to trade the universe for—the universe and everything else I thought I loved. I was sick: sick at heart and sick at mind. And to cure a bad situation I had now gone out and caused bloody deeds to be done myself. I who had seen the golden light had done my own wading in blood. I had sent Doc to kill....

The pain of it was more than I could stand. I groped desperately for the unity—the golden light—and could not find it. I scrabbled and clutched for self-justification and found nothing. Nothing, but the wrong-end-to excuse of saving the lives of the few people that meant something to me. I had killed that they should not be killed. Nature, red in tooth and claw.... wrote Tennyson. The books I had drowned in during earlier weeks danced in my head; but there was no comfort in them. The only small, slim reason I could find for my living was to defend what I loved. At least, if there was no justification in doing that, there was no agony. Perhaps I could be simply pagan, and simply simple.

I had no ashes of my fathers, no temples and no gods. I was not Horatius, the ancient Roman of whom Macaulay had rhymed in these lines from his Lays of Ancient Rome. I only had my little tribe of one-time strangers to guard against all things human, temporal and infinite; and I wanted some comfort, some prayer to cling to. Like an overboard passenger hanging on to a life preserver, I clung now to Macaulay’s four lines and the idea of a finish in battle, to end all, to wash all out; and I went whirling down into darkness, into dreams and final forgetfulness....

I woke suddenly, it seemed a long time later, staring up into two close, concerned faces. One was the smooth face of Doc and the other the hairy face of the Old Man.

“Marc!” said Doc. “Are you all right? Were you dreaming?”

“Why? What?” My tongue was thick and dry. “What is it?”

“Your eyes were closed and you kept saying, ‘I can’t do it—I can’t do it—’ and we couldn’t wake you up,” Doc said.

The Old Man nuzzled my face in relief. I got a noseful of his hair and realized he badly needed a bath. That brought me back to normality faster than anything else.

“Where are we?” I said, sitting up.

“I think we’re almost home,” said Doc. “You take a look. You know how this plane works. I don’t.”

I turned to the control panel and depressed one of the keys.

“Where are we?” I asked. “Show me with a mark on a map.”

Obediently, the screen gave me the image of the last enlargement of the map I had asked it for earlier. A tiny image of the aircraft appeared on this and I peered at it for a second or two before I could see that it was actually in motion across the map lines.

“Looks like we’re not more than a few minutes out,” I said, “depending on how fast we’re travelling.

I looked out and down. We still seemed to be at the same altitude; and, surprisingly, the sun seemed no higher above the horizon behind us than it had been when we took off. That would seem to indicate that we had been matching the earth’s rotational speed—which was a good rate of travel, to be sure.

“I’ve told it to go in and land by the summer palace,” I told Doc. I turned back to the control panel and spoke to it. “Land slowly. I don’t want any of our own people shooting at us. And I don’t want to scare anybody.”

The craft took me literally. It came in over the summer palace at exactly three thousand meters of altitude and then descended vertically, and slowly. We took about twenty minutes to actually touch ground in the landing area, and by the time we did, most of the population of the community was on hand, standing off about fifty feet from our touchdown spot, with the community leaders in the front rank.

I opened the door of the future plane and stepped down to the earth—and they all just stared at me, as if I were a man from Mars. Then Doc and the Old Man came scrambling out behind me; and everyone poured in on us with a rush. I was surrounded, picked up and carried, literally, almost all the way to the summer palace entrance before I could make them put me down on my feet.

When I finally did get a semblance of quiet, I climbed up in one of the jeeps parked there, stood on the back seat and told them, as briefly as I could, that I had escaped from Paula, that she would be after me eventually, but should not be showing up for some weeks at least, and I would have more details for them tomorrow.

But right now, I had to sort myself out and talk things over with the other leaders.

They were a little disappointed not to hear the whole story at once; but they dispersed to their various activities eventually, after I had promised a community-wide celebration for that evening. Finally, I got to go inside the palace with Ellen, Marie, Bill and the rest.

Over food in the same dining room in which I had told them I was going with Paula, I broke the news to them, bluntly.

“She’s not completely sane,” I said. “I don’t mean she’s out of her head all the time; she’d be less dangerous if she was. I mean that when it comes to certain things she’ll do exactly what she wants, regardless of the consequences. Because when she gets to that point, nothing matters except doing what she wants. That’s why I left; because sooner or later, she would want something and find me in the way; and that would be the end of me.”

I told them about the letter she had me sign.

“The point was to hit back at the soldiers who had killed the experts,” I said, “and to saddle me with the blame for doing it. Sooner or later, she would have used that blame to get rid of me. That’s why I had to get out of there without wasting time. Because it could have been sooner. It could have been the minute the men she wanted executed were executed.”

“But what’ll she do now?” Marie asked.

“She’ll send a force to bring me back,” I said. “But maybe not right away, because she’s understrength now. That’s one reason leaving her now was good timing. Here, I can work with Porniarsk and maybe we can find a way to make the move forward before her people can show up here. I’ve been working on pattern recognition. I’m stronger in that area than I was. It’s a fighting chance, anyway.”

I looked over at Porniarsk, who had not been outside with the others when we landed, but who had come into the dining room since we had been sitting there.

“I should have sent word to you sooner,” he said. “The fact is, I ran into this sticking point over a month ago, but I thought that it was something I could get through. Now, I don’t know. Maybe the two of us can get through it.”

“I’ll come to the lab with you as soon as we’re finished here,” I said, between bites of the home-cured ham I was digging into. “But in any case—”

I looked back at the rest of them.

“In any case, everyone in the community who won’t be needed for the monad gestalt, when and if we’re ready to use it, better start making preparations to scatter, now. If Paula can’t get me back, she’ll raise bloody hell—and I mean bloody hell literally— with anyone connected to me she can get her hands on. Bill, Marie-”

They both looked at me, from farther on down the table.

“You’d better start making plans as to how supplies are to be portioned out, and where to, and how people are to take off. Also, Doc-”

“Yo.”

“We’re going to need a fast, a really fast warning system to give us as much notice as possible when we learn Paula or some of her people are headed this way. Maybe you can figure out something using that aircraft we came in.”

“I think so, Marc.” He looked at Ellen. “Right, Ellen?”

Ellen nodded.

“All right.” I finished the ham and pushed my plate back. “Anyone have any suggestions or comments, before I head out to the lab with Porniarsk?”

“You need some sleep,” said Marie. “You look dead. So does Doc.”

I looked at her. The words were Marie-type words, but there was a difference about her which found an echo in the way she said them. However, I had no time to investigate such things now.

“I slept on the flight coming in,” I said. “Doc probably could use some sleep.”

“I slept last night,” said Doc.

“Whatever,” I said, getting to my feet. “Anyway, I’ll catch up on my sleep later. Porniarsk? Ready to go?”

“Yes,” he said. We went out of the dining room together, leaving the others behind us.

“It’s an unusual situation,” said Porniarsk, once we got to the tank in the lab. “It’s the kind of stoppage as if the extrapolative element of this device—what you’ve been calling the computer-had encountered a logical contradiction, so that further extrapolations from this point would result in increasing error. But attempts on my part to find out what such a contradiction might be have produced no results.”

“Let me look at where it stopped,” I said.

He activated the tank. Once more I stared into the blue-grayness, with the little firefly points of light flickering through the space of it. For a moment, a small crawling fear woke inside me, a fear that in my step aside with Paula I had lost whatever had given me the ability to see patterns in the tank before. But then, slowly, the little points of light began to relate and group themselves into associations.

The pattern took shape. It was a strange and unfamiliar pattern, which was to be expected. But when I tried to go one step further and change my perception from that of small lights in a tank to the actual universe envisioned, as I had done once before, I could not do it. The small crawling fear came back, stronger.

“I can see what you’ve got there,” I said to Porniarsk, finally. “But I can’t seem to make it mean anything to me. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“You may just be tired,” said Porniarsk. “Or perhaps you’ve been away from the device long enough to feel unfamiliar with it.”

“Maybe.”

I gave up and withdrew my attention from the pattern in the tank. Suddenly, I was dead tired. Tired right down to the marrow of my bones.

“You’re right about one thing,” I told Porniarsk. “I need sleep. I’ll go lie down.”

I went back to my own room, part of the suite I shared with Marie and Ellen. But neither of them were there now. It was only early afternoon, and they, with the rest of the community, would be hard at work. I felt a child’s loneliness for someone to sit with me while I fell asleep; but I pushed the emotion away from me. I undressed, lay down on the bed, pulled a blanket over me and stared at the white ceiling, lightly shadowed now and then by the clouds outside reflecting from the window.

I was still dead tired; but I began to wonder if I would sleep. I lay there.

I woke to someone shaking me. For a second, I thought I was back on the future plane again and being woken by Doc and the Old Man. Then I saw it was dark outside the window and dark in the room, and the shape bending over me was female.

“Marc-” It was Ellen’s voice. “I hate to wake you, but the whole community’s waiting for you. If you can just come out and show yourself for a little while, you can come back after that and sleep as long as you want.”

“Sure,” I said. “All right.”

I levered my wooden body up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and she began to massage my neck, standing in front of me and reaching around behind my head. I leaned my forehead gratefully against the human softness of her belly, feeling myself come alive again to the warm pressure of her fingers kneading the stiff cords and muscles running up from my shoulders into the area behind my ears. She felt and smelled delightful; and I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life, getting my neck rubbed.

But she stopped after a while.

“You’re awake now,” she said. “Get dressed.”

She was right. I was awake; and there was nothing to do but get dressed. I was standing on one leg, putting on my pants, when it came to me suddenly that what I had felt was second cousin to what makes dogs and other animals enjoy being petted and stroked by humans. Not the physical sensation alone, but the implications of affection and concern. For a second, I could almost feel what an animal might feel in such case—and there, for a second, the universe-identity almost was with me again. But the second passed, and it was gone.

I finished dressing. Ellen had already gone ahead. I followed down the corridors, out through the door, and stepped into the warm, early evening dark of outside. A barbecue pit had been dug in the landing area, and I could smell roasting meat. There were several other large fires, throwing sparks high in the air so that they seemed to mingle with the stars overhead; and the open space around them was filled with moving silhouettes and the hubbub of voices. For some reason, it reminded me of a small town in Mexico I had happened to go through once on vacation on an evening of a fiesta. I could not remember the name of the saint who was the cause of the fiesta; but it had been night, and fireworks were exploding high in the air over the town, their sparks raining down into the dark streets. Lights and voices had been all over the place, with people coming and going in the narrow streets, so that it all had a sort of incredible richness to it. I had wondered then where that feeling of richness came from; but of course now I knew where. Unconsciously, I had been reading the patterns of the fiesta around me the way those who lived in the area read them. I was picking the rich feeling up from them; and now I was doing the same thing, picking up the magic and warmth of the moment from the rest of the community, gathered here to celebrate the fact that Doc and I, and even the Old Man, were back safe.

I went forward into the crowd, and was recognized. The faces and bodies swirled around me, drink was shoved into my hand. I was mobbed and hustled and questioned and patted on the back and kissed until my head started to spin. Between that spinning and the fatigue I had, measured by the little sleep I had just had, I was not to remember most of the events of that evening. It was merely one long happy blur that ended when I finally groped my way back into my dark room and fell on my bed again, some hours later.

Ellen was there and I hung on to her.

“Where’s Marie?” I asked after a while.

“She’s still outside,” Ellen said. “Sleep, now.”

I slept.

I did not come to until late the next day. But in spite of that long, exhausted slumber, it was three days before I was really back in proper body and mind again. The night of the celebration with the crowd had healed me somewhat, in a way I could not quite pin down, but I felt more whole and healthy generally. I went back to Porniarsk’s lab on the third day and tried the pattern of the tank again.

The first time I tried it, I was no more successful than I had been the first day I had come home. Still, my failure did not leave me with the sensation of being so helpless as before, and after a rest I tried again. This time I was also unsuccessful, but I got the impression I had come closer to actually envisioning the universe; and so I continued, trying and trying again, feeling that I got a little closer with each try—and a couple of weeks later I broke through.

Whatever barrier I had been pushing against went down all at once. Without warning, I was suddenly in the universe of galaxies and stars—and what I saw leaped at me so hard that I was jarred out of it, back into the conscious reality of the lab and myself standing there, staring into the tank.

“Why, hell!” I said. “It’s wrong!”

“Wrong?” Porniarsk said. “In what way?”

I turned to the avatar.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do know; but it doesn’t matter! Don’t you see? Your device here shut itself down because it began to turn up inconsistencies within the patterns it was evolving from the patterns it had evolved previously. Logically, there couldn’t be any inconsistencies, but there are!”

“I don’t understand,” said Porniarsk.

“Don’t you? Look,” I said, “this tank has been extending previous patterns that were correct and getting one that is incorrect.”

“Then you’re saying the device has broken down? I don’t see how it could,” said Porniarsk.

“No. It hasn’t broken down—that’s the point. It’s not wrong! What’s wrong is reality. One of the factors the device takes into account is the human—pardon me, I mean the intelligent life—factor; and that factor logically evolved is creating inconsistencies with the purely physical evolution of the other factors considered. Don’t you see what that means?”

“I do not,” said Porniarsk.

“It means somewhere up there in the future—at the time we’re looking at right now—intelligent life is doing something about the time storm. Doing something at least effective enough to produce inconsistencies with what would have happened if the storm had just been allowed to run its course. We’ve found them, Porniarsk! We’ve found a time when they’re able to do something about the time storm!”

The avatar stood perfectly still, looking at me. He was so motionless and his silence went on so long that I began to entertain the outrageous thought that he had not heard me.

“I see,” he said, speaking just as I opened my mouth to repeat to him what I had just said. “Then our search is over.”

“That’s right. All we have to do now is figure out how the monad needs to shift the immediate small factors so that at least this lab can move forward to that time.”

“Is it possible?”

I had never actually stopped to doubt that it was possible; and his question took half the joy out of me at one blow.

“Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. We’re away down at the end of the chain of storm changes. The forces dealing with this area have to be relatively light....”

I ran down.

“We’ll have to check and see, of course,” I said. “Maybe we’d better do that first before I tell everyone what we’ve found and start getting their hopes up.”

We were still checking several days later when Doc came into the lab one morning.

“I’ve just made a swing east in the plane,” he said. He had become used to the craft now and he flew daily patrols. “There’s a force of about a hundred and fifty of Paula’s soldiers, about half on foot and half on horseback, about a hundred and twenty miles east of here. No motorized transport or anything more than carry weapons. They aren’t wearing her uniforms, but they can’t be any other troops. No one else on this continent can put together that many people and get them to move in formation like that.”

“How did they get so close?” Porniarsk asked.

“They must have started out individually or in small groups,” Doc said. “That’s the only way I can think of. Then they rendezvoused someplace last night, so that this was the first day they’ve been all together. I’d have spotted them from the air otherwise. At the rate they’re marching, they’ll be here in less than a week.”

I looked at Porniarsk.

“That ends the checking,” I said. “All we can do now is go, and hope we make it.”