Time Storm

30

There was something wrong in the atmosphere around the summer palace. I could feel it, but I could not take the time to pin it down. I set the rest of the community to packing up, ready to get out, and with Porniarsk, got down to the choosing of an optimum target nanosecond on the day before the soldiers were due to arrive. We wanted a time when the pattern of storm forces concerned with our small area would be as close as possible to the conformation I was going to try to force them into with the monad. My original idea had been to deal with as small an area as possible— probably only the lab itself and everything inside it But as the situation developed, it turned out that the difference between restructuring the forces dealing with just the lab and those dealing with an area including the summer palace, mountain section and enough of the plain to contain the town and a couple of square miles outside it, was essentially no difference at all, in terms of the size of the forces to be dealt with.

This put a new complexion on things. It was the first good news I could remember finding in a long time. Now I could take along everybody, if they wanted to go. I was tied to the work in the lab, but I sent Doc out to tell the rest of the community that as things had turned out, they didn’t need to run and hide from the soldiers unless they wanted to. Those who wanted to come along with the monad and myself into the future could simply stick around.

Having sent the word out I got back to work. Matters, for once, seemed to be all going in the right direction. The more I pinned down the force-changes to be made, the more possible they looked. Even setting aside the fact that I was much more pattern-experienced and more developed and mature than I had been when I had balanced the forces in the immediate area of the planet, what I now looked at was a much simpler job.

This, in spite of the fact that we would be moving an unguessable distance of time into the future. There was no way to measure how far, but thousands of years anyway in terms of the old temporal yardsticks we had used before the time storm. The reason for this was that, even taking in the area including the town, I was dealing with a very small patch of space compared to that which enclosed the immediate neighborhood of the Earth. What it amounted to was that I would be making a much larger temporal change—but in a very, very much tinier area than I had the time before. It was as if I multiplied by a factor of a few thousand, but then divided the result by millions.

So, matters in the lab progressed well; but nothing goes with complete smoothness. It was a good thing that Porniarsk and I were, if anything, ahead of our schedule for charting all the parameters of the shift as I had laid it out; because I found myself called away from the lab to deal with the human side of the move.

Without realizing it, I had hit everyone in the community harder than I had planned when I had sent out word with Doc that those who wanted to come with me could do so. Living with the time storm as I had been all this time, I had forgotten that only those who had been with me at the time of the balancing of forces originally would have any idea of what to expect from involving themselves in what I planned to do. Nor did they look on going far into the future as calmly as I did.

Accordingly, they were seething with questions that needed some kind of answers if they were to come up with their individual decisions. I found I had to call a meeting of the community as a whole to explain matters and answer those questions. We were too many to crowd into even the largest Quonset hut, so the meeting was held outside on the landing area, with a public address system rigged by Bill for the occasion, with extra microphones on long cords, so that everybody could hear the questions as well as the answers.

I began by explaining the mechanism of the time storm as well as I understood it, and how this mechanism had affected us here on Earth. Porniarsk stood beside me in the jeep I was using for a speaker’s platform, ready to answer questions himself; but no one asked him any. I think they were still a little wary of Porniarsk, whom few besides those in the summer palace had, in fact, ever seen.

When I finished that part of my explanation, I called for questions, but there were none. So I went on to explain how I believed that up ahead in the future, people—not merely human people, but “people” in the larger sense, including intelligent, civilized life like that represented by Porniarsk’s race—would finally come to grips with the time storm and find some way of stopping it. Finally, I repeated what I was sure they must know already, that I thought I had located such a time and I planned to go there. Those who wanted to go with me, could.

Once more I asked for questions. This time I got them—three hours or more of them, mostly unanswerable, by me or anyone else there at least.

Basically, they were unanswerable because what they all wanted most to know was what it would be like for them up there in the future. This was, naturally, something about which I had no more idea than they had themselves. It began to sink in on me as I stood there doing my best to answer them, what an unimaginable gulf exists between those who are obsessed by a goal and those who simply want to live as best they can. In a manner of speaking, I wanted only to arrive in Samarkand, and anything short of the moment when I got there was unimportant. The others were concerned with the possibility of tigers and robbers on the way, the availability of wells along the route, the quarters they would occupy once they arrived and the marketplace where they would eventually vend their wares.

I could not help them. Without realizing it, I had discounted myself completely from the price I was willing to pay to get what I wanted. They had not. They could not think like me; and—God help me—I could no longer think like them.

But I did what I could. I gave them words, explanations, until my throat was hoarse, and they went away discussing what I had said, sure that I had told them something of importance, but finding themselves still unsatisfied, and unreassured.

Porniarsk and I went back to the lab. With or without the extra people, I had to close with the storm forces when the proper moment came; and the moment was marching inexorably toward us.

We finished going over all possibilities by mid-afternoon of the day before the soldiers were due in. Doc had been checking the progress of our invaders from the air, at heights of ten to fifteen thousand feet. Whether they noticed him—the milky-colored aircraft was all but invisible to the ground at that altitude—or not, they continued to come on steadily, neither slowing nor increasing their first observed rate of travel. If they had been the total force that Paula could bring against us, it would have been a temptation to go out and meet them. A night raid or two on their camp, led by some of our people who had picked up special skills from Doc, plus a few good daytime ambushes, could have cut their strength to a point where we would have been able to defend against them quite handily. But Paula could keep after us forever, and there was no use wasting lives.

I had been worrying about what to do with the Experimentals, now that some of us were moving forward in time and the rest taking to the hills. Paula was just the sort of person to kill them all on sight when she found out I had escaped, if they were left behind and undefended.

That problem, however, I found no longer existed. Apparently, when the Old Man had taken his interest in me, the rest of the village had started to disintegrate socially. Except for a few of the others who had formed alliances with some of the human families and were either going forward with these families or taking to the hills with them, the rest had long since wandered away from the village on their own and disappeared. It was a sad sort of diaspora to think about, because there was nothing away from here for them but the lives of solitary, intelligent animals; but there was nothing I, or any of our people, could do about it now. It could be, I told myself, that there was a consciousness in them that their race, as a race, had no future—just as it had had no past beyond a test tube. But that thought did not make me feel any better.

In any case, I had no time to think about Experimentals now. This afternoon was the afternoon that had been picked for saying goodbyes. I made myself available out in the landing area; and they came up by individuals and families and groups to say farewell, not only to me, but to the rest of us who were going. I was surprised, and even a little secretly unhappy, to see the number who had decided to take their chances running from Paula the rest of their lives, in preference to following me forward. But, it was their decision; and better they make it now while they had the chance than regret that they had not made it, later.

Dinner time was to be the end of the farewells. We broke off finally and went inside. I had wanted to hold a meeting of the people who would be with me in the monad before we settled down to eat; but when we all gathered in the dining room there were some extra faces. One of these was merely Wendy, who had never shown any interest in being part of the time storm work, but who was welcome to the monad if she wanted to join. Also, there were her gangling young boyfriend, who was not welcome under any circumstances, and Abe Budner, our big, slow-moving Director of Food Services and former chef, whom I liked personally, but whom I had never thought of as being monad material.

“Abe,” I said, as I sat down at the table, “no offense, but we’re just about to start a business meeting. You and—”

“Marc,” said Marie.

My mind suddenly became alert. By which I mean that it came out of the whole problem of the move into time and back to the everyday present of the dining room and the people now in it. I woke to the fact that Marie, Wendy, the boyfriend and Abe were all in hiking gear, rough clothes and heavy boots. I also became aware that there was a silence in the room, a tense silence on the part of everybody else that said that all of them there had known for some time about what I was just now recognizing.

I looked at Marie.

“You’re not going?” I said.

“That’s right, Marc,” she said. Now that I really examined her for the first time in a very long, long period, I was a little shocked at what I saw. Her face was tired, and definitely now showed the signs of middle-age, the crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes, the sagging of the chin line. I had never really looked at her in all these months. I had never thought to look.

“Get out of here, the rest of you,” I said, hoarsely. I did not specify who the rest were, but they all left the room except the four who were dressed to travel, and Ellen.

“Wendy and Walter don’t want to go into the future, Marc,” Marie said. “And I’ve decided to go along with them and Abe.”

“Marie...” I said. The words would not come. Patterns flashed and clicked through my mind; and I saw what I did not want to see. If Marie stayed here, Paula would find her sooner or later; and Paula would remember that Marie had been one of my two wives. It was inevitable—no, it was not inevitable. Did I think I was a deity to deal in inevitability? But it was so overwhelmingly probable that the chances it might not happen were too insignificant to consider.

“Marie,” I said. “Don’t you understand? Unless you go with me, you’ll land right in Paula’s hands. Believe me, I know. You will.”

“Even if I do,” she said.

“Look...” I made an effort to get the emotion out of my voice and talk reasonably. “There’s no point in throwing yourself away just because Wendy wants to stay. I know, she’s young, and-”

“You don’t understand,” Marie said. “I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here myself.”

Understanding suddenly struck me like a numbing blow. I had not fooled anyone, it seemed, except myself. I realized now that she and Ellen had known all along how I had reacted to Paula, and what at least part of my reason was for going off with her.

“Listen to me,” I said. “About Paula and me—”

“Marc,” Marie said. “You’re going to have to understand. It’s me who doesn’t want to go into the future. It’s me. I can’t take this moving any more. I’m sick of it. I want to settle in one place and stay.”

“With Paula hunting you down?” I couldn’t believe what I heard.

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be here, in this world, not in some other. Not starting all over again. I can’t keep starting over and over again, Marc. You can. All right, you go ahead. But I want a little ordinary life for as long as I can have it, here, before the end comes.”

I shook my head. It was all crazy. Vaguely, I became aware that even the ones who had stayed behind before had gone—Wendy and the boyfriend and Abe. All except Ellen, and she was standing far back now in a corner of the room, almost lost in shadow. Marie came around the table to me.

“You never did understand me, Marc, did you?” she said. “You didn’t understand me from the first; and you didn’t love me.”

“Maybe not at first,” I said; and my voice had gone hoarse again. It was part of the general craziness that I should be standing here now telling her this while the other woman I loved stood back listening. “It’s different now.”

“Not different enough,” she said. “Not to the point where you’d move one inch out of your way for me. Or anyone.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then prove it. Stay here yourself. Don’t go forward.”

“Marie! For Christ’s sake, talk sense!”

“I am talking sense. But you can’t even hear me.” She stopped and said nothing for a moment; then, surprisingly, she reached up and stroked my cheek with her fingers, very gently. “It’s all right, Marc. You don’t have to hear. You can’t change for me, I know that. But there’s a point beyond which I can’t change for you. Nobody can make all the changes you’d like them to make, don’t you know that?”

“I just want you to live,” I said. “I don’t want Paula to get you.”

“I know, dear,” she said. “But it won’t work. I’ve got to stay; and even if you wanted to stay too, you couldn’t protect me.”

“Don’t be so damn sure about that!” I said; and for an insane, small second, hope of straightening this out after all flickered alive in me. “If I decided to take Paula and all her army apart, it might take some time; but—”

“You’d be throwing yourself away on something other than what you’re built to do,” she said. “If things went that way, I’d have held you prisoner here, instead of you taking me prisoner into the future.”

I didn’t know what to tell her.

“Marc,” she said, raising her face to me. “Say goodby to me.”

The ghost of some giant hand took me by the neck and bent my head down to hers. I kissed her and her lips felt dry and strange, as if I had never known them before. She hugged me, and I hung on to her in return until she used strength to break herself loose.

“There,” she said, stepping back a pace, “it’ll be all right. A big part of it is you just can’t bear to lose anything, Marc. But it’ll be all right in the long run. Goodby now; and be careful.”

She went out. I watched the doorway through which she had gone, and when I looked around not even Ellen was in the room. I went out into the shadows of the evening and walked by myself for a long while.

When I came back inside, it was nearly ten o’clock and there were a great many things to be done. I called together the monad, which now consisted of the Old Man, Ellen, Bill and myself. Doc had volunteered to join us; and with Marie missing, I now more than wanted him, I needed him there. I went over the patterns with them, as best I could describe them. Not so much because the patterns would mean anything particular to them; but the more their minds could identify with mine once we were in action together, the stronger we would be as a unit, and the more certain I could be of doing what I had set out to do.

Most of the people in the community who were leaving had already gone by midnight, when the meeting broke up. I sent Doc out to check that everyone was clear of the area who did not want to be transported forward with the rest of us. It was one of those coffee nights, when everything is due to happen with the next day’s sunrise, and the nerves feel stretched to the point where they sing like guitar strings at a touch. A warm weather front had moved in early in the evening, and the dark outside was still and hot. Only a faint rumble of thunder sounded from below the horizon, from time to time; and the lights among the buildings down below were fewer even than they might be at this hour on an icy winter night, so that already the community looked like a ghost town.

Doc came back.

“Everyone gone but the Mojowskis,” he said, “and they were just leaving as I came up. Be clear of the area in another twenty minutes.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go on into the lab. Porniarsk’s getting everybody into helmets and set to go. Tell them I’ll be along in twenty minutes.”

He went. I took one more turn around outside. The night air was so dark and still it could almost be felt by the fingers; and the mutter of distant thunder seemed to sound halfway around the horizon of the plain below. I had a vision of Paula’s soldiers night-marching through the gloom to take us by surprise. But even if they had started to move the moment the sun was down, they could not get here in time. No one was moving in the streets of the town below. Those going with us would be in their homes, waiting.

I went into the summer palace and took a final tour of the building. The rooms seemed oddly empty, as if they had been abandoned for years. I stepped into the courtyard where Sunday lay for a moment, but without turning on the lights. As I stood there, a cicada shrilled suddenly in the darkness at my feet and began to sing.

I went back inside, with the song of the cicada still trilling in my head. It stayed with me as I went down the halls and into the brightly lit lab. Everybody was in place, with helmets already on. Only Porniarsk stood by the directing console, which he had moved out into the center of the room by the tank. I went to the tank myself, to make one last check of the patterns, for we had it set on the pattern of our moment of destination. There was no change in what I saw there.

I seated myself and took a helmet. As I lowered it over my head, the cicada sound was still ringing in my ears, so that it was like being trapped under there with it. I felt my strength flow together with the strength of the others in the monad and the memory of the cicada sound was lost in the silent song of blended identities as I opened myself to the time storm forces in balance around us.

They were there. They had been there all this time, waiting, quivering in balance like a tangle of arrested lightnings. I read their pattern at a glance this time and laid the far future pattern that I wanted like a template upon them. There was matching and overlap and disagreement between the two patterns. I reached out with the strength of the monad, pushed, and the two slid together. It was suddenly done, and over. There had been nothing to it.

I took off my helmet and looked around. The others were taking off their helmets also and, under the fluorescent lights, their faces looked pale and wondering, like the faces of children. “We’re there?” said Ellen. “But where are we?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Then I noticed that around the corners of the drawn shades of the windows, the gleam of full daylight was showing.