Time Storm

31

We put up the shades; and the sunlight, which looked no different than any sunlight we had ever known, poured in. But outside the windows, all we could see was the same inner courtyard that held Sunday. Overhead, it was a half-cloudy day with thick white cloud masses and clear blue alternating.

We went down the corridors and out into the parking area. Below us, the empty village of the Experimentals and the town were unchanged; but beyond a short distance of plain that surrounded these, high grasses now began. The stalks looked to be six feet tall at least and stretched to the horizon like an endless field of oversize wheat. The road was gone. What now was on the other side of the mountain behind us, we could not, of course, see.

Down in the town, there was still no one stirring. This was not surprising, since many of them might not yet have realized that the move had been made. There had been no sound, no feeling of physical movement when it had happened. It was difficult even for me to realize that this was the far future I had talked about.

“Shall I go tell them, below?” Doc asked.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He hopped into one of the jeeps and drove off. I stood where I was with Ellen beside me, and the others, including Porniarsk, not far off. A moment later, we could see Doc’s jeep emerge beyond the trees and drive in among the buildings of the town, stopping here and there while he jumped out and went inside.

Each time he came out again, he was followed by people from inside a building. Soon the streets were swarming, and the figures below were starting to stream back up the slope toward us. Half an hour later, there was an impromptu celebration underway on the landing area.

It struck me, caught up in it as I was, that I had had more shocks, and more large gatherings recently than in any time since before the time storm. Nonetheless, this last one—this arrival party, as it was named almost immediately—vibrated with something neither the welcome home blast, nor the information session had possessed. There was a relaxed feeling of peace about this occasion that I had not noticed before. It was a warm, almost a cozy, feeling. Moving about among my fellow time travellers, picking up patterns, I finally zeroed in on the reason for it. There was something held in common by all the people now around me that I had not thought to look for in them, before we made the move.

In a sense, those who had come with us were the adventurers among our community, the true pioneers. Those particular words all rang a little off-note, applied to the situation we were in. But what I mean is that, to an individual, those who had come forward with me were men, women, and even children who did not want to be any further back down the line of history than they had to be. In all of them, there was an urge to be at the very front of the wave, up where the race as a whole was breaking new ground.

Realizing this, something new and unsuspected in me warmed to them. It was a corner of myself that I had not even realized existed before. It was, in fact, the part of me that felt just the way they did. Even if I had known before we started that what we would all find up here would be the hour of Armageddon and the final end for our kind, I at least would have wanted to go anyway, to be part of even that, while it lasted, in preference to living out my life in any previous time, no matter how comfortable.

Now, here I was with perhaps a hundred and eighty people who felt the same way I did. Under the most unlikely set of conditions that could be imagined, I had unconsciously put together my own special tribe. I was so elated with this discovery that I had to talk about it with someone. Ellen was busy helping organize the food and drink aspect of the gathering, so I went looking for Bill.

I found him also busy. He had set up a table with some sheets of paper and was asking everybody to sign up so that we could have a complete and correct list of who had actually come through with us, since there were people at the last moment who had changed their minds either for or against the move. The sign-up table, however, was essentially self-operating, now that word of it was being passed through the crowd, and I managed to pull him aside.

We walked off a little way from the rest, and I told him my discovery about the pioneer element in those who had come and my pleasure in it.

“I can’t get over striking gold like that,” I said. “Stop and think how small the whole North American population was after we got the mistwalls halted. And out of that small population we’ve gathered nearly two hundred people who really belong up here, thousands of years ahead in time.”

“That’s true, of course,” he said.

His handsome, small face had been tanned by several years of outdoor weather, and the same amount of time seemed to have thickened and matured even the bones of it, so that he now looked more competent and mature. I realized that it was with him as it had been with Marie. Just as I had not really looked at her for a long time, so I had not really looked at him either; and he had been changing under my nose.

“... it shouldn’t be such a surprise, though,” he was going on to say, even as I was noting the changes in him. “Stop to think that the ones who gathered around us in the first place were survivor types. You had to be a survivor type to stay alive while the mistwalls were moving. Even if you were one of the few who were lucky enough to stay put and have no mistwalls come near you, contact with the survivor types around you afterwards either made you like them in a hurry, or buried you.”

“My point, though,” I checked and glanced around to make sure that none of the others were close enough to overhear me discussing them in this clinical fashion, “my point is that these people are a lot more than simple survivors.”

“Right,” said Bill, his brown face serious. “Look what happened, though. After the time storm, our group began to attract a particular type of people—those who had heard of us and thought they’d like to be associated with us. The ones we attracted were the ones who saw the same sort of things in us they saw in themselves. So they came—but they didn’t all stay. Those who didn’t fit went off again. The community was a sort of automatic self-filter for a common type. Then, when it came down to a question of who wanted to make the jump forward in time or not, that decision shook out the last of the chaff.”

I winced inside; though I was careful to make sure no sign of it showed on my face. He had labelled Marie with a tag I neither agreed with, nor would have wanted to hear applied to her even if I had agreed with it. At the same time, I had to admit he had laid out a good argument. I said as much.

“Time will tell, of course,” he answered. “I’ll say one thing, though.” He turned and met my eyes directly with his. “I’ve never felt happier in my life than when I realized that it was a settled thing, an unchangeable thing, that I was coming forward like this.”

“Well,” I said, a little lamely. “I’m glad.”

“I think even if Bettijean hadn’t wanted to come along, I still wouldn’t have hesitated.”

I opened my mouth to ask who Bettijean was, and then closed it again. One more thing had evidently been going on under my nose without my noticing. I would ask Ellen later.

“I’d better get back to the others,” I said.

After the celebration had begun to settle down a bit, I got up on my customary jeep-rostrum to tell them what we would be doing in the next few days. I said that we would start setting up the community again, here. Meanwhile, Doc would be flying surveys to locate other human settlements in this future world. He would, in fact, fly a spiral course out of this area; and the navigating equipment of the plane could be used to map the ground he covered, in the sense that it would store up information about it, which could later be recalled on the view screen of the control panel.

“How soon do you think we’ll find other people?” some male voice I did not recognize, somewhere toward the back of the crowd, asked.

“I can’t make any guesses,” I said. “Actually, if I was betting, I’d bet they’d find us first.”

There was a silence; and I suddenly realized they were waiting for me to expand on that.

“This is the future,” I said. “Porniarsk and I found evidence that up here they may be doing something about the time storm. If that’s the case, they have to be pretty competent technologically. I’m assuming that sooner or later, and probably sooner, the fact that we’re here will register on whatever sort of sensing equipment they’ve got. For one thing, if they’re aware of the time storm, they’re going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly got exchanged by the time storm forces for a chunk from the past.”

There were a lot more questions after that, some serious, some not so, covering everything from what future humans would look like to whether we should post guards—against animals, if not humans—until we learned that this was unnecessary. I turned that suggestion over to Doc, who thought it was a good idea. The session ended with Bill climbing into the jeep and making himself somewhat unpopular by saying that he wanted to start tomorrow morning getting a complete inventory of everything we had left after those leaving had taken what they wanted; and he wanted everybody to cooperate by listing their own possessions.

I broke away from the gathering before it finally ended and got together with Porniarsk in the lab. The view we had in the tank was essentially the same as the one that had been in it before our move. The difference was that now it was real rather than extrapolated; and there were minor corrections in its display because of that.

“Try it now,” I said to Porniarsk. “See if we can extrapolate forward from here, now that it’s the present.”

He worked with the equipment for perhaps twenty minutes.

“No,” he said. “It’s still hesitating over inconsistencies.”

“Then we’ve landed in the right place—or time, I mean,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried. Between you and me, I half-expected the people from this time to be waiting for us when we appeared.”

“You were assuming that our activity of time forces would at once attract their attention? I would have thought so, too.”

“And that they’d have means of getting here the moment they saw it,” I said. “If they don’t, how can they be advanced enough to do anything about the time storm generally?”

“I don’t know,” said Porniarsk. “But I think there are too many unknowns here for either of us to speculate.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“About that, I believe I am. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.”

“All right,” I said. “But if no one shows up within twenty-four hours, I’m going to begin to worry.”

No one did show up in the next forty-eight hours. Nor within the forty-eight hours after that, nor in the week that followed. Meanwhile, Doc was coming back from his daily mapping flights and reporting no sign of other human existence. No habitations, no movement. We were evidently at the far eastern end of a mid-continental area of plains uniformly covered by the tall grass, like central North America in the time of the buffalo; though there were none of the bison breed to be seen now.

However, both the grasslands and the hardwood forest that began about sixty miles west of where our chunk of territory had landed were aswarm with other game. Deer, elk, wolf, bear, moose... and the whole category of familiar smaller wildlife. The hardwood forest gave evidence of stretching to the east coast and had been in existence long enough to kill off most of the undergrowth beneath it, so that it had a tidily unreal look about it, like a movie set for a Robin Hood epic. Doc had landed in an open section of it and reported great-trunked oaks and elms with level, mossy ground beneath them, so that there was a cathedral look to the sunlight streaming down between the lofty limbs overhead.

I kept to myself my concern over the fact we were not being approached by the other intelligences of this future time. Our community was digging in, literally. Just as we had arrived here in daylight when we had left our former time period at night, so we had also arrived here in the spring; although it had been fall where we had left. A fair amount of planted crops had been lost behind us; and even without Bill’s urging, a number of our people were eager to get seeds in the ground in this place. There would be no stores of pre-time storm goods to plunder for additional food and supplies in the time where we were now.

So the first week became the second, and the second the third, with no sign of other intelligent life to be found on the continent around us and no futuristic visitors. Gradually we began to adjust to the fact that we might, indeed, be completely alone on this planet of the future; and the life of our own community began to take up most of our attention.

It was a strenuous time. In addition to coping with the fact that here we would have to supply our own necessities, there was evidence that the climate in this future time and area would have colder winters than we had endured, back where we had been. Possibly, much colder winters. There was a good deal of work to be done to insulate buildings and expand the capacity of their heating units, whether fireplaces or stoves.

With the move, we had lost the small river from which we had powered our electric generator. Bill had said he could get some windmill structures built in a few weeks to give us at least intermittent current; but this depended on having the hands available to do the work. More immediate was the need for firewood. Right now the only wood available was on our section of a mountain that had come forward in time with us. One hard winter would deforest this completely. It was almost an imperative that we arrange somehow to bring fuel from the forested area sixty miles to our east, or move the community to it; and we had too big a stake in fixed property here to make that move in one short summer.

The result was that everybody worked time and overtime, including me. In a way, this was something I was grateful for; because it kept my mind off the fact that no one had contacted us. Doc had by now flown as far as the east coast and for some hundreds of miles north of what had once been the Canadian border. He had seen absolutely no sign of civilization. Everywhere, there was only wilderness visible from the muskeg conifer forest of the north, through the now-distorted pattern of the Great Lakes, down to the flat country north of the former Mexican border. A cold worry had begun to nibble at me that possibly Earth at this time was completely uninhabited and forgotten; and if that was so, how in my lifetime was I ever to contact time storm fighters who were light-years—possibly hundreds to millions of light-years—away?

So I was grateful for the hard work, in one way. In another way, it kept me from coming to grips with a second worry, one that was like acid eating away deep within me. With Marie’s leaving, something in her had come out into the open that I had never suspected she felt. Now, I was aware of it in Ellen as well. Ellen was still there during the days; she was there beside me at night; but I could sense now that not all of her was there. Some part of her was being withheld from me. There was a wall between us, as there had been between Marie and myself, although I had never realized it.

I wanted to talk to her about it; but there was no time. In the morning we only had time to rise, dress, eat, and run. During the day there was no rest, no pause in which to talk. At night, there was only time for another meal, and sleep would threaten to claim us before we had finished refueling the weary, empty engines of our bodies. We fell into bed, opened our eyes—it seemed—a moment later; and another day’s cycle was already rushing us inexorably onward.

But there had to be a break sometime. It came at the end of the fifth week, when the first of Bill’s windmills began to power the generator, and a trickle of electricity came to make our lighting fixtures glow faintly against the ceilings and walls behind them. It was as good an excuse as any to give people a breather, and I declared a night and a day off.

For all the wonders of artificial light refound, there was little celebrating that first evening. All that most of us wanted to do was to sleep; and sleep we did, until late the next day. Then, in the noon sunlight, we gradually came out of our sleeping quarters to sit or move around slowly in the sun, either doing nothing at all, or turning our attention at last to something that had long gone neglected, that we now had time to check, clean, mend, or build.

It was the second of these activities that concerned me. When I woke, Ellen was already up and out of the summer palace. I got up, drank a couple of cups of black coffee and went looking for her.

I found her hanging out a wash on the upsloping hillside that lay on the opposite side of the summer palace from that which held the landing area. Coming around the corner and seeing her from a distance, I woke to the fact that she had necessarily taken over all of Marie’s household obligations in addition to her own. I had been so used to having both of them around and being selfishly immersed in my own problems, that it had never occurred to me that Ellen would now be doing double duty in addition to her outside work with the rest of the community. Nor had it ever occurred to me to help either her or Marie before. I came around a corner of the building and saw her from a little distance. I stopped, and for a moment I simply watched her, for she had not yet seen me. Then I went forward, picked up a pair of my own jeans from the basket and joined her in hanging up the rest of the wet stuff.

We worked side by side in silence.

“Look,” I said, when we were done. “Why don’t you sit down for a moment? I’ll take the basket in, bring out a card table and some chairs and fix us a lunch. You just sit still. How about it?”

She looked at me. I had never been able to read the deep thoughts behind her face, and I could not now. But I noticed again, as I had come to notice since Marie had left, how Ellen had also changed with the years in between. She was still young—what had I figured out once, that she could not be any older than Doc and was perhaps even younger? But there was nothing of a girl left about her now; not even the ghost, it seemed, of she whom I had picked up in the panel truck long since. The Ellen I looked at now was a mature woman and another person entirely.

“All right,” she said.

She sat down on the grass of the hillside, took off the scarf she had tied around her head and shook her hair out. She was wearing some old, autumn-brown slacks and a dark green shirt, open at the throat. Her neck rose in one straight column from the spread collar of the shirt, and under her dark hair, now loose about her head and shoulders, her eyes were blue-green and brilliant.

I took the basket and went into the house. I rummaged around the kitchen, trying to remember what she had shown a liking for, in the way of food. I had become a halfway decent cook in my years alone in the north woods before the time storm hit; but there was not much available here in the way of foodstuffs. We were all living off stored goods until fall, when the crops of our recent planting would hopefully be in.

I finally found a small canned ham, and with this, some canned new potatoes, and three of the highly valuable eggs from our community’s small flock of chickens, managed to make a sort of ham and potato salad, moistened with a spur-of-the-moment, homemade mayonnaise I whipped up from the yolk of one of the eggs and the corn oil we had in fair quantity. I also hunted around the palace and found a bottle of Liebfraumilch that was not overage. There was no way to cool it, lacking electricity for our refrigerator; but salad and wine, once I had the card table and chairs set up outside with a tablecloth of sorts on it, looked reasonably festive.

“That’s good,” said Ellen, about the salad, as we ate; and I warmed clear through.

“Glad to hear you say so,” I told her. “Do you realize I really don’t know that much about what you like to eat?”

“I like everything,” she said.

“That’s good. Because it’ll be a long time before we have anything like what we were used to before,” I said; and I went on about what we could expect in the way of diet that winter, even if the crops went well.

I was talking around and about, trying to get her to give me some sort of conversational lead from which I could get onto the topic I wanted to bring up. She said nothing, however, to help. Nonetheless, with the relaxation of the food and wine in me, I finally began to drift on the tide of my own words into the area I wanted.

“There’s two chances that might help protect Marie and the others,” I said. “One’s that when Paula’s soldiers arrived and found the country changed where we’d been, they figured I’d magicked everybody safely forever beyond their reach, and Paula bought that idea when they told her—”

“Do you really think she would?”

I hesitated.

“No,” I said. “If she was completely normal, mentally, I’d think she might. But part of her mind is never going to rest, where I’m concerned; and sooner or later, word is going to reach her of people who’ve met and recognized some of our people who stayed behind. Then her hunt’ll be on again. All we can really hope for is a delay.”

“What’s the other chance?”

“That’s the long one. If I ever do get into contact with the time storm fighters here and get to work with them, maybe I can learn some way to go back and make Marie and the rest permanently safe from Paula—maybe by shifting Paula herself to a different time.”

Ellen said nothing. There was a little silence between us; and a fly that had discovered the empty wine bottle circled it, droning.

“God help her!” I said; and the words broke out of me, all of a sudden. “God help them all!”

“It was her decision,” said Ellen.

“I know,” I said. “But I-”

I looked at her.

“How much did Paula have to do with her going?” I asked.

“Not much,” said Ellen.

“You both knew how I reacted to—to Paula. Believe me, I didn’t even know it myself. I didn’t even realize it until after I caught on to what she actually was, headwise, and then I knew I had to get out of there.”

“Paula wasn’t that important to Marie.”

“You say that? If it hadn’t been for Paula and how I felt about her, we’d still have Marie and Wendy with us.”

“I don’t think so,” Ellen said.

“How can you say you don’t think so? Marie never talked about leaving before.”

“Not to you. She did to me, lots of times.”

I stared at Ellen.

“She did? Why?”

“She told you why, when she left. Marc,” Ellen said, “you don’t listen. That’s one of the reasons she went.”

“Of course I listen!”

She said nothing.

“Ellen, I loved Marie!” I said. “Why wouldn’t I listen to someone I loved? I loved Marie—and I love you!”

“No.” Ellen got up from the table, picked up the empty plates and silver and started in toward the house. “You don’t, Marc. You don’t love anyone.”

“Will you come back here!” I shouted after her. She stopped and turned. “For once will you come back and say more than three words in a row? For Christ’s sake, come and sit down and talk to me! There’s something here, in the air between us. I can feel it. I bump into it every time I turn around. And you^’re telling me that there was something like that between Marie and me and I didn’t know about it. Come back and tell me what it was. Come back and talk to me, damn it!”

She stood facing me, holding the dishes.

“It wouldn’t do any good.”

“Why not?”

She did not answer.

“Do you love me?” I said.

“Of course. So did Marie.”

“She loved me and she wanted to leave me? I didn’t love her and I want to keep her? What kind of sense does that make? If you loved me the way you say you do, you’d explain it to me, so I could do something about it, about me, or whatever was necessary.”

“No,” she said. “You’ve got things the wrong way around. I love you without your doing anything.”

“All right, then!”

“But you’re asking me to change. Talk doesn’t come easily to me. You know that. If I have to talk before you can love me, then you don’t love me. You wanted Marie to change, too, but she couldn’t. I can, but I won’t. It’s up to you, Marc, not me.”

I stared at her; but before I could say anything more, a stranger walked around the corner of the summer palace and came up to us. He was a startling figure, a good four inches taller than I was, completely bald, and wearing only a sort of kilt of white cloth around his waist. Even his feet were bare. His features looked something like those of an Eskimo’s but his skin was brown-dark, and the muscles stood out like cords under the skin. He looked as if he had spent his lifetime exercising, not with barbells, but on the parallel rings and other gymnastic equipment. He came up to me.

“Marc Despard?” he said. He had no accent that I could put my finger on, but the timbre of his voice was somehow different from that of any other human voice I’d heard. “My name’s Obsidian. Sorry we took so long to come forward and meet you, but we had to study you for a while, first”