Time Storm

36

“They’re a great people, Marc,” said Porniarsk, once we were alone again in the ordinary configuration of Obsidian’s quarters— which Obsidian had, by now, largely given over to our own private use. “You shouldn’t forget that.”

“You think they are?” I said.

I heard him as if from a middle distance. I was once more as I had been when we had just left Earth on the way here in Obsidian’s quarters; like someone who had trained years for a single conflict. I was light and empty inside, remote and passionless, hollow of everything but the thought of the battle that would come, which nothing could avert or delay.

“Yes,” he said, “they’ve survived the time storm. They’ve learned to live with it, even to use it for their own benefit, and they’ve made a community of innumerable races, a community that’s a single, working unit. Those are great achievements. They deserve some honor.”

“Let other people honor them, then,” I said. It was still as if I was talking to him from some distance off. “I’ve got nothing left except for what I’ve still got waiting for me.”

“Yes,” he said. He sounded oddly sad. “Your foe. But these people aren’t your foe, Marc. Not even the time storm’s your foe.”

“You’re wrong there,” I told him.

“No.” He shook his ponderous head.

I laughed.

“Marc,” he said, “listen to me. I’m alive, and that alone surprises me. I’d expected I’d stop living, once I was taken from the time in which Porniarsk existed. But it seems, to my own deep interest, that in some way I’ve got an independent life now, a life of my own. But even if this is true, it’s a single life only. I was constructed, not engendered. I can’t have progeny. My life’s only this small moment in which I live it; and I’m concerned with what and whom I share that moment. In this case, it’s you, Ellen, Bill, Doc, and the rest.”

“Yes,” I said. At another time, what he had said might have moved me deeply. But at the moment, I was too remote, too concentrated. I heard and understood what he told me; but his words were like a listing of academic facts, off somewhere on the horizon of my existence, shrunken by their distance from what obsessed me utterly.

“Because of this,” he said, “I’m concerned with what you’re planning to do. I’m afraid for you, Marc. I want to save what I’ve got no other words to call but your soul. If that’s to be saved, sooner or later, you’ll have to reconcile yourself with things as they are. And unless you do it in time, you’ll lose your battle. You’ll die.”

“No,” I said. The need for sleep was deep in me and I only wanted to end the talking. “I won’t lose. I can’t afford to. Now I’ve got to get some rest. I’ll talk to you after I wake up, Porniarsk.”

But when I finally woke up, Dragger was standing over the cushion on which I lay.

“Marc,” she said, “your training as a temporal engineer is going to begin at once; and if you can absorb that, you’ll be taken out to where the line of battle runs with the time storm forces.”

I was suddenly fully awake and on my feet. She was going on, still talking. Porniarsk was also to be given the training. This was a bonus, because in no way had I dared to hope I could win for him also what I had wanted for myself. But now he, too, would have the chance. There was a comfort for me in the sight of his ugly, heavy bulldog shape. He was like a talisman from home, a good omen.

Obsidian took us far across space again. For the first time we came to another vehicle. It was like a raft the size of a football field, with some sort of invisible, impalpable shield, like a dome, over it to keep in an atmosphere that would preserve workable temperatures and pressures for the massive engineering equipment it carried. Barring the star scene that arched over us in every direction, it was like nothing so much as being in the engine room of an incredibly monstrous battleship.

All the way out to this star raft in Obsidian’s quarters, and for nearly two weeks of Earth time after we got there, Porniarsk and I were force-fed with information from the teaching machines Obsidian had talked about. It was an unnerving process. We were like blank cassette tapes in a high speed duplicator. There was no physical sensation of being packed with instruction; and in fact, the information itself did not become usable until later, when contact with some of the actual engineering work going on aboard the raft tapped it, the way a keg of wine might be tapped. But at the same time, there was a psychic consciousness of mental lumber being added to our mental warehouses that was curiously exhausting in its own way. The sensation it produced was something like that which can come from weeks of overwork and nervous strain, to the point where the mind seems almost physically numb.

How Porniarsk reacted to it was something I had no way of knowing, because we were kept separated. Emotionally isolated by my own purpose, I was generally indifferent to what was being done to me, physically or mentally; and when, in due time, the process of information-feeding ended, I fell into a deep sleep that must have lasted well beyond the six hours of my normal slumber period. When I woke, suddenly, all the knowledge that had been pumped into me exploded from the passive state into the active.

I had opened my eyes in the same unstressed state of thoughtlessness that normally follows a return from the mists of sleep. I was at peace, unthinking—and then, suddenly the reality of the universe erupted all about me. I was all at once bodiless, blind, and lost, falling through infinity, lifetimes removed from any anchor point of sanity or security.

I tumbled; aware—too much aware—of all things. Panic built in me like a deep-sea pressure against the steel bulkhead of my reason, threatening to burst through and destroy me. There was too much, all at once, crowding my consciousness. Suddenly I had too much understanding, too much awareness...

I felt the pressure of it starting to crack me apart; and then, abruptly, my long-held purpose came to my rescue. Suddenly I was mobilized and fighting back, controlling the overwhelming knowledge. I had not come this far in time and space and learning to disintegrate now in an emotional spasm. The universe was no bigger than my own mind. I had discovered that for myself, before this. I had touched the universe, not once, but several times previously. It was no great frightening and unknowable entity. It was part of me, as I was part of it. A thing did not frighten itself. An arm did not panic at discovering it was attached to a body.

I surged back. I matched pressure for pressure. I held.

But my mind was still far removed from my body, back on the raft. It felt as if, at the same time, I was floating motionless, and flying at great speed through infinity. My vantage point was somewhere between the island universes, out in intergalactic space. In a sense, it was as if I stood on the peak of a high mountain, from which I could see the misty limits of all time and space. Almost, it seemed, I could see to the ends of the universe; and for the first time, the total action of the time storm activity became a single pattern in my mind.

“So, Marc,” said a voice—or a thought. It was both and neither, here where there were no bodies and no near stars—“you survived.”

It was Dragger speaking. I looked for her, instinctively, and did not see her. But I knew she was there.

“Yes,” I said. I was about to tell her that I had never intended anything else, but a deeper honesty moved me at the last second. “I had to.”

“Evidently. Do you understand the temporal engineering process, now?”

“I think so,” I said; and as I said it, the knowledge that had been pumped into me began to blend with what I was now experiencing, and the whole effort they were making unrolled into order and relationship, like a blueprint in my mind.

“This isn’t the way I imagined it,” I said. “You’re actually trying to stop the time storm, by physical efforts, to reverse its physical effect on the universe.”

“In a sense.”

“In a sense? All right, say in a sense. But it’s still physical reversal. To put it crudely, in the sort of terms you’re most familiar with, the normal decay of entropy began to stop and reverse itself when the universe stopped expanding. Then, when the farther stars and the outer galaxies started falling back here and there, they set up areas where entropy was increasing rather than decaying. Isn’t that right, Dragger? So it had to be these stresses, these conflicts between the two states of entropy in specific areas, that spawned the nova implosions and triggered the time faults, so that on one side of a sharp line, time was moving one way, and on the other, a different way. So that’s what made the time storm! But I assumed you’d be attacking the storm directly to cure it.”

“We’re after the root cause.”

“Are you, Dragger? But this way—this is using sheer muscle to mend things.”

“Do you know of a better way?”

“But—using energy to reverse the falling back of these physical bodies, to force them to move apart again? There ought to be some way that wouldn’t require tapping another universe. Isn’t that what you’re doing—and tapping a tachyon universe at that? You’re working with forces that can tear this universe apart.”

“I asked you,” repeated Dragger, “do you know a better way?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ve got to see this for myself. I can’t believe you can control something that powerful.”

“Look, then,” said Dragger. “S Doradus is only a thought away from us here.”

It was true. Merely by thinking of it, we were there, with no time spent in the movement. Bodiless, with Dragger bodiless beside me, I hung in space and looked at the great spherical darkness that was the massive engine enclosing the young blue-white giant star called S Doradus. It was an engine that trapped all the radiation from that vast sun, to use it as a focus point, a lens in the fabric of our universe, through which then flowed the necessary jet of energy from the tachyon universe that was being tapped for power-to push not only stars, but galaxies around.

A coldness took my mind. Through that lens, we were touching another place where every physical law, and time itself, was reversed from ours. As long as the lens aperture was controlled, as long as it remained small and unvarying, the reaction between the two universes was under command. But if die lens should tear and open further, under the forces it channelled, the energy flow could flash to proportions too great to be constrained. The fabric between the universes would break wide open; it would be mutual annihilation of both—annihilation in no-time.

“You see now,” said Dragger, “why we didn’t think it was possible for you to do this work. In fact, if you hadn’t been able to make the conceptual jump that set you free to survey the situation, like this, there’d have been no point in even considering it.”

“Made the jump? Just a minute,” I said. “This isn’t something I’ve done all on my own. I must be getting some technological assistance to let my point of view go wheeling through infinite distances, like this.”

“Of course you are,” said Dragger. “But the only person who could make it possible for your mind to endure such assistance was you, yourself. You’re strong enough to endure the sense of dislocation involved. We didn’t think you were. I didn’t think you were. I was wrong.”

“I’ve got work I want to do,” I said. “That helps.”

“A great deal, evidently. At any rate, Marc, you’re one of a select group now. Less than a millionth of one percent of all our people have the talent to do this work and endure the conditions under which it’s done. Are you surprised we doubted that you could? An individual has to be born with the talent to be a temporal engineer. Evidently, you were born with it—millenia before there was such work.”

“I didn’t know about this,” I said. “That’s true enough. But there were other things that called for the same kind of abilities.”

I was thinking of the stock market of that part of me which could never rest until it had tracked down what it searched for; also, of that other part of me that had immediately recognized, in the time storm, an opponent waiting for me....

My mind boggled suddenly and strangely, and shied away from finishing that particular thought. Puzzled, I would have come back to it; but Dragger was talking to me again.

“Are you listening to me, Marc?”

“I’m listening,” I said. I returned my full attention to the moment, and our conversation, with an effort. “Something bothers me, though. If it’s pure technology at work, why is it talent’s needed at all? Why is it only a few can do this? There must be more than a few who can endure the conditions, as you say.”

“There are,” she answered. “And that’s why you’ve got one more strength you have to demonstrate. We need people with a special talent because when we move stars, and more than stars, we make gross changes in the time storm forces. We don’t have any technological device quick enough to safely measure and assess the effect of those changes on the stresses by which we control the flow of energy from the tachyon universe. If the pressure against which we’re exerting our energy flow changes suddenly, the flow can increase, the lens may dilate, and you must have guessed what can happen then, before any adjustment can be made.”

“You mean the lens tearing open,” I said.

“That’s right. Only minds able to read the pattern of the time storm forces, directly, can see danger coming fast enough to correct for it. We who are temporal engineers have to direct our stream of extra-universal energy and, at the same time, make sure that it doesn’t get out of our control.”

She stopped speaking. Eyeless, I hung in space, watching the great darkness that was the engine, the dyson sphere enclosing S Doradus. My imagination pictured the unbelievable holocaust within that shell of collapsed matter and the Klein bottle forces, that made the core of a star millions of times the mass of our sun into a tiny rent in the fabric of a universe. I had thought I was equal to any dimensions that might exist in the battle I wanted to join; but the dimensions here were beyond imagination. I was less than a speck of dust to that stellar nucleus; and in turn, it was infinitesimal, to the point of nonexistence, compared to the two great opposed masses of energy between which it formed a bridge and a connection.

And I was going to share in the control of that bridge?

My courage stumbled. There was a limit, even to imagination; and here that limit was exceeded. I felt my view of the space around me growing obscured and tenuous. I was aware of Dragger, watching, judging me; and with remembrance of her presence, my guts came back to me. If she could stay and work here, so could I. There was nothing any life born in this universe could do, that I could not at least attempt.

The view of the space before me, and the mighty engine in it, firmed. It grew clear and sharp once more.

“You’re still with us?” asked Dragger.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then there’s only one more step to take,” she said. “We’ll test you on the line. If you don’t succeed there, no one can help you. There’ll be no way out.”

“I’m ready.”

We went forward, toward the dyson sphere. Bodiless, we passed, like thought through its material shell, through the Klein bottle forces, down into the sea of radiation beyond any description that was the enclosed star. We approached the core that was the lens. Here, ordinary vision was not possible. But with the help of the information that had been pumped into me, the lens area rendered itself to my mental perception as an elliptical opening, dark purple against a wall of searing blue-white light. The energy stuff of the other universe pouring through that opening, was invisible, but sensible. It rendered itself as a force of such speed and pressure that it would have felt solid to the touch, if touch had existed in that place and it had been safe to use it upon that inflow.

Dragger led me almost to the lip of the lens.

“Do you feel anything?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was an odd counter force at work here. In spite of the tremendous outflow, I felt something like an undertow, as well, sucking us toward the lens. From where I felt it, it was nothing I could not resist; but I did not want to get closer.

“The downdraft,” said Dragger—the word she used in her communication form was not a precise or scientific term, but a casual one, almost a nickname for what I felt. “Does it bother you?”

“Yes,” I said; for the touch of its pull toward the open lens filled me with uneasiness. “I don’t know why.”

“It bothers us all,” she said, “and none of us is sure why. It’s no problem here, but out at operations point it becomes something you’ll need to watch out for. Now, meet the others working in this area.”

She spoke in turn to at least a couple of dozen other identities. My stored information recognized the symbols that were their personal identification as they answered her and spoke to me. Our conversation seemed to be mind to mind, here in the heart of the star. But actually, as I knew, we were talking together through the purely technological communications center of the space raft where my body and Porniarsk’s were. Most of those I spoke to had been at my full-dress argument session, previously. I was a little surprised to realize how many, there, had been temporal engineers; although, now that I thought of it, it was only logical that most of them should have been, since they would be the ones most concerned with me.

“Marc is going on line with us, out at operations point,” Dragger said. “If he works out, there, we’ve got another operator. Marc, are you ready to go?”

“Yes,” I said.

We withdrew from the lens, from the star and the engine. I had expected that I, at least, would be returning to my body on the raft, from which I would then go by ordinary, physical means to the operations point. But our identities instead started moving out along the energy projection from the engine, through interstellar space from the lesser Magellanic Cloud, where S Doradus was, toward our own galaxy.

“Your bodies will be sent back,” she said.

“Bodies?”

I woke to the fact that the identity of Porniarsk had just joined us.

“Porniarsk!” I said. “You’re going on the line, too?”

“Only as an observer, I’m afraid,” he answered. “As I think I’ve said to you in the past, I lack creativity. And a certain amount of creativity is required for direct work in temporal engineering. But in all other respects, I’m qualified; and our instructors thought you, at least, might find me useful to have with you.”

“Dragger?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“The decision wasn’t mine,” she answered. “But I think it’s a good one. In spite of the fact you’ve passed all tests, Marc, you’re still very much an unknown quantity to us. Aside from whatever advantage it’ll be to you to have your friend with you, it’ll make the rest of us feel more secure to know that there’s an observer ready to tell us what happens if you do have trouble.”

“Enlightened selfishness,” I said.

“Of course.”

The trip we were now taking was a curious one. My newly educated memory told me it would have been thoroughly possible to make an immediate jump over the hundred and forty thousand light-years of distance from the neighborhood of S Doradus to our own galaxy. But Dragger evidently had a reason for taking me over the distance slowly, following the route of the energy being sent from the engine to the retreating matter of our galaxy; and now I began to understand what that reason was.

The energy from the tachyon universe was not projected in the form it was received, like a light beam aimed over a hundred and forty thousand light-years of distance. Instead, it was converted to a time force line, itself—an extension across space of form without mass, which would not be converted back into energy until it touched the solid material at its destination; and even then, it would be absorbed, rather than felt, as an outside force, by that material.

The form in which it was extended, however, was designed to increase in cross section until it was as wide as the galaxy to which it was being sent. Crudely, then, the energy flow could be represented as a funnel shape, with the small end at the lens of S Doradus and the width of the funnel increasing over the light-years of intergalactic distance between lens and galaxy, until the large end could contain our whole galaxy, including its spiral arms.

We were following, then, alongside this expanding funnel; and as we travelled, I became acutely conscious of its steady growth, and of a corresponding increase in the uneasiness I had felt about the downdraft. And this was ridiculous; because here, with the energy converted into a massless form, there was no downdraft to be felt. Dragger’s reason for moving Porniarsk and me this slowly along the route of the projected energy was becoming apparent.

I set my teeth against the reaction. It did not let itself be beaten down easily, because there was something very old about it; as if I had suddenly come face to face with a dire wolf out of prehistory, lurking among the shadows of some well-groomed, civilized park, at sunset. But it was only one more enemy to conquer; and gradually, as I faced it, it ceased to gain against me and then finally retreated. It was all but gone when Dragger spoke.

“How do you feel, Porniarsk?”

“I’m filled with wonder,” said Porniarsk.

“Outside of that, nothing?”

“Nothing,” he answered.

“And you, Marc?”

“Something,” I said. “But I think I’ve got it licked.”

She did not say any more until we came, at last, to the edges of our own galaxy and moved in among its stars, ourselves now within the mouth of the funnel.

“When possible,” she said, “we give the individual engineer a sector of work that includes their own home world. Your sector, Marc and Porniarsk, will include the world from which Obsidian brought you to us. Just now, there’s no work going on in it. For the moment, no changes in the temporal forces are appearing here, although the earlier forces aren’t balanced fully except in the local area of your world where you balanced them yourself, we understand, back before we have records of the storm. But there are going to be forces building up farther in toward the galaxy’s center in about nine months of your local time. You’ll have that many months to study your sector. Your bodies are being returned there and you’ll be able to spend some time in them. Obsidian’s returning them and bringing in the equipment you’ll need individually to work in this sector.”

We were in sight of Sol, now; and to my eyes, the star scene had a familiar look that moved me more deeply than I would have expected it could.

“I was told of one more test to be passed back here,” said Porniarsk.

“There’s one,” said Dragger, “but not for you—for Marc. Marc, in the final essential, the only way we’ll ever know whether you can work with the time storm is to see you work with it. Only, if it turns out you can’t, it’ll almost certainly destroy you. That’s why this is the last test; because it’s the one that can’t be taken under other than full risk conditions.”

“Fencing with naked weapons,” I said.

I had not meant to say it out loud, for one reason because I did not think Dragger would know what I was talking about; but she surprised me.

“Exactly,” She said. “And now, I’ll get back to my own work. Marc, Porniarsk, watch out for the downdraft, now that you’re sensitized to it. It seems diffuse and weak out here; but don’t forget it’s always with you, whether you’re in space like this, or down on a planet surface. Like any subtle pressure, it can either wear you down slowly, or build up to the point where it can break you.”

“How soon will Obsidian return, so we can have our bodies back?” Porniarsk asked.

“Soon. No more than a matter of hours now. Perhaps, in terms of your local time, half a day.”

“Good,” said Porniarsk. “We’ll see you again.”

“Yes,” she said. “Before the next buildup of forces that affects this sector.”

“Goodby, Dragger,” I said. “Thanks.”

“There’s no reason for thanks. Goodby, Marc. Goodby, Porniarsk.”

“Goodby, Dragger,” Porniarsk said.

She was suddenly gone. As we had been talking, we had drawn on into the Solar System, until we now hung invisibly above the Earth at low orbit height of less than two hundred miles above its surface.

“I’d like to go down, even without our bodies and make sure everything’s been going well,” said Porniarsk.

“Yes,” I said; then checked myself. “-No.”

“No?”

“Something’s sticking in my mind,” I said. “I don’t like it. Dragger was talking about this sector being affected by a buildup of time forces farther in toward the center of the galaxy, in about nine months.”

“If you’ll consult the same information I had impressed on me,” said Porniarsk, mildly, “you’ll see that the area of space she was talking about is quite large. It’d be reasonable to assume that the chance of our own solar system being strongly affected by that buildup should be rather small—”

“I don’t like it, though,” I said, “I’ve got a feeling....”

I stopped.

“Yes?” said Porniarsk.

“Just a feeling. Just a sort of uneasy hunch,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t say anything about it to Dragger—it’s too wispy an idea. But I think I’d like to take a look at the forces of that full area from close up, out here, before I go down to Earth. You go ahead. It won’t take me much longer to do that than the few hours we have to kill, anyway, before Obsidian gets here with our carcasses; and nobody’s going to realize we’re around until then. You go ahead. I’ll be along.”

“If that’s what you want,” said Porniarsk. “You don’t need me with you?”

“No reason for you to come at all,” I said. “Go ahead down. Check up on things. You can check up for both of us.”

“Well, then. If that’s what you want,” said Porniarsk.

I had no way of telling that he had gone; but in any case, I did not wait to make sure he was. Even while I had been talking to him, the uneasy finger of concern scratching at my mind had increased its pressure. I turned away from the Earth and the solar system, to look south, east, west, and north about the galactic plane at the time storm forces in action there.