Time Storm

37

It was not just the forces themselves I wanted to study. It was true that they would have progressed considerably since I had last viewed them in the tank of Porniarsk’s lab; but that tank had still given me patterns from which I could mentally extrapolate to the present with a fair certainty of getting the present picture of matters, in general. But what concerned me was how those patterns would look in the light of my new knowledge; not only of the engine around S Doradus and the lens there, but of the downdraft as well. The downdraft worried me—if only for the fact that it had had the capacity to disturb me, gut-wise as well as mentally, when I had encountered it.

The situation I found in the area when I examined it was one in which the sectors were established within force lines that had been stabilized by the universal community, so that they might be used by members of that community in physical travel amongst stars. I was now able to trace with no difficulty the first twenty-nine force line time shifts Obsidian’s quarters had used in carrying us to the testing by Dragger and the others. I could have continued to trace them all the way to our destination; but right now, I was concerned only with the situation in the area to which Dragger had assigned me.

Between the force lines, stability did not exist—except in our own area around Earth where we had produced it ourselves. Struck by a sudden curiosity, I checked the Earth’s balance of forces with what I now knew about the time storm and satisfied myself that the present balance was not my doing. My original balance had evidently lasted far longer than I had expected—in fact, for several hundred years. But since that time, it had been periodically renewed by an outside agency. I was puzzled for a second that Porniarsk had not picked up this evidence of outside time storm control earlier than the present period. Then I remembered that the search had been made by the computer mind of the tank; and undoubtedly Porniarsk, like myself, had never bothered to instruct it to consider a continuing state of inaction, in what was already a nonstorm area, as an anomaly.

Within the fixed boundary lines of the stabilized force lines set up to be used for cross-space transportation, the time storm had gone on in its normal pattern of developing and spreading temporal disintegration, until about three thousand years ago, when there began to be evidence of periodic checking of areas threatening to set off large-scale disturbances throughout the general, galaxy-wide pattern. This checking had apparently been so minor as to be essentially unnoticeable, until the cumulative effect of a number of such incidents began to show evidence of anomaly on the large, general scale; and the tank picked them up.

I studied the stabilized force lines; and I studied the earlier, smaller evidence of disturbance checking. What was gnawing at me, I finally decided, was the fact that corrections which were too small to be important, taken singly, could pile up to have a much more serious cumulative effect on the stress situation of the galactic area as a whole.

Moreover, this could kick back against the flow through the lens and cause exactly the sort of tearing and enlargement that was the everpresent danger there.

It was all very iffy. It was a chain reaction of possibilities, only— but I did not like the look of it. I swung back and forth mentally over the force line stress pattern in my sectors, trying to make it all add up in some other way than it had just done; but I kept getting the same answer.

What I was hunting for were those elements of patterns that would point me toward the evolution of one particular pattern, less than a year from the present moment. It was difficult and frustrating because, so far, I had no idea what kind of ultimate pattern it was I was after. All I had to go on was a subconscious reaction to something I did not like; as when someone who spends his life in the open, in the woods or on the sea, will step out of doors on a morning, sniff the air, feel the wind, look at the sky and say—“I don’t like the looks of the weather.” The day might even be bright, sunny and warm, with no obvious hint of change about it; and still, some deep-brain sensor, conditioned by an experience consciously forgotten, sends up an alarm signal.

I thought of calling Dragger and immediately saw the pitfall on that path. Dragger had warned me that the only way, in the end, to prove I could work with the time storm was for me to work with it. My starting at shadows, if indeed that was what I was doing now and there was nothing really for me to worry about, might strike her as just the sort of sign she had been talking about, that I could not deal with the storm.

She might even be right in thinking that. She had given me no reason to think there was any dangerous situation building up here; in fact, she had deliberately reassured me this was not the case.

Maybe, I thought, the best thing for me was to put it out of my mind and follow Porniarsk back down to Earth’s surface. I had been paying little attention to time, but now I realized that at least as many hours had gone by as Dragger had said it would take before Obsidian was due back on Earth with Porniarsk’s body and mine. I should go to his station now, pick up my body and go back to my own clan.

I turned and went Mentally, it was only a single stride to Obsidian’s quarters, in the forest east of our community. Obsidian himself was not there when I arrived, nor was the body of Porniarsk, which meant that the avatar must already be back home. But my own body was waiting for me; and I sat up in it on the edge of the cushion on which it had been lying, feeling the strangeness of experiencing the weight and mass of it under the pull of gravity once more.

As I sat up, the illumination of the room increased around me, responding to my increased heart beat, temperature, and half a dozen other signals picked up by its technology from my now activated body. I stood up and moved to one of the two consoles that still stood in roughly the same places they had stood on our voyage out.

I knew how to use these now. I touched the keys of one of them and stepped from the room in Obsidian’s quarters to the spot on the landing area, outside the door of the summer palace, where Obsidian had always appeared.

The darkness about me when I arrived came as a small shock. Waking in the room at Obsidian’s, I had not realized I might have come home during the hours when that face of my planet was away from our sun. For a second after appearing there, I felt oddly as if I had not come home in the body, after all, but as if I was still only a point of view, hovering there, as I had hovered in space a few moments past, overlooking the whole galaxy and all the stars that were now shining down upon me.

The drawn shades on the windows of the summer palace were warm with light. Everyone there would be celebrating Porniarsk’s return and expecting me at any moment. I turned and looked away, down the slope to the town below; and under the bright new moon of midsummer, I saw the buildings down there had their windows also warmly lit against the night. I had been intending to turn to the door immediately, and go on into the palace; but now I found myself caught where I was.

The small, cool wind of the after sunset hours wrapped itself around me. I could hear it moving also in the distance, whistling faintly amongst the trees on the slope below. No night bird called; and the chill and the silence held me apart from the light and the talk that would be indoors. Out of the avalanche of printed words I had read during my mad period crept something more for me to remember. Not a quote this time, but a story—the French-Canadian legend of La Chasse Galerie. It was a myth about the spirits of the old voyagers who had died away from home, out on the fur trade routes, coming back in a large ghost canoe on New Year’s Eve for a brief visit with their living families and the women they had loved.

Standing alone in the darkness, strangely held from going inside, I felt myself like one of those returned ghosts. Inside the lighted windows there were the living; but no matter how much I might want to join them, it would be no use. Like the ghosts of the voyagers, I was no longer one of them, within. I had become something else, part of another sort of place and time. It seemed to me suddenly that the small cold breeze I felt and heard no longer wrapped around me, but blew straight through my bones, as it did through the tree limbs below me; and I thought that all my life I had been outside, looking at lighted windows, thinking how good it would be to be inside.

Once, I might have made it to there. God knows I had tried, with my mother, with Swannee... but now it was too late; and that was no one’s fault. It was not even my fault, in a sense. Because at each fork in the road along the way, I had made the best choice I knew to make; and all those choices had led me here. If here was outside forever, still, getting here had led me to many good things, beginning with Ellen and the crazy cat and continuing to this same moment, which was also, in its own way, good. For if I was lonely out here in the dark, looking at the lighted shades of the windows and knowing I could not be behind them, I was less lonely knowing who and what were there, and that their lives, which were part of me now, could be warm and bright.

Thinking this, I felt some of the warmth come out and enter me, after all. I remembered that I had discovered before this, that there was no real separateness. I was all things and all things were me... and, with that bit of remembering, I began to move again into touch with the universe. I flowed out to be part of the breeze around me, the ground under me and the trees beyond me, part of all the houses below with their lights and separate lives. I felt the summer palace behind me and reached into it to touch everyone there. There was no light, but the gold came into everything again. I saw them all behind the walls at my back, the eternally-sleeping Sunday, Doc, Bill, Porniarsk and Ellen. I saw Ellen and I touched her; and she was the key to all the rest between the walls of infinity and all infinities beyond those walls. I had a larger picture of this universe and all others now. I went out and out....

“Marc!”

I turned to vanish, to step back into Obsidian’s quarters; and even as I turned, I knew it was already too late. I came all the way around to face the summer palace and saw, darker shadow within shadow, Ellen there.

“Ellen,” I said, “how did you know I was here?”

She came toward me.

“I know where you are,” she said, stopping in front of me. I could barely make out her face. “I always know where you are. Porniarsk was back, and when you didn’t come in, you had to be here.”

“Go back inside,” I said. My voice was a little hoarse. “Go back in. I’ll be along in a moment.”

“No you won’t,” she said. “You were going to leave and not come in.”

I said nothing.

“Why, Marc?”

Still, I could not answer. Because suddenly, I knew why. What had been niggling at me all the time I had been studying the force lines now suddenly rearranged itself from a possibility to a certainty, from a suspicion to a knowledge, as the absolute vision of my unity with the universes took hold.

I had been turning away because I knew I would not be coming back.

“Why?”

I realized, then, that she was not asking me why I had been leaving. She already knew it was because I would not be back. She was asking me why I would go to something from which I would never return.

“I have to,” I said.

She put her arms around me. She was very strong, but we both knew she could not hold me there. The whole damn universe was pulling me in the other direction. There always was Doc for her, I thought bleakly, looking down at her. I had seen the way he felt about her. But I was wiser now than I had been; and I knew better than to mention that to her now.

“I do love you, Ellen,” I said.

“I know you do,” she said, still holding me. “I know you do. And you don’t have to go.”

“I do,” I said. “It’s the time storm.”

“Let somebody else do it.”

“There isn’t anyone else.”

“That’s because you’ve made it so there isn’t.”

“Ellen, listen.” I felt terribly helpless. “The whole universe is going to blow wide open unless I do something.”

“When?”

“When?” I echoed.

“I said, when? Ten years from now? Ten months? Two weeks? Two days? If it’s two days, take the two days-the first two, real days of your life—stay here and let it blow.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Can’t?” she said. She let go and stepped back from me. “No, that’s right. You can’t.”

“Ellen...” I said. I stepped toward her; but she moved back again, out of reach.

“No,” she said. “You go now. It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right,” I said.

“It’s all right,” she repeated. “You go.”

I stood there for a second more. But there was no way I could reach her, and I had no more words to say that would do any good. She already knew I yearned to stay. She knew I wouldn’t. What was there to tell her beyond that?

I went. It was like tearing myself down the middle and leaving the larger half behind.

I stepped back into Obsidian’s quarters and turned to the console to put in a call to Dragger. There was a little delay, and then Dragger’s voice spoke to me out of the air of the softly lit room, with its cushions and its nighttime trees all around.

“Forgive me, but I’m working now and can’t be disturbed. Leave word if you want me to call you back.”

It was a canned message.

“This is Marc,” I said. “Call me as soon as you get this message. It’s critical.”

I sat down on the cushion I had gotten up from earlier and sent my mind back out among the stars.

The forces of the time storm were still out there, waiting for me. Now that I came back to them with the additional insight of my momentary contact with the universe, outside the summer palace, what I had only suspected before showed as not only certain but unavoidably obvious. But whether I could convince Dragger and the other engineers of its obviousness was by no means certain. My conviction rested on my own way of interpreting the forces, which was different from theirs.

The time storm was too much in their blood and bones for them to hate it and love it the way that I did. For I did, I realized now, both hate and love it. I hated it for what it had done, for the millions of lives it had swept out of existence. Or perhaps they were all still in existence somewhere else—locked up in little dead end universes—my wife, Swannee; and all those Ellen had known; Marie’s husband; Samuelson’s family; and the countless others erased by moving mistwalls, not only on Earth but all through the universe. But I loved it, even as I hated it, for being my opponent, for giving me an enemy to grow strong in fighting.

So it was because of both the love and hate that I could see where it was trending now; and it was because they saw it only as a technological problem that I feared the temporal engineers like Dragger would not. I traced the lines of my suspicion again now, through the network of forces, out beyond my sector, out beyond the galaxy and the influence of the one lens I had seen, until I had checked it out against the storm across all the viewable universe. What I feared was there, all right. I could trace the paths of my suspicions, I could see the connections to my own satisfaction, but I could not turn up any solid evidence to present to the engineers.

I was still searching for something to prove what I believed when Dragger called me back.

“Marc?” her voice sounded in my mind. “You had something critical to talk to me about?”

“The time storm’s going to get out of hand,” I said. “It’s going to get out of hand right here in our own galaxy, and possibly in a number of others throughout the universe, at the same time. The pattern’s already evolving out of the patterns of the last thousand years. You’ve already got evidence of it. You told me there’d be increased activity here in nine months or so, my local time. That isn’t just going to be increased activity. It’s going to be activity that’s quadrupled, sextupled, a hundred or a thousand times increased, all at once.”

“What makes you say so, Marc?”

“The character of the patterns I see evolving.”

There was a little silence.

“Marc, can you describe what you mean by ‘character’?”

“The color, the feel, the implications of the patterns in the way they form and change.”

There was another silence.

“None of these words you mention have any precise meaning for me, Marc,” she said. “Can you describe what you’re talking about in hard concepts? Failing that, can you give me the concepts you’re talking about in more than one mode?”

“No,” I said, “because these verbal symbols of your language only approximate my personal meanings. I’m translating verbal symbols from my own language. Symbols that have special value derived out of my experience, my experience with all sorts of things outside your experience, my experience with buying and selling shares of stock in a market, with painting pictures in varied colors, with understanding what is written and carved in the name of art, with thousands of things that move intelligent and nonintelligent life, and make it the way it is.”

“I think I understand,” Dragger said. “But to convince me you’re right about this coming emergency you’re talking about, you’ll need to give me evidence in terms and symbols I can value and weigh exactly as you do. The only symbols like that are in my language, which you now also know.”

“I can’t explain things your language hasn’t any symbols for.”

“Then you’re saying that you can’t convince me of what you guess is going to happen,”

“Not guess. Know.”

“If you know, show me how you know.”

There was an emptiness of desperation in me. I had known it would be like this, but I had hoped anyway. Somehow, I had hoped, the gap would be bridged between our two minds.

“Dragger, don’t you remember how I explained to you how I’d learned about the time storm by a different route than the rest of you? That route gave me a view of it you others don’t have; and that view gives me insights, knowledge, you don’t have. Don’t you remember how I convinced you I had a right to be tested? And didn’t I pass those tests?”

“But have you actually passed the last part of that test, now?” Dragger said. “Or are you finding some incapability in yourself in actual practice, an incapability which you hide from yourself by imagining there’s an emergency condition building, that none of the rest of us can see and you can’t substantiate?”

“Dragger,” I said. “I know this is going to happen!”

“I believe you think you know. I don’t yet believe you’re correct.”

“Will you check?”

“Of course. But if I understand you, my checking isn’t likely to turn up any evidence that agrees with you.”

“Check anyway.”

“I’ve said I will. Call me again if you find something more to prove what you say.”

“I will.”

She said no more. She had gone then. I said no more, either, merely hung there, a point of nothingness in open space. The conclusion was the conclusion I’d feared. I was alone, as I had always been, as I still must be.

Dragger would check, but find nothing to convince her I was right. It was up to me either to find something she could understand, or stop the time storm myself.

It was the latter that I’d come to, eventually—I might as well face that now. It had been inevitable from the first, that the time storm and I should come to grips at last, alone, like this. I had come this far forward in time to find the tools to fight it and the allies to help me. I had not found the allies after all; but I had found some tools. Thanks to Dragger and the others, I knew that the storm could be affected by massive use of energy. Thanks to myself, I now knew that all things, all life, all time, were part of a piece; and if I could just reach out in the right way, I could become part of that piece and understand any other part as if it was part of me.

The thought was calming. Now that there was no hope of outside help, the solitary and abandoned feeling began losing its edge in me. It was ironic that I had come this far forward to find help who could handle a time storm I believed was too big for me to handle alone, only to discover that, while the help was here, it would not aid me. But now the irony no longer mattered. All that did was that I was back at ground zero, alone; and there was no need to waste any more effort on false hopes.

If anything was to be done, I would have to do it, by myself; and if nothing could be done, nothing could be done.

I felt more at peace than I could have dreamed I would, at this point. The unity with the universe came on me without my reaching for it, and I hung bodilessly in the midst of the galaxy that had produced my race and myself, sensing and touching all things in it. I had thought of failure as inconceivable. Nothing was inconceivable. Ellen had said to let the universe blow and take what time remained for myself, even if it was only a couple of days. It would be more than a couple of days, of course. It would be months, at least; and each day of that could be a lifetime if I lived it touching everything around me.

Ellen had been right in her own way, and I should have told her so. I thought of going back now and saying it—and then I realized that she was reaching for me.

“Ellen?” I said; as I might have spoken to Dragger.

No words came back. She could not speak to me in symbols, because she did not have access to the technological equipment of the engineers. But across the touch between us, I could feel her thought, even though it was not in words.

I shouldn’t have let you go like that, she was telling me.

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”

No, she told me, you mustn’t come back. Not as long as you still think you can do something and want to do it. I want you to do what you want to do. I just didn’t want to cut you off; I didn’t want to be separated from you.

“You don’t have to be,” I said. “You never have to be separated from anything as long as you can really hold it in your mind. I didn’t know that before; but I know it now.”

A sudden discovery moved in me.

“Ellen,” I said, “where are all the short words, and the short speeches? You’re thinking just the way everybody talks.”

It just always came out the other way, she answered. But I talked to you like this, in my head, from the very beginning, from the first day you picked me up.

“I should have known,” I said. “Anyway, I know now. Ellen, I’m coming home.”

No, she told me. You mustn’t unless you’re sure you don’t want to stay at all. Are you sure?

We no longer talked in a place where there were any rooms to hide what I did not want her to know.

“No,” I said. “You’re right. There may not be anything at all I can do, but I want to try. I’ve got to try.”

Then try, she said. It’s whatever you want, because I’m with you now. Aren’t I with you?

“Oh, you are,” I said. And I reached, forgetting how I was bodiless, to hold her.

With that she came to me, like a wraith but real, across the light-years of space from our little planet, to where I now floated. And with her came another wraith, a bounding, furry shape that bounced against me and sandpapered my face and hands with its rough tongue and crowded between our legs as we clung together.

“Sunday!” I said.

Of course, Ellen told me, he was always there if only you’d reached for him.

With them both there, with the three of us—we three ghosts-together once more, my heart broke apart with happiness and out of the broken pieces rose a strength that spread and towered in me like a genie let loose from a bottle when the Solomon’s seal is snapped. There was no universe or combination of universes that I was not now ready to attack, to save what I now held; and I reached to the ends of all time and all spaces. So-at last—by the one route I had never dreamed existed, understanding dawned on me.

“I should have realized it,” I said to Ellen. “It’s one and the same thing, the time storm and what’s always been inside me, what’s always been inside all of us.”