Gordon R. Dickson (50 page)

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

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

Ellen was there and I hung on to
her.

"Where's Marie?" I asked
after a while.

"She's still outside,"
Ellen said. "Sleep, now."

I slept.

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

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

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

"Why, hell!" I said.
"It's wrong!"

"Wrong?" Porniarsk said.
"In what way?"

I turned to the avatar.

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

"I don't understand," said
Porniarsk.

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

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

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

"I do not," said
Porniarsk.

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

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

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

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

"Is it possible?"

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

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

I ran down.

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

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

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

"How did they get so
close?" Porniarsk asked.

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

I looked at Porniarsk.

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

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.