Gordon R. Dickson (56 page)

I reached her, felt her there,
lightly, and started to enfold her—and something far out in myself jerked back,
so that the wave of my feeling was sucked away again, abruptly, and my touch
against her was lost. All at once, the golden light was gone and the unity was
destroyed. I was alone and isolated, in my armchair in the room, looking out
through the glass window panes at a world I could no longer feel.

I sat there, dulled and numbed by my
failure. But after a few moments, a miracle happened; because the door opened,
Ellen walked in, bent over the chair and kissed me. Then, without a word, she
turned and went back toward the door.

"Why?" I managed to croak
as she opened it.

She looked back and smiled.

"I just felt like it," she
said.

She went out, closing the door
behind her; and I sat there with my heart rising like a rocket. Because now I
knew. I had not succeeded in fully touching her; but I knew that I was going in
the right direction now; because she had felt me trying. If I lived, I would
reach her eventually.

Our half-day holiday ended with
noon. I put on work clothes and left the summer palace to go down and help the
people who were insulating and expanding our largest Quonset, so that it could
become a combination dining hall, hospital, and living quarters for those of us
who might turn out to be too young, too old, or too feeble to live out the
winter cold in the other, flimsier, buildings of the town. I had just shut the
door of the summer palace behind me when Obsidian appeared in front of me.

"Can we talk?" he said.

"Of course," I said. He
came first before any rough carpentry of which I was capable.

"We've come to an important
decision, my colleagues and I," he said. "You remember I told you our
original plan was to gather enough information on you so that we'd know how to
educate you into adjustment with civilization? At least, educate you enough so
that you could stay with us, here?"

"I remember," I said.

"I'm afraid I didn't tell you
everything," he said. "There was an alternative I didn't mention. If
it turned out you people couldn't be adjusted to a civilized pattern, we were
intending to send you back to your own time, the time you left to come
here."

"No, you didn't tell me
that," I said. "But you didn't have to. We primitives can think of
those sort of alternatives without being prompted, you know."

"Yes. Well," Obsidian
looked uncomfortable, "as it happens, you've turned out to be in some ways
more than we guessed; in fact, more than we bargained for. In particular,
you're different, yourself, from anything we imagined. So, now we've come up
with a third alternative. But for this we're going to need your
agreement."

"Oh?" I said. He did not
answer immediately, so I prompted him. "Agreement to what?"

"To an alternative that ties in
to this desire of yours to get into the work of controlling what you call the
time storm. Logically, it's unthinkable to expect someone from as far back in
the past as you are to be capable of learning to do a kind of work that's done
only by unusual, highly qualified individuals in our time. But because of
certain anomalies about you, we'd like to test your aptitude for such
work."

"Fine," I said. And for
the second time that day my heart went up like a rocket.

"You understand," Obsidian
said, "this testing in no way changes the fact that by no stretch of the
imagination could we expect you to actually be able to work in the temporal
area. It's simply a means of supplying us with data by which we can decide best
what to do with all your group, here."

"All right," I said.

"Are you sure you understand?
Our interest in whether you have any ability for temporal work is only
academic."

"I hear you," I said. But
my heart was still high inside me. Explain it any way he might, Obsidian could
not hide from me the fact that, in offering me such tests, they were letting me
come one step closer to the goal I had been working toward.

"Well, then," said
Obsidian, "even if you're willing, there's a further question. Ordinarily,
there'd be no need for you to leave your area, here. But in this particular
case some special conditions are involved; so that to be tested you have to be
willing to go some distance across the galaxy. Now, if you want time to
consider this—"

"Thanks. It's not necessary.
I'll be happy to go wherever being tested requires."

He gazed across the jeep at me for a
full second.

"Are you sure you
understand?"

"I think so," I said.
"You want to know if I'm willing to be tested for abilities in time storm
fighting. I am. You also want to know if I'm agreeable to going a large chunk
of light years to wherever I have to go to be tested. I am."

"You understand this means
travel between the stars, through space?"

"Well, I'd gathered that,"
I said. But he did not echo my grin.

"I'm a little surprised,"
he said. "I understood from what you told me that you'd never been off
this one world in your life."

"That's right."

"But you're willing to go,
without thinking it over? Without talking it over with the rest of your
people?"

"I'll check with them, of
course," I said. "But they've been getting along without my immediate
help while I've been talking to you. They ought to be able to get along without
me for a bit longer. How long would I be gone?"

"In terms of time here, not
more than a couple of your weeks. Probably considerably less. It may be a
single simple test will give us an answer, once you've reached your
destination. It's possible we might have to test further, but probably not more
than a day or two."

"I see," I said. "The
more ability I show, the more you'll go on testing?"

"Essentially. But Marc,"
said Obsidian, "if you've got hopes of our tests finding you to have very
great ability in that area, I wish you'd temper those hopes. Believe me—"

"I believe," I said.
"I'm also willing to go. We're agreed?"

"Yes," he said, slowly.

"Good. The thing you have to
understand about me, friend Obsidian," I said, "is that I'll do
whatever I decide is best. I'm not going to leave the other people here in a
bind because I didn't bother to check. I'll check first. But I said I want to
go, and I'm going."

"Forgive me," he said.

"There's nothing to
forgive," I said. "It's just that this isn't a matter of group
discussion. This is me, saying what I choose to do."

"All right," he said.
"But it's not quite what I'm used to. You understand that? We have—"

"I know," I said.
"You people've got a pattern of responsibility. So've I. And I won't
violate my pattern any more than you'd violate yours. But I tell you, Obsidian,
I want to go where your people will test me. The fact it's across space doesn't
matter; because I'd go cross-universe as quickly as I'd go around this jeep to
get that done."

I had gotten a little warm on the
subject; and I was braced to have him react with equal emotion. Instead he only
looked at me, a long, questioning look. Then he nodded.

"This means more to you than
we'd thought," he said.

I stared back at him. Something
other than the golden light was moving me now; a surge of feeling that was more
like a tide, a running tide carrying me irresistibly forward.

"You don't understand me at
all," I said, "do you?"

"No." He shook his head.

"All right," I told him.
"See if it has meaning for you this way. I don't know who my remote
ancestors were; but what moves me as far as the time storm goes, must go as far
back as they do. There's something in me that's certain about one thing; that
anything can kill me, but until I'm killed I'm what lives. And as long as I
live, I'll fight. Come and get me out to face my special enemy, whoever that
is; and while I can still move, I'll stay after it. When I'm finally done for,
I'll still be happy; because I wasn't deprived of my chance to do something.
All I want is that chance—nothing else matters; and here you come asking me if
the fact I have to cross some space to be tested might make me decide against
going!"

I had really moved off the high end
of the emotional scale this time, but I saw now that at last I had gotten
through to him. I do not think even then that he understood what I was talking
about, but he had registered the charge of the emotion that had ridden on top
of my words.

"How much time do you need
before you'll be ready to go?" he said.

"Two—three hours, say."

"Good. One more thing. We'd
like, since we're moving you this distance, to take advantage of the
opportunity to do some testing of the avatar, as well. Do you think he'd be
willing to come? He's had experience in cross-space travel, I understand."

"He has," I said.
"I'll ask him. I think he'll want to come."

"Then I'll be back in three of
your hours."

He vanished.

I turned back into the summer palace
and went to find Porniarsk. It had not occurred to me until now to wonder what
had been occupying him since we had arrived at our destination here in the
future; and it struck me suddenly, now, that he had been busy in the lab all
that time. But at what, I wondered? When I arrived, I found him working with
the vision tank; and I asked him that question.

"I've been doing some
charting," he said, waving a stubby tentacle at the tank. "I thought
perhaps if I could establish specifically what the inconsistencies were that we
noted, I might be able to evolve a picture of what's happening with the time
storm at this future moment."

"What did you find out?"

"I discovered that, except for
certain areas where the force lines of the storm still seem to be breeding, the
universe in general has been brought pretty much into the same sort of
temporary, dynamic balance that we achieved around this planet back in our
earlier time."

"What about the breeding
areas?" I asked.

"That's interesting. Very
interesting," he said. "The force lines seem to be both breeding and
healing—both increasing and decreasing in these areas. By the way, the areas
I'm talking about are all out in the midsections of the galaxies. There's none
of them down in the very center of a galaxy—in what might be called the dead
core area."

"Dead core?"

"I thought you knew?" He
glanced at me. "The center of most galaxies, like this one, is an area of
very old stars, immersed in a dust cloud."

"Where's the closest activity
to this solar system?"

"The blue-white supergiant
star," said Porniarsk, "that you call Rigel seems to be one of the
near loci. But the main activity close to us is centered on the star you call S
Doradus in the lesser Magellani Cloud, outside this galaxy, about a hundred and
forty thousand light-years from us here."

"S Doradus is a big, hot star,
too, isn't it?" I said.

"Like Rigel, one of the
brightest."

"Sounds like a large, bright
star is necessary. Can you tell why?"

"No," said Porniarsk.
"All I know is that the lines of time storm activity in the area in
question seem to center on S Doradus. And, then, there's the matter that S
Doradus has stopped radiating."

"Stopped what?"

"It's no longer radiating. It's
gone dark," Porniarsk said. "I mean by that, that if you were in the
immediate neighborhood of that star, it would no longer appear to be radiating.
From our distance here, of course, it still seems to be shining; since we're
getting light that left it thousands of years ago."

My head began to spin. The
distances, the star sizes, and the rest of the information involved was on such
a scale that my imagination struggled to get a grip on it.

"I've got a message for
you," I said, to shift the topic of conversation.

I told him about Obsidian taking me
to be tested, and his question as to whether Porniarsk would be willing to go
also.

"Of course," said
Porniarsk. "I'd be very interested to see how they do such testing."

34

Three hours turned out to be less
time than I thought in which to get hold of Ellen and the other leaders,
explain what Porniarsk and I were going to be doing, and pack a suitcase. When
Obsidian reappeared outside the summer palace at the landing area, he found
about forty people—all who could possibly get up there to see Porniarsk and
myself off. But it was not at the others he stared, or even at Porniarsk and
me, but at the suitcase at my feet.

"Can I ask... he began.

"My bag," I said. I
guessed what was puzzling him. "Personal necessaries. Remember, I wear
clothes, shave every morning, and things like that."

"Oh," he said. I had
discovered by the end of our first day of acquaintance that the humans of his
time had no body hair to speak of. "Of course."