Gordon R. Dickson (17 page)

At any rate, I broke away from Marie
and her at last and walked into the dust and the mist, as tense as one of the
dogs walking into a strange backyard. The physical and emotional feeling of
upset took me before I had a chance to close my eyes against the dust—but
again, as on that earlier time I had gone through the mistwall to find Marie's
place, the sensations were less than I had felt before. I found myself
wondering if it was possible either to build up an immunity to going through
the walls, or else simply to get used to the reactions they triggered in living
bodies.

I pushed ahead blindly, the ground
becoming a little rough and uneven under my feet, until the lessening of the
dust-sting against the skin of my face told me I must be coming out on the
other side of the time change line. I opened my eyes.

I stood now in rugged territory. If
I was not among mountains, then certainly I was in the midst of some steep
hills. Directly ahead of me was some sort of massive concrete structure, too
large for me to see in its entirety. The part I was able to see was a mass of
ruins, with new grass sprouting at odd points among the tumbled blocks of what
had evidently been walls and ceilings.

What had smashed it up so thoroughly
was hard to imagine. It didn't look so much as if it had been bombed as if it
had been picked up and
twisted,
the way you might twist a wet towel to
wring it dry. About it, the steep slopes, covered with gravel and a few fir and
spruce trees, looked deserted under the cloudless, midday sky. The air
temperature was perceptibly cooler than it had been on the other side of the
mistwall, as if I was now at a noticeably higher altitude—though I had not felt
the elevator-sort of inner ear sensations that would suggest a sudden change to
a lower air pressure. There were no birds visible and no sounds of insects. Of
course, if this new land was high enough it could be above the flight zone of
most insects.

However, whatever the structure
before me had been at one time, now it was a ruin only. There was no sign of
life anywhere. It was far-fetched to think that there could be anyone in that
pile of rubble who might have a greater understanding of the time storm than I
did, let alone ideas on how to live with it or deal with it. I might as well go
back through the mistwall to Marie, Wendy and the dogs.

But I hesitated. There was a
reluctance in me to cut short this business of being off on my own—almost as
much reluctance as there was in me to face Marie and admit the whole experiment
of going through the mistwall had been profitless. I compromised with myself
finally; it would do no harm to go around the ruin and a little farther into
this new territory, until I could see the whole extent of it and perhaps make
some guess as to what it had once been. The concrete of what was left of it
appeared as modern, or more so, than anything in my native time—it might even
have come from a few years beyond my original present.

It was an odd feeling that was
pushing me to explore farther—a small feeling, but a powerful one. There was
something about that jumble of concrete that plucked at my problem-solving
mental machinery and beckoned it.

I swung to the right, approaching
the ruin and circling it at the same time. As I got closer, the building turned
out to be larger even than it had looked at first, and it was not possible to
see it all at once. After a while, however, I got to where I could get a sight
down one long side line of it. I still could not really see it as a whole,
because it curved away from me, following the contours of the hill on which it
was built; but it seemed to become progressively less of a ruin as its
structure receded from me, and its interest to me grew. It reminded me a little
of my own life, beginning as a wreck and developing into something with a
shape, purposeful, but too big to see and know as a whole. I felt almost as if
the building was something familiar, like an old friend built out of concrete;
and I prowled further on alongside it.

It continued to sprawl out and curve
away from me as I went; and after I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile, I
realized that I never would be able to see the thing as a whole. It was simply
too big, and it spread out in too many directions.

I might have turned back then; but I
noticed that the building was relatively undamaged in the further area of it I
had now reached. Facing me were some windows that were whole, in sections of
grey concrete wall that looked untouched. Farther on, there was even a door
that looked slightly ajar—as if it needed only to be pushed to open to let
anyone into the interior.

I went toward the door. It was a
heavy, fire-door type; and when I put my weight into it and pulled, it swung
outward slowly. Inside was a flight of bare concrete stairs with black iron
pipe railing, leading upward. I mounted the stairs slowly and quietly, the
rifle balanced in my hands, ready to use, even while the sensible front of my
mind told me that this was ridiculous. I was wasting my time on a deserted and
destroyed artifact; and it was high time I was heading back to Marie and Wendy,
who would be worrying about me by now.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I
let myself through another door into a long corridor, with only a bare white
wall and window to my left, windows through which the sun was now striking
brilliantly, but aglitter with glass doors and interior windows to my right,
through which I could see what seemed to be row on row of offices and
laboratories.

I took a step down the corridor, and
something plucked lightly at the cuff of my left pantleg. I looked down. What
appeared to be a small black thread had been fastened to the wall of each side
of the corridor and now lay broken on the floor where my leg had snapped it.

"Who's there?" asked a
voice over my head.

I looked up and saw the grille of a
speaker—obviously of some public address system that had been built into this
corridor when the whole structure had been put up.

"Hello?" said the voice.
It was tenor-weight, a young man's voice. "Who is it? Just speak up. I can
hear you."

Cautiously, I took a step backward.
I was as careful as I could be in picking up my foot and putting it down again.
But still, when the sole of my boot touched the corridor surface, there was a
faint, gritting noise.

"If you're thinking of going
back out the way you came in," said the voice, "don't bother. The
doors are locked now. It's part of the original security system of this
installation; and I've still got power to run it."

I took two more quick, quiet steps
back and tried the door to the stairway. The door handle was immovable and the
door itself stood motionless against my strongest push.

"You see?" said the voice.
"Now, I don't mean to keep you prisoner against your will. If you want to
leave, I can let you out. I just thought we might talk."

"Can you see me?" I asked.

"No," he answered.
"But I've got instruments. Let's see... you're about two hundred and
ninety centimeters tall and weigh eighty-two point five three plus kilos. On
the basis of voice tone and body odors, you're male, blood temperature
approximately half a degree above normal, heartbeat fifty-eight—cool-headed customer,
plainly—blood pressure a hundred and eight over eighty-seven. You're wearing
some synthetics, but mostly wool and leather by weight—outdoor clothes. My
mechanical nose also reports you as carrying a combination of metal, wood, oil
and other odors that imply a rifle of some kind, plus some other metal that may
be a knife; and according to the other scents you carry, you've been outside
this building only a little while after coming from some place with a lot of
grass, few trees and a warmer, moister climate."

He stopped talking.

"I'm impressed," I said,
to start him up again. I did not trust his promise to let me go just for the
asking; and I was looking around for some way out besides the locked door.
There were the windows—how many stairs had I climbed on the way up? If I could
break through a window, and the drop was not far to the ground....

"Thank you," said the
voice. "But it's no credit to me. It's the equipment. At any rate, reading
from what I have here, you're out exploring rather than looking for trouble.
You aren't carrying equipment or supplies for living outdoors, even though the
odors on you say that's how you've been living. That means such equipment and
supplies you have must be elsewhere. You wouldn't be likely to leave them
unattended—some animal might chew them up to get at whatever food you were
carrying, so you probably have others with you. They aren't in view anywhere
around the area outside the building, or I'd know about them, and you're the
only one inside, besides me; so that means you just about had to come through
that stationary line of temporal discontinuity, out there."

I stopped looking for windows. Now I
actually was impressed. The equipment had been remarkable enough in what it
could tell him about me; but any idiot could sit and read results from gauges
and dials, if he had been trained well enough. This kind of hard, conscious
reasoning from evidence, on the other hand, was something else again.

"What did you call it—a
temporal discontinuity?" I asked.

"That's right. Have you got
another name for it?" said the voice. "It really doesn't matter what
it's called. We both know what we're talking about."

"What do you call it when it
moves?" I asked.

There was a long second of silence.

"Moves?" said the voice.

I damn near grinned.

"All right," I said,
"now I'll do a little deducing. I'll deduce you haven't left this building
since the time storm struck."

"Time storm?"

"The overall pattern of your
temporal discontinuities," I said. "I call that a time storm. I call
individual discontinuities like the one out there, time lines. I call the haze
in the air where one is, a mistwall."

There was a pause.

"I see," he said.

"And you haven't left this
building since that mistwall appeared out there, or since whatever it was,
first happened to this building?"

"That's not quite the way it's
been," he answered. "I've gone outside a few times. But you're right,
essentially. I've been here since the first wave of disruption hit, studying
that discontinuity you came through. But you—you've been moving around. And you
say there're discontinuities that move?"

"Some of them travel across
country," I said. "Where they've gone by, the land's changed. It's
either changed into what it's going to be sometime in the future, or into what
it was, once, in the past."

"Very interesting..." the
voice was thoughtful. "Tell me, are there many people out there, where the
moving dis—time lines are?"

"No," I said. "It's
been some weeks and I've covered a lot of ground. But I've only found a
handful. The Hawaiian Islands seem to have come through pretty well. You can
hear broadcasting regularly from there on short wave and other stations on the
radio, now and then—"

"Yes, I know," the voice
was still thoughtful. "I thought it was the discontinuities cutting off
most of the reception."

"I doubt it," I said.
"I think there just aren't many people still left in the world. What was
this place?"

"A federal installation.
Research and testing," said the voice, absently. "What's it like out
there?"

"It's like a world-sized crazy
quilt, cut up into all sorts of different time areas, marked off one from each
other by the mistwalls—by the time lines or discontinuities. The big problem is
the situation's still changing. Every moving time line changes everything where
it passes."

I stopped talking. His voice did not
pick up the conversation. I was busy thinking about the words "research
and testing."

"You said you'd been studying
the time line, there," I said. "What have you learned so far?"

"Not much," his voice was
more distant now, as if he had moved away from the microphone over which he had
been speaking, or was caught up in some other activity, so that he was giving
me only a part of his attention. "What you call the mistwall appearance
seems to be a matter of conflicting air currents and temperature differentials
between the two zones. But there doesn't seem to be any material barrier... you
say they sometimes move?"

"That 's right," I said.
"Any reason why they shouldn't?"

"No, I suppose... yes," he
said. "There's a reason. As far as I've been able to measure, these lines
of discontinuity stretch out beyond the reach of any instruments I have. In
other words, they go right off into space. You'd assume any network of forces
that massive would have to be in balance. But if certain of the lines are
moving, then it has to be a dynamic, not a static, balance; and that means...."

"What?"

"I don't know," he said.
"Maybe I'm just letting my human ideas of size and distance influence me.
But I've got trouble imagining something that big, shifting around
internally."

He stopped talking. I waited for him
to start up again. But he did not.

"Look," I said. "I
just sort of ran from this overall situation, the way you'd run for shelter
from a thunderstorm, for the first few weeks. But now I'm trying to find out if
there isn't some way to get on top of the situation—to control it—"