Gordon R. Dickson (20 page)

By the end of the first week we
added a fifth gunner—Tek. The man had worked hard to do anything that was asked
of him; until he had begun finally to make a believer even out of me. The
conclusion I came to at last was that whatever it was he wanted, for the
moment, at least, it included cooperation with the rest of us. I walked him off
a short distance from our night camp on the end of our seventh day together and
asked him a lot of questions about himself.

The answers were unhesitating and
interesting. His full name was Techner, pronounced "Tek-ner," Wilson
Ambervoy—he had been named for a couple of grandparents. He had been good
enough as a high school football player to get a scholarship to the University
of Indiana—and Indiana had fielded a Big Ten team which did not play mediocre
football. However, he had not taken the study end of college seriously and had
flunked out midway through his sophomore year. Luckily—he was usually lucky,
Tek told me frankly—he got a job immediately with an uncle who owned a paint
store. The uncle was in poor health and inside of half a year, Tek was managing
the store. About that time, he got into real estate. With the cosignature of
his paint store uncle, Tek swung a mortgage and bought a twelve-unit apartment
building. To run it, he brought in a friend named Ricky, a drinking buddy the
same age as himself, who had a knack for card games and was in the habit of
having a poker session in his former bachelor apartment every night after the
bars closed.

He and Tek remodeled two of the
apartment units of their building into one large one to make, as Tek put it,
"a pretty impressive-looking cave"; and the after-hours card games
expanded. Meanwhile, they made it a point to rent the rest of the units to girl
friends of Tek's; and a number of these would also drop in on the card game
after hours to make sandwiches, pour drinks and watch the game. If the supply
of these girls ran short, Tek went out prospecting and found some more.

The result was that there were
always a number of good-looking girls around the card game, and young male
strangers began dropping in for a hand or two, just to meet them. Tek's buddy
did well with his cards. He paid Tek a percentage of his winnings as rent for
the apartment; and the other units became very much in demand among Tek's girl
friends, so that he was able to raise the rent several times and still keep
every unit filled.

"You understand," Tek said
to me. "Nobody cheated in the card games. There was nothing professional
about the girls. Just everybody had a good time, and Ricky and me had it for
free —well, maybe we came out a little bit ahead, but when we did, we just
spent it on more good stuff...."

And then the time storm had come
along; Tek had been taking a nap. When he woke, he was alone in the apartment
building. Alone in an empty town. He ended up going out adventuring, and one by
one, he ran into the other men of his gang, whom he recruited out of a sort of
pack-instinct for leadership.

"But that wasn't really what I
was after," Tek said to me as we walked together, with the camp and the
fire we always built for it distant in the twilight before the small town on
the outskirts of which we had stopped for the night. "You know, even
before this time storm, or whatever you call it, came along, I was beginning to
get a little filled up on the apartment, the fun and games, and all the rest of
it. I was beginning to want to do something—I don't know what. I still don't
know. But just roaming around, living off the country, isn't it either."

Tek stopped and looked at me in the
growing dimness.

"They're not bright, you know,"
he said, "those five back there I picked up. Garney was the brightest of
them all; and he was nothing you could build on. Now, little old Bill Gault
there, he's bright; and you are, too. Someday maybe you'll tell me what you did
before this happened and where you came from; and I'll bet it'll be
interesting. And this business of yours with the mistwalls—it might lead to
something. That's what I want. Something."

He stopped talking.

"All right," I said.
"Let's head back."

Halfway back to the camp, I came to
a conclusion.

"You can start carrying a rifle
tomorrow," I told him. "But don't forget you're still under orders.
Mine."

"Right," he said.
"But I'd be on your side anyway."

"For now, you would," I
said dryly.

He laughed.

"Come on, man," he said.
"Anything can happen if you look far enough into the future. If anything
comes along to change the situation that much, you'll know about it as soon as
I will."

So we moved on with five gunners
instead of four, and things went almost suspiciously well. The plan Bill and I
had evolved was based on our theory that our best chance to get on top of the
time storm was to keep looking for the most advanced future segment we could
find. Hopefully the more advanced an area we could hit, the more likely we were
to find the equipment or the people to help us deal with the time storm. If we
were going to be able to do something about it, that was where we were most
likely to find the means. If we were going to be forced to live with it—perhaps
we could find the techniques and patterns we needed in something beyond our
present time slot.

As I had discovered earlier,
however, the time changes seemed to be weighed toward the past, rather than
toward the future. We found three futuristic-looking segments behind mistwalls;
but they were either apparently stripped of anything or anyone useful, or else
their very futureness was in doubt. It was two weeks and two days before we
found a segment that was undeniably part of a city belonging to a time yet to
come—a far future time, we thought at first. Though of course, there was no way
we might tell how much time would have been necessary to make changes.

This particular segment was behind
the second mistwall we had encountered that day. The first had showed us
nothing but unrelieved forest, stretched out over descending hills to a horizon
that was lost in haze, but which must have been many miles off. Such a
landscape might be part of a future segment, but it was not passable by our
wheeled vehicles, and it promised nothing. We pulled back through the
mistwall—it was then about ten in the morning—paused for an early lunch and
went on.

About 2:30 P.M., we saw a second,
stationary mistwall and moved up to it. We were travelling along a gravel road
at the time, through what seemed like an area of small farms. The mistwall
sliced across a cornfield and obliterated the corner of what had once been a
tall, white and severely narrow farmhouse—an American Gothic among farmhouses.

We left our motorcade in the road,
and Bill and I walked up the farm road into the farmyard, carrying most of the
instruments. The rest straggled along behind us but stayed back, as I had
repeatedly warned them to, a good twenty yards from where we were working.

I said the rest stayed back—I should
have said all the rest but Sunday. The leopard had put up with seeing me go
through mist-walls for about two days after he and the girl had rejoined us and
had contented himself with overwhelming me with pleased greetings when I
returned. Like all our humans, he obviously had a powerfully remembered fear of
the time lines, in spite of having crossed one at Marie's place. But after Bill
and I had penetrated through the third wall we had encountered, I had heard
something odd behind me and looked to see Sunday coming through the mistwall
behind us, tossing his head, his eyes closed and mewling like a lost kitten. He
broke out and came to me—still with his eyes closed and evidently depending on
nose alone—and it had taken me fifteen minutes to soothe him back to quietness.
However, going back through the mistwall later, he had been much less upset;
and two days later he was accompanying us with the indifference of a veteran.
Of course, as soon as he started coming through the mist-walls after us, the
girl did too. But it was possible to order her not to; Sunday could not be kept
back.

So, in this case, as had become his
habit, Sunday followed Bill and me up to the mistwall and waited while we made
our measurements and tests. These showed it to be little different from the
many other walls we had tested. But when we finally went through this time, we
found a difference.

We came out in a—what? A courtyard,
a square, a plaza... take your pick. It was an oval of pure white surface and
behind, all about it, rose a city of equal whiteness. Not the whiteness of new
concrete, but the whiteness of veinless, milk-colored marble. And there was no
sound about it. Not even the cries of birds or insects. No sound at all.

14

"…We were the first,"
wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
his
Rime of the Ancient Mariner—

"Whoever burst,

Into that silent sea..."

If you know that bit of poetry, if
you love poetry the way I do, you will be able to feel something like the
feeling that hit Bill and me when we emerged from the mistwall into that city.
Those lines give it to you. It was with us and that city beyond our time, as it
had been with that sea and Coleridge's Mariner. It was a city of silence,
silence such as neither of us had ever heard, and such as we had never
suspected could exist—until that moment. We were trapped by that silence, held
by it, suddenly motionless and fixed, for fear of intruding one tiny noise into
that vast, encompassing and majestic void of soundlessness, like flower petals
suddenly encased in plastic. It held us both, frozen; and the fear of being the
first to break it was like a sudden hypnotic clutch on our minds, too great for
us to resist.

We were locked in place; and perhaps
we might have stood there until we dropped, if it had been left to our own
wills alone to save us.

But we were rescued. Shatteringly
and suddenly, echoing and reechoing off to infinity among the white towers and
ways before us, came the loud scrape of claws on a hard surface; and a broad,
warm, hard, leopard-head butted me in the ribs, knocking me off my frozen balance
to fall with a deafening clatter to the pavement, as my gun and my equipment
went spilling all around me.

With that, the spell was smashed. It
had only been that first, perfect silence that operated so powerfully on our
emotions, and that, once destroyed, could never be recreated. It was an
awesome, echoing place, that city—like some vast, magnificent tomb. But it was
just a place once its first grip on us had been loosed. I picked myself up.

"Let's have a look
around," I said to Bill.

He nodded. He was not, as I was, a
razor addict; and over the two weeks or more since I had met him, he had been
letting his beard go with only occasional scrapings. Now a faint soft fuzz
darkened his lower face. Back beyond the mistwall, with his young features,
this had looked more ridiculous than anything else; but here against the pure
whiteness all around us and under a cloudless, windless sky, the beard, his
outdoor clothing, his rifle and instruments, all combined to give him a savage
intruder's look. And if he looked so, just from being unshaved, I could only
guess how I might appear, here in this unnaturally perfect place.

We went forward, across the level
floor of the plaza, or whatever, on which we had entered. At its far side were
paths leading on into the city; and as we stepped on one, it began to move,
carrying us along with it. Sunday went straight up in the air, cat-fashion, the
moment he felt it stir under his feet, and hopped back off it. But when he saw
it carrying me away from him, he leaped back on and came forward to press hard
against me as we rode—it was the way he had pressed against me on the raft
during the storm, before he, the girl and I had had to swim for shore.

The walkway carried us in among the
buildings, and we were completely surrounded by milky whiteness. I had thought
at first that the buildings had no windows; but apparently they had—only of a
different sort than anything I had ever imagined. Seeing the windows was
apparently all a matter of angle. One moment it seemed I would be looking at a
blank wall—the next I would have a glimpse of some shadowed or oddly angled
interior. It was exactly the same sort of glimpse that you get of the mercury
line in a fever thermometer when you rotate the thermometer to just the proper
position. But there was no indication of life, anywhere.

Around us, over us, the city was
lifeless. This was more than a fact of visual observation. We could feel the
lack of anything living in all the structures around us like an empty ache in
the mind. It was not a painful or an ugly feeling, but it was an unpleasant
feeling just for the reason that it was not a natural one. That much massive
construction, empty, ready and waiting, was an anomaly that ground against the
human spirit. The animal spirit as well, for that matter; because Sunday
continued to press against me for reassurance as we went. We stepped off the
walkway at last—it stopped at once as we did so—and looked around at a solid
mass of white walls, all without visible windows or doors.

"Nothing here," said Bill
Gault after a while. "Let's go back now."

"No," I said. "Not
yet."

I could not have explained to him
just why I did not want to give up. It was the old reflex at the back of my
head, working and working away at something, and feeling that it was almost on
top of that missing clue for which it searched. There had to be something here
in this empty city that tied in with our search to make reason out of the time
storm, the time lines, and all the business of trying to handle them or live
with them. I could feel it.