Gordon R. Dickson (21 page)

"There's no one here,"
Bill said.

I shook my head.

"Let's get inside," I
said. "Any one of these buildings will do."

"Get inside? How?" He
looked around us at the marble-white, unbroken walls.

"Smash our way in
somehow," I said. I was looking around myself for something to use as a
tool. "If nothing else, the machine pistol ought to make a hole we can
enlarge—"

"Never mind," he said, in
a sort of sigh. I turned back to look at him and saw him already rummaging in
his pack. He came out with what looked like a grey cardboard package, about ten
inches long and two wide, two deep. He opened one end and pulled out part of a
whitish cylinder wrapped in what looked like wax paper.

The cylinder of stuff was,
evidently, about the same consistency as modeling clay. With its wax paper
covering off, it turned out to be marked in sections, each about two inches
long. Bill pulled off a couple of sections, rewrapped the rest and put it away,
back in his pack. The two sections he had pulled out squeezed between his hands
into a sort of thin pancake, which he stepped over and pressed against one of
the white walls. It clung there, about three feet above the ground.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Explosive," he said.
"A form of plastic—" He pronounced it plas
-teek,
with the
emphasis on the second syllable—"but improved. It doesn't need any fuse.
You can do anything with it safely, even shoot a bullet into it. Nothing
happens until it's spread out like that, thin enough so that sufficient area
can react to the oxygen in the air."

He moved back from the wall where he
had spread out the pancake, beckoning me along with him. I came, without
hesitating.

We stood about thirty feet off,
waiting. For several minutes nothing happened. Then there was an insignificant
little
poof
that would hardly have done credit to a one inch
firecracker; but an area of the white wall at least six feet in diameter seemed
to suck itself inward and disappear. Beyond, there was a momentary patch of
blackness; and then we were looking into a brightly lit chamber or room of some
sort, with several large solid-looking shapes sitting on its floor area, shapes
too awkwardly formed to be furniture and too purposelessly angular to seem as
if they were machinery.

Like the room, like the walls, they
were milky white in color. But that appearance did not last long.

Without warning, the damaged wall
blushed. I don't know how else to describe it. From white it turned blood-red,
the reddishness most intense around the edges of the hole blown in the wall and
toning down from there as it spread outward. And it spread with unbelievable
speed. In a moment, the color change had swept over all the walls and pavement
around us and raced on to turn the city, the whole city, to red.

Far off among the buildings, a
faint, siren sound began. It was uncomfortably as if the city was a living
thing we had wounded, and now it was not only bleeding internally but crying.

But this was just the beginning of
the change.

"Look!" said Bill.

I turned back from gaping at the
city to see Bill pointing once more at the hole in the wall. The red around the
ragged rim of broken material had darkened and deepened until it was almost
black—a thick and angry color of red. But now, as I watched, that dark-red edge
began to develop a hairline of white—glowing white-hot-looking brightness
beyond the edge of darkest red. And this tiny edge of white thickened and
widened, tinged with pink where it came up against the dark red, but continuing
to thicken in whiteness on its other, broken edge that touched only air.

"It's healing itself,"
said Bill.

I had not realized it until he put
it into words, but that was exactly what was happening. The white that was
appearing was new wall surface, growing down and inward, beginning to fill the
hole that we had blown in the wall.

I took a step -forward as soon as I
realized this, then stopped. The hole was already too small for me to go
through, easily; and those white-glowing edges did not look like anything I
would want to brush up against on my way past.

"All right," I said to
Bill, "let's try it someplace else, and next time be a little quicker
about going through, once we've opened it up."

"No. Wait," he said,
catching hold of my arm as I started off to a further section of the wall.
"Listen!"

I stopped and listened. The distant,
wailing, siren-sound had been continuing steadily, but without any indication
of coming any closer to us and the scene of the action. But now that Bill had
my attention, I heard another sound superimposed on the first. It was the noise
of a faint, dull-toned but regular clanking. The sort of thing you might hear
from a large toy tractor, if it had been constructed, with its movable parts,
out of plastic rather than metal. And this sound was coming toward us.

I had the machine pistol up and
aimed without thinking; and Bill had his gun also pointed, when the source of
the noise came around the corner of the same building where we had blown the
opening in the wall. It came toward us, apparently either not understanding, or
understanding but ignoring, the menace of our guns. I stared at it,
unbelievingly, because I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was
creature or machine.

By the time I had reluctantly
concluded it was a creature, it was less than a dozen feet from us and it
stopped. A machine I might have risked pumping a few slugs into. A creature was
another matter entirely. Aside from the fact that killing another living thing
has some emotional overtones to it, there were a great many more dangerous
possibilities involved for us if it was alive, and our hostile response was not
successful. So we simply stood and looked it over, and it looked us over.

It looked—it's hard to say how it
looked in that first minute. Something like a Saint Bernard-sized, very
short-limbed, very heavy-headed, bulldog shape, with a clump of three tails or
tentacles, about two feet in length, sprouting from each shoulder. The whole
body was covered with rectangular bony plates about a couple of inches at their
widest, which flexed at their jointures with the plates surrounding them to
allow the body beneath them to move. Smaller plates even covered most of the
massive head. The two eyes were brown and large.

"Don't shoot!" I said to
Bill, without taking my eyes off the creature.

I don't know what movement of his, if
any, triggered off that reaction in me. At the moment, I only knew two things.
I had been searching from the very beginning, for an x-factor, a Game Warden, a
missing piece to the puzzle of the time storm; and the old reliable
search-reflex in the back of my mind now was practically shouting at me that
this might be it. And—second, but no less important—the whole improbable being
radiated an impression of non-enmity. That impressive armor, that ferocious
head, somehow added up, not so much to something threatening, as to something
rather clumsy and comic—even lovable, like the bulldog it faintly resembled.

Still, I would have had trouble
convincing Bill of any of that alone—but luckily, just at that moment, I got
corroborative testimony from a completely unexpected source—Sunday. Up until
now the leopard had not moved; but now, suddenly, he strolled past me, right up
to the creature, and proceeded to strop himself in a friendly manner up one
side of it and down the other. He then sniffed it over a few times and gravely
returned to me. That did it. Bill lowered his gun.

"Hello," I said to the
creature. The word sounded almost ridiculous in the context of our
confrontation, here in this silent, strange place. The creature said nothing.

"I'm Marc Despard," I said.
"This is Bill Gault."

Still no answer.

"Marc," said Bill, in a
strained, thin voice. "Let's start backing up, slowly. If it lets us go,
we can back right into the mistwall, and maybe it won't follow us—"

He broke off because some sounds
were finally beginning to come from the creature. Sounds that were something
like a cross between the internal rumblings of indigestion and the creaking of
machinery that had not been used in a long time.

"Due...." said the
creature, in a deep-tone, grating voice. "Yanglish."

It fell silent. We waited for more
sounds, but none came.

"Start backing if you
want," I answered Bill, still keeping my gaze, however, on the creature.
"I'm going to stay and see if I can't find out something about this."

"I...." said the creature,
loudly, before Bill could answer me. There was a pause while we waited for
more.

"I am...." it said, after
a second. Another pause. Then it continued, in jerks, almost as if it were
holding a conversation with itself, except that the pauses between bits of
conversation became shorter and shorter until they approached ordinary
sentence-length human speech.

"I am...." said the
creature again.

"... Porniarsk.

"Porniarsk. I am... an of....

"I am Porniarsk Prime Three...
of... an....

"I am Porniarsk Prime Three, an...
avatar... of Porniarsk....

"... Expert in Temporals
General. I am the... third... avatar of Porniarsk... who is an... expert on the
Temporal Question."

"It's a robot of some
sort," said Bill, staring at Porniarsk's avatar.

"No," it said. "I
am
Porniarsk. Avatar, secondarily only. I am living—... alive. As you
are."

"Do we call you
Porniarsk?" I asked.

There was a pause, then a new sort
of creaking, unused machinery noise; and the heavy head was nodding up and
down, so slowly, awkwardly and deliberately that the creature called Porniarsk
looked even more comic than before. It broke off its head-movements abruptly at
the top of a nod.

"Yes," it said.
"Porniarsk Prime Three is... a full name. Call me Porniarsk. Also,
he.
I am... male."

"We'll do that," I said.
"Porniarsk, I'm sorry about damaging your city here. We didn't think there
was anyone still around."

"It is not... it isn't my
city," said Porniarsk. "I mean it's neither mine as avatar, nor is it
something that belongs to me as Porniarsk. I come from...

He had been going great guns, but
all at once he was blocked again. We waited, while he struggled with his verbal
problem.

"I come from many... stellar
distances away," he said, finally. "Also from a large temporal...
time... distance. But I should say also that, in another measure, I am... from
close to here."

"Close to this world?"
Bill asked.

"Not..." Porniarsk broke
off in order to work at the process of shaking his head this time, "to
this world, generally. Just to... here, this place, and a few other places on
your Earth."

"Is this place—this city or
whatever it is..." asked Bill, "from the same time as the time you
come from?"

"No," said Porniarsk.
"No two times can be alike—no more than two grains of sand be
identical."

"We aren't stupid, you
know," said Bill. For the first time I'd known him, there was an edge in
his voice. "If you can tell us that much, you can do a better job of
explaining things than you're doing."

"Not stupid... ignorant,"
said Porniarsk. "Later, perhaps? I am from far off, spatially; from far
off, temporally; but from close, distance-wise. When you broke the wall here,
this city signalled; I had been for a long period of my own time on the watch
for some such happening at any one of the many spots I could monitor; and when
the city signalled, I came."

"Why is the city so
important?" I asked.

"It isn't," said
Porniarsk, swinging his heavy head to look at me. "You are important. I
believe. I'll go with you now unless you reject me; and at last, perhaps we can
be of use to ourselves and to the universe."

I looked at Bill. Bill looked at me.

"Just a minute," I said.
"I want to look this place over. It's from out of our future, if my guess
is right. There may be a lot of things here we can use."

"Nothing," said Porniarsk.
"It is only a museum—with all its exhibits taken away long since."

He made no visible move that my eyes
could catch, but suddenly, all the walls about us seemed to suck themselves in
and produce circular doorways.

"If you would like to look, do
so," Porniarsk said. He folded his short legs inward under him and went
down like a large coffee table with its four supports chopped away by four
axemen at once. "I will wait. Use-time is subjective."

I was half-ready to take him at his
words that the "city" was no use to us; but Bill was beckoning me
away. I followed him away and around a corner, with Sunday trailing along after
me, out of sight of Porniarsk. Bill stopped, then, and I stopped. Sunday went
on to sniff at an open doorway.

"Listen," whispered Bill,
"I don't trust it."

"Him," I said, absently.
"Porniarsk—he said he was male."