Gordon R. Dickson (27 page)

The front wheels of the jeep jolted
and shuddered over some small rocks. We were moving beyond the end of the
village street and up over open ground again. I gave my attention back to my
driving.

The drive up even the easy side of
the peak was rough enough, but the jeep was equal to it. With enough foresight,
it was possible to pick a route among the really heavy boulders that would
otherwise have barred our way. A little more than halfway up, we hit a
relatively level area of hard earth, surrounding the basin of a natural spring
coming out of the cliff; and we stopped to rest and taste the water, which was
cold enough to set our teeth on edge. I had not been conscious of being
thirsty, except for a fleeting moment when I told Richie to bring back a jerry
can of water with the other things. He had; and I had forgotten to get a drink
then. Now I felt a thirst like that of someone lost in the desert for two days.
I drank until my jaws ached, paused, drank, paused, and drank again.

After a bit we went the rest of the
way up to the top of the peak, where the building was. Seen up close, it turned
out to be a structure maybe sixty feet in diameter, with only one entrance and
no windows. Like a blockhouse at a firing range, only larger.

The entrance had a door, which slid
aside as we came within a stride of it. We had a glimpse of darkness beyond,
then lighting awoke within, and we stepped into a brightly illuminated,
circular interior, with a raised platform in the center and open cubicles all
around the exterior wall, each cubicle with a padded chair, its back toward the
center of the room and its cushions facing a sort of console fixed to the wall.

"What is it?" asked Bill,
almost in a whisper. He was standing with Porniarsk and me on the raised
platform but, unlike us, turning continually on his heel as if he wanted to get
a view of all hundred and eighty degrees of the room at once.

"It is," said Porniarsk,
"something you might think of as a computer, in your terms. It's a
multiple facility for the use of observers who'd wish to draw conclusions from
their observations of the inhabitants in the village."

"Computer?" Bill's voice
was louder and sharper. "That's all?"

"It's working principle isn't
that of the computers you're familiar with," said Porniarsk. "This
uses the same principle that's found in constructs from the further future,
those I've referred to as devices-of-assistance. You'll have to trust me to put
this construct into that future mode so it'll be useful in the way we
need."

"How'll we use it?" Bill
asked.

"You won't use it," said
Porniarsk. "Marc will use it."

They both turned their heads toward
me.

"And you'll teach me how?"
I said to Porniarsk.

"No. You'll have to teach
yourself," Porniarsk answered. "If you can't, then there's nothing
anyone can do."

"If he can't, I'll try,"
said Bill tightly.

"I don't think the device will
work for you if it fails for Marc," said Porniarsk to him. "Tell me,
do you feel anything at this moment? Anything unusual at all?"

"Feel?" Bill stared at
him.

"You don't feel anything,
then," said Porniarsk. "I was right. Marc should be much more
attuned. Marc, what do you feel?"

"Feel? Me?" I said,
echoing Bill. But I already knew what he was talking about.

I had thought, at first, I must be
feeling a hangover from the fight with the inhabitants of the village. Then I'd
thought the feeling was my curiosity about what was inside this building, until
I saw what was there. Now, standing on the platform in the center of the
structure, I knew it was something else—something like a massive excitement
from everywhere, that was surrounding me, pressing in on me.

"I feel geared-up," I
said.

"More than just geared-up, I
think," Porniarsk said. "It was a guess I made only on the basis of
Marc's heading for this area; but I was right. Porniarsk hoped only that a
small oasis of stability might be established on the surface of this world, in
this immediate locality. With anyone else, such as you, Bill, that'd be all we
could do. But with Marc, maybe we can try something more. There's a chance he
has an aptitude for using a device-of-assistance."

"Can't you come up with a
better name for it than that?" said Bill. His voice was tight—tight enough
to shake just a little.

"What would you suggest?"
asked Porniarsk.

I turned and walked away from them,
out of the building through the door that opened before me and shut after me. I
walked into the solitude of the thin, clean air and the high sunlight. There
was something working in me; and for the moment, it had driven everything else,
even Ellen, out of my mind. It was like a burning, but beneficent, fever, like
a great hunger about to be satisfied, like the feeling of standing on the
threshold of a cavern filled with treasure beyond counting.

It was all this, and still it was
indescribable. I did not yet have it, but I could almost touch it and taste it;
and I knew that it was only a matter of time now until my grasp closed on it.
Knowing that was everything, I could wait now. I could work. I could do
anything. The keys of my kingdom were at hand.

18

Then began a bittersweet time for
me, the several weeks that Porniarsk worked on the equipment in what we were
now calling the "roundhouse." It was sweet because, day by day, I
felt the device-of-assistance coming to life under the touch of those three
tentacle-fingers Porniarsk had growing out of his shoulders. The avatar had
been right about me. The original Porniarsk had not suspected there would be
anyone on our Earth who could use the device without being physically connected
to it. But evidently I was a freak. I had already had some kind of mental
connection with this place, if only subconsciously, during the days of The
Dream in which I had pushed us all in this direction and to this location. I
said as much to Porniarsk one day.

"No," he shook his head,
"before that, I'd think. You must have felt its existence, here, and been
searching for it from the time you woke to find your world changed."

"I was looking," I said.
"But I didn't have any idea what for."

"Perhaps," said Porniarsk.
"But you might find, after the device is ready and you can look back over
all you've done, that you unconsciously directed each step along the way toward
this place and this moment, from the beginning."

I shook my head. There was no use
trying to explain to him, I thought, how I had never been able to let a problem
alone. But I did not argue the point any further.

I was too intensely wrapped up in
what I could feel growing about me—the assistance of the device. It was only
partly mechanical. Porniarsk would not, or could not, explain its workings to
me, although I could watch him as he worked with the small colored cubes that
made up the inner parts of seven of the consoles. The cubes were about a
quarter the size of children's blocks and seemed to be made of some hard, translucent
material. They clung together naturally in the arrangement in which they
occurred behind the face of the console; and Porniarsk's work, apparently, was
to rearrange their order and get them to cling together again. Apparently, the
rearrangement was different with each console; and Porniarsk had to try any
number of combinations before he found it. It looked like a random procedure
but, evidently, was not; and when I asked about that, Porniarsk relaxed his
no-information rule enough to tell me that what he was doing was checking
arrangements of the cubes in accordance with "sets" he already
carried in his memory center, to find patterns that would resonate with the
monad that was me. It was not the cubes that were the working parts, evidently,
but the patterns.

Whatever he was doing, and however
it was effective, when he got a collection of cubes to hang together in a
different order, I felt the effect immediately. It was as if another psychic
generator had come on-line in my mind. With each addition of power, or
strength, or whatever you want to call it, I saw more clearly and more deeply
into all things around me.

—Including the people. And from this
came the bitter to join with the sweet of my life. For as, step by step, my
perceptions increased, I came to perceive that Ellen was indeed intending to
leave with Tek as soon as my work with the device had been achieved. She was
staying for the moment and had talked Tek into staying, only so that he and she
could hold down two of the consoles, as Porniarsk had said all of the adults in
our party would need to do when I made my effort to do something about the time
storm. After that, they would go; and nothing I could say would stop her.

The reasons why she had turned to
Tek as she had, I could not read in her. Her personal feelings were beyond the
reach of my perception. Something shut me out. Porniarsk told me, when I
finally asked him, that the reason I could not know how she felt was because my
own emotions were involved with her. Had I been able to force myself to see, I
would have seen not what was, but what I wanted to see. I would have perceived
falsely; and since the perception and understanding I was gaining with the help
of the device were part of a true reflection of the universe, the device could
give only accurate information; consequently, it gave nothing where only
inaccuracy was possible.

So, I was split down the middle; and
the division between the triumph and the despair in me grew sharper with the
activation of each new console. After the fourth one, the avatar warned me that
there was a limit to the step-up I could endure from the device.

"If you feel you're being
pushed too hard," he said, "tell me quickly. Too much stimulus, and
you could destroy yourself before you had a chance to use the device
properly."

"It's all right," I said.
"I know what you're talking about." And I did. I could feel myself
being stretched daily, closer and closer toward a snapping point. But that
point was still not reached; and I wanted to go to the limit no matter what
would happen afterwards.

It was the pain of Ellen's imminent
leaving that drove me more than anything else. With the device beginning to
work, I was partly out of the ordinary world already. I did not have to test
myself by sticking burning splinters in my flesh to know that the physical side
of me was much dwindled in importance lately. It was easy to forget that I had
a body. But the awareness of my immaterial self was correspondingly amplified
to several times its normal sensitivity; and it was in this immaterial area
that I was feeling the loss of Ellen more keenly than the amputation of an arm
and a leg together.

There was no relief from that
feeling of loss except to concentrate on the expansion of my awareness. So,
psychically, I pushed out and out, running from what I could not bear to
face—and then, without warning, came rescue from an unexpected direction.

It was late afternoon, the sunlight
slanting in at a low angle through the door to the roundhouse, which we had
propped open while Porniarsk worked on the last console. Bill and I were the
only other ones there. We had opened the door to let a little of the natural
breeze and outer sun-warmth into the perfectly controlled climate of the
interior; and in my case, this had brought the thought of my outside concerns
with it, so that for a moment my mind had wandered again to thinking of Ellen.

I came back to awareness of the
roundhouse, to see Bill and Porniarsk both looking at me. Porniarsk had just
said something. I could hear the echo of it still in my ear, but without, its
meaning had vanished.

"What?" I asked.

"It's ready," said
Porniarsk. "How do you feel—able to take this seventh assistance? You'll
remember what I told you about the past increases not being limited? They each
enlarge again with each new adaptation you make to the device. If you're near
your limit of tolerance now, the effect of this last increase could be many
times greater than what it is presently; and you might find yourself crippled
in this vital, non-physical area before you had time to pull yourself back from
it."

"I know, I know," I said.
"Go ahead."

"I will, then," said
Porniarsk. He reached with one of his shoulder tentacles to the console half
behind him and touched a colored square.

For a second there was nothing. Then
things began to expand dramatically. I mean that literally. It was as if the
sides of my head were rushing out and out, enclosing everything about me... the
roundhouse, the peak, the village, the whole area between the mistwalls that
now enclosed me, all the other areas touching that area, the continent, the
planet... there was no end. In addition, not only was I encompassing these
things, but all of them were also growing and expanding. Not physically, but
with meaning-acquiring many and many times their original aspects, properties,
and values. So that I understood all of them in three dimensions, as it were,
where I before had never seen more than a single facet of their true shape.
Now, seen this way, all of them—all things, including me—were interconnected.

So I found my way back. With the
thought of interconnection, I was once more in The Dream, back in the spider
web spanning the universe. Only now there were patterns to its strands. I read
those patterns clearly; and they brought me an inner peace for the first time.
Because, at last, I saw what I could do, and how to do it, to still the storm
locally. Not just in this little section of the earth around me, but all around
our planet and moon and out into space for a distance beyond us, into the
general temporal holocaust. I saw clearly that I would need more strength than
I presently had; and the pattern I read showed that success would carry a
price. A death-price. The uncaring laws of the philosophical universe, in this
situation, could balance gain against loss in only one unique equation. And
that equation involved a cost of life.