Gordon R. Dickson (29 page)

It was not the most lively cocktail
hour on record. I pretended to drink, pouring as little as possible into my cup
each time, and putting somewhat more into the other cup, which slowly began to fill.
The Old Man kept staring at me; apparently, he was capable of keeping it up
without blinking as long as the daylight lasted. Eventually, even the small
amounts of liquor with which I was wetting my tongue began to make themselves
felt. I found myself talking. I told the Old Man what fine stuff it was I was
drinking, and I invited him to help himself. I speculated on the interesting
discoveries he would make if he only joined me and became friendly.

He continued to stare.

Eventually, the other cup was as
full as it could safely be, and the sun was almost down. There was nothing more
I could do. I left the cups and the bottle with the top off and got to my feet.

"Pleasant dreams," I said
to him, and left. Back once more in the rocks a safe distance from the village,
I got out my field glasses and peered down in the direction of his building. It
was almost dark, and one thing the experimentals did not have was artificial
lighting. They all disappeared into their buildings at dusk and only reappeared
with the dawn. But by straining my vision now, I was able to make out a dim
figure still in front of the Old Man's building. I squinted through the
binoculars, my eyes beginning to water; and, just as I was about to give up, I
caught a tiny glint of light on something moving.

It was the bottle, being upended in
the general area of the Old Man's head. I gave an inward, silent whoop of joy.
Unless he had decided to use the brandy for a shampoo, or unless he turned out
to have a body that reacted to alcohol as if it was so much branch water, I had
him.

I waited until the moon came up,
then got the pickup and drove by moonlight down through the main street of the
village to the Old Man's building. I took an unlit flashlight and went in the
building entrance. Inside, I turned the flashlight on and found the Old Man. He
was curled up in the corner of the single room that was the building's interior
on a sort of thick rug. He reeked of brandy, and was dead drunk.

He was also no lightweight. I had
not thought it to look at him, for all the experimentals looked small and
skinny by human standards; but apparently they were nothing but bone and
muscle. Still, I managed to carry him out to the pickup and get him inside the
cab. Then I drove back out of the village to the camp.

At the camp, I took him out of the
pickup, unchained Sunday and put him in the pickup, put the chain and collar on
the Old Man and lifted him, still snoozing, into one of the jeeps. By this
time, I was surrounded by people wanting to know what I was doing.

"I want to try him out on the
equipment up at the roundhouse," I said. "He drank almost a full
bottle of brandy, and he ought to sleep until morning, but with all this noise
he may just wake up. Now, will you let me get him put away up there? Then I'll
come down and tell you all about it."

"We already had dinner,"
said Wendy.

"Hush," said Marie to her,
"Marc'll have his dinner when he gets back. You're coming right back
down?"

"In twenty minutes at the
outside," I said.

I turned on the lights of the jeep and
growled up the hillside in low gear. The partitions between the consoles had
supports that were anchored in the concrete floor of the roundhouse; and I
chained the sleeping Old Man to one of these. As an afterthought, I took from
the jeep the canteen of drinking water we always kept with each of the vehicles
and left it beside him. If he got drunk like a human, he was likely to have a
hangover like a human.

Then I growled my way back down
again to the camp to turn Sunday loose, answer questions, and have my dinner.

To everybody except Porniarsk and
Bill, who already knew what I had in mind, I explained my capture of the Old
Man with a half-truth, saying I wanted to see if he could be useful as a
partial monad when we tried to use the equipment in the roundhouse, the day
after tomorrow. It was not until later that evening, in the privacy of the
camper, after Wendy was asleep, that I talked to Marie about using the little
girl at one of the consoles. Surprisingly, Marie thought it was a very good
idea. She said Wendy had no one to play with but the dogs, and she had been
wanting badly to get in on what the adults were doing.

19

I slept that night, but I did not
rest. As soon as I closed my eyes I was off among the strands of the spider
web, riding the shifting forces of the time storm about our world. I scuttled
about, studying them. I already knew what I would have to do. Every so often,
for a transitory moment, the forces in this area I had chosen came close to a
situation of internal balance. If, at just the right moment, I could throw all
the force controlled by the eight other monads and myself against the tangle of
conflicting forces that was the storm, hopefully I could nudge this tiny corner
of the storm into a state of dynamic balance.

Why do I say "hopefully"?
I knew I could do it—if only Wendy and the Old Man, under the assistance of the
device, would give me amplification enough to act as an eighth monad. For it
was not power I needed but understanding. As clearly as I could see the forces
now, I needed to see them many times more clearly, in much finer detail. Close
in, focused down to the local area which was all that Porniarsk had envisioned
me bringing into balance, my vision was sharp enough. But on wider focus, when
I looked further out into the time storm, the fine detail was lost. One more
monad and I could bring those distant, fuzzy forces into clarity.

It was merely a matter of waiting
until morning, I told myself, finally, and made myself put the whole problem
out of my head.

At my bidding, it went; which was
something such a problem would never have done a week before. But then another
thought came to perch on my mind like a black crow.

I was aware I had never been what
the world used to call a kind or moral man, a "good" man, as my
grandfather would have said. I had always let myself do pretty much what I
wanted, within practical limits; and I had never been particularly caring, or
concerned for other people. But ethical laws are a part of any philosophical
universe; they have to be. And was it entirely in agreement with those laws,
now, my carrying these eight other people—nine, if you counted the Old Man as
being in the people category—into a joust with something as monstrous as the
time storm, only because of my own hunger to know and do?

Granted, I could not see any way in
which they could be hurt. The only one I was putting on the line, as far as I
knew, was myself. But there are always understandings beyond understandings.
Perhaps there was some vital bit of information I did not have.

On the other hand, perhaps that was
not really what was bothering me. I looked a little deeper into myself and
found the real fishhook in my conscience; the unanswered question of whether,
even if I knew there was real danger to the others, I would let that be reason
enough to stop me. Perhaps I would go ahead anyway, prepared to sacrifice them
to my own desires, my own will.

This question was harder to put out
of my mind than the time storm problem, but in the end, I managed. I lay,
open-eyed and without moving, until the dawn whitened the shade drawn over the
window on the side of the camper across from the bunk on which I lay with
Marie.

I got up and dressed quietly. Marie
slept on, but Wendy opened her eyes and looked at me.

"Go back to sleep," I told
her. She closed her eyes again without argument. (Probably only humoring me, I
thought.)

Dressed, I glanced at Marie,
half-tempted to wake her and say a few words to her. But there was no good
reason for that, I realized, unless I only wanted to leave her with some
enigmatic, but portentous, statement she could remember afterwards and worry
over, wondering if she could have done something more for me in some way; and
things might have been different. I was a little ashamed of myself and let
myself out of the camper as softly as I could.

Outside, the morning air was dry and
cold. I shivered, even under the leather jacket I was wearing, and fired up the
coleman stove to make a pot of coffee. All the time I was making it, I could
feel the Old Man's presence in the back of my mind. He was connected to the
console, which meant he was in connection with me. I could feel that he was
awake now and suffering from the hangover I had anticipated. The discomfort was
making him savage—I could tell that, too. But underneath the savagery he was
beginning to wonder a little at what his mind could now sense of me, and
through me, of tile larger universe.

I made my coffee, drank it, and
drove one of the jeeps to the roundhouse. Inside, around where the Old Man had
been, it was a mess. He had been sick—I should have thought of the possibility
of that. In addition, he had urinated copiously.

I cleaned up, cautiously. Now that
he was awake, I had enough respect for those ape-like arms of his not to let
him get a grip on me. But he let me work on until I was right next to him,
without making any move in my direction. He was still staring at me all the
time, but now there was a speculative gleam in his brown eyes. He had now
realized who it was his mind connected to. I could feel him in my head,
exploring the connection and the situation. I had guessed right. Now, he was
interested. But his mind was still alien to me, much more alien than
Porniarsk's.

I took a chance, disconnected him
from the console, unhooked his chain from the stanchion, and led him outside,
to ensure that any further eliminations he was moved to would take place
somewhere else than in the roundhouse. I found a boulder too heavy for him to
move and with a lower half that was narrower than the top, so that the loop of chain
I looked around it could not be pulled off over the top. I rechained him to
this. The boulder was on the far side of the roundhouse, so that he could
neither see his village nor be seen from it, assuming that his fellows down
there had distance vision good enough to pick him out. Then I left him with
some bread, an opened can of corned beef and a refilled canteen of water, and
went down to my own breakfast. He let me go without a sound, but his eyes
followed me with their speculative look as long as I was in sight. All the way
down the mountain, I could feel his mind trying to explore mine.

Once back at the camp, I got out the
binoculars and looked over the village. Its inhabitants were out of their homes
and about their daily activities. None of them seemed to be missing the Old Man
or showing any curiosity about the lack of his presence. That much was all
right, then. I went back, put the binoculars away and ate breakfast. All the
others were up and also breakfasting; but there was a tension, a taut feeling
in the very air of the camp.

I did not feel like talking to
anyone; and the rest seemed to understand this. They left me alone while I was
eating—all but Sunday, who clearly sensed that something unusual was up. He did
not rub against me in his usual fashion, but prowled around and around me, his
tail twitching as if his nerves were on fire. He made such an ominous
demonstration that I was alarmed for Bill, when at last, he started to come
toward me.

But Sunday drew back just enough to
let him get close, although he circled the two of us, eyeing Bill steadily and
making little occasional singing noises in his throat.

"I don't want to bother
you," Bill said. His voice was hardly more than a murmur, too low for any
of the others to overhear.

"It's all right," I said.
"What is it?"

"I just wanted you to
know," he said, "you can count on me."

"Well," I said,
"thanks."

"No, I really mean
count
on me," he insisted.

"I hear you," I said.
"Thanks. But all you'll have to do today is sit at that console and let me
use you."

He looked back at me for a second in
a way that was almost as keyed-up and strange as Sunday's present behavior.

"Right," he said and went
off.

I had no time to puzzle over him.
There was Sunday to get into the cab of the pickup and the doors safely closed
on him; and the leopard was just not agreeable to going in this morning. In the
end I had to haul him in as a dead weight, swearing at him, with one fist
closed on the scruff of his neck and my other arm around his wedge-shaped cat
chest below his forelegs. I didn't dare have any of the others help me in the
mood the leopard was in—even the girl. Though, in fact, she was busy at the
moment, doing something in the motorhome with Marie—and she probably would not
have come anyway if I'd called.

I finally got Sunday in and the door
closed. Immediately he found himself trapped, he began to thrash around and
call to me. I closed my ears to the sounds he was making and got my party into
the jeeps and headed up the side of the peak. I was already at work with the
back of my head, monitoring the present interplay of the forces in the storm,
as far as I could pick them out. A real picture of the pattern out as far as
the Moon's orbit would have to wait until the others were all at their consoles
and connected with me. I thought I was gaining some advantage from them
already, which was a very good sign. Either I had been building psychic muscle
since the last two consoles had been finished, or the Old Man was proving to be
even more useful than I had hoped. Actually, in one way, he had already
exceeded expectations; because I was still as strongly linked to him as I had
been when he had been connected to the console and chained inside the
roundhouse.