Gordon R. Dickson (30 page)

Wendy, who had been chattering away
merry and bright in the back of the jeep I was driving, fell into dubious
silence as we pulled up to the level spot where the roundhouse stood and she
saw the Old Man staring at us. But he only gave her and the others a single
surveying glance and then came back to concentrate on me as I got out of the
jeep and came back toward him.

He knew where I was going to take
him. He came along almost eagerly when I unlocked the chain and led him to the
roundhouse door. It slid aside automatically as we got within arm's length of
it, and he went over the threshold ahead of me with a bound, headed toward his
console. I took him to it and chained him on a short length of the chain, so
that he could not reach around the partition to whoever would be at the console
next to him.

Bill followed me in and blocked the
door open to the outer air, as we had got in the habit of doing. The others
followed him. They began to take their places under Porniarsk's direction and
let themselves be connected to their consoles. The dark material clung to itself
when one end of it was loosely wrapped around the throat. The further end of it
reached through the face of the console to touch the pattern of blocks inside.
It was so simple as to seem unbelievable, except for the fact that the strap
had a mild, built-in warmth to it. It was a semi-living thing, Porniarsk had
told me. All the connections in the roundhouse were made with such semi-living
objects. They operated like psychic channels. If you imagine the tube through
which a blood transfusion is being given, as being alive and capable of making
its own connection with the blood systems of the two people involved in the
transfusion, you have an analogous picture.

The straps were vaguely comforting
to wear, like a security blanket. I noticed Wendy brighten up for the first
time since seeing the Old Man, when hers was wrapped around her throat by Bill.
There was one waiting for me at the monitoring station in the middle of the
room; but I wanted to try seeing what kind of connection I could have with the
other monads without it, before I strapped myself in.

Bill and Porniarsk strapped in the
others, then Bill strapped himself in, and Porniarsk went to the monitoring
station. He reached with one tentacle for the colored square on the console
there that activated all connections. His tentacle flicked down to touch the
square, and the connection already established between myself and the Old Man
suddenly came alive with our mutual understanding of what would happen when
activation took place.

The Old Man howled.

His vocal capabilities were
tremendous. All of us in the roundhouse were half-deafened by the sound, which
rang like a fire siren in our ears, and broadcast itself outward from the
propped-open door. In that same second, Porniarsk's tentacle touched the surface
of the square, and the connections were activated. Full contact with all the
other monads there erupted around me; and full perception of the time storm
forces out of Moon orbit distance smashed down on me like a massive wall of
water. The Old Man's howl was cut off in mid-utterance. I found my body running
for the roundhouse door.

For with contact had come full
understanding of what the Alpha Prime had done, and what he had been trying to
do. I burst out of the roundhouse and looked down the steep, bouldered face of
the peak that fell toward the village. The lower edge of it was alive with
black, climbing bodies.

How the Old Man had contacted them,
I did not know. His connection with me and the console had made it possible,
that was obvious; but he had used channels of identity with his own people that
were not part of my own, human machinery. The most I could understand was that
he had not actually called them, in a true sense. He had only been able to
provoke an uneasiness in them that had sent most of them out hunting among the
lower rocks, in the direction of the peak.

But now they had heard him. Lost
somewhere in the gestalt of the monad group of which he and I were a
part—Porniarsk had been right in his use of that word, for the group, myself
and this place were all integrated into a whole now—the Old Man's mind was
triumphant. He knew that he had called in time, that his people had heard and
were coming.

I whirled around and stared back
into the roundhouse through the open door, though I already knew what I would
see. Inside, all the figures were motionless and silent. There was not even a
chest-movement of breathing to be seen in any of them, for they were caught in
a timeless moment—the moment in which we had contacted the storm and I had
paused to examine the pattern of its forces. Even Porniarsk was frozen into
immobility with his tentacle-tip touching his activation square on the monitor
console. The square itself glowed now, with a soft, pink light.

I was still unconnected and mobile.
But the Old Man's people would be here in twenty minutes; and all our weapons
were down at the camp.

I watched my body turn and run for
the nearest jeep, leap into it, start it, turn it, and get it going down the
slope toward camp. I had the advantage of a vehicle, but the distance was twice
as much, down to camp, than it was up the slope the experimentals were
climbing, and twice as far back up again. The jeep bounced and slid down the
shallower slope on this side of the peak, skidding and slewing around the
larger boulders in the way. My body drove it; but my mind could not stay with
it, because I had already seen enough of the present moment's pattern to locate
the upcoming pressure point I searched for. That pressure point would be coming
into existence in no more time than it would take the villagers to climb to the
roundhouse, possibly, even in less time. I had that long only to study all the
force lines involved and make sure that my one chance to produce a state of
balance was taken exactly on the mark.

20

It was not the pattern of forces in
the time storm itself I studied; but the image of this pattern in the
philosophical universe during that fractional, timeless moment when I had first
tapped the abilities of our full monad-gestalt. That image was like a three-dimensional
picture taken by a camera with a shutter speed beyond imagination. Already, of
course, the configuration of the forces in the storm had developed, through a
whole series of changes, into totally different patterns, and they were
continuing to change. But with the gestalt and the device to back me up, I
could study the configuration that had been and calculate how the later
patterns would be at any other moment in the future.

In any such pattern—past, present,
or future—the time storm forces of any given area had to have the potential of
developing into a further state of dynamic balance. The potential alone,
however, was not good enough. To begin with, the forces had to be very close to
balance, within a very small tolerance indeed; otherwise, the relatively feeble
strength of my gestalt would not be able to push them into balance.

But first, the imbalances to be
corrected must be understood in detail. Balance was an ideal state; and the
chances of it occurring naturally were as small as the total time storm itself
was large. The only reason it was barely possible to achieve it artificially
lay in a characteristic of the time storm itself; the storm's tendency to break
up progressively into smaller and smaller patterns and for these to break up in
turn, and so on. This was the same characteristic that Porniarsk had mentioned
as presenting the greatest danger of the storm if it was not fought and
opposed. The continuing disintegration would continue to produce smaller and
smaller temporal anomalies until, at last, any single atomic particle would be
existing at a different temporal moment than its neighbor. But in this case, it
offered an advantage in that the disintegration process produced smaller
temporal anomalies within larger ones, like miniature hurricanes in the calms
that were the eyes of larger ones; and so, by choosing the right moment to act,
it was possible to balance the forces of a small, contained anomaly, without
having to deal with the continuing unbalanced forces of a larger disturbance
containing it.

Of course, the word
"hurricane" did not really convey the correct image of a temporal
anomaly. In its largest manifestation, such an anomaly represented the enormous
forces released in intergalactic space along the face of contact between an
expanding galaxy and a contracting one. Here on earth, in its smallest—so far
—manifestation, it was an area such as the one we and the experimentals were
inhabiting now, with the conflicting forces existing where the mistwalls marked
their presence. Temporally, the mistwalls were areas of tremendous activity.
Physically, as we had discovered, they were no more than bands of lightly
disturbed air and suspended dust, stretching up from the surface of the earth
until they came into conflict with other forces of their same
"hurricane."

In my philosophical image of the
apparent walls that were time storm force-lines, I saw them in cross-section,
so that they seemed like a web of true lines filling a three-dimensional space,
the interstices between lines being the chunks of four-dimensional space they
enclosed. Seen close up, the lines looked less like threads than like rods of
lightning frozen in the act of striking. Whatever this appearance represented
of their real properties in the physical universe, the fact was clear that they
moved and were moved by the other force-lines with which they interacted; so
that they developed continually from one pattern to another, in constant
rearrangement, under the push of the current imbalance.

I already knew in what general
direction the patterns in the area I was concerned with were developing. But
now I projected these developments, studying the parade of succeeding
configurations for specific details, looking for one that would give me a
possibility of forcing a balanced pattern into existence before the
experimentals arrived at the roundhouse. I could not do this until I had
returned with weapons and driven off the figures now climbing the peak, for the
good reason that the pattern showed me the development of affairs here, as well
as the larger picture. I alone, even with guns, would not be able to drive off
those who were coming. There were more than a hundred of them; and this time
they would not give up as easily as they had before. They had been conditioned
to ignore the roundhouse. Now, somehow, the Old Man had managed to break that
conditioning. The only thing that would stop them would be fright at some great
natural event. A volcanic eruption, an earthquake—or the meteorological
reaction when the mistwall through which we had entered went out of existence,
and the atmosphere of the area on its far side suddenly mixed with the
atmosphere on this.

I must get down, get weapons, get
back up, and hold them off long enough to use the gestalt successfully to
produce balance in the pattern. My mind galloped past the developing patterns,
checking, checking, checking; and as it went, the jeep under me was skidding
and plunging down the slope to our camp.

I slid in between our tents, at
last, in a cloud of dust and stopped. I jumped out of the jeep, unlocked the
door of the motorhome, and plunged inside.

Warm from the hot, still atmosphere
within, the guns were where we always kept them, in the broom closet, with the
ammunition on a shelf above. I grabbed two shotguns and the two heaviest
rifles, with ammo. But when I reached for the machine pistol, it was not there.

I spent, perhaps, a couple of
frantic minutes looking for it in improbable places about the motorhome, before
I finally admitted to myself that it was gone. Who could have managed to get
into the vehicle, which Marie and I kept locked religiously except when one of
us was in it, was something there was no time to puzzle about now. With its
extendable stock collapsed, the weapon was light and small enough to be carried
under a heavy piece of outer clothing by either man or woman—and most of us
going up to the roundhouse this morning had worn either a jacket or a bulky
sweater. I got out of the motorhome in a hurry, not even bothering to lock it
behind me. I made the driver's seat of the jeep in one jump, gunned the
still-running motor and headed back up the slope of the peak.

I was perhaps a hundred and fifty
yards from the camp when the dead silence that had existed there registered.
Sunday had been back there all the time I was getting the guns, locked up in
the cab of the pickup. But I had not heard a sound from him, in spite of the
fact that he must have heard the jeep arrive, and seen, heard, and possibly
even smelled me. He should have been putting up as much racket as he could, in
an effort to make me come and let him out. But there had been no noise at all.

I drove another twenty yards or so
before I gave in to the suddenly empty, sick feeling inside me. Then, I
wrenched the jeep around and roared back down to the camp to the pickup.

I did not need to get out of the
jeep to look at it. I did not even need to get close. From twenty feet away, I
could see the windshield of the pickup lying on the hood of the vehicle like a
giant's lost spectacle lens. Somehow, Sunday had managed to pop it completely
out of its frame. And he was gone.

I knew where he had gone. I got the
field glasses and looked off up the steep slope leading directly to the
roundhouse, where the tiny black figures of the experimentals could now be seen
more than halfway up. Down below them, I saw nothing for a moment— and then
there was a flash of movement. It was Sunday, headed to join me on top, where
he must have believed me to be, not travelling by the roundabout, easy slope I
had come down in the jeep, but directly up the mountainside on a converging
route with those from the village below.