Gordon R. Dickson (31 page)

He would keep coming. If the
experimentals did not get in his way, he would simply pass them up. But if they
tried to stop him, he would kill as long as he could until he was killed
himself. But he would keep coming.

The idiotic, loving beast! There was
nothing but death for him where he was headed; but even if he had known that,
it would not have stopped him. There was nothing I could do for him now. I
could not even take time out to think of him. There were eight people and a
world to think of.

I ripped the jeep around and headed
up the slope. The best I could do; the longer distance before me would make it
a tossup whether I could get back to the roundhouse before the experimentals
arrived.

I had the upcoming patterns of the
time storm in my head now. I could see the one I wanted developing. It was not
an absolutely sure thing, so far; but it was as close to a sure thing as I
could wish for in limited time, such as we had now. It would form within
seconds after I made the top of the peak and the roundhouse.

There was nothing more I could do
now but drive. In the roundhouse the others were still immobile—even the Old
Man-caught up in the gestalt. I gave most of my attention to the ground ahead.

It was the best driving I had ever
done. I was tearing hell out of the jeep, but if it lasted to the top of the
peak that was all I asked of it. I did not lose any time, but what I gained—the
best I could gain—was only seconds. When I did reach the level top and the
roundhouse at last, the experimentals were not yet there.

I skidded the jeep to a stop beside
the door of the roundhouse and tossed one rifle, one shotgun, and most of the
ammunition inside. Then I pulled the block that was holding the door open—and
all this time, the storm pattern I was waiting for was coming up in my
mind—stepped back, and the door closed automatically. The experimentals did not
have doors to buildings. Perhaps they did not know what a door was and would
think, seeing this one closed, that there was no entrance into the roundhouse.
If they did by accident trigger the door to opening, those inside would have
the other two guns which, one way or the other, they would be awake and ready
to use; for in a moment I would either win or lose, and the gestalt would be
set free again.

I watched the door close and turned
just in time to see the first round, ape-like head come over the edge of the
cliff-edge, some forty yards away. I snatched up the rifle and had it halfway
to my shoulder when I realized I would never fire it. There was no time now.
The moment and the pattern I waited for were rushing down upon me. I had no
more mind to spare for killing. Still standing with the rifle half-raised, I
went back into the pattern; meanwhile, as if through the wrong end of a
telescope, I was seeing the black figure come all the way up into view and
advance, and other black figures appear one by one behind him, until there were
four of them coming steadily toward me, not poising the knives they held to
throw, but holding them purposely by the hilt, as if they wanted to make sure
of finishing me off.

It was the final moment. I saw the
pattern I had waited for ready to be born. I felt the strength of my monad
gestalt; and at last, I knew certainly that what I was about to try would work.
The four experimentals were more than halfway to me; and now I could understand
clearly how the indications I had read had been correct. I would be able to do
what I had wanted; and with the windstorm that would follow the disappearance
of the mistwalls, the experimentals would panic and retreat. But the cost of
all this would be my life. I had expected it to be so.

I stood waiting for the
experimentals, the pattern rushing down upon me. In the last seconds, a
different head poked itself over the edge of the cliff, and a different body
came leaping toward me. It was Sunday, too late.

The pattern I awaited exploded into
existence. I thrust, with the whole gestalt behind me. The fabric of the time
storm about me staggered, trembled and fell together—locked into a balance of
forces. And awareness of all things vanished from me, like the light of a
blown-out lamp.

21

The world came back to me, little by
little. I was conscious of a warm wind blowing across me. I could feel it on my
face and hands; I could feel it tugging at my clothes. It was stiff, but no
hurricane. I opened my eyes and saw streamers of cloud torn to bits scudding
across the canvas of a blue sky, moving visibly as I watched. I felt the hard
and pebbled ground under my body and head; and a pressure, like a weight, on
the upper part of my right thigh.

I sat up. I was alive—and unhurt.
Before me, out beyond the cliff-edge where the experimentals had appeared,
there was no more mistwall—only sky and distant, very distant landscape. I
looked down and saw the four black bodies on the ground, strung out almost in a
line. None of them moved; and when I looked closer I saw clearly how badly they
had been torn by teeth and claws. I looked further down, yet, at the weight on
my thigh, and saw Sunday.

He lay with his head stretched
forward to rest on my leg, and one of the leaf-shaped knives was stuck,
half-buried in the big muscle behind his left shoulder. Behind him, there was
perhaps fifteen feet of bloody trail where he had half-crawled, half-dragged
himself to me. His jaws were partly open, the teeth and gums red-stained with
blood that was not his own. His eyes were closed. The lids did not stir, nor
his jaws move. He lay still.

"Sunday?" I said. But he
was not there to hear me.

There was nothing I could do. I
picked up his torn head, somehow, in my arms and held it to me. There was just
nothing I could do. I closed my own eyes and sat there holding him for quite a
while. Finally, there were sounds around me; I opened my eyes again and looked
up to see that the others, released now that the gestalt was ended, had come
out of the roundhouse and were standing around looking at the new world. Marie
was standing over me.

Tek and Ellen were off by themselves
some thirty yards from the roundhouse. He had turned the jeep around and
evidently pulled it off a short distance in a start back down the side of the
peak. But for some reason he had stopped again and was now getting back out of
the driver's seat, holding one of the rifles, probably the one I had thrown
into the roundhouse, tucked loosely in the crook of his right elbow, barrel
down. Ellen was already out of the jeep and standing facing him a few steps
off.

"You go," she was saying
to him. "I can't now. He doesn't even have Sunday now."

I remembered how much Sunday had
meant to her in those first days after I had found her. And how he had put up
with her more than I ever would have expected. But she had always been fond of
him. And I—I had taken him for granted. Because he was mad. Crazy, crazy,
insane cat. But what difference does it make why the love's there, as long as
it is? Only I'd never known how much of my own heart I'd given back to him
until this day and hour.

Ellen was walking away from Tek and
the jeep now.

"Come back," Tek said to
her.

She did not answer. She walked past
me and into the roundhouse through the door that was once more propped open. In
the relative shadow of the artificially lit interior, she seemed to vanish.

Tek's face twisted and went savage.

"Don't try anything," said
Bill's voice, tightly.

I looked to the other side of me and
saw him there. He was pale-faced, but steady, holding one of the shotguns. The
range was a little long for accuracy with a shotgun; but Bill held it
purposefully.

"Get out if you want," he
told Tek. "But don't try anything."

Tek seemed to sag all over. His
shoulders drooped; the rifle barrel sagged downward. All the savageness leaked
out of him, leaving him looking defenseless.

"All right," he said, in
an empty voice.

He started to turn away toward the
jeep. Bill sighed and let the shotgun drop butt-downward to the earth; so that
he held it, almost leaning on the barrel of it, wearily. Tek turned back,
suddenly, the rifle barrel coming up to point at me.

Bill snatched up the shotgun, too
slowly. But in the same second, there was the yammer of the machine pistol from
inside the roundhouse, and Ellen walked out again holding the weapon and firing
as she advanced. Tek, flung backward by the impact of the slugs, bounced off
the side of the jeep and slid to the ground, the rifle tumbling from his hands.

Ellen walked a good dozen steps
beyond me. But then she slowed and stopped. Tek was plainly dead. She dropped
the machine pistol as if her hands had forgotten they held it; and she turned
to come back to me.

Marie had been standing unmoving,
close to me all this time. But when Ellen was only a step or two away, Marie
moved back and away out of my line of vision. Ellen knelt beside me and put her
arms around both me and the silent head I was still holding.

"It'll be all right," she
said. "It's all going to be all right. You wait and see."

22

We had won. In fact, the world had
won, for the freezing of the movement of the time lines into a state of dynamic
balance was complete for the immediate area of our planet. But for me,
personally, after that there followed a strange time, the first part of which I
was not really all there in my head and the second part of which, I was most
earnestly trying to get out of my head.

It was left to the others to pick up
the pieces and deal with the period of adjustment to the new physical state of
affairs, which they did by themselves. Of the months immediately following the
moment of change at the station, I have no clear memory. It was a period of
time in which days and nights shuttered about me, light and dark, light and
dark, like frames on a film strip. Spring ran into summer, summer into fall,
and fall into winter, without any real meaning for me. When the cold months
came, I would have still sat outside in jeans and a tank top if the girl or
Marie had not dressed me to suit the temperature; and I would probably have
starved to death if they had not put food in front of me and stood over me to
see that I ate it.

My reality during that time was all
inside my skull, in a universe where the grey fog of indifference only lifted
to a sharp awareness of psychic pain and guilt. Sunday had loved me—the only
thing in the world that ever had—and I had killed him.

Porniarsk had worked a piece of
technological magic almost immediately, out of knowledge from the time and
place of his original avatar; but it did not help the way I felt. He had
created some kind of force-field enclosure, in which Sunday's stabbed and slain
body was held in stasis—a sort of non-cryogenic preserving chamber. He could
not bring Sunday back to life, Porniarsk told me; but as long as time had
become a variable for us, there was always the chance that, eventually, we
would contact someone with the knowledge to do it. He told me this many times,
repeating himself patiently to get the information through the fog about me.
But I did not believe him; and, after the first time, I refused to go anywhere
near the black-furred body lying still, inside its glass-like energy shell.

The core of my guilt, though none of
the rest suspected it, lay in the knowledge of my responsibility for Sunday's
death—and something more. The further element was part of the knowledge that I
had always failed with any person or thing who had tried to get close to me. It
was a fact of my experience; and, buried behind it all this time, had been the
darker suspicion that when I could not turn love away from me, I would always
at least manage to destroy its vehicle. Now, in my awareness of my own
responsibility for the death of Sunday, I had confirmed that suspicion.

The confirmation was my own private
purgatory. No one, not even Porniarsk, seemed to suspect that I might have,
subconsciously, used the moment of coming to grips with the time storm to rid
myself of the one creature who embarrassed me with an affection I lacked the
personal machinery to return. But I myself knew the truth. I knew—and I woke
fresh to the knowledge every morning. I sat with it through days of the months
that followed and went to sleep with it at night.

As I saw it, my sin was not one of
simple, but of calculated, omission. Which made it one of commission instead.
It printed itself as a damning question on the clouds above me in the daytime and
glowed, invisible to all eyes but mine, on the darkness of the ceiling above
me, at night. If I could read the factors of the time storm, the question
ran—and I had been able—then why hadn't I also taken a moment to puzzle out the
factors of human and animal interaction that had led to the deaths of Tek and
Sunday?

I had not done so, the whisper
inside me repeated night and day, because I had wanted them dead. Particularly,
I had wanted Sunday dead; for if he continued to exist and follow me about,
eventually the other humans would discover that there was an emptiness in me
where a heart ought to be. Then it would strike them that I could never care
two cents for them either; and they would turn on me because who could be safe
with someone like me around?