Gordon R. Dickson (33 page)

In a second it would have been
over—but in that second, the Old Man reached out and placed a hand on both my
shirt and the hand holding the gun, arresting my movement.

The pressure of his hand was a calm,
almost a gentle touch. I could feel the unexerted strength behind his fingers;
but he was not gripping my hand, merely laying his own on top of it, just as,
once, I might have stopped some business guest reaching for the check of a
lunch to which I had just taken him. It was not the kind of touch that could
have checked me from continuing to draw the gun and shoot him if I had decided to.
But somehow, I was stopped.

For the first time I looked directly
into—deeply into—those eyes of his.

I had gone to zoos once and looked
into the eyes of some of the animals there. There were no more zoos now, nor
was it likely that there would ever be again. But once there had been; and in
their cages, particularly in the cages of the big cats, the apes, and bears and
the wolves, I had looked into wild animal eyes from only a few feet of
distance. And there had been something in those eyes that was not to be found
in the eyes of my fellow humans. There were eyes that looked at me from the
other side of the universe. Perhaps they could be loving, perhaps, under
stress, they could be filled with fury and anger; but now, to me, a human, they
were remote—separated from me by a gulf neither man nor beast could cross. They
looked at me, without judgment and without hope.

If they lived and it was their fate
to encounter me in the open, they would deal with me as best their strength
allowed. If I died they would watch me die, simply because there was nothing
else they could do, whether I was their deepest enemy or their dearest friend.
Their eyes were the eyes of creatures locked up alone in their own individual
skulls all the hours and minutes of their life. As animals, they neither knew
nor expected the communication every human takes for granted, even if he or she
is surrounded by mortal foes.

The eyes of the Old Man were like
that—they were the fettered eyes of an animal. But mixed in with that, there
was something more—for me alone. It was not love such as Sunday had had for me.
But it was something in its own way, perhaps, as strong. I recognized it
without being able to put a name to it—although suddenly, I knew what it was.

The Old Man and his tribe, who had been
born from test tubes, had been created on the brink of humanity. They teetered
on the nice edge of having souls. Of these, the most aware was the Alpha Prime,
Old Man himself, because he was the most intelligent, the strongest and the
most questioning. Also, he had shared the monad with me in that moment in which
we had brought the local effects of the time storm to a halt. In fact, he had
shared it alone with me, before any of the other humans had joined in. He had
been exposed then to communication for the first time in his life; and it must
have awakened a terrible hunger in him. I realized that, all this time, he had
been trying to get back into communication with me.

So, that is why as soon as he had
been let free again—whenever that was—he had begun to search me out, to
approach me little by little, day by day, until now, at last, he sat at arm's
length from me. He not only sat at arm's length from me, but with his hand in a
gesture that was almost pleading, arresting the gun with which he must know I
had planned to kill him.

My own soul turned over in me.
Because I suddenly understood what he had understood. From the beginning,
because of what we had shared in the moment of the taming of the time storm, he
had been much more understanding of me than I had suspected. He had known that
I did not want him near me. He had known that my desire to be free of him could
be murderous. And he had known what I was doing when my hand went inside my
shirt.

I had had enough experience with him
to know that my strength was like a baby's compared to his—for all that we
probably weighed about the same. It would have been no effort for him to have
taken the gun from me. He could have easily broken the arm that held it or
throttled me with one hand. But he had done none of these. Instead he had
merely come as close as he ever must have come in his life to pleading with
someone to spare him, to accept him, to be his fellow, if not his friend.

In that same moment I realized that
he—strange as it seemed and incredible as it was that he should have the
capability, just from that solitary shared moment in the monad—understood
better than any of them how Sunday had felt about me, and how I had felt about
Sunday. In his animal-human eyes I read it, how I had
really
felt about
Sunday; and at last—at last—I fell apart.

I had been right both ways. I had
been right in that I was someone who did not know how to love. But I had been
wrong, in spite of this, when I told myself I had not loved the crazy cat. All
this I understood suddenly, at last, in the moment in which the Old Man
squatted before me, with one long hand still laid flat against my shirt, over
the spot where my fist and the revolver that was to have killed him were
concealed. The floodgates within me went down suddenly and I was washed halfway
back again once more to the shores of humanity. Only halfway, but this was
farther than I had ever been before.

23

I sat there and cried for a long
time; and the Old Man waited me out as he might have waited out a storm,
squatting in a cave in the hills. When it was over, I was sane again; or at
least as close to sanity as I could expect to be, under the circumstances.
Together we went back to the camp, and from then on, he was openly at my side
most of the daylight hours.

What he had done, of course, was to
crack the protective shell I had grown about myself in reaction to the massive
internal effort of controlled power that had been involved in using the monad.
In doing that, I had discovered muscles of the inner self that I had not known
I owned, and I had also tuned myself up emotionally with a vengeance. In
self-defense, with Sunday's death, my mind had closed itself off until it could
heal the psychic tearings these stresses had created. Now that I was back in my
skull, however, these things were suddenly very obvious to me; and some other
things as well. Chief of these was that there was a great deal I needed to do
with myself if I wanted to continue my joust with the time storm and the
universe.

Meanwhile, I was faced with reentering
the world of the living. To my pleasure and to the feeding of a new humbleness
inside me, the others had been doing very well without my guiding hand. I found
that I was now ruler of what might well be called a small kingdom—and that was
only the beginning of the discoveries awaiting me.

A great deal had happened in the
year and a half that I had been obsessed with myself. For one thing, the world
was a world again. With the interference from the moving time lines ended,
short-wave radio communication had tied the continents back together, to the
mutual discovery of all us survivors that there were more of us than we had
suspected. The North American continent was now a patchwork of relatively small
kingdoms, like my own, with the exception of the west coast, from Baja
California northward halfway into British Columbia, Canada. That west coast
strip, as far east as Denver and in some cases beyond, was now a single
sovereignty under a woman who called herself the Empress. The Empress was from
the Hawaiian Islands—which appeared to have suffered less than any other part
of the world from the moving mistwalls and the time changes of the time storm.
The islands had lost no more than two-thirds of their population, as opposed to
a figure that must be much closer to ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent for
most of the rest of the world. The Empress was a woman from the island of
Hawaii itself, who had seized control there with a ragtag, impromptu army, and
then gone on to take over the other islands and the west coast of North
America.

England and Ireland, apparently,
were nearly deserted. Most of northern Europe also was a wasteland because of a
brief ice age that had come with some of the time changes and covered most of
that continent with an ice sheet from the Arctic Circle as far south as the
middle of France. This ice sheet was now gone; but the human life that was left
was now all below the former ice line. Stretching around the Mediterranean and
into the north of Africa were essentially nothing more than scattered, single
family households. The rest of Africa, like South America, was largely
non-communicating, from which Bill assumed that those areas had been pretty
well depopulated by the time storm also.

Russia, India and the whole Oriental
area had also been hard hit. As a result they appeared to have fallen back into
a sort of peaceful medieval, agricultural condition, with small villages
scattered sparsely across the immensity of land. Australia and New Zealand had
lost almost all of their cities, but had a surprising number of families
surviving pretty much as they always had in the interior and on the rest of
that island continent. However, these people, although articulate and largely
supplied with their own radios, were so widely scattered that they were also,
in effect, no more than individual families living in isolation.

Bill had made a large map on one
wall of the rambling, continually building structure that my group had come to
call the summer palace. The place was a strange construction, being composed
partly of lumber, partly of native rocks cemented together, and partly of
cement blocks trucked in from a half-obliterated town thirty miles away, that
had owned a cement block factory. The palace had poured concrete floors and
bare walls for the most part; but Bill had been a good enough architect to see
that it was adequately wired and equipped with ductwork, not only for heating,
but for summer air conditioning. I think that I had been conscious of the
existence of his map in it, during my nonparticipating period; but I had never
looked at the map with any degree of interest until the Old Man cracked me out
of my shell. Now that I did, I found myself marveling that what was left of the
world could have gotten its scattered parts back into contact with each other
in such a short time.

I discovered something else, as a
byproduct of reawakening to what was going on around me. This was that our new
world was a world hungry for news, and I myself was a piece of that news. By
this time, all the people on earth who had radio receivers knew who it was who
had brought the local effects of the time storm into balance. They knew what I
looked like, who my lieutenants were, and what our local situation here was. I
was, I discovered, regarded as a sort of combination of Einstein and
Napoleon—and the planet's number one celebrity. This attention might ordinarily
have given me a large opinion of myself. However, under the circumstances, it
had a hollow ring to it. It was rather like being crowned King of the Earth on
the stage of the empty Hollywood Bowl, while an audience of five sat in the
middle of the front row seats and applauded energetically. After discovering
what it was like, I put my position in the world-wide, public eye out of my
mind and concentrated on matters close to home.

It was curious that I, who had once
believed that I could never endure to be married, now had two wives. Of course,
legally, I was married to neither one of them; but wives they were in every
practical sense of the word, and particularly in the eyes of the community
surrounding us. Marie and Ellen—I would have bet anyone that if there were ever
two women likely not to get on with each other at all, it would be those two.
Marie was talkative, conventional and probably—she had never told me her
age—older than I was. The girl was certainly still well under twenty,
close-mouthed to an almost abnormal degree, and recognized no convention or
rules but her own. What the two of them could have in common was beyond me. I
puzzled over it from time to time but never succeeded in getting an answer.

But they joined forces magnificently
when it came to lining up in opposition to me. One of the typical examples of
this appeared directly after I had come back to my senses and rejoined the
world of the living. All the time that I had been more or less out of my head,
they had taken care of me as if I had been three years old. Now that I had my
ordinary wits back, rather than just getting back to normal ways, they both
apparently decided, without a word, that I should get it through my head that
my days of being waited upon were over.

This would have been all right if
they had merely returned to the normal pattern of affairs that had existed
before we got the time storm forced into balance. But they now moved as far in
the direction of leaving me to my own devices as they had gone previously in
watching over me. In fact, the whole matter went to what I considered
ridiculous limits.

For example, during the time I had
been obsessed with my inner problems, I had been, except for rare intervals, as
sexless as a eunuch. When I came back to myself, of course, that changed. The
day the Old Man helped me break me loose, I found myself waiting for the
evening and the hours of privacy in the motorhome. I had never been one to want
more than one woman in my bed at a time; and I was not at all sure whether it
was the girl or Marie I wanted that night. But I definitely knew that I wanted
one or the other. I gave them time to get settled first; but when I came to the
motorhome, Ellen was nowhere to be seen and Marie was a mound under covers on
her own bed, her back towards me.