Gordon R. Dickson (35 page)

"Communications," he said
briefly, and led me into a radio room containing two women, one young and one
middle-aged. It was filled with radio equipment that even to my amateur eye
seemed impressive.

"Bebe, Jill," Bill said,
"this is Marc Despard."

The two looked up from their panels,
smiled and nodded to me. Bill led me out of the room again.

"Now," said Bill, moving
down to knock on the second door on the left, "this is-"

"Come in," said Marie's
voice.

Bill smiled at me and led me in.
Marie was seated behind a large desk in a very businesslike office, with papers
in front of her. She was looking over the papers at a lean, big-boned man who
must have stood about six feet six when he was on his feet. Right now he was
sitting down, dressed in a white shirt and what seemed to be white duck pants.

"I'll be right with you,
Marc," she said, and picked up what was apparently an interrupted
conversation with the man in white.

"What you've got to make them
understand, Abe, is that if they want to draw supplies and cook their own
meals, they have to do it according to our rules. At our convenience, not
theirs. I'm not going to put up with anyone either wasting food or not eating
adequately—any more than I'd put up with their breaking any of the other laws.
That means they submit their menu for the week in advance to you, you approve
it, and then—only then—you authorize one of your own people to give them
supplies for just exactly what they've planned to serve. You understand?"

"Sure," said Abe, in a
deep slow voice. He had a touch of some Eastern European accent.

Marie looked away from him over to
me again.

"Marc," she said,
"this is Abe Budner, our Director of Food Services and chef for the
community kitchen. I'm hoping we can train people to take the chef's job off
his hands before long."

Abe Budner got up as slowly and
solemnly as he had spoken, shook hands with me and sat down again.

"We're just looking
around," Bill said.

"Good," said Marie
briskly. "Because I really don't have time to stop and talk now. I can
tell you all about this work this evening, Marc."

We were dismissed. Bill and I left.

"And this," said Bill,
knocking on the remaining door in the corridor, "is Ellen's."

We waited, but there was no answer
to his knock.

The door at the far end of the
corridor opened behind us.

"Something?" said a voice.
We turned and I saw what looked like a boy of about eighteen, wearing dark
pants and a khaki shirt with two brass buttons pinned on the left side of his
shirt collar.

"Ellen's out checking the Ryan
boundary," this individual said. "Is there anything I can do for
you?"

He looked questioningly at me.

"This is Marc Despard,
Doc," said Bill.

"Marc Despard? I'm really glad
to meet you, sir," said Doc flusteredly and energetically, shaking my
hand. "I've looked forward to meeting you."

"Well, now you have," I
said. I was not exactly taken with him.

"Doc is Ellen's second in
command," said Bill. "His full name's Kurt Dockwiler, but we all call
him Doc. His militia rank is captain."

"Oh?" I said.

"I was just going to show Marc
Ellen's office," Bill added.

"You bet. Come in," said
Doc, stepping past us, throwing open the door and leading us in. I followed him
and Bill brought up the rear.

I don't know what I had expected;
but Ellen's office was simply a tidy, utilitarian place with the usual filing
cabinets, a perfectly clean desk and a few extra chairs facing the desk as if
she had been holding a conference recently.

"If you'd like to wait,"
said Doc, "she ought to be back in about twenty minutes. I can send over
to the kitchen for coffee—or anything else."

"No, I'm just looking
around," I said. "I'll see her tonight."

"Of course!" Doc followed
Bill and myself back down the corridor and out through the outer office.
"If I can ever be useful in any way, Mr. Despard, the message center can
reach me at any time."

"I'll remember that," I
said getting in the jeep.

Bill started up and we drove off.

"How old is he, anyway?" I
said.

"I don't know exactly,"
answered Bill. "Twenty or twenty-one, I think."

"He looks more like Ellen's
age."

"Nothing wrong with that,"
Bill said.

I looked at him. But his face was
perfectly innocent of any particular expression.

"I'm just surprised there
aren't any older men around to hold down a job like that," I told him.
"That's all."

"We've got older men, of
course," said Bill. He was heading the jeep back up into the trees in the
direction of the summer palace. "Most of them have families, or at least
somebody, who make them a bad choice for a high risk occupation. Then again,
none of them have Doc's qualifications."

"Qualifications?"

"His father was career
army," Bill said. "He absorbed a lot of the military art, just by
growing up in various bases. That and other things. He's a black belt in judo
and he's taught survival classes. Also he's a mountain climber."

There was not much to say to that. I
sat quiet during most of the ride back up to the summer palace, and in that
time I came around to feeling that I might have been a little unfair to Doc.

"We'll go see Porniarsk
now," Bill said, stopping the jeep once more at the palace. "I didn't
take you to him right away because I thought either Marie or Ellen might have
things they'd want to show you in their areas; and their schedule is pretty
well tied in with other things. Porniarsk, you can see any time."

I felt a warmth of old affection at
the thought of the alien avatar. Porniarsk, with his ugly bull-dog shape and
unemotional responses, was a particularly stable point in my pyrotechnic and
shifting universe. I followed Bill into the palace, thinking with surprise
that, in all the last year and a half, I had not sought out Porniarsk once and
had seen him in total perhaps no more than half a dozen times.

The room in the summer palace that
Bill led me into, eventually, must have had as much floor space as the Quonset
hut down in the village we had just left. It was a rectangular room with floor,
walls and ceiling painted white and a row of windows all down one side. The
other walls were occupied mainly by equipment that had once been in the station.
Apparently, Porniarsk had had it all transported down here.

However, what caught my eye
immediately was not this, nor even the friendly sight of Porniarsk himself, but
a box shape with transparent sides perhaps twenty feet long by six wide and
three deep, almost filled with some greyish-blue substance. When I got closer,
I saw that whatever it was seemed to be a liquid. There was a noticeable
meniscus,
and a black tube running over the edge of one of the sides and
down into the box showed the apparent angular distortion at the surface that a
stick does, poked down into water. Porniarsk had been doing something with the
tank; but he turned and came to meet us as we entered.

"How are you, Marc?" he
said as we met, his easy speech at odds, as always, with the curious mechanical
sound of his voice, and his manner of speaking.

"I'm fine—now," I said.
"How've you been?"

"There's been no reason for me
to be other than I always am," Porniarsk said.

"Of course," I said.
"Well, then, how have things been going?"

"I've been getting a few things
done," Porniarsk said. "But nothing with any great success. But then,
real progress isn't often dramatic, being a matter of small steps taken daily
that add up to a total accomplishment over a period of time."

"Yes," I said. I thought
of the experience it had taken me a year and a half to come to terms with.
"There's a lot of things I'd like to talk to you about."

"I'm glad to hear it,"
said Porniarsk. "On my part, I've been looking forward to talking to you.
I can progress much more rapidly if I've got a primary mind to work with; and
the only primary mind we've produced so far is you."

"Only me?" I said. It
jarred me slightly to hear it—at the same time I felt a small ego-pleasure.

"Primary minds can only be
developed or uncovered by monad activity," he said. "All the other
minds involved in the gestalt only resonated and amplified yours, without
developing. So I've been restricted to doing what I can with the resonating
minds. In fact, I've been restricted to the one resonating mind that had no
other duties to occupy it."

He turned his head and nodded
ponderously toward a corner. I looked and saw the Old Man, perched on the seat
before one of the consoles taken from the station, the helmet on his head.

"The Alpha Prime," said
Porniarsk. "He's been my main subject. Happily, he seems eager for the
experience of being connected with the equipment here. Daytimes, he's generally
unavailable. I understand he's been with you most of the time. But at night, he
often comes here on his own initiative to work with me."

I gazed at the Old Man. He squatted
utterly still on the chair before the console, with a curious assurance—almost
as if it was a throne and he was a king.

"What could you learn from
him?" I asked.

"It's not what I can learn
from
him," said Porniarsk deliberately, "but what I could learn
through
him. Just as I want to learn and discover matters through
you—though since you're a primary mind, I'd expect that you'd also learn, and
be able to add the knowledge you personally gain to what I can gain."

He stopped speaking for a second,
then started again.

"In fact," he said,
"I ought to point out that what I can learn is limited by the kind of
instrument I am, myself—personally. As an avatar of Porniarsk I've got only so
much conceptual range. On the other hand, Marc, your conceptual range is
something I don't know. It could be less than Porniarsk's—that is to say,
mine—or it might be a great deal greater. It could be limitless, in that you
might be able to go on increasing it, as long as you want to make the effort to
extend its grasp. Which brings me to an important point."

He stopped again. But this time he
did not continue immediately.

"What point?" asked Bill,
finally.

"The point," said
Porniarsk in his unvarying accent, "of whether Marc, after his one
experience with the monad, really wants to explore further into an area where
mind becomes reality and where it's impossible to draw a line where the
definitive change occurs."

"I'll answer that," I
said.

It came to me suddenly, that while
I'd never really come to doubt that I wanted to dig deeper into the time storm
and everything connected with it, for the last year and a half, I'd been hiding
from the fact that I'd eventually have to get back to that work.

"I don't have any reverse gear,"
I said. "The only way for me to go is straight ahead. Even standing still
doesn't work."

"In that case," said
Porniarsk, "you and I have a big job ahead of us."

"Fine with me," I said.

"I guessed so from the
beginning," said Porniarsk. "So, in that case, maybe we might talk
right now about the basic principles involved here, and how you can be involved
also."

"Absolutely," I said. I
meant every word I said. "This all ties in with something I want to
do—something I'm going to do."

"If you'll forgive me,"
said Porniarsk, "I felt that about you from the first time we met.
However, it's a lot bigger universe than you, or the entities of your time,
seem to realize. If you were anything else than a rather unusual individual,
I'd have to say you're presumptuous to have the ambition I think you're
entertaining."

"I told you I've got something
to do," I said. "In any case, we both want the same thing, don't we?
To control this runaway situation with time?"

"Quite correct. But remember
what I said—if you weren't an unusual individual, I wouldn't be devoting this
much energy to you. Not because I wasn't interested; but because it'd be a
waste of time. By your own standards, Marc, you're arrogant. Partly, this is
simply because you recognize your own ability. Part of it is a prickliness,
what you'd call a chip on the shoulder, because other people don't see what you
see. I can sympathize with this. But it's still something you'll have to
overcome, if you're going to achieve the full primary identity you'll need."

"We'll see," I said.

I had been looking forward to
talking to him. I had a great deal, I had thought, to tell him. What I most
wanted to talk about was how it could be that, just as it had been back in the
days when I had been playing the stock market, I could almost taste—almost
feel—
what
it was I wanted to take hold of in the time storm. But his sudden criticism put
me off.