Gordon R. Dickson (42 page)

Bill looked at her quickly.

"You don't mean that."

"All right, I don't," said
Ellen. "But it gripes me."

She folded her arms and looked
hard-eyed at me.

"And what about the time
storm?" Bill said to me. "How can you keep on working toward a way to
do something permanent about that, if you go off with Paula? What if the
balance of temporal forces we set up breaks down sometime in the time you're
gone? What if it breaks down tomorrow?"

"If it breaks down tomorrow, I
can't do a thing more about it but try to reestablish the balance again, the
way I did the first time."

"You can't do that if you're
not here," Marie said.

"Don't talk nonsense,
Marie," I said to her. "Paula needs a stable Earth as much as we do.
She'd send me back in a hurry to reestablish a balance of forces if that
balance broke down and mist-walls started moving again."

"It might not be so easy to
reestablish next time, Porniarsk says," Bill put in. "What about
that?"

"If it's not as easy, it's not
as easy," I told them all. "I tell you I'm not yet ready to take on
the time storm again to produce any more permanent state of balance than I did
before."

For a second, nobody said anything.
The silence was as prickly as a fistful of needles.

"Anyway," said Ellen,
"have you checked with Porniarsk? You owe him that much before you do
anything like going off."

As a matter of fact, I had
completely forgotten about Porniarsk. The avatar was never concerned or
consulted in any of our purely human councils about community matters; and as a
result, I had fallen out of the habit of thinking about him when decisions like
this were to be made. Ellen was quite right. I could not do anything with the
time storm if I lost the help of Porniarsk. If I simply went off with Paula and
he should think I'd given up on the storm....

"I haven't checked with him
yet," I said. "Of course I will. I'll go talk to him now. I suppose
he's in the lab?"

"I think so," said Bill.

"Yes, he is," said Ellen.
"I was just in there."

That bit of information caught at my
attention. As far back as I could remember, Ellen had never paid any particular
attention to Porniarsk. I went out and down the corridors toward the lab. On
the way, I passed the little interior courtyard where Sunday lay preserved; and
on impulse I checked, turned, and went in to look at him.

I had not come to see him in months.
It had been a painful thing even to think of him for a long time; and while now
the pain was understood and largely gone, the habit of avoidance was still
strong in me. But at this moment, there was a feeling in me almost as if I
should let the crazy cat know that I was going—as if he was still alive and
would worry when I did not come back immediately. The roofless courtyard was
dark, except for starglow, when I stepped into it, and cold with the spring
night. I closed the door by which I had come out and reached out to thumb on
the light switch controlling the floodlights around the walls. Suddenly the
courtyard was illuminated so brightly it hurt my eyes; there, to my right, was
the transparent box in which Sunday lay.

It was like a rectangular fish tank
a little longer than the leopard and perhaps three feet deep, set up on a
wooden support about coffee table height and dimensions. Within, it held that
same fluid-looking stuff that filled Porniarsk's universe viewing tank and
which he had given me to understand was actually something like an altered
state of space—if you could picture nothingness as having variable states. At
any rate, what he told me it did was to hold Sunday's body in a condition
outside of the movement of time, any time. As a result, his body was even now
in exactly the same condition it had been in less than two hours after his
death, when Porniarsk had surrounded it with a jury-rigged version of this
non-temporal space tank.

Nearly two hours, of course, was far
too long for him to have been dead if we had been hoping for any sort of
biological revival. If it had been possible to mend his wounds and start his
life processes in the present state of his dead body, there would have been
nothing to bring to life. His brain cells had died within minutes without
oxygen, and the information contained in them was lost. A body in perpetual
coma would have been all we could have achieved.

But what Porniarsk had hopes of was
something entirely different. It was his expectation that, if we could learn to
control the time storm even a little, we might be able to either acquire the
knowledge directly, or contact others farther up the temporal line who had it,
so that we could return the temporal moment of Sunday's body back to a few
seconds before he had been wounded. It was a far-fetched hope and one that I,
myself, had never really been able to hold. But if Porniarsk could believe in
it, I was willing to go along with him as far as his faith could take us.

Perhaps at that, I thought to myself
as I stood looking at Sunday's silent form lying there with its eyes closed and
its wounds hidden under bandages, I had indeed had some secret and sneaking
hope of my own, after all. I needed to hope. Because Sunday was still there in
my mind like a chunk of jagged ice that would not melt. He represented
unfinished business on my part. He had died before I could show him that I
appreciated what he had given me—and the fact that the gift was an unthinking
animal's one did nothing to lessen the obligation. What I owed to the others,
to Ellen, to Marie perhaps, and Bill—or even to Porniarsk himself—I still had
time to pay, because they were still alive and around. But the invoice for
Sunday's love, and his death, which had come about because he had rushed to
rescue and protect me, still hung pinned to the wall of my soul with the dagger
of my late-born conscience.

No—it was not because of how he had
died that I was in debt to him, I thought now, watching his motionless body in
the floodlights. It was what he had done for me while he was alive. He had
cracked open the hard shell that cased my emotions, so that now I walked
through the world feeling things whether I wanted to or not; which was
sometimes painful, but which was also a part of living. No, regardless of what
happened with Paula, I could never be diverted permanently from work with the
time storm, if only for my hope of seeing Sunday alive again, so that I could
let him know how I felt about him.

I turned off the lights. Suddenly,
in the dark and the starlight, I began to shiver, great shuddering, racking
shivers. I had become chilled, standing there in the raw spring night in my
shirtsleeves. I went back to the warmth inside and down the hall a little
farther to Porniarsk's lab.

He was there when I stepped through
its door and the Old Man was with him, squatting silently against one of the
walls and watching, as the avatar stood gazing into the universe tank. They
both turned to me as I came toward them.

"I thought I'd drop by," I
said; and the social words sounded foolish in this working room, spoken to the
alien avatar and the experimental, near-human animal. I hurried to say
something more to cover up the fatuous sound of it. "Have you found out
anything new?"

"I've made no great gain in
knowledge or perception," Porniarsk said, quite as if I had last spoken to
him only an hour or two before, instead of something like months since.

"Do you think you will?" I
said.

"I have doubts I will," he
said. "I'm self-limited by what I am, as this one here—" he pointed
to the Old Man, who turned to gaze at him for a second before looking back at
me, "is self-limited by what he is. Porniarsk himself might do a great
deal more. Or you might."

"You're sure there's no hope of
getting Porniarsk here?" I asked. I had asked that before; but I could not
help trying it again, iii the hope that this time the answer would be
different.

"I'm sure. There's a chance of
something large being accomplished here. But there's a certainty of something not
so large, but nonetheless important, being accomplished where Porniarsk is now.
He will never leave that certainty for this possibility."

"And you can't tell me where he
is, even?"

"Not," said the avatar,
"in terms that would make any sense to you."

"What if things change? Could
you then?"

"If things change, anything is
possible."

"Yes," I said. I was
suddenly very aware that we were at the end of a long and full day. I would
have sat down just then if there had been a chair nearby; but since neither Porniarsk
nor the Old Man used chairs, the nearest one at the moment was at a far end of
the room, and it was not worth my going and bringing it back.

"I haven't been getting
anywhere myself, I'm afraid," I said— and immediately, having said it,
remembered that this was not quite true. I hesitated, wondering if my
experience of several days past with the cardinal that had come to perch on the
bird feeder, and all that had followed, would mean anything to the avatar.
"Well, there has been something."

He waited. The Old Man waited. If
they had been two humans, at least one of them would have asked me what that
something had been.

"I've been doing a lot of
reading for some time now..." I went on after a moment; and I proceeded to
tell Porniarsk how the Old Man had cracked me loose from the mental fog I'd
been in ever since Sunday's death, and how I had started on my search through
everything I could lay my hands on between book covers. I had never told him
this before; and, hearing the words coming from my mouth now, I found myself
wondering why I had not.

Porniarsk listened in silence, and
the Old Man also listened. How much the Old Man comprehended I had no way of
telling. He certainly understood a fair amount of what we humans said to each
other, apparently being limited, not so much by vocabulary, as by what was
within his conceptual abilities. Certainly he knew I was talking about him part
of the time, and almost certainly, he must have understood when I was talking
about that moment on the mountainside when I was ready to kill him and the
touch of his hand stopped me.

Porniarsk let me go through the
whole thing, right down to the description of the golden light and my helping
Orrin Elscher unload his pickup truck. When I was finally done, I waited for
him to say something, but still he did not.

"Well," I said, at last.
"What do you think? Did I really break through to something, or didn't
I?"

"I've no way to answer that
question," Porniarsk said. "Any discovery can be valuable. Whether
it's valuable in the way we need it to be, valuable toward learning how to
control the time storm, I've no way of knowing. Basically, I'd say that
anything that expands your awareness would have to be useful."

I found myself less than happy with
him. It had been a great thing to me, that episode with the cardinal and the
golden light and the passage with Elscher; and the avatar's treating it so
calmly rubbed me the wrong way. I was on the edge of snapping at him; then it
came to me that I was having one of the suspect emotions —anger.

So—why was I angry? I asked myself
that, and the answer came back quickly and clearly. I was angry because I had
been expecting to be patted on the back. Subconsciously, I had been cooking in
the back of my head all this time a neat little argument for him, to the effect
that I had made this large step forward, working on my own; so going off with
Paula would not waste any time, since I could continue working toward more
large steps while I was away. But now Porniarsk had shot the whole scheme down
by not showing the proper astonishment and awe at my accomplishment; and I was
left without the necessary springboard for my argument.

All right. So it was a case of going
back and starting over again —with honesty this time.

"We're up against a
situation," I said. "I may have to leave here for a time. I don't
know how long."

"Leave?" Porniarsk asked.

I told him about Paula.

"You see?" I said, when I
was done. 'The only safe way for the people here—and for that matter, for what
you have in this room and any work with the time storm—is for me to go along
with her, for a while anyway. But it's temporary. I'll only be gone for a
while. I want you to know that."

"I can understand your
intentions," said Porniarsk. "Can I ask if you've weighed the
importance of what you want to protect here against the importance of what you
may be able to do eventually in combatting the time storm? If nothing else, an
accident could destroy you while you're away from here."

"Accident could destroy me
here."

"It's much less likely to do so
here, however; isn't that so? With this Paula, you'll be moving into an area of
higher physical risk?"

"Yes, I guess so," I said.
"No. No guess about it. You're right, of course."

"Then perhaps you shouldn't
go."

"God help me, Porniarsk!"
I said. "I've got to! Don't you understand? We can't fight her and
survive. And we've got to survive first and get our work with the time storm
done after, because there's no way to do it the other way around."