Gordon R. Dickson (43 page)

"You're sure we couldn't
survive if you stayed?"

"As sure as I am of
anything."

He stood, the heavy mask of his
features facing me silently for a second.

"Do one thing, please," he
said. "It's been some time since you looked into the viewer here. Will you
look again now, and tell me if there's any difference in what you see?"

"Of course," I told him.

I stepped up to the tank and looked
into it. Now that I focused in on the space contained by it, I once more saw
the myriad of tiny lights moving about in it. I looked at them, feeling a
strange disappointment; and it took me a second or two to realize the reason. I
had unconsciously bought my own story about having accomplished some
breakthrough in understanding, the moment with the cardinal. I had really
expected to see something more than I ever had, the next time I looked into
this device; and now came disappointment.

Identified, the disappointment grew
to a sharp pang. It was against all reason. I did not want to discover evidence
that would be against my going with Paula. I wanted evidence that I should go,
and it was exactly that sort of evidence that I was getting. But I realized
that this was not what I really wanted—it was not what my heart wanted.

I reached into my memory to
recapture the moment with the cardinal and the golden light that had been
everywhere. But it slipped away from my imagination. I could not evoke it. A
bitter anger began to rise in me. My mind beat against the iron bars of its own
inability, and what I reached for went further and further from me.

I may have said something. I may
have snarled, or sworn, or made some sound. I think I remember doing something
like that, though I am not sure. But suddenly, there was a touch on my left
hand. My mind cleared. I looked down and saw the Old Man beside me. He had
taken hold of my fingers, and he was looking up at me.

My mind cleared. Suddenly, Sunday
and the cardinal and all things at once came back together again. All the angry
emotion washed out of me and I remembered that it was not by pushing out, but
by taking in, that I had finally found the common pattern that connected me
with all things else. I let go then, opened up my mind to anything and
everything, and looked into the universe tank once more.

There were the lights again. But
now, as I watched, I began to pick up rhythms in their movements, and identify
patterns. Forces were at work to shift them about, and those forces were
revealed in the patterns I saw. As I identified more and more of them, their
number grew until they began to interact, until larger and larger clusters of
lights were locking together in interrelated movements. There was no golden
illumination around me this time; but there was an intensity—not a tension, but
an intensity—that mounted like music rising in volume until it reached a
certain peak, and I broke through. All at once, I was there.

I was no longer standing looking
into a viewing device. I was afloat in the actual universe. I was a point of
view great enough to see from one end of the universe to the other and, at the
same time, able to focus in on single stars, single worlds. Now I observed not
the representation, but the reality; and for the first time I perceived it as a
single, working whole. From particle to atom, to star, to galaxy, to the full
universe itself, I saw all the parts working together like one massive living
organism moving in response to the pressure of entropy....

"My God!"
I said—and I heard my own voice
through the bones of my skull, very small and far away, for I was still out
there in the universe. "My God, it's collapsing! It's contracting!"

For it was. What I looked at were
the patterns of a universe that had been uniformly expanding, all its galaxies
spreading out from each other, creating an entropy that was running down at a
uniform rate. But now the pattern had been expanded too far. It had been
stretched too thin, and now it was beginning to break down in places. Here and
there, galaxies were beginning to fall back into the pattern, to reapproach
each other; and where this was happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those
places, entropy was increasing, side by side and conflicting with those
still-expanding patterns in which entropy continued to decrease.

The result was stress; a chaos of
laws in conflict, spreading like a network of cracks fracturing a crystal,
spreading through the universal space, riding the tides of movement of the
solid bodies through space. It was stress that concentrated and generated new
fractures at the points of greatest mass, primarily at the centers of the
galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran, time states changed, forward or
back, one way or another.

Four billion years ago, the first
stress crack had touched our galaxy. My point of view turned time back to that
point and I saw it happen. An accumulation of entropic conflict near the galaxy
center. A massive star that went nova—but unnaturally,
implosion
nova.

There was a collapse of great mass.
A collapse of space and time, followed by an outburst of radiating time faults,
riding the wave patterns of the stellar and planetary movements within the galaxy,
until at last the time storm reached far out into the galactic arms and touched
our own solar system.

What had gone wrong was everything.
What was falling apart was not merely this galaxy, but the universe itself.
There was nothing to tie to, no place to stand while the process could be
halted, the damage checked and mended. It was too big. It was everything, all
interconnected, from the particles within my own body to the all-encompassing
universe. There was no way I or anyone else could stop something like that. It
was beyond mending by me, by humanity, beyond mending by all living intelligent
beings. Facing it, we were less than transitory motes of dust caught up in a
tornado, helpless to even dream of controlling what hurled us about and would
destroy us at its whim....

27

I woke in my own bed and with the
feeling that I had been through this once before. For a moment, I could not
remember when; then I recalled my earlier experience with the universe tank and
how I had passed out after getting caught up in what I saw there. I felt a
momentary quirk of annoyance. If I was going to fold up every time I tried to
see things in that tank....

But the annoyance faded as I
remembered what I had seen. Here, lying in the familiar bed in the familiar
room with everything simple and usual about me, the memory seemed impossible,
like nothing more than some bad dream. But it was not a bad dream. It was
reality; and in spite of the comfortable appearance of everyday security that
surrounded me, the fact of the time storm as I had seen it loomed over us all
like some giant, indifferent mountain that might crumble and bury us at any
moment, or might let us live a thousand years in peace.

But still... for all that I could
feel the shadow of the storm still dark on me, I was not quite as destroyed by
it as I had been when I had first seen it in its full dimensions, imaged in the
tank. A reaction had taken place inside me, a stubborn reflex against utter
despair and hopelessness. There was no way I could even begin to dream, as I
had for so long, of controlling the storm. And still... and still... something
inside me was refusing to give up. Some strange and snorky part of my being was
insisting that the situation could still be fought and perhaps overcome.

It was impossible. Perhaps a
thousand more individuals like myself, armed with powers beyond the powers of
gods, might have stood a chance of achieving control, but I was alone and had
no such powers. Only, there it was. I could not let go. Something in me refused
to do it.

Ellen came in, carrying a glass of
water.

"How are you?" she asked.

"I'm all right," I said.

The shade was pulled down on the
bedroom's one window and a light was on. But now that I looked, I saw the
paler, but brighter, gleam of daylight around the edge and bottom of the shade.

"How long have I been
here?" I asked, as she came over to me. She handed me the glass of water
and also, two white pills.

"Take these," she said.

"What are they?" I asked,
looking at the pills in my hand.

"She didn't tell me, but Marie
said you should take them when you woke up."

"Now damn it, I'm not taking
some medication I don't know about just because you say Marie says I should
take them."

"I think they're only
aspirin."

"Aspirin?"

I looked at them closely. Sure
enough, they had the little cross stamped on one side that was the trademark of
the brand we had been able to get our hands on locally; and when I held them
close to my nose, I could catch a faint whiff of the acid smell that was the
sign of aspirin when it was getting old. Overage drugs were one of our problems
since we were restricted to stocks from time periods all antedating at least
the time when we had balanced the forces of the time storm. These two tablets
were really fresher than most of their kind that I had encountered in the last
half year. Marie must have been hoarding these against some emergency. I felt
ashamed of myself. I did not need the pills, but they would only keep on aging
toward uselessness if I did not take them, while swallowing them would do me no
harm and make Marie feel her efforts had not been wasted.

I took them.

"Porniarsk wants to talk to you
if you're up to it."

"I'm up to it, all right."
I threw the covers back and sat up on the edge of the bed. They had undressed
me. "Where are my pants?"

"Closet," said Ellen.
"Maybe you'd better not get up."

"No, I'm fine," I said.
She looked unconvinced and I decided to lie a little. "I had a headache
but it seems to be getting better already."

"If you're sure," said
Ellen. "I'll go tell him then."

She went out, and I had time to get
dressed before Porniarsk trundled into the room.

"Are you well?" he asked
me.

"Fine," I said. "No
problems. I'm not even particularly tired."

"I'm glad to hear that. Do you
remember what you said before you collapsed?"

"I'm not sure...."

"You said 'My God...' and then
you said 'It's impossible. I can't do it. It can't be done...' Can you tell me
what you meant and what made you say that?"

"What I saw in the tank,"
I said.

I told him what that had been. When
I was through he stood for a second, then creaked off one of his heavy-headed
nods.

"So you believe now that
further effort to control the storm is useless?" he asked.

"That's the way those patterns
looked," I said. "But now... I'm not sure. I still don't see any hope
in them, but at the same time, I don't seem to be able to bring myself to give
up."

"I'm glad of that," said
the avatar. "With no will to succeed, you'd fail even if there was good
reason to expect success. But with will, there's always hope. Porniarsk himself
has always believed that the apparent is only the possible. Therefore failure,
like success, can always be only a possibility, never a certainty."

"Good," I said. "But
what do we do now?"

"That's my question to
you," said Porniarsk. "My earlier guess was right. Your capabilities
are far beyond mine. It's up to you to find the answer."

For the next three days I tried,
while holding Paula in play as well as I could. But the evening of the fourth
day her impatience came out in the open.

"I'll need an answer tomorrow,
Marc," she said, as she went back to her own rooms. "I've spent more
time here now than I planned."

It was the eleventh hour, clearly. I
thought of calling Porniarsk, Ellen, and Marie together for a brainstorming
session and rejected the notion. There was nothing they could do to help me. As
Porniarsk had said, it was up to me—alone.

I isolated myself in the library,
paced the floor for a while, and came up with absolutely nothing. My mind kept
sliding off the problem, like a beetle on a slope of oily glass. Finally, I
gave up and went to bed alone, hoping that something might come to me in my
sleep.

I woke about three hours later,
still without a solution. My mind was spinning feverishly; but only with
worries. What was to become of Ellen and Marie, and for that matter, our whole
community, if I went off as Paula's captive-servant and either died or did not
come back? What could help the world if the local forces of the storm broke out
of balance again? There was no answer anywhere except the hope of doing
something with the storm after all and using control of its forces to somehow
break the hold that Paula's superior army gave her over us all.

And I could not find such a hope.
Every possibility seemed bleak and dry and worn out. There was only one way to
unlock the door confronting me—with some kind of a key; and there was no key.
My thoughts had spun around in a circle so long they were exhausted. I threw on
the topcoat that I used as a bathrobe and went back to the library to get away
from my own circular idea-dance.