Gordon R. Dickson (51 page)

We finished going over all
possibilities by mid-afternoon of the day before the soldiers were due in. Doc
had been checking the progress of our invaders from the air, at heights of ten
to fifteen thousand feet. Whether they noticed him—the milky-colored aircraft
was all but invisible to the ground at that altitude—or not, they continued to
come on steadily, neither slowing nor increasing their first observed rate of
travel. If they had been the total force that Paula could bring against us, it
would have been a temptation to go out and meet them. A night raid or two on
their camp, led by some of our people who had picked up special skills from
Doc, plus a few good daytime ambushes, could have cut their strength to a point
where we would have been able to defend against them quite handily. But Paula
could keep after us forever, and there was no use wasting lives.

I had been worrying about what to do
with the Experimentals, now that some of us were moving forward in time and the
rest taking to the hills. Paula was just the sort of person to kill them all on
sight when she found out I had escaped, if they were left behind and
undefended.

That problem, however, I found no
longer existed. Apparently, when the Old Man had taken his interest in me, the
rest of the village had started to disintegrate socially. Except for a few of
the others who had formed alliances with some of the human families and were
either going forward with these families or taking to the hills with them, the
rest had long since wandered away from the village on their own and
disappeared. It was a sad sort of diaspora to think about, because there was
nothing away from here for them but the lives of solitary, intelligent animals;
but there was nothing I, or any of our people, could do about it now. It could
be, I told myself, that there was a consciousness in them that their race, as a
race, had no future—just as it had had no past beyond a test tube. But that
thought did not make me feel any better.

In any case, I had no time to think
about Experimentals now. This afternoon was the afternoon that had been picked
for saying goodbyes. I made myself available out in the landing area; and they
came up by individuals and families and groups to say farewell, not only to me,
but to the rest of us who were going. I was surprised, and even a little
secretly unhappy, to see the number who had decided to take their chances
running from Paula the rest of their lives, in preference to following me
forward. But, it was their decision; and better they make it now while they had
the chance than regret that they had not made it, later.

Dinner time was to be the end of the
farewells. We broke off finally and went inside. I had wanted to hold a meeting
of the people who would be with me in the monad before we settled down to eat;
but when we all gathered in the dining room there were some extra faces. One of
these was merely Wendy, who had never shown any interest in being part of the
time storm work, but who was welcome to the monad if she wanted to join. Also,
there were her gangling young boyfriend, who was not welcome under any
circumstances, and Abe Budner, our big, slow-moving Director of Food Services
and former chef, whom I liked personally, but whom I had never thought of as
being monad material.

"Abe," I said, as I sat
down at the table, "no offense, but we're just about to start a business
meeting. You and—"

"Marc," said Marie.

My mind suddenly became alert. By
which I mean that it came out of the whole problem of the move into time and
back to the everyday present of the dining room and the people now in it. I
woke to the fact that Marie, Wendy, the boyfriend and Abe were all in hiking
gear, rough clothes and heavy boots. I also became aware that there was a silence
in the room, a tense silence on the part of everybody else that said that all
of them there had known for some time about what I was just now recognizing.

I looked at Marie.

"You're not going?" I
said.

"That's right, Marc," she
said. Now that I really examined her for the first time in a very long, long
period, I was a little shocked at what I saw. Her face was tired, and
definitely now showed the signs of middle-age, the crow's-feet at the corners
of the eyes, the sagging of the chin line. I had never really looked at her in
all these months. I had never thought to look.

"Get out of here, the rest of
you," I said, hoarsely. I did not specify who the rest were, but they all
left the room except the four who were dressed to travel, and Ellen.

"Wendy and Walter don't want to
go into the future, Marc," Marie said. "And I've decided to go along
with them and Abe."

"Marie..." I said. The
words would not come. Patterns flashed and clicked through my mind; and I saw
what I did not want to see. If Marie stayed here, Paula would find her sooner
or later; and Paula would remember that Marie had been one of my two wives. It
was inevitable—no, it was not inevitable. Did I think I was a deity to deal in
inevitability? But it was so overwhelmingly probable that the chances it might
not happen were too insignificant to consider.

"Marie," I said.
"Don't you understand? Unless you go with me, you'll land right in Paula's
hands. Believe me, I know. You will."

"Even if I do," she said.

"Look..." I made an effort
to get the emotion out of my voice and talk reasonably. "There's no point
in throwing yourself away just because Wendy wants to stay. I know, she's
young, and-"

"You don't understand,"
Marie said. "I don't want to go with you. I
want
to stay here
myself."

Understanding suddenly struck me
like a numbing blow. I had not fooled anyone, it seemed, except myself. I
realized now that she and Ellen had known all along how I had reacted to Paula,
and what at least part of my reason was for going off with her.

"Listen to me," I said.
"About Paula and me—"

"Marc," Marie said.
"You're going to have to understand. It's me who doesn't want to go into
the future. It's me. I can't take this moving any more. I'm sick of it. I want
to settle in one place and stay."

"With Paula hunting you
down?" I couldn't believe what I heard.

"That doesn't matter. I'll be
here, in this world, not in some other. Not starting all over again. I can't
keep starting over and over again, Marc. You can. All right, you go ahead. But
I want a little ordinary life for as long as I can have it, here, before the
end comes."

I shook my head. It was all crazy.
Vaguely, I became aware that even the ones who had stayed behind before had
gone—Wendy and the boyfriend and Abe. All except Ellen, and she was standing
far back now in a corner of the room, almost lost in shadow. Marie came around
the table to me.

"You never did understand me,
Marc, did you?" she said. "You didn't understand me from the first;
and you didn't love me."

"Maybe not at first," I
said; and my voice had gone hoarse again. It was part of the general craziness
that I should be standing here now telling her this while the other woman I
loved stood back listening. "It's different now."

"Not different enough,"
she said. "Not to the point where you'd move one inch out of your way for
me. Or anyone."

"That's not true."

"Then prove it. Stay here
yourself. Don't go forward."

"Marie! For Christ's sake, talk
sense!"

"I am talking sense. But you
can't even hear me." She stopped and said nothing for a moment; then, surprisingly,
she reached up and stroked my cheek with her fingers, very gently. "It's
all right, Marc. You don't have to hear. You can't change for me, I know that.
But there's a point beyond which I can't change for you. Nobody can make all
the changes you'd like them to make, don't you know that?"

"I just want you to live,"
I said. "I don't want Paula to get you."

"I know, dear," she said.
"But it won't work. I've got to stay; and even if you wanted to stay too,
you couldn't protect me."

"Don't be so damn sure about
that!" I said; and for an insane, small second, hope of straightening this
out after all flickered alive in me. "If I decided to take Paula and all
her army apart, it might take some time; but—"

"You'd be throwing yourself
away on something other than what you're built to do," she said. "If
things went that way, I'd have held you prisoner here, instead of you taking me
prisoner into the future."

I didn't know what to tell her.

"Marc," she said, raising
her face to me. "Say goodby to me."

The ghost of some giant hand took me
by the neck and bent my head down to hers. I kissed her and her lips felt dry
and strange, as if I had never known them before. She hugged me, and I hung on
to her in return until she used strength to break herself loose.

"There," she said,
stepping back a pace, "it'll be all right. A big part of it is you just
can't bear to lose anything, Marc. But it'll be all right in the long run.
Goodby now; and be careful."

She went out. I watched the doorway
through which she had gone, and when I looked around not even Ellen was in the
room. I went out into the shadows of the evening and walked by myself for a
long while.

When I came back inside, it was
nearly ten o'clock and there were a great many things to be done. I called
together the monad, which now consisted of the Old Man, Ellen, Bill and myself.
Doc had volunteered to join us; and with Marie missing, I now more than wanted
him, I needed him there. I went over the patterns with them, as best I could
describe them. Not so much because the patterns would mean anything particular
to them; but the more their minds could identify with mine once we were in
action together, the stronger we would be as a unit, and the more certain I
could be of doing what I had set out to do.

Most of the people in the community
who were leaving had already gone by midnight, when the meeting broke up. I
sent Doc out to check that everyone was clear of the area who did not want to
be transported forward with the rest of us. It was one of those coffee nights, when
everything is due to happen with the next day's sunrise, and the nerves feel
stretched to the point where they sing like guitar strings at a touch. A warm
weather front had moved in early in the evening, and the dark outside was still
and hot. Only a faint rumble of thunder sounded from below the horizon, from
time to time; and the lights among the buildings down below were fewer even
than they might be at this hour on an icy winter night, so that already the
community looked like a ghost town.

Doc came back.

"Everyone gone but the
Mojowskis," he said, "and they were just leaving as I came up. Be
clear of the area in another twenty minutes."

"Fine," I said. "Go
on into the lab. Porniarsk's getting everybody into helmets and set to go. Tell
them I'll be along in twenty minutes."

He went. I took one more turn around
outside. The night air was so dark and still it could almost be felt by the
fingers; and the mutter of distant thunder seemed to sound halfway around the
horizon of the plain below. I had a vision of Paula's soldiers night-marching
through the gloom to take us by surprise. But even if they had started to move
the moment the sun was down, they could not get here in time. No one was moving
in the streets of the town below. Those going with us would be in their homes,
waiting.

I went into the summer palace and
took a final tour of the building. The rooms seemed oddly empty, as if they had
been abandoned for years. I stepped into the courtyard where Sunday lay for a
moment, but without turning on the lights. As I stood there, a cicada shrilled
suddenly in the darkness at my feet and began to sing.

I went back inside, with the song of
the cicada still trilling in my head. It stayed with me as I went down the
halls and into the brightly lit lab. Everybody was in place, with helmets
already on. Only Porniarsk stood by the directing console, which he had moved
out into the center of the room by the tank. I went to the tank myself, to make
one last check of the patterns, for we had it set on the pattern of our moment
of destination. There was no change in what I saw there.

I seated myself and took a helmet.
As I lowered it over my head, the cicada sound was still ringing in my ears, so
that it was like being trapped under there with it. I felt my strength flow
together with the strength of the others in the monad and the memory of the
cicada sound was lost in the silent song of blended identities as I opened
myself to the time storm forces in balance around us.

They were there. They had been there
all this time, waiting, quivering in balance like a tangle of arrested
lightnings. I read their pattern at a glance this time and laid the far future
pattern that I wanted like a template upon them. There was matching and overlap
and disagreement between the two patterns. I reached out with the strength of
the monad, pushed, and the two slid together. It was suddenly done, and over.
There had been nothing to it.

I took off my helmet and looked
around. The others were taking off their helmets also and, under the fluorescent
lights, their faces looked pale and wondering, like the faces of children.
"We're there?" said Ellen. "But where are we?"