Gordon R. Dickson (62 page)

She did not say any more until we
came, at last, to the edges of our own galaxy and moved in among its stars,
ourselves now within the mouth of the funnel.

"When possible," she said,
"we give the individual engineer a sector of work that includes their own
home world. Your sector, Marc and Porniarsk, will include the world from which
Obsidian brought you to us. Just now, there's no work going on in it. For the
moment, no changes in the temporal forces are appearing here, although the
earlier forces aren't balanced fully except in the local area of your world
where you balanced them yourself, we understand, back before we have records of
the storm. But there are going to be forces building up farther in toward the
galaxy's center in about nine months of your local time. You'll have that many
months to study your sector. Your bodies are being returned there and you'll be
able to spend some time in them. Obsidian's returning them and bringing in the
equipment you'll need individually to work in this sector."

We were in sight of Sol, now; and to
my eyes, the star scene had a familiar look that moved me more deeply than I
would have expected it could.

"I was told of one more test to
be passed back here," said Porniarsk.

"There's one," said
Dragger, "but not for you—for Marc. Marc, in the final essential, the only
way we'll ever know whether you can work with the time storm is to see you work
with it. Only, if it turns out you can't, it'll almost certainly destroy you.
That's why this is the last test; because it's the one that can't be taken
under other than full risk conditions."

"Fencing with naked
weapons," I said.

I had not meant to say it out loud,
for one reason because I did not think Dragger would know what I was talking
about; but she surprised me.

"Exactly," She said.
"And now, I'll get back to my own work. Marc, Porniarsk, watch out for the
downdraft, now that you're sensitized to it. It seems diffuse and weak out
here; but don't forget it's always with you, whether you're in space like this,
or down on a planet surface. Like any subtle pressure, it can either wear you
down slowly, or build up to the point where it can break you."

"How soon will Obsidian return,
so we can have our bodies back?" Porniarsk asked.

"Soon. No more than a matter of
hours now. Perhaps, in terms of your local time, half a day."

"Good," said Porniarsk.
"We'll see you again."

"Yes," she said.
"Before the next buildup of forces that affects this sector."

"Goodby, Dragger," I said.
"Thanks."

"There's no reason for thanks.
Goodby, Marc. Goodby, Porniarsk."

"Goodby, Dragger,"
Porniarsk said.

She was suddenly gone. As we had
been talking, we had drawn on into the Solar System, until we now hung
invisibly above the Earth at low orbit height of less than two hundred miles
above its surface.

"I'd like to go down, even
without our bodies and make sure everything's been going well," said
Porniarsk.

"Yes," I said; then
checked myself. "-No."

"No?"

"Something's sticking in my mind,"
I said. "I don't like it. Dragger was talking about this sector being
affected by a buildup of time forces farther in toward the center of the
galaxy, in about nine months."

"If you'll consult the same
information I had impressed on me," said Porniarsk, mildly, "you'll
see that the area of space she was talking about is quite large. It'd be
reasonable to assume that the chance of our own solar system being strongly
affected by that buildup should be rather small—"

"I don't like it, though,"
I said, "I've got a feeling...."

I stopped.

"Yes?" said Porniarsk.

"Just a feeling. Just a sort of
uneasy hunch," I said. "That's why I didn't say anything about it to
Dragger—it's too wispy an idea. But I think I'd like to take a look at the
forces of that full area from close up, out here, before I go down to Earth.
You go ahead. It won't take me much longer to do that than the few hours we
have to kill, anyway, before Obsidian gets here with our carcasses; and
nobody's going to realize we're around until then. You go ahead. I'll be
along."

"If that's what you want,"
said Porniarsk. "You don't need me with you?"

"No reason for you to come at
all," I said. "Go ahead down. Check up on things. You can check up
for both of us."

"Well, then. If that's what you
want," said Porniarsk.

I had no way of telling that he had
gone; but in any case, I did not wait to make sure he was. Even while I had
been talking to him, the uneasy finger of concern scratching at my mind had
increased its pressure. I turned away from the Earth and the solar system, to
look south, east, west, and north about the galactic plane at the time storm
forces in action there.

37

It was not just the forces
themselves I wanted to study. It was true that they would have progressed
considerably since I had last viewed them in the tank of Porniarsk's lab; but
that tank had still given me patterns from which I could mentally extrapolate
to the present with a fair certainty of getting the present picture of matters,
in general. But what concerned me was how those patterns would look in the
light of my new knowledge; not only of the engine around S Doradus and the lens
there, but of the downdraft as well. The downdraft worried me—if only for the
fact that it had had the capacity to disturb me, gut-wise as well as mentally,
when I had encountered it.

The situation I found in the area
when I examined it was one in which the sectors were established within force
lines that had been stabilized by the universal community, so that they might
be used by members of that community in physical travel amongst stars. I was
now able to trace with no difficulty the first twenty-nine force line time
shifts Obsidian's quarters had used in carrying us to the testing by Dragger
and the others. I could have continued to trace them all the way to our
destination; but right now, I was concerned only with the situation in the area
to which Dragger had assigned me.

Between the force lines, stability
did not exist—except in our own area around Earth where we had produced it
ourselves. Struck by a sudden curiosity, I checked the Earth's balance of
forces with what I now knew about the time storm and satisfied myself that the
present balance was not my doing. My original balance had evidently lasted far
longer than I had expected—in fact, for several hundred years. But since that
time, it had been periodically renewed by an outside agency. I was puzzled for
a second that Porniarsk had not picked up this evidence of outside time storm
control earlier than the present period. Then I remembered that the search had
been made by the computer mind of the tank; and undoubtedly Porniarsk, like
myself, had never bothered to instruct it to consider a continuing state of
inaction, in what was already a nonstorm area, as an anomaly.

Within the fixed boundary lines of
the stabilized force lines set up to be used for cross-space transportation,
the time storm had gone on in its normal pattern of developing and spreading
temporal disintegration, until about three thousand years ago, when there began
to be evidence of periodic checking of areas threatening to set off large-scale
disturbances throughout the general, galaxy-wide pattern. This checking had
apparently been so minor as to be essentially unnoticeable, until the
cumulative effect of a number of such incidents began to show evidence of
anomaly on the large, general scale; and the tank picked them up.

I studied the stabilized force
lines; and I studied the earlier, smaller evidence of disturbance checking.
What was gnawing at me, I finally decided, was the fact that corrections which
were too small to be important, taken singly, could pile up to have a much more
serious cumulative effect on the stress situation of the galactic area as a
whole.

Moreover, this could kick back
against the flow through the lens and cause exactly the sort of tearing and
enlargement that was the everpresent danger there.

It was all very iffy. It was a chain
reaction of possibilities, only— but I did not like the look of it. I swung
back and forth mentally over the force line stress pattern in my sectors,
trying to make it all add up in some other way than it had just done; but I
kept getting the same answer.

What I was hunting for were those
elements of patterns that would point me toward the evolution of one particular
pattern, less than a year from the present moment. It was difficult and
frustrating because, so far, I had no idea what kind of ultimate pattern it was
I was after. All I had to go on was a subconscious reaction to something I did
not like; as when someone who spends his life in the open, in the woods or on
the sea, will step out of doors on a morning, sniff the air, feel the wind,
look at the sky and say—"I don't like the looks of the weather." The
day might even be bright, sunny and warm, with no obvious hint of change about
it; and still, some deep-brain sensor, conditioned by an experience consciously
forgotten, sends up an alarm signal.

I thought of calling Dragger and
immediately saw the pitfall on that path. Dragger had warned me that the only
way, in the end, to prove I could work with the time storm was for me to work
with it. My starting at shadows, if indeed that was what I was doing now and
there was nothing really for me to worry about, might strike her as just the
sort of sign she had been talking about, that I could not deal with the storm.

She might even be right in thinking
that. She had given me no reason to think there was any dangerous situation
building up here; in fact, she had deliberately reassured me this was not the
case.

Maybe, I thought, the best thing for
me was to put it out of my mind and follow Porniarsk back down to Earth's
surface. I had been paying little attention to time, but now I realized that at
least as many hours had gone by as Dragger had said it would take before
Obsidian was due back on Earth with Porniarsk's body and mine. I should go to
his station now, pick up my body and go back to my own clan.

I turned and went Mentally, it was
only a single stride to Obsidian's quarters, in the forest east of our
community. Obsidian himself was not there when I arrived, nor was the body of
Porniarsk, which meant that the avatar must already be back home. But my own
body was waiting for me; and I sat up in it on the edge of the cushion on which
it had been lying, feeling the strangeness of experiencing the weight and mass
of it under the pull of gravity once more.

As I sat up, the illumination of the
room increased around me, responding to my increased heart beat, temperature,
and half a dozen other signals picked up by its technology from my now
activated body. I stood up and moved to one of the two consoles that still
stood in roughly the same places they had stood on our voyage out.

I knew how to use these now. I
touched the keys of one of them and stepped from the room in Obsidian's
quarters to the spot on the landing area, outside the door of the summer
palace, where Obsidian had always appeared.

The darkness about me when I arrived
came as a small shock. Waking in the room at Obsidian's, I had not realized I
might have come home during the hours when that face of my planet was away from
our sun. For a second after appearing there, I felt oddly as if I had not come
home in the body, after all, but as if I was still only a point of view,
hovering there, as I had hovered in space a few moments past, overlooking the
whole galaxy and all the stars that were now shining down upon me.

The drawn shades on the windows of
the summer palace were warm with light. Everyone there would be celebrating
Porniarsk's return and expecting me at any moment. I turned and looked away,
down the slope to the town below; and under the bright new moon of midsummer, I
saw the buildings down there had their windows also warmly lit against the
night. I had been intending to turn to the door immediately, and go on into the
palace; but now I found myself caught where I was.

The small, cool wind of the after
sunset hours wrapped itself around me. I could hear it moving also in the
distance, whistling faintly amongst the trees on the slope below. No night bird
called; and the chill and the silence held me apart from the light and the talk
that would be indoors. Out of the avalanche of printed words I had read during
my mad period crept something more for me to remember. Not a quote this time,
but a story—the French-Canadian legend of La Chasse Galerie. It was a myth
about the spirits of the old voyagers who had died away from home, out on the
fur trade routes, coming back in a large ghost canoe on New Year's Eve for a
brief visit with their living families and the women they had loved.

Standing alone in the darkness,
strangely held from going inside, I felt myself like one of those returned
ghosts. Inside the lighted windows there were the living; but no matter how
much I might want to join them, it would be no use. Like the ghosts of the
voyagers, I was no longer one of them, within. I had become something else,
part of another sort of place and time. It seemed to me suddenly that the small
cold breeze I felt and heard no longer wrapped around me, but blew straight
through my bones, as it did through the tree limbs below me; and I thought that
all my life I had been outside, looking at lighted windows, thinking how good
it would be to be inside.