Gordon R. Dickson (66 page)

"At any rate," she said,
almost defensively, "we trapped your mental energy pattern in time to keep
it from going through. Something else
could
have gone through, that was
a part of you, though what it would be, there's no way of telling."

"His soul," said
Porniarsk, firmly and clearly.

"Call it that, for the moment,
then," said Dragger. "At any rate, it's been some eight of the local
days here, since then."

"Eight days? Is that all?"

"That's plenty," said
Ellen.

"It felt like...." I
began, and ran out of words.

"Temporal differences,"
said Dragger, more briskly, "or possibly differences in temporal
perception? It'll take a great deal of study."

"But you did it, Marc,"
said Ellen. "Whoever they are in the other universe, they've been sending
messages in through the lens. The engineers here understand now. They're cutting
off the inflow of differential energy and doing something with the downdraft
instead. It's going to work out. It's all going to work out."

"You were right in the first
place, Marc," said Dragger. "We were too much a part of the time
storm ourselves to realize the forces that were building up."

"It's interesting," put in
Porniarsk. "When you get down to it, there's nothing in such great supply
that it's inexhaustible, no container so large it can't be filled."

"And that's true for a universe
as well as boxes, bags, oceans, and galaxies," said Ellen.

"I should say, however,"
Porniarsk corrected himself, "it may be that the human spirit is
inexhaustible. Time and work will tell."

"You were right, as I said,
Marc," Dragger repeated. She was apparently determined to make her
apology, or say her piece, whichever it was. "We were too close to the
problem to see it properly. Are you interested in the details?"

"You could say that," I
answered. I pulled the pillow up behind me and propped myself up against it. I
got it crooked, but Ellen straightened it out.

"Essentially," Dragger
said, "you were right in assuming that it was a mistake to import energy
into this universe from another one—Ellen told us what you told her, before you
tried to go through the lens."

"The energy already stored in
the increase of entropy by matter falling back in toward itself," I said,
"can be tapped to push it out again, instead of using the energy flow from
the other universe."

"They told you about it over
there, then?" Dragger asked.

"They didn't tell me," I
said. "When you've seen both universes it becomes 'obvious. Theirs is the
opposite of ours. There, something travelling at the speed of light is standing
still. When you started tapping the differential in energy between their universe
and ours, you triggered off the equivalent of an entropic decrease in their
universe, where normality was a continually increasing entropy and a collapsing
universe."

"Ah," said Dragger,
"that explains it."

"Explains why you've got to
work with them to pump back the energy you've taken from them?" I said.

"No," said Dragger,
"we're already doing that, of course. It becomes possible if we use the
downdraft to trigger the release of energy stored on this side, as you said.
No, I'm talking about a message we got from them, thanking us for solving their
problem."

"Oh," I said.

"Apparently," said
Dragger, "they don't realize that you weren't deliberately sent to them as
our representative, and that your concern was to solve the problem here, rather
than altruistically offering to aid them with their problem."

"I see," I said.

"All this is rather
embarrassing to us," said Dragger. "There's little we can do to set
the record straight with them—at least until communications between the two
universes becomes more sophisticated and we understand their conceptual
processes better. In time, no doubt, we can make it clear to them they owe us
no gratitude. But that still leaves us overwhelmingly obligated to you."

"I don't know what you can do
about that," I said. "I was interested in saving this universe for
myself and those I now know I care for. Wait—"

"Yes?" Dragger said.

"There's one thing," I
said. "One of the things that Porniarsk and I hoped for from the beginning
was that you could do something for a leopard who used to be a friend of mine.
He was killed, and Porniarsk put him in a state of timelessness, hoping that,
up here in our future, you people would know how to reverse time for him back
before the moment he was hurt and killed. If you could do that for me-"

"Oh, yes," said Dragger.
"Ellen and Porniarsk both told me about this; and we've looked at the body
of the creature. I'm afraid there's absolutely nothing we can do with
that."

"I see," I said.

"Life isn't something that can
be created simply by an alteration of the temporal matrix, forward or back. You
have to have noticed," said Dragger, "that when you passed through a
time line—a mistwall, as you called it in the past—and through time lines in
travelling with Obsidian to your testing, that your movement in external time
did not change your apparent age or state of health—"

"All right," I said.
"Yes. I understand. All right. Let it go then."

"But what I was going to
say," went on Dragger, "is that life is apparently a concept; and,
given the concept, the rest isn't difficult. As you discovered yourself at the
time you had your conversation with Ellen, in space, before you went to pass
through the lens-"

"Oh, for God's sake!" said
Ellen, exasperatedly.

She went to the door of the bedroom,
opened it, and put her head out into the corridor.

"Doc!" she called.

"—you were able to summon up a
complete conceptual gestalt of your leopard, probably largely thanks to your
developed ability to recognize and think in patterns. We've theorized that what
you did was to put together in your mind a critical number of behavior patterns
of the leopard and this triggered off a creative whole. Now, given this, of
course, it's simple for us—"

"I should have thought of it
myself, of course," said Porniarsk. "I'm ashamed that I didn't."

"—to build a duplicate of the
physical body to which that conceptual gestalt belonged. As Porniarsk says,
this much was possible even in his culture, back in that early time. So, we
took the completed pattern from your unconscious several days ago—"

Doc appeared in the open doorway. A
black, furry thunderbolt shot past him, flew through the air and landed on top
of me, stropping my face with a file-rough tongue. The bed collapsed.

"Oof!" I said.

I had intended to say, "Will
you get the hell off me, you crazy cat?" but I didn't have the wind. He
had knocked it all out of me. It didn't matter.