Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

The meeting was breaking up. Some of the figures in the stands were simply disappearing, some were walking off through visible doorways, some were simply melting into the illusions of surrounding scenery. I found myself alone with Porniarsk, Obsidian, and Dragger.

“We’ll check, of course,” said Dragger to me. “Tell me, Marc, what is it exactly you want?”

“I want to fight the time storm. Myself. Personally.”

“I have to say I can’t see how that can be anything but a complete impossibility,” she said. “On the other hand, there are always new things to be learned.”

“They’re a great people, Marc,” said Porniarsk, once we were alone again in the ordinary configuration of Obsidian’s quarters— which Obsidian had, by now, largely given over to our own private use. “You shouldn’t forget that.”

“You think they are?” I said.

I heard him as if from a middle distance. I was once more as I had been when we had just left Earth on the way here in Obsidian’s quarters; like someone who had trained years for a single conflict. I was light and empty inside, remote and passionless, hollow of everything but the thought of the battle that would come, which nothing could avert or delay.

“Yes,” he said, “they’ve survived the time storm. They’ve learned to live with it, even to use it for their own benefit, and they’ve made a community of innumerable races, a community that’s a single, working unit. Those are great achievements. They deserve some honor.”

“Let other people honor them, then,” I said. It was still as if I was talking to him from some distance off. “I’ve got nothing left except for what I’ve still got waiting for me.”

“Yes,” he said. He sounded oddly sad. “Your foe. But these people aren’t your foe, Marc. Not even the time storm’s your foe.”

“You’re wrong there,” I told him.

“No.” He shook his ponderous head.

I laughed.

“Marc,” he said, “listen to me. I’m alive, and that alone surprises me. I’d expected I’d stop living, once I was taken from the time in which Porniarsk existed. But it seems, to my own deep interest, that in some way I’ve got an independent life now, a life of my own. But even if this is true, it’s a single life only. I was constructed, not engendered. I can’t have progeny. My life’s only this small moment in which I live it; and I’m concerned with what and whom I share that moment. In this case, it’s you, Ellen, Bill, Doc, and the rest.”

“Yes,” I said. At another time, what he had said might have moved me deeply. But at the moment, I was too remote, too concentrated. I heard and understood what he told me; but his words were like a listing of academic facts, off somewhere on the horizon of my existence, shrunken by their distance from what obsessed me utterly.

“Because of this,” he said, “I’m concerned with what you’re planning to do. I’m afraid for you, Marc. I want to save what I’ve got no other words to call but your soul. If that’s to be saved, sooner or later, you’ll have to reconcile yourself with things as they are. And unless you do it in time, you’ll lose your battle. You’ll die.”

“No,” I said. The need for sleep was deep in me and I only wanted to end the talking. “I won’t lose. I can’t afford to. Now I’ve got to get some rest. I’ll talk to you after I wake up, Porniarsk.”

But when I finally woke up, Dragger was standing over the cushion on which I lay.

“Marc,” she said, “your training as a temporal engineer is going to begin at once; and if you can absorb that, you’ll be taken out to where the line of battle runs with the time storm forces.”

I was suddenly fully awake and on my feet. She was going on, still talking. Porniarsk was also to be given the training. This was a bonus, because in no way had I dared to hope I could win for him also what I had wanted for myself. But now he, too, would have the chance. There was a comfort for me in the sight of his ugly, heavy bulldog shape. He was like a talisman from home, a good omen.

Obsidian took us far across space again. For the first time we came to another vehicle. It was like a raft the size of a football field, with some sort of invisible, impalpable shield, like a dome, over it to keep in an atmosphere that would preserve workable temperatures and pressures for the massive engineering equipment it carried. Barring the star scene that arched over us in every direction, it was like nothing so much as being in the engine room of an incredibly monstrous battleship.

All the way out to this star raft in Obsidian’s quarters, and for nearly two weeks of Earth time after we got there, Porniarsk and I were force-fed with information from the teaching machines Obsidian had talked about. It was an unnerving process. We were like blank cassette tapes in a high speed duplicator. There was no physical sensation of being packed with instruction; and in fact, the information itself did not become usable until later, when contact with some of the actual engineering work going on aboard the raft tapped it, the way a keg of wine might be tapped. But at the same time, there was a psychic consciousness of mental lumber being added to our mental warehouses that was curiously exhausting in its own way. The sensation it produced was something like that which can come from weeks of overwork and nervous strain, to the point where the mind seems almost physically numb.

How Porniarsk reacted to it was something I had no way of knowing, because we were kept separated. Emotionally isolated by my own purpose, I was generally indifferent to what was being done to me, physically or mentally; and when, in due time, the process of information-feeding ended, I fell into a deep sleep that must have lasted well beyond the six hours of my normal slumber period. When I woke, suddenly, all the knowledge that had been pumped into me exploded from the passive state into the active.

I had opened my eyes in the same unstressed state of thoughtlessness that normally follows a return from the mists of sleep. I was at peace, unthinking—and then, suddenly the reality of the universe erupted all about me. I was all at once bodiless, blind, and lost, falling through infinity, lifetimes removed from any anchor point of sanity or security.

I tumbled; aware—too much aware—of all things. Panic built in me like a deep-sea pressure against the steel bulkhead of my reason, threatening to burst through and destroy me. There was too much, all at once, crowding my consciousness. Suddenly I had too much understanding, too much awareness...

I felt the pressure of it starting to crack me apart; and then, abruptly, my long-held purpose came to my rescue. Suddenly I was mobilized and fighting back, controlling the overwhelming knowledge. I had not come this far in time and space and learning to disintegrate now in an emotional spasm. The universe was no bigger than my own mind. I had discovered that for myself, before this. I had touched the universe, not once, but several times previously. It was no great frightening and unknowable entity. It was part of me, as I was part of it. A thing did not frighten itself. An arm did not panic at discovering it was attached to a body.

I surged back. I matched pressure for pressure. I held.

But my mind was still far removed from my body, back on the raft. It felt as if, at the same time, I was floating motionless, and flying at great speed through infinity. My vantage point was somewhere between the island universes, out in intergalactic space. In a sense, it was as if I stood on the peak of a high mountain, from which I could see the misty limits of all time and space. Almost, it seemed, I could see to the ends of the universe; and for the first time, the total action of the time storm activity became a single pattern in my mind.