Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“So, Marc,” said a voice—or a thought. It was both and neither, here where there were no bodies and no near stars—“you survived.”

It was Dragger speaking. I looked for her, instinctively, and did not see her. But I knew she was there.

“Yes,” I said. I was about to tell her that I had never intended anything else, but a deeper honesty moved me at the last second. “I had to.”

“Evidently. Do you understand the temporal engineering process, now?”

“I think so,” I said; and as I said it, the knowledge that had been pumped into me began to blend with what I was now experiencing, and the whole effort they were making unrolled into order and relationship, like a blueprint in my mind.

“This isn’t the way I imagined it,” I said. “You’re actually trying to stop the time storm, by physical efforts, to reverse its physical effect on the universe.”

“In a sense.”

“In a sense? All right, say in a sense. But it’s still physical reversal. To put it crudely, in the sort of terms you’re most familiar with, the normal decay of entropy began to stop and reverse itself when the universe stopped expanding. Then, when the farther stars and the outer galaxies started falling back here and there, they set up areas where entropy was increasing rather than decaying. Isn’t that right, Dragger? So it had to be these stresses, these conflicts between the two states of entropy in specific areas, that spawned the nova implosions and triggered the time faults, so that on one side of a sharp line, time was moving one way, and on the other, a different way. So that’s what made the time storm! But I assumed you’d be attacking the storm directly to cure it.”

“We’re after the root cause.”

“Are you, Dragger? But this way—this is using sheer muscle to mend things.”

“Do you know of a better way?”

“But—using energy to reverse the falling back of these physical bodies, to force them to move apart again? There ought to be some way that wouldn’t require tapping another universe. Isn’t that what you’re doing—and tapping a tachyon universe at that? You’re working with forces that can tear this universe apart.”

“I asked you,” repeated Dragger, “do you know a better way?”

“No,” I said. “But I’ve got to see this for myself. I can’t believe you can control something that powerful.”

“Look, then,” said Dragger. “S Doradus is only a thought away from us here.”

It was true. Merely by thinking of it, we were there, with no time spent in the movement. Bodiless, with Dragger bodiless beside me, I hung in space and looked at the great spherical darkness that was the massive engine enclosing the young blue-white giant star called S Doradus. It was an engine that trapped all the radiation from that vast sun, to use it as a focus point, a lens in the fabric of our universe, through which then flowed the necessary jet of energy from the tachyon universe that was being tapped for power-to push not only stars, but galaxies around.

A coldness took my mind. Through that lens, we were touching another place where every physical law, and time itself, was reversed from ours. As long as the lens aperture was controlled, as long as it remained small and unvarying, the reaction between the two universes was under command. But if die lens should tear and open further, under the forces it channelled, the energy flow could flash to proportions too great to be constrained. The fabric between the universes would break wide open; it would be mutual annihilation of both—annihilation in no-time.

“You see now,” said Dragger, “why we didn’t think it was possible for you to do this work. In fact, if you hadn’t been able to make the conceptual jump that set you free to survey the situation, like this, there’d have been no point in even considering it.”

“Made the jump? Just a minute,” I said. “This isn’t something I’ve done all on my own. I must be getting some technological assistance to let my point of view go wheeling through infinite distances, like this.”

“Of course you are,” said Dragger. “But the only person who could make it possible for your mind to endure such assistance was you, yourself. You’re strong enough to endure the sense of dislocation involved. We didn’t think you were. I didn’t think you were. I was wrong.”

“I’ve got work I want to do,” I said. “That helps.”

“A great deal, evidently. At any rate, Marc, you’re one of a select group now. Less than a millionth of one percent of all our people have the talent to do this work and endure the conditions under which it’s done. Are you surprised we doubted that you could? An individual has to be born with the talent to be a temporal engineer. Evidently, you were born with it—millenia before there was such work.”

“I didn’t know about this,” I said. “That’s true enough. But there were other things that called for the same kind of abilities.”

I was thinking of the stock market of that part of me which could never rest until it had tracked down what it searched for; also, of that other part of me that had immediately recognized, in the time storm, an opponent waiting for me....

My mind boggled suddenly and strangely, and shied away from finishing that particular thought. Puzzled, I would have come back to it; but Dragger was talking to me again.

“Are you listening to me, Marc?”

“I’m listening,” I said. I returned my full attention to the moment, and our conversation, with an effort. “Something bothers me, though. If it’s pure technology at work, why is it talent’s needed at all? Why is it only a few can do this? There must be more than a few who can endure the conditions, as you say.”

“There are,” she answered. “And that’s why you’ve got one more strength you have to demonstrate. We need people with a special talent because when we move stars, and more than stars, we make gross changes in the time storm forces. We don’t have any technological device quick enough to safely measure and assess the effect of those changes on the stresses by which we control the flow of energy from the tachyon universe. If the pressure against which we’re exerting our energy flow changes suddenly, the flow can increase, the lens may dilate, and you must have guessed what can happen then, before any adjustment can be made.”

“You mean the lens tearing open,” I said.

“That’s right. Only minds able to read the pattern of the time storm forces, directly, can see danger coming fast enough to correct for it. We who are temporal engineers have to direct our stream of extra-universal energy and, at the same time, make sure that it doesn’t get out of our control.”

She stopped speaking. Eyeless, I hung in space, watching the great darkness that was the engine, the dyson sphere enclosing S Doradus. My imagination pictured the unbelievable holocaust within that shell of collapsed matter and the Klein bottle forces, that made the core of a star millions of times the mass of our sun into a tiny rent in the fabric of a universe. I had thought I was equal to any dimensions that might exist in the battle I wanted to join; but the dimensions here were beyond imagination. I was less than a speck of dust to that stellar nucleus; and in turn, it was infinitesimal, to the point of nonexistence, compared to the two great opposed masses of energy between which it formed a bridge and a connection.

And I was going to share in the control of that bridge?

My courage stumbled. There was a limit, even to imagination; and here that limit was exceeded. I felt my view of the space around me growing obscured and tenuous. I was aware of Dragger, watching, judging me; and with remembrance of her presence, my guts came back to me. If she could stay and work here, so could I. There was nothing any life born in this universe could do, that I could not at least attempt.