Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

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.

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.