Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“I do,” I said. “It’s the time storm.”

“Let somebody else do it.”

“There isn’t anyone else.”

“That’s because you’ve made it so there isn’t.”

“Ellen, listen.” I felt terribly helpless. “The whole universe is going to blow wide open unless I do something.”

“When?”

“When?” I echoed.

“I said, when? Ten years from now? Ten months? Two weeks? Two days? If it’s two days, take the two days-the first two, real days of your life—stay here and let it blow.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Can’t?” she said. She let go and stepped back from me. “No, that’s right. You can’t.”

“Ellen...” I said. I stepped toward her; but she moved back again, out of reach.

“No,” she said. “You go now. It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right,” I said.

“It’s all right,” she repeated. “You go.”

I stood there for a second more. But there was no way I could reach her, and I had no more words to say that would do any good. She already knew I yearned to stay. She knew I wouldn’t. What was there to tell her beyond that?

I went. It was like tearing myself down the middle and leaving the larger half behind.

I stepped back into Obsidian’s quarters and turned to the console to put in a call to Dragger. There was a little delay, and then Dragger’s voice spoke to me out of the air of the softly lit room, with its cushions and its nighttime trees all around.

“Forgive me, but I’m working now and can’t be disturbed. Leave word if you want me to call you back.”

It was a canned message.

“This is Marc,” I said. “Call me as soon as you get this message. It’s critical.”

I sat down on the cushion I had gotten up from earlier and sent my mind back out among the stars.

The forces of the time storm were still out there, waiting for me. Now that I came back to them with the additional insight of my momentary contact with the universe, outside the summer palace, what I had only suspected before showed as not only certain but unavoidably obvious. But whether I could convince Dragger and the other engineers of its obviousness was by no means certain. My conviction rested on my own way of interpreting the forces, which was different from theirs.

The time storm was too much in their blood and bones for them to hate it and love it the way that I did. For I did, I realized now, both hate and love it. I hated it for what it had done, for the millions of lives it had swept out of existence. Or perhaps they were all still in existence somewhere else—locked up in little dead end universes—my wife, Swannee; and all those Ellen had known; Marie’s husband; Samuelson’s family; and the countless others erased by moving mistwalls, not only on Earth but all through the universe. But I loved it, even as I hated it, for being my opponent, for giving me an enemy to grow strong in fighting.

So it was because of both the love and hate that I could see where it was trending now; and it was because they saw it only as a technological problem that I feared the temporal engineers like Dragger would not. I traced the lines of my suspicion again now, through the network of forces, out beyond my sector, out beyond the galaxy and the influence of the one lens I had seen, until I had checked it out against the storm across all the viewable universe. What I feared was there, all right. I could trace the paths of my suspicions, I could see the connections to my own satisfaction, but I could not turn up any solid evidence to present to the engineers.

I was still searching for something to prove what I believed when Dragger called me back.

“Marc?” her voice sounded in my mind. “You had something critical to talk to me about?”

“The time storm’s going to get out of hand,” I said. “It’s going to get out of hand right here in our own galaxy, and possibly in a number of others throughout the universe, at the same time. The pattern’s already evolving out of the patterns of the last thousand years. You’ve already got evidence of it. You told me there’d be increased activity here in nine months or so, my local time. That isn’t just going to be increased activity. It’s going to be activity that’s quadrupled, sextupled, a hundred or a thousand times increased, all at once.”

“What makes you say so, Marc?”

“The character of the patterns I see evolving.”

There was a little silence.

“Marc, can you describe what you mean by ‘character’?”

“The color, the feel, the implications of the patterns in the way they form and change.”

There was another silence.

“None of these words you mention have any precise meaning for me, Marc,” she said. “Can you describe what you’re talking about in hard concepts? Failing that, can you give me the concepts you’re talking about in more than one mode?”

“No,” I said, “because these verbal symbols of your language only approximate my personal meanings. I’m translating verbal symbols from my own language. Symbols that have special value derived out of my experience, my experience with all sorts of things outside your experience, my experience with buying and selling shares of stock in a market, with painting pictures in varied colors, with understanding what is written and carved in the name of art, with thousands of things that move intelligent and nonintelligent life, and make it the way it is.”

“I think I understand,” Dragger said. “But to convince me you’re right about this coming emergency you’re talking about, you’ll need to give me evidence in terms and symbols I can value and weigh exactly as you do. The only symbols like that are in my language, which you now also know.”

“I can’t explain things your language hasn’t any symbols for.”

“Then you’re saying that you can’t convince me of what you guess is going to happen,”

“Not guess. Know.”

“If you know, show me how you know.”

There was an emptiness of desperation in me. I had known it would be like this, but I had hoped anyway. Somehow, I had hoped, the gap would be bridged between our two minds.

“Dragger, don’t you remember how I explained to you how I’d learned about the time storm by a different route than the rest of you? That route gave me a view of it you others don’t have; and that view gives me insights, knowledge, you don’t have. Don’t you remember how I convinced you I had a right to be tested? And didn’t I pass those tests?”

“But have you actually passed the last part of that test, now?” Dragger said. “Or are you finding some incapability in yourself in actual practice, an incapability which you hide from yourself by imagining there’s an emergency condition building, that none of the rest of us can see and you can’t substantiate?”

“Dragger,” I said. “I know this is going to happen!”

“I believe you think you know. I don’t yet believe you’re correct.”

“Will you check?”

“Of course. But if I understand you, my checking isn’t likely to turn up any evidence that agrees with you.”

“Check anyway.”

“I’ve said I will. Call me again if you find something more to prove what you say.”

“I will.”

She said no more. She had gone then. I said no more, either, merely hung there, a point of nothingness in open space. The conclusion was the conclusion I’d feared. I was alone, as I had always been, as I still must be.

Dragger would check, but find nothing to convince her I was right. It was up to me either to find something she could understand, or stop the time storm myself.

It was the latter that I’d come to, eventually—I might as well face that now. It had been inevitable from the first, that the time storm and I should come to grips at last, alone, like this. I had come this far forward in time to find the tools to fight it and the allies to help me. I had not found the allies after all; but I had found some tools. Thanks to Dragger and the others, I knew that the storm could be affected by massive use of energy. Thanks to myself, I now knew that all things, all life, all time, were part of a piece; and if I could just reach out in the right way, I could become part of that piece and understand any other part as if it was part of me.