Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

My hunt had been nothing more than the human search for love. Only I had been afraid of finding it even while I was pursuing it. So I had made sure to create masks for all those I encountered, so that if I became attached to any of them, my attachment would be to the mask and not to the real being behind it. That way, if the person betrayed me, it did not matter, because I had never really known them anyway. There was no way the living person behind the mask could sink emotional hooks into my soul because it was to the mask I had committed myself. In retrospect, I had put a mask on my mother and sister. I had put masks on Swannee and Marie and Paula. Those whom I feared I might love I gave unlovable masks. Only to those I was sure were unable to love me did I give masks that I could love.

It was a fail-safe system. It was only when I forgot to use it that I got tripped up. The crazy cat and the idiot girl-who would have suspected in the beginning that either of them would be able to reach through and tear me up inside? True, I had wakened to the danger in the girl and tried to put a mask on her, but by that time, it was too late. Meanwhile, the crazy cat had already got to me. When he was killed, for the first time in years, I hurt; and, hurting, I came back to life, whether I wanted to or not.

Now I was grateful for that return to life, because what I had been doing was wrong. It was against instinct and could only have led me nowhere finally, but to a desiccated hell of sheer loneliness that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the contented isolation in which I now hung. This way I was alive. The other way, I would have been dead. The golden light had been first to give me the answer; but then, I had still struggled against it.

I was in my own bedroom of the summer palace. For a moment, the terrible thought came that the whole thing had only been some sort of dream. But then, I knew better.

I looked around and saw Ellen, standing beside my bed with Porniarsk and Dragger.

“Hello,” I said to Ellen, and my own physical voice echoed strangely in my ears. “I’m back.”

“Yes,” she answered.

It was the sort of answer I would have expected from her. I lay there, savoring the familiar goodness of it, feeling warm and comfortable, while the three of them stood watching me with a careful concern, as if I were some sort of carefully brooded egg which was about to hatch and which might produce something strange. I thought over half a dozen things to say; decided against all of them and simply held out my arms to Ellen, who came and hugged me.

“How did I get back here?” I asked, finally, when she let me go. Outside of feeling as weak as dishwater, I seemed to be fine.

“We brought your body here right away,” said Dragger, speaking twentieth century English now, as well as Obsidian ever had. “Just as soon as we caught you. We were barely in time to keep your identity from going through the lens.”

I stared at her.

“No, you weren’t,” I said.

At that, Dragger looked embarrassed, like someone caught in a lie, which surprised me. I would not have thought it possible for her to show that particular reaction; and I would not have expected myself to be able to interpret it, if she had. But there was no doubt about what I was seeing now.

“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-”