Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“Oh, yes,” said Dragger. “Ellen and Porniarsk both told me about this; and we’ve looked at the body of the creature. I’m afraid there’s absolutely nothing we can do with that.”

“I see,” I said.

“Life isn’t something that can be created simply by an alteration of the temporal matrix, forward or back. You have to have noticed,” said Dragger, “that when you passed through a time line—a mistwall, as you called it in the past—and through time lines in travelling with Obsidian to your testing, that your movement in external time did not change your apparent age or state of health—”

“All right,” I said. “Yes. I understand. All right. Let it go then.”

“But what I was going to say,” went on Dragger, “is that life is apparently a concept; and, given the concept, the rest isn’t difficult. As you discovered yourself at the time you had your conversation with Ellen, in space, before you went to pass through the lens-”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Ellen, exasperatedly.

She went to the door of the bedroom, opened it, and put her head out into the corridor.

“Doc!” she called.

“—you were able to summon up a complete conceptual gestalt of your leopard, probably largely thanks to your developed ability to recognize and think in patterns. We’ve theorized that what you did was to put together in your mind a critical number of behavior patterns of the leopard and this triggered off a creative whole. Now, given this, of course, it’s simple for us—”

“I should have thought of it myself, of course,” said Porniarsk. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t.”

“—to build a duplicate of the physical body to which that conceptual gestalt belonged. As Porniarsk says, this much was possible even in his culture, back in that early time. So, we took the completed pattern from your unconscious several days ago—”

Doc appeared in the open doorway. A black, furry thunderbolt shot past him, flew through the air and landed on top of me, stropping my face with a file-rough tongue. The bed collapsed.

“Oof!” I said.

I had intended to say, “Will you get the hell off me, you crazy cat?” but I didn’t have the wind. He had knocked it all out of me. It didn’t matter.