Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I stopped looking for windows. Now I actually was impressed. The equipment had been remarkable enough in what it could tell him about me; but any idiot could sit and read results from gauges and dials, if he had been trained well enough. This kind of hard, conscious reasoning from evidence, on the other hand, was something else again.

“What did you call it—a temporal discontinuity?” I asked.

“That’s right. Have you got another name for it?” said the voice. “It really doesn’t matter what it’s called. We both know what we’re talking about.”

“What do you call it when it moves?” I asked.

There was a long second of silence.

“Moves?” said the voice.

I damn near grinned.

“All right,” I said, “now I’ll do a little deducing. I’ll deduce you haven’t left this building since the time storm struck.”

“Time storm?”

“The overall pattern of your temporal discontinuities,” I said. “I call that a time storm. I call individual discontinuities like the one out there, time lines. I call the haze in the air where one is, a mistwall.”

There was a pause.

“I see,” he said.

“And you haven’t left this building since that mistwall appeared out there, or since whatever it was, first happened to this building?”

“That’s not quite the way it’s been,” he answered. “I’ve gone outside a few times. But you’re right, essentially. I’ve been here since the first wave of disruption hit, studying that discontinuity you came through. But you—you’ve been moving around. And you say there’re discontinuities that move?”

“Some of them travel across country,” I said. “Where they’ve gone by, the land’s changed. It’s either changed into what it’s going to be sometime in the future, or into what it was, once, in the past.”

“Very interesting...” the voice was thoughtful. “Tell me, are there many people out there, where the moving dis—time lines are?”

“No,” I said. “It’s been some weeks and I’ve covered a lot of ground. But I’ve only found a handful. The Hawaiian Islands seem to have come through pretty well. You can hear broadcasting regularly from there on short wave and other stations on the radio, now and then—”

“Yes, I know,” the voice was still thoughtful. “I thought it was the discontinuities cutting off most of the reception.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think there just aren’t many people still left in the world. What was this place?”

“A federal installation. Research and testing,” said the voice, absently. “What’s it like out there?”

“It’s like a world-sized crazy quilt, cut up into all sorts of different time areas, marked off one from each other by the mistwalls—by the time lines or discontinuities. The big problem is the situation’s still changing. Every moving time line changes everything where it passes.”

I stopped talking. His voice did not pick up the conversation. I was busy thinking about the words “research and testing.”

“You said you’d been studying the time line, there,” I said. “What have you learned so far?”

“Not much,” his voice was more distant now, as if he had moved away from the microphone over which he had been speaking, or was caught up in some other activity, so that he was giving me only a part of his attention. “What you call the mistwall appearance seems to be a matter of conflicting air currents and temperature differentials between the two zones. But there doesn’t seem to be any material barrier... you say they sometimes move?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Any reason why they shouldn’t?”

“No, I suppose... yes,” he said. “There’s a reason. As far as I’ve been able to measure, these lines of discontinuity stretch out beyond the reach of any instruments I have. In other words, they go right off into space. You’d assume any network of forces that massive would have to be in balance. But if certain of the lines are moving, then it has to be a dynamic, not a static, balance; and that means....”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just letting my human ideas of size and distance influence me. But I’ve got trouble imagining something that big, shifting around internally.”

He stopped talking. I waited for him to start up again. But he did not.

“Look,” I said. “I just sort of ran from this overall situation, the way you’d run for shelter from a thunderstorm, for the first few weeks. But now I’m trying to find out if there isn’t some way to get on top of the situation—to control it—”

“Control?”

I waited a second; but he did not say any more.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I say some kind of dirty word?”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “If the whole disturbance is bigger than our planet, possibly system-wide—and in some sort of dynamic balance, the idea of controlling it is....” He hesitated. For the first time there was something like emotion in his voice. “Don’t you realize we never have been able to control even a hurricane—no, not even a thunderstorm like the one you were talking about—when this first hit us. Have you any idea of the magnitude of the forces involved in something like this, if it’s stretching all over the solar system?”

“What makes you think it is?” I asked.

He did not answer.

“All right,” I said, after a moment. “If you’re not going to talk, let me out of here and we’ll say goodby. I was going to invite you to come along with me—out where you can study the moving lines as well as this static one. But I gather that’s not the way you like to work.”

I turned on my heel, went back to the stairway door and pushed. But it was still locked.

“Wait,” he said. “Do you have other people with you?”

“Yes,” I told him. “How about you? Are you alone here?”

“That’s right,” he said. “There were a couple of hundred people in the installation here, when the disruption first hit. When I got my senses back, I was the only one left. I was in the hyperbaric chamber at the time—not that I can figure out why that should have made a difference.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” I said. “I think some of us are just naturally immune—statistical survivors.”

“Survivors.”

“Of the time changes. It’s only a thought. Don’t ask me for details.”

“An interesting thought....”

The voice trailed off. Down the long inner wall of the corridor, one of the doors opened, and a short, lightly-boned figure in white slacks and white shirt stepped out and came toward me. He was so small that my first thought was that he could not be more than twelve or fourteen years old in spite of his adult voice; but when he got closer, I saw that his face was the face of a man in his late teens or early twenties. He came up to me and offered me his hand.

“Bill Gault,” he said. It was a strong name for someone that light.

I shook hands with him.

“Marc Despard,” I answered.

“I think I’d like to go with you, after all,” he said.

I studied him. He was in no way frail or abnormal, just light and small. At the same time, his lack of size and the spurious air of being half-grown about him, made me hesitate now at the thought of adding him to our party. I had just not expected anyone so... so physically insignificant, to be the person behind the voice I had been talking with. For a moment I felt a touch of exasperation. All my life, until I had run into the girl and the crazy cat, I had gotten by nicely with no responsibility for anyone but myself. But since this damned time storm started, it seemed I had done nothing else but play guardian and protector—to girls, leopards, women and children—and from the look of Bill Gault, I now had another responsibility on my hands. I could imagine what would happen if this featherweight should try to stand up alone to one of Tek’s men, for example.