Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Without warning, the damaged wall blushed. I don’t know how else to describe it. From white it turned blood-red, the reddishness most intense around the edges of the hole blown in the wall and toning down from there as it spread outward. And it spread with unbelievable speed. In a moment, the color change had swept over all the walls and pavement around us and raced on to turn the city, the whole city, to red.

Far off among the buildings, a faint, siren sound began. It was uncomfortably as if the city was a living thing we had wounded, and now it was not only bleeding internally but crying.

But this was just the beginning of the change.

“Look!” said Bill.

I turned back from gaping at the city to see Bill pointing once more at the hole in the wall. The red around the ragged rim of broken material had darkened and deepened until it was almost black—a thick and angry color of red. But now, as I watched, that dark-red edge began to develop a hairline of white—glowing white-hot-looking brightness beyond the edge of darkest red. And this tiny edge of white thickened and widened, tinged with pink where it came up against the dark red, but continuing to thicken in whiteness on its other, broken edge that touched only air.

“It’s healing itself,” said Bill.

I had not realized it until he put it into words, but that was exactly what was happening. The white that was appearing was new wall surface, growing down and inward, beginning to fill the hole that we had blown in the wall.

I took a step -forward as soon as I realized this, then stopped. The hole was already too small for me to go through, easily; and those white-glowing edges did not look like anything I would want to brush up against on my way past.

“All right,” I said to Bill, “let’s try it someplace else, and next time be a little quicker about going through, once we’ve opened it up.”

“No. Wait,” he said, catching hold of my arm as I started off to a further section of the wall. “Listen!”

I stopped and listened. The distant, wailing, siren-sound had been continuing steadily, but without any indication of coming any closer to us and the scene of the action. But now that Bill had my attention, I heard another sound superimposed on the first. It was the noise of a faint, dull-toned but regular clanking. The sort of thing you might hear from a large toy tractor, if it had been constructed, with its movable parts, out of plastic rather than metal. And this sound was coming toward us.

I had the machine pistol up and aimed without thinking; and Bill had his gun also pointed, when the source of the noise came around the corner of the same building where we had blown the opening in the wall. It came toward us, apparently either not understanding, or understanding but ignoring, the menace of our guns. I stared at it, unbelievingly, because I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was creature or machine.

By the time I had reluctantly concluded it was a creature, it was less than a dozen feet from us and it stopped. A machine I might have risked pumping a few slugs into. A creature was another matter entirely. Aside from the fact that killing another living thing has some emotional overtones to it, there were a great many more dangerous possibilities involved for us if it was alive, and our hostile response was not successful. So we simply stood and looked it over, and it looked us over.

It looked—it’s hard to say how it looked in that first minute. Something like a Saint Bernard-sized, very short-limbed, very heavy-headed, bulldog shape, with a clump of three tails or tentacles, about two feet in length, sprouting from each shoulder. The whole body was covered with rectangular bony plates about a couple of inches at their widest, which flexed at their jointures with the plates surrounding them to allow the body beneath them to move. Smaller plates even covered most of the massive head. The two eyes were brown and large.

“Don’t shoot!” I said to Bill, without taking my eyes off the creature.

I don’t know what movement of his, if any, triggered off that reaction in me. At the moment, I only knew two things. I had been searching from the very beginning, for an x-factor, a Game Warden, a missing piece to the puzzle of the time storm; and the old reliable search-reflex in the back of my mind now was practically shouting at me that this might be it. And—second, but no less important—the whole improbable being radiated an impression of non-enmity. That impressive armor, that ferocious head, somehow added up, not so much to something threatening, as to something rather clumsy and comic—even lovable, like the bulldog it faintly resembled.

Still, I would have had trouble convincing Bill of any of that alone—but luckily, just at that moment, I got corroborative testimony from a completely unexpected source—Sunday. Up until now the leopard had not moved; but now, suddenly, he strolled past me, right up to the creature, and proceeded to strop himself in a friendly manner up one side of it and down the other. He then sniffed it over a few times and gravely returned to me. That did it. Bill lowered his gun.

“Hello,” I said to the creature. The word sounded almost ridiculous in the context of our confrontation, here in this silent, strange place. The creature said nothing.

“I’m Marc Despard,” I said. “This is Bill Gault.”

Still no answer.

“Marc,” said Bill, in a strained, thin voice. “Let’s start backing up, slowly. If it lets us go, we can back right into the mistwall, and maybe it won’t follow us—”

He broke off because some sounds were finally beginning to come from the creature. Sounds that were something like a cross between the internal rumblings of indigestion and the creaking of machinery that had not been used in a long time.

“Due....” said the creature, in a deep-tone, grating voice. “Yanglish.”

It fell silent. We waited for more sounds, but none came.

“Start backing if you want,” I answered Bill, still keeping my gaze, however, on the creature. “I’m going to stay and see if I can’t find out something about this.”

“I....” said the creature, loudly, before Bill could answer me. There was a pause while we waited for more.

“I am....” it said, after a second. Another pause. Then it continued, in jerks, almost as if it were holding a conversation with itself, except that the pauses between bits of conversation became shorter and shorter until they approached ordinary sentence-length human speech.

“I am....” said the creature again.

“... Porniarsk.

“Porniarsk. I am... an of....

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three... of... an....

“I am Porniarsk Prime Three, an... avatar... of Porniarsk....

“... Expert in Temporals General. I am the... third... avatar of Porniarsk... who is an... expert on the Temporal Question.”

“It’s a robot of some sort,” said Bill, staring at Porniarsk’s avatar.

“No,” it said. “I am Porniarsk. Avatar, secondarily only. I am living—... alive. As you are.”

“Do we call you Porniarsk?” I asked.

There was a pause, then a new sort of creaking, unused machinery noise; and the heavy head was nodding up and down, so slowly, awkwardly and deliberately that the creature called Porniarsk looked even more comic than before. It broke off its head-movements abruptly at the top of a nod.

“Yes,” it said. “Porniarsk Prime Three is... a full name. Call me Porniarsk. Also, he. I am... male.”

“We’ll do that,” I said. “Porniarsk, I’m sorry about damaging your city here. We didn’t think there was anyone still around.”

“It is not... it isn’t my city,” said Porniarsk. “I mean it’s neither mine as avatar, nor is it something that belongs to me as Porniarsk. I come from...