Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

He had been going great guns, but all at once he was blocked again. We waited, while he struggled with his verbal problem.

“I come from many... stellar distances away,” he said, finally. “Also from a large temporal... time... distance. But I should say also that, in another measure, I am... from close to here.”

“Close to this world?” Bill asked.

“Not...” Porniarsk broke off in order to work at the process of shaking his head this time, “to this world, generally. Just to... here, this place, and a few other places on your Earth.”

“Is this place—this city or whatever it is...” asked Bill, “from the same time as the time you come from?”

“No,” said Porniarsk. “No two times can be alike—no more than two grains of sand be identical.”

“We aren’t stupid, you know,” said Bill. For the first time I’d known him, there was an edge in his voice. “If you can tell us that much, you can do a better job of explaining things than you’re doing.”

“Not stupid... ignorant,” said Porniarsk. “Later, perhaps? I am from far off, spatially; from far off, temporally; but from close, distance-wise. When you broke the wall here, this city signalled; I had been for a long period of my own time on the watch for some such happening at any one of the many spots I could monitor; and when the city signalled, I came.”

“Why is the city so important?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” said Porniarsk, swinging his heavy head to look at me. “You are important. I believe. I’ll go with you now unless you reject me; and at last, perhaps we can be of use to ourselves and to the universe.”

I looked at Bill. Bill looked at me.

“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to look this place over. It’s from out of our future, if my guess is right. There may be a lot of things here we can use.”

“Nothing,” said Porniarsk. “It is only a museum—with all its exhibits taken away long since.”

He made no visible move that my eyes could catch, but suddenly, all the walls about us seemed to suck themselves in and produce circular doorways.

“If you would like to look, do so,” Porniarsk said. He folded his short legs inward under him and went down like a large coffee table with its four supports chopped away by four axemen at once. “I will wait. Use-time is subjective.”

I was half-ready to take him at his words that the “city” was no use to us; but Bill was beckoning me away. I followed him away and around a corner, with Sunday trailing along after me, out of sight of Porniarsk. Bill stopped, then, and I stopped. Sunday went on to sniff at an open doorway.

“Listen,” whispered Bill, “I don’t trust it.”

“Him,” I said, absently. “Porniarsk—he said he was male.”

“He also said he was an avatar,” said Bill. “The incarnation of a deity.”

Bill’s carping pricked me the wrong way.

“—Or the incarnation of an idea, or a philosophy, or an attitude!” I said. “Why don’t you read all of the entry in the dictionary next time?” Abruptly, I realized that he was scared; and my jumping on him was the last sort of move likely to help matters. “Look, he’s just the sort of thing we’ve been hunting for. Someone out of the future who might be able to help us handle this time storm business.”

“I don’t trust... him,” said Bill stubbornly. “I think he’s just planning to use us.”

“He can’t,” I said, without thinking.

“Why not?” Bill stared at me.

He had me, of course. I had responded out of my feelings rather than out of my head—or, to be truthful, out of my reflex for pattern-hunting, which was still yelling that I might have found the missing piece necessary to complete the jigsaw puzzle. I did not know why I was so unthinkingly sure of the fact that while we might be able to use Porniarsk, he could not use us. I had thought that the end result of my certainty about Swannee’s survival had taught me some healthy self-doubt. But here I was, certain as hell, all over again.

“I’ve just got a hunch,” I said to Bill then. “But in any case, we can’t pass him up. We’ve got to, at least, try to get the information we need out of him. Now, you can see the sense of that, can’t you?”

He hesitated in answering. I had hit him on his weak side—the side that believed in scientific question and experimentation.

“Of course you can,” I went on. “There’s no point to anything if we throw away the first good lead we’ve found to making sense out of things. Let’s go back now and take Porniarsk along with us to the rest of them. There’ll be plenty of time to find out what he’s after personally, once we’ve got him back in camp. Whatever he’s got, I’ll feel a lot safer when he’s got the dogs, Sunday and the rest of our guns all around him—don’t you agree?”

Bill nodded reluctantly.

“All right,” he said. “But I want to look into a few of these buildings, anyway.”

“We’ll do that, then.” I could afford to give in on a small point, now that he’d yielded on the large one. “But I’ve got a hunch Porniarsk’s right, and there’s nothing to find.”

So, accompanied by Sunday, we searched through a couple of the now-open buildings. But it was just as I’d thought. Porniarsk had not been lying so far as we could discover. The buildings were nothing but a lot of empty rooms—in immaculate condition, without a trace of dust or damage—but empty. Echo-empty.

In the end we went back and collected Porniarsk. He clattered to his feet as we came up and fell in step with us when I told him we were headed back through the mistwall to the rest of our people. However, I stopped when we came to the nearer edge of the wall.

“I’d like you to wait here, Porniarsk,” I told him, “while Bill and I go through first. Give us a chance to tell the rest of our people about you and tone down the surprise when you show up. Is that all right with you?”

“All right,” said Porniarsk, clunking down into lying position again. “Call when you want me to come after you.”

“We will,” I said.

I led Bill and Sunday back through the mist. When we opened our eyes on the other side, it was to find a deserted, if cozy-looking, farmyard. The cooktent had been set up in the yard and Marie had both charcoal grilles going, but no one was on duty except the dogs. Clearly, the others were all inside the farmhouse—the very sort of place I had ordered them never to go into unless I told them it was safe, and only after a couple of us had done a room-by-room search with guns, first. There were too many nasty surprises, from booby traps to ambushes, that could be set up in a place like an abandoned building.

“Get out here!” I shouted. “Get out here, all of you!”

I had the satisfaction of seeing them come scrambling out of the door and even out of a couple of windows, white-faced, possibly thinking we were under attack from somewhere, or perhaps another mistwall was bearing down on us. It was not the best of all possible times to rub a lesson in; but I took a few minutes once they were outside to read them out for what they had done.

“Well, it’s ridiculous!” said Marie. “It isn’t as if we walked in there blind. Tek and the girl took their guns and checked it out first.”

Of course that put a different face on the matter, but I was hardly in a position to admit so at the moment. I looked over at Tek and the girl. He, of course, had been too smart from the beginning to make his own excuses; while the girl, of course, was simply following her usual practice of not talking. But I met her eyes now; and grim, angry eyes they were.

“They did, did they?” I said. “And who ordered them to do that?”

“I asked them to,” said Marie.