Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Bill Projec was in his late thirties. He claimed to be pure-blooded Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota; but he did not have the look of the Sioux I had seen around Minnesota, although otherwise he looked undeniably Indian. He had a face that looked as if he could walk through a steel wall without a change of expression. Actually, he was almost exclusively a political leader for his colony, of whom only a few were also Indian. Petr Wallinstadt was in his mid-fifties, a tall post of a man with iron grey hair, large hands and a heavy-boned face. He was a limited-minded man whose quality of leadership lay in an utter steadfastness of attitude and purpose. Whatever Wallinstadt said he would do, he would do, Bill had told me in the briefing he had given me on the leaders before their arrival, and calling him stub-bora was a weak way to describe him. Once he had made up his mind, it was not merely no use to try to argue further with him, he literally did not hear you if you tried to talk about it.

Old Ryan—otherwise called Gramps—was the patriarch among the leaders, and the patriarch of his own group as well. He may have been only a few years older than Wallinstadt, or he may have been as much as twenty years older. He was white-haired, as wide as a wall, bright, tricky, domineering, and explosive. He and Merry Water did not hide their intentions about steering clear of each other; and there had been bets made in the other communities for some time now as to when the two would hit head on and over what. One possible reason why this had been avoided so far may have been the fact that the young Ryans (anyone in Gramps’ group was labelled a Ryan, whether he or she was one by blood or not) sneakingly admired the more esoteric freedoms of the TvLostChord people; and there was a good deal of fraternization—and sororization, to coin a word-going on. Meanwhile, the two leaders stayed close to home and ran into each other in person only on occasions such as this Thanksgiving bash at our place.

There had been considerable jockeying by the four leaders from the moment they showed up to see who could get the most of my attention. Not surprisingly, Old Man Ryan was the clear winner. He could not monopolize my time, but he could and did get half again as much of it as anyone else. I found myself with a sneaking liking for the old bastard, a title he came by honestly both in the ancestral and moral sense and was, if anything, rather proud of. For one thing, he had both brains and experience; and he was not the monomaniac that Merry was, the taciturn farmer that Petr Wallinstadt was and had been before the time storm, or the suspicious chip-on-the-shoulder character that Billy was. Ryan could talk about many things and did, and his sense of humor was well-developed, though raunchy to the point of unbelievability.

It was he who brought up the matter of the Empress, after about a week or so of celebrating. We were standing in the library, brandy snifters half-full of beer in our hands, looking down the slope in the late-winter afternoon sunlight to the river, where a skating party was in progress on the ice that stretched out from the banks to the black, open water of midchannel.

“What’ll you do if she comes?” Ryan asked, without warning, in the midst of a talk about spring planting.

“Who?” I asked, absently.

My attention and my mind were only partly on the discussion we had been having about storing root vegetables; and it seemed to me I had missed something he had said. Actually, I had been concentrating on the skaters. In the early twilight, some of them had put on hard hats with miner’s lamps attached to them and these, now lit, were glinting like fireflies in the approach of the early twilight. The little lights circled and wove figures above the grey of the ice. Patterns of all kinds had been a fascination to me from my beginning. It had been the patterns I saw in the movements of the stock market that had been the basis of my success there. Similarly, with the management of my snowmobile company and everything else right up to our duel with the time storm, in which my ability to see the force-patterns was crucial. Now, I was beginning to make out a pattern in the encircling lights. It was a fragile, creative pattern, built as it developed, but determined by the available space of ice, the social patterns of the occasion, and the affections or dislikes of the individuals involved. I felt that if I could just study the swirl of lights long enough, I would finally be able to identify, by his or her movements, each invisible individual beneath a light source.

“Who?” I asked again.

“Who? The Empress! Beer getting to you, Despard? I said, what’ll you do if she comes this way? And she’ll be coming, all right, if she lives that long; because she’s out to take over the world. You’ve got a pretty good little part-time combat force but you can’t fight three hundred full-time soldier-kids, equipped with transports, planes, helicopters and all sorts of weapons right up to fly-in light artillery.”

“What’ll you do if she comes?” I asked, still not really with him.

“Christ! Me? I’ll wheel and deal with her, of course,” he grunted into his glass, drinking deeply from it. “I know I can’t fight her. But you might be sucker enough to try.”

He tickled me. I finally pulled my attention entirely from the skater patterns on the ice.

“So?” I said, mimicking his own trick of argument. When he got serious like this, he talked with the explosiveness of a nineteen-twenties car backfiring. “I better not plan to ask you for help if I’m crazy enough to take her on, then? That it?”

“Damnright!” He stopped backfiring suddenly, turned full on to face me, and switched to purring like an asthmatic alley cat. “But you’re smart. You know well as I do how many ways there are to peel a grape like that. Now, if you’d just let old Gramps do the talking-for your bunch and mine only—I tell you I can deal with someone like her....”

“Sure you can,” I said. “And with you dealing with her for your people and mine, all the other groups would be forced into joining us, in their own self-defense. Which would leave her with the idea —particularly since you could help it along while you were doing the dealing—that you were the real power in this area, the man to settle with; and, like all the rest, I was in your pocket.”

“Screw you!” He swung away from me to stare out the window at the skating party. The cold afternoon was darkening fast; and his fat profile, against the dimming light, showed panting and angry. “Let her take your balls then. See if I make you a neighborly offer like that a second time!”

I grinned. He could not help himself. It was simply in him to push for an advantage as long as he had the strength to do it. If I ever really needed an alliance with him, I knew he would jump at the thinnest offer. From what Bill had told me, we would have had very little trouble conquering all our neighbors, including Gramps and his clan, if we took the notion.

But all this did not alter the facts that the Empress was nothing to grin about and that the old man had a head on his shoulders. I sobered.

“What’s this about her having three hundred full-time soldiers, aircraft and artillery?” I asked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“One of my boys came back from the west coast,” he said.

“Back from the west coast?” I said. “When did any one of your people go out there?”

“Ah, it’s some time back,” he said, taking a drink from his snifter. He was lying and I knew it, but I couldn’t waste half an hour pinning him down to the truth. “The point is, he was in San Luis Obispo. There’s an old army camp outside that town, and she’s been using it as a training area. All the people in town know about the planes and the helicopters and the guns. And the soldiers come into San Luis Obispo every night to hit the bars. They’ve got four actual bars in there.”