Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“She’s got half the world to go after down to the top of South America, and the other half clear up to Alaska,” I said. “What makes you think she’d be coming this way?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” grunted Ryan. “It’s not country you take over nowadays. It’s people. The important places. And this place is important enough. It’s got you here.”

Unfortunately, he was right. It had gradually begun to dawn on me, since I came from living exclusively inside my own skull, how much I was considered some sort of post-time storm wizard, not only among the people of our own community, but generally around the globe. Why they had settled on me and not on Porniarsk—or even on Bill, for that matter—puzzled me. Possibly Bill was not colorful enough to make good myth and legend; and Porniarsk could be considered too inhuman to be judged the wizard rather than the wizard’s familiar. But it was a fact that this impression of me seemed to be spreading all over the world, according to the shortwave talk we heard, no doubt growing more wild and hairy the greater its distance from anyone who had ever seen me in person.

That being the case, it suddenly made sense why the Empress might mount an expedition in my direction. She could hardly lose.

If I was as magical as rumor had it, she would be acquiring a valuable sort of Merlin. If I was not, she could still keep me close under wraps and maintain the legend, threatening people with my powers, and gaining the sort of credit anyone acquires by owning a pet sorcerer.

A corner of that situation suddenly opened up into innumerable corridors of possibilities; and the pattern-seeking portion of my mind began to gallop along them to map out the territory to my own advantage.

Ryan was still talking to me.

“What?” I asked.

“Got through to you with that, didn’t I?” he said.

“That’s right, Gramps,” I told him, “you got through to me.”

I turned to face him.

“I want to talk to that boy of yours,” I said. “I want to hear him tell me about everything he saw.”

“Well, now I don’t know “We can dicker over your price for letting him talk to me later. Is he here with the people you brought along?”

“No,” said Ryan, frowning. “Now, where did he say he was going? Seems to me he said something about going east this time....”

But, of course, this was only his way of making sure he gave nothing away for nothing. I had to promise him I’d send someone over to do welding for him on a windmill generator he was putting up—none of his group could weld for sour apples; and then of course, it turned out that the relative who’d been on the west coast was out on the ice right now, together with the others we were watching from the window.

I had the boy in—he was only eighteen—and with Ryan, Bill, and Ellen standing by, we shook him down for everything he could remember about the Empress and her armed forces. He was a little reticent about why he had gone away to the Pacific coast in the first place. I got the impression he had had a fight with Gramps and run off before the old man could have him beaten up by some of the more loyal sons and daughters of the clan. He kept moving because he ran into no one who particularly wanted him to stay; and so he had ended up somewhere around San Bernardino, where he found work as a wagon-driver (the west coast was short of petroleum products, and horse breeding was becoming a way of life). As a teamster he had eventually driven a load of freight north to San Luis Obispo and spent a week or so in the town before selling his freight goods to someone other than the person he was supposed to deliver them to, and cutting and running with the sale price.

Once safely away from San Luis Obispo, he had decided to head home. Not only because San Bernardino was now an unhealthy place for him, but because he thought he could probably buy his way back into Gramps’ favor with the stories he had to tell, if not with his newly acquired possessions. For he had used the value of the goods he had stolen to buy himself the best horse, saddle and rifle he could find. Besides, as he told us, he was more than a little homesick by that time.

It turned out, however, he did not have that much more of value to add to what Gramps had already told me, except that his description of the planes used to transport the Empress’ troops revealed them to me to be VTOL’s, vertical-take-off-and-landing craft. That bit of information explained how the Empress could plan to airlift her soldiers into potential battlefields around a world where airports and landing strips were either no longer in existence or in bad states of repair. With VTOL’s, she would be able to land just about anywhere.

But—there was a joker in the deck at the same time. My mind went click and put the matter of the petroleum shortages and the horse breeding together, in a military context. Her aircraft would need fuel to operate. That meant that to come as far east as we were, she either had to be sure of finding refueling spots along the way—the remains of cities with fuel still in storage somewhere—or carry her fuel along. To carry it along in the aircraft themselves would leave no room for the troops. It was an equation in supply that had only one sensible solution. Before she went anywhere, she would need to send the fuel ahead of her overland, for which horse-drawn wagons were the only answer. Not only that, but her soldiers must necessarily hoof it to within a few miles of their objective. Meanwhile, the pilots of the aircraft would undoubtedly fly them empty, except perhaps for the Empress herself and her immediate staff, to a rendezvous with the soldiers on foot, when those were at last within striking distance of their objective.

I sent Gramps and his wandering relative away and laid the matter, as I saw it, before Bill and Ellen.

“What it means,” I told them, “is that we’ve got a cushion of a few months between the time when she decides to come this way and when she actually gets here. Not only that, but we ought to be able to set up some sort of agreement with communities west of us to warn us when her soldiers and wagons start to come through. Is there someone around here we could send off to do that for us?”

Bill looked at Ellen.

“There’s Doc. He’d be good at it,” Bill said, “if you could spare him for a couple of weeks.”

“Doc?” I echoed; and then I saw them looking at me. “All right, all right I just can’t get over how young he is.”

That was not the right thing to say. Ellen’s face did not change an inch, but I could feel her reaction.

“Once they get to know him,” Bill said, “Doc can command a lot of respect. And it isn’t exactly like taking a stroll in the park, travelling around like that these days. The number of things that still might have kept somebody like young Ryan from coming back alive might surprise you, Marc. With Doc, we’d have the best possible chance of getting our envoy back.”

“All right,” I said. It was a time for giving in. “I was just thinking how he’d strike other people who’d see him the way I see him. But you know better than I do. I suppose I ought to get to know him better myself.”

Ellen grinned, a thing she did rarely.

“You’ll learn,” she said.

I was left with the feeling that while I was forgiven, I had lost a point to her, nonetheless.

Well, as I told myself after they left, all that was mainly in her, Bill and Marie’s department My department, right now, was tracking down that something I searched for in the library and in my own head. I had not been able to do much while the holiday season was still on, with the guests around; but as soon as all that nonsense was over, I went back to work.

The search I returned to kept producing the same results as it had before, only more of them. I kept picking up clues, bits, indications, tingles—call them what you like. What they all really added up to was evidence that what I searched for was not just in my imagination. At the same time, they were no more than evidence. I began to lie awake nights, listening to the breathing of the woman-body beside me, staring at the moon-shadowed ceiling over the bed and trying to stretch my mind to form an image of what I was after. But all I could come up with was that whatever its nature, it was something of a kind with the time storm. Not akin to the time storm, but something belonging to the same aspect of the universe.