Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I turned toward Doc.

“Doc,” I said, “shoot him.”

Doc unslung the machine pistol he had hanging from his right shoulder.

“Stop. Stop—” shouted Yneho Johnson. “Don’t! Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Just under two minutes left,” I reminded him, and watched him gallop back across to his Empress.

They were still talking a minute later.

“Four minutes up,” said Bill, behind me.

“Let it get down to thirty seconds,” I told him.

We waited.

“Coming up on four and a half minutes,” Bill said.

I stepped out in front of the others and made an elaborate show of looking at my watch.

“Now,” I said to Bill, under my breath.

He had a small detonator switch in his pocket, with a wire running from it back into the palace and from there out again to a spot in the parking area near its west edge. He reached into the pocket, pressed the detonator button; and a fountain of dirt exploded very satisfactorily to about thirty feet in the air, thereby cleaning us out of dynamite almost completely—and not industrial dynamite at that, but the sort of explosive that used to be available in hardware stores in mining areas. I made a large show of looking at my watch again.

“Maybe they won’t realize it’s a warning,” said Marie, tightly.

“They’ll realize,” Ellen said.

They had. The Empress was at last on the move toward me—not by herself, but with her whole entourage surrounding her. Mentally, I docked her a couple of points for not coming sooner. It should have been obvious to her that if there was one patch of ground in the parking area not likely to be mined, it would be the space where I and my own people were standing. She came on until her group merged with mine, and she walked up to stand face to face with me, smiling.

“Marc,” she said, “you and I have to have a private talk.”

“I can talk out here,” I said.

“You probably can.” She was very pleasant. “I find it works better for me if I don’t take my own staff into my confidence exclusively. But don’t you think we could both be a little more relaxed and free if it was just the two of us chatting?”

It was not an unreasonable argument; and I had already made my point—which was that I was not about to make any deal behind the back of my associates. I could afford to give in gracefully.

“All right. Come inside,” I said.

I took her into the palace. On the still air indoors, I could catch a hint of perfume about her that had not been noticeable outside. I was suddenly very conscious of her physically—both of her female presence and her bandbox costuming. The ghost of Swannee moved momentarily between us, once more. On impulse I took her to the library, cleared the books off one of the other chairs for her, and we sat down facing each other.

“You must have somebody around who cares about preserving information,” she said, looking about the room.

“Yes,” I said. “What did you want to talk about?”

She crossed one leg over the other.

“I need your help, Marc.”

“You could have written me a letter, Paula.”

She laughed.

“Of course—if it’d just been a matter of you and me. But I’m the Empress and you’re Marc Despard, the man who controls the time storm. When two people like us get together, it has to be a state visit.”

“Aside from the fact that I don’t begin to control the time storm,” I said, “what about this state visit of yours? A state visit with an army and three howitzers?”

“Don’t pretend to be something other than the intelligent man I know you are,” she answered. “All this show of force is an excuse for you, Marc—an excuse for you to agree to work with me because that’s the only way you can keep the people you have around you now from being hurt.”

“I’m that valuable?”

“I said, don’t pretend to be less bright than you are. Of course you’re that valuable.”

“All right. But why should I take advantage of your excuse? Why should I want to work with you, in any case?”

“Wouldn’t you rather have the resources of the whole world at your fingertips, than just what you can reach here, locally?”

“I don’t need any more than I have here,” I said.

She leaned forward. There was an intensity, a vibrancy about her that was very real, unique. She had to know I knew she was using it deliberately to influence me.

“Marc, this world still has got a lot of people in it who need putting back together into a single working community. Don’t tell me you don’t want to have a hand in that. You’re a natural leader. That’s obvious, aside from the time storm and what you’ve done with it. Can you really tell me you’d turn your back on the chance to set the world right?”

She either had a touch of the occult about her, or she was capable of reading patterns from behavior almost as accurately as I might have myself. My deep drive to defeat the time storm reached out with its left hand to touch the basic human hunger to conquer and rule. Mentally, I gave her back the two points I had docked her earlier—and a couple more besides. But I did not answer her right away; like a good salesman, she knew when to close.

“Say you’ll at least talk it over with me in the next few days,” she added.

“I suppose I can do that,” I told her.

So it turned out that her appearance became a state visit in reality. The main body of her troops and the howitzers stayed out of sight over the horizon, although none of us, including me, ever forgot they were there; and she, with her immediate official family, slipped into the role of guests, as old Ryan and the others had been over the Thanksgiving holidays.

She was a good deal more entertaining than my neighbors had been, and much more persuasive. She had a mind like a skinning knife. But the most effective argument she brought to bear on me in the next five days was the pretense that she was putting her military strength aside and trying to convince me by argument alone. I knew better, of course. As I just said, none of us could forget those troops and the artillery just beyond field glass range. But her refusal to bring her military muscle directly into the discussion left me to argue silently with my own conscience over whether it was not just personal pride or stubbornness on my part that made me so willing to expose my wives and friends to death or maiming rather than join forces with her.

She had another lever to use on me, although at the time I did not rate its effectiveness with that of the argument-only ploy. She was reputed to have the kind of legendary sexiness that made her troops dream of her at night and consider all other women as watered-down substitutes; but I got no such signals from her at all. Except for the odd moments in which she reminded me of Swan-nee, she was good company and interesting, that was all. At the same time, by contrast, she did seem to make Marie look limited and unworldly, and Ellen juvenile.

Of course, she and I had very little time out of each other’s company. We were the two heads of state and if she was to be entertained by us, I usually had to be on stage myself. The time I had with my own people was what was left over, usually either the early hours in the morning, before Paula had put in an appearance from the several rooms—suite was too pretentious a word for them —we had turned over to her and her several personal attendants— or late at night after she had tired out.

It was a situation that put both Ellen and Marie, particularly, at some distance from Paula and myself, but perhaps this was not a bad arrangement. It developed that neither of them liked her or saw anything but serious trouble coming from any extended association with her.