Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

“I haven’t checked with him yet,” I said. “Of course I will. I’ll go talk to him now. I suppose he’s in the lab?”

“I think so,” said Bill.

“Yes, he is,” said Ellen. “I was just in there.”

That bit of information caught at my attention. As far back as I could remember, Ellen had never paid any particular attention to Porniarsk. I went out and down the corridors toward the lab. On the way, I passed the little interior courtyard where Sunday lay preserved; and on impulse I checked, turned, and went in to look at him.

I had not come to see him in months. It had been a painful thing even to think of him for a long time; and while now the pain was understood and largely gone, the habit of avoidance was still strong in me. But at this moment, there was a feeling in me almost as if I should let the crazy cat know that I was going—as if he was still alive and would worry when I did not come back immediately. The roofless courtyard was dark, except for starglow, when I stepped into it, and cold with the spring night. I closed the door by which I had come out and reached out to thumb on the light switch controlling the floodlights around the walls. Suddenly the courtyard was illuminated so brightly it hurt my eyes; there, to my right, was the transparent box in which Sunday lay.

It was like a rectangular fish tank a little longer than the leopard and perhaps three feet deep, set up on a wooden support about coffee table height and dimensions. Within, it held that same fluid-looking stuff that filled Porniarsk’s universe viewing tank and which he had given me to understand was actually something like an altered state of space—if you could picture nothingness as having variable states. At any rate, what he told me it did was to hold Sunday’s body in a condition outside of the movement of time, any time. As a result, his body was even now in exactly the same condition it had been in less than two hours after his death, when Porniarsk had surrounded it with a jury-rigged version of this non-temporal space tank.

Nearly two hours, of course, was far too long for him to have been dead if we had been hoping for any sort of biological revival. If it had been possible to mend his wounds and start his life processes in the present state of his dead body, there would have been nothing to bring to life. His brain cells had died within minutes without oxygen, and the information contained in them was lost. A body in perpetual coma would have been all we could have achieved.

But what Porniarsk had hopes of was something entirely different. It was his expectation that, if we could learn to control the time storm even a little, we might be able to either acquire the knowledge directly, or contact others farther up the temporal line who had it, so that we could return the temporal moment of Sunday’s body back to a few seconds before he had been wounded. It was a far-fetched hope and one that I, myself, had never really been able to hold. But if Porniarsk could believe in it, I was willing to go along with him as far as his faith could take us.

Perhaps at that, I thought to myself as I stood looking at Sunday’s silent form lying there with its eyes closed and its wounds hidden under bandages, I had indeed had some secret and sneaking hope of my own, after all. I needed to hope. Because Sunday was still there in my mind like a chunk of jagged ice that would not melt. He represented unfinished business on my part. He had died before I could show him that I appreciated what he had given me—and the fact that the gift was an unthinking animal’s one did nothing to lessen the obligation. What I owed to the others, to Ellen, to Marie perhaps, and Bill—or even to Porniarsk himself—I still had time to pay, because they were still alive and around. But the invoice for Sunday’s love, and his death, which had come about because he had rushed to rescue and protect me, still hung pinned to the wall of my soul with the dagger of my late-born conscience.

No—it was not because of how he had died that I was in debt to him, I thought now, watching his motionless body in the floodlights. It was what he had done for me while he was alive. He had cracked open the hard shell that cased my emotions, so that now I walked through the world feeling things whether I wanted to or not; which was sometimes painful, but which was also a part of living. No, regardless of what happened with Paula, I could never be diverted permanently from work with the time storm, if only for my hope of seeing Sunday alive again, so that I could let him know how I felt about him.

I turned off the lights. Suddenly, in the dark and the starlight, I began to shiver, great shuddering, racking shivers. I had become chilled, standing there in the raw spring night in my shirtsleeves. I went back to the warmth inside and down the hall a little farther to Porniarsk’s lab.

He was there when I stepped through its door and the Old Man was with him, squatting silently against one of the walls and watching, as the avatar stood gazing into the universe tank. They both turned to me as I came toward them.

“I thought I’d drop by,” I said; and the social words sounded foolish in this working room, spoken to the alien avatar and the experimental, near-human animal. I hurried to say something more to cover up the fatuous sound of it. “Have you found out anything new?”

“I’ve made no great gain in knowledge or perception,” Porniarsk said, quite as if I had last spoken to him only an hour or two before, instead of something like months since.

“Do you think you will?” I said.

“I have doubts I will,” he said. “I’m self-limited by what I am, as this one here—” he pointed to the Old Man, who turned to gaze at him for a second before looking back at me, “is self-limited by what he is. Porniarsk himself might do a great deal more. Or you might.”

“You’re sure there’s no hope of getting Porniarsk here?” I asked. I had asked that before; but I could not help trying it again, iii the hope that this time the answer would be different.

“I’m sure. There’s a chance of something large being accomplished here. But there’s a certainty of something not so large, but nonetheless important, being accomplished where Porniarsk is now. He will never leave that certainty for this possibility.”

“And you can’t tell me where he is, even?”

“Not,” said the avatar, “in terms that would make any sense to you.”

“What if things change? Could you then?”

“If things change, anything is possible.”

“Yes,” I said. I was suddenly very aware that we were at the end of a long and full day. I would have sat down just then if there had been a chair nearby; but since neither Porniarsk nor the Old Man used chairs, the nearest one at the moment was at a far end of the room, and it was not worth my going and bringing it back.

“I haven’t been getting anywhere myself, I’m afraid,” I said— and immediately, having said it, remembered that this was not quite true. I hesitated, wondering if my experience of several days past with the cardinal that had come to perch on the bird feeder, and all that had followed, would mean anything to the avatar. “Well, there has been something.”

He waited. The Old Man waited. If they had been two humans, at least one of them would have asked me what that something had been.

“I’ve been doing a lot of reading for some time now...” I went on after a moment; and I proceeded to tell Porniarsk how the Old Man had cracked me loose from the mental fog I’d been in ever since Sunday’s death, and how I had started on my search through everything I could lay my hands on between book covers. I had never told him this before; and, hearing the words coming from my mouth now, I found myself wondering why I had not.