Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Porniarsk listened in silence, and the Old Man also listened. How much the Old Man comprehended I had no way of telling. He certainly understood a fair amount of what we humans said to each other, apparently being limited, not so much by vocabulary, as by what was within his conceptual abilities. Certainly he knew I was talking about him part of the time, and almost certainly, he must have understood when I was talking about that moment on the mountainside when I was ready to kill him and the touch of his hand stopped me.

Porniarsk let me go through the whole thing, right down to the description of the golden light and my helping Orrin Elscher unload his pickup truck. When I was finally done, I waited for him to say something, but still he did not.

“Well,” I said, at last. “What do you think? Did I really break through to something, or didn’t I?”

“I’ve no way to answer that question,” Porniarsk said. “Any discovery can be valuable. Whether it’s valuable in the way we need it to be, valuable toward learning how to control the time storm, I’ve no way of knowing. Basically, I’d say that anything that expands your awareness would have to be useful.”

I found myself less than happy with him. It had been a great thing to me, that episode with the cardinal and the golden light and the passage with Elscher; and the avatar’s treating it so calmly rubbed me the wrong way. I was on the edge of snapping at him; then it came to me that I was having one of the suspect emotions —anger.

So—why was I angry? I asked myself that, and the answer came back quickly and clearly. I was angry because I had been expecting to be patted on the back. Subconsciously, I had been cooking in the back of my head all this time a neat little argument for him, to the effect that I had made this large step forward, working on my own; so going off with Paula would not waste any time, since I could continue working toward more large steps while I was away. But now Porniarsk had shot the whole scheme down by not showing the proper astonishment and awe at my accomplishment; and I was left without the necessary springboard for my argument.

All right. So it was a case of going back and starting over again —with honesty this time.

“We’re up against a situation,” I said. “I may have to leave here for a time. I don’t know how long.”

“Leave?” Porniarsk asked.

I told him about Paula.

“You see?” I said, when I was done. “The only safe way for the people here—and for that matter, for what you have in this room and any work with the time storm—is for me to go along with her, for a while anyway. But it’s temporary. I’ll only be gone for a while. I want you to know that.”

“I can understand your intentions,” said Porniarsk. “Can I ask if you’ve weighed the importance of what you want to protect here against the importance of what you may be able to do eventually in combatting the time storm? If nothing else, an accident could destroy you while you’re away from here.”

“Accident could destroy me here.”

“It’s much less likely to do so here, however; isn’t that so? With this Paula, you’ll be moving into an area of higher physical risk?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said. “No. No guess about it. You’re right, of course.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t go.”

“God help me, Porniarsk!” I said. “I’ve got to! Don’t you understand? We can’t fight her and survive. And we’ve got to survive first and get our work with the time storm done after, because there’s no way to do it the other way around.”

“You’re sure we couldn’t survive if you stayed?”

“As sure as I am of anything.”

He stood, the heavy mask of his features facing me silently for a second.

“Do one thing, please,” he said. “It’s been some time since you looked into the viewer here. Will you look again now, and tell me if there’s any difference in what you see?”

“Of course,” I told him.

I stepped up to the tank and looked into it. Now that I focused in on the space contained by it, I once more saw the myriad of tiny lights moving about in it. I looked at them, feeling a strange disappointment; and it took me a second or two to realize the reason. I had unconsciously bought my own story about having accomplished some breakthrough in understanding, the moment with the cardinal. I had really expected to see something more than I ever had, the next time I looked into this device; and now came disappointment.

Identified, the disappointment grew to a sharp pang. It was against all reason. I did not want to discover evidence that would be against my going with Paula. I wanted evidence that I should go, and it was exactly that sort of evidence that I was getting. But I realized that this was not what I really wanted—it was not what my heart wanted.

I reached into my memory to recapture the moment with the cardinal and the golden light that had been everywhere. But it slipped away from my imagination. I could not evoke it. A bitter anger began to rise in me. My mind beat against the iron bars of its own inability, and what I reached for went further and further from me.

I may have said something. I may have snarled, or sworn, or made some sound. I think I remember doing something like that, though I am not sure. But suddenly, there was a touch on my left hand. My mind cleared. I looked down and saw the Old Man beside me. He had taken hold of my fingers, and he was looking up at me.

My mind cleared. Suddenly, Sunday and the cardinal and all things at once came back together again. All the angry emotion washed out of me and I remembered that it was not by pushing out, but by taking in, that I had finally found the common pattern that connected me with all things else. I let go then, opened up my mind to anything and everything, and looked into the universe tank once more.

There were the lights again. But now, as I watched, I began to pick up rhythms in their movements, and identify patterns. Forces were at work to shift them about, and those forces were revealed in the patterns I saw. As I identified more and more of them, their number grew until they began to interact, until larger and larger clusters of lights were locking together in interrelated movements. There was no golden illumination around me this time; but there was an intensity—not a tension, but an intensity—that mounted like music rising in volume until it reached a certain peak, and I broke through. All at once, I was there.

I was no longer standing looking into a viewing device. I was afloat in the actual universe. I was a point of view great enough to see from one end of the universe to the other and, at the same time, able to focus in on single stars, single worlds. Now I observed not the representation, but the reality; and for the first time I perceived it as a single, working whole. From particle to atom, to star, to galaxy, to the full universe itself, I saw all the parts working together like one massive living organism moving in response to the pressure of entropy....

“My God!” I said—and I heard my own voice through the bones of my skull, very small and far away, for I was still out there in the universe. “My God, it’s collapsing! It’s contracting!”

For it was. What I looked at were the patterns of a universe that had been uniformly expanding, all its galaxies spreading out from each other, creating an entropy that was running down at a uniform rate. But now the pattern had been expanded too far. It had been stretched too thin, and now it was beginning to break down in places. Here and there, galaxies were beginning to fall back into the pattern, to reapproach each other; and where this was happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those places, entropy was increasing, side by side and conflicting with those still-expanding patterns in which entropy continued to decrease.