Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

The result was stress; a chaos of laws in conflict, spreading like a network of cracks fracturing a crystal, spreading through the universal space, riding the tides of movement of the solid bodies through space. It was stress that concentrated and generated new fractures at the points of greatest mass, primarily at the centers of the galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran, time states changed, forward or back, one way or another.

Four billion years ago, the first stress crack had touched our galaxy. My point of view turned time back to that point and I saw it happen. An accumulation of entropic conflict near the galaxy center. A massive star that went nova—but unnaturally, implosion nova.

There was a collapse of great mass. A collapse of space and time, followed by an outburst of radiating time faults, riding the wave patterns of the stellar and planetary movements within the galaxy, until at last the time storm reached far out into the galactic arms and touched our own solar system.

What had gone wrong was everything. What was falling apart was not merely this galaxy, but the universe itself. There was nothing to tie to, no place to stand while the process could be halted, the damage checked and mended. It was too big. It was everything, all interconnected, from the particles within my own body to the all-encompassing universe. There was no way I or anyone else could stop something like that. It was beyond mending by me, by humanity, beyond mending by all living intelligent beings. Facing it, we were less than transitory motes of dust caught up in a tornado, helpless to even dream of controlling what hurled us about and would destroy us at its whim....

I woke in my own bed and with the feeling that I had been through this once before. For a moment, I could not remember when; then I recalled my earlier experience with the universe tank and how I had passed out after getting caught up in what I saw there. I felt a momentary quirk of annoyance. If I was going to fold up every time I tried to see things in that tank....

But the annoyance faded as I remembered what I had seen. Here, lying in the familiar bed in the familiar room with everything simple and usual about me, the memory seemed impossible, like nothing more than some bad dream. But it was not a bad dream. It was reality; and in spite of the comfortable appearance of everyday security that surrounded me, the fact of the time storm as I had seen it loomed over us all like some giant, indifferent mountain that might crumble and bury us at any moment, or might let us live a thousand years in peace.

But still... for all that I could feel the shadow of the storm still dark on me, I was not quite as destroyed by it as I had been when I had first seen it in its full dimensions, imaged in the tank. A reaction had taken place inside me, a stubborn reflex against utter despair and hopelessness. There was no way I could even begin to dream, as I had for so long, of controlling the storm. And still... and still... something inside me was refusing to give up. Some strange and snorky part of my being was insisting that the situation could still be fought and perhaps overcome.

It was impossible. Perhaps a thousand more individuals like myself, armed with powers beyond the powers of gods, might have stood a chance of achieving control, but I was alone and had no such powers. Only, there it was. I could not let go. Something in me refused to do it.

Ellen came in, carrying a glass of water.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m all right,” I said.

The shade was pulled down on the bedroom’s one window and a light was on. But now that I looked, I saw the paler, but brighter, gleam of daylight around the edge and bottom of the shade.

“How long have I been here?” I asked, as she came over to me. She handed me the glass of water and also, two white pills.

“Take these,” she said.

“What are they?” I asked, looking at the pills in my hand.

“She didn’t tell me, but Marie said you should take them when you woke up.”

“Now damn it, I’m not taking some medication I don’t know about just because you say Marie says I should take them.”

“I think they’re only aspirin.”

“Aspirin?”

I looked at them closely. Sure enough, they had the little cross stamped on one side that was the trademark of the brand we had been able to get our hands on locally; and when I held them close to my nose, I could catch a faint whiff of the acid smell that was the sign of aspirin when it was getting old. Overage drugs were one of our problems since we were restricted to stocks from time periods all antedating at least the time when we had balanced the forces of the time storm. These two tablets were really fresher than most of their kind that I had encountered in the last half year. Marie must have been hoarding these against some emergency. I felt ashamed of myself. I did not need the pills, but they would only keep on aging toward uselessness if I did not take them, while swallowing them would do me no harm and make Marie feel her efforts had not been wasted.

I took them.

“Porniarsk wants to talk to you if you’re up to it.”

“I’m up to it, all right.” I threw the covers back and sat up on the edge of the bed. They had undressed me. “Where are my pants?”

“Closet,” said Ellen. “Maybe you’d better not get up.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. She looked unconvinced and I decided to lie a little. “I had a headache but it seems to be getting better already.”

“If you’re sure,” said Ellen. “I’ll go tell him then.”

She went out, and I had time to get dressed before Porniarsk trundled into the room.

“Are you well?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said. “No problems. I’m not even particularly tired.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Do you remember what you said before you collapsed?”

“I’m not sure....”

“You said ‘My God...’ and then you said ‘It’s impossible. I can’t do it. It can’t be done...’ Can you tell me what you meant and what made you say that?”

“What I saw in the tank,” I said.

I told him what that had been. When I was through he stood for a second, then creaked off one of his heavy-headed nods.

“So you believe now that further effort to control the storm is useless?” he asked.

“That’s the way those patterns looked,” I said. “But now... I’m not sure. I still don’t see any hope in them, but at the same time, I don’t seem to be able to bring myself to give up.”

“I’m glad of that,” said the avatar. “With no will to succeed, you’d fail even if there was good reason to expect success. But with will, there’s always hope. Porniarsk himself has always believed that the apparent is only the possible. Therefore failure, like success, can always be only a possibility, never a certainty.”

“Good,” I said. “But what do we do now?”

“That’s my question to you,” said Porniarsk. “My earlier guess was right. Your capabilities are far beyond mine. It’s up to you to find the answer.”

For the next three days I tried, while holding Paula in play as well as I could. But the evening of the fourth day her impatience came out in the open.

“I’ll need an answer tomorrow, Marc,” she said, as she went back to her own rooms. “I’ve spent more time here now than I planned.”

It was the eleventh hour, clearly. I thought of calling Porniarsk, Ellen, and Marie together for a brainstorming session and rejected the notion. There was nothing they could do to help me. As Porniarsk had said, it was up to me—alone.

I isolated myself in the library, paced the floor for a while, and came up with absolutely nothing. My mind kept sliding off the problem, like a beetle on a slope of oily glass. Finally, I gave up and went to bed alone, hoping that something might come to me in my sleep.