Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I woke about three hours later, still without a solution. My mind was spinning feverishly; but only with worries. What was to become of Ellen and Marie, and for that matter, our whole community, if I went off as Paula’s captive-servant and either died or did not come back? What could help the world if the local forces of the storm broke out of balance again? There was no answer anywhere except the hope of doing something with the storm after all and using control of its forces to somehow break the hold that Paula’s superior army gave her over us all.

And I could not find such a hope. Every possibility seemed bleak and dry and worn out. There was only one way to unlock the door confronting me—with some kind of a key; and there was no key. My thoughts had spun around in a circle so long they were exhausted. I threw on the topcoat that I used as a bathrobe and went back to the library to get away from my own circular idea-dance.

Under the artificial lights, the library was still and comfortless. I sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs and closed my eyes. My mind skittered off at all angles, throwing up pictures of everyone for whom I felt responsible... Marie, Wendy, Ellen, the avatar....

Their images chased each other before the vision of my imagination, like movie film played on the inner surfaces of my closed eyelids. Even the shapes of people who were not around anymore. I watched Tek, going down from the bullets of the machine pistol in Ellen’s hands; Samuelson, waiting with his rocket launcher for the outsize toy-like attackers of his small town; Sunday, as I had first seen him; Sunday again, with Ellen, back when I had called her only “the girl”; Sunday....

Sunday.

Suddenly, with the thought of him, it all came together. My mind opened up like a flower at sunrise, and life flowed back into me. The light and all things in the still room seemed to change. Once more, I felt my identity with all my people and the cat who slumbered; and I saw at once what could perhaps be done if there was time enough. I got to my feet with my idea still in me and went as quickly as I could to Porniarsk’s lab.

Porniarsk was standing immobile beside the vision tank, his eyes fastened on nothing, when I turned the lights on in the dark room. It was impossible to tell whether he slept at times like this, or whether in fact he slept at all. We had all asked him about that at one time or another, and he had always answered that the question was meaningless in his terms and unanswerable in ours. Now, when the lights went on, he stayed as he was for a second, then turned his head to look at me.

“What is it, Marc?” he asked.

“I think I might have it!” I said. “It just came to me. Look, you can run this tank like a computer, can’t you? I mean you can extrapolate the storm forward and back?”

“Yes.”

“How far forward?”

“Until extrapolation’s no longer possible,” he said. “Until the time storm destroys the universe, or the capacity of the tank’s logical sequencing is exceeded.”

“Look,” I said. My vocal cords were tight and my voice bounced loudly off the bare, white-painted concrete walls. “There’s always been the chance we might be able to get help with the storm up forward, but I’ve never thought about that in terms of a really long way forward. I remember now, when I was seeing the patterns in the tank, I thought that if I could find a thousand like me something might, just might, be done. We’d never find anything like that in the reasonably near future. But, if we went as far forward as we could—maybe way up there, there really are a thousand others like that. Away up there. As far into the future as we can reach.”

“And if there were,” said Porniarsk. “How could we contact them?”

“We might be able to go to them.” The words were galloping out of me and my brain felt wrapped in flames. “If I could just see what the storm patterns were, up in that time—just the patterns affecting this immediate area, the area right around this house, maybe just even around this lab—I might be able to unbalance the present forces enough so they’d correspond. I might be able to produce a time change line; one single mistwall to move just us, far down the future-line to them.”

He neither moved nor made a sound for five or six seconds, while my heart beat heavily inside me, shaking my chest.

“Perhaps,” he said.

The breath I had not realized I was holding went out of me in something like a grunt.

“We can do it?”

“I can show you the ultimate pattern possible to this device— perhaps,” he said. “Are you sure you can make use of it, if I do?”

“No,” I said, “I can try, though.”

“Yes,” he said. His head went up, his head went down, in one of his nods. “I’ll need time to work out the storm patterns that far forward.”

“How much time?”

He looked at me steadily, “I don’t know. Maybe days. Maybe, some years.”

“Years!” I said. But then the sense of what he was saying sank into me. The furthest pattern perceivable by the vision tank could only be reached by going through all preceding patterns.

“When I’ve reached the limits of the device’s capacity,” he said, “I can call you in to see it.”

“Then we need to buy whatever time that takes,” I said. “That settles it. I’ll tell Paula I’ll go with her.”

“Probably that’s best. But you’ll have to be able to come back here when I’ve found the final pattern.”

“I’ll get back,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

I felt wonderful. All my frustration had vanished in a burst of energy and certainty. I would not have gone back to bed even if I could have slept. I looked at my wristwatch, and it was five-thirty in the morning.

“I’ll wake up everyone who needs to know and tell them,” I said, “right now. Will you come along?”

“You don’t need me,” he said, “and any time wasted from now on delays the final moment of achievement.”

“All right.”

I went out and started waking up the others. A little under an hour later I had them all sitting around the dining room of the summer palace, drinking coffee to get their eyes open and waiting for an explanation. I had run into the meeting all those whom I thought must know what would be going on, but nobody else. At the table were Ellen, Marie, Bill, Doc, and Wendy—Wendy looking particularly sullen. She was grown up enough now to have a fourteen-year-old boyfriend—or thought she was. I thought ten years old ridiculously young for anything like that, though it was a fact she was beginning to develop physically; and she had asked to have him take part in this council as well. Naturally, I had spiked the notion. It was merely the last in a series of efforts she had made recently to get her mother and the rest of us to adopt the boyfriend into our inner family.

For the rest, Doc looked unperturbed, as if he was the only person there, besides myself, who was wide awake. Ellen looked concerned, Marie looked drawn and older than I had ever seen her look, and Bill was still white-faced and shrunken-looking from interrupted slumber.

“I’m going to tell Paula today I’ll go with her,” I said, without preamble. “We’ll probably take off later today.”

I told them about my hope, my talk with Porniarsk and about what he was already at work on at this moment “... The point is,” I wound up, “Porniarsk and the rest of you are probably safe here as long as Paula still considers me a friend and coworker. If that changes, she might think of keeping me under control by picking up some of you as hostages for my good behavior. So, if things get prickly between the two of us I’ll send you warning of it; and I want you all to clear out of here immediately and scatter. Scatter all over the place, each one by yourself— and don’t let the rest of the community know you’re going.”