Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

She was right. I was awake; and there was nothing to do but get dressed. I was standing on one leg, putting on my pants, when it came to me suddenly that what I had felt was second cousin to what makes dogs and other animals enjoy being petted and stroked by humans. Not the physical sensation alone, but the implications of affection and concern. For a second, I could almost feel what an animal might feel in such case—and there, for a second, the universe-identity almost was with me again. But the second passed, and it was gone.

I finished dressing. Ellen had already gone ahead. I followed down the corridors, out through the door, and stepped into the warm, early evening dark of outside. A barbecue pit had been dug in the landing area, and I could smell roasting meat. There were several other large fires, throwing sparks high in the air so that they seemed to mingle with the stars overhead; and the open space around them was filled with moving silhouettes and the hubbub of voices. For some reason, it reminded me of a small town in Mexico I had happened to go through once on vacation on an evening of a fiesta. I could not remember the name of the saint who was the cause of the fiesta; but it had been night, and fireworks were exploding high in the air over the town, their sparks raining down into the dark streets. Lights and voices had been all over the place, with people coming and going in the narrow streets, so that it all had a sort of incredible richness to it. I had wondered then where that feeling of richness came from; but of course now I knew where. Unconsciously, I had been reading the patterns of the fiesta around me the way those who lived in the area read them. I was picking the rich feeling up from them; and now I was doing the same thing, picking up the magic and warmth of the moment from the rest of the community, gathered here to celebrate the fact that Doc and I, and even the Old Man, were back safe.

I went forward into the crowd, and was recognized. The faces and bodies swirled around me, drink was shoved into my hand. I was mobbed and hustled and questioned and patted on the back and kissed until my head started to spin. Between that spinning and the fatigue I had, measured by the little sleep I had just had, I was not to remember most of the events of that evening. It was merely one long happy blur that ended when I finally groped my way back into my dark room and fell on my bed again, some hours later.

Ellen was there and I hung on to her.

“Where’s Marie?” I asked after a while.

“She’s still outside,” Ellen said. “Sleep, now.”

I slept.

I did not come to until late the next day. But in spite of that long, exhausted slumber, it was three days before I was really back in proper body and mind again. The night of the celebration with the crowd had healed me somewhat, in a way I could not quite pin down, but I felt more whole and healthy generally. I went back to Porniarsk’s lab on the third day and tried the pattern of the tank again.

The first time I tried it, I was no more successful than I had been the first day I had come home. Still, my failure did not leave me with the sensation of being so helpless as before, and after a rest I tried again. This time I was also unsuccessful, but I got the impression I had come closer to actually envisioning the universe; and so I continued, trying and trying again, feeling that I got a little closer with each try—and a couple of weeks later I broke through.

Whatever barrier I had been pushing against went down all at once. Without warning, I was suddenly in the universe of galaxies and stars—and what I saw leaped at me so hard that I was jarred out of it, back into the conscious reality of the lab and myself standing there, staring into the tank.

“Why, hell!” I said. “It’s wrong!”

“Wrong?” Porniarsk said. “In what way?”

I turned to the avatar.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do know; but it doesn’t matter! Don’t you see? Your device here shut itself down because it began to turn up inconsistencies within the patterns it was evolving from the patterns it had evolved previously. Logically, there couldn’t be any inconsistencies, but there are!”

“I don’t understand,” said Porniarsk.

“Don’t you? Look,” I said, “this tank has been extending previous patterns that were correct and getting one that is incorrect.”

“Then you’re saying the device has broken down? I don’t see how it could,” said Porniarsk.

“No. It hasn’t broken down—that’s the point. It’s not wrong! What’s wrong is reality. One of the factors the device takes into account is the human—pardon me, I mean the intelligent life—factor; and that factor logically evolved is creating inconsistencies with the purely physical evolution of the other factors considered. Don’t you see what that means?”

“I do not,” said Porniarsk.

“It means somewhere up there in the future—at the time we’re looking at right now—intelligent life is doing something about the time storm. Doing something at least effective enough to produce inconsistencies with what would have happened if the storm had just been allowed to run its course. We’ve found them, Porniarsk! We’ve found a time when they’re able to do something about the time storm!”

The avatar stood perfectly still, looking at me. He was so motionless and his silence went on so long that I began to entertain the outrageous thought that he had not heard me.

“I see,” he said, speaking just as I opened my mouth to repeat to him what I had just said. “Then our search is over.”

“That’s right. All we have to do now is figure out how the monad needs to shift the immediate small factors so that at least this lab can move forward to that time.”

“Is it possible?”

I had never actually stopped to doubt that it was possible; and his question took half the joy out of me at one blow.

“Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. We’re away down at the end of the chain of storm changes. The forces dealing with this area have to be relatively light....”

I ran down.

“We’ll have to check and see, of course,” I said. “Maybe we’d better do that first before I tell everyone what we’ve found and start getting their hopes up.”

We were still checking several days later when Doc came into the lab one morning.

“I’ve just made a swing east in the plane,” he said. He had become used to the craft now and he flew daily patrols. “There’s a force of about a hundred and fifty of Paula’s soldiers, about half on foot and half on horseback, about a hundred and twenty miles east of here. No motorized transport or anything more than carry weapons. They aren’t wearing her uniforms, but they can’t be any other troops. No one else on this continent can put together that many people and get them to move in formation like that.”

“How did they get so close?” Porniarsk asked.

“They must have started out individually or in small groups,” Doc said. “That’s the only way I can think of. Then they rendezvoused someplace last night, so that this was the first day they’ve been all together. I’d have spotted them from the air otherwise. At the rate they’re marching, they’ll be here in less than a week.”

I looked at Porniarsk.

“That ends the checking,” I said. “All we can do now is go, and hope we make it.”

There was something wrong in the atmosphere around the summer palace. I could feel it, but I could not take the time to pin it down. I set the rest of the community to packing up, ready to get out, and with Porniarsk, got down to the choosing of an optimum target nanosecond on the day before the soldiers were due to arrive. We wanted a time when the pattern of storm forces concerned with our small area would be as close as possible to the conformation I was going to try to force them into with the monad. My original idea had been to deal with as small an area as possible— probably only the lab itself and everything inside it But as the situation developed, it turned out that the difference between restructuring the forces dealing with just the lab and those dealing with an area including the summer palace, mountain section and enough of the plain to contain the town and a couple of square miles outside it, was essentially no difference at all, in terms of the size of the forces to be dealt with.