Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

This put a new complexion on things. It was the first good news I could remember finding in a long time. Now I could take along everybody, if they wanted to go. I was tied to the work in the lab, but I sent Doc out to tell the rest of the community that as things had turned out, they didn’t need to run and hide from the soldiers unless they wanted to. Those who wanted to come along with the monad and myself into the future could simply stick around.

Having sent the word out I got back to work. Matters, for once, seemed to be all going in the right direction. The more I pinned down the force-changes to be made, the more possible they looked. Even setting aside the fact that I was much more pattern-experienced and more developed and mature than I had been when I had balanced the forces in the immediate area of the planet, what I now looked at was a much simpler job.

This, in spite of the fact that we would be moving an unguessable distance of time into the future. There was no way to measure how far, but thousands of years anyway in terms of the old temporal yardsticks we had used before the time storm. The reason for this was that, even taking in the area including the town, I was dealing with a very small patch of space compared to that which enclosed the immediate neighborhood of the Earth. What it amounted to was that I would be making a much larger temporal change—but in a very, very much tinier area than I had the time before. It was as if I multiplied by a factor of a few thousand, but then divided the result by millions.

So, matters in the lab progressed well; but nothing goes with complete smoothness. It was a good thing that Porniarsk and I were, if anything, ahead of our schedule for charting all the parameters of the shift as I had laid it out; because I found myself called away from the lab to deal with the human side of the move.

Without realizing it, I had hit everyone in the community harder than I had planned when I had sent out word with Doc that those who wanted to come with me could do so. Living with the time storm as I had been all this time, I had forgotten that only those who had been with me at the time of the balancing of forces originally would have any idea of what to expect from involving themselves in what I planned to do. Nor did they look on going far into the future as calmly as I did.

Accordingly, they were seething with questions that needed some kind of answers if they were to come up with their individual decisions. I found I had to call a meeting of the community as a whole to explain matters and answer those questions. We were too many to crowd into even the largest Quonset hut, so the meeting was held outside on the landing area, with a public address system rigged by Bill for the occasion, with extra microphones on long cords, so that everybody could hear the questions as well as the answers.

I began by explaining the mechanism of the time storm as well as I understood it, and how this mechanism had affected us here on Earth. Porniarsk stood beside me in the jeep I was using for a speaker’s platform, ready to answer questions himself; but no one asked him any. I think they were still a little wary of Porniarsk, whom few besides those in the summer palace had, in fact, ever seen.

When I finished that part of my explanation, I called for questions, but there were none. So I went on to explain how I believed that up ahead in the future, people—not merely human people, but “people” in the larger sense, including intelligent, civilized life like that represented by Porniarsk’s race—would finally come to grips with the time storm and find some way of stopping it. Finally, I repeated what I was sure they must know already, that I thought I had located such a time and I planned to go there. Those who wanted to go with me, could.

Once more I asked for questions. This time I got them—three hours or more of them, mostly unanswerable, by me or anyone else there at least.

Basically, they were unanswerable because what they all wanted most to know was what it would be like for them up there in the future. This was, naturally, something about which I had no more idea than they had themselves. It began to sink in on me as I stood there doing my best to answer them, what an unimaginable gulf exists between those who are obsessed by a goal and those who simply want to live as best they can. In a manner of speaking, I wanted only to arrive in Samarkand, and anything short of the moment when I got there was unimportant. The others were concerned with the possibility of tigers and robbers on the way, the availability of wells along the route, the quarters they would occupy once they arrived and the marketplace where they would eventually vend their wares.

I could not help them. Without realizing it, I had discounted myself completely from the price I was willing to pay to get what I wanted. They had not. They could not think like me; and—God help me—I could no longer think like them.

But I did what I could. I gave them words, explanations, until my throat was hoarse, and they went away discussing what I had said, sure that I had told them something of importance, but finding themselves still unsatisfied, and unreassured.

Porniarsk and I went back to the lab. With or without the extra people, I had to close with the storm forces when the proper moment came; and the moment was marching inexorably toward us.

We finished going over all possibilities by mid-afternoon of the day before the soldiers were due in. Doc had been checking the progress of our invaders from the air, at heights of ten to fifteen thousand feet. Whether they noticed him—the milky-colored aircraft was all but invisible to the ground at that altitude—or not, they continued to come on steadily, neither slowing nor increasing their first observed rate of travel. If they had been the total force that Paula could bring against us, it would have been a temptation to go out and meet them. A night raid or two on their camp, led by some of our people who had picked up special skills from Doc, plus a few good daytime ambushes, could have cut their strength to a point where we would have been able to defend against them quite handily. But Paula could keep after us forever, and there was no use wasting lives.

I had been worrying about what to do with the Experimentals, now that some of us were moving forward in time and the rest taking to the hills. Paula was just the sort of person to kill them all on sight when she found out I had escaped, if they were left behind and undefended.

That problem, however, I found no longer existed. Apparently, when the Old Man had taken his interest in me, the rest of the village had started to disintegrate socially. Except for a few of the others who had formed alliances with some of the human families and were either going forward with these families or taking to the hills with them, the rest had long since wandered away from the village on their own and disappeared. It was a sad sort of diaspora to think about, because there was nothing away from here for them but the lives of solitary, intelligent animals; but there was nothing I, or any of our people, could do about it now. It could be, I told myself, that there was a consciousness in them that their race, as a race, had no future—just as it had had no past beyond a test tube. But that thought did not make me feel any better.

In any case, I had no time to think about Experimentals now. This afternoon was the afternoon that had been picked for saying goodbyes. I made myself available out in the landing area; and they came up by individuals and families and groups to say farewell, not only to me, but to the rest of us who were going. I was surprised, and even a little secretly unhappy, to see the number who had decided to take their chances running from Paula the rest of their lives, in preference to following me forward. But, it was their decision; and better they make it now while they had the chance than regret that they had not made it, later.