Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Dinner time was to be the end of the farewells. We broke off finally and went inside. I had wanted to hold a meeting of the people who would be with me in the monad before we settled down to eat; but when we all gathered in the dining room there were some extra faces. One of these was merely Wendy, who had never shown any interest in being part of the time storm work, but who was welcome to the monad if she wanted to join. Also, there were her gangling young boyfriend, who was not welcome under any circumstances, and Abe Budner, our big, slow-moving Director of Food Services and former chef, whom I liked personally, but whom I had never thought of as being monad material.

“Abe,” I said, as I sat down at the table, “no offense, but we’re just about to start a business meeting. You and—”

“Marc,” said Marie.

My mind suddenly became alert. By which I mean that it came out of the whole problem of the move into time and back to the everyday present of the dining room and the people now in it. I woke to the fact that Marie, Wendy, the boyfriend and Abe were all in hiking gear, rough clothes and heavy boots. I also became aware that there was a silence in the room, a tense silence on the part of everybody else that said that all of them there had known for some time about what I was just now recognizing.

I looked at Marie.

“You’re not going?” I said.

“That’s right, Marc,” she said. Now that I really examined her for the first time in a very long, long period, I was a little shocked at what I saw. Her face was tired, and definitely now showed the signs of middle-age, the crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes, the sagging of the chin line. I had never really looked at her in all these months. I had never thought to look.

“Get out of here, the rest of you,” I said, hoarsely. I did not specify who the rest were, but they all left the room except the four who were dressed to travel, and Ellen.

“Wendy and Walter don’t want to go into the future, Marc,” Marie said. “And I’ve decided to go along with them and Abe.”

“Marie...” I said. The words would not come. Patterns flashed and clicked through my mind; and I saw what I did not want to see. If Marie stayed here, Paula would find her sooner or later; and Paula would remember that Marie had been one of my two wives. It was inevitable—no, it was not inevitable. Did I think I was a deity to deal in inevitability? But it was so overwhelmingly probable that the chances it might not happen were too insignificant to consider.

“Marie,” I said. “Don’t you understand? Unless you go with me, you’ll land right in Paula’s hands. Believe me, I know. You will.”

“Even if I do,” she said.

“Look...” I made an effort to get the emotion out of my voice and talk reasonably. “There’s no point in throwing yourself away just because Wendy wants to stay. I know, she’s young, and-”

“You don’t understand,” Marie said. “I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here myself.”

Understanding suddenly struck me like a numbing blow. I had not fooled anyone, it seemed, except myself. I realized now that she and Ellen had known all along how I had reacted to Paula, and what at least part of my reason was for going off with her.

“Listen to me,” I said. “About Paula and me—”

“Marc,” Marie said. “You’re going to have to understand. It’s me who doesn’t want to go into the future. It’s me. I can’t take this moving any more. I’m sick of it. I want to settle in one place and stay.”

“With Paula hunting you down?” I couldn’t believe what I heard.

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be here, in this world, not in some other. Not starting all over again. I can’t keep starting over and over again, Marc. You can. All right, you go ahead. But I want a little ordinary life for as long as I can have it, here, before the end comes.”

I shook my head. It was all crazy. Vaguely, I became aware that even the ones who had stayed behind before had gone—Wendy and the boyfriend and Abe. All except Ellen, and she was standing far back now in a corner of the room, almost lost in shadow. Marie came around the table to me.

“You never did understand me, Marc, did you?” she said. “You didn’t understand me from the first; and you didn’t love me.”

“Maybe not at first,” I said; and my voice had gone hoarse again. It was part of the general craziness that I should be standing here now telling her this while the other woman I loved stood back listening. “It’s different now.”

“Not different enough,” she said. “Not to the point where you’d move one inch out of your way for me. Or anyone.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then prove it. Stay here yourself. Don’t go forward.”

“Marie! For Christ’s sake, talk sense!”

“I am talking sense. But you can’t even hear me.” She stopped and said nothing for a moment; then, surprisingly, she reached up and stroked my cheek with her fingers, very gently. “It’s all right, Marc. You don’t have to hear. You can’t change for me, I know that. But there’s a point beyond which I can’t change for you. Nobody can make all the changes you’d like them to make, don’t you know that?”

“I just want you to live,” I said. “I don’t want Paula to get you.”

“I know, dear,” she said. “But it won’t work. I’ve got to stay; and even if you wanted to stay too, you couldn’t protect me.”

“Don’t be so damn sure about that!” I said; and for an insane, small second, hope of straightening this out after all flickered alive in me. “If I decided to take Paula and all her army apart, it might take some time; but—”

“You’d be throwing yourself away on something other than what you’re built to do,” she said. “If things went that way, I’d have held you prisoner here, instead of you taking me prisoner into the future.”

I didn’t know what to tell her.

“Marc,” she said, raising her face to me. “Say goodby to me.”

The ghost of some giant hand took me by the neck and bent my head down to hers. I kissed her and her lips felt dry and strange, as if I had never known them before. She hugged me, and I hung on to her in return until she used strength to break herself loose.

“There,” she said, stepping back a pace, “it’ll be all right. A big part of it is you just can’t bear to lose anything, Marc. But it’ll be all right in the long run. Goodby now; and be careful.”

She went out. I watched the doorway through which she had gone, and when I looked around not even Ellen was in the room. I went out into the shadows of the evening and walked by myself for a long while.

When I came back inside, it was nearly ten o’clock and there were a great many things to be done. I called together the monad, which now consisted of the Old Man, Ellen, Bill and myself. Doc had volunteered to join us; and with Marie missing, I now more than wanted him, I needed him there. I went over the patterns with them, as best I could describe them. Not so much because the patterns would mean anything particular to them; but the more their minds could identify with mine once we were in action together, the stronger we would be as a unit, and the more certain I could be of doing what I had set out to do.

Most of the people in the community who were leaving had already gone by midnight, when the meeting broke up. I sent Doc out to check that everyone was clear of the area who did not want to be transported forward with the rest of us. It was one of those coffee nights, when everything is due to happen with the next day’s sunrise, and the nerves feel stretched to the point where they sing like guitar strings at a touch. A warm weather front had moved in early in the evening, and the dark outside was still and hot. Only a faint rumble of thunder sounded from below the horizon, from time to time; and the lights among the buildings down below were fewer even than they might be at this hour on an icy winter night, so that already the community looked like a ghost town.