Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

Doc came back.

“Everyone gone but the Mojowskis,” he said, “and they were just leaving as I came up. Be clear of the area in another twenty minutes.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go on into the lab. Porniarsk’s getting everybody into helmets and set to go. Tell them I’ll be along in twenty minutes.”

He went. I took one more turn around outside. The night air was so dark and still it could almost be felt by the fingers; and the mutter of distant thunder seemed to sound halfway around the horizon of the plain below. I had a vision of Paula’s soldiers night-marching through the gloom to take us by surprise. But even if they had started to move the moment the sun was down, they could not get here in time. No one was moving in the streets of the town below. Those going with us would be in their homes, waiting.

I went into the summer palace and took a final tour of the building. The rooms seemed oddly empty, as if they had been abandoned for years. I stepped into the courtyard where Sunday lay for a moment, but without turning on the lights. As I stood there, a cicada shrilled suddenly in the darkness at my feet and began to sing.

I went back inside, with the song of the cicada still trilling in my head. It stayed with me as I went down the halls and into the brightly lit lab. Everybody was in place, with helmets already on. Only Porniarsk stood by the directing console, which he had moved out into the center of the room by the tank. I went to the tank myself, to make one last check of the patterns, for we had it set on the pattern of our moment of destination. There was no change in what I saw there.

I seated myself and took a helmet. As I lowered it over my head, the cicada sound was still ringing in my ears, so that it was like being trapped under there with it. I felt my strength flow together with the strength of the others in the monad and the memory of the cicada sound was lost in the silent song of blended identities as I opened myself to the time storm forces in balance around us.

They were there. They had been there all this time, waiting, quivering in balance like a tangle of arrested lightnings. I read their pattern at a glance this time and laid the far future pattern that I wanted like a template upon them. There was matching and overlap and disagreement between the two patterns. I reached out with the strength of the monad, pushed, and the two slid together. It was suddenly done, and over. There had been nothing to it.

I took off my helmet and looked around. The others were taking off their helmets also and, under the fluorescent lights, their faces looked pale and wondering, like the faces of children. “We’re there?” said Ellen. “But where are we?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Then I noticed that around the corners of the drawn shades of the windows, the gleam of full daylight was showing.

We put up the shades; and the sunlight, which looked no different than any sunlight we had ever known, poured in. But outside the windows, all we could see was the same inner courtyard that held Sunday. Overhead, it was a half-cloudy day with thick white cloud masses and clear blue alternating.

We went down the corridors and out into the parking area. Below us, the empty village of the Experimentals and the town were unchanged; but beyond a short distance of plain that surrounded these, high grasses now began. The stalks looked to be six feet tall at least and stretched to the horizon like an endless field of oversize wheat. The road was gone. What now was on the other side of the mountain behind us, we could not, of course, see.

Down in the town, there was still no one stirring. This was not surprising, since many of them might not yet have realized that the move had been made. There had been no sound, no feeling of physical movement when it had happened. It was difficult even for me to realize that this was the far future I had talked about.

“Shall I go tell them, below?” Doc asked.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He hopped into one of the jeeps and drove off. I stood where I was with Ellen beside me, and the others, including Porniarsk, not far off. A moment later, we could see Doc’s jeep emerge beyond the trees and drive in among the buildings of the town, stopping here and there while he jumped out and went inside.

Each time he came out again, he was followed by people from inside a building. Soon the streets were swarming, and the figures below were starting to stream back up the slope toward us. Half an hour later, there was an impromptu celebration underway on the landing area.

It struck me, caught up in it as I was, that I had had more shocks, and more large gatherings recently than in any time since before the time storm. Nonetheless, this last one—this arrival party, as it was named almost immediately—vibrated with something neither the welcome home blast, nor the information session had possessed. There was a relaxed feeling of peace about this occasion that I had not noticed before. It was a warm, almost a cozy, feeling. Moving about among my fellow time travellers, picking up patterns, I finally zeroed in on the reason for it. There was something held in common by all the people now around me that I had not thought to look for in them, before we made the move.

In a sense, those who had come with us were the adventurers among our community, the true pioneers. Those particular words all rang a little off-note, applied to the situation we were in. But what I mean is that, to an individual, those who had come forward with me were men, women, and even children who did not want to be any further back down the line of history than they had to be. In all of them, there was an urge to be at the very front of the wave, up where the race as a whole was breaking new ground.

Realizing this, something new and unsuspected in me warmed to them. It was a corner of myself that I had not even realized existed before. It was, in fact, the part of me that felt just the way they did. Even if I had known before we started that what we would all find up here would be the hour of Armageddon and the final end for our kind, I at least would have wanted to go anyway, to be part of even that, while it lasted, in preference to living out my life in any previous time, no matter how comfortable.

Now, here I was with perhaps a hundred and eighty people who felt the same way I did. Under the most unlikely set of conditions that could be imagined, I had unconsciously put together my own special tribe. I was so elated with this discovery that I had to talk about it with someone. Ellen was busy helping organize the food and drink aspect of the gathering, so I went looking for Bill.

I found him also busy. He had set up a table with some sheets of paper and was asking everybody to sign up so that we could have a complete and correct list of who had actually come through with us, since there were people at the last moment who had changed their minds either for or against the move. The sign-up table, however, was essentially self-operating, now that word of it was being passed through the crowd, and I managed to pull him aside.

We walked off a little way from the rest, and I told him my discovery about the pioneer element in those who had come and my pleasure in it.

“I can’t get over striking gold like that,” I said. “Stop and think how small the whole North American population was after we got the mistwalls halted. And out of that small population we’ve gathered nearly two hundred people who really belong up here, thousands of years ahead in time.”

“That’s true, of course,” he said.

His handsome, small face had been tanned by several years of outdoor weather, and the same amount of time seemed to have thickened and matured even the bones of it, so that he now looked more competent and mature. I realized that it was with him as it had been with Marie. Just as I had not really looked at her for a long time, so I had not really looked at him either; and he had been changing under my nose.