Gordon Dickson - Time Storm

I had really moved off the high end of the emotional scale this time, but I saw now that at last I had gotten through to him. I do not think even then that he understood what I was talking about, but he had registered the charge of the emotion that had ridden on top of my words.

“How much time do you need before you’ll be ready to go?” he said.

“Two—three hours, say.”

“Good. One more thing. We’d like, since we’re moving you this distance, to take advantage of the opportunity to do some testing of the avatar, as well. Do you think he’d be willing to come? He’s had experience in cross-space travel, I understand.”

“He has,” I said. “I’ll ask him. I think he’ll want to come.”

“Then I’ll be back in three of your hours.”

He vanished.

I turned back into the summer palace and went to find Porniarsk. It had not occurred to me until now to wonder what had been occupying him since we had arrived at our destination here in the future; and it struck me suddenly, now, that he had been busy in the lab all that time. But at what, I wondered? When I arrived, I found him working with the vision tank; and I asked him that question.

“I’ve been doing some charting,” he said, waving a stubby tentacle at the tank. “I thought perhaps if I could establish specifically what the inconsistencies were that we noted, I might be able to evolve a picture of what’s happening with the time storm at this future moment.”

“What did you find out?”

“I discovered that, except for certain areas where the force lines of the storm still seem to be breeding, the universe in general has been brought pretty much into the same sort of temporary, dynamic balance that we achieved around this planet back in our earlier time.”

“What about the breeding areas?” I asked.

“That’s interesting. Very interesting,” he said. “The force lines seem to be both breeding and healing—both increasing and decreasing in these areas. By the way, the areas I’m talking about are all out in the midsections of the galaxies. There’s none of them down in the very center of a galaxy—in what might be called the dead core area.”

“Dead core?”

“I thought you knew?” He glanced at me. “The center of most galaxies, like this one, is an area of very old stars, immersed in a dust cloud.”

“Where’s the closest activity to this solar system?”

“The blue-white supergiant star,” said Porniarsk, “that you call Rigel seems to be one of the near loci. But the main activity close to us is centered on the star you call S Doradus in the lesser Magellani Cloud, outside this galaxy, about a hundred and forty thousand light-years from us here.”

“S Doradus is a big, hot star, too, isn’t it?” I said.

“Like Rigel, one of the brightest.”

“Sounds like a large, bright star is necessary. Can you tell why?”

“No,” said Porniarsk. “All I know is that the lines of time storm activity in the area in question seem to center on S Doradus. And, then, there’s the matter that S Doradus has stopped radiating.”

“Stopped what?”

“It’s no longer radiating. It’s gone dark,” Porniarsk said. “I mean by that, that if you were in the immediate neighborhood of that star, it would no longer appear to be radiating. From our distance here, of course, it still seems to be shining; since we’re getting light that left it thousands of years ago.”

My head began to spin. The distances, the star sizes, and the rest of the information involved was on such a scale that my imagination struggled to get a grip on it.

“I’ve got a message for you,” I said, to shift the topic of conversation.

I told him about Obsidian taking me to be tested, and his question as to whether Porniarsk would be willing to go also.

“Of course,” said Porniarsk. “I’d be very interested to see how they do such testing.”

Three hours turned out to be less time than I thought in which to get hold of Ellen and the other leaders, explain what Porniarsk and I were going to be doing, and pack a suitcase. When Obsidian reappeared outside the summer palace at the landing area, he found about forty people—all who could possibly get up there to see Porniarsk and myself off. But it was not at the others he stared, or even at Porniarsk and me, but at the suitcase at my feet.

“Can I ask... he began.

“My bag,” I said. I guessed what was puzzling him. “Personal necessaries. Remember, I wear clothes, shave every morning, and things like that.”

“Oh,” he said. I had discovered by the end of our first day of acquaintance that the humans of his time had no body hair to speak of. “Of course.”

Following this conversation, there was a great deal of kissing and handshaking all around. In fact, our community nowadays was more like one large family than anything else. I almost spoiled the occasion by laughing out loud at the spectacle of Porniarsk solemnly promising people that he would be careful and take good care of himself. It was rather like a battleship assuring everyone that it would keep a wary eye out for sharks and take care not to get bitten.

But even the saying of goodbyes had to run down finally.

“We’re all set,” I told Obsidian.

“All right,” he said. “Then, if you’ll just stand close to me, here.”

Porniarsk and I moved in until we were almost nose to nose with him, leaving a ring of unoccupied ground about ten feet wide around us. All at once, we were standing elsewhere, in a little open space between the trunks of massive elms spaced about thirty feet apart. We stood on something that looked like a linoleum rug, but felt underfoot like deep carpeting, a solid dark green in color. About us were some walls at odd angles, several large puff-type cushions ranging up to a size that would have made a comfortable queen-sized bed, and several of what looked like control panels on stands apparently connected to nothing.

I looked around.

“This is your living area and working quarters?” I asked Obsidian.

“Yes,” he said. “I think you’ll find it comfortable for the three of us. I can arrange the walls so that you can have separate rooms for privacy, if you like.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I assume we won’t be here long in any case, will we?”

“About the equivalent of five days of local time.”

“Five days?” I said. “I thought we’d be leaving for wherever it is in a matter of hours, if not minutes?”

“Oh, we’ve already left,” he said. He waved his hand and something like a picture window appeared between us and the trees to our left. The view in the picture window, however, was a view of black space, bright pinprick stars as thick as pebbles on a beach, and a blue and white earth-globe nearly filling the lower right-hand corner of the view.

I stared at the earth-globe and confirmed my first impression that it was visibly shrinking in size as I watched.

“I thought you said this was your working and living area?”

“It is.”

“It’s a spaceship, too?”

Obsidian waved a hand.

“I suppose you could call it that,” he said. “Actually, it’s more accurate to say it’s simply living quarters. The process of travelling between the stars isn’t much more cumbersome if we bring it along, however; and it’s a lot more comfortable if we do so.”

I turned about in a circle, on my heel.

“The trees and all,” I said. “That’s just an illusion?”

“Out here, yes,” Obsidian said. “Back when we first arrived, of course, you were looking at the actual surrounding forest.”

“When did we take off?”

“As soon as we arrived. But to call it a takeoff—”