by
gordon dickson
st.martin's pesss
hew york

Copyright © 1977 by Gordon R. Dickson
All rights reserved
For information, write:
St. Martin's Press
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Manufactured in the United States of America

DEDICATION: TO THE LIBRARIANS
During the 193t)'s and 1940's anyone writing science fiction did so
almost exclusively for magazines. Then in the early 1950's the
magazine market began to die and paperback books took over.
But the paperback books were on the stand one week and gone
the next. By the time an author's newest book came out his older
books had disappeared.
As a result, during these later years, when the magazines were
mostly gone and the paperback books were coming and going,
there were only a few of us who could afford to be full-time
writers of science fiction; and the fact that this was possible at all
was only because libraries continued to be the only real market for
hardcover science fiction. The libraries alone bought science fiction
books on a regular basis, shelved them, and made them
continuously available to readers; and in this way libraries kept
both science fiction and those of us who wrote it, alive.
To librarians everywhere, therefore, this book—the youngest of
my literary children to see the light of day—is dedicated.

1
The leopard—I called him Sunday, after the day I found him—
almost never became annoyed with the girl, for all her hanging on
to him. But he was only a wild animal, after all, and there were
limits to his patience.
What had moved me to pick up first him, then her, was some-
thing I asked myself often without getting a good answer. They
were nothing but encumbrances and no concern of mine. My only
concern was getting to Omaha and Swannee. Beyond that point
there was no need for me to think. But... I don't know. Some-
how out of the terrible feeling of emptiness that I kept waking up
to in the mornings, I had gotten a notion that in a world where
nearly all the people and animals had vanished, they would be liv-
ing creatures I could talk to. "Talk to," however, had turned out
to be the working phrase; because certainly neither of them were
able to talk back. Crazy cat and speechless girl and with them, my-
self, who before had always had the good sense never to need any-
body, dragging them both along with me across a landscape as
mixed up and insane as they were. But, of course, without me they
would have been helpless.
This time, the trouble erupted just as I pushed the panel truck
over a rise in late summer wheat country, which I figured had once
been cornland, a little below the one-time northern border of

2
Iowa. All the warning I heard was a sort of combination meow-
snarl. Not a top-pitch, ready-to-fight sound, but a plain signal that
Sunday had had enough of being treated like a stuffed animal and
wanted the girl to leave him alone. I braked the panel sharply to a
stop on the side of the empty, two-lane asphalt road and scram-
bled over the seat backs into the body of the truck.
"Cat!" I raved at him. "What the hell's got into you now?"
But of course, having said his piece and already gotten her to let
him go, Sunday was now feeling just fine. He lay there, completely
self-possessed, cleaning the fur on the back of his right forepaw
with his tongue. Only, the girl was huddled up into a tight little
ball that looked as if it never intended to come unwound again;
and that made me lose my temper.
I cuffed Sunday; and he cringed, putting his head down as I
crawled over him to get to the girl. A second later I felt his rough
tongue rasping on my left ankle in a plea for forgiveness—for what
he did not even understand. And that made me angry all over
again, because illogically, now, I was the one who felt guilty. He
was literally insane where I was concerned. I knew it, and yet I
had taken advantage of that to knock him around, knowing I was
quite safe in doing so when otherwise he could have had my throat
out in two seconds as easy as yawning.
But I was only human myself, I told myself; and here I had the
girl to unwind again. She was still in her ball, completely unyield-
ing, all elbows and rigid muscle when I put my hands on her. I had
told myself I had no real feeling for her, any more than I had for
Sunday. But somehow, for some reason I had never understood, it
always damn near broke my heart when she went like that. My
younger sister had had moments of withdrawal something like that
—before she grew out of them. I had guessed this girl to be no
more than fifteen or sixteen at the most, and she had not said a
word since the day I found her wandering by the road. But she
had taken to Sunday from the moment I had led her back to the
truck and she first laid eyes on him. Now, it was as if he was the
only living thing in the world for her; and when he snarled at her
like that, it seemed to hit her like being rejected by everyone who
had ever loved her, all at once.
I had been through a number of crises like this one with her
before—though the others had not been so obviously Sunday's fault

3
—and I knew that there was nothing much to be done with her
until she began to relax. So I sat down and wrapped my arms
around her, cuddling her as close as her rigidness would allow, and
began to try to talk her out of it. The sound of my voice seemed to
help, although at that time she would never show any kind of di-
rect response to it, except to follow orders.
So, there I sat, on the mattresses and blankets in the back of the
panel truck, with my arms around her narrow body that was more
sharp bones than anything else, talking to her and telling her over
and over again that Sunday wasn't mad at her; he was just a crazy
cat, and she should pay no attention when he snarled, except to
leave him alone for a while. After a while I got tired of repeating
the same words and tried singing to her—any song that I could
remember. I was aware it was no great performance. I may have
believed at that time that I was hell on wheels at a number of
things, but I knew singing was not one of them. I had a voice to
scare bullfrogs. However, that had never seemed to matter with
the girl. It was keeping up the human noise and holding her that
helped. Meanwhile, all the time this was going on, Sunday had
crept up as close to us as he could and had his forepaws around
my left ankle, his forehead butted against my knee.
So, after a while, illogically, I reached down and patted his
head, which he took as forgiveness. I was a complete fool for both
of them, in some ways. Shortly after that, the girl began to stir.
The stiffness went out of her. Her arms and legs extended them-
selves; and without a word to me she pulled away, crawled off and
put her arms around Sunday. He suffered it, even licking at her
face with his tongue. I unkinked my own cramped muscles and
went back up front to the driver's seat of the truck.
Then I saw it, to the left of the highway. It was a line of sky-
high mist or dust-haze, less than a couple of hundred yards away,
rolling down on us at an angle.
There was no time for checking on the two back there to see if
they were braced for a racing start. I jammed the key over, got the
motor started, and slammed the panel into motion down the nar-
row asphalt lane between the brown-yellow of the standing wheat,
now gently wind-rippled by the breeze that always preceded a
mistwall, until the plant-tops wavered into varying shades of gold.

No mistwall I had seen, with the time change line its presence al-
ways signalled, had ever moved faster than about thirty miles an
hour. That meant that unless this one was an exception, theoret-
ically, any car in good working order on a decent road should have
no trouble outrunning it. The difficulty arose, however, when—as
now—the mistwall was not simply coming up behind us, but mov-
ing at an angle flanking the road. I would have to drive over half
the length of the wall or more—and some mistwalls were up to ten
miles long—to get out of its path before it caught us, along with ev-
erything else in its way. I held the pedal of the accelerator to the
floor and sweated.
According to the needle on the speedometer, we were doing
nearly a hundred and ten—which was nonsense. Eighty-five miles
an hour was more like the absolute top speed of the panel truck.
As it was, we swayed and bounced along the empty road as if five
more miles an hour would have sent us flying off it.
I could now see the far end of the mistwall. It was still a good
two or three miles away; and the wall itself was only a few hun-
dred yards off and closing swiftly. I may have prayed a little bit at
this point, in spite of being completely irreligious. I seem to re-
member that I did. In the weeks since the whole business of the
time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught
2

6
since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had,
in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me. I had thought
then it was another heart attack, come to carry me off for good
this time; and the bitterness of being chopped down before I was
thirty and after I had spent nearly two years putting myself into
the best possible physical shape, had been like a dry, ugly taste in
my throat just before the change line reached me and knocked me
out.
I remember still thinking that it was a heart attack, even after I
came to. I had gone on thinking that way, even after I found the
squirrel that was still in shock from it; the way Sunday had been
later, when I found him. For several days afterwards, with the
squirrel tagging along behind me like some miniature dog until I
either exhausted it or lost it, I did not begin to realize the size of
what had happened. It was only later that I began to understand,
when I came to where Duluth should have been and found virgin
forest where a couple of hundred thousand people had lived, and
later yet, as I moved south, and stumbled across the log cabin with
the bearded man in cord-wrapped leather leggings.
The bearded man had nearly finished me. It took me almost
three minutes too long after I met him to realize that he did not
understand that the rifle in my hand was a weapon. It was only
when I stepped back and picked up the hunting bow, that he
pulled his fancy quick-draw trick with the axe he had been using
to chop wood when I stepped into his clearing. I never saw any-
thing like it and I hope I never see it again, unless I'm on the side
of the man with the axe. It was a sort of scimitar-bladed tool with
a wide, curving forward edge; and he had hung it on his shoulder,
blade-forward, in what I took to be a reassuring gesture, when I
first tried to speak to him. Then he came toward me, speaking
some kind of Scandinavian-sounding gibberish in a friendly voice,
the axe hung on his shoulder as if he had forgotten it was there.
It was when I began to get worried about the steady way he was
coming on and warned him back with the rifle, that I recognized
suddenly that, apparently, as far as he was concerned, I was carry-
ing nothing more than a club. For a second I was merely paralyzed
by the enormity of that insight. Then, before I could bring myself
to shoot him after all in self-defense, I had the idea of trying to
pick up the bow with my free hand. As an idea, it was a good one

7
—but the minute he saw the bow in my hand he acted; and to this
day, I'm not sure exactly how he did it.
He reached back at belt-level and jerked forward on the handle-
end of the axe. It came off his shoulder—spinning, back, around,
under his arm, up in the air and over, and came down, incredibly,
with the end of its handle into his fist and the blade edge forward.
Then he threw it.
I saw it come whirling toward me, ducked instinctively and ran.
I heard it thunk into a tree somewhere behind me; but by then I
was into the cover of the woods, and he did not follow.
Five days later I was where the twin cities of Minneapolis and
St. Paul had been—and they looked as if they had been abandoned
for a hundred years after a bombing raid that had nearly leveled
them. But I found the panel truck there, and it started when I
turned its key. There was gas in the filling station pumps, though I
had to rig up a little kerosene generator I liberated from a sporting
goods store, in order to pump some of it into the tank of the truck,
and I headed south along U.S. 35W. Then came Sunday. Then
came the girl. . . .
I was almost to the far end of the mistwall now, although to the
left of the road the haze was less than a hundred yards from the
roadway; and little stinging sprays of everything from dust to fine
gravel were beginning to pepper the left side of the panel, includ-
ing my own head and shoulder where the window on that side was
not rolled up. But I had no time to roll it up now. I kept pushing
the gas pedal through the floor, and suddenly we whipped past the
end of the wall of mist, and I could see open country clear to the
summer horizon.
Sweating, I eased back on the gas, let the truck roll to a stop,
and half-turned it across the road so I could look behind us.
Back where we had been, seconds before, the mist had already
crossed the road and was moving on into the fields that had been
on the road's far side. They were ceasing to be there as it passed—
as the road itself had already ceased to be, and the farm land on
the near side of the road. Where the grain had rippled in the wind,
there was now wild, grassy hillside—open country sparsely in-
terspersed with a few clumps of trees, rising to a bluff, a crown of
land, less than a quarter of a mile off, looking so close I could
reach out and touch it. There was not a breath of wind stirring.

8
I put the panel back in gear again and drove off. After a while
the road swung in a gentle curve toward a small town that looked
as normal as apple pie, as if no mistwall had ever passed through
it. It could be, of course. My heart began to pound a little with
hope of running into someone sane I could talk with, about every-
thing that had happened since that apparent heart attack of mine
in the cabin.
But when I drove into Main Street of the town, between the
buildings, there was no one in sight; and the whole place seemed
deserted. Hope evaporated into caution. Then I saw what seemed
to be a barricade across the street up ahead; and a single figure
crouched behind it with what looked like a rocket launcher on his
shoulder. He was peering over the barricade away from me; al-
though he must have heard the sound of the motor coming up the
street behind him.
I pulled the truck into an alley between two stores and stopped
it.
"Stay here and stay quiet," I told the girl and Sunday.
I took the carbine from beside my driver's seat and got out.
Holding it ready, just in case, I went up behind the man crouched
at the barricade. Up this close I could see easily over the barricade
—and sure enough, there was another mistwall, less than a mile
away, but unmoving. For the first time since I had come into the
silent town, I became conscious of a steady sound.

It came from somewhere up ahead, beyond the point where the
straight white concrete highway vanished into the unmoving haze
of the mistwall—a small buzzing sound. Like the sound of a fly in
an enclosed box on a hot July day such as this one was.
"Get down," said the man with the rocket launcher.
I pulled my head below the top line of the makeshift barricade-
furniture, rolls of carpeting, cans of paint—that barred the empty
street between the gritty sidewalks and the unbroken store win-
dows in the red brick sides of the Main Street building. Driving in
from the northwest, I had thought at first that this small town was
still living. Then, when I got closer, I guessed it was one of those
places, untouched but abandoned, such as I had run into further
north. And so it was, in fact; except for the man, his homemade
barricade, and the rocket launcher.
The buzzing grew louder. I looked behind me, back down Main
Street. I could just make out the brown, left front fender of the
panel truck showing at the mouth of the alley into which I had
backed it. There was no sound or movement from inside it. The
two of them in there would be obeying my orders, lying still on the
blankets in the van section, the leopard probably purring a little in
its rough, throaty way and cleaning the fur of a forepaw with its
3

10
tongue, while the girl held to the animal for comfort and compan-
ionship, in spite of the heat.
When I looked back through a chink in the barricade, there was
something already visible in the road. It had evidently just ap-
peared out of the haze, for it was coming very fast. Its sound was
the buzzing sound I had heard earlier, now growing rapidly louder
as the object raced toward us, seeming to swell in size, like a
balloon being inflated against the white backdrop of the haze, as it
came.
It came so fast that there was only, time to get a glimpse of it. It
was yellow and black in color, like a wasp; a small gadget with an
amazing resemblance to a late-model compact car, but half the
size of such a car, charging at us down the ruler-straight section of
highway like some outsize wind-up toy.
I jerked up my rifle; but at the same time the rocket launcher
went off beside me with a flat clap of sound. The rocket was slow
enough so that we could see it like a black speck, curving through
the air to meet the gadget coming at us. They met and there was
an explosion. The gadget hopped up off the road shedding parts
which flew toward us, whacking into the far side of the barricade
like shrapnel. For a full minute after it quit moving, there was no
sound to be heard. Then the whistling of birds and the trilling of
crickets took up again.
I looked over at the rocket launcher.
"Good," I said to the man. "Where did you get that launcher,
anyway?"
"Somebody must have stolen it from a National Guard outfit,"
he said. "Or brought it back from overseas. I found it with a
bunch of knives and guns and other things, in a storeroom behind
the town police office."
He was as tall as I was, a tight-shouldered, narrow-bodied man
with a deep tan on his forearms, and on his quiet, bony face.
Maybe a little older than I; possibly in his late thirties. I studied
him, trying to estimate how hard it would be to kill him if I had to.
I could see him watching, doubtless with the same thought in
mind.
It was the way things were, now. There was no shortage of food
or drink, or anything material you could want. But neither was
there any law, anymore—at least, none I'd been able to find in the
last three weeks.

To break the staring match, I deliberately looked away to the
gadget, lying still now beyond the barricades, and nodded at it.
"I'd like to have a look at it close up," I said. "Is it safe?"
"Sure." He got to his feet, laying down the rocket launcher. I
saw, however, he had a heavy revolver—possibly a thirty-eight or
forty-four—in a holster on the hip away from me; and a deer rifle
carbine like mine was lying against the barricade. He picked it up
in his left hand.
"Come on," he said. "They only show up one at a time; on a
staggered schedule, seven to ten hours apart."
I looked down the road. There were no other wrecked shapes in
black and yellow in sight along it.
"You're sure?" I said. "How many have you seen?"
He laughed, making a dry sound in his throat like an old man.
"They're never quite stopped," he said. "Like this one. It's
harmless, now, but not really done for. Later it'll crawl back, or
get pulled back behind the mist over there—you'll see. Come on."
He climbed over the barricade and I followed him. When we
got to the gadget, it looked more than ever like an overlarge toy
car—except that where the windows should be, there was a flat yel-
low surface; and instead of four ordinary-sized wheels with tires,
the lower halves of something like sixteen or eighteen small metal
4

12
disks showed through the panel sealing the underbody. The rocket
had torn a large hole in the gadget's side.
"Listen," said the man, stooping over the hole. I came close and
listened myself. There was a faint buzzing still going on down
there someplace inside it.
"Who sends these things?" I said. "Or what sends them?"
He shrugged.
"By the way," I said, "I'm Marc Despard." I held out my hand.
He hesitated.
"Raymond Samuelson," he said.
I saw his hand jerk forward a little, then back again. Outside of
that, he ignored my offered hand; and I let it drop. I guessed that
he might not want to shake hands with a man he might later have
to try to kill; and I judged that anyone who worried about a nicety
like that was not likely to shoot me in the back, at least, unless he
had to. At the same time, there was no point in asking for trouble
by letting any misunderstandings arise.
"I'm just on my way through to Omaha," I said. "My wife's
there, if she's still all right. But I'm not going to drive right across
that time change line out there if I've got a choice." I nodded at
the haze from which the gadget had come. "Have you got any
other roads leading south or east from the town?"
"Yes," he said. He was frowning. "Did you say your wife was
there?"
"Yes," I answered. For the life of me, I had meant to say "ex-
wife," but my tongue had slipped; and it was not worth
straightening the matter out now for someone like Samuelson.
"Look," he said, "you don't have to go right away. Stop and have
dinner."
Stop and have dinner. Something about my mentioning a wife
had triggered off a hospitality reflex in him. The familiar, homely
words he spoke seemed as strange and out of place, here between
the empty town and the haze that barred the landscape to our
right, as the wrecked gadget at our feet.
"All right," I said.
We went back, over the barricade and down to the panel truck.
I called to the leopard and the girl to come out, and introduced
them to Samuelson. His eyes widened at the sight of the leopard;

13
but they opened even more at the sight of the girl behind the big
cat.
"I call the leopard 'Sunday'," I said. "The girl's never told me
her name."
I put out my hand and Sunday stepped forward, flattening his
ears and rubbing his head up under my palm with a sound that
was like a whimper of pleasure.
"I came across him just after a time change had swept the area
where he was," I said. "He was still in shock when I first touched
him; and now I've got his soul in pawn, or something like that.
You've seen how animals act, if you get them right after a change,
before they come all the way back to being themselves?"
Samuelson shook his head. He was looking at me now with
some distrust and suspicion.
"That's too bad," I said. "Maybe you'll take my word for it,
then. He's perfectly safe as long as I'm around."
I petted Sunday. Samuelson looked at the girl.
"Hello," he said, smiling at her. But she simply stared back
without answering. She would do anything I set her to doing, but I
had never been able to make her seem conscious of herself. The
straight, dark hair hanging down around her shoulders always had
a wild look; and even the shirt and jeans she was wearing looked
as if they did not belong on her.
They were the best of available choices, though. I had put her
into a dress once, shortly after I had found her; and the effect had
been pitiful. She had looked like a caricature of a young girl in
that dress.
"She doesn't talk," I said. "I came across her a couple of days
after I found the leopard, about two hundred miles south. The
leopard was about where the Minneapolis-St. Paul area used to be.
It could have come from a zoo. The girl was just wandering along
the road. No telling where she came from."
"Poor kid," said Samuelson. He evidently meant it; and I began
to think it even more unlikely that he would shoot me in the back.
We went to his house, one block off Main Street, for dinner.
"What about the—whatever-you-call-them?" I asked. "What if
one comes while you aren't there to stop it?"
"The buzzers," he said. "No, like I told you, they don't run on
schedule, but after one's come by, it's at least six and a half hours

14
before the next one. It's my guess there's some kind of automatic
factory behind the mist there, that takes that long to make a new
one."
Samuelson's house turned out to be one of those tall, ornate,
late-nineteenth century homes you still see in small towns. Two
stories and an attic with a wide screen porch in front and lilac
bushes growing all along one side of it. The rooms inside were
small, dark and high-ceilinged, with too much furniture for their
floorspace. He had rigged a gas motor and a water tank to the well
in his basement that had formerly been run by an electric pump;
and he had found an old, black, wood-burning stove to block up in
one corner of this spacious kitchen. The furniture was clean of
dust and in order.
He gave us the closest thing to a normal meal that I'd eaten—or
the girl had, undoubtedly —since the time storm first hit Earth. I
knew it had affected all the Earth, by this time; not just the little
part west of the Great Lakes in North America, where I was. I
carried a good all-bands portable radio along and, once in a while,
picked up a fragment of a broadcast from somewhere. The con-
tinuity—or discontinuity—lines dividing the time areas usually
blocked off radio. But sometimes things came through. Hawaii,
evidently, was unique in hardly having been touched, and I'd occa-
sionally heard bits of shortwave from as far away as Greece. Not
that I listened much. There was nothing I could do for the people
broadcasting, any more than there was anything they could do for
me.
I told Samuelson about this while he was fixing dinner; and he
said he had run into the same thing with both the shortwave and
long-wave radios he had set up. We agreed that the storm was not
over.
"We've only had the one time change here in Saulsburg,
though," he said. "Every so often, I'll see a line of change moving
across country off on the horizon, or standing still for a while out
there; but so far, none's come this way."
"Where did all the people go, that were in this place?" I asked.
His face changed, all at once.
"I don't know," he said. Then he bent over the biscuit dough he
was making, so that this face was hidden away from me. "I had to
drive over to Peppard—that's the next town. I drove and drove and

15
couldn't find it. I began to think I was sick or crazy, so I turned
the car around and drove home. When I got back here, it was like
you see it now."
It was clear he did not want to talk about it. But I could guess
some of what he had lost from the house. It had been lived in by
more than one adult, and several children. There were a woman's
overshoes in the front closet, toys in a box in one corner of the liv-
ing room, and three bicycles in good condition in the garage.
"What did you do for a living?" he asked me after a moment.
"I was retired," I said.
He frowned over that, too. So I told him about myself. The time
storm had done.nothing in my case to leave me with things I did
not want to talk about, except for the matter of Swannee, down in
Omaha; and somehow I was perfectly comforted and sure that she
and that city had come through the time storm changes unharmed,
though I had heard no radio broadcasts from there.
"I started investing in the stock market when I was nineteen," I
said, "before I was even out of college. I struck it lucky." Luck, of
course, had nothing to do with it; but I had found I could not tell
people that. Because the word "stocks" was involved, it had to be
luck, not hard research and harder-headed decision-making, that
had made money for me. "Then I used what I had to take over a
company that made trailers and snowmobiles; and that did all
right. I'd be there yet, but I had a heart attack."
Samuelson's eyebrows went up.
"A heart attack?" he said. "You're pretty young for something
like that."
"I was damned young," I said. "I was twenty-four."
I discovered suddenly that I had been wrong about not having
things I did not want to talk about. I did not want to tell him
about my heart attack. He looked too much like a man who'd
never had a sick day in his life.
"Anyway," I said, "my doctor told me to take it easy and lose
weight. That was two years ago. So I sold out, set up a trust to
support me, and bought a place up in the woods of northern Min-
nesota, beyond Ely—if you know that state. I got back in shape,
and I've been fine ever since; until the time storm hit three weeks
ago."
"Yes," he said.

16
The food was ready, so I helped him carry it into the dining
room and we all ate there; even Sunday, curled up in a corner. I
had thought Samuelson might object to my bringing the leopard
into his house, but he had not.
Afterwards, we sat on his screened porch at the front of the
house, with the thick leaves of the sugar maple in the yard screen-
ing us from the western sun. It was after six by my watch, but now
in midsummer, there was at least another three hours of light left.
Samuelson had some homemade white wine which was not bad. It
was not very good either, but the town was apparently a dry town;
and of course, he had not left it since he had first come back here
and found his people gone.
"How about the girl?" he asked me, when he first poured the
wine into water glasses.
"Why not?" I said. "We may be all dead—her included—tomor-
row, if the wrong sort of time change catches us."
So he gave her a glass. But she only took a small sip, then put it
down on the floor of the porch by her chair. After a bit, while
Samuelson and I talked, she got out of the chair itself and sat
down on the floor where she could put an arm around Sunday,
who was lying there, dozing. Outside of raising a lazy eyebrow
when he felt the weight of her arm, the leopard paid no attention.
It was amazing what he would stand from her, sometimes.
"What is it?" Samuelson asked me, after we'd been talking for a
while about how things used to be. "I mean—where did it come
from?"
He was talking about the time storm.
"I don't know," I said. "I'll bet nobody does. But I've got a
theory."
"What's that?" He was looking at me closely in the shadow of
the porch. A little evening breeze stirred the lilac bushes into
scraping their upper branches against the side of the house.
"I think it's just what we're calling it," I said. "A storm. Some
sort of storm in space that the whole world ran into, the same way
you could be out driving in your car and run into a thunderstorm.
Only in this case, instead of wind and rain, thunder and lightning,
we get these time changes, like ripples moving across the surface
of the world, with everything getting moved either forward or back
in time. Wherever a change passes over them."

17
"How about here?" he asked. "The town's just where it was be-
fore. Only the people . .
He trailed off.
"How do you know?" I said. "Maybe the area right around
here was moved forward just a year, say, or even a month. That
wouldn't be enough to make any change in the buildings and
streets you could notice, but it might have been beyond the point
where everybody living here, for some reason, decided to get out."
"Why?"
"Those buzzers, as you call them," I said. "Seeing one of them
come at the town would be pretty good reason to me to get out, if
I was someone living here."
He shook his head.
"Not everybody," he said. "Not without leaving some kind of
message."
I gave up. If he did not want reasonable explanations, there was
no point in my forcing it on him.
"Tell me," he said, after we had sat there without talking for a
while, "do you think God had something to do with it?"
So that was his hang-up. That was why he stayed here, day after
day, defending a town with no people in it. That was why he had
carefully adapted the well in the basement to the new conditions
and set up a wood stove so that he could give a regular meal at a
moment's notice to a complete family, if they should return unex-
pectedly, showing up at the front door, tired and hungry. I wanted
to tell him neither God nor human had ever changed things much
for me; but now that I knew what his question meant to him, I
could not do it. All at once I felt the pain in him—and I found my-
self suddenly angry that someone I did not even know should be
able to export his troubles to me, like that. It was true I had lost
nothing, not like him. Still ....
"Who can tell?" I said, standing up. "We'd better be going."
He stood up also, quickly. Before he was on his feet, Sunday
was on his, and that brought the girl scrambling upright.
"You could stay here overnight," he said.
I shook my head.
"You don't want to drive in the dark," he went on.
"No," I said. "But I'd like to get some miles under our belt be-
fore quitting for the day. I'm anxious to get to my wife."

I led the leopard and the girl out to the panel, which 1 had
driven over and now stood in his driveway. I opened the door on
the driver's side, and the other two got in, crawling back into the
body. I waited until they were settled, then got in myself and was
about to back out, when Samuelson, who had gone in the house
instead of following us to the truck, came out again, almost shyly,
with a pair of large paper grocery sacks. He pushed them in
through the open window at my left.
"Here," he said. "There's some food you could use. I put in a
bottle of the wine, too."
"Thanks." I put the two sacks on the empty front seat beside
me. He looked past me, back into the body of the van, where the
girl and the leopard were already curled up, ready for sleep.
"I've got everything, you know," he said. "Everything you
could want. There's nothing she could use—clothes, or anything?"
"Sunday's the only thing she wants," I said. "As long as she's
got him, there's nothing else she cares about."
"Well, goodby then," he said.
"So long."
I backed out into the street and drove off. In the sideview mir-
ror I could see him walk into the street himself so that he could
look after us and wave. I turned a corner two blocks down and the
houses shut him from view.
He had given me a filling station map earlier, with a route
marked in pencil, that led me to the south edge of the city and out
at last on a two-lane asphalt road rising and dipping over the land,
with open, farmer's fields on either side. The fields had all been
planted that spring; and as I drove along I was surrounded by
acres of corn and wheat and peas no one would ever harvest or
use. The sky-high wall of haze that was the time change line, hold-
ing its position just outside of Samuelson's town, now to the left
and behind us, grew smaller as I drove the van away from there.
In a car we were pretty safe, according to what I had learned so
far. These time lines were like lengths of rod, rolling across the
landscape; but as I say, I had yet to encounter any that seemed to
travel at more than thirty miles an hour. It was not hard to get
away from them as long as you could stick to a road.
I had been keeping my eyes open for something in the way of
an all-terrain vehicle, but with adequate speed. Something like a

19
Land Rover that could make good time on the roads but could
also cut across open country, if necessary. But so far I had not
found anything.
I became aware that the engine of the van was roaring furiously
under the hood. I was belting us along the empty asphalt road at
nearly seventy miles an hour. There was no need for anything like
that. It was both safer and easier on the gas consumption to travel
at about forty or forty-five; and now and then gas was not easily
available, just when the tank ran low. It was true I had four spare
five-gallon cans-full, lashed to the luggage carrier on the van's
roof. But that was for real emergencies.
Besides, none of the three of us had anything that urgent to run
to—or away from. I throttled down to forty miles an hour, wonder-
ing how I had let my speed creep up in the first place.
Then, of course, I realized why. I had been letting Samuelson's
feelings get to me. Why should I cry for him? He was as crazy
from the loss of his family as the girl was—or Sunday. But he had
really wanted us to stay the night, in that large house of his from
which his family had disappeared; and it would have been a
kindness to him if we had stayed. Only, I could not take the
chance. Sometime in the night he might change suddenly from the
man who was desperate for company to a man who thought that I,
or all of us, had something to do with whatever it was that had
taken his people away from him.
I could not trust his momentary sanity. Samuelson had talked
for a while like a sane man; but he was still someone sitting in a
deserted town, shooting rockets full of high explosives at out-size
toys that attacked at regular intervals. No one in that position
could be completely sane. Besides, insanity was part of things,
now. Sunday was the definitive example. I could have cut the leop-
ard's throat, and he would have licked my hand as I was doing it.
The girl was in no better mental condition. Samuelson, like them,
was caught in this cosmic joke that had overtaken the world we
knew—so he was insane too, by definition. There was no other pos-
sibility.
Which of course, I thought, following the idea to its logical con-
clusion, as I drove into the increasing twilight, meant that I had to
be insane, too. The idea was almost laughable. I felt perfectly
sane. But just as I had not trusted Samuelson, if I were him, or

20
anyone else looking at me from the outside as I drove across the
country with a leopard and a speechless girl for companions, I
would not trust myself. I would have been afraid that there could
be a madness in me too, that would overtake me sometime, sud-
denly and without warning. Of course, that was all nonsense. I put
the ridiculous thought out of my head.

5
When the red flush of the sunset above the horizon to our right
began to grow narrow and dark, and stars were clearly visible in
the clear sky to the east, I pulled the van off the road into a com-
fortable spot under some cottonwood trees growing down in a lit-
tle dip between two hills and set up camp. It was so warm that I
had the tent flaps tied all the way back. I lay there looking out at
the stars, seeming to move deeper and deeper in the night sky,
becoming more and more important and making the earth under
me feel more like a chip of matter lost in the universe.
But I could not sleep. That had happened to me a lot, lately. I
wanted to get up and go sit outside the tent by myself, with my
back to the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. But if I did, Sunday
would get up and come out with me; and then the girl would get
up and follow Sunday. It was a chain reaction. A tag-end of a line
from my previous two years of steady reading, during my hermit-
like existence above Ely, came back to me. Privatum commodum
publico cedit—"private advantage yields to public." I decided to lie
there and tough it out.
What I had to tough out was the replaying in my head of all the
things that had happened. I had almost forgotten, until now, my
last summer in high school when I started teaching myself to read
Latin because I had just learned how powerfully it underlays all

22
our English language. Underlays and outdoes. "How long, O Ca-
taline, will you abuse our patience?" Good, but not in the same
ballgame with the thunder of old Cicero's original: "Quo usque,
Catilina, abutere patienta nostra?"
After the sweep of the first time change that I thought was my
second heart attack come to take me for good this time—after I
had found I was not dead, or even hurt—there had been the squir-
rel, frozen in shock. The little grey body had been relaxed in my
hands when I picked it up; the small forepaws had clung to my
fingers. It had followed me after that for at least the first three
days, when I finally decided to walk south from my cabin and
reach a city called Ely, that turned out to be no longer there. I had
not understood then that what I had done to the squirrel was what
later I was to do to Sunday—be with it when it came out of shock,
making it totally dependent on me ... . Then, a week or so later,
there had been the log cabin and the man in leggings, the trans-
planted Viking or whoever, who I thought was just anyone cutting
firewood with his shirt off, until he saw me, hooked the axe over
his shoulder as if holstering it, and started walking toward
me ... .
I was into it again. I was really starting to replay the whole se-
quence, whether I wanted to or not; and I could not endure that,
lying trapped in this tent with two other bodies. I had to get out. I
got to my feet as quietly as I could. Sunday lifted his head, but I
hissed at him between my teeth so angrily that he lay down again.
The girl only stirred in her sleep and made a little noise in her
throat, one hand flung out to touch the fur of Sunday's back.
So I made it outside without them after all, into the open air
where I could breathe; and I sat down with my back against the
rugged, soft bark of one of the big cottonwoods. Overhead the sky
was perfectly clear and the stars were everywhere. The air was still
and warm, very transparent and clean. I leaned the back of my
head against the tree trunk and let my mental machinery go. It
was simply something I was stuck with—had always been stuck
with, all my lifetime.
Well, perhaps not all. Before the age of seven or eight, things
had been different. But by the time I was that old, I had begun to
recognize that I was on my own—and needed no one else.
My father had been a cipher as far back as I could remember. If

23
someone were to tell me that he had never actually realized he had
two children, I would be inclined to believe it. Certainly I had seen
him forget us even when we were before his eyes, in the same
room with him. He had been the director of the Walter H. Mann-
heim private library in St. Paul; and he was a harmless man—a
bookworm. But he was no use either to me or my younger sister as
a parent.
My mother was something else. To begin with, she was beauti-
ful. Yes I know, every child thinks that about its mother. But I
had independent testimony from a number of other people; partic-
ularly a long line of men, other than my father, who not only
thought so, also, but told my mother so, when I was there to
overhear them.
However, most of that came later. Before my sister was born
my mother was my whole family, by herself. We used to play
games together, she and I. Also, she sang and talked to me and
told me stories endlessly. But then, after my sister was born, things
began to change. Not at once, of course. It was not until Beth was
old enough to run around that the alteration in my mother became
clearly visible. I now think that she had counted on Beth's birth to
do something for her marriage; and it had not done so.
At any rate, from that time on, she began to forget us. Not that
I blamed her for it. She had forgotten our father long since—in
fact, there was nothing there to forget. But now she began to for-
get us as well. Not all of the time, to start with; but we came to
know when she was about to start forgetting because she would
show up one day with some new, tall man we had never seen, who
smelled of cigars and alcohol.
When this first started happening, it was the beginning of a bad
time for me. I was too young then to accept it, and I wanted to
fight whatever was taking her away from me; but there was noth-
ing there with which I could come to grips. It was only as if a glass
window had suddenly been rolled up between her and me; and no
matter how I shouted or pounded on its transparent surface, she
did not hear. Still, I kept on trying to fight it for several years, dur-
ing which she began to stay away for longer and longer periods-
all with my father's silent consent, or at least with no objections
from him.
It was at the close of those years that my fight finally came to an

24
end. I did not give up, because I could not; but the time came
when my mother disappeared completely. She went away on one
last trip and never came back. So at last I was able to stop strug-
gling; and as a result I came to the first great discovery of my life,
which was that nobody ever really loved anyone. There was a
built-in instinct when you were young that made you think you
needed a mother; and another built-in instinct in that mother to
pay attention to you. But as you got older you discovered your
parents were only other humanly selfish people, in competition
with you for life's pleasures; and your parents came to realize that
this child of theirs that was you was not so unique and wonderful
after all, but only a small savage with whom they were burdened.
When I understood this at last, I began to see how knowing it gave
me a great advantage over everyone else; because I realized then
that life was not love, as my mother had told me it was when I was
very young, but competition—fighting; and, knowing this, I was
now set free to give all my attention to what really mattered. So,
from that moment on I became a fighter without match, a fighter
nothing could stop.
It was not quite that sudden and complete a change, of course. I
still had, and probably always would have, absent-minded mo-
ments when I would still react to other people out of my early
training, as if it mattered to me whether they lived or died. Indeed,
after my mother disappeared for good, there was a period of sev-
eral years in which Beth clung to me—quite naturally, of course,
because I was all she had—and I responded unthinkingly with the
false affection reflex. But in time she too grew up and went looking
somewhere else for attention; and I became completely free.
It was a freedom so great I saw most people could not even
conceive of it. When I was still less than half-grown, adults would
remark on how strong-minded I was. They talked of how I would
make my mark in the world. I used to want to laugh, hearing them
say that, because anything else was unthinkable. I not only had
every intention of leaving my mark on the world; I intended to put
my brand on it and turn it into my own personal property; and I
had no doubt I could do it. Free as I was of the love delusion that
blinkered all the rest of them, there was nothing to stop me; and I
had already found out that I would go on trying for what I wanted
as long as it was there for me to get.

25
I had found that out when I had fought my mother's withdrawal
from us. I had not been able to stop struggling against that until it
had finally sunk in on me that she was gone for good. Up until
that time I had not been able to accept the fact she might leave us.
My mind simply refused to give up on her. It would keep going
over and over the available data or evidence, with near-idiot, un-
ending patience, searching for some crack in the problem, like a
rat chewing at a steel plate across the bottom of a granary door. A
steel plate could wear down a rat's teeth; but he would only rest a
while to let them grow again, and then go back once more to
chewing, until,one day he would wear his way through to where
the grain was. So it was with me. Pure reflex kept the rat chewing
like that; and, as far as I was concerned, it was a pure reflex that
kept my mind coming back and back to a problem until it found a
solution.
There was only one way to turn it off, one I had never found
out how to control. That was if somehow the knowledge managed
to filter through to me that the answer I sought would have no
usefulness after I found it. When that happened—as whe^I finally
realized my mother was gone for good—there would be an almost
audible click in my mind, and the whole process would blank out.
It was as if the reflex suddenly went dead. But that did not happen
often; and it was certainly not happening now.
The problem my mind would not give up on at the moment was
the question of what had happened to the world. My head kept re-
playing all its available evidence, from the moment of my collapse
in the cabin near Duluth to the present, trying for one solid, ex-
plainable picture that would pull everything together.
Sitting now under the tree, in the shade of a new-risen quarter
moon and staring up at the star-bright sky of summer, I went clear
back to reliving my college days, to the paper I had written on the
methods of charting stocks, followed by the theoretical invest-
ments, then the actual investments, then the penthouse suite in the
Bellecourt Towers, hotel service twenty-four hours a day, and the
reputation for being some sort of young financial wizard. Then my
cashing out and buying into Snowman, Inc., my three years as
president of that company, while snowmobile and motor home
sales climbed up off the wall chart—and my marriage to Swannee.
I had never blamed Swannee a bit for what had happened. It

26
must have been as irritating to her as it would have been to me to
have someone hanging on to her the way I ended up doing. The
way I had decided to get married in the first place was that I had
gotten tired of living in the penthouse apartment. I wanted a real
house, and found one. An architecturally modern, rambling build-
ing with five bedrooms, on about twenty acres of land with its own
small lake. And of course, once I had decided to have a house, I
realized what I really needed was a wife to go along with it. And I
looked around a bit and married Swannee. She was not as beauti-
ful as my mother, but she was close to it. Tall, with a superb body
and a sort of golden-custard colored hair, very fine, that she wore
long and which floated around her shoulders like a cloud.
By education she had been headed for being a lawyer; but her
instincts for work were not all that strong. In spite of the fact that
she had done well academically in law school, she had never taken
her bar exams and was, in fact, working as a sort of ornamental
legal assistant to a firm of corporation attorneys down in St. Paul.
I think she was glad to give up the pretense of going to the office
every day and simply take over as my wife. She was, in fact, ideal
from my standpoint. I had no illusions about her. I had buried
those with the memories of my mother years before. So I had not
asked her to be anymore than she was; ornamental, good in bed,
and able to do the relatively easy job of managing this home of
mine. I think, in fact, we had an ideal marriage—until I spoiled it.
As I said, occasionally I would become absent-minded and re-
spond as if other people really mattered to me. Apparently I made
the mistake of doing this with Swannee; because little by little she
drifted off from me, began disappearing on short trips almost as
my mother had done, and then one day she told me she wanted a
divorce and left.
I was disappointed, but of course, not much more than that;
and I decided that trying to have an ordinary, live-in wife had
been a mistake in the first place. I now had all my time to devote
to work, and for the next year I did just that. Right up to the mo-
ment of my first heart attack.
At twenty-four. God damn it, no one should have to have a
heart attack after only twenty-four years in this world! But again
there was my rat-reflex mind chewing away at that problem, too,
until it broke through to a way out. I cashed in and set up a living

27
trust to support me in style forever, if necessary; and I went up to
the cabin to live and make myself healthy again.
Two years of that—and then the blackout, the squirrel, the trek
south, the man with the axe . . . and Sunday.
I had almost shot Sunday in the first second I saw him, before I
realized that he was in the same sort of trance the squirrel had
been in. We ran into each other about twenty miles or so south of
the Twin Cities, in an area where they had started to put together
a really good modern zoo—one in which the animals wandered
about almost without restriction; and the people visiting were
moved through wire tunnels and cages to see the creatures in
something like their natural wild, free states.
But there was no zoo left when I got there; only half-timbered
country. A time-change line had moved through, taking out about
three miles of highway. The ground was rough, but dry and open.
I coaxed the panel truck across it in low gear, picking as level a
route as I could and doing all right, until I got one rear wheel
down into a hole and had to jack it up to get traction again.
I needed something firm to rest the jack base on. I walked into
a little patch of woods nearby looking for a piece of fallen tree
limb the right size, and literally stumbled over a leopard.
He was crouched low on the ground, head twisted a little side-
ways and looking up as if cringing from something large that was
about to attack him. Like the squirrel, he was unmoving in that
position when I walked into him—the time storm that had taken
out the road and caught him as well, must have passed only min-
utes previously. When I stubbed my toe on his soft flank, he came
out of his trance and looked at me. I jumped back and jerked up
the rifle I had had the sense to carry with me.
But he stepped forward and rubbed along the side of my upper
leg, purring, so much like an overgrown household pussycat that I
could not have brought myself to shoot him, even if I had had the
sense to do so. He was a large young male, weighing a hundred
and forty pounds when I later managed to coax him onto a bath-
room scale in an abandoned hardware store. He rubbed by me,
turned and came back to slide up along my other side, licking at
my hands where they held the rifle. And from then on, like it or
not, I had Sunday.
I had puzzled about him, and the squirrel, a number of times

28
since. The closest I had come to satisfying my search for what had
made them react as they had, was that being caught by a time
change jarred anything living right back to its infancy. After I first
came to in the cabin—well, I had generally avoided thinking about
that. For one thing I had a job to clean myself up. But I do
remember that first, terrible feeling of helplessness and abandon-
ment—like a very young child lost in a woods from which he
knows he can never find his way out. If someone had turned up
then to hold my hand, I might have reacted just like the squirrel or
the leopard.
Then there had been our meeting—Sunday's and mine—with the
girl. That had been a different kettle of fish. For one thing, evi-
dently she had passed the point of initial recovery from being
caught in a time change; but equally evidently, the experience—or
something just before the experience—had hit her a great deal
more severely than my experience with the time change had done.
But about this time, the stars started to swim slowly in a circu-
lar dance, and I fell asleep.
I woke with the sun in my eyes, feeling hot and itchy all over. It
was a bright cloudless day, at least a couple of hours old, since
dawn; evidently the tree had shaded me from the sun's waking me
earlier.
Sunday lay curled within the open entrance to the tent; but he
was all alone. The girl was gone.

My first reaction, out of that old, false, early training of mine, was
to worry. Then common sense returned. It would only be a relief,
as far as I was concerned, to have her gone; with her fits of with-
drawal and her pestering Sunday until he^in turn, became a
bother.
Damn it, I thought, let her go.
But then it occurred to me that something might have happened
to her. It was open country all around us here, except for a screen
of young popple, beyond which there was a small creek. I went
down through the popple and looked across the creek, up over a
swelling expanse of meadow lifting to a near horizon maybe three
hundred yards off. There was nothing to be seen. I went down to
look at the creek itself, the edges of which were muddy and
marshy, and found her footprints in soft earth, going toward the
water. A little further, one of her shoes was stuck in the mud and
abandoned.
The creek was shallow—no more than knee deep for someone
her size. I waded across, picked up the shoe, located her tracks in
the mud on the far side and saw them joined by two other sets of
footprints. Bare feet, larger than hers. I began to feel cold and hot
inside at the same time.
I went back to the tent, strapped on the belt with the holstered
6

30
revolver and took the carbine. The carbine held thirteen shells and
it was semi-automatic. My first thought was of following the tracks
up the hill; and then I realized that this would be more likely to
alert whoever the other two people had been than if I drove. If
they saw me coming in the panel, they might figure I'd given up
the girl and left her. If they saw me coming on foot, particularly
with Sunday, they wouldn't have much choice but to think I was
chasing her down.
I packed the gear. It would be hard to replace, maybe; and
there was no guarantee we'd be coming back this way again. Then
I got into the panel, letting Sunday up on the seat beside me for
once, but making him lie down out of sight from outside. I pulled
out on the highway and headed up the road parallel to the way I
had last seen the footprints going.
We did not have far to go. Just up and over the rise that
belonged to the meadow across the creek, I saw a trailer camp
with some sort of large building up in front of all the trailers. No
one had cut the grass in the camp for a long time, but there were
figures moving about the trailers. I drove up to the building in
front. There were a couple of dusty gas pumps there, and a cheer-
fully-grinning, skinny, little old man in coveralls too big for him
came out of the building as I stopped.
"Hi," he said, coming up within about four feet of Sunday's side
of the car and squinting across through the open window at me.
"Want some gas?"
"No thanks," I said. "I'm looking for a girl. A girl about four-
teen, fifteen years old with dark hair and doesn't talk. Have you
seen—"
"Nope!" he chirped. "Want some gas?"
Gas was something you had to scrounge for these days. I was
suddenly very interested in him.
"Yes," I said. "I think I'll have some gas. And . . ."
I let my voice trail off into silence. He came closer, cocking his
left ear at me.
"What'd y'say?" He stuck his head in the window and came
face to face with Sunday, only inches between them. He stopped,
perfectly still.
"That's right," I said. "Don't move or make a sound, now. And
don't try to run. The leopard can catch you before you can take

31
three steps." He didn't know that Sunday would never have under-
stood in a million years any command I might have given to chase
someone.
I jerked my thumb at the back of the panel. Sunday understood
that. He turned and leaped into the back, out of the right hand
seat in one flowing movement. The old man's eyes followed him. I
slid over into the right hand seat.
"Now," I said, "turn around. Give me room to open the door."
He did. I opened the door on that side of the panel a crack. The
baggy coverall on his back was only inches away. Vertically in the
center of the back, about belt level, was a tear or cut about eight
inches long. I reached in through it and closed my hand on pretty
much what I expected. A handgun—a five-chamber .22 revolver-
stuck in a belt around his waist under the coveralls.
"All right," I said, picking up the carbine and getting out of the
panel behind him. "Walk straight ahead of me. Act ordinary and
don't try to run. The leopard will be with me; and if I don't get
you, he will. Now, where's the girl? Keep your voice down when
you answer."
"Bub-bu-bu—," the old man stammered. Sounds, nothing un-
derstandable. Plainly, as his repeated offer of gas had shown, who-
ever lived in this camp had chosen one of their less bright citizens
to stand out front and make the place look harmless.
"Come on, Sunday," I said.
The leopard came. We followed the old man across the drive,
past the pumps. The large building looked not only closed, but
abandoned. Darkness was behind its windows, and spider webs
hung over the cracked white paint of its door frame. I poked the
old man with the carbine muzzle, directing him around the right
end of the building and back into the camp. I was expecting to be
jumped or fired at, at any second. But nothing happened. When I
got around the end of the building, I saw why. They were all at the
party.
God knows, they might have been normal people once. But
what I saw now were somewhere between starving savages and
starving animals. They were mostly late adolescents, rib-skinny
every one of them, male and female alike barefoot below the rag-
ged cuff-edges of the jeans they wore and naked above the waist-
band. Every one of them, as well, was striped and marked with

32
black paint on face and body. They were gathered, maybe thirty or
forty of them, in an open space before the rows of trailers began.
It might have been a stretch of show lawn, or a volleyball court,
once. At the end of it, tied to a sort of X of planks set upright and
surrounded by burnable trash, paper and bits of wood, was the
girl.
Whether she had come there willingly, I do not know. It is not
beyond the bounds of possibility that she had finally despaired of
ever having Sunday love her; and when she met those two other
pairs of feet by the creek, she had gone off of her own free will
with them. But she was terrified now. Her eyes were enormous,
and her mouth was stretched wide in a scream that she could not
bring forth.
I poked the old man with the gun muzzle and walked in among
them. I saw no weapons; but it stood to reason they must have
something more than the revolver that had been hidden on the old
man. The back of my neck prickled; but on the spur of the mo-
ment the best thing I could think of was to put a bold front on it,
and maybe we could just all walk out of here—the girl, Sunday and
I—with no trouble.
They said not a word, they did not move as I walked through
them. And then, when I was less than a dozen feet from the girl,
she finally got that scream out of her.
"Look out!"
For a part of a second I was so stunned to hear her utter some-
thing understandable that I only stared. Then it registered on me
that she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me. I
spun around, dropping on one knee instinctively and bringing up
the carbine to my shoulder.
There were two of them, lying on the roof of the house with ei-
ther rifles or shotguns—I had no time to decide which. They were
just like the others, except for their firearms. The girl's shriek must
have startled them as much as it had me, because they were simply
lying there, staring down at me with their weapons forgotten.
But it was not them I had to worry about, anyway, because—I
have no idea from where—the crowd I had just passed had since
produced bows and arrows; perhaps a bow for every five or six of
them, so that half a dozen of them were already fitting arrows to
their strings as I turned. I started firing.

33
I shot the two on the roof first, without thinking—which was
pure foolishness, the reflex of a man brought up to think of
firearms as deadly, but of arrows as playthings—because the two
on the roof did not even have their guns aimed, and by the time
I'd fired at them a couple of arrows had already whistled by me.
They were target arrows, lacking barbed hunting heads, but none-
theless deadly for that. The rest of the ones being aimed would
certainly not all have missed me—if it had not been for Sunday.
There was nothing of the Lassie-dog-to-the-rescue about Sun-
day. The situation was entirely beyond his understanding; and if
the two on the roof or the bow-wielders had shot me quickly and
quietly enough; probably he would merely have sniffed sadly at me
as I lay on the ground and wondered why I had stopped moving.
But the girl had screamed—and I must suddenly have reeked of the
body chemicals released by fear and fury—so Sunday operated by
instinct.
If I was frightened, he was frightened, too. And in wild animals,
as in man himself once he is broken down to it, fear and fury are
the same thing. Sunday attacked the only fear-making cause in
view—the group of archers and their friends before us; and they
found themselves suddenly facing a^wild, snarling, pinwheel-of-
knives that was a hundred and forty pound member of the cat
family gone berserk.
They ran from him. Of course they ran. All but three or four
that were too badly clawed or bitten to get away. I had plenty of
time and freedom to get the girl untied from the planks and start
to lead her out of the clearing. By that time Sunday was off in one
corner of the open space, daintily toying, with one hooked claw, at
a bleeding, moaning figure that was trying to crawl away from
him. It was a little sickening; but so was what they had planned
for the girl. I called the leopard. He came—if reluctantly—and fol-
lowed us back to the truck. We got out of there.
Half a mile down the highway I had to pull over to the shoulder
and stop the car, again. Sunday was still prickly from the adrena-
line of the battle. He wanted to lie in the back of the panel all
alone and lick his fur. The girl, rebuffed by him, was suddenly
sick. I helped her out of the car and held her head until it was
over. Then I got her back into the front seat of the car, curled up
there with a blanket over her.

34
"They were going to EAT me," she whispered, when I covered
her up.
It was the second time she had spoken, and all in one day. I
looked at her, but her eyes were squeezed shut. I could not tell if
she had been talking to me, or only to herself. I got the panel mov-
ing again and let her sleep. That evening when we camped, I tried
talking to her myself. But she had gone back to being dumb. She
would neither speak nor look at me. Foolishly, I even found my-
self feeling disappointed —even a little hurt at that. But of course
that was just the wrong-headed early training at work in me again.
I had been feeling good over the fact that she was coming out of
her mental prison—as if that really mattered, one way or another.
The next day we headed south by west again. It was a bright,
hot day, and I was feeling good. We had gotten off the asphalt on
to a stretch of superhighway, and there was no one to be seen—not
even anything on the road as inconsequential as an abandoned car.
We were making good time; and Samuelson had helped me to fix
myself on the map. We were close enough to the location of
Omaha that, barring unforeseen delays along the road, we would
reach it by sunset. When noon came, I picked a ramp and pulled
off the freeway—just to be on the safe side in case someone un-
friendly should be cruising it about the time we were having lunch
—and found a patch of shade under some large, scraggly-limbed
trees I could not identify.
We had hardly glimpsed the mistwall of a time change all morn-
ing—and the few we had seen had been far off, so far off that in
the bright daylight it was impossible to tell whether they were
standing still or moving. But obviously one had passed by where
we were some time, since the storms started. About four hundred
yards from the exit ramp of the highway the cross road ended
abruptly in a clump of tall mop-headed palms, the kind you find
lining the street boulevards in Los Angeles.
The palms and the big scraggly-limbed trees signalled that we
were into a different time-changed territory than we had been
earlier. Now that I stopped to notice it, for some time there had
been a different kind of dampness to the air than that which comes
from midwestern, mid-summer humidity. The softness of the at-
mosphere was more like that of a seacoast; and the few white
clouds that moved overhead seemed to hang low and opulent in

35
the sky, the way they do in Florida, instead of being high and dis-
tant like piled up castles, as they are in temperate zone mid-con-
tinental skies during the warm months.
It was a hint, I thought, to be on our guard against strange com-
pany. As far as I had been able to determine, it was only every-
thing below the animal level that got changed by the time storms
when they passed. I had begun to add up some evidence in what I
saw to reach the conclusion that much of what I came across was
several hundred, if not several thousand, years forward from my
own original time. There was some evidence of extensive storm
damage and geological change, followed by considered reforesta-
tion in a majority.of the landscapes I moved through. There must
have been massive loss of life in most areas at the same time or
another, which accounted for the scarcity of most warm-blooded
creatures, except for birds. Certainly topography and vegetation
changed when a time line passed; and I had noticed fish in lakes
that had not been lakes before the time change. But just where on
the scale of life the dividing line was drawn, I had no idea. It
would pay to be watchful. If, for example, snakes were below the
dividing line, then we might suddenly encounter poisonous varie-
ties in latitudes or areas where such varieties had never existed be-
fore.
I spent part of the lunch hour trying to get the girl to talk; but
she was back at being voiceless again. I kept chattering to her,
though, partly out of stubbornness and partly out of the idea that if
she had loosened up once, she could again; and the more I tried to
wear down the barrier between us, possibly, the sooner she would.
When we were done with lunch, we buried the tin cans and the
paper. The girl and I ate a lot of canned stuff, which made meals
easy; and I had fallen into the habit of feeding Sunday on canned
dog food or any other meat that could be found. He also hunted
occasionally as we went along. But he would never go very far
from me to do it, and this restricted what he could catch. We
buried our trash just in case someone or something might find the
remains and take a notion to trail us. We got back in the panel
truck and headed once more down the superhighway.
But it was exactly as if stopping to eat lunch had changed our
luck. Within five miles the superhighway disappeared—cut off by
some past time storm line. It ended in a neat lip of concrete hang-

36
ing thirty feet in the air with nothing in the shape of a road below
or beyond it but sandy hills, covered with cactus and scraggly
trees. I had to backtrack two miles to find an exit ramp that led
down on to a road that appeared to keep going off at an angle as
far as I could see. It was asphalt, like most of the roads we had
been travelling earlier, but it was not in as good shape as the ones
that had led us through Samuelson's small town and past the
trailer camp. It was narrower, high-crowned, and weedy along the
edges. I hesitated because, although the road angled exactly in the
direction I wanted to go, there was something about it that filled
me with uneasiness. I simply did not like the look of it. Here and
there sand had blown across it, a smudge of gold on black—but not
to any depth that would slow down the panel truck. Still, I slowed
on my own and cruised at no more than thirty miles an hour,
keeping my eyes open.
The road seemed to run on without end, which did nothing to
allay that uneasiness of mine. There was something about it that
was unfamiliar—not of any recognizable time—in spite of the fact
that it looked like a backwoods road anywhere. The sandy hill-
scapes following us on either side were alien, too, as if they had
been transported from a desert somewhere and set down here.
Also, it was getting hotter and the humidity was worse.
I stopped the panel, finally, to do a more precise job of estimat-
ing our position on the map than I could do while driving. Accord-
ing to the compass I had mounted on the instrument panel on our
vehicle, the asphalt road had been running almost exactly due
west; and the outskirts of Omaha should be less than twenty miles
southwest of us.
As long as we had been on the superhighway, I had not
worried; because a road like that, obviously belonging to our origi-
nal twentieth century time, had to be headed toward the nearest
large city—which had to be Omaha. Just as on the asphalt road at
first I had not worried either, because it headed so nearly in the di-
rection I wanted to go.
But it was stretching out now to the point where I began to
worry that it would carry me to the north and past the city, without
letting me catch sight of it. Certainly, by this time we had gone far
enough to intersect some other roads heading south and into the
metropolitan area. But we had crossed no other road. For that

37
matter, we had come across nothing else that indicated a city
nearby, no railroad tracks, no isolated houses, no fences, no subur-
ban developments in the bulldozer stage of construction. ... I
was uneasy.
Laying out the road map on the hood of the car, I traced our
route to the superhighway, traced the superhighway to what I
believed to be the exit by which we had come down off it, and
along the road that exit tied into—headed west. The road was
there; but according to the map, less than a dozen miles farther
on, it ran through a small town called Leeder; and we had come
twenty miles without seeing as much as a road sign.
I went through the whole thing twice more, checked the com-
pass and traced out our route, and checked the odometer on the
panel to see how far we'd come since leaving the superhighway—
and the results came out the same. We had to be bypassing Omaha
to the north.
I got back in the truck and started travelling again, driving
slowly. I told myself I'd give myself another five miles without a
crossroad before turning back. I drove them, and then another
five. But I saw no crossroad. Nothing. Only the narrow, neglected-
looking strip of asphalt which looked as if it might continue un-
changed around to the Pacific Ocean.
I stopped the panel again, got jnit and walked off the road to
check the surface of the ground to the south. I walked back and
forth and stamped a few times. The surface was sandy, but hard—
easily solid enough to bear the weight of the panel truck; and the
vegetation was scattered enough so that there would be no trouble
driving through it. Up until now I had been very careful not to get
off the roads, for fear of a breakdown of the truck which would
strand us a distance from any hope of easily finding another vehi-
cle. On foot we would be at the mercy of the first moving time
storm wall that came toward us.
But we were so close now—we were just a few miles away from
getting back to normal life. I could see Swannee in my mind's eye
so clearly that she was almost like a mirage superimposed on the
semidesert landscape around us. She had to be there, waiting for
me. Something inside me- was still positive, beyond all argument,
that Omaha had survived; and that along with it Swannee had sur-
vived in the sanity of a portion of the world as it had been before

38
the time storm. In fact my mind had toyed a number of times with
the idea that since Omaha, like Hawaii, had survived, it might
mean there might be many other enclaves of safety; and the fact
that there were such enclaves would mean there was a way of
beating the time storm, by applying to all other places the special
conditions or whatever unusual elements had kept these enclaves
protected.
In those enclaves she and I could still lead the reasonable and
normal life we could have had before the time storm hit; and
somehow I felt sure that the experience of the time storm would
have straightened her out on what had gone wrong between us be-
fore. Time would have brought her to the realization that it was
simply an old reflex on my part that had made me act like some-
one literally in love with her. Also, she would know how tough life
could be outside the enclaves like the one she now lived in—or
even there, for that matter. She would have a new appreciation of
what I could do for her, in the way of taking care of her. In fact,
the more I thought, the more confident I was that by this time she
would be ready to indulge these little emotional lapses of mine. All
I had to do was find her and things would go well.
—But that was something to think about when there was time to
think about it. The big question now was—should I take the panel
cross-country, south, away from the road, to find a highway or
street that would bring me to the city?
There was really no argument about it. I got Sunday and the girl
back into the panel—they had followed me outside and wandered
after me as I stamped on the ground to make sure it would not
bog down the panel—then we got back in the truck, turned off the
asphalt and headed due south by the compass.
It was not bad driving at all. I had to slow down to about five to
ten miles an hour; and I kept the panel in second gear, occa-
sionally having to shift down to low on the hills, but generally
finding it easy going. It was all up and down, a roller coaster-type
of going for about nine-tenths of a mile; and then suddenly we
came up over a rise and looked down on a lakeshore.
It was just a strip of whitish-brown, sandy beach. But the shal-
low, rather stagnant-looking water beyond the beach stretched out
as far as I could see and out of sight right and left as well. Evi-
dently the time storm had moved this whole area into the north-

39
west of the metropolitan area, pretty well blocking off access from
that direction. The problem for me now was—which way would be
the shortest way round the lake? Right or left?
It was a toss-up. I squinted in both directions but for some rea-
son, just while I had been standing there, a haze of some sort
seemed to have moved in, so that I could not see far out on the
water in any direction. Finally I chose to go to the right, because I
thought I saw a little darkness through the haze upon the sun-glare
off the water and sand in that direction. I turned the nose of the
truck and we got going.
The beach was almost as good as a paved road to drive on. It
was flat and firm. Apparently, the water adjoining it began to
shelve more sharply as we went along, for it lost its stagnant, shal-
low appearance and began to develop quite a respectable surf.
There was an onshore wind blowing; but it helped the heat and the
humidity only a little. We kept driving.
As I watched the miles add up on the truck's odometer, I began
gradually to regret not trying in the other direction. Clearly, I had
picked the long way around this body of water, because looking
ahead I could still see no end to it. When the small, clicking
figures of the odometer rolled up past the twelve mile mark, I
braked the truck to a halt, turned around and headed back.
As I said, the beach was good driving. I pushed our speed up to
about forty, and it was not long before we were back at the point
where we had first come across the lake. I kept pounding along;
and shortly I made out something up ahead. The dazzle of sunlight
from the water seemed to have gotten in my eyes so that I could
not make out exactly what it was—something like a handkerchief-
sized island with a tree, or a large raft with a diving tower out in
the water, just a little way from the beach. But there were the
black silhouettes of two-legged figures on the sand there. I could
stop to get some directions, and we could still be pulling into
Swannee's driveway in time for dinner.
The dazzle-effect on my eyes got worse as the panel got close to
the figures; and the glitter of sunlight through the windshield was
not helping. I blinked, and blinked again. I should have thought to
pick up some dark glasses and keep them in the glove compart-
ment of the panel for situations like this—but I just had not ex-
pected to run into water-glare like this. I must have been no more

40
than thirty or forty feet from the figures by the time I finally
braked the panel to a stop and jumped out of it on to the sand,
blinking to get the windshield-glitter out of the way between us—
and I still could not see them clearly. There were at least half a
dozen of them on the beach, and I saw more out on the raft or
whatever it was.
I started toward them.
"Hey!" I said. "I'm lost. Can you put me on the road to
Omaha? I want to get to Byerly Park, there."
The figures did not answer. I was within a few steps of them
now. I stopped, closed my eyes and shook my head violently. Then
I opened my eyes again.
For the first time I saw them clearly. They had two legs apiece
all right; but that was the only thing people-like about them. As
far as I could see, they wore no clothes; and I could have sworn
they were covered with greenish-gold scales. Heavy, lizard-like
features with unblinking dark eyes stared directly into my face.
I stared back at them. Then I turned and looked out at the raft
and beyond. All around were the beach and the water—nothing
more. And finally, finally, the truth came crashing in on me.
There was too much water. There was no way Omaha could
still exist out there beyond the waves. I had been wrong all the
time. I had been fooling myself, hugging to my mind an impossible
hope, as if it was the fixed center of the universe.
Omaha was gone. Gone completely. Swannee was gone. Like so
many other things, she had been taken away forever. I had lost her
for good, just as I had lost my mother . . .
The sun, which had been high overhead, seemed to swing half-
way around the sky before my eyes and turn blood red. The water
seemed to go black as ink and swirl up all around me and the
watching lizard-humans. My mind felt as if it was cracking wide
open; and everything spun about me like liquid going down a
drain, sucking water and beach and all, including me, away down
into some place that was ugly and frightening.
It was the end of the world. I had been intending to survive
anything for Swannee's sake; but all the time she had already been
gone. She and Omaha had probably been lost in the first moment
after the time storm hit. From then on, there had only been the il-
lusion of her in my sick mind. I had been as insane as Samuelson,

41
after all. The crazy cat, the idiot girl and I—we had been three
loonies together. I had flattered myself that the mistwalls were all
outside me; but now I could feel them breaching the walls of my
skull, moving inside me, wiping clean and destroying everything
over which they passed. I had a faint and distant impression of
hearing myself howling like a chained dog; and of strong hands
holding me. But this, too, swiftly faded away, into a complete and
utter nothingness. . . .

7
The world was rocking gently underneath me. No ... it was not
the world, it was the raft rocking.
Waking, I began to remember that there had been moments of
clarity before this. But they had been seldom. Most of the time I
had been in a world in which I had found Swannee—but a changed
Swannee—after all; and we had settled down in an Omaha un-
touched by the time storm. But, slowly, that world had begun to
wear thin; and more and more often there had been moments
when I was not in Omaha but here, seeing the raft and the rest of
it from my present position. Now, there was no doubt which world
I lived in.
So I was back for good. I could feel that; along with a grim,
aching hunger in my belly. For the first time I began to wonder
where the raft was going, and to worry about Sunday and the girl.
I looked around, identifying things from the hazy periods ear-
lier. It was a beautiful, clear day at sea, or at whatever equivalent
of a sea it was upon which we were afloat. A few inches from my
nose were saplings, tree branches or what-have-you, that had been
woven into a sort of cage about me. Beyond the cage, there was a
little distance—perhaps ten feet—of open log surface to an edge of
the raft, studded with the ever-sprouting twigs that tried to grow
from the raft logs, though these had been neatly and recently bit-

44
ten off for this day. Beyond the logs was the restlessly heaving sur-
face of the gray-blue water, stretching away to the curve of the ho-
rizon.
I rolled over and looked out in the opposite direction, through
another cage-side of loosely woven withes, at the rest of the raft.
It was about a hundred or so feet in length. At one end was a
stand of—I had to call them "trees" for want of any better name—
their thick-leaved, almost furry-looking tops taking advantage of
whatever breeze was blowing to push the raft along before it.
Around their base grew the carefully cultivated stand of shoots
from which my cage, and just about everything else the lizard-peo-
ple seemed to make with their hands, had been constructed.
Behind the trees and the shoots were a couple of other cages
holding the girl and Sunday, plus a pile of shells and stones that
apparently had some value for the lizards. They looked all right.
They were both perhaps a little thinner; but they seemed lively
enough; and, in fact, the girl was looking brighter and more in
charge of herself than I could ever remember seeing her. From her
cage on back, except for piles of assorted rubble and junk—every-
thing from sand itself to what looked like a heap of furs—were the
various members of the crew. I found myself calling them a crew
for lack of a better term. For all I knew, most of them may have
been passengers. Or perhaps they were all members of one family;
there was no way of telling.
But in any case, there were thirty or forty of them, most simply
lying on their bellies or sides, absolutely still in the sunlight, but
with dark eyes open and heads up, not as if they were sleeping.
The few on their feet were moving about aimlessly. There were
only four who seemed to have any occupation. One was an indi-
vidual who was working his way down the far side of the raft on
all fours, delicately biting off the newly sprouted twigs from the
logs of the raft as he went, and three others at the rear of the raft.
These three were holding the heavy shaft of a great steering oar,
which evidently gave the raft what little directional purpose it
could have while floating before the wind.
In the very center of the raft, back about twenty feet from my
cage, was a roughly square hole in the logs, exposing a sort of
small interior swimming pool of the same water that was all
around us. For several minutes, I stared at the hole, puzzled. The

45
sight of it triggered off a nagging feeling in the back of my mind,
as of something that ought to be remembered, but which, annoy-
ingly, refused to surface from the unconscious. Something half-
recalled from one or more moments of earlier temporary return to
rationality. As I watched, one of the recumbent lizard-people got
up, walked over to the pool and stepped into it. He splashed down
out of sight and stayed invisible for what must have been at least
four or five minutes before his head bobbed to the surface momen-
tarily, and then he disappeared again.
There were several more splashes. A few of the others had
joined him in the pool. I watched the water there for a while, but
the lizard-people'stayed mainly below the surface. After about
fifteen minutes or so, one of them climbed back out and lay down
on the bare logs once more, scales wet and glistening in the sun.
From my earlier brief moments of sanity, I remembered seeing
a lot of this swimming pool activity,, but without speculating about
it. Now that my mind was back in my head for good, the old reflex
in me to gnaw away at answers I did not have went to work. The
most obvious reason for their continual plunges was to keep the
outside of their bodies reasonably damp. They had the look of a
water-living race; either one which had evolved in the sea, or
whatever we were on, or humans who had returned to an aquatic
environment. If it was the latter, then it could be that this part of
the earth had been moved very far into the past or future indeed,
either far enough back to find the great Nebraska sea—that shallow
ocean that had occupied the interior of the North American conti-
nent in the Permian period, or far enough into the future to find a
time when that sea had been geologically recreated.
A shift that far forward would have given time for humans to
deevolve and make a genetic shift to the form of these who had
captured us. I studied them.
I had not really looked closely at them before, but now that I
did so, I could see clearly that there were, indeed, two sexes
aboard, and that the females had a mammalian breast develop-
ment—although this was barely perceptible.
The genitals of both sexes were all but hidden in a heavy hori-
zontal fold of skin descending from the lower belly into the crotch;
but what I could see of these external organs was also mammalian,
even human-like, in appearance. So it looked strongly as if a far

46
futureward development of this area under the time storm
influence was a good guess.
Outside of the slight bodily differences, the sex of the individual
creatures around us seemed to make little difference in the ordi-
nary conduct of their daily lives. I saw no signs of sexual response
between individuals—no sign even of sexual awareness. Perhaps
they had a season for such things, and this was not it.
They were clearly used to spending a good share of their time in
water; and that perhaps explained their periodic dunkings in the
raft pool. It could be that they were like dolphins who needed to
be wetted down if they were out of water for any length of time.
It seemed strange to me, though, that they should go to the
trouble of cutting a hole in the center of their raft, rather than just
dunking themselves over one of the edges, if that was their reason
for getting in the water. I was mulling this strangeness over, when
something I had been looking at suddenly registered on me as an
entirely different object from what I had taken it to be.
Everybody has had the experience of looking right at an object
and taking it for something entirely different from what it really is
—until abruptly, the mind clicks over and recognizes its true na-
ture. I had been staring absently at a sort of vertical plane project-
ing from the water alongside the raft and perhaps half a dozen feet
off from the edge, and more or less half-wondering what usefulness
it had, when the object suddenly took on its true character, and
my heart gave an unusually heavy thump.
I had been allowing the plane's apparent lack of motion relative
to the raft to deceive me into thinking it was a surface of wood, a
part of the raft itself. Abruptly, I recognized what it really was—I
had seen enough of the same things charter-fishing on my vaca-
tions to South America, back when I still owned Snowman, Inc.
What I was watching was a shark's fin, keeping pace with the raft.
There was no mistaking that particular shape for the fin of a
sailfish, a tarpon, or any other sea denizen. It was the dorsal of a
shark-but what a shark!
If the fin was in proportion to the body beneath it, that body
must be half as long as this raft.
Now that I saw it clearly for what it was, I could not imagine
what had led me to mistake it for a plane of wood. But now my
mind had clicked over and would not click back. If monsters like

47
that were about in these waters, no wonder the lizard-people
wanted to do their swimming inboard.
On the other hand, it was odd . . . once one or more of them
were in the water, the shark should be able to get at them as easily
underneath the raft as alongside it. Unless there was some reason
it would not go under the raft after them. Or did the lizard-people
figure that by the time the shark started under the raft, they would
have time to get back out of the pool and back up on top of the
logs of which it was built? Now, that was a good theory. On the
other hand, I had seen no evidence of unusual haste in those get-
ting out of the pool.
Was it possible that in the water the lizard-people could out-
swim the shark? That did not seem likely, although obviously, our
captors were at home in the water, and obviously, they were built
for swimming. They were thick-bodied and thick-limbed, their
elbows and knees bent slightly so that they stood in a perpetual
crouch; and both their hands and feet were webbed to near the
ends of their fingers and toes. They looked to be very powerful,
physically, compared to a human, and those teeth of theirs were
almost shark-standard in themselves; although none of them were
much more than five feet tall. But in relation to a shark that size,
the strength of any one of them would not be worth considering.
I was puzzling about these things, when a change came in the
schedule. One of the lizard people approached the cage holding
the girl and opened up some sort of trapdoor in one end of it. The
girl crept out, as if shehad been through this before and knew the
procedure, and, without hesitation, got up, walked to the pool, and
jumped in. She stayed there, holding onto an edge.
Hie same lizard who had let her out was joined by another, and
the two of them went over to the cage of Sunday, who snarled as
they approached. They paid no attention to him but lifted up his
cage easily between them—evidently I had been right about their
strength—carried it to the edge of the pool and opened its end.
Sunday, however, showed none of the girl's willingness to leave
his cage for the water. But evidently the lizards had encountered
this problem before. After a moment's wait, one of them got down
into the pool, reached up with a scaly arm, and pulled cage and
Sunday under the surface with him.
For a moment there was no sign of leopard, cage, or lizard. Then

48
the head of Sunday broke water in the exact center of the pool,
snorting, and swimming strongly. He swam directly to the edge of
the pool by the girl, crawled out, and sat down in the sun to lick
himself dry, looking as furious as only a wet cat can look. The liz-
ard rose behind him, towing an empty cage and climbed out on the
other side.
The two made no immediate attempt to recage him, and I was
still watching him when a sudden squeaking sound behind me
made me turn my head to look. A door in the far end of my own
cage was being lifted. I turned around and crawled out. A lizard-
man was standing facing me, and I caught a sickish, if faint, reek
of fish-smell from him before I turned and went toward the pool.
But at the edge I stopped, looking once more to my right where
the shark fin was still on patrol.
My escort picked me up and dropped me in the water. I came
up sputtering, and grabbed hold of the edge to haul myself out.
Then I saw the girl, still hanging on to a log, in the water near me,
watching. Evidently, she considered it safe enough where we were.
I turned and tried to look down through the water; but the
shadow of the trees at the front of the raft was on it and made it
too dark to see. I took a breath, stuck my head under the water
and looked about. Then I saw why the shark was nothing to worry
about when you were in the pool. The underside of the raft was a
tangle of tree-growth; either roots or saplings of the same sort I
could see growing upwards from the top of the logs.
It was growth that had run wild, a veritable nightmare jungle
of straight and twisted, vine-like limbs, some of them almost half
as thick as the logs of the raft itself. The roots grew everywhere
but in towards the pool area itself, until about fifteen feet down or
so, they curved in and came together in a mat, like the bottom of
an underwater nest. I assumed the lizards kept the pool area clear
underwater by biting off the new suckers emerging from the logs,
as they did in the clean areas topside. Plainly, even something
the size of the shark companioning this raft could not get at us
through that tangle below.
So, the pool was safe territory after all. Not only that, it oc-
curred to me now, but the heavy mass of vegetation underneath
must act as a sort of keel for the raft. I pulled my head back up
out of water and looked around in the air.

49
The girl was still in the pool. Sunday was still out of it and lick-
ing his fur, undisturbed. The two lizards who had turned us out of
our cages had wandered off and become indistinguishable from
their companions. I wondered what would happen if I got out of
the pool myself. I did so—the girl imitating my action a second
later—and found that nothing happened. The lizards ignored us.
I was startled suddenly to feel a hand slip into mine. I turned
and it was the girl. She had never done anything like that before.
"What is it?" I asked.
She paid no attention to the words. She was already leading me
toward the back of the raft. I followed along, puzzled, until a nag-
ging sense of familiarity about our actions sprang an answer out of
my hazy memory of those earlier brief returns to consciousness.
She was leading me—the two of us completely ignored by the
lizards—to the back edge of the raft; and the back edge was what
was available to us by way of sanitary conveniences on this voy-
age. Apparently, while I had been out of my head, she had ac-
quired the responsibility of leading me back there to relieve my-
self, after each periodic dip in the pool.
When this memory emerged, I put on the brakes. She and I
had been living under pretty close conditions from the moment we
had met. But now that my wits were back in my skull, I preferred
at least the illusion of privacy in matters of elimination. After tug-
ging at me vainly for a while, she gave up and went on by herself. I
turned back to the pool.
Sunday was nearly-dry now, and once more on good terms with
the world. When I got back to the pool edge, he got up from
where he was lying and wound around my legs, purring. I patted
his head and sat down on the logs to think. After an unsuccessful—
because I wouldn't let him—attempt to crawl into my lap, he gave
up, lay down beside me and compromised by dropping his head on
my knee. The head of a full-grown leopard is not a light matter;
but better the head than all of him. I stroked his fur to keep him
where he was; and he closed his eyes, rumbling in sheer bliss at my
giving him this much attention.
After a little while the girl came back, and I went off to the back
of the raft by myself, warning her sternly to stay where she was,
when she once more tried to accompany me. She looked worried,
but stayed. When I came back, she was lying down with her arm

50
flung across Sunday's back and was back to her customary pattern
of acting as if I did not even exist.
I sat down on the other side of Sunday, to keep him quiet, and
tried to think. I had not gotten very far, however, when a couple
of the lizards showed up. The girl rose meekly and crawled back
into her cage. I took the hint and went back into mine. Sunday, of
course, showed no signs of being so obliging; but the lizards han-
dled him efficiently enough. They dropped a sort of clumsy twig
net over him, twisted him up in it, and put net and all in his cage.
Left alone there, Sunday struggled and squirmed until he was free;
and a little later a lizard, passing, reached casually in through the
bars of the cage, whisked the loose net out and carried it off.
So, there I was, back in the cage—and it was only then that I re-
alized that I was hungry and thirsty. Above all, thirsty. I tried
yelling to attract the attention of the lizards, but they ignored me. I
even tried calling to the girl for advice and help; but she was back
to being as unresponsive as the lizards. In the end, tired out, I
went to sleep.
I woke about sunset to the sound of my cage being opened
again. Before I knew it, I was being dumped in the pool once
more. This time, I got a taste of the water into which I had been
thrown. It was not ocean-salty—it had a faint taste that could be a
touch of brackishness, but it was clearly sweet enough for human
consumption. If this was the Nebraska sea, it was open to the
ocean at its lower end. But as I remembered reading, it had been
very shallow; and like the Baltic in my time, this far north, in-flow-
ing rivers and underground springs could have diluted it to nearly
fresh-water condition. I climbed out of the pool and went to the
side edge of the raft to drink, just to avoid any contamination
there might be in the pool. I could not remember water tasting
quite so good.
I lay on the logs of the raft with my belly full until the liquid
began to disperse to the rest of my dehydrated body, then got up
and went looking for something to eat. A quick tour of the raft
turned up coconuts, which I had no way of opening, some green
leafy stuff which might or might not be an edible vegetable, and a
stack of bananas—most of which were still green.
I helped myself to the ripest I could find, half expecting the liz-
ards to stop me. But they paid no attention. When I had taken

51
care of my appetite, I thought of the girl and took some back to
her.
She gave me one quick glance and looked away. But she took
the bananas and ate them. After she had finished, she got up and
went a little way away from me and lay down on her side, ap-
parently sticking her arm right through the solid surface of the
raft.
I went over to her and saw that she had found a place where
two adjoining logs gapped apart; and her arm was now reaching
down through the gap into the water and the tangle of growth
below.
Something about her position as she lay there struck an odd
note of familiarity. I straightened up and looked around the raft.
Sure enough, the lizards who were lying down were nearly all in
just the position she had taken. Apparently, they too had found
holes in the raft.
I wondered what sort of a game she and they were playing. I
even asked her—but of course I got no answer. Then, just a few
seconds later she sat up, withdrawing her arm and held out her
closed fist to me. When she opened it up, there was a small fish in
the palm of her hand—hardly bigger than the average goldfish in a
home fishbowl.
She held it out to me with her head averted; but clearly she was
offering it to me. When I did not take it, she looked back at me
with something like a flash of anger on her face and threw the fish
away. It landed on the-raft surface only inches from Sunday. The
leopard stretched out his neck to reach it and eagerly licked it up.
The girl had gone back to her fishing. But whatever she caught
next, she put in her own mouth. Later on, she made a number of
trips to feed Sunday with what she caught. Full of curiosity, I went
looking for another gap in the logs, lay down and put my eye to it.
In the shadow under the raft I could at first see nothing. But as
my vision adjusted, I looked into the tangle of growth there and
saw a veritable aquarium of small marine life. So this was how the
lizards provisioned themselves. It was like carrying a game farm
along with you on your travels. The small fish and squid-like crea-
tures I saw through the gap in the logs did not look all that appe-
tizing to me, at first glance. But after my third day on bananas, I
found myself eating them along with the girl and the lizards—eat-

52
ing them, and what's more, enjoying them. Protein hunger can be
a remarkably powerful conditioning force.
Meanwhile—on the days that immediately followed—I was trying
to puzzle out a great many things, including why we had been
brought along on the raft. The most obvious answer that came to
me was the one I liked least—that, like the bananas and the coco-
nuts, we three represented a potential exotic addition to the ordi-
nary lizard diet, a sort of special treat to be eaten later.
I also toyed with the thought that we had been picked up as
slaves, or as curiosities to be used or traded off at some later time.
But this was hard to believe. The lizards were clearly an extremely
primitive people, if they were a true people at all, and not some
sort of ant-like society operating on instinct rather than intelli-
gence. They had shown no sign of having a spoken language; and
so far I had not seen any of them using even stone tools to make
or do anything. The extent of their technology seemed to be the
weaving of the nets and cages, the gathering of things like coco-
nuts (and the three of us) and the building of this raft; if, indeed,
this raft had been deliberately built, rather than being just grown
to order, or chewed loose from some larger mass of vegetation of
which it originally had been a part.
No, I was forgetting the steering oar. The next time I was let
out of my cage, I went back to the stern of the raft to look at it.
What I found was on a par with the rest of the raft. The oar was
not so much an oar as a thinner tree trunk of the same variety as
those which made up the logs of the raft. It had no true blade. It
was bare trunk down to the point where it entered the water, and
from there on, it was mop-like with a brush of untrimmed growth.
It was pivoted in a notch between two logs of the raft, tied in place
there with a great bundle of the same flexible vine or plant with
which the lizards had made the net they used to restrain Sunday.
This tie broke several times a day, but each time, it was patiently
rewrapped and reknotted by the nearby lizards.
Whatever their cultural level—in fact, whether they had a cul-
ture or not—they had clearly collected the three of us for their own
purposes, not for ours. It struck me that the sooner we got away
from them, the better.
But here on a raft in the middle of an unknown body of water,
getting away was something easier to imagine than do. For one

53
thing, we would have to wait until we touched land again; and
there was no telling when that would be. Or was there? I puzzled
over the question.
It was hard to believe that the lizards could be trying to follow
any specific route with their clumsy sail of trees and their mop-
ended steering oar. At best, I told myself, they could only impose
a slight angle on the path of their drift before the wind. But, when
I thought about this some more, it occurred to me that the wind
had been blowing continually from the stern of the raft with about
the same strength since I had gotten my senses back. We were, of
course, still in the, temperate latitudes of what had been the North
American continent, well above the zone of any trade winds. But,
what if here on this body of water, current climatic conditions
made for seasonal winds blowing in a certain direction? Say, for
example, winds that blew east in the summer and west in the win-
ter, from generally the same quarters of the compass? Judging by
the sun, we were now headed generally east. With a continuous
directional breeze like that to rely on, even the crude rig of this
raft could follow a roughly regular route depending only on the
season of the year.
That evening I marked on one of the logs the angle of the sun-
set on the horizon to the longitudinal axis of the raft, by cutting
marks in one of the logs under my cage with my pocketknife. It set
almost due astern of us, but a little to the north. The next morning
I again marked the angle of the sunrise—again, a little to the north
of our long axis. A check of the angle of the steering oar
confirmed this. The three lizards holding it had it angled to guide
the raft slightly to the north from a true east-west line. It was not
until then that I thought of checking the stars.
So I did, as soon as they came out that evening; but they were
absolutely unfamiliar. I could not recognize a single constellation.
Not that I was very knowledgeable about astronomy; but like most
people, I was normally able to pick out the Little and the Big
Dippers and find the pole star from the Big Dipper. Such a
difference in the patterns of the heavens I saw could only be strong
evidence that a time change had moved this part of the world a
long way from the present I had known—either far into the future
or far into the past.

54
If so . . .a new thought kindled in an odd back corner of my
mind.
If it was indeed the Permian period, or a future one like it,
through which this raft was now sailing, then one thing was highly
likely. We were almost surely moving along roughly parallel to the
northern shore of the inland sea since the beach where we had first
run into the lizards had to be that same northern shore; and it now
seemed probable we had been holding a steady northeasterly
course ever since. I had seen a geology textbook map of the Great
Nebraska Sea once, years ago. It had showed the land area of the
southern and middle states depressed, and that part of the conti-
nent drowned, so that the Gulf of Mexico, in effect, filled most of
the lower middle region of North America. That meant, almost
certainly, we should be running in to land again before long. We
were not, as I had originally feared, off on some endless voyage to
nowhere, as we were perfectly capable of being, while an endless
supply of food swam underneath us and water all around us that
was drinkable.
The prospect of coming to land again before too long meant we
ought to at least get a chance to escape. I cheered up at the
thought and, with immediate anxieties out of the way, remembered
the rest of what was still heavy in my mind.
The insane belief I had had in the survival of Swannee was, of
course, still with me, like the mistwall of a time change line in the
back of my thought.
But the rest of my brain recognized it for the illusion it was.
Evidently, while I had been out of my head, what was left had
been coming to terms with this matter. I was now ready to admit
that there had been something more than a lingering knee-jerk
reflex of the affection response operating in me. The plain truth of
the matter was that I had flipped over Swannee. Not only had I
flipped, but I had done it after I married her, not before; and the
thing that had driven her off was the fact that I had tried to
change the rules of the game after the game was started. I had let
myself go with the idea that I loved Swannee; and made up in my
mind a completely imaginary image of her as someone who was
lovable. Of course she wasn't. She was an ordinary self-seeking
human being like all the rest of us, and when she acted like one
and took off to escape my trying to make her into something she

55
was not, I literally set out to work myself to death, and almost suc-
ceeded with the heart attack.
I suppose, in a way, I had never really let go of Swannee—even
then. So that when the time storm hit, the one thing I could not
accept was that it could have touched her in any way.
But I now had met, and survived, the fact of her death. The
madness, of course, was still back there in the recesses of my
mind, and still virulent; but it was dying, and time would kill it off
entirely. Just as time had healed my first sense of loss when she
had gotten married. Now that it was dying, locked in my wooden
cage most of the time and going nowhere, I had plenty of leisure to
begin looking more sanely at the world around me. Out of that
look came a couple of recognitions I had been refusing to make
earlier. One was that we would have to work hard to survive on
this raft. Sunday and the girl were not only thin, as I had noticed,
but getting thinner. Sunday himself required the equivalent of four
pounds of meat a day to keep him alive. I needed about two thou-
sand calories, or nearly half that amount; and the girl, because she
was not yet at her full growth, probably the same. We two, of
course, could make use of carbohydrates—like the bananas—as
well, as long as those lasted. But getting Sunday the equivalent of
four pounds of protein daily through the cracks between the logs
of the raft was impossible; even with both the girl and I doing our
best—which we did as soon as I realized what the situation was.
The lizard-people showed no interest at all in providing food for
us. We would need to reach land soon if we wanted to live.
The second recognition was that only a few people, relatively,
had escaped the time change. A few people and a few animals.
Apparently the changes had been like great rakes that swept away
most of the population, but here and there let an individual like
me, the girl, or Sunday, slip through their tines. Either that, or
some of us simply were natural survivors—statistical immunes.
Whether the greater number of the population of my time had
been carried off to some other continuum, or destroyed by the sud-
denly changed conditions, there was no telling. But one fact was
becoming more apparent day by day—there was no reasonable
hope of their ever coming back. The moving finger writes . .
I, and the girl, and Sunday, along with a relative handful of
others, possibly including these lizard-people, were stuck with

56
making what we could out of the world as it now was. What we
had at the present, of course, was chaos, with the time lines still
moving and different times coming into existence behind each of
them. But maybe if I was right about some of us being statistical
immunes, we would learn eventually to live with the lines, passing
from zone to zone and becoming a new civilization which took
constant time changes for granted.
Unless, that is, there was some way of bringing the time changes
to a halt. . . .
Now, that was a new thought. It exploded in me silently, one
night as I lay there on my back, looking up through the bars of my
cage at the unfamiliar star-patterns, while the raft rocked gently
under me. I lay there, turning it over and over in my head, ex-
amining it. That relentless part of my mind had fastened on the
idea the second it emerged, like the jaws of a boa constrictor on
part of a prey the snake intended to swallow, and now I knew I
could never let it go, until I had succeeded with it, or proved its
impossibility.

Ten mornings later we saw land, and by noon it was obvious we
would reach it the same day. I was ready to blow kisses at it from
the first second it had appeared like a dark smudge on the horizon.
Try as the girl and I might, we could not keep the three of us
properly fed with the small underraft waterlife; and I had lived
with a sharp-toothed fear that we would have grown too weak to
try escaping by the time our chance for it came. Our goal was a
curving bay with a wide beach shelving gently down to it, some
hills hazy in the background, and one or two large rocks or small
rocky islands just beyond the mouth of the bay.
Shortly after noon the lizards lined up along the side of the raft
facing the shark fin and began to roll up the vegetable-like leaves I
had seen and throw these small green balls at the shark. Where the
balls of vegetable matter touched the water, a milky stain spread
immediately and was still spreading, like the blossoming of some
underwater flower, as the motion of the raft left the spot behind
us. As the lizards continued to pelt the water around the fin with
the balls of green stuff, a milky rime gradually gathered around the
base of the fin itself.
Suddenly the fin moved, changed angle in the water and moved
off rapidly until it was lost from sight. Looking back along the
wake of the raft, I saw the shapes of small fish come to the surface
8

58
belly-up through the whitened water where the green stuff had
fallen.
So we half-drifted, half-steered at last into the bay without our
overside companion. In the bay the water was as calm as a lake on
a still day, and startlingly clear. I could look down at a sandy,
plant-and-shell strewn bottom, finally, that must have been fifty
feet below, although it looked much shallower.
I was able to estimate its true depth because the full extent of
the growth on the underside of the raft was now visible; and it
stretched down almost as far, if not as far, as the trees that were
our "sail" stretched up from the deck of the raft. A good two hun-
dred yards or more from the beach we grounded, the lowest exten-
sions of the growth under our raft touching against the bottom of
the bay and stopping us from going further inshore.
The lizards immediately began diving for what seemed to be
some sort of large shellfish. The shells were a good foot in length,
and when I picked up one of the first that was brought on board, I
was startled by the heaviness of it. The whole thing must have
weighed twenty pounds.
In the sun and the air, the shells soon opened of their own ac-
cord; and the lizards scooped the interior creatures out and swal-
lowed them more or less whole.
So did the girl, Sunday and myself. They were delicious; and we
would have stuffed ourselves if I had not stopped, and made the
girl stop feeding herself as well as Sunday, for fear of intestinal
upset in all of us after such a period of semi-starvation.
But beyond a few mild stomach cramps an hour or so later, I
had no bad effects, and the girl and Sunday did not even seem to
have that. So, I left them to eat or not as they wished; and during
the next few days, we ate our persistent hunger out of existence
through steady snacking on the shellfish.
We were free to do this around the clock, because Sunday, the
girl and I had been let out of our cages some time before we came
to anchor, so to speak; and since then, none of the lizards had
bothered to put us back in. As my hunger diminished, I began to
think less of that and more about escaping. I could stand on the
edge of the raft and look at the sand of the beach. Only a couple
of hundred yards away, as I said; but it might as well have been a
couple of hundred miles away. There was no way to get ashore ex-

59
cept to swim there. And even if the girl could, and Sunday would
make it through the water with me, any one of the amphibious-
looking lizard-people could probably let us get nine-tenths of the
way to the beach and still reach us in time to bring us back before
we could wade ashore. They shot through the clear underwater
like green rockets. But there had to be a way. It was bad enough
to have to figure out a way of escaping by myself. The headache
would come in bringing the girl and Sunday safely with me. But I
could not leave them behind. Neither one was able to survive
alone. It had to be the three of us, together.
I was standing looking down into the water at them, even envy-
ing them in a way, when something like a swiftly-moving dark
shadow suddenly intruded on the scene; and all at once lizards
were literally leaping out of the water back on to the surface of the
raft. All but one. Down in the transparent depths, that one was
being swallowed. Either our original shark, or one just like it, had
joined us; and once more we had a deadly companion alongside.
The lizards stood on the deck and stared down at the shark. I
did not blame them. In the beautifully clear water the huge sea
predator loomed like a nuclear submarine. It was patrolling the
water about the raft now, in short runs and turns back and forth,
as if impatient for another victim.
I looked at the still-large pile of green vegetation on the raft.
But none of the lizards made a move toward it, and after a second
I realized why. Clearly the stuff, in water, was a potent poison.
They could safely throw it overside when they were moving before
a breeze, away from the place where the poison would linger. But
here in this bay, once th^vater was poisoned, they would not be
able to return soon to their diving for shellfish.
I waited. The shark stayed. The lizards waited. I fumed. The
shark's presence was one more obstacle in the way of escape for
the girl, Sunday and myself. At the same time I was amazed at the
apparent helplessness of the lizards. I had assumed without think-
ing that they would have some kind of plan to deal with a situation
of this sort. But apparently not—unless their technique was to sim-
ply wait out the shark, sit on the raft until it got tired and went
away.
However, if it was the same shark—or even of the same breed
and temperament as the shark that had dogged the raft earlier—it

60
was not likely to leave in any reasonable length of time. The fin
that had followed us earlier had been with us for days on, end.
The eerie part of the whole business was that there was no visi-
ble sign of an attempt at consultation among the lizards. From the
beginning they had shown no indication of having a spoken lan-
guage; and I had not been able to make out any other method of
signs or signalling they might be using between themselves. But I
had always assumed that in some way, if they had to, they could
communicate with each other. Now it seemed they could not even
do that. A handful of them stood and watched the shark for a
while; but eventually, all of them went back to acting as if they
were still out at sea, resting on the logs, hunting between them in
the growth under the raft in search of small marine life to eat, and
so on. The only sign that there was anything at all unusual about
the situation was the fact that still none of them came to put us
back in our cages.
Night came with no change. A day after that followed with the
shark still waiting and the lizards still all on the raft. Around
noon of the third day, however, something new began to happen.
Just before the sun was full overhead, one of the lizards lying
near the edge of the raft, beyond which the shark was presently
patrolling, got to his feet. He stood facing down at the shark in the
water, and then he began to bounce as he stood, not moving his
feet, but bending his knees slightly so that he bobbed up and down
like someone on a diving board getting ready to dive.
Once started, he continued the bobbing steadily and with a sort
of reflexive monotony of pace. The other lizards seemed to be pay-
ing no attention to him; but after perhaps half an hour, when I
looked back over at where he was, after having my attention else-
where for a while, I saw that another of the lizards, about ten feet
from him, was now also on his feet and bobbing. The two of them
matched their rhythms precisely, rising and falling together as if
the same invisible spring was actuating them both.
An hour later, there were four of them on their feet and bob-
bing. Gradually, more and more of the others joined them in si-
lent, continuous movement—until by mid-afternoon all the lizards
on the ship were performing the same soundless, feet-in-place
dance.
The shark, meanwhile, either having seen them on the edge of

61
the raft, or—what is more likely—having been attracted by the vi-
brations of their movements through the logs and the water, was
now patrolling in very short runs back and forth, almost within
touching distance, it seemed, of the raft edge.
Suddenly, as the shark passed, one of the lizard figures leaped
into the water upon its back . . . and all at once the air was full of
lizards taking to the water,
I ran to the side of the raft and looked out—and down. The
shark was already at the bottom of the bay, moving rapidly away
from the raft. But the lizards were all over him, like green-scaled
dogs clinging to a bull. Their heavy jaws were tearing chunks out
of the shark's incredibly tough hide; and a filmy cloud of blood
was spreading through the underwater. Not merely shark's blood,
either. I saw the huge selachian catch a lizard in its jaws and liter-
ally divide him in half.
Then the whole struggle moved away out of my sight, headed
toward the open sea, as the shark evidently followed its reflex to
go for deeper water.
For some moments I simply stood, staring—then the implica-
tions of the situation exploded on me. I ran to the girl and grabbed
her by the arm.
"Come on," I said. "Come on, now's our chance! We can get
ashore now, while they're all gone."
She did not answer. She only stared at me. I looked over
at Sunday.
"Come, Sunday!"
He came. The girl came also. She did not hang back; but on the
other hand, she only let {ne pull her toward the shoreside of the
raft, which was its forward end.
"We've got to swim for the beach!" I shouted at her. "If you
can't swim, hang on to me. You understand?"
I roared the last two words at her as if she was deaf; but she
only stared back at me. She was not hindering, but neither was she
helping. The cold thought came through me that, once more, I was
being put in a concerned situation. Why didn't I go off and leave
her—her and the leopard both, if it came to that? The important
thing was that I live, not that I save other people's lives.
But, you know, I could not. Somehow, to go ashore by myself
and leave both of them here was unthinkable. But she would have

62
to do something more than just stand there* not making an active
effort to get ashore. I tried to tell her this; but it was at once like
talking to someone who was deaf and someone who had given up
thinking.
I was reaching the desperation point. I was about to throw her
bodily into the water when the first of the lizards started coming
back aboard the raft, and our chance to escape was past.
I gave up and turned back to watch them climb out of the water
onto the logs. Those who had been hurt were the first to return.
They crawled back up into the sunlight, one by one, and dropped
down, to lie as still as if each of them had been knocked on the
head.
Lizards kept coming back over the next half hour or so. The
last dozen or so to come aboard had been very badly bitten by the
shark. Three of these later died, and the surviving lizards simply
pushed the bodies overside. The tide took them out in the late af-
ternoon, and in the morning they were gone. There would be
plenty of scavengers waiting for them.
The lizards did not go immediately back to their shell-fishing
when day broke the following morning. They had evidently won
their battle with the large shark—though my guess was that it had
cost them at least a dozen of their number. But they seemed
exhausted by the effort; and as the sun rose, the clear water of the
bay showed itself to be full of small sharks, not more than two or
three feet long but dashing around madly as if still excited by the
gore and torn meat of the day before. Sunday, the girl and I were
still uncaged; and I began to hope that, possibly, this would be-
come the permanent state of affairs. If so, I appreciated it; al-
though of course, I could always have cut myself out of my woven
cage with my pocketknife and then freed the girl and Sunday.
I could not decide what was keeping the smaller sharks around
us. There was nothing for them to feed on that I could see. Then
that night the first storm I had ever known to ruffle that sea blew
up, a heavy, tropical rainstorm type of atmospheric explosion; and
I found out why they were still with us.
The wind began in the afternoon, and the sky piled up with
white clouds which crowded together and darkened until we had
an early twilight. Then the breeze died and the water beneath us
became viscid and heavy. The raft rocked, rubbing on the floor of

63
the bay with its undergrowth, swayed by a swell that came in on us
from far out on the airless water, even though we felt no wind
where we were.
Then lightning and thunder began to flicker and growl—high up
in the clouds above us, but also far out, over the open water. A
new, cold breeze sprang up, blowing shoreward, strengthening as
the daylight faded; and the sound and activity of the storm grew,
approaching us and coming lower, closer toward the surface of the
sea. As the last of the sun's illumination went, leaving us in a pitch
darkness, the storm broke over us with its full power; and we
clung in darkness to the now heavily pitching and rolling raft.
I had found a place to wedge myself among the trees of our
"sail," with one arm around the girl and the other holding on to
Sunday. The girl trembled and shivered as the cold rainwater
poured down on us; but the leopard took it stoically, pressing close
to me but never moving. Around us, also wedged in among the
trees, were some of the lizards. Where the rest of them were, I had
no idea. It was impossible to see someone in the total darkness un-
less they were right beside you. In the total darkness, vision came
only in brief glimpses, every few seconds or so, when there would
be a crack of thunder and a vivid lightning flash that lit up the
whole surface of the raft, streaming with the rain and plunging like
a tethered horse as the black waves all around us tried to drive us
up on the beach, and the raft's undergrowth, grounded on the sand
below, resisted.
The lightning flashes were like explosions in the mind. After the
sudden brilliance of e^ch was gone, the scene it revealed would
linger for a second on the retina and in the mind before fading out.
I got wild glimpses of the struggling raft—and wilder glimpses of
the waters of the bay, not merely their surface but their depths, as
sometimes the raft heeled over to hold us in a position staring al-
most directly down into the heaving sea.
The water was alive with marine life of all kinds, visible in the
lightning flashes, dashing about in a frenzy. I had wondered what
had brought all the small sharks into the bay after the fight with
the big shark was over. Now I suddenly saw why. Like a great wa-
terlogged mass bumping and rolling along the very floor of the
bay, impelled by the storm and by the fly-like swarm of smaller

64
fish tearing at its carcass, the huge shark, now dead, was with us
again.
It could not have died at the time the lizards abandoned their
fight with it, or its skeleton would have been stripped clean long
before this. It must have survived, weakly fighting off the smaller
members of its own species who were ready to devour it while it
still lived, until just a few hours past, when loss of blood and
strength had finally let it down into death.
Now, like a dead man returned to the scene of the crime, it was
back with us, courtesy of the storm and the onshore wind. A freak
of that wind and storm was bringing it back, not merely into the
bay, but right up against the roots of our raft itself. Clinging to
the tree-trunks on either side of me, looking down into the water
with each flash of lightning, I was less than fifty feet or so in a
straight line from where what was left of the carcass was being
torn apart—now, by larger sharks and other fish up to fifteen or
twenty feet long, still small compared to the sea corpse, but big
enough from my point of view. I fretted over their presence. Even
if another chance to escape should come, with all the lizards off
the raft, we could not hope to make the swim ashore in safety,
through those swarming shark jaws.
Then, suddenly, there was a lightning flash and the underwater
scavengers were all gone. The half-eaten body of the large shark
lay rolling to the sea-disturbance and the tearing it had just been
getting by its devourers, but now it was alone on the floor of the
bay. I blinked and waited for the next flash. I could not believe
what I saw.
With the next flash came enlightenment; and with it, an end to
shark carcass, raft, lizards, and everything. The next glare showed
the shark overshadowed by a shape twice its size—a dark body,
like an underwater cloud. And it also showed, out of the water and
white against the black of the waves, a gray-white tentacle as thick
as a cable used to tie up a superliner. The tentacle was out of the
water. It stood erect in the air, like a telephone pole, twenty feet
above the deck at the far end of the raft. A moment later the raft
shuddered, as if to the blow of an unthinkably huge axe, and the
end where we were began to rise in the air.
Another flash of lightning showed the great tentacle now grip-

65
ping the whole far end of the raft and pulling it over, down into
the waves.
There was no more time for waiting, nor any time to talk the
two of them into coming with me. I yelled in Sunday's ear to
come, pulled the girl after me, and jumped for the water. Its chok-
ing wetness closed over my head; but I came up still holding on to
the girl, and taking a sight on the beach with the next flash, began to
swim ashore.
I do not remember how I made it. It seemed I swam forever
holding up the girl. But eventually the wet blackness that enclosed
us threw us forward into a blackness that had no substance, and a
split second later we slammed against hard, level sand. Even with
most of the breath knocked out of me, I had the sense to crawl as
much farther up the beach as I could, dragging the girl. Then I
collapsed. I let myself drop on the beach, one hand still holding an
arm of the girl. The damp, grainy surface beneath me went soft as
a mattress and I fell into sudden, deep sleep.
I woke to daylight and warming air. The girl was only a few feet
away. So was Sunday.
In the bay there was no sign of any raft, or anything, for that
matter. We were as alone as if we had been lost in the desert for
weeks. I lay there, slowly letting our new situation become real to
me.
We were free again, but without food, weapons, or trans-
portation. In addition, I felt as if I had been drawn through a
whole series of knotholes, one after another. By contrast, the girl
and Sunday looked as rested and cheerful as if the storm and all
the rest of it had never happened. Well, their reactions were noth-
ing to be surprised at, I told myself, grumpily. I was twice the age
of the girl or nearly so and probably five times the age of Sunday.
It didn't matter. By God, the three of us had made it!
The minute I tried to sit up, they noticed me. In a second they
were all over me. Sunday gave one large leap to land beside me
and started to rub himself up against my chest, knocking me flat.
The girl reached me a split-second later and picked me up.
"Stop that," she scolded Sunday, out loud, in actual and unex-
pected words. I was sitting up again now, but her arms were still
around me, her head against my chest; and I got the strange im-

66
pression that she was hugging me. This sort of response by the two
of them made me feel absurdly warm inside; but when I tried to
pat the girl on the head, she broke away at once, scrambling to her
feet, turning her back and walking off a few steps. Sunday, purring
loudly, was doing his best to knock me down again; but I was
braced for him.
I leaned heavily on his back with one arm and pulled myself
creakily to my feet. Seen from the shore, the place we had ended
up had much less of the California look than the beach where we
had first run into the lizards. Back from the stretch of open sand
were some kind of pine-needle trees with a northerly look and a
tree like a willow, with fairly thick-standing grass in the open
spaces.
I patted Sunday on the head and spoke to the girl's back.
"We'd better look around," I said, hoarsely.
I led the way and the other two followed. Behind the immediate
fringe of trees there was a small bluff. We went up to the top of
that and looked out at what seemed to be a stretch of midcon-
tinental prairie spottily overgrown with clumps of trees. There
were not quite enough trees to call it a forest and an almost total
lack of undergrowth. In the open patches it was mainly high grass,
green and brown, with just an occasional, scattered, lone sapling
or bush.
Nowhere in sight was there any sign of civilization.
I stood on the top of the bluff and did some pondering. I did
not like the semi-arid look of the country before me. We were on
foot now, and we could survive without food for a few days, if
necessary; but what I was looking at did not have the appearance
of being either lake or river country, and drinking water was a
constant need. Add to that the fact that we were now completely
unarmed except for my pocketknife; and it might not be just wild
animals we would have to worry about encountering out there.
In the end, I decided against leaving the only drinking water in
view, which was the lake. We went east along the beach, the route
in which the lizard raft had been headed anyway, for three days,
living off shellfish and whatever small creatures we could find in
the sand or shallow water just offshore. Our diet of small things
from the underside of the raft had done my sensibilities a world of
good in that area of diet. I could now eat anything that didn't look

67
as if it would poison me—and eat it raw at that. The girl was
equally open-minded, I noticed; and as for Sunday, he had never
had a problem about the looks of his food to begin with.
The third day we hit the jackpot—well, a jackpot of sorts. It
must have been somebody's lakeshore home, on a lake that had
now become part of the inland sea. There were no people in sight
around it, and no other lakeshore houses or cabins nearby. But
this place must have cost someone a good deal of money. It had a
large house, with attached garage and a separate pole barn—that
is, a type of barn-size building, made of metal roof and siding that
were literally hung on wooden posts the thickness of telephone
poles, set in the earth. It also had a dock and a boat. A road that
was dirt, but well-graded and well-kept, led from the house and
the lake away into the country beyond the beach. The country
here was treed thickly enough to be honestly called forested.
The home looked as if it had been abandoned less than a week
before. Some of the food in the refrigerator still looked edible; and
the food in the large, chest-type freezer in the double garage would
probably have been edible if the electric power had stayed on. We
must have crossed a former mistwall line, some way back; because
this was the kind of trick the time storm played. A few miles off,
we had been several geologic ages in the past, here we were only in
yesterday. Tomorrow we might be in any future time, I supposed.
As it was, I trusted none of it. But there was a wealth of canned
goods on shelves—also bottled goods. It gave me a peculiar feeling
to mix myself a scotch and soda—even an iceless scotch and soda—
and sit sipping it in the overstuffed chair of a carpeted living room.
The only drawback to the place was that it had neither of the
two things we needed most—Weapons and transport—a car or truck
in which we could travel.
I searched the place from dock to driveway. There was not even
a canoe in the boathouse. There was, in the pole barn, a 1931 all-
black Model A Ford roadster somebody had been restoring; but it
was not in driveable condition, nor were there parts lying around
that could be put in to make it driveable. It held only the block of
a motor, with the head off and the cylinders, crankshaft and oil
pan missing. There were a couple of bicycles in the garage, a bat-
tered girl's single-speed, and a man-size three-speed Raleigh, which
had been kept in only slightly better condition.

68
In one end of the pole barn, however, was a gasoline-driven
electric generator, in beautiful condition under its protective coat
of grease, and a good deal of wood and metal-working tools-
power and otherwise—also in fine condition. I got the generator
cleaned up and going; although after about fifteen minutes I shut it
off again. The three of us were used to doing without the luxury of
electric lights and appliances; and there was, I judged after meas-
uring it with a stick, only ten or fifteen gallons of gas left in a
drum by the generator. I did not yet know exactly what I would
use the gas for, but it was too useful a material to be wasted.
Later, I found some empty pop bottles with screwtops and filled
them with the gas, then tied rags around their necks, so that they
could be turned into molotov cocktails in a hurry. That gave us
one kind of weapon.
Meanwhile, the girl and Sunday were settling in. There were
two bedrooms with closets holding women's clothes, and the girl,
for the first time, began to show some interest in what she wore.
She still stuck to shirt and jeans, generally, but I caught her a cou-
ple of times trying on things when I came into the house unex-
pectedly from outside.
Sunday liked the carpets. He slept and ate. We all ate—and
gained back some of the weight we had lost on the raft.
I was determined that we would not stir from where we were
without some means of protecting ourselves. I had two ideas about
weapons I might be able to make. I had rejected the thought of a
bow and arrows. I was a mediocre-to-poor archer; and no bowyer
at all. Making a really effective bow was beyond me. Other alter-
natives were, first a homemade, muzzleloading gun using a length
of metal water pipe wrapped with wire, if I could find any, and
using match heads for the explosive element. In short—a zip gun.
Second, a crossbow using a leaf from one of the springs of the
Model A. There was enough gas to let me run the generator and
get the wood and metal-working power tools operating in the pole
barn.
In the end, I chose the crossbow, not because it was simpler,
but because I couldn't find any wire; and I had a vision of the
water pipe blowing up in my face. I found a dry chunk of firewood
that looked to me to be maple or oak, sawed it roughly to shape
and then worked it on the lathe to an approximation of a stock and

69
frame for the crossbow. I cut a slot across the frame, sank the leaf
spring (the smallest of the leaf springs) into it crosswise and did as
good a job of gluing it there as I could. Modern glues were mira-
cle-workers, given half a chance. I glued a separate, notched bar
of hard wood along the top of the frame for the cord of the cross-
bow, and set up a lever-crank to allow me to tighten the bow cord,
notch by notch.
I had more trouble making the short, heavy arrows—quarrels—
for the thing than I did putting together the crossbow itself. It was
not easy to make a straight shaft from a raw chunk of wood, I dis-
covered.
But the day came when I had both crossbow and quarrels. Both
had been tested. There was no lack of power in the crossbow. The
problem was with my quarrels. Their shafts broke too easily when
they hit something hard. But, they would do on any flesh and
blood target. The morning came when we mounted the two bikes,
the girl and I—happily she had evidently ridden a bicycle before,
and the skill came back to her quickly—and wearing backpacks,
we started off down the empty road, away from the lake, with Sun-
day footing it alongside us.
The weather was pleasant, with the temperature in the high six-
ties, Fahrenheit, and the sky was lightly spotted with occasional
clouds. As we got away from the water the humidity began to fall
off sharply, until the day was almost like one in early autumn up
near the Canadian border. We made good time, considering—con-
sidering Sunday, that was. Dogs are generally content to trot
steadily alongside the bikers they belong to; but Sunday had a cat's
dislike of regimentation. Sunday preferred that the girl and I travel
at the equivalent of a sIqw walk, so that he could make short side
excursions, or even take a quick nap and still catch up with us.
When we did stop finally, to give him a break, he lay down heavily
on top of the girl's bike and would not be moved until I hauled
him clear by sheer muscle-strength and a good grip on the scruff of
his neck.
In the end we compromised with him, riding along at hardly
more than a walking speed. As a result, it was not surprising that I
got more and more involved in my own thoughts.
The road we were on had yet to lead past any sign of civili-
zation. But, of course, we were not covering ground at any great

70
speed. Eventually our route must bring us to someplace where we
could get the weapons and wheels I wanted. Then, once more mo-
bile and protected, as it were, I meant to do a little investigating
along the thought I had come to, lying on the lizard raft, nights. If
the world was going to be as full of potential threats, as we had
just seen it, it was high time we set actively about the business of
learning the best ways to survive in it. . . .
We hit no signs of civilization that day, but late afternoon, we
crossed a creek hardly larger than a trickle, running through a cul-
vert under the road. In this open territory it looked as though it
probably contained clean water; but I boiled it to make sure, and
we set up camp for the night by it.
Midway through the next morning on the road, we rode past a
chunk of a suburb. I mean exactly that—a chunk. It was some two
hundred yards off our asphalt highway, a roughly triangular piece
of real estate with lawns, garages, streets and tract houses looking
as if it had been sliced off at random and dropped down here in
the middle of nowhere.
There were no people about it any more than there had been
people about the lakeshore home. But these buildings were not in
the untouched condition of the house by the lake. The area
looked, in fact, as if a tornado had passed through it, a tornado, or
else something with the size of a dinosaur and a destructive urge to
match. There was not one building that was whole and weather-
tight, and some were all but flattened.
Nonetheless, they represented a treasure trove for us. I went
through all the houses and turned up a sixteen gauge shotgun and
a carbine-type .22 rifle. There were no shells for the shotgun and
only one box of shorts for the .22. But the odds on picking up am-
munition for these two common caliber firearms were good enough
to count on. The suburb-chunk also contained eight cars. Five of
these had been made useless by whatever had smashed the build-
ings. Of the remaining three, all were more than a few years old,
and one would not start at all. That left me with a choice between
a two-door Pontiac hardtop in relatively good shape and a Volvo
four-door sedan that was pretty well beaten up.
I chose the Volvo, however. Not only for its extra carrying ca-
pacity, but because the gas mileage should be better. There was no
filling station among the homes in the suburb, but I drained the

71
gas tanks of all the other cars that proved to have anything in
them; and when we started out in the Volvo, we had a full tank
plus another fifteen gallons in cans tied on to a makeshift rack on
top of the trunk. Also, I had found two three-speed bikes in good
shape. They were tied to the top of the car.
The suburb had a fine, four-lane concrete road leading out of it,
but that ended about two hundred yards from the last of the
smashed houses. I drove the Volvo, bumping and bucking across a
lumpy open field, to get it back on our familiar asphalt and turned
left into the direction in which we had been originally headed. We
kept going; and about an hour later, I spotted a mistwall to our
right. It was angled toward the road we were on, looking as if it
crossed the asphalt somewhere up ahead of us.

My heart jumped when I saw it; but after watching it closely for a
little while, I calmed down. Clearly, the wall was standing still. We
continued on up along the road, with its vertical, white face getting
closer and closer, until finally we were far enough along to see
where it ended. It did indeed cut across the road at last, about a
quarter mile ahead of where we were; but it only continued be-
yond that point of intersection for about a hundred yards. By
going off the asphalt to the left just a short distance, we could get
around the end of the cloud-high curtain. Not only could we by-
pass it safely; but after going a little further, we would be able to
get where we could see what was behind it, without ever having to
set foot in what might be dangerous territory. I kept us moving.
We stopped finally and left the road, a good fifty or a hundred
feet short of the point where it was intersected by the mistwall. Up
this close to the wall, we could see it seeming to reach clear out of
sight above us; and we could feel the peculiar breeze and the dust
that always eddied from it, like the peppering of a fine spray on
our face and hands. We struck off into the trees and brush to the
left of the road, with the car in low gear and moving along level
with the face of the wall.
It did not take long to reach the end of it. I kept on a little fur-
ther, however, not wanting to turn the corner until I could see
9

74
behind it. But though we kept going further and further, we still
did not seem to quite clear the end. Finally, I saw why. We were
not going to be able to see behind that mistwall after all. Here at
what I had thought was its point of termination, it had either bent
to the right and continued, or run into another mistwall going off
at an angle in that direction.
At first, all I felt was disappointment that I was not going to get
a look behind it. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the reason
neither mistwall nor mistwall section had been moving had been
because each had butted up against the other; and the two time
change lines coming together had somehow created an unusual
state or condition that had halted them both.
The moment that I thought it, I was hungry to see what was
behind the intersection of those two mistwalls. Ever since, lying on
the lizard raft, I had come up with the idea that perhaps those of
us who were still here on the earth might be individually immune
to the time changes, I had been playing with the idea of not avoid-
ing the next mistwall we met, but deliberately walking into it, to
see if I could get through and survive. Now I had a double reason
to try going through the one before me. It was not merely to find
out if I could get through with nothing worse than the uncon-
sciousness I had experienced the first time, but to discover if there
was something special or strange about the situation where one
time change line ran into another. I stopped the Volvo.
I got out and looked at the wall. I also looked forward along the
other angle of the second, or continued, mistwall to see where the
road emerged once more from it, only about a couple of hundred
yards away. It occurred to me that all I had to do was get back on
the road and keep going, and the three of us would continue to
stay safe, united, and happy. Or, I could turn and go through the
mistwall; and I might, just might, learn something—that is, if I
made it through all right.
I stood there. And the longer I stood, the stronger grew the
desire in me to try going through the wall. It was exactly the way it
had always been, from my earliest childhood, when my mind fas-
tened on to a question and would not let it go without finding the
answer. The phenomenon was like every time since I'd first let that
relentless mental machinery in my head get its teeth into a prob-
lem. I remembered perfectly the terrible feeling I had felt during

75
the initial seconds of that first time change, when I had thought I
was having another heart attack. I remembered the miserable,
helpless, empty sensation all through me after I had come to. I
remembered every bit and part that had been bad about it; and
still. . . still... as I stood there the wanting to go through that
wall and find out what I did not know was like a sharp, sweet taste
on my lips and a hunger that used me up inside like fire.
I turned back at last to look at the girl and Sunday. If I went
through the wall and never returned, what would happen to them?
I told myself that I owed them nothing, and something inside me
called me a liar. At the same time, the thought of any respon-
sibility I might have toward either of them had about as much de-
terrent effect on the hunger that was eating me up as a cup of
water tossed on a burning building. I had no real choice. I had to
go through that wall if I-and they-died for it. I turned back to
the leopard and the girl, both of whom were still sitting in the car.
"Stay here!" I said. "You understand me? Stay right here.
Don't take as much as one step after me. Stay where you are!"
They both stared at me silently. One of the girl's hands twitched
—that was all. I turned and walked away from them, toward the
mistwall, until I had to squint my eyes against the flying dust of it.
Just before I reached the actual mist of the wall, I turned and
looked back. The girl still sat with Sunday beside her, both watch-
ing me. Neither had moved a muscle.
I turned back again, closed my eyes to the sting of the dust, and
walked blindly forward.
But the hard part was not the dust. The hard part was that it
was like walking into an emotional tornado. It was bad. It was
very bad. But, somehow, it was not as bad as I remembered it
from the first time, outside cabin. Maybe this was because my
first time through had left me with a sort of immunity; as if I had
been inoculated against the effects I felt. Maybe it was easier be-
cause I now had some idea what to expect and was braced for it.
Basically, I felt as if my soul had been ripped out of my being. I
felt naked, sick and frightened. But, you know, it was not the kind
of fear I feared—if that statement makes any sense to you. I stayed
on my feet and came out the other side, walking.
I was suddenly assaulted by the clamor of dogs barking not far
in front of me. I opened my eyes and saw them—more than a

76
dozen of them, all tied to short leashes, but all barking, snarling
and leaping against their tethers to get at me. They were tied to
leashes anchored to thick stakes driven into the earth, in front of a
slice of a house about fifty yards away, a house sitting on a chunk
of a lawn in the interior angle of the two mistwalls. Behind the
house was forest, and the house itself was a two-story frame build-
ing that looked as if it would be at home surrounded by a mid-
western farmyard. As I looked, the door opened, and a woman
came out with a rifle already at her shoulder, pointed at me.
"Drop your gun." Her voice was a low, carrying soprano, soft
but positive.
"Wait a minute," I told her. "How about talking about this?"
I had no intention of dropping my gun. She was standing behind
the dogs, in the open, with no rest or other support for her rifle,
but with the weapon up and aimed. If I had to shoot her to live
myself, I would. At that distance, unless she was a natural marks-
woman, holding her gun steady enough to hit me would not be
easy. Even from where I stood, I could see the end of the barrel
waver slightly in the sunlight.
I was more concerned about her dogs; and I was not about to
drop the one weapon that could defend me against them. In fact—
the situation framed itself in my mind and produced its own ines-
capable conclusion—if she turned the dogs loose on me, I was
going to shoot her first. They were dogs of all sizes, but the least of
them must have gone at least forty pounds, which is heavy enough
to be a potential man-killer. I could shoot three-quarters of them,
and there would still be enough left to pull me down and finish me
off. Nor did I think she would be able to pull them off in time to
save my life, once she had set them on me.
"Listen!" I called to her. "I'm just here by accident—"
"I said put down your gun!" she cried. Her rifle went off, and a
bullet whistled wide of me into the mistwall beside me.
"Quit that!" I said, raising the .22. "Or I'll have to start shoot-
ing back."
She hesitated—or if it wasn't hesitation, at least she did not pull
her trigger again. Perhaps the first shot had been more accidental
than otherwise. I kept talking.
"Look," I told her over the noise of the dogs. "I don't want to
bother you. I just happened to stumble on your place here, and I'll

77
be glad to be on my way again. Why would I want to be any trou-
ble to you anyway? You're armed, you've got your dogs; and I'm
all alone. Now, why don't we just both point our rifles to the
ground and talk for a moment—"
Her gaze, which had been focused on me, shifted suddenly. Her
rifle barrel changed its aim slightly.
"Alone?" she shouted back. "Do you call that alone?"
I turned to look; and sure enough, her question was a good one.
If there was one thing I could count on—if there was one damn
thing under the sun that I could absolutely be sure of with Sunday
and the girl—it was that they would do exactly what I had told
them not to. Somehow they had worked up the courage to come
through the mistwall on their own, and now they were standing
right behind me.
Of course, this changed the situation entirely. The woman had
three times as much target, now. She might not hit me, but her
chances of hitting one of our group was tripled. I felt a touch of
something not far from panic. Add to what was happening the fact
that with Sunday in view and scent, the dogs were now really
going crazy; while Sunday's own back was beginning to arch like
the stave of a drawn bow. He did not like dogs.
But for all that, he would not leave me to face them alone. He
pressed close against my leg and snarled softly in his throat,
watching the dogs. It was magnificently touching and, at the same
time, monumentally exasperating to know that the crazy cat would
stay beside me, even if I tried to drive him back with a club.
I looked again at the woman—just in time. She had grown arm-
tired of holding the rifle to her shoulder and was moving now to
untie the nearest dogs. There was no time for me to debate the
ethics of the situation. I put a shot from my own rifle into the dirt
between her and the animal she was approaching. She froze.
"Don't try letting any of them go!" I called to her. "I don't
want to hurt you; but I'm not going to let us be chewed up by your
animals. Step back now and put your own gun down."
She backed up, but without letting go of her rifle. I put another
shot from the .22 into the frame of the doorway behind her. She
checked, hesitated, and let the gun slip from her hands to the earth
at her feet.
"All right!" I said. "Now, I'm not going to hurt you, but I've

78
got to make sure you're not going to hurt us. Stay where you are
and don't move."
She stood still. I turned to the girl.
"Hold, Sunday!" I said. "Stay right where you are, both of you.
This time, I mean it!"
I went forward, holding the .22. The dogs had their tethers
stretched taut, trying to reach me, so that it was possible for me to
see where I needed to walk to stay out of reach of each one of
them as I went through their pack. I came up to the woman, bent
and picked up her gun. It was a 30.06, a good, clean, hunting rifle.
With that in my hands, I felt more secure.
I knew what I had to do, then—and that was shoot the dogs
while they were all still safely tied up. But when I raised her rifle I
found I could not do it. It was not just that the woman would be
vulnerable without them once I had taken her rifle and gone on. It
was also the matter that I was still too civilized. I could not get
over thinking of them as pets, instead of as the four-legged killers
she had turned them into. I twisted about to face the woman.
"Look," I said. "I'm going to have to kill your dogs to make
sure they won't hurt us, unless you can think of some way to fix
things so I can trust them not to attack us."
She sighed and shivered at the same time. It was as if all the
strength in her had suddenly run out.
"I can do it," she said, in a dead voice. She looked away from
me, to the dogs. "Quiet! Down—all of you. Down! Be quiet!"
They obeyed, to my astonishment. Their barking and snarling
fell gradually into silence. They stared at the woman, licking their
muzzles, and lay down one by one until they were all on the
ground and silent, watching.
"That's pretty good," I said to the woman.
"I used to run an obedience school," she answered in the same
dead voice. "You don't have to worry. You can go now."
"Sorry," I said. "But I don't know what else you have in the
way of guns or dogs inside that house of yours. Let's go inside.
You first."
She stiffened.
"No!"
"Calm down, damn it!" I said. "I just want to look around."
She was still stiff.

79
"Just a minute," she said. She turned her head and called back
through the open doorway into the dark interior behind her.
"Wendy, come out here."
"My daughter," she said, harshly.
We waited, and after a second, a blonde-haired little girl of
early grade school age came out and pressed herself up against the
woman, who put her arm around the child.
"It's all right," the woman said, "we're just going to show this
man our house."
She turned then, and with one arm still around her daughter, led
the way inside. I followed, carrying both rifles. There was not a
great deal to see inside. A time change line had cut the house very
nearly in half. A portion of the living room, all of the kitchen and
bathroom, plus one bedroom and a half, remained. The bright sun
coming in the uncurtained windows of the rooms that were still
whole made the spartan existence that the two of them had been
living here all very clear and plain. I went over the rooms care-
fully, but there were no other guns and only some kitchen knives
that might have possibilities as weapons.
The woman said nothing all the time I was looking around. She
stood by the living room window and glanced out from time to
time. I thought she was checking on the dogs, because they stayed
quiet. But I was wrong.
"Is that your wife out there?" she asked at last.
"Wife?" I said.
For a second, the question made no sense at all. I looked out
the window where she was looking and saw only Sunday and the
girl. Then, of course, I understood.
"No!" I said. "She's just a kid. I picked her up after she'd just
been through a time change; and it mixed her up pretty badly.
She's not right yet, for that matter. I—"
I broke off. I had been about to go on and tell her about my
previous conviction that Swannee had escaped the time changes,
and a lot more that was purely personal. But it was none of her
business. For that matter, the girl was none of her business, either.
The fact of the matter was, I had long since drifted into ignoring
any sexual quality in the girl; if I had ever paid any attention to
that, in the first place. My mind had been full of my own personal
problems. But I could hardly try to explain that to this woman

80
without confusing the matter more than I would clear it up. I was
a little surprised at the strength of the sudden urge in me to talk
about it; then I realized that she was the first rational, adult
human I had met since the beginning of the time storms. But it
was still none of her business.
I looked once more around the living room of the house, ready
to leave now. The woman spoke quickly, as if she could read my
mind.
"Why don't you ask her to come in?"
"Ask her in?" I said. "If she comes in, the leopard has to come
in, too."
She grew a little pale at that and held the young child closer to
her side. But then she tossed her head back.
"Is he dangerous?" she asked. "The leopard?"
"Not if the two of you stay well back from him," I said. "But if
he comes in here, he's got to pass by those dogs of yours, and I
can't imagine that happening."
"I can," she said, flatly. "They'll obey orders."
She walked with her daughter to the door, which was standing
open, and through it. I followed her.
"Come on in!" she called to the girl and Sunday. Of course the
girl neither moved nor answered, any more than Sunday did.
"It's all right," I told the girl. "You and Sunday come in." I
turned to the woman. "And you'd better control those dogs."
The girl had already started toward the house; but Sunday held
back. Seeing he would not come, she turned back to him. I had to
go out to both of them.
"Come on," I said. I took a fistful of the loose skin at the scruff
of Sunday's neck and led him with me toward the house. He came;
a little reluctantly, but he came. The dogs tied nearest to his path
shrank back from him as we approached, but those farther off
whined and crawled forward to the limit of their tethers, white-
toothed and panting.
"Down!" said the woman from the doorstep, and, hearing her,
if I'd been a dog I would not have delayed doing what she said.
The soft soprano now had a knife-edge to it. It lifted and cut. It
carried clearly without her seeming to have to raise the volume.
"All of you-down! QuietI" The dogs followed the girl and Sunday

81
with eyes and wet breath; but they neither got to their feet nor
raised a clamor.
We all went back inside the house and the woman shut the door
behind us. One lone bark sounded from the yard as the door
closed. The woman opened it again and looked out. There was si-
lence. She closed the door once more and this time the silence con-
tinued.
"Hello," she said to the girl. "I'm Marie Walcott, and this is my
daughter, Wendy."
The girl—my girl—said nothing. Her face had a look that made
it appear merely as if she did not understand, but which I knew
well enough tb recognize as an expression of stubbornness.
"She doesn't talk," I told the woman. "I mean, she can talk, but
she doesn't like to—part of the shock she went through, I suppose.
But she hears and understands you, all right."
The girl stepped to my side, at that, then went around me and
knelt down on the other side of Sunday, putting an arm around the
leopard's neck.
"Poor thing," said the woman, watching her. The expression on
the girl's face did not change. The woman looked back at me.
"What are you going to do now?"
"We'll move on," I said. "I told you that. And I'm taking this
rifle of yours. I'll leave you my .22 rifle—I'll drop it about five hun-
dred yards out, so we'll be well gone by the time you get to it. It's
a lighter gun and it'll suit you better in any use you've got for a
rifle. The dogs are your real protection, and I'm leaving you those,
alive. But try to track us down with them, and I'll shoot every one
of them that Sunday doesn't tear up."
"I wouldn't come after you that way," said the woman. "Where
are you going anyway?"
"Into the futuremost segment of time-changed country I can
find," I said. "Somewhere there must be somebody who'll under-
stand what's happened to the world."
"What makes you so sure there's anyone like that?"
"All right," I said, "if there isn't we're still going to be looking-
for the best piece of time to stay with, or some way of living with
the time changes, themselves. I've been running away from the
mistwalls; but now I'm going through any one I meet, so I can find
out what's on the other side."

82
She looked out her window toward the two mistwalls overshad-
owing her dogs and her home.
"What is on the other side out there?" she asked.
"You wouldn't like it," I said. "What's farther in?" I pointed
through the back of the house toward the forest that crowded close
upon her place.
"I don't know," she said. "There used to be a town of fifty
thousand people—Gregory, Illinois—about ten miles down the
road, there. But there's not even any road, now. I don't know."
I looked closely at her.
"You haven't moved from this place since the time storms first
started?"
"That's right." She looked somber. "Wendy and I sat here and
prayed, after the first time change came close. At first we prayed
for Tim—for my husband to come back. But now for some time
we've just prayed that the mistwalls will leave us alone."
"Two of them are right on top of you," I said. "Didn't you
think of getting away from them?"
"To what?" she said, shrugging. "I've got half a year's supply of
food in the basement here—had to, since we live out of town. If
they move over us, then it's over, all at once. Meanwhile, we're
safer here than someplace else. I ran a boarding kennel, so I had
the dogs, here, to guard me. And there was—or we thought there
was—always the chance my husband . . . ."
She shrugged again and stopped talking.
"All right," I hefted both rifles and turned toward the door.
"Come on, Sunday, Girl. As for you, Mrs. Walcott, wait fifteen
minutes and then follow us out. You'll find the .22 leaning against
a tree, a little way into the woods, there."
I opened the door. The woman's voice spoke from behind me to
the dogs, commandingly.
"Quiet! Down!" Then her tone changed. "We could go with
you."
I turned around. My first, unthinking reaction was that she was
joking. I saw she was not. Then, suddenly, I saw and understood a
great many other things.
I had been assuming, without really looking at her, that she was
housewifely middle-aged. She was wearing slacks and a man's
shirt, and of course she had on no makeup. Her hair was cut short

83
—rather clumsily cut short; and there were dark circles of weari-
ness under her eyes. By contrast with the girl, the only human
member of the opposite sex I had seen since the first time storm,
at first glance, Marie Walcott had looked maturely-fleshed and
unremarkable. Now, suddenly I realized that she was probably no
older than I. In fact, given the conditions of civilization once more
she would have been damned attractive. She was full grown, some-
one my own age, with the body of a woman rather than that of a
half-grown girl, with a sane adult mind and capability of speech.
Suddenly I remembered that it had been a long time since I and
any woman ....
I noticed all*this in a moment; and in the same moment, I real-
ized that she had wanted me to notice—had set out to make me no-
tice. It changed the whole picture.
"Go with us?" I said, more to myself than to her.
"We'd all be safer, in one large group," she said. "You could
use another grown-up. And of course, there's the dogs."
She was right about the dogs. A pack like that, properly trained,
could really be valuable.
"There's your daughter," I said. "She's too young to be making
long marches every day."
"I've got a cart the dogs can pull her in—also, we'd be running
into roads, and some kind of transportation sooner or later, don't
you think? Meanwhile, I . . . we'd both feel better with a man
around."
She was giving me all the practical reasons why our teaming up
would work, and I was countering with all the practical arguments
against it; and we both knew that we were talking around the one
real reason I should or should not add her to my party, which was
that I was male and she was female.
"Why don't you think it over?" she said. "Stay here overnight
and think abouHt. Maybe we can talk about it some more, later
on."
"All right," I said. "We'll stay until tomorrow." I glanced out
the window.
"I'd better camp off by the edge of the trees, there," I said.
"Sunday isn't going to take to your dogs just like that—or they to
him."
"Sunday?" said the woman. "Is that what you call him? I think

84
you heard me say my name. I'm Marie Walcott and this is
Wendy."
"I'm Marc Despard," I said.
"Marc, I'm pleased to meet you." She held out her hand and I
took it. It was a strange feeling to shake hands after the last few
weeks. Her hand was small but firm, and there were calluses at
the base of her fingers. "Are you French?"
I laughed. "The name's French-Canadian."
She let go of my hand and looked at the girl.
"I didn't hear . . ."
"She's never told me her name," I said. I looked at the girl.
"How about it? Do you want to tell us now?"
The girl was absolutely silent. I shrugged.
"I've just been calling her 'Girl,'" I said. "I guess you'll have to
do the same."
"Maybe," Marie smiled at her, "she'll tell us her name—later
on, when she feels like it."
The girl stood without a word.
"Don't count on it," I said to Marie.

I had rigged a backpack-style tent for the girl and myself from
some of the canvas in the boatdock before we left the deserted
lakeshore house. I set this up at the edge of the trees, upwind of
the dogs. Sunday had already begun ignoring the dog pack; and
Marie rode herd on them through the afternoon, commanding
them to be quiet any time they started to get worked up about
Sunday or the rest of us. Once the camp was made, I left the girl
with Sunday and went to the house alone.
Marie took me around and introduced me individually to each
of the dogs. I spoke to each and petted each one briefly while
Marie stood sternly over them to make sure that they behaved.
Occasionally I got a brief tail movement by the way of acknowl-
edgment but most of them merely rolled their eyes up at me and
only endured both my touch and my voice. I guessed that I
smelled too much-of cat for any of them to be really comfortable;
and I mentioned this to Marie. But she shrugged it off.
"They'll get used to you," she said. The tone of her voice in-
dicated that they had better.
She left me then, to get dinner ready. I spent a little time trying
to make friends with her daughter. But Wendy was a quiet, shy
child who—like the dogs—evidently found me too strange and po-
10

86
tentially frightening to warm up to, on short acquaintance. She
was obviously relieved when I left her at last and went back to
camp.
Sunday was there, tied to the trunk of a large tree with a length
of our heaviest rope, ending in a loop around his neck. He was
lying down and, to my surprise, did not seem to mind being re-
stricted this way. Since he was not objecting and it was convenient
to have him anchored so, I left him the way he was. The girl must
have tied him up so that she could wander off by herself, because
she was nowhere to be seen.
She had not returned by the time Marie stuck her head out her
door to call us to dinner. I waited a little while, but she still had
not come back when Marie called a second time; and I decided
not to worry about her. There was no counting on her, anyway.
Sunday was still not objecting to being tied up—which was ideal
from my point of view. He had dozed off kittenishly lying on his
back with his paws in the air, as if there was no dog within a thou-
sand miles. I got up and left; and all he did was open his eyes
sleepily to look after me.
The good smell of cooking reached me before I opened the door
and surrounded me as soon as I came in. Marie had produced a
ham—it had to have been a canned one—heated and glazed it, and
filled out the meal with what must have been home-grown toma-
toes, potatoes and a salad made with some greens I didn't identify,
but which, with a cheese dressing, tasted magnificent.
"She didn't come with you?" Marie asked, as she sat down at
the table with Wendy and me.
"She's gone off somewhere. Sunday's tied up," I said.
She nodded, evidently reassured. She did not know that Sunday
was capable of chewing through any rope that tied him in no sec-
onds flat, if the notion occurred to him. But he was not likely to
wander off; and he had sense enough not to start trouble with the
dogs, but to pick his way among them, if he got the urge to free
himself and join me in the house.
It was a marvelous dinner. Marie had gotten rid of the slacks
and shirt. She was wearing a soft, yellow dress that went well with
the color of her blond hair, which—while still short—was smoothed
out somehow and looked less as if it had undergone home barber-
ing. She had used a touch of lipstick too, and possibly a hint of

87
other makeup. The total result was enough to bring back the
past in a way that the scotch and sodas I had made in the lake-
front home never had.
I had been regretting all afternoon that I had not had the sense
to bring at least one bottle from the liquor stock of the lakeshore
home. But as it turned out, Marie had her own supply. She had
not produced any wine with the meal; but afterwards she came up
with a bottle of rum, after everything was over and Wendy had
gone off to bed. It was not great rum, but it went well with the
coffee.
We sat on the couch in her living room and talked, about our
situations—and a lot else. Under the influence of the rum, I re-
member telling her more about myself than I had intended to ever
tell anyone. But in the warmth and privacy of the living room, I
was lulled into a sense of security. I knew very well that Marie was
only out after her own advantage. I knew what was going on with
both of us; but I did not give a damn. In fact, I remember thinking
that I deserved something like this, after wet-nursing an insane
leopard and a wild girl all these weeks. Somewhere along there
with the rum and the coffee, I put my arm around Marie; and only
a little later we turned the lights out.
I don't know how late it was. It was certainly sometime after
midnight when I left the house. Marie followed me naked to the
door in the darkness to put her head out and hiss the dogs into si-
lence when they roused on seeing me. I gave her a last kiss and
went across the dark ground under a young moon to the camp.
Sunday was curled up under the tree to which he had been tied;
and there was a lump on the ground beside him that was the girl,
come back. The groundsheet out of our tent was a black pool
under them on the semi-moonlighted ground; and some of our
blankets were spread over both of them.
I shrugged, drunkenly. If the girl wanted to lie out there and get
soaked through with the morning dew, that was up to her. I
crawled intoHhe tent and wrapped myself as well as I could in the
remaining blankets. I was either not quite asleep and hallucinating,
or else I was already asleep and dreamed the whole thing; but it
seemed to me that just before I dropped into a deep well of uncon-
sciousness, Sunday raised his head and looked me right in the eye,
speaking to me.

88
"You stink!" he said distinctly, in the girl's voice.—And that
was the last I remember.
When I woke, someone was standing over me. But it was nei-
ther Sunday nor the girl. It was Marie; and she handed me a cup
of hot coffee.
"Sorry to wake you," she said. "But I can use your help if we're
going to get off today."
"Get off today?" I echoed stupidly. She stood there, looking
down at me for a long second.
"That's what we talked about last night, wasn't it?" she said.
"Do you remember?"
I started to say I didn't. But then it came back to me. She was
right, of course. That was, indeed, one of the things we had talked
about last night. We had made plans to leave today—all of us, to-
gether.
"Yes," I said. I lay looking at her, part of me hating myself and
filled with self-contempt at letting myself be bought so easily; and
part of me remembering last night and looking forward to tonight.
"I'll be along in a bit."
"Good," she said.
She went off. I got up and dressed. The girl and Sunday were
not to be seen. During the period on the lizard raft, with no way to
do anything about it, my beard had grown to a respectable length.
But I had always liked the feel of being clean-shaven, and as soon
as we found the lakeshore home, I had been happy to discover a
razor and go back to being naked-faced once more. Normally, I
liked shaving. It was part of the familiar ritual of coming awake in
the morning—and I did not come awake in the morning easily. But
this morning the habitual scraping actions did not clean off a layer
of guilt left on me by the night before. In a sense, I had sold Sun-
day and the girl down the river for the selfish satisfaction of my
own desires.
Sunday, of course, did not know what was going on. But he was
not going to have the old freedom he was accustomed to, living
with the dog-pack alongside him, whether he knew it or not. Also,
he was going to have to share me with a couple of extra humans—
and that was not going to make him happy, either. He had
adjusted to the girl; but the girl loved him—Marie and Wendy did
not, and there was no guarantee that they ever would. As for the

89
girl, she had already made it plain how she felt about the situation.
I washed the last of the soap off my face and began to pump
myself up with counter-arguments. We had been bound eventually
to bump into other people with whom we would want and need to
associate. Sunday had been destined to have to learn to share me
with other people, finally. The girl, likewise. The three of us could
not go on forever being exclusively insane together, as we had
been until I faced the freshwater sea and the fact that Swannee
was gone for good.
It was not going to be easy adapting, for me either, I told my-
self. But I was going to have to do it. So were the girl and Sunday.
That was life—you could not always have what you wanted.
By the time I went over to get some breakfast from Marie and
help her prepare to move out, I had the top layer of my mind—if
nothing beyond that—thoroughly convinced that I was not only
doing the best thing for all concerned, but being considerably self-
sacrificing to boot.
It took us most of the day to get ready. Marie had two carts
fitted with bicycle wheels, which she had trained certain of her
dogs to pull. The carts themselves were obviously homemade, but
remarkably well put together. Marie, apparently, had a definite
mechanical talent. They were light and rolled easily. But they had
one real drawback—no springs except the bicycle parts that sup-
ported the wheels. They would be all right on road surfaces, but I
could not see them lasting more than a few days loaded and going
cross-country, as we were going to be doing sooner or later. How-
ever, since we had nothing in the way of materials and tools
around to provide them with springs, I decided not to say any-
thing. There was no point in borrowing trouble.
We started out shortly after noon. The girl—she had showed up
in time for breakfast, after all—Sunday, and I made up the ad-
vance guard, about fifty yards ahead of the rest. Behind us came
Marie, walking, and the two carts, with Wendy riding one and the
other loaded with food, water and gear for all of us, plus the .22,
which I had given to Marie. Three dogs pulled each cart; and all
the rest moved in a tight and disciplined patrol around the carts
and Marie.
The others travelled at a fair walking speed for cross-country;
but they did not make as good time as Sunday, the girl and I

90
would have by ourselves, because they stopped more often for one
reason or another—and often, the reason was Wendy. The original
three of us, up in front of them all, however, could pretty well ig-
nore the problems of these others. It was almost like being off on
our own again. Sunday, of course, did not mind the slower pace at
all. It gave him that much more time to explore things. He and the
dogs, I noticed, had already solved the problem of coexistence in
typical animal fashion—by ignoring each other. Once, when Sun-
day lagged behind, one of the forward dogs trotted past him at a
distance of less than ten feet, and neither one so much as glanced
at the other.
Several times I took advantage of being alone with the girl to try
getting her to talk some more. But she was not in the mood,
evidently. Nor would she look at me.
"All right," I told her, at last. "You work it out by yourself,
then."
I stepped out ahead, putting her from my mind and concen-
trating on scouting for our whole group. A few hours after we had
left Marie's place, I ran across something like a logging road, or a
farmer's tractor path among the trees, and followed it up until I
could see through a thinning screen of forest to what was obvi-
ously a small town, down in a small cup-shaped valley area sur-
rounded by open fields. It was about three hundred yards from the
edge of the forest to the nearest buildings.
I turned about and headed back to contact Marie. Just in case
there was anyone in that town, I did not want us to come strolling
in followed by a leopard and a pack of dogs. Some nervous citizen
was liable to take a shot—at Sunday, in particular. The rest were a
fair distance behind me. Evidently, I had gained on them more
than I had thought. At any rate, we got together once more and
together came up to the edge of the woods to take a look at the
town through some binoculars Marie had brought.
Through the binoculars, the town seemed deserted. There was
no sign of movement, human or animal. I handed the binoculars to
Marie, who was beside me.
"Take a look," I said.
She did.
"That's Gregory, I take it?" I said, when she put the binoculars
down.

91
"Yes," she said. But she was frowning. After a short pause she
added, but slowly and still frowning, "It's got to be."
"Got to be?" I asked. "What do you mean?"
"I mean it is Gregory—I recognize it," she said. "But I don't
know . . . there's something different about it."
"Nobody in sight," I suggested.
"That, too," she said. "But something else. It looks changed,
somehow. Only I can't say how."
I took the binoculars back from her and studied the buildings I
could see. Aside from their stillness in the late afternoon sun, there
was nothing that struck me immediately as unusual about the
town. Then I noticed a house with the blinds down on all of its
windows.
I looked at the other houses. Those nearby did not have their
blinds drawn. If all had, of course, it could simply have meant that
a time change had come through the area at night and caught the
inhabitants after they had settled to sleep. But the houses close to
the one with the blinds drawn had theirs up—then, moving the
glasses about, I found first one, and then four more houses where
all the shades seemed to be down.
It could mean nothing, of course.
"Do they know you in Gregory?" I asked Marie.
"Oh, yes," she said. "We did all our shopping here."
I turned to the girl.
"Hang on to Sunday. Keep him with you," I said. "Marie, you
and I can take a walk in with a couple of the dogs—just a couple—
and see if there's anyone there."
I left my rifle behind, and made Marie leave hers. We stepped
out into the sunlight and walked toward the buildings. It was all so
ordinary that I felt a little ridiculous; and then, when we were
about fifty feet out in the open, a figure came shambling around
the corner of the house with the blinds down and faced us.
I did not get a good look at it. It was very big, either an
unusually large man or woman all bundled up in loose furs, or
something else. Even its face was furry, or hidden by a beard. But
it came around the corner of the building and lifted one arm.
There was a wink of light from the end of the arm; and the dog
furthest in front of us—leading the rest of us by perhaps fifteen feet

92
—leaped into the air with a howl that broke off abruptly as it fell
back on its side in the grass, to lie there still.
I dove to the ground, pulling Marie down with me; and some-
thing sizzled over our heads as we lay there. A second later, there
were sounds like rifle shots from the town and the singing of bul-
lets over our heads.
"Back!" I said to Marie. "Crawl! Back to the woods!"
We turned and went on our bellies. The shots continued, and
once or twice I heard the sizzle overhead again; but nothing
touched us. It seemed a long, long crawl. We were almost back
when we came across the second dog we had taken with us, a lean
German shepherd-type that had been named Buster, lying dead. In
his case, it was a bullet from behind that had gone in at the back
of his head and taken off half of his lower jaw when it came out.
Flies were already buzzing around the corpse.
We crawled on, Marie and I, until the shadows of the trees were
about us. Even then, we continued on hands and knees a little fur-
ther before we risked standing up. Then we turned and went back
to join the girl and Wendy for a look at the town.
But there was nothing to see. The fur-covered figure was no
longer in sight; and the shooting had stopped.
"What was it?" said Marie. She was shaking and her voice was
tight.
"I don't know," I said. I turned to the girl. "Did you get a look
at it through the binoculars?"
The girl nodded.
"Was it a man or a woman?"
The girl shook her head.
"Why won't you talk?" Marie suddenly screamed at her.
"Easy," I said to Marie. "Easy." I spoke to the girl again. "Not
a man or a woman either? You mean you couldn't tell?"
The girl nodded.
"You could tell?"
She nodded again.
"You could tell it wasn't a man or a woman?" I said. "What
was it then?"
"I don't know," said the girl, unexpectedly. "A thing."
She turned and walked off. I went after her, but she would not

93
even stand still to be questioned, let alone answer, after that.
Defeated, I went back to Marie.
"Maybe something out of the future that wandered through its
own mistwall into Gregory, here," I said to her. "Anyway, what-
ever it is, it doesn't seem to want to come after us—just seems to
want us to leave it alone. I think we'd better go around this town.
What's the next one up the line called? And how far is it?"
"Elton," said Marie. "And it's about five miles."
"That's where we'll head, then," I told her.
We stayed within the cover of the woods and made a circuit of
Gregory. By the time we were around the town, the afternoon was
fairly well advanced; but we pushed on, hoping to reach Elton. We
never did, though. After nearly three more hours of travelling
without a sight of a road or a town, we came to bluffs overlooking
a river. A big river; easily a quarter of a mile across.
There was obviously no going farther that day. We set up camp
on the bluff, and in the morning I went down to the river's edge
to take a look at the situation.
The water was fresh and cold. The edge where I stood was
overgrown with willows and seemed to drop off deeply; but a little
farther downstream the river made a bend, and there was a sandy
beach and shallow water. I explored that far, accompanied by Sun-
day and the girl. The current of the water seemed to slow, going
around the curve, and there was plenty of driftwood on the beach
to make into a raft. I went back to Marie on the bluff. She was
making coffee and she gave me a cup.
"So you want to cross the river," she said; after I had told her
what it was like, there.
I shrugged.
"We don't have to," I answered. "We can go upriver, or
downriver, and we may even run into a bridge, somewhere, cross-
ing it. But summer isn't going to last forever; and the more I think
about it, the more it seems to me that we ought to keep heading
due east. It's our best chance to find some large civilized group
that's survived the time storms."
So it wa^settled—more or less. I did some planning, out loud,
with Marie and the girl listening. The dogs could swim, of course.
So could Sunday and we adults—or, rather, we two adults and the
one near-adult, who was the girl. Wendy, the equipment and the

94
supplies could be rafted over. Reducing the raft load to Wendy
and our possessions meant we would need only a relatively small
raft. Luckily we had a hammer and even some nails along, al-
though, actually, I had decided to save the nails and chain the logs
of the raft together with the dog chains, for maximum safety.
As I mentioned earlier, I had been looking forward to the eve-
ning—and Marie. However, it developed that Wendy was either
coming down sick with something, or upset by the travel; Marie
gave me to understand that, as far as that night went, she would be
tied up with family matters. So as not to waste time, I took advan-
tage of the long twilight to go down on the beach and make a start
gathering the logs for the raft, then chopping them to length with
Marie's axe.
Sunday and the girl went down there with me; and as things
turned out, I built a fire and went on working by that, even after
the sunset left us; so that we ended up making a separate camp
down there. Just before I turned in for the night, something oc-
curred to me.
"You know," I said to the girl, looking across the fire to where
she sat with Sunday, "we left that raft of the lizards in one hell of
a hurry, that night. I remember pulling you through the water; but
I don't really remember how well you can swim—or even if you
can really swim. Can you? Do you think you can make it across
the river?"
I expected a nod or a shake of the head at the most. But to my
surprise, she answered in words.
"I'm not going."
I stared at her.
"What do you mean-you're not going?" I exploded. "Do you
think you can stay here on this side of the river, alone? Get that
thought out of your mind. You're going."
She shook her head, looking not at me, but at the fire.
I sat, staring at her, too angry for words. Then I took hold of
my anger with both hands, figuratively speaking, and tried to talk
calmly.
"Look," I said, as reasonably as I knew how. "We've been to-
gether for some time, you and I and Sunday. But nothing lasts for-
ever. You must have known that sooner or later we were going to

95
be meeting other people and joining them, or they'd be joining
us . . .
I went on talking, calmly and persuasively, using all the argu-
ments I had used to myself the day before, and doing, I thought, a
good job of it. It was only common sense I was telling her; and I
pointed this out to the girl. Aside from her youth and sex, any sin-
gle person stood a much reduced chance of survival. What would
she do with herself? Practical matters aside, Sunday would miss
her. For that matter I would miss her, myself ....
I was talking away quite earnestly, and even beginning to think
that I was getting through to her, when she got up suddenly and
walked away 'out of the circle of firelight, leaving me in mid-sen-
tence.
I stared after her into the darkness. Something cold came in out
of the night and sat down on my chest. For the first time, it oc-
curred to me that she could actually be meaning to do what she
had just said she would.

11
An hour after sunrise, Marie, Wendy, our equipment, supplies,
dogs and all were down on the beach watching me finish off the
raft. Watching and helping, as much as they could. It was Marie
who brought up the subject of the girl.
"I think," said Marie, looking over to where the girl sat on a
log, stroking Sunday at her feet, "everybody should do their
share."
"She's not going," I said.
Marie stared at me.
"She's not going?" Marie said. There was an odd note in her
voice—a note which could have meant anything. I could not inter-
pret it at all. "You don't mean that?"
"I don't mean it," I said. "She does."
"Oh?" said Marie. She looked over at the girl again. "It's her
idea?"
"That's right."
Marie stood for a moment, watching the girl.
"No," Marie said, finally. "She'll go."
I did not say anything more, myself. I concentrated on finishing
the raft. When I was done, we launched it and loaded it with the
contents of the two bicycle carts and the carts themselves. It
floated well, a square of good-sized logs almost ten feet by ten feet

98
in area; and there was plenty of room on it for Wendy—though the
little girl was pale as moonlight and clearly frightened to death of
riding across the river on the rocking log surface.
While Marie coaxed and soothed the child, I took six of the
dog-leash chains I had set aside while I was making the raft. Three
of these I put around Sunday's neck to make a choke-collar for
him. I fastened the second three to the first and looped them
around a log too big for the leopard to drag. Then I went to the
raft and picked up the .22 rifle and its box of shells.
"What are you doing?" Marie interrupted her efforts with
Wendy to stare at me. "That's mine. You gave it to me."
"I'm taking it back," I said.
I walked away, not listening to what else she said. The girl had
come to stand concernedly over Sunday and examine his chains-
Sunday, himself, had hardly blinked when I had put them on him.
He lay basking in the sun. I walked up to the girl and shoved both
rifle and shells into her hands.
"You can learn to shoot this," I said. "Keep the shells dry and
use them up only when you really need to. Whatever you do, make
sure they're not dirty when you put them in the rifle. And make
sure no dirt gets in the barrel of the rifle. If it does, take some
string from your pack, and tie a clean patch of cloth on the end of
it. Drop the string through the barrel and keep pulling the cloth
through the barrel until it looks shiny from end to end, when you
hold it up and look at the light through it, the way you've seen me
do. Have you got that?"
She took the box and gun from me without a word.
"I'm leaving Sunday with you," I said. "Don't unchain him
until we've been gone at least a day and a night. If I'm not around,
I think he'll stick with you; and he'll be even more protection to
you than the gun. Remember, winter's coming on in a few months.
Try to find some place where you can settle in and be protected
until it warms up again."
She looked at me.
"Well," I said. "Goodby."
She did not move or speak. I turned and went back to Marie.
Marie had Wendy on the raft and was already stripped down to
a yellow one-piece swimsuit. She looked good in it, as I would
have expected since the night before last. I had not stopped to

99
think about such niceties myself. Now, out of tribute to her own
bathing dress, I left my shorts on—a foolish bit of male modesty
which I had not planned on, earlier. But I had spare underclothing
in my backpack, and I could hang the wet shorts outside the back-
pack to dry as I travelled, after we reached the other side.
I looked back once more at the girl and Sunday, and waved.
Neither one responded, of course. I got into the cold river water,
holding on to the raft along with Marie. The dogs took to the
water on their own, after us; and we began the swim across.
As I said, the water was cold, in spite of it being midsummer.
The current swept us farther downriver than even I had expected
by the time we .made the crossing; and by that time, in spite of
considering myself a fairly strong swimmer, I was grateful to have
the raft to cling to, and sympathetic to the dogs who had no such
thing. One of them, indeed, got the idea at one point to try and
climb up on the raft; but a sharp command from Marie made him
drop back off it. All in all, though, we must have been in the water
more than half an hour by the time we finally struggled ashore on
a small sandy spot backed up by a space, about two house-lots in
size, of sand and grass reaching back to the edge of a fairly thick
woods.
I had gotten out, hauled the raft in close and lifted Wendy
ashore, and was beginning to unload the raft when a tense word
from Marie made me straighten up and turn around.
Five men had come out of the trees—about half-way out be-
tween trees and water. They stood perhaps twenty yards or so
from us in a semi-circle, hemming us in against the river's edge.
They were all well-dressed—dressed for the outdoors, that is. Each
of them wore thick-soled country-style boots, with high tops disap-
pearing up inside heavy trousers; and above the waist they all wore
leather or firm-cloth jackets, with the collars of winter-weight
shirts showing at the neck; and all but one of them wore some
kind of hat. Every one of them had at least one handgun belted
around his waist as well as a rifle in his hands.
The one without a hat stood a little forward of the rest and
seemed to be the leader, though he was younger than any of the
others, and even looked to be a good half-dozen years younger
than I was. But he was as tall as I, and wider of shoulder, in his
jacket. His face was heavy-boned; and like mine, it was clean-

100
shaven—all the rest wore beards of varying lengths. He grinned at
me as I reached for the rifle on the raft.
"Leave it lay," he said. I stopped reaching.
"Guard!" snapped Marie. "Point!"
Swiftly, the dogs fanned out around us, each facing one or more
of the men, which in most cases meant that there were a couple of
dogs on each; and each canine form went into its own version of a
tense on-the-mark position, like a trained bird dog pointing quail.
The rifles of the men came up.
"Hold it!" said the young man. "Keep your dogs there if you
don't want them shot!"
Marie said nothing, but the dogs stood still. The young man
dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground and leaned on the gun
in friendly fashion—though I noticed the rest of them kept their
weapons ready to use. He smiled at us again.
"Well," he said. "What's it like on the other side of the river?"
"There's nothing much there," I said. I was freezing to death,
standing mid-thigh deep in the water, but I did not want to move
out of arm's reach of the rifle on the raft. "What's it like on this
side?"
"Nothing much on this side, either," the young man said. "Cou-
ple of empty towns . . . ."
He was answering me, but he was watching Marie. They were
all watching Marie. It was that yellow swimsuit. I had not been
unaware that she had put it on with at least part of her mind on
what it would do to me. Now, it was doing the same thing to these
men; only with them it was, I thought, turning out to be a bit too
much of a good thing. But yet, instead of doing something sensi-
ble, like taking a jacket or blanket from the raft to cover herself,
and in spite of the fact that, like me, she had to be both wet and
cold, she continued to stand where she was, deliberately inviting
their stares. Not only that, but now she had to start talking, to
draw that much more attention on herself.
"What do you think you're doing?" she cried, pulling Wendy to
her. "As if my child wasn't frightened enough, you have to come
charging out of the woods like this with guns—"
She had begun to rub the little girl down with the towel Wendy
had worn around her neck, as a seal to keep water spray from get-
ting under the blanket in which she had been wrapped during the

101
raft voyage. The activity may have been purely motherly, but it
was almost as effective as if Marie had begun to do the dance of
the seven veils in front of our visitors. A couple of them were grin-
ning slightly.
"Well now, I'm sorry," said the young leader. "Awfully sorry."
His men grinned a little more widely.
"You ought to be!" said Marie, towelling away. "Just because
something's happened to the world doesn't mean the people can't
be decent! Anybody with any brains would offer to help, instead of
bursting out like that, like thugs—"
"We'll be glad to help," said the young man. "You don't under-
stand us, that's why we came over, to help you—"
"I should think so!" snapped Marie. "That's more like it. Here,
when there's hardly any people left in the world, those that are left
need to stick together. Well, maybe I shouldn't jump down your
throat like that—" She was still continuing to towel Wendy vigor-
ously in her almost-dance, in spite of the fact that Wendy now,
plainly, wanted only to be released. "But if you'd just had to swim
an icy river like that, you'd be a little upset too, when a bunch of
men with guns—"
"Mommy, I'm dry now!" Wendy was protesting, squirming in
Marie's grasp.
"Hold still, dear!" said Marie. "As I was saying, a bunch of
men with guns—"
I caught it then, out of the corner of my eye; just a flicker of
movement. Suddenly, I saw what was happening, and why Marie
had been standing there, chattering and bouncing about to hold
their attention.
While she had been putting on her little show, the dogs had
been about their own business. Apparently she had trained them
well. As long as the eyes of the man it watched were upon it, the
dog guarding him stood tensely still, at point. But the moment that
attention moved elsewhere for even a fraction of a second, the dog
stole forward—one step, two steps, even half a step, as if it was
stalking a rabbit lying still and hidden in a cornfield. To begin
with, the dogs had been almost as far away from the men as Marie
and I were. Now, they had halved the'distance between them and
our welcoming committee.
Now, it was no longer a case of the men being able to kill all the

102
dogs before the dogs could reach them. They might kill a good
half of the dogs, but the other half stood an almost equal chance
of reaching them while they were doing that.
In the same moment that I saw the flicker of movement, the
man with the gun, at which the movement had been directed, saw
it too. Evidently the dog had gotten too far inside our fields of vi-
sion to move without being noticed.
"Tek—" shouted the man. "The dogs! Look!" The young leader
jerked his eyes from Marie and swept them around the semicircle
of half-crouching canines. At the same time the others started to
jerk their guns up. But I had already taken advantage of the fact
that their attention was off me to sweep up the rifle off the raft into
my own hands.
"Hold it!" I shouted.
I had the rifle to my shoulder, aimed at Tek's belt. The dogs
were ready.
"Hold it—just like he says!" barked Tek—if that was the young
leader's full name. He himself stood perfectly still.
His men froze.
"That's better," he said, in a calmer voice. He looked once
more at Marie and me and smiled; but I could see a little shininess
of sweat on his face. A 30.06 slug through the intestines is not a
happy prospect; and I was close enough so that even if I was a
poor shot, I shouldn't miss. "That's much better. You don't want
to waste any of these good dogs, now do you, ma'am? We'll just
back out of here and let you folks go your own way, since that's
what you seem to want. If we can't be friends"—and he was smil-
ing at Marie alone, now—"then that's just how it'll have to be.
Sorry, though. It'd have been nice to know you. Now, we'll just
start backing up . . . ."
And he did start backing up. His men imitated him. The dogs
immediately followed, step for step, as if invisible threads con-
nected each of them to the man on which the dog focused.
"Hold!" said Marie. The dogs stopped; and the men kept back-
ing, each holding his rifle now in one hand, down by his side and
out of the way. I kept my own rifle steady at my shoulder.
The men reached the edge of the trees and slipped back into
their shadow, all but Tek, who stopped briefly.
"Keep going," said Marie.

103
"Sure. See you sometime," called Tek.
"Only if we don't see you first!" answered Marie, grimly.
Tek waved. He paused for a second and looked directly at me.
He made a little gesture like tipping a non-existent hat.
"You're a lucky man!" he called to me. "Don't anyone ever tell
you you're not!"
There was no sneer in his voice. There did not have to be. His
message was clear enough. I was negligible—it was Marie and her
dogs who were driving him off. For a second I flared into a rage—
and for a second I almost charged out of the water after him, to
call him a liar to his face—then that answer-seeking reflex in
the back of my mind pounced on his clear intent like Sunday
pouncing on a scuttling fieldmouse. He was trying to get me to
charge after him in just that fashion. The dogs were not dangerous
from a distance without my rifle covering them from behind. If I
got out in front they could shoot me, then kill the dogs safely from
a distance they had now regained between themselves and the ca-
nines.
So I did not rush out, after all. Instead, I laughed. I laughed
loudly, hoping he would hear me—but he was already gone into
the shadows of the trees, and I could not tell if he was still within
earshot or not.
I came out of the water then, but slowly, and handed the rifle to
Marie.
"Watch the woods," I said.
I turned back to haul the raft, safely, far enough out of the
water so that the river current could not pull it away until we had
unloaded it. Then I took the rifle back from Marie while she
rubbed some life back into my body and toweled herself dry.
Meanwhile, there had been no further sign of Tek and his men.
Marie posted a couple of dogs at the very edge of the woods, on
watch; and we turned to unloading the raft.
Once we were unloaded, I built a fire to warm us up. It was
only after the fire was going well and Marie had some soup heating
on its flames, that I thought to look back across the river to see if
the girl and Sunday had witnessed our encounter with Tek and his
men. But a glance showed me that we had drifted so far down
river in our crossing, that the beach where I had left girl and leop-
ard was now around the bend of the further shoreline, out of sight.

104
I turned back to the soup, grateful for its filling heat, but feeling a
little empty inside all the same.
After I dressed, I scouted with Marie and a few of the dogs to
see if the neighborhood was really clear of Tek and his com-
paneros. We found that the woods into which they had gone was
actually only a narrow fringe of trees, perhaps a couple of hundred
yards in width, paralleling the river. The woods were clear of
human life and beyond them rose a small slope to a sort of shallow
river bluff, from which we could see over a fairly wide, open,
grassy area. There was no sign of Tek and company there, either,
and no sign of mistwalls, or anything else, moving. We went back
and made camp by the river, where we had landed. Marie and I
both figured we deserved a little holiday.
The next day we pushed on east, with me scouting well ahead.
A few of the dogs were beginning to take to me, finally—perhaps
the water had washed off enough of Sunday's smell to make me
socially acceptable to them—and there were a couple I could trust
to obey a few simple commands. Marie drilled them with me; and
they responded well. One was a bitch—a sort of large cocker span-
iel mix and the more intelligent of the two. The other was a lean,
nervous, German shepherd type, male and looking half-starved.
The bitch was called Merry and the German shepherd was Cox.
They would heel, stand, guard and scout for me in a circle, at a
sweep of my arm—and that was pretty good, considering our lim-
ited acquaintance.
So, they and I got along pretty well, moving perhaps four hun-
dred yards or so in front of Marie, Wendy and the rest. I was off
by myself, as I liked it; but travelling with two dogs was not like
travelling with Sunday. They would obey commands; Sunday al-
most never had—except by accident. They travelled at my pace; I
had been used to travelling more or less at Sunday's. They were
deadly weapons I could control. Sunday had been almost uncon-
trollable and absolutely unpredictable.
But there was one great point of difference that outweighed all
their virtues. The crazy cat had loved me—loved me for myself
alone. It was a love induced by accident and the time change
effect, but nonetheless it was there. And I—I had gotten used to it.
Merry and Cox could have been as cheerfully working for Tek at

105
this moment, if Marie had drilled them into obeying him instead of
me.
So I put thoughts of Sunday out of my mind—I had not dared to
think of the girl from the first. Now I allowed myself the thought
that it was lucky she was on the far side of the river, and Tek with
his men, on this. Hopefully she would run into some decent people
on her side. People being naturally spread out over the spectrum
of human character as they were, she had as good a chance of
finding good people as she had of finding bad ones. 1 put her out
of my mind, too. No man—and no girl—could have the world just
the way they wanted it, always.
By noon of the second day after we had crossed the river, we
moved out of the relatively open area beyond the river bluff on
this side and began to come on rolling country covered by what
was obviously farmland, scattered with deserted-looking farm-
houses. The change was gradual enough so that it was impossible
for us to tell whether the change from open country to cultivated
earth was natural or the result of a time change. But in any case,
the appearance of the area did not jibe exactly with Tek's words
about only a "couple of empty towns" on this side of the river. We
passed by the deserted-looking farmhouses at a healthy distance;
and at no time did the dogs give any kind of alarm.
So three days of travel went by quietly with no sign of Tek and
his group, or any other humans, and no sign of trouble. Then, on
the morning of the fourth day we spotted a mistwall standing off to
our right, and I changed our line of march to angle toward it.

12
Marie objected to the whole idea. Her own instinct was to head
away from the mistwall; and I could not blame her.
"All right," I said, turning away. "You go on. I should catch up
to you in a couple of days. If not, you'd better not wait for me."
I took perhaps a half a dozen steps away from her before she
made a sound; and then I heard her behind me.
"What can I do? What can I do?"
It was an aching, tearing sort of cry. I turned around and saw
her, her eyes squeezed shut, her face white, her fists clenched at
her sides, and all her body rigid. I went back to her.
Suddenly, I understood how it was with her. From her point of
view, she had contributed to our partnership everything she had to
contribute. She had abandoned what little security she still had
left, following the time storm, to go with me—more for Wendy's
sake, I suspected, than for her own. She had been adjustable,
faithful and hardworking, a good partner by day and night. She
had trusted her dogs, herself—and even her daughter—to me. And
still, here on some reasonless whim, as it seemed to her, I was
going to risk everything on a chance that could just as easily be
avoided.
I put my arms around her and tried to get her to soften up; but
she was as rigid as ever the girl had been in one of her states of

108
shock. But I simply stood there and kept holding her, as I had
kept holding the girl in those instances, and after a while, I
thought I felt some yielding in her. She shuddered and began to
cry, in great, inward, throaty, tearing sobs that were almost
tearless.
However, after a while, even these began to quiet down; and I
began to talk, quietly, into her ear while I held her.
"Listen to me," I said. "There only were three things I might
not have gone along with you on; and now that Sunday and the
girl are gone, there's only one. But that's something I've been
stuck with all my life. Now that I've taken on the question of figur-
ing out the time storm, I don't have any choice. I've got to go
through any mistwalls I find and see what's on the other side of
them—I've got to, you understand? There's no choice for me when
I come to something like this. There never has been."
"I know you don't love me," she said into my chest. "I never
asked for that. But where will we go if you don't come back? What
will we do?"
"You'll do just fine," I said. "All you have to do is sit down for
half an hour and wait, while I step through the mistwall and take a
look at what's beyond it before I come back out."
"All!" she said.
"That's right. All," I told her. "You'll have to take my word for
it; but with most of the mistwalls I've seen, the two sides of them
were pretty much the same, front and back. The odds are against
anything being there that's either very good or very bad. If it's
bad, I'll duck back right away. If it's good, it could mean a new,
safe future for all of us. You ought to be pushing me to go and
look, not holding me back!"
"Oh, you'll do what you want," she said and pulled away from
me. But evidently it was settled; we set off for the mistwall.
At the point where we came up to it, the mistwall crossed a lit-
tle hollow crowned by trees on both sides, so that there was a sort
of natural trough some sixty yards wide and perhaps a hundred
long leading to it. I had picked this point as one where Marie,
Wendy and the dogs could stay more or less hidden from anyone
observing from the higher level of land surrounding them. We had
spotted the mistwall early, and we reached the trough, or hollow,
perhaps an hour before noon. The mistwall itself was completely

109
unmoving—now that I thought of it, I had never seen a motionless
mistwall begin to travel, or a moving one stop. It could be that
there were two different varieties of time lines involved . . . now
that was a new thought.
I got everyone down in the hollow and climbed back out to the
surrounding level to make sure they were invisible from anyone
looking across the outside plain. They were, and using the binocu-
lars reassured me that there was no sign of movement between the
clumps of trees on the plain itself. They should be perfectly safe
for an hour or so while I was on the other side of the mistwall—
certainly they would be safe for the time it would take me to go,
turn around and. come back, if I found something on the other side
I did not like.
Going back down into the hollow, I found myself trying to
remember if I had ever seen anyone or anything alive moving
voluntarily through one of the mistwalls. But I could remember
none.
Marie held me tightly for a long moment before she would let
me leave them for the mistwall itself—and even Wendy clung to
me. The little girl had been getting over her shyness where I was
concerned, these last few days since the girl and Sunday had been
gone. I felt a sudden touch of discomfort at the realization that I
had not reacted to the small overtures the child had been making
in my direction. It came to me suddenly and heavily that it was
some obscure connection between her presence and the absence of
the other two, the girl and Sunday, that had kept me cool to her.
Now, suddenly, I felt guilty. It was not Wendy's fault that things
were happening as they were.
At any rate, I broke away from Marie and her at last and
walked into the dust and the mist, as tense as one of the dogs
walking into a strange backyard. The physical and emotional feel-
ing of upset took me before I had a chance to close my eyes
against the dust—but again, as on that earlier time I had gone
through the mistwall to find Marie's place, the sensations were less
than I had felt before. I found myself wondering if it was possible
either to build up an immunity to going through the walls, or else
simply to get used to the reactions they triggered in living bodies.
I pushed ahead blindly, the ground becoming a little rough and
uneven under my feet, until the lessening of the dust-sting against

110
the skin of my face told me I must be coming out on the other side
of the time change line. I opened my eyes.
I stood now in rugged territory. If I was not among mountains,
then certainly I was in the midst of some steep hills. Directly
ahead of me was some sort of massive concrete structure, too large
for me to see in its entirety. The part I was able to see was a mass
of ruins, with new grass sprouting at odd points among the tum-
bled blocks of what had evidently been walls and ceilings.
What had smashed it up so thoroughly was hard to imagine. It
didn't look so much as if it had been bombed as if it had been
picked up and twisted, the way you might twist a wet towel to
wring it dry. About it, the steep slopes, covered with gravel and a
few fir and spruce trees, looked deserted under the cloudless, mid-
day sky. The air temperature was perceptibly cooler than it had
been on the other side of the mistwall, as if I was now at a notice-
ably higher altitude—though I had not felt the elevator-sort of
inner ear sensations that would suggest a sudden change to a lower
air pressure. There were no birds visible and no sounds of insects.
Of course, if this new land was high enough it could be above the
flight zone of most insects.
However, whatever the structure before me had been at one
time, now it was a ruin only. There was no sign of life anywhere.
It was far-fetched to think that there could be anyone in that pile
of rubble who might have a greater understanding of the time
storm than I did, let alone ideas on how to live with it or deal
with it. I might as well go back through the mistwall to Marie,
Wendy and the dogs.
But I hesitated. There was a reluctance in me to cut short this
business of being off on my own—almost as much reluctance as
there was in me to face Marie and admit the whole experiment of
going through the mistwall had been profitless. I compromised
with myself finally; it would do no harm to go around the ruin and
a little farther into this new territory, until I could see the whole
extent of it and perhaps make some guess as to what it had once
been. The concrete of what was left of it appeared as modern, or
more so, than anything in my native time—it might even have
come from a few years beyond my original present.
It was an odd feeling that was pushing me to explore farther—a
small feeling, but a powerful one. There was something about that

Ill
jumble of concrete that plucked at my problem-solving mental ma-
chinery and beckoned it.
I swung to the right, approaching the ruin and circling it at the
same time. As I got closer, the building turned out to be larger
even than it had looked at first, and it was not possible to see it all
at once. After a while, however, I got to where I could get a sight
down one long side line of it. I still could not really see it as a
whole, because it curved away from me, following the contours of
the hill on which it was built; but it seemed to become progres-
sively less of a ruin as its structure receded from me, and its inter-
est to me grew. It reminded me a little of my own life, beginning
as a wreck ancT developing into something with a shape, purpose-
ful, but too big to see and know as a whole. I felt almost as if the
building was something familiar, like an old friend built out of
concrete; and I prowled further on alongside it.
It continued to sprawl out and curve away from me as I went;
and after I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile, I realized that I
never would be able to see the thing as a whole. It was simply too
big, and it spread out in too many directions.
I might have turned back then; but I noticed that the building
was relatively undamaged in the further area of it I had now
reached. Facing me were some windows that were whole, in sec-
tions of grey concrete wall that looked untouched. Farther on,
there was even a door that looked slightly ajar—as if it needed only
to be pushed to open to let anyone into the interior.
I went toward the door. It was a heavy, fire-door type; and
when I put my weight into it and pulled, it swung outward slowly.
Inside was a flight of bare concrete stairs with black iron pipe rail-
ing, leading upward. I mounted the stairs slowly and quietly, the
rifle balanced in my hands, ready to use, even while the sensible
front of my mind told me that this was ridiculous. I was wasting
my time on a deserted and destroyed artifact; and it was high time
I was heading back to Marie and Wendy, who would be worrying
about me by now.
Reaching the top of the stairs, I let myself through another door
into a long corridor, with only a bare white wall and window to
my left, windows through which the sun was now striking bril-
liantly, but aglitter with glass doors and interior windows to my

112
right, through which I could see what seemed to be row on row of
offices and laboratories.
I took a step down the corridor, and something plucked lightly
at the cuff of my left pantleg. I looked down. What appeared to be
a small black thread had been fastened to the wall of each side of
the corridor and now lay broken on the floor where my leg had
snapped it.
"Who's there?" asked a voice over my head.
I looked up and saw the grille of a speaker—obviously of some
public address system that had been built into this corridor when
the whole structure had been put up.
"Hello?" said the voice. It was tenor-weight, a young man's
voice. "Who is it? Just speak up. I can hear you."
Cautiously, I took a step backward. I was as careful as I could
be in picking up my foot and putting it down again. But still, when
the sole of my boot touched the corridor surface, there was a faint,
gritting noise.
"If you're thinking of going back out the way you came in,"
said the voice, "don't bother. The doors are locked now. It's part
of the original security system of this installation; and I've still got
power to run it."
I took two more quick, quiet steps back and tried the door to
the stairway. The door handle was immovable and the door itself
stood motionless against my strongest push.
"You see?" said the voice. "Now, I don't mean to keep you
prisoner against your will. If you want to leave, I can let you out. I
just thought we might talk."
"Can you see me?" I asked.
"No," he answered. "But I've got instruments. Let's see . . .
you're about two hundred and ninety centimeters tall and weigh
eighty-two point five three plus kilos. On the basis of voice tone
and body odors, you're male, blood temperature approximately
half a degree above normal, heartbeat fifty-eight—cool-headed cus-
tomer, plainly—blood pressure a hundred and eight over eighty-
seven. You're wearing some synthetics, but mostly wool and
leather by weight—outdoor clothes. My mechanical nose also re-
ports you as carrying a combination of metal, wood, oil and other
odors that imply a rifle of some kind, plus some other metal that
may be a knife; and according to the other scents you carry,

113
you've been outside this building only a little while after coming
from some place with a lot of grass, few trees and a warmer,
moister climate."
He stopped talking.
"I'm impressed," I said, to start him up again. I did not trust his
promise to let me go just for the asking; and I was looking around
for some way out besides the locked door. There were the win-
dows—how many stairs had I climbed on the way up? If I could
break through a window, and the drop was not far to the
ground . . .
"Thank you," said the voice. "But it's no credit to me. It's the
equipment. At any rate, reading from what I have here, you're out
exploring rather than looking for trouble. You aren't carrying
equipment or supplies for living outdoors, even though the odors
on you say that's how you've been living. That means such equip-
ment and supplies you have must be elsewhere. You wouldn't be
likely to leave them unattended—some animal might chew them up
to get at whatever food you were carrying, so you probably have
others with you. They aren't in view anywhere around the area
outside the building, or I'd know about them, and you're the only
one inside, besides me; so that means you just about had to come
through that stationary line of temporal discontinuity, out there."
I stopped looking for windows. Now I actually was impressed.
The equipment had been remarkable enough in what it could tell
him about me; but any idiot could sit and read results from
gauges and dials, if he had been trained well enough. This kind of
hard, conscious reasoning from evidence, on the other hand, was
something else again.
"What did you call it—a temporal discontinuity?" I asked.
"That's right. Have you got another name for it?" said the
voice. "It really doesn't matter what it's called. We both know
what we're talking about."
"What do you call it when it moves?" I asked.
There was a long second of silence.
"Moves?" said the voice.
I damn near grinned.
"All right," I said, "now I'll do a little deducing. I'll deduce you
haven't left this building since the time storm struck."
"Time storm?"

114
"The overall pattern of your temporal discontinuities," I said. "I
call that a time storm. I call individual discontinuities like the one
out there, time lines. I call the haze in the air where one is, a mist-
wall."
There was a pause.
"I see," he said.
"And you haven't left this building since that mistwall appeared
out there, or since whatever it was, first happened to this
building?"
"That's not quite the way it's been," he answered. "I've gone
outside a few times. But you're right, essentially. I've been here
since the first wave of disruption hit, studying that discontinuity
you came through. But you—you've been moving around. And you
say there're discontinuities that move?"
"Some of them travel across country," I said. "Where they've
gone by, the land's changed. It's either changed into what it's
going to be sometime in the future, or into what it was, once, in
the past."
"Very interesting . . ." the voice was thoughtful. "Tell me, are
there many people out there, where the moving dis—time lines
are?"
"No," I said. "It's been some weeks and I've covered a lot of
ground. But I've only found a handful. The Hawaiian Islands seem
to have come through pretty well. You can hear broadcasting reg-
ularly from there on short wave and other stations on the radio,
now and then—"
"Yes, I know," the voice was still thoughtful. "I thought it was
the discontinuities cutting off most of the reception."
"I doubt it," I said. "I think there just aren't many people still
left in the world. What was this place?"
"A federal installation. Research and testing," said the voice,
absently. "What's it like out there?"
"It's like a world-sized crazy quilt, cut up into all sorts of
different time areas, marked off one from each other by the mist-
walls—by the time lines or discontinuities. The big problem is the
situation's still changing. Every moving time line changes every-
thing where it passes."
I stopped talking. His voice did not pick up the conversation. I
was busy thinking about the words "research and testing."

115
"You said you'd been studying the time line, there," I said.
"What have you learned so far?"
"Not much," his voice was more distant now, as if he had
moved away from the microphone over which he had been speak-
ing, or was caught up in some other activity, so that he was giving
me only a part of his attention. "What you call the mistwall ap-
pearance seems to be a matter of conflicting air currents and tem-
perature differentials between the two zones. But there doesn't
seem to be any material barrier . . . you say they sometimes
move?"
"That 's right," I said. "Any reason why they shouldn't?"
"No, I suppose . . . yes," he said. "There's a reason. As far as
I've been able to measure, these lines of discontinuity stretch out
beyond the reach of any instruments I have. In other words, they
go right off into space. You'd assume any network of forces that
massive would have to be in balance. But if certain of the lines are
moving, then it has to be a dynamic, not a static, balance; and that
means . . . ."
"What?"
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I'm just letting my human
ideas of size and distance influence me. But I've got trouble imag-
ining something that big, shifting around internally."
He stopped talking. I waited for him to start up again. But he
did not.
"Look," I said. "I just sort of ran from this overall situation,
the way you'd run for shelter from a thunderstorm, for the first
few weeks. But now I'm trying to find out if there isn't some way
to get on top of the situation—to control it—"
"Control?"
I waited a second; but he did not say any more.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Did I say some kind of dirty
word?"
"You don't understand," he said. "If the whole disturbance is
bigger than our planet, possibly system-wide—and in some sort of
dynamic balance, the idea of controlling it is . . . ." He hesitated.
For the first time there was something like emotion in his voice.
"Don't you realize we never have been able to control even a hur-
ricane—no, not even a thunderstorm like the one you were talking
about—when this first hit us. Have you any idea of the magnitude

116
of the forces involved in something like this, if it's stretching all
over the solar system?"
"What makes you think it is?" I asked.
He did not answer.
"All right," I said, after a moment. "If you're not going to talk,
let me out of here and we'll say goodby. I was going to invite you
to come along with me—out where you can study the moving lines
as well as this static one. But I gather that's not the way you like
to work."
I turned on my heel, went back to the stairway door and
pushed. But it was still locked.
"Wait," he said. "Do you have other people with you?"
"Yes," I told him. "How about you? Are you alone here?"
"That's right," he said. "There were a couple of hundred people
in the installation here, when the disruption first hit. When I got
my senses back, I was the only one left. I was in the hyperbaric
chamber at the time—not that I can figure out why that should
have made a difference."
"I've got an idea about that," I said. "I think some of us are
just naturally immune—statistical survivors."
"Survivors."
"Of the time changes. It's only a thought. Don't ask me for de-
tails."
"An interesting thought. . . ."
The voice trailed off. Down the long inner wall of the corridor,
one of the doors opened, and a short, lightly-boned figure in white
slacks and white shirt stepped out and came toward me. He was so
small that my first thought was that he could not be more than
twelve or fourteen years old in spite of his adult voice; but when
he got closer, I saw that his face was the face of a man in his late
teens or early twenties. He came up to me and offered me his
hand.
"Bill Gault," he said. It was a strong name for someone that
light.
I shook hands with him.
"Marc Despard," I answered.
"I think I'd like to go with you, after all," he said.
I studied him. He was in no way frail or abnormal, just light
and small. At the same time, his lack of size and the spurious air

117
of being half-grown about him, made me hesitate now at the
thought of adding him to our party. I had just not expected anyone
so ... so physically insignificant, to be the person behind the
voice I had been talking with. For a moment I felt a touch of exas-
peration. All my life, until I had run into the girl and the crazy cat,
I had gotten by nicely with no responsibility for anyone but my-
self. But since this damned time storm started, it seemed I had
done nothing else but play guardian and protector—to girls, leop-
ards, women and children—and from the look of Bill Gault, I now
had another responsibility on my hands. I could imagine what
would happen if this featherweight should try to stand up alone to
one of Tek's men, for example.
"Well, you can't just walk out there like that," I said. "Haven't
you got some heavier clothes and some hiking boots? And if
you've got a gun of any kind around, bring that along, too, with
whatever in the way of a pack and extra clothing you can scrape
up."
"Oh, I'm all prepared," Bill Gault said. "I've had things ready
for some time, in case I did decide to leave."
And you know—he had. He took me down the corridor to a
room where he outfitted himself in synthetic wool and leather gear
that filled me with envy. Evidently, this installation had been test-
ing, among other things, various kinds of special-duty outerwear
for the armed services. When he was done, he looked like an
officer in the ski troops, lacking only the skis. The well-stuffed
backpack he wore was a marvel; and he had both a revolver and
the latest in army lightweight, automatic rifles.
I looked at the rifle particularly.
"You don't have another one like that lying around, do you?" I
asked.
"This is the only one," he said. "But there's a machine pistol, if
you'd like it."
I looked at him. He had looked so ready in his outdoor garb, it
had been hard for me to remember that he had been boxed up
here since the time storm had started. But one good innocent sen-
tence like that brought back the realization in a hurry.
"You've got ammunition for it?"
"Lots of ammunition," he said.

118
"And," I said, "you were actually going to let us walk off with-
out it? You were going to leave it behind?"
"Well, you've already got a rifle," he said, nodding at the 30.06.
"And a machine pistol's not very practical for hunting."
I shook my head.
"Get it," I said, "and as much ammunition for it as you think I
can reasonably carry."
He did. It was an Uzi. And the damn fool would have left it
behind.
"Let's go," I said, loading my pockets and belt with the spare
clips he had brought, until I felt heavy enough to walk bow-legged.
"That is, unless you've got some other useful surprises to spring
on me."
"Nothing I can think of," he said. "Food-"
"Food's no real problem," I said. "There seems to be canned
goods enough to last the few of us who're left for the rest of our
lifetimes. Come on."
He led me out. The door opened this time when I pushed on it.
We went down the stairs and out of the building; and I led him
back to the mistwall.
"What should I expect?" he asked, as we came up to it.
His tone was so casual that, for a second, I did not understand.
Then I looked at him and saw that his face was pale. Calm, but
pale.
"You're thinking of how it was when the time storm first caught
you?" I said. He nodded. "It won't be that bad. It seems to get
easier with experience. Hang on to my belt, though, if you want;
and if I feel you let go, I'll put down the rifle and lug you through
myself. But try and stay on your feet if you can, because we can
use both these guns if we can get them out."
He nodded again and reached out to hook fingers in my belt.
"You'll have to close your eyes against the dust when we get
close," I said. "Just concentrate on keeping on your feet, and stay-
ing with me."
We went into the mistwall then. It was not bad at all for me,
this time; but I could imagine how it might be for him. I was so
undisturbed by the passage through that I had attention to spare
when I heard Marie's voice on the far side of the mistwall, as we
started to come out of the far side of it.

119
. . shoot it!" Marie was crying, almost hysterically.
"No," said another voice. "If you make them hurt him at all,
I'll shoot you!"
It was the girl talking and making the longest speech I had ever
heard her utter.

1 took a few more steps forward out of the dust and opened my
eyes. There was a regular convention in session in the hollow
where I had left just Marie, Wendy and the dogs. They, of course,
were still there; and all the dogs were on guard position, not mak-
ing a sound. Wendy was holding tight to her mother, and Marie
was facing away from me.
Beyond Marie were the girl and Sunday. The girl sat cross-
legged on the ground, with the .22 rifle aimed at Marie. The girl's
back was against the back of Sunday. He also was seated, on his
haunches, and looking bored-but the tip of his tail was twitching
ominously. He faced outward at a half-ring of figures, all with
their rifles facing in Sunday's direction but looking momentarily
baffled. Tek and his gang had come visiting us again and, ap-
parently, encountered a problem.
The appearance of myself and Bill Gault out of the mistwall did
nothing to make their problem any easier. In fact, clearly it came
as a severe jolt. They stared at us as if Bill and I were ghosts mate-
rializing before their eyes; and a sudden intuitive conclusion
clicked into place in the back of my mind. Just as I once had, ob-
viously they were in the habit of avoiding mistwalls. No doubt, ev-
erybody still on the face of the earth today avoided them, instinc-
tively, remembering the emotional upset and discomfort of their
13

122
first experience with any part of the time storm. And here were
Bill and I, strolling out of this particular mistwall as casually as
walking from one room into another.
Hard on the heels of that bit of understanding came another.
The scrap of overheard conversation I had heard suddenly re-
solved itself. Clearly, the "it" Marie had been telling Tek and his
men to shoot had been Sunday; and, just as clearly, Sunday and
the girl had come here hunting me—which meant that Tek and
company had probably been following them, as well as the dogs
and us, all this time.
I had gotten this far with my thoughts, when the frozen moment
in which the girl and Tek's gang stared at me was abruptly and
joyously smashed asunder by Sunday. Plainly, he heard, smelled,
or otherwise recognized me in spite of his back being turned. He
jumped to his feet, turned about, and came bounding at me like a
kitten, purring like an outboard motor and stropping himself up
against me with unrestrained enthusiasm.
I had a second to brace myself, but being braced did not help
much. When a hundred and forty pound leopard throws an affec-
tionate shoulder block into your midsection, you realize the advan-
tages of four legs over two. At least when one cat makes loving
demonstrations to another, the recipient has a couple of spare feet
to prop himself upright with. I staggered and nearly went down.
Meanwhile, Marie had turned around to see what was going on
and saw me.
"Marc!" she cried.
There was so much desperate relief in her voice, I was almost
ready to forget that she had seemed on the verge of entering into
partnership with the enemy to get rid of Sunday and the girl. But
our difficulties were not at an end, because now she also came to
throw her arms around me.
"You've been gone for hours!" she said.
I had no time to point out that I had not even been gone one
hour, at the most; because Sunday, seeing her coming, had already
classed her as a potential attacker and finally decided to do some-
thing about her. I fended her off with one arm, while just manag-
ing to slap Sunday hard on the nose to check the lethal paw-swipe
with which he would have turned our little reunion into a very real
tragedy.

123
I succeeded—but of course, success left me with a rebuffed
woman and a rebuffed leopard at once, on my hands. Marie was
hurt that I should shove her off. Sunday was destroyed. I tried to
soothe the leopard with my hands and the woman with my voice at
the same time.
"Marie—no!" I said. "Bless you! I love you—but stand back,
will you? Sunday's likely to claw you in half."
"Then what are you doing petting the animal?" cried Marie.
"So he won't get loose and claw somebody else! For Christ's
sake—" I yelled at her, "stand back, will you? Keep Wendy
back-"
I was running out of breath. Sunday had forgiven me and was
once more trying to throw frantic, affectionate shoulder blocks
into me.
"Down, Sunday!" I managed, finally, to wrestle the leopard to
the ground and lie on him while he licked cheerfully and lovingly
at any part of my person that was within tongue-reach. I looked
up and glared at the girl.
"What are you doing on this side of the river?" I snarled.
"He pulled himself loose!" she said.
I went on glaring at her. She was an absolute, bare-faced liar.
Sunday would have choked himself to death on those chains I had
used to restrain him before he would have been able to pull him-
self free. Of course, the girl had turned him loose herself, deliber-
ately, so that they could both follow me. I knew it, and she knew I
knew it; and I could see she didn't care a hoot that I knew it.
Girl, leopard and woman—I could not do a thing with any of
them. I looked around for something in my own class to tie into;
and my gaze lighted on Tek. The man was two axe-handles across
the shoulders and besides being six years or more younger than I,
had that easy, muscular balance of movement that signals the nat-
ural athlete. He could, almost undoubtedly, have held me off with
one hand while beating me to death with the other; but just at that
moment, if I had not been occupied with the absolute necessity of
keeping Sunday flattened out, I would have picked a fight with
Tek for the simple joy of having something legitimate to hit.
I had dropped both the machine pistol and the rifle, necessarily,
needing both hands to handle Sunday and Marie. But the pistol
was only a short arms-length from me. I scooped it up, now, point-

124
ing it at Tek, and noticed that Bill Gault had maintained enough
presence of mind to lift his army automatic rifle into firing position
under his arm. In terms of sheer firepower, we two more than
matched up to the hunting rifles carried by Tek and his men, and
the dogs could mop up any other difference that existed. But then,
Tek took me completely by surprise.
"Hold it!" he shouted, before I could say anything more. "Hold
it—I'm with you!"
To my astonishment, he threw his rifle toward Marie and
walked unarmed up to us and turned around to face his former
crew. He grinned at Marie and nodded pleasantly to me.
"Just give the orders," he said to me. "I won't pick up my gun
unless you say so."
There had been a moment of frozen disbelief on the part of his
men when he had switched sides. But now there was a general
outcry from them.
"Tek!"
"Tek, you bastard—what are you doing to us?"
"Tek, damn it!"
"Tek
"Sorry," he said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling at them.
"I can tell when I've run into a better team, that's all. If you're
bright, you'll come over on their side, too. If you're not, don't
blame me."
Three of the five of them began to argue with him all at once.
He said nothing, though, and gradually their voices died down.
One of the two men who had not tried to argue him out of it
finally spoke. He was a narrow-bodied, balding man in his late
thirties or early forties, with a sharp, hard face.
"That was all pretty quick and easy," he said. "Almost like it
was planned, the quick way he went over to them. Come on, the
rest of you. Let's clear out and leave Tek with them, if that's what
he wants."
The men shifted uneasily. I looked at Tek, but he was staring
off at the horizon, ignoring the whole matter with an indifference
as sublime as Sunday's could be on occasion. But the other man
who had not argued with Tek now spoke up.
"Sure, Garney," he said. "Let's all go off and let you run things

125
instead of Tek—is that it? I'm sticking with him. Come on, every-
body."
He walked across to us and laid his rifle down beside Tek's. But
I noticed he laid it down carefully. It was a bolt action, and he had
the bolt uppermost; and when he stepped back from it, he was
only a couple of feet away from a quick grab to regain it.
Slowly, one by one, the others came over. All except the man
called Garney, who had suggested they leave Tek behind. When at
last they were all standing with us, leaving Garney alone, Tek took
his eyes off the horizon slowly and gazed at him.
"Well," he said, gently. "So long then, Garney. Maybe you bet-
ter head off in a different direction from where we're going."
"All right, Tek," said Garney, "that's all right. I wouldn't want
to have anything more to do with any of you."
He backed up a few steps, watching us. Then, evidently decid-
ing that it was simply not practical to back the long distance it
would take to get him out of our rifles' range, he turned his back
and walked swiftly away. He went off, up over the lip of the hol-
low and disappeared.
Tek's men who had joined us moved to pick up their rifles.
"Leave them lay!" said Tek.
They stopped, staring at him; and he nodded in my direction.
"Leave them, until the chief here tells us what to do."
I became suddenly conscious of the fact that they were all star-
ing at me; and that I was still lying sprawled out on Sunday, trying
to control him with one hand, while I clung to the Uzi and at-
tempted to keep it pointed, with the other. Sunday had quieted
down somewhat by this time; so I scrambled to my feet, cuffed
him lightly when he tried to recommence his greetings to me and
faced Tek with his men.
"All right," I said. "Let's talk about this. I don't remember
hanging out any sign asking for volunteers."
Tek shrugged.
"All I can do is try," he said.
"Marc!" said Marie, sharply. She looked at me for a second as
if she was going to say something then and there, then closed her
mouth and crossed the little distance between us. This time, I was
glad to see, she made it a point to approach me on the opposite

126
side from Sunday. She came up to me and took hold of my arm,
whispering in my ear.
"Marc, are you crazy?" she demanded. "Isn't it better to have
these men as friends, instead of enemies?"
I was about to answer sharply, when I thought better of it. I
nodded to Tek.
"Ask him how he'd answer that," I said out loud. "Go ahead."
Something like a dark shadow seemed to pass across Marie's
face; and she looked at me oddly. But she stepped back from me
without a word and turned to face Tek.
"I asked Marc if it wasn't better to have you as friends instead
of enemies," she said, loudly and clearly. "He said to ask you how
you'd answer that."
"Sure," said Tek, "if I was him, I'd want to know how you'd
know you could trust us."
She stared at him. He smiled back.
"You see, now," he said, "I'm not trying to put anything over
on anybody. I volunteered to join you all on my own. It's up to
chief there—what did you say his name was? Marc? It's up to
Marc."
"And up to me, too!" said Marie, sharply.
"And you, too, of course, ma'am," said Tek. "But—no offense
to you and your dogs—but I'd worry a bit more about Marc, here,
if it came right down to picking one of you over the other to have
trouble with. Him, his pet leopard, and his friend there."
He nodded to Bill Gault. I had almost forgotten Bill. Now, I
called him over and introduced him to Marie, Wendy, and the girl,
while still keeping a cautious eye on Tek and the others. All the
time, the back of my mind was working. The truth of the matter
was, if Bill and I were to dig into this business of the time storm
seriously, we would need troops to take the ordinary work and
fighting off our hands. Plus the fact that we might well be adven-
turing through a mistwall into a situation where a number of peo-
ple with guns were needed.
Also, something Tek had just said had sparked off a notion in
the back of my mind. While listing the things that might worry him
about having me for an enemy, Tek had specified Sunday as one
of them. I had grown so used to Sunday that I had almost forgot-
ten how unnatural it was to other people to see a full grown leop-

127
ard tagging after me like a kitten. The tendency was for the watch-
ers to assume I had a lot more control over him than I actually
did—as well as to assume that he was a great deal brighter and
more responsive than his cat brain would ordinarily allow. There
was a bluff I could run.
"All right," I said, "I'll tell you what we can do. We can take
all of you on a probation, and see how you'll do. Leave your guns
piled where they are; and if any of you have to go someplace away
from the camp, where you might run into trouble, one or two of
the dogs can go with you. Meanwhile, I'll set the leopard to watch
you. He may not be able to tell me what you talk about; but if any
of you make any move that looks as if you mean to hurt one of us,
he can tear you apart before you'll know what hit you."
I looked them over.
"Well?" I said. "How about it? Want to join us on those
terms?"
They looked at me hesitantly—all but Tek. Then they looked at
Tek.
"Marc—" began Marie, and then checked herself.
"What?" I looked at her.
"Nothing," she said. I looked back at the men.
"How about it?"
"Speaking, just for myself, of course," said Tek, "I think that's
fine—real fine. I've got no intentions of being anything but a good
friend to you all anyway, so your leopard doesn't worry me a bit.
But that's just me. The others are going to make their deals with
you on their own."
"All right," I said. "Suppose the seven of you find a place to sit
down together over there about ten yards away from your guns
and the rest of us. I've got some things to do."
Tek led off agreeably. He sat down, and the rest followed.
I turned my attention to the girl, who was now getting to her
feet. She had been holding her rifle grimly aimed at Marie, all the
while, but now she lowered it.
"Are you all right?" I asked her. "You haven't been hurt or
anything? Have you been getting enough to eat?"
She looked at me with a very strange expression. For a moment
I swore she was going to answer me. But habit took over. She
turned without a word and walked away from me to where Sunday

128
was, a few steps away, and began petting him, with her back to
me.
"I take it that means 'yes'!" I called after her. She did not reply,
of course. The voice of Marie spoke in low, but tight, tones in my
ear.
"Marc, she's not staying, she or that leopard, either."
I turned to stare at her. She looked ready to fight.
"Of course they're staying," I said.
"Then I'm leaving, with Wendy and the dogs."
"And Tek and his men right behind you," I said. I had not
meant to put it that bluntly; but I was just about out of patience.
"Go ahead."
She glared at me fiercely for a moment, then turned and went to
Wendy. But she made no move to begin a departure.
I looked around for Bill Gault, saw him standing waiting a little
distance away and beckoned him over to me. He came and I led
him off out of low-voiced earshot of the rest.
"I didn't mean to lead you into a touchy situation like this," I
said. "You can go back to your installation, if you feel like it, and
I won't blame you."
"No," he said. "You were right. I couldn't really learn anything
more, shut up there. The only way to study the situation is to look
at as many of the discontinuities as I can find. We ought to keep
on the move and, every time we get near one, have a look at it."
"Good," I told him. "By the way, you never did tell me what
your field is. Were you a research scientist, a lab man, or what?"
"Well, no," he said. "I do have a degree in physics . . . but ac-
tually, I was just technical editor for the installation."
He gazed at me uncomfortably.
"Technical editor!" I said.
"That's right."
"Well, what the hell can you do, then?" I demanded. I was
about at the end of my temper, anyway; and this last disap-
pointment threatened to cut me loose. I had taken it for granted he
was some sort of scientific expert, at least.
"I can do a lot!" Bill said, swiftly. "I can observe, make tests
and record—and I know something about physics, as I said. Also,
I've been up to my eyebrows in everything we worked on at the in-
stallation for the five years I've been there. I'm not helpless."

129
"All right," I answered. "But you're going to have to show
me.
He did. During the two weeks that followed, my opinion of him,
starting from the sub-basement level of that moment, went steadily
up. He had brought with him in his backpack some remarkably
small, but durable instruments to measure temperature, air pres-
sure, wind velocity and humidity, plus a few less common things
like electrostatic levels and magnetic flows. He also designed a
number of long rods for pushing these into and through a mistwall,
while we stood safely outside.
This is not to say we did not enter the walls. In the final essen-
tial, it was necessary to go through them. As we moved across
country in the days following the addition of Tek and his men to
our group—to say nothing of Bill himself, and the rejoining of the
girl and Sunday—we ran into at least one, and sometimes more,
mistwalls a day. We would make all the tests on them that Bill
could think of; but once he had the results noted down, it was a
matter of he and I going through them, that is, unless it were a
moving mistwall we were investigating, in which case we spotted
them early through binoculars and moved to outflank and see
behind them.
We did not go into them as blindly as I had gone into earlier
ones. Among other designs of Bill's were rod or rope devices to be
thrown through the mistwall and dragged back, to give us an idea
of the ground situation and atmosphere beyond. The third time we
used them, what we learned kept us from walking off a cliff on the
far side of the mistwall, before we would have had a chance to
open our eyes. But, in the end, in almost every instance, we still
had to go through personally.
We found a number of different situations, from raw desert to
empty city, on the far sides of these walls; and we profited from
what we found. Fourteen days after our group had come to its full
size, we were riding in a sort of motorcade, all of us, including the
dogs. Our vehicles consisted of a couple of brand new motor
homes for sleeping and living quarters, preceded by a couple of
jeep carryalls and followed by a pickup truck, all three smaller ve-
hicles with four-wheel drive, carrying the armed members of the
party while we were on the move. With wheels under us, outflank-
ing the moving mistwalls became not only easier, but more certain.

130
There were four of us who carried weapons to start with—
myself, Marie, Bill, and also the girl. She had become attached to
that .22 of hers. In fact, she refused to give it up, and when I had
her fire it for me, I found that she had not merely kept it in good
condition, she was developing into a good shot. At short to me-
dium range in rough country, a light gun like a .22 could be as
effective as an elephant gun, in every way but impact, if the person
shooting it was accurate enough; and I was glad to have her able
to use it.
By the end of the first week we added a fifth gunner—Tek. The
man had worked hard to do anything that was asked of him; until
he had begun finally to make a believer even out of me. The con-
clusion I came to at last was that whatever it was he wanted, for
the moment, at least, it included cooperation with the rest of us. I
walked him off a short distance from our night camp on the end of
our seventh day together and asked him a lot of questions about
himself.
The answers were unhesitating and interesting. His full name
was Techner, pronounced "Tek-ner," Wilson Ambervoy—he had
been named for a couple of grandparents. He had been good
enough as a high school football player to get a scholarship to the
University of Indiana—and Indiana had fielded a Big Ten team
which did not play mediocre football. However, he had not taken
the study end of college seriously and had flunked out midway
through his sophomore year. Luckily—he was usually lucky, Tek
told me frankly—he got a job immediately with an uncle who
owned a paint store. The uncle was in poor health and inside of
half a year, Tek was managing the store. About that time, he got
into real estate. With the cosignature of his paint store uncle, Tek
swung a mortgage and bought a twelve-unit apartment building.
To run it, he brought in a friend named Ricky, a drinking buddy
the same age as himself, who had a knack for card games and was
in the habit of having a poker session in his former bachelor apart-
ment every night after the bars closed.
He and Tek remodeled two of the apartment units of their
building into one large one to make, as Tek put it, "a pretty
impressive-looking cave"; and the after-hours card games ex-
panded. Meanwhile, they made it a point to rent the rest of the
units to girl friends of Tek's; and a number of these would also

131
drop in on the card game after hours to make sandwiches, pour
drinks and watch the game. If the supply of these girls ran short,
Tek went out prospecting and found some more.
The result was that there were always a number of good-looking
girls around the card game, and young male strangers began drop-
ping in for a hand or two, just to meet them. Tek's buddy did well
with his cards. He paid Tek a percentage of his winnings as rent
for the apartment; and the other units became very much in de-
mand among Tek's girl friends, so that he was able to raise the
rent several times and still keep every unit filled.
. . You understand," Tek said to me. "Nobody cheated in
the card games. There was nothing professional about the girls.
Just everybody had a good time, and Ricky and me had it for free
—well, maybe we came out a little bit ahead, but when we did, we
just spent it on more good stuff . . . ."
And then the time storm had come along; Tek had been taking
a nap. When he woke, he was alone in the apartment building.
Alone in an empty town. He ended up going out adventuring, and
one by one, he ran into the other men of his gang, whom he
recruited out of a sort of pack-instinct for leadership.
"But that wasn't really what I was after," Tek said to me as we
walked together, with the camp and the fire we always built for it
distant in the twilight before the small town on the outskirts of
which we had stopped for the night. "You know, even before this
time storm, or whatever you call it, came along, I was beginning to
get a little filled up on the apartment, the fun and games, and all
the rest of it. I was beginning to want to do something—I don't
know what. I still don't know. But just roaming around, living off
the country, isn't it either."
Tek stopped and looked at me in the growing dimness.
"They're not bright, you know," he said, "those five back there
I picked up. Garney was the brightest of them all; and he was
nothing you could build on. Now, little old Bill Gault there, he's
bright; and you are, too. Someday maybe you'll tell me what you
did before this happened and where you came from; and I'll bet
it'll be interesting. And this business of yours with the mistwalls—it
might lead to something. That's what I want. Something."
He stopped talking.
"All right," I said. "Let's head back."

132
Halfway back to the camp, I came to a conclusion.
"You can start carrying a rifle tomorrow," I told him. "But
don't forget you're still under orders. Mine."
"Right," he said. "But I'd be on your side anyway."
"For now, you would," I said dryly.
He laughed.
"Come on, man," he said. "Anything can happen if you look
far enough into the future. If anything comes along to change the
situation that much, you'll know about it as soon as I will."
So we moved on with five gunners instead of four, and things
went almost suspiciously well. The plan Bill and I had evolved was
based on our theory that our best chance to get on top of the time
storm was to keep looking for the most advanced future segment
we could find. Hopefully the more advanced an area we could hit,
the more likely we were to find the equipment or the people to
help us deal with the time storm. If we were going to be able to do
something about it, that was where we were most likely to find the
means. If we were going to be forced to live with it—perhaps we
could find the techniques and patterns we needed in something be-
yond our present time slot.
As I had discovered earlier, however, the time changes seemed
to be weighed toward the past, rather than toward the future. We
found three futuristic-looking segments behind mistwalls; but they
were either apparently stripped of anything or anyone useful, or
else their very futureness was in doubt. It was two weeks and two
days before we found a segment that was undeniably part of a city
belonging to a time yet to come—a far future time, we thought at
first. Though of course, there was no way we might tell how much
time would have been necessary to make changes.
This particular segment was behind the second mistwall we had
encountered that day. The first had showed us nothing but un-
relieved forest, stretched out over descending hills to a horizon
that was lost in haze, but which must have been many miles off.
Such a landscape might be part of a future segment, but it was not
passable by our wheeled vehicles, and it promised nothing. We
pulled back through the mistwall—it was then about ten in the
morning—paused for an early lunch and went on.
About 2:30 P.M., we saw a second, stationary mistwall and
moved up to it. We were travelling along a gravel road at the time,

133
through what seemed like an area of small farms. The mistwall
sliced across a cornfield and obliterated the corner of what had
once been a tall, white and severely narrow farmhouse—an Ameri-
can Gothic among farmhouses.
We left our motorcade in the road, and Bill and I walked up
the farm road into the farmyard, carrying most of the instruments.
The rest straggled along behind us but stayed back, as I had re-
peatedly warned them to, a good twenty yards from where we
were working.
I said the rest stayed back—I should have said all the rest but
Sunday. The leopard had put up with seeing me go through mist-
walls for about'two days after he and the girl had rejoined us and
had contented himself with overwhelming me with pleased greet-
ings when I returned. Like all our humans, he obviously had a
powerfully remembered fear of the time lines, in spite of having
crossed one at Marie's place. But after Bill and I had penetrated
through the third wall we had encountered, I had heard something
odd behind me and looked to see Sunday coming through the mist-
wall behind us, tossing his head, his eyes closed and mewling like a
lost kitten. He broke out and came to me—still with his eyes closed
and evidently depending on nose alone—and it had taken me
fifteen minutes to soothe him back to quietness. However, going
back through the mistwall later, he had been much less upset; and
two days later he was accompanying us with the indifference of a
veteran. Of course, as soon as he started coming through the mist-
walls after us, the girl did too. But it was possible to order her not
to; Sunday could not be kept back.
So, in this case, as had become his habit, Sunday followed Bill
and me up to the mistwall and waited while we made our measure-
ments and tests. These showed it to be little different from the
many other walls we had tested. But when we finally went through
this time, we found a difference.
We came out in a—what? A courtyard, a square, a plaza . . .
take your pick. It was an oval of pure white surface and behind,
all about it, rose a city of equal whiteness. Not the whiteness of
new concrete, but the whiteness of veinless, milk-colored marble.
And there was no sound about it. Not even the cries of birds or
insects. No sound at all.

14
. . We were the first," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his
Rime of the Ancient Mariner—
"Who ever burst,
"Into that silent sea. .
If you know that bit of poetry, if you love poetry the way I do,
you will be able to feel something like the feeling that hit Bill and
me when we emerged from the mistwall into that city. Those lines
give it to you. It was with us and that city beyond our time, as it
had been with that sea and Coleridge's Mariner. It was a city of si-
lence, silence such as neither of us had ever heard, and such as we
had never suspected could exist—until that moment. We were
trapped by that silence, held by it, suddenly motionless and fixed,
for fear of intruding one tiny noise into that vast, encompassing
and majestic void of soundlessness, like flower petals suddenly en-
cased in plastic. It held us both, frozen; and the fear of being the
first to break it was like a sudden hypnotic clutch on our minds,
too great for us to resist.
We were locked in place; and perhaps we might have stood
there until we dropped, if it had been left to our own wills alone to
save us.
But we were rescued. Shatteringly and suddenly, echoing and
reechoing off to infinity among the white towers and ways before

136
us, came the loud scrape of claws on a hard surface; and a broad,
warm, hard, leopard-head butted me in the ribs, knocking me off
my frozen balance to fall with a deafening clatter to the pavement,
as my gun and my equipment went spilling all around me.
With that, the spell was smashed. It had only been that first,
perfect silence that operated so powerfully on our emotions, and
that, once destroyed, could never be recreated. It was an awesome,
echoing place, that city—like some vast, magnificent tomb. But it
was just a place once its first grip on us had been loosed. I picked
myself up.
"Let's have a look around," I said to Bill.
He nodded. He was not, as I was, a razor addict; and over the
two weeks or more since I had met him, he had been letting his
beard go with only occasional scrapings. Now a faint soft fuzz
darkened his lower face. Back beyond the mistwall, with his young
features, this had looked more ridiculous than anything else; but
here against the pure whiteness all around us and under a cloud-
less, windless sky, the beard, his outdoor clothing, his rifle and
instruments, all combined to give him a savage intruder's look.
And if he looked so, just from being unshaved, I could only guess
how I might appear, here in this unnaturally perfect place.
We went forward, across the level floor of the plaza, or what-
ever, on which we had entered. At its far side were paths leading
on into the city; and as we stepped on one, it began to move, car-
rying us along with it. Sunday went straight up in the air, cat-
fashion, the moment he felt it stir under his feet, and hopped back
off it. But when he saw it carrying me away from him, he leaped
back on and came forward to press hard against me as we rode—it
was the way he had pressed against me on the raft during the
storm, before he, the girl and I had had to swim for shore.
The walkway carried us in among the buildings, and we were
completely surrounded by milky whiteness. I had thought at first
that the buildings had no windows; but apparently they had—only
of a different sort than anything I had ever imagined. Seeing the
windows was apparently all a matter of angle. One moment it
seemed I would be looking at a blank wall—the next I would have
a glimpse of some shadowed or oddly angled interior. It was ex-
actly the same sort of glimpse that you get of the mercury line in a
fever thermometer when you rotate the thermometer to just the

137
proper position. But there was no indication of life, anywhere.
Around us, over us, the city was lifeless. This was more than a
fact of visual observation. We could feel the lack of anything living
in all the structures around us like an empty ache in the mind. It
was not a painful or an ugly feeling, but it was an unpleasant feel-
ing just for the reason that it was not a natural one. That much
massive construction, empty, ready and waiting, was an anomaly
that ground against the human spirit. The animal spirit as well, for
that matter; because Sunday continued to press against me for
reassurance as we went. We stepped off the walkway at last—it
stopped at once as we did so—and looked around at a solid
mass of white walls, all without visible windows or doors.
"Nothing here," said Bill Gault after a while. "Let's go back
now."
"No," I said. "Not yet."
I could not have explained to him just why I did not want to
give up. It was the old reflex at the back of my head, working and
working away at something, and feeling that it was almost on top
of that missing clue for which it searched. There had to be some-
thing here in this empty city that tied in with our search to make
reason out of the time storm, the time lines, and all the business of
trying to handle them or live with them. I could feel it.
"There's no one here," Bill said.
I shook my head.
"Let's get inside," I said. "Any one of these buildings will do."
"Get inside? How?" He looked around us at the marble-white,
unbroken walls.
"Smash our way in somehow," I said. I was looking around my-
self for something to use as a tool. "If nothing else, the machine
pistol ought to make a hole we can enlarge—"
"Never mind," he said, in a sort of sigh. I turned back to look
at him and saw him already rummaging in his pack. He came out
with what looked like a grey cardboard package, about ten inches
long and two wide, two deep. He opened one end and pulled out
part of a whitish cylinder wrapped in what looked like wax paper.
The cylinder of stuff was, evidently, about the same consistency
as modeling clay. With its wax paper covering off, it turned out to
be marked in sections, each about two inches long. Bill pulled off a
couple of sections, rewrapped the rest and put it away, back in his

138
pack. The two sections he had pulled out squeezed between his
hands into a sort of thin pancake, which he stepped over and
pressed against one of the white walls. It clung there, about three
feet above the ground.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Explosive," he said. "A form of plastic—" He pronounced it
plas-teek, with the emphasis on the second syllable—"but im-
proved. It doesn't need any fuse. You can do anything with it
safely, even shoot a bullet into it. Nothing happens until it's spread
out like that, thin enough so that sufficient area can react to the
oxygen in the air."
He moved back from the wall where he had spread out the pan-
cake, beckoning me along with him. I came, without hesitating.
We stood about thirty feet off, waiting. For several minutes
nothing happened. Then there was an insignificant little poof that
would hardly have done credit to a one inch firecracker; but an
area of the white wall at least six feet in diameter seemed to suck
itself inward and disappear. Beyond, there was a momentary patch
of blackness; and then we were looking into a brightly lit chamber
or room of some sort, with several large solid-looking shapes sit-
ting on its floor area, shapes too awkwardly formed to be furniture
and too purposelessly angular to seem as if they were machinery.
Like the room, like the walls, they were milky white in color.
But that appearance did not last long.
Without warning, the damaged wall blushed. I don't know how
else to describe it. From white it turned blood-red, the reddishness
most intense around the edges of the hole blown in the wall and
toning down from there as it spread outward. And it spread with
unbelievable speed. In a moment, the color change had swept over
all the walls and pavement around us and raced on to turn the
city, the whole city, to red.
Far off among the buildings, a faint, siren sound began. It was
uncomfortably as if the city was a living thing we had wounded,
and now it was not only bleeding internally but crying.
But this was just the beginning of the change.
"Look!" said Bill.
I turned back from gaping at the city to see Bill pointing once
more at the hole in the wall. The red around the ragged rim of
broken material had darkened and deepened until it was almost

139
black—a thick and angry color of red. But now, as I watched, that
dark-red edge began to develop a hairline of white—glowing white-
hot-looking brightness beyond the edge of darkest red. And this
tiny edge of white thickened and widened, tinged with pink where
it came up against the dark red, but continuing to thicken in
whiteness on its other, broken edge that touched only air.
"It's healing itself," said Bill.
I had not realized it until he put it into words, but that was ex-
actly what was happening. The white that was appearing was new
wall surface, growing down and inward, beginning to fill the hole
that we had blown in the wall.
I took a step -forward as soon as I realized this, then stopped.
The hole was already too small for me to go through, easily; and
those white-glowing edges did not look like anything I would want
to brush up against on my way past.
"All right," I said to Bill, "let's try it someplace else, and next
time be a little quicker about going through, once we've opened it
up."
"No. Wait," he said, catching hold of my arm as I started off to
a further section of the wall. "Listen!"
I stopped and listened. The distant, wailing, siren-sound had
been continuing steadily, but without any indication of coming any
closer to us and the scene of the action. But now that Bill had my
attention, I heard another sound superimposed on the first. It was
the noise of a faint, dull-toned but regular clanking. The sort of
thing you might hear from a large toy tractor, if it had been con-
structed, with its movable parts, out of plastic rather than metal.
And this sound was coming toward us.
I had the machine pistol up and aimed without thinking; and
Bill had his gun also pointed, when the source of the noise came
around the corner of the same building where we had blown the
opening in the wall. It came toward us, apparently either not un-
derstanding, or understanding but ignoring, the menace of our
guns. I stared at it, unbelievingly, because I had a hard time mak-
ing up my mind whether it was creature or machine.
By the time I had reluctantly concluded it was a creature, it was
less than a dozen feet from us and it stopped. A machine I might
have risked pumping a few slugs into. A creature was another mat-
ter entirely. Aside from the fact that killing another living thing

140
has some emotional overtones to it, there were a great many more
dangerous possibilities involved for us if it was alive, and our hos-
tile response was not successful. So we simply stood and looked it
over, and it looked us over.
It looked—it's hard to say how it looked in that first minute.
Something like a Saint Bernard-sized, very short-limbed, very
heavy-headed, bulldog shape, with a clump of three tails or tenta-
cles, about two feet in length, sprouting from each shoulder. The
whole body was covered with rectangular bony plates about a cou-
ple of inches at their widest, which flexed at their jointures with the
plates surrounding them to allow the body beneath them to move.
Smaller plates even covered most of the massive head. The two
eyes were brown and large.
"Don't shoot!" I said to Bill, without taking my eyes off the
creature.
I don't know what movement of his, if any, triggered off that re-
action in me. At the moment, I only knew two things. I had been
searching from the very beginning, for an x-factor, a Game War-
den, a missing piece to the puzzle of the time storm; and the old
reliable search-reflex in the back of my mind now was practically
shouting at me that this might be it. And—second, but no less im-
portant—the whole improbable being radiated an impression of
non-enmity. That impressive armor, that ferocious head, somehow
added up, not so much to something threatening, as to something
rather clumsy and comic—even lovable, like the bulldog it faintly
resembled.
Still, I would have had trouble convincing Bill of any of that
alone—but luckily, just at that moment, I got corroborative testi-
mony from a completely unexpected source—Sunday. Up until now
the leopard had not moved; but now, suddenly, he strolled past
me, right up to the creature, and proceeded to strop himself in a
friendly manner up one side of it and down the other. He then
sniffed it over a few times and gravely returned to me. That did it.
Bill lowered his gun.
"Hello," I said to the creature. The word sounded almost ridic-
ulous in the context of our confrontation, here in this silent,
strange place. The creature said nothing.
"I'm Marc Despard," I said. "This is Bill Gault."
Still no answer.

141
"Marc," said Bill, in a strained, thin voice. "Let's start backing
up, slowly. If it lets us go, we can back right into the mistwall, and
maybe it won't follow us—"
He broke off because some sounds were finally beginning to
come from the creature. Sounds that were something like a cross
between the internal rumblings of indigestion and the creaking of
machinery that had not been used in a long time.
"Due . . . ." said the creature, in a deep-tone, grating voice.
"Yanglish."
It fell silent. We waited for more sounds, but none came.
"Start backing if you want," I answered Bill, still keeping my
gaze, however, on the creature. "I'm going to stay and see if I
can't find out something about this."
"I . . . ." said the creature, loudly, before Bill could answer
me. There was a pause while we waited for more.
"I am . . . ." it said, after a second. Another pause. Then it
continued, in jerks, almost as if it were holding a conversation
with itself, except that the pauses between bits of conversation be-
came shorter and shorter until they approached ordinary sentence-
length human speech.
"I am . . . ." said the creature again.
"... Porniarsk.
"Porniarsk. I am ... an of ... .
"I am Porniarsk Prime Three... of... an ... .
"I am Porniarsk Prime Three, an . . . avatar ... of Porni-
arsk ....
". . . Expert in Temporals General. I am the . . . third . . .
avatar of Porniarsk . . . who is an . . . expert on the Temporal
Question."
"It's a robot of some sort," said Bill, staring at Porniarsk's
avatar.
"No," it said. "I am Porniarsk. Avatar, secondarily only. I am
living— . . . alive. As you are."
"Do we call you Porniarsk?" I asked.
There was a pause, then a new sort of creaking, unused machin-
ery noise; and the heavy head was nodding up and down, so
slowly, awkwardly and deliberately that the creature called Por-
niarsk looked even more comic than before. It broke off its head-
movements abruptly at the top of a nod.

142
"Yes," it said. "Porniarsk Prime Three is ... a full name. Call
me Porniarsk. Also, he. I am . . . male."
"We'll do that," I said. "Porniarsk, I'm sorry about damaging
your city here. We didn't think there was anyone still around."
"It is not. . . it isn't my city," said Porniarsk. "I mean it's nei-
ther mine as avatar, nor is it something that belongs to me as Por-
niarsk. I come from . . .
He had been going great guns, but all at once he was blocked
again. We waited, while he struggled with his verbal problem.
"I come from many . . . stellar distances away," he said,
finally. "Also from a large temporal. . . time . . . distance. But I
should say also that, in another measure, I am . . . from close to
here."
"Close to this world?" Bill asked.
"Not. . ." Porniarsk broke off in order to work at the process
of shaking his head this time, "to this world, generally. Just to
. . . here, this place, and a few other places on your Earth."
"Is this place—this city or whatever it is . . ." asked Bill, "from
the same time as the time you come from?"
"No," said Porniarsk. "No two times can be alike—no more
than two grains of sand be identical."
"We aren't stupid, you know," said Bill. For the first time I'd
known him, there was an edge in his voice. "If you can tell us that
much, you can do a better job of explaining things than you're
doing."
"Not stupid . . . ignorant," said Porniarsk. "Later, perhaps? I
am from far off, spatially; from far off, temporally; but from close,
distance-wise. When you broke the wall here, this city signalled; I
had been for a long period of my own time on the watch for some
such happening at any one of the many spots I could monitor; and
when the city signalled, I came."
"Why is the city so important?" I asked.
"It isn't," said Porniarsk, swinging his heavy head to look at me.
"You are important. I believe. I'll go with you now unless you
reject me; and at last, perhaps we can be of use to ourselves and to
the universe."
I looked at Bill. Bill looked at me.
"Just a minute," I said. "I want to look this place over. It's

143
from out of our future, if my guess is right. There may be a lot of
things here we can use."
"Nothing," said Porniarsk. "It is only a museum—with all its
exhibits taken away long since."
He made no visible move that my eyes could catch, but sud-
denly, all the walls about us seemed to suck themselves in and pro-
duce circular doorways.
"If you would like to look, do so," Porniarsk said. He folded his
short legs inward under him and went down like a large coffee
table with its four supports chopped away by four axemen at once.
"I will wait. Use-time is subjective."
I was half-r^ady to take him at his words that the "city" was no
use to us; but Bill was beckoning me away. I followed him away
and around a corner, with Sunday trailing along after me, out of
sight of Porniarsk. Bill stopped, then, and I stopped. Sunday went
on to sniff at an open doorway.
"Listen," whispered Bill, "I don't trust it."
"Him," I said, absently. "Porniarsk—he said he was male."
"He also said he was an avatar," said Bill. "The incarnation of
a deity."
Bill's carping pricked me the wrong way.
"—Or the incarnation of an idea, or a philosophy, or an atti-
tude!" I said. "Why don't you read all of the entry in the dictionary
next time?" Abruptly, I realized that he was scared; and my jump-
ing on him was the last sort of move likely to help matters. "Look,
he's just the sort of thing we've been hunting for. Someone out of
the future who might be able to help us handle this time storm
business."
"I don't trust. . . him," said Bill stubbornly. "I think he's just
planning to use us."
"He can't," I said, without thinking.
"Why not?" Bill stared at me.
He had me, of course. I had responded out of my feelings rather
than out of my head—or, to be truthful, out of my reflex for pat-
tern-hunting, which was still yelling that I might have found the
missing piece necessary to complete the jigsaw puzzle. I did not
know why I was so unthinkingly sure of the fact that while we
might be able to use Porniarsk, he could not use us. I had thought
that the end result of my certainty about Swannee's survival had

144
taught me some healthy self-doubt. But here I was, certain as hell,
all over again.
"I've just got a hunch," I said to Bill then. "But in any case, we
can't pass him up. We've got to, at least, try to get the information
we need out of him. Now, you can see the sense of that, can't
you?"
He hesitated in answering. I had hit him on his weak side—the
side that believed in scientific question and experimentation.
"Of course you can," I went on. "There's no point to anything
if we throw away the first good lead we've found to making sense
out of things. Let's go back now and take Porniarsk along with us
to the rest of them. There'll be plenty of time to find out what he's
after personally, once we've got him back in camp. Whatever he's
got, I'll feel a lot safer when he's got the dogs, Sunday and the rest
of our guns all around him—don't you agree?"
Bill nodded reluctantly.
"All right," he said. "But I want to look into a few of these
buildings, anyway."
"We'll do that, then." I could afford to give in on a small point,
now that he'd yielded on the large one. "But I've got a hunch Por-
niarsk's right, and there's nothing to find."
So, accompanied by Sunday, we searched through a couple of
the now-open buildings. But it was just as I'd thought. Porniarsk
had not been lying so far as we could discover. The buildings were
nothing but a lot of empty rooms—in immaculate condition, with-
out a trace of dust or damage—but empty. Echo-empty.
In the end we went back and collected Porniarsk. He clattered
to his feet as we came up and fell in step with us when I told him
we were headed back through the mistwall to the rest of our peo-
ple. However, I stopped when we came to the nearer edge of the
wall.
"I'd like you to wait here, Porniarsk," I told him, "while Bill
and I go through first. Give us a chance to tell the rest of our peo-
ple about you and tone down the surprise when you show up. Is
that all right with you?"
"All right," said Porniarsk, clunking down into lying position
again. "Call when you want me to come after you."
"We will," I said.
I led Bill and Sunday back through the mist. When we opened

145
our eyes on the other side, it was to find a deserted, if cozy-look-
ing, farmyard. The cooktent had been set up in the yard and Marie
had both charcoal grilles going, but no one was on duty except the
dogs. Clearly, the others were all inside the farmhouse—the very
sort of place I had ordered them never to go into unless I told
them it was safe, and only after a couple of us had done a room-
by-room search with guns, first. There were too many nasty sur-
prises, from booby traps to ambushes, that could be set up in a
place like an abandoned building.
"Get out here!" I shouted. "Get out here, all of you!"
I had the satisfaction of seeing them come scrambling out of the
door and even out of a couple of windows, white-faced, possibly
thinking we were under attack from somewhere, or perhaps an-
other mistwall was bearing down on us. It was not the best of all
possible times to rub a lesson in; but I took a few minutes once
they were outside to read them out for what they had done.
"Well, it's ridiculous!" said Marie. "It isn't as if we walked in
there blind. Tek and the girl took their guns and checked it out
first."
Of course that put a different face on the matter, but I was
hardly in a position to admit so at the moment. I looked over at
Tek and the girl. He, of course, had been too smart from the be-
ginning to make his own excuses; while the girl, of course, was
simply following her usual practice of not talking. But I met her
eyes now; and grim, angry eyes they were.
"They did, did they?" I said. "And who ordered them to do
that?"
"I asked them to," said Marie.
"You did?"
"Yes, I did!" said Marie. "For God's sake, Marc, the rest of us
have to start doing things on our own, sooner or later, don't we?"
I was finding myself slipping into a public argument with my
people—not the best thing for a leader, if he wants to hold his posi-
tion.
"Right! And I'll tell you when. Meanwhile—" I went on before
she, or any of the rest of them could say something more, "Bill
and I brought back someone for you all to meet. Brace yourself—
he's not human. Bill, do you want to call him?"
"Porniarsk!" shouted Bill, turning to the mistwall.

146
Marie and the rest also turned toward the mistwall, with a swift-
ness that cheered me up somewhat. I had meant what I had said to
Porniarsk about preparing them for the shock of meeting him.
Now the thought in my mind was that a little shock might have a
salutary effect on them. We were not an army of world-
conquerers, after all. Half a dozen determined adults with decent
rifles could wipe us out, or make slaves of us at a moment's notice,
if we took no precautions.
Porniarsk came clanking through the mistwall into view and
stopped before us.
"I am Porniarsk Prime Three," he announced, in exactly the
same tones in which he had introduced himself to Bill and me.
"The third avatar of Porniarsk, an expert in temporal science. I
hope to work together with you so that we all may benefit the uni-
verse."
"Yes," said Bill dryly. "Only, of course we've a little more in-
terest in helping ourselves first."
Porniarsk swiveled his heavy head to look at Bill.
"It is the same thing," Porniarsk said.
"Is it?" said Bill.
Porniarsk creaked off a nod.
"What you've observed as local phenomena," he said, "are es-
sentially micro-echoes of the larger disturbance, which began
roughly half a billion years ago, according to your original time
pattern."
"Oh?" said Bill. He was trying to be indifferent, but I could
catch the ring of interest in his voice that he was trying to hide.
"Well, just as long as it can be fixed."
"It cannot be fixed," said Porniarsk. "The knowledge is not
available to fix it."
"It isn't?" I said. "Then what's all this about helping the uni-
verse?"
"The whole problem is beyond my time pattern and any other
time pattern I know," said Porniarsk. "Yet, our responsibility re-
mains. Though we cannot solve, we can attack the problem, each
of us like the ants of which you know, trying to level a mountain
such as you are familiar with. With each micro-echo, each infini-
tesimal node attacked, we approach a solution, even if it is not for
us to reach it."

147
"Wait a minute—" began Tek.
He had not liked my blowup over their going into the house
without my orders, even though he had said nothing. And now, the
note of potential rebellion was clear in his voice.
"Hold it!" I said, hastily. "Let me get to the bottom of this first.
Porniarsk, just how far does the whole problem extend—this prob-
lem of which our troubles here are a micro-echo?"
"I thought," said Porniarsk, "I had made clear the answer to
that question. The temporal maladjustments are symptoms of the
destruction of an entropic balance which has become omnipresent.
The chaos in temporal patterns is universal."
None of us said anything. Porniarsk stood waiting for a moment
and then realized he had not yet reached our basic levels of under-
standing.
"More simply put," he said, "all time and space are affected.
The universe has been fragmented from one order into a wild pat-
tern of smaller orders, each with its own direction and rate of cre-
ation or decay. We can't cure that situation, but we can work
against it. We must work against it; otherwise, the process will
continue and the fragmentation will increase, tending toward
smaller and smaller orders, until each individual particle becomes
a universe unto itself."
. . . And that's all of what he said then that I remember, be-
cause about at that point my mind seemed to explode with what it
had just discovered—go into overdrive with the possibilities de-
veloping from that—on a scale that made any past mental work I
had ever done seem like kindergarten-level playtime, by compari-
son. At last, my hungry rat's teeth had found something they could
tear into.

15
They tell me that, after a while, I came to and gave everybody, in-
cluding Porniarsk, orders to pack up and move on; and I kept the
avatar and all of us moving steadily for the better part of the next
three weeks. Just moving, not stopping to investigate what was be-
yond the mistwall, or in any of the buildings or communities we
passed. Pushing forward, as if I was on a trek to some far distant
land of great promise.
Moments of that trek, I dimly remember. But only moments. I
was too full of the end result of all the speculations I had been
making about the time storm—now paying off all at once. I did
have flashes of awareness of what I was doing, and of what was
going on around me. But it was all background, unimportant sce-
nery, for the real place I was in and the real thing I was doing,
which was The Dream.
In The Dream I was the equivalent of a spider. I say "the
equivalent of," because I was still myself; I was just operating like
a spider. If that doesn't make sense, I'm sorry, but it's the best I
can do by way of explanation. As description, it hardly makes
sense to me either; but I've never found another way to describe
what that particular brain-hurricane was like.
In The Dream, then, I was spider-like; and I was clambering
furiously and endlessly about a confusion of strands that stretched

150
from one end of infinity to the other. The strands had a pattern,
though it would have taken someone infinite in size to stand back
enough to perceive it as a whole. Still, in a way I can't describe, I
was aware of that pattern. My work was with it; and that work
filled me with such a wild, terrible and singing joy that it was only
a hairline away from being an agony. The joy of working with the
pattern, of handling it, sent me scrambling inconceivable distances,
at unimaginable speeds, across the strands that filled the universe,
with every ounce of strength, every brain cell engaged in what I
was doing, every nerve stretched to the breaking-point. It was a
berserk explosion of energy that did not care if it destroyed its
source, that was myself, as long as things were done to the pattern
that needed doing; and somehow this was all associated with my
memories of my first determination to put my brand on the world
about me; so that the energy sprang from deep sources within me.
Actually, what I was experiencing was beyond ordinary descrip-
tion. The pattern was nameless. My work with it was outside
definitions. But at the same time, I knew inside me that it was the
most important work that ever had been and ever would be. It
carried an adrenalin-like drunkenness that was far beyond any fa-
miliar self-intoxication. People talk, or used to talk, about drug
highs. This high was not a matter of chemistry but of physics.
Every molecule of my body was charged and set vibrating in reso-
nance with the pattern and the work I was doing upon it.
Meanwhile, I continued, with some detached part of my con-
sciousness, to lead and direct my small band of pilgrims; effec-
tively enough, at least, so that they did not depose me as a mad-
man and set up some new leader in my place. Not—as I found out
later—that they did not all notice a difference in me and individ-
ually react to, or use, that difference to their own purposes. When
I returned wholly to myself, I found that a number of things were
changed.
It may have been sheer accident that I was able to return at all,
but I don't think so. I think I was ready to back off from the pat-
tern, at least for a while; and what triggered my return was only a
coincidence, or the first summons able to reach over the long dis-
tance to that part of me that was out there on the web-strands of
the universe.
It was Sunday—I almost said, "of course"—who brought me

151
back. Apparently, he had been sticking to me like a paid attendant
all through this three week period. I would guess he had sensed
enough of the fact that a major part of my mind was missing, to
make him worried. Most of the time I must have paid him no at-
tention. But during my brief flashes of awareness of those about
me, I remember being annoyed by the fact that I was literally trip-
ping over him every time I turned around.
In this instance, I was momentarily partway back in my full
senses, and I had deliberately left the others, gone off out of sight
and sound of the others to find a place where I could sit on a rock
and be alone for a bit. Sunday had followed me; and he pushed
himself on me. after I was seated, almost crawling into my lap. I
shouted at him to go away; and in exasperation, when he paid no
attention, I cuffed at him with my open hand.
It was not a hard blow. I had never hit Sunday hard; but some-
times, swinging at him was the only way to get across the idea that
I was serious about what I wanted. Still, as I struck at him, that
little part of my mind that was back, apart from the pattern, was
beginning to feel a twinge of guilt for hitting him. Only, abruptly,
that guilt was lost in a much deeper feeling of shock, and sud-
denly, I was stone-cold sober, free of the web-pattern for the first
time in three weeks.
Because I missed him. My hand swung through nothing but
empty air, and I almost fell off the stone.
Sunday had dodged—and that was all wrong. I don't mean
wrong, physically, of course. Naturally, his cat reflexes made my
human ones look silly. If he had wished, at any time in all the
while we had been together, he could have seen to it that no finger
of mine ever came close to him. But he never had. He had never
dodged before. It was one of the effects of the time storm upon
him. When I would lose my temper and slap him, he only closed
his eyes, flattened his ears, and crouched down like a kitten before
an annoyed mama leopard.
But this time, he had dodged. And he sat now, just out of arms'
length, gazing at me with an expression that, for the first time in
our months of being together, I could not read.
"Sunday?" I said wonderingly.
He came to me then, with a bound, pushing against me, licking
at my hands and face and purring like a motorboat. Just as he

152
evidently had known I was gone, now he knew I was back. Indeed,
indeed I was back—and it was wonderful from my point of view as
well. I hugged the old son of a bitch and came close to crying over
him, in return.
It was at this moment that a shadow fell across us both; and I
looked up to see the girl. Where she had come from—whether she
had been standing off at a distance, watching Sunday and me—I
don't know. But there she was; and the look on her face was like
the look now on Sunday's. I almost reached out my arms to her
also, as naturally and instinctively as I was hugging and punching
Sunday; but just as I was about to do so, the back of my mind
said, "Hold it! What're you doing? She's no crazy leopard!" And I
hesitated.
It was only a second's hesitation, but apparently it was enough.
The look went out of her face, and the next thing I knew, she was
gone. For a wild moment I thought of going after her; then I told
myself there was no point in it until she got over whatever had
made her leave.
Her going like that had left me with an empty place inside me
and just above my belt buckle, though. I sat where I was, fondling
Sunday until I felt normal again, then got to my feet; and the two
of us headed back toward the others, who were at a noon camp
just over a rise to our left. I joined them; and nobody seemed to
notice anything different about me.
However, beginning at once, and through the three days that
followed, I quickly began to discover differences in them. It
dawned on me that those in my inner circle of people had been as
aware of my abnormal mental state as had Sunday and the girl and
had gone on pretending to everybody else that I was perfectly nor-
mal, for reasons of their own.
The reason in Marie's case was obvious. As the consort of the
leader of our little band, she had a self-interest in seeing that I was
not deposed for reasons of mental incompetence. Tek, apparently,
liked the position of follower for some strong reason of his own. I
got the impression that he was waiting for something, and the time
was not yet ripe for whatever it was. Bill volunteered his reason.
"Thank God you're all right again," he said to me, the first time
we were off together out of earshot of the others, on an advance
patrol in the pickup. "If you'd gone on that way, with your mind a

153
thousand miles off most of the time, for another week, this outfit
would have fallen apart."
"Oh, I don't think so," I said. "Tek and Marie would probably
have worked out some kind of agreement to keep the tribe to-
gether."
He looked at me, I thought, a little oddly.
"Even if they had," he said, "that'd be as bad as falling apart.
We're not out here just to survive. We're out here to find out what
makes the temporal discontinuities operate. With you not in
charge, any hope of that'd be lost."
"Not necessarily," I said.
"Necessarily: I can't control them, and you're the only other in-
telligent person here." He was serious.
"Don't underestimate Tek," I said.
"He's smart," said Bill grimly. "He's not intelligent. He can't
appreciate the value of going after knowledge for its own sake. If
he ever tries to take over from you, I'll kill him. I told him so."
I stared at Bill. Evidently, he meant what he had said.
"There's no danger," I said. "Anyway, you'd better wait until I
call for help, before you go thinking of killing anyone. We don't
want anybody shot by mistake."
"All right," said Bill. Exactly as if he was agreeing not to pass
the salt at breakfast until I asked for it.
"Good," I said. "Now everything's just the way it has been.
Let's forget it."
Only it wasn't—just the way it had been, I mean. For one thing,
Marie had gone away from me in a manner that's hard to describe.
She acted no differently than she ever had, but it was almost as if
she had given up hope that there could be anything more than an
alliance of convenience between us. Put that way, it doesn't
sound like anything too important. But it left me feeling guilty in
spite of the fact that I was fully convinced that I owed her nothing;
and, in addition, I was helpless to do anything to mend the
situation.
Tek had also changed. He was as much at my orders as ever,
but I found him taking charge of the other men whenever there
was a vacuum of command, quite as if I had appointed him my
lieutenant. And finally, there was the girl ....
For one thing, she had evidently acquired a name while my

154
mind was off on the web. It sounded like "Elly" when the others
used it; but Marie, when I asked her, told me that it was actually
Ellen and that Tek had given it to the girl. Well, at least, that
made more sense. It was unlikely she had suddenly remembered
her name, when she had gone this long time without remembering
anything else. But when I asked Tek what made him think he
could name her, he denied he had.
"I had to call her something," he said. "I asked her what she
wanted for a name, and that's the one she picked for herself."
Ellen was a pretty enough name in its own way; I wondered
where she had gotten it. But "Elly," or however they might have
spelled its contraction, was ugly, I thought. I could not bring my-
self to use it. As far as I was concerned she was still "the girl"; but
I was plainly a minority of one in that.
Tek was paying a good deal of attention to her, and she was
spending most of her time in his company. For no particular rea-
son, I found I didn't approve of that either. She had developed
more than I had noticed—I now noticed—since those first days
when the only things that looked human on her were a shirt and
jeans. She wore dresses now that, possibly with Marie's help, had
been altered to fit her; and her hair was always clean, tied in a
ponytail at the back of her head. She was even starting to develop
a few curves.
All this was to her credit, of course. She was as sparing with
words as ever, but the change in her made her seem a good deal
older; and possibly that was what had attracted Tek's interest in
her. As I say, I found that I didn't approve—although there
seemed no specific reason I could nail down for going to him and
telling him to leave her alone.
In the first place, even if he agreed, I knew her better than to
think she would leave him alone, particularly if I was the one who
ordered it. In the second place, I had been ready to abandon her
behind me on the bank of that river, so who was I to assume any
responsibility for her? Finally, what did I have against Tek, any-
way? Since he had been with us, he had been a model of propriety
and obedience to orders; and she was only somebody born yester-
day. So why make it any of my business?
I still didn't like it. I was stuck with the irrational feeling that he
was nowhere near good enough for her. Unfortunately, I couldn't

155
even get her alone to tell her so. I had been wrong about thinking
she would get over what had put her off when I had hesitated in
reacting to her, back on the rock where Sunday had returned me
to my complete self. As far as she seemed to be concerned, I was
invisible and inaudible.
To hell with her, I thought, and put my mind to deciding what
our tribe should aim for next. We had evidently been travelling
with no goal at all, being kept moving by my half-minded, but
compulsive, determination. The evening of the day I made up my
mind to put the whole question of the girl and Tek out of my mind
for good, I waited until after dinner and then got Porniarsk and
Bill together. •
"Come along with me in one of the jeeps," I said. "It's time we
had some discussion about this whole business of the time storms.
I want to talk to the two of you, alone."
"No," said Porniarsk. "You want to talk to me, alone."
Bill looked startled and then bleak. He was not much at giving
away his feelings through his expressions, but I had learned to
read him fairly well by this time; and what I now read was that
Porniarsk's words were like a slap in the face to him.
"Sorry, Porniarsk," I said. "I'm the one who decides how many
of us are going to talk, and when."
"No," said Bill. "You talk to him alone. It may be important."
He turned around and walked off.
I opened my mouth to call him back and then closed it again.
Inside that boy-sized body and behind that innocent face was the
identity of a mature and intelligent man; and he had just shown
himself capable of thinking in larger terms than I, in my reaction
against Porniarsk's words.
I turned to look at the alien. It was still early evening and the
whole landscape around us was softened and gentled by the pink-
ening light. Amidst all that softness, the bony-plated, uncouth
form of Porniarsk looked like a miniature dinosaur out of a brutal
and prehistoric age. Porniarsk said nothing now, merely stood
looking at me and waiting. There was no way I could guess
whether he had understood my reaction and Bill's and was simply
unconcerned with our human feelings, or whether he had under-
stood neither of us at all.
I had been pretty well ignoring Porniarsk during the last few

156
weeks of my involvement with The Dream; and in fact, there
seemed little to be learned from him unless he chose to inform us.
His speech by this time was as human as that of the rest of us; but
the thoughts behind his words, when he did speak, remained in-
decipherable. He moved from one statement to another by a logic
mostly invisible to our human thinking.
And yet—he was not without some kind of emotion, even some
kind of warmth. There was no more sentiment to be read in the
tones of his voice, or in his actions, than in those of a robot; but
he seemed . . . likeable. I don't know what other word to use. He
seemed to radiate a sort of warmth that we all, including the men
we had acquired along with Tek, felt and responded to. Even the
animals seemed to feel it. I had seen how Sunday had taken to him
at first sight. The dogs also, in their rare free moments when they
were not under command or tied up, would seek him out, wagging
their tails and sniffing him all over each time as if this was a first
meeting, before ending by licking at his armor-plated hide. Por-
niarsk paid them no more attention than he did Sunday or one of
us humans when he was not exchanging specific information on
some point or other. He seemed not to need to eat. Whenever he
had no place in particular to move to, he would fold up and drop
into a lying position with a clatter like that of a dumped load of
bricks. But whether he ever slept in this position, I had never been
able to find out. Certainly, I had never caught him with his eyes
closed.
So—Porniarsk was a conundrum. He usually left us no choice
but to accept him pretty much as he was. And now, with Bill hav-
ing walked off, I found myself about to do just that, one more
time.
"All right, Porniarsk," I said. "It's you and me then. Come on."
I climbed into the jeep beside which we had been standing as we
talked. Porniarsk made one of the astounding leaps he seemed to
be capable of with only a slight flexing of his post-like legs, and
crashed down into the seat beside me, on his haunches. The jeep
rocked sideways on its springs—I had estimated before this that if
Porniarsk weighed an ounce, he must weigh well over three hun-
dred pounds—but recovered. I started the vehicle up and we drove
off.
I did not go more than a few hundred yards, just enough to put

157
us out of earshot of the rest of the camp. Then I killed the motor
and turned to Porniarsk. It was an odd feeling to find myself al-
most nose to nose with that massive, bulldog-like head. For the
first time I noticed his eyes were not just brown in color, but so
deep a brown as to be almost black. This close, I could see their
pupils contract and expand in cat-fashion, while we talked.
"All right, Porniarsk," I said. "I need your help. You evidently
know a lot more about the time storm effects than we do. I want
to stop this random moving around just in hopes we'll run into a
piece of country that's future enough for us to be able to do some-
thing about the mistwalls and the rest of it. I need you to help me
figure out where to head."
"No," said Porniarsk.
"No?" I said.
"You do not need me to help you find a trigger area," said Por-
niarsk.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I said. This, coming on top of
his rejection of Bill, was enough to stir my temper again.
"It's supposed to mean that my assistance is not required to set
you on the road to the destination you wish. You've already set
yourself on that road."
I took rein on my emotions. I reminded myself that I had to
stop anthropomorphizing him. He was probably only trying to tell
me something, and the fact that he was not built to think like a
human was getting in the way.
"Since when?" I asked, as calmly as I could.
"Since your temporary abstraction, and during your partial in-
volvement with the overall problem, ever since the moment in
which my words caused you to visualize the magnitude of it. Am I
making myself—" Porniarsk broke off uncharacteristically in mid-
sentence. "Am I talking sense?"
"I don't know," I said. "How'd you know why I collapsed, or
about how I've been since?"
"I've been watching you," he said, "and drawing conclusions
from what you do. The conclusions are those I just stated."
"What've I been doing, then?"
"Going," he repeated, with no hint of impatience in his voice,
"toward a trigger area."
I felt a sort of delicate feeling—an instinct to caution. There was

158
no way he could have known what had been working in the back
of my mind with The Dream, these last few weeks; but he was
talking one hell of a lot as if he had read my mind.
"That could be an accident," I said. "What makes you think it's
anything more than an accident?"
"You withdrew," he said. "But then you recovered enough to
guide your party, if not in a straight line, in a consistent direction
by the most travellable route, toward the location of an area I
know to contain devices of assistance at a technological level,
which might achieve a first step of halting the moving lines of tem-
poral alteration—temporal discontinuities, as Bill calls them, or
mistwalls, as you say."
I stared at him.
"If you know about a place like that," I said, "why haven't you
done something about the temporal—oh, hell, whatever you want
to call them—before now?"
"The devices are devices of assistance, but not of a design
which will assist me. I'm an avatar, as I told you, an avatar of Por-
niarsk Prime Three. The devices would be of assistance to Por-
niarsk himself, but he's otherwise engaged."
"Tell him to drop whatever's otherwise engaging him then, and
get over here."
"He wouldn't come," said the avatar. "This planet is your prob-
lem. The problem of Porniarsk is a larger one. It involves many
planets like this. Therefore, he has such as I who am his avatar, so
he can have several manipulative sets of himself at work. But all I
am is an avatar. Alone, I can't manipulate the forces involved
here, no matter how competent the device of assistance available
to me."
I shook my head.
"All right, then, Porniarsk—or Porniarsk's avatar—" I began.
"Porniarsk is fine," he interrupted. "You'll never meet Por-
niarsk himself, or any of his other avatars, so there's no danger of
confusion."
"I don't know about that," I said. "You've got me pretty con-
fused right now. I don't understand any of this."
"Of course," said Porniarsk, agreeable. "You're uneducated."
"Oh? Is that it?"
"How could you be otherwise? You've never had the chance to

159
learn about these forces and their effects. I can't educate you, but I
can explain specific elements of the situation as you run across
them. Trying to explain them before you encounter them won't
work because you don't have either the vocabulary or the concepts
behind the vocabulary."
"But I will when I run into these elements?" I said. "Is that it?"
"On encountering the experience, you'll see the need for the ap-
propriate terms, with which you might then be able to understand
enough of the underlying concepts to work with."
"Oh?" I didn't mean to sound sarcastic, but this kind of conver-
sation with Porniarsk had a habit of driving me to it. "My under-
standing's not guaranteed then?"
"Be reasonable," said Porniarsk; and this kind of appeal in
colloquial, uninfected English from the genial gargoyle sitting next
to me, had to be experienced to be believed. "How can / guaran-
tee your understanding?"
How, indeed? He had a point, there.
"I give up," I said, and I meant it. "Just tell me one thing. How
did I happen to know enough to head in the right direction?"
"I don't know," Porniarsk answered. "I'd expected that, sooner
or later, you'd ask me if there were any future areas containing the
means to do something about the time storm effects locally, that is,
here on this world. Then I could have directed you to such an
area. However, you've directed yourself to one without me. I don't
understand how. Porniarsk himself wouldn't understand how,
though perhaps he could find the answer. I'm only an avatar. I
can't."
"All right, tell me what to do now, then," I said.
Porniarsk's head creaked in a negative shaking.
"There's nothing I can advise you on until you've experienced
the immediate future area of the assistance device technology," he
said. "Now that I've seen you do this much by yourself, I'd be
cautious about advising you in any case. It might be that you'll
learn more, and faster, on your own."
"I see," I said. "That's fine. That's just fine. Then tell me, why
did you stop Bill from coming out here with us, if you weren't
going to tell me anything anyway?"
"Bill wouldn't believe me," said Porniarsk. "He doesn't trust
me."

160
"And I do?"
The gargoyle head leaned slightly, almost confidentially, toward
mine.
"You've learned something you shouldn't have been able to
learn by yourself," said Porniarsk. "You've touched the greater
universe. Of course, you don't trust me, either. You're too primi-
tive to trust an avatar of another kind, like myself. But in your
case, trust isn't necessary."
"Oh?" I said. "Why?"
"Because you want to believe me," said Porniarsk. "If what I'm
saying is true, then you're headed toward something you want very
much. That's not the same thing as trust; but trust can come later.
For now, your wanting to believe will do."

So we drove back to camp in the last of the twilight and in si-
lence. I only asked him one question on the way back.
"Do you really give a damn about any of us?" I said. "Or are
you just interested in the time storm?"
"Porniarsk cares for all life," his steady voice answered. "If he
didn't, he'd have no concern with the time storm. And I am Por-
niarsk, only in an additional body."
It was cold comfort. I believed him; but at the same time, I got
the feeling that there was something more he was withholding
from me.
In any case, there was nothing to do now but keep going.
Oddly, I trusted him. Something had happened to me since The
Dream; and that was that, in a strange way, I had come to feel an
affection and responsibility for him, along with all the others. It
was as if a corner of my soul's house had put up a blind on one
window to let in a little sunshine. I did take Bill aside the next day
and gave him a rough briefing on my conversation with Porniarsk.
Bill fulfilled Porniarsk's prediction by being highly skeptical of the
avatar's motives and implications.
"It sounds to me like a con game," he said. "It's part of a con
game to flatter your mark. Did you feel you were headed any place
in particular, these last three weeks?"
16

162
I hesitated. Somehow, I didn't get the feeling that Bill was ripe
right now for hearing an account of The Dream, and how it had
been with me. But there was no way to answer his questions fully
without telling him about my back-of-the-brain spiderwork.
"I had a feeling I was tied into something important," I said.
"That's as far as it went."
"Hmm," said Bill, half to himself. "I wonder if Porniarsk's tele-
pathic?"
"That's as far-fetched as me supposed to be knowing where
we're going, when I didn't know where we're going," I said.
Bill shrugged.
"If we hit this trigger area place soon, you'll have known where
we're going," he said. "No reason there shouldn't be as much
truth to telepathy. When did Porniarsk say we'd reach the area?"
Of course, wound up as I had been by what he'd had to say
about me personally, I'd forgotten to ask him.
"I'll find out," I said and went off to look for the avatar.
Porniarsk politely informed me that we should hit the trigger
area in about a day and a half the way we were travelling; and,
yes, it would be behind a mistwall like all the other mistwalls we'd
seen. As to what was inside, it was best I experienced that for my-
self first, before Porniarsk did any explaining.
He was not wrong. Late in the afternoon of the following day,
we spotted a stationary mistwall dead ahead; and two hours later
we set up evening camp a couple of hundred yards from it.
The countryside here was open pastureland, rolling hills with
only an occasional tree but small strands of brush and marshy
ponds. Here and there a farmer's fence straggled across the land-
scape; and the two-lane blacktop road we had been following,
since its sudden appearance out of nowhere ten miles before, ran
at an angle into the mistwall and disappeared. The day had been
cool. Our campfires felt good. Autumn would be along before
long, I thought, and with that began to turn over ideas for the win-
ter; whether to find secure shelter in this climate or head south.
I made one more attempt to get Porniarsk to tell me what lay
on the other side of the mistwall; but he was still not being helpful.
"You could at least tell us if we're liable to fall off a cliff before
we come out of the wall, or step into a few hundred feet of deep
water," I growled at him.

163
"You won't encounter any cliffs, lakes, or rivers before you
have a chance to see them," Porniarsk said. "As far as the terrain
goes, it's not that dissimilar from the land around us here."
"Then why not tell us about it?"
"The gestalt will be of importance to you later."
That was all I could get out of him. After dinner, I called a
meeting. Porniarsk attended. I told the others that Porniarsk
believed that, beyond this particular mistwall, there was an area
different from any we'd run into so far. We might find equipment
there that would let us do something about the time storm and the
moving mistwalls. Bill and I, in particular, were interested in the
chance of doing so, as they all knew. For one thing, if we could
somehow stop the mistwalls from moving, we could feel safe set-
ting down someplace permanently. Perhaps we could start rebuild-
ing a civilization.
It was quite a little speech. When I was done, they all looked at
me, looked at Porniarsk, who had neither moved nor spoken, and
then looked back at me again. None of them said anything. But
looking back at them, I got the clear impression that there were as
many different reactions to what I had just said as there were
heads there to contain the reactions.
"All right then," I said, after a reasonable wait to give anyone
else a chance to speak. "We'll be going in, in the morning. The
ones going will be Bill, me, and three others, all with rifles and
shotguns both, in one of the jeeps. Anybody particularly want to
be in on the expedition, or shall I pick out the ones to go?"
"I'll go," said Tek.
"No," I said. "I want you to stay here."
I looked around the firelit circle of faces, but there were no
other volunteers.
"All right then," I said. "It'll be Richie, Alan, and Waite. Start-
ing with the best shot and working down the list."
The fourth man, Hector Monsanto, whom everybody called
"Zig," did not look too unhappy at being left out. He was the
oldest of the four men we had acquired along with Tek, a short,
wiry, leathery-featured individual in his late thirties, who looked as
if most of his life had been spent outdoors. Actually, according to
Tek, he had grown up in a small town and had been a barber who
spent most of his time in the local bars.

164
He was the oldest of the four and the least agile. The other
three were in their early to mid-twenties and could move fast if
they needed to.
So, the following morning we tried it. It took about an hour or
so for Bill to satisfy himself, by throwing a weighted line through
the mistwall and pushing pipe lengths screwed together to beyond
the mistwall's far edge, that the terrain beyond was both level and
safe. Then we brought the jeep we were going to use up to the wall
and got in with our weapons. I climbed in behind the wheel with
Bill on the other front seat. Alan, Richie, and Waite got into the
back. We made a pretty full load.
Then Sunday, purring loudly, as if congratulating us all on a
permission no one had given him, leaped up into Bill's lap and set-
tled down for the ride; and, before I could shove him out, the girl
began to climb into the back seat holding a rifle.
"Hold it!" I roared. "Everybody out!"
We off-loaded, everybody except the girl and Sunday, who took
advantage of the available empty space to settle down that much
more firmly.
"Now, look—" I began to the girl.
"I'm going," she said. Sunday purred loudly and cleaned the fur
on top of one of his forepaws. It was a double declaration of in-
subordination.
Of course, there was no way I could stop them. I could put
them out of the vehicle, but they could walk in right behind us.
Sunday had proved that, unlimited times. In fact, I had known—
everybody had known—that he would be coming along. I had not
counted on the girl.
I glared around me. This particular expedition was sorting itself
out in exactly the wrong way. I don't know what made me so con-
vinced that there might be danger beyond this mistwall. I'd gone
into a number of others confidently enough. Perhaps it was Por-
niarsk's refusal to tell me exactly what was beyond the wall. At
any rate, I felt the way I felt; and for that type of feeling, I was
taking all the wrong people and leaving all the wrong people be-
hind.
An ideal expeditionary group would have been myself, Tek, and
a couple of the men, none of whom meant a great deal to me—ex-
cept myself; and I was too much of an egotist to think that I

165
couldn't survive whatever mystery lay in front of me. Sunday, the
girl, Bill, even to a certain extent, Marie and little Wendy, were
people I cared about to one degree or another and would just as
soon have kept safely in the rear area.
But Bill could not be left behind, in justice. The quest to under-
stand the time storm was as much his as mine. Sunday could not
be kept out, in practice; and now the girl had proclaimed her in-
tention to go in with us whether I wanted her to or not. Meanwhile
Tek, who outside of myself was the one person fit to take charge
of those left behind, if enemies of some kind suddenly appeared
over the horizon behind us, could, by no stretch of common sense,
be taken. Evejr since Marie, Wendy, and I had run into him and
his group, I had been half-expecting that any day, we might bump
into another such armed and predatory gang.
"All right!" I said. "If everybody's going to go, we'll have to use
the pickup. Let's get it cleared out!"
The pickup was our main transport. In the back, it had all our
camping equipment, food, fuel, and other supplies. We had
unloaded part of what it contained to set up camp the night be-
fore; but if it was to be used as a battle wagon, the rest of the box
had to be cleared. We moved back and went to work.
Twenty minutes later, we once more approached the mistwall;
this time in the pickup, in low gear. The girl and Bill and I were in
the front seat with the windows rolled up, with me as driver. In the
open box behind were Alan and Waite and Richie, holding a
disgruntled Sunday on a leash. I'd shut the leopard out of the cab
by main force and snapped his leash around his neck when he
tried to join the three of us in the cab. As I pushed the nose of the
pickup slowly into the first dust of the mistwall, there was a heavy
thud on the roof of the cab. I stopped, rolled down the window
and stuck my head out to glimpse Sunday, now lying on the cab
top. I rolled the window back up and went on.
The mist surrounded us. The dust hissed on the metal of the
pickup's body, as the motor of the truck grumbled in low gear. We
were surrounded by an undeviating whiteness in which it was im-
possible to tell if we were moving. Then the whiteness lightened,
thinned, and suddenly we rolled out into sunlight again. I stopped
the truck.
We were in a rocky, hilly section of country. The thin, clear air

166
that made everything stand out with sudden sharpness signalled
that we were at a higher altitude, and the sparseness of vegetation
—no trees and only an occasional green, spiny bush—suggested a
high, desert country, like the altiplano of inland Mexico. The land-
scape was mainly rock, from hard dirt and gravel, to boulders of
all sizes. Rough, but not too rough for the jeeps to get through;
and, if a clear route could be found between the boulders, proba-
bly even the pickup could be nursed along.
The ground before us was fairly clear and level, but boulder-
strewn slopes rose sharply to the right and left of us. Directly
ahead, the level space dipped down into a cup-shaped depression
holding what appeared to be a small village. The buildings in the
village were odd; dome-shaped, with floorless, front-porch exten-
sions, consisting simply of projecting roofs upheld at each end by
supporting poles. Under those roofs, out in the open, there seemed
to be a few machines or equipment—mechanical constructs of
some kind. No human beings were visible. Beyond the village, the
ground rose sharply into a small mountain—it was too steep to be
called a hill—wearing a belt of trees halfway up its several hundred
feet of height. On one side of the mountain, the bare peak sloped
at an angle the jeeps could possibly manage. But the other slopes
were all boulder-strewn and climbable only by someone on foot.
On top, crowning the peak, was a large, solid, circular building,
looking as if it had been poured out of fresh white concrete ten
seconds before we appeared on the scene. That was as much as I
had a chance to notice, because then everything started to happen.
A number of objects hit loudly on the body and cab of the
truck, one shattering the window next to Bill. At the same time,
there was a yowl of rage from Sunday and I caught sight, fleet-
ingly, of the leopard leaping off the roof of the cab to the right,
with his leash trailing in the air behind him. Suddenly the rocks
around us were speckled by the visages of dark-furred, ape-like
creatures.
The guns of the men in the box were firing. The girl, who had
been seated between Bill and myself, scrambled over Bill crying
out Sunday's name, opened the door of the pickup on that side,
and disappeared. Bill exited after her; and I heard the machine
pistol yammering. I jerked open the door on my side, rolled out on

167
to the hard-pebbled earth, and began firing from a prone position
at any furry head I could see.
There was a timeless moment of noise and confusion—and then
without warning, it was over. There were no longer any creatures
visible to shoot at, except for perhaps four or five who lay still, or
barely stirring, on the ground. I fired a few more rounds out of
reflex and then quit. The other guns fell silent.
I got to my feet. Sunday stalked back into my line of vision, his
tail high in self-congratulation. He headed for one of the two furry
figures that still moved. I opened my mouth to call him back; but
before he could have reached the creature, a rifle in the box be-
hind me began to sound again, and both the moving bodies went
motionless.
"Quit that!" I shouted, spinning around. "I want one alive—"
I broke off, suddenly realizing I was talking to a man who
wasn't listening. Richie, his round face contorted, was kneeling
behind the metal side of the pickup box, firing steadily at the dark-
furred shapes; and he kept at it until his rifle was empty.
I climbed into the box and took the gun away from him as he
tried to reload it.
"Simmer down!" I said.
He looked at me glassy-eyed, but sat without moving. There
wasn't a mark on him.
But the other two were hit. Alan had one side of his face
streaming blood from what seemed to be a scalp wound. He was
holding up Waite, who was breathing in an ugly, rattling way with
his face as white as the building on the peak. His right hand was
trapped behind Alan; but he kept trying to bring his left hand up
to his chest, and Alan kept holding it away.
My head cleared. I remembered now that the barrage that had
come at us had contained not only thrown rocks but a few leaf-
shaped, hiltless knives. One of the knives was now sticking in
Waite's chest low on the left side. It was in perhaps a third the
length of its blade; and evidently it had slid in horizontally be-
tween two ribs.
Waite coughed, and a little pink froth came out the corners of
his mouth.
"He wants to get the knife out," said Alan, pleadingly to me.
"Should we just pull it out, do you think?"

168
I looked down at Waite. It did not matter, clearly, whether we
took the knife out or not. The blade had gone into his lungs and
now they were filling up with blood. Waite looked back up at me
with panic in his eyes. He was the quiet one of Tek's four men and
possibly the youngest. I had never been sure if he was really like
the others, or whether he had simply gotten swept up and tried to
be like them.
There was nothing I or anyone else in our group could do for
him. I stood looking down at him, feeling my helplessness, like
something in my own chest being raggedly cut. This was one of the
people I had been thinking meant little or nothing to me and
would be easily expendable. I had not stopped to realize how close
a group like ours could come to be, living together like a family,
moving together, facing a possibly dangerous world together.
Maybe he would die more quickly without the knife blade in him
and removing it would be the kindest thing we could do for him.
"If he wants it out, he might as well have it out," I said.
Alan let go of Waite's arm. The arm came up, and its hand
grasped the handle of the knife but could not pull it out. Alan
half-reached for the knife himself, hesitated, tried again, hesitated,
and looked appealingly at me.
I reached down and took hold of the handle. The blade stuck at
first, then slid out easily. Waite yelled—or rather, he tried to yell,
but it was a sound that ended in a sort of gargle. He pulled away a
little from Alan and leaned over forward, face tilted down intently
toward the bed of the box, as if he was going to be sick. But he
was not. He merely hung there sagging against the grip of Alan's
arms, his gaze calm and intent on the metal flooring; and then, as
we watched, he began to die.
It was like watching him dwindle away from us. His face
relaxed and relaxed, and the focus in his eyes became more and
more general, until all at once there was no focus at all and he was
dead. Alan let him down quickly but softly on the bed of the box.
I turned and climbed out of the box back on to the ground. I
saw Bill standing on this side of the truck now and Sunday nosing
curiously at one of the bodies. Suddenly, it struck me.
"Girl!" I shouted at Bill. "The girl! Where is she?"
"I don't know," said Bill.

169
I ran around the front of the truck and the bouldered slope on
the side I'd seen her disappear.
"Girl!" I kept shouting. "G/W/"
I couldn't find her. I found one of the dead ape-creatures, but I
couldn't find her. I started threading back and forth among the
rocks as I worked up the slope; and then, suddenly, I almost fell
over her. She was in a little open space, half-sitting up with her
back against a boulder and a torn-off strip of her shirt tied around
one leg above the knee.
For a moment I thought she was already dead, like Waite—and
I couldn't take it. It was like being cut in half. Then she turned her
head to look at me, and I saw she was alive.
"Oh, my God!" I said.
I knelt down beside her and wrapped her up in my arms, telling
myself I would never let go of her again. Never. But she was as
stiff and unresponsive in my grasp as a wild animal caught in a
trap. She did not move; but she did not relax either, and finally,
this brought me more or less back to my senses; I didn't want to
let her go, but I stopped holding her quite so tightly.
"Are you all right?" I said. "Why didn't you answer me?"
"My name's Ellen," she said.
"Is that all!" I hugged her again. "All right! You'll be Ellen
from now on. I won't ever call you anything else!"
"It doesn't matter what you call me," she said. "I'm not going
to be here anyway."
She was still stiff and cold. I let go of her and sat back on my
knees so that I could see her face; and it was as unyielding as the
rest of her.
"What do you mean, you aren't going to be here?" She was
talking nonsense. She had evidently been hurt or wounded in the
leg, but that could hardly be serious.
"Tek and I are going away by ourselves. It's already decided,"
she said. "We were just waiting to make sure you got through this
last mistwall all right. You can keep Sunday. He only gets in the
way all the time anyway."
She turned, grabbed hold of the boulder against which she had
been leaning, and pulled herself up on one leg.
"Help me back to the pickup," she said.

170
My head was whirling with that crazy announcement of hers. I
stared down at her bandaged leg.
"What happened to you?" I said, automatically.
"I got hit by a rock, that's all. It scraped the skin off and bled a
little, so I wrapped it up; but it's only a bruise."
"Try putting your weight on it." Something automatic in me
was doing the talking. "Maybe it's broken."
"It's not broken. I already tried." She took hold of my arm with
both her hands. "It just hurts to walk on it. Help me."
I put an arm around her, and she hopped back down the slope
on one leg, by my side, until we reached the cab of the pickup, and
I helped her up on to the seat. I was operating on reflex. I could
not believe what she had said; particularly, just now, when I had
just realized how important she was to me. It was the way I had
found myself feeling about Waite, multiplied something like a mil-
lion times. But there were things demanding decisions from me.
Richie and Alan were still in the back of the truck with the
body of Waite. I looked at them. Somebody had to take the pickup
back through the mistwall with the girl and Waite. Richie was the
unhurt one, but his eyes still did not look right.
"How badly are you hurt?" I asked Alan.
"Hurt?" he said. "I didn't get hurt."
"You could fool me," I said dryly. He didn't seem to get it.
"Your head! How bad's the damage to your head?"
"My head?"
He put up a hand and brought it down covered with blood. His
face whitened.
"What is it?" he said. "How bad . . . ." His bloody hand was
fluttering up toward the head wound, wanting to touch it, but
afraid of what it might feel.
"That's what I want to know," I said.
I climbed into the cab and bent over him, gingerly parting the
hair over the bloody scalp. It was such a mess I couldn't see any-
thing.
"Feel anything?" I asked, probing with my fingertips.
"No . . . no . . yes!" he yelped.
I pulled my hands away.
"How bad did that feel?" I asked him. He looked embarrassed.

171
"Not too bad—I guess," he said. "But I felt it, where you
touched it."
"All right," I told him. "Hang on, because I'm going to have to
touch it some more."
I probed around with my fingers, wishing I'd had the sense to
bring bandages and water with us. He said nothing to indicate that
I was giving him any important amount of pain; and all my fingers
could find was a swelling and a relatively small cut.
"It's really not bad at all," he said sheepishly, when I'd finished.
"I think I just got hit by a rock, come to think of it."
"All right," I said. My own hands were a mess now. I wiped
them as best I could on the levis I was wearing. "Looks like a
bump and a scratch, only. It just put out a lot of blood. If you're
up to it, I want you to stay."
"I can stay," he said.
"All right, then. Richie!"
Richie looked at me slowly as if I was someone calling him
from a distance.
"Richie! I want you to drive the pickup back through the mist-
wall. You're to take the girl and Waite back, then pick up some
bandages, some antibiotics and a jerry can of drinking water and
bring it back to us. Understand me?"
"Yeah . . . ." said Richie, thickly.
"Come on, then," I said.
I climbed out of the box of the pickup and he came after me. I
saw him into the cab and behind the wheel.
"He'll take you back to the camp," I told the girl and closed the
door on the driver's side before she could answer—assuming, that
is, that she had intended to answer. The pickup's motor, which
had been idling all this time, growled into gear. Richie swung it
about and drove out of sight into the mistwall, headed back.
I looked around. Bill was standing about twenty yards ahead of
me. Beside him was Porniarsk, who must have followed us
through the mistwall at some time when I wasn't looking. They
seemed to be talking together, looking down into the village, the
machine pistol hanging by its strap, carelessly, from Bill's right
arm. It was incautious of him to be so relaxed, I thought. We had
driven off one attack, but there was no way of knowing we might
not have another at any minute.

172
I went toward them. As I did, I had to detour around the body
of one of the attackers, who had apparently been trying to rush the
pickup. It lay face-down, the apelike features hidden, and it re-
minded me of Waite, somehow. For a moment I wondered if there
were others among its fellows that were feeling the impact of this
one's death, as I had felt that of Waite. My mind—it was not quite
under control right then, my mind—skittered off to think of the girl
again. Of Ellen—I must remember to think of her as Ellen from
now on.
It was so strange. She was small and skinny and cantankerous.
How could I love her like this? Where did it come from, what I
was feeling? Somehow, when I wasn't paying any attention, she
had grown inside me, and now, she took up all the available space
there. Another thought came by, blown on the wandering breeze
of my not-quite-in-control mind. What about Marie? I couldn't
just kick her out. But maybe there was no need for worry. All
Marie had ever seemed to want was the protection inherent in our
partnership. It might be she would be completely satisfied with the
name of consort alone. After all, there were no laws now, no
reason that I couldn't apparently have two wives instead of one.
No one but us three need know Marie was a wife in name only
... of course, the girl would have to agree ....
I stopped thinking, having reached Bill and Porniarsk. They
were still looking down at the village. I looked down, too, and, to
my surprise, saw it populated and busy. Black, furry, apelike
figures were visible all through its streets and moving in and out of
the dome-shaped houses. Most, in fact, seemed to be busy with
whatever objects they had under the porch-like roofs before the en-
trances of their buildings. But a fair number were visible simply
sitting in the dust, singly or in pairs, doing nothing; and a small
group were in transit from one spot to another.
They were within easy rifle shot of where we stood, and the
three of us must have been plainly visible to them; but they paid
us no attention whatsoever.
"What the hell?" I said. "Is that the same tribe that hit us just
now?"
"Yes," said Bill.
I looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he nodded at
Porniarsk instead.

173
"Let him tell you."
Porniarsk creaked his head around to look sideways and up at
me.
"They're experimental animals," Porniarsk said, "from a time
less than a hundred years ahead of that you were in originally
when the time storm reached you."
"You knew about them?" The thought of Waite made my
throat tight. "You knew about them waiting to kill us, and you
didn't warn us?"
"I knew only they were experimental animals," said Porniarsk.
"Apparently part of their conditioning is to attack. But if the at-
tack fails, they go back to other activities."
"It could be . . ." said Bill slowly and thoughtfully, "it could
be their attack reflex was established to be used against animals,
instead of the people of the time that set them up here; and they
just didn't recognize us as belonging to the people level, as they'd
been trained to recognize it."
"It's possible," said Porniarsk. "And then, if they attacked and
failed, they might be conditioned to stop attacking, as a fail-safe
reflex."
"That's damned cool of the both of you," I said, my throat free
again. "Waite's dead and you're holding a parlor discussion on the
reasons."
Bill looked at me, concerned.
"All right, all right," I said. "Forget I said that. I'm still a little
shook up from all this. So, they're experimental animals down
there, are they?"
"Yes," said Porniarsk, "experimental animals, created by ge-
netic engineering to test certain patterns of behavior. Up there on
the height behind their community is the laboratory building from
which they were observed and studied. The equipment in that
structure that was designed for working with this problem is equip-
ment that, with some changes and improvements, may be able to
aid in controlling the effects of the time storm, locally."
Bill was staring straight at me. His face was calm, but I could
hear the excitement under the level note he tried to speak in.
"Let's take a look, Marc."
"All right," I said. "As soon as the pickup comes back, we'll go
get a jeep and try that long slope on the right of the peak."

The only vehicle-possible route to the peak led down through the
main street of the village. When Alan got back with a jeep, we left
him there; and Porniarsk, Bill and I drove down the slope and in
between the buildings. We had perhaps twenty feet to spare on ei-
ther side of us as we went through the village, for the central street
—if you could call it that—was twice the width of the other lanes
between buildings. The furry faces we passed did not bother to
look at us, with a single exception. A slightly grizzled, large, and
obviously male individual—none of them wore anything but a sort
of Sam Browne belt, to which were clipped the sheaths that held
their knives and some things which looked like small hand tools-
sat in front of one building and stared from under thick tufts of
hair where his brows should be, his long fingers playing with the
knife he held on his knees. But he made no threatening moves,
with the knife or anything else.
"Look at that old man," said Bill, pointing with the muzzle of
his machine pistol at the watcher.
"I see him," I said. "What do you want me to do about him?"
"Nothing, I'd suggest," said Porniarsk. My question had not re-
ally called for an answer, but perhaps he had not understood that.
"That one's the Alpha Prime of the males' community. The name
'Old Man' fits him very well. As Alpha Prime, his reflexes, or con-
17

176
ditioning, dictate a somewhat different pattern of action for him
alone. But I don't think he or the others will act inimically again,
unless you deliberately trigger some antagonistic reaction."
"What are they all doing?" Bill asked.
I looked in the direction he was staring. There were a number
of porches along the left side of the street, each with one or two of
the experimentals under them. I picked out one who was operating
what was clearly a spinning wheel. Another was cutting up a large
sheet of the leathery material their harnesses were made out of,
plainly engaged in constructing Sam Browne belts. But the rest
were working with machines I did not recognize and either getting
no visible results, or results that made no sense to me. One, in par-
ticular, was typing away energetically at a sort of double keyboard,
with no noticeable effect, except for a small red tab that the ma-
chine spat out at odd intervals into a wire basket. The worker
paid no attention to the tabs he was accumulating, seeming to be
completely wound up in the typing process itself.
"They're self-supporting, after a fashion," said Porniarsk.
"Some of what they do provides them with what they need to live.
Other specific activities are merely for study purposes—for the
studies of the people who put them here."
"Where are those people?" I asked. "Can we get in touch with
them?"
"No." Porniarsk swiveled his neck once more to look at me
from the seat beside me. "They are not here."
"Where did they go?"
"They no longer exist," said Porniarsk. "No more than all the
people you knew before your first experience with the time storm.
Yoij and Bill and the rest of you here, including these experi-
mental creatures, are the ones who have gone places."
I took my attention off the street for a second to stare at him.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you, and those with you, are people the time storm has
moved, rather than eliminated," Porniarsk answered. "I'm sorry,
that can't be explained properly to you yet, by someone like me,
not until you understand more fully what has been involved and is
involved in the temporal displacements. Remember, I told you that
this disturbance began roughly half a billion years in your past?"

177
I remembered. But it had only been a figure to me at the time.
Who can imagine a time-span of half a billion years?
"Yes," I said.
"It also began several million years in your future," said
Porniarsk. "Perhaps it might help you to think, provisionally,
of the time storm as a wave-front intersecting the linear time you
know—the time you imagine stretching from past to future—at an
angle, so that your past, present and future are all affected at once
by the same action."
"Why didn't you tell us this before?" demanded Bill.
"Unfortunately, the image I just gave you isn't really a true
one," said Porniarsk. "You forget the matter of scale. If the time
storm is like a wave-front on a beach, we and our worlds are less
than individual atoms in the grains of sand that make up that
beach. What we experience as local effects appear as phenomena
having very little resemblance to the true picture of the wave-front
as a whole. I only mention this because it's now become important
for Marc to be able to imagine something of the forces at work
here."
The front wheels of the jeep jolted and shuddered over some
small rocks. We were moving beyond the end of the village
street and up over open ground again. I gave my attention back
to my driving.
The drive up even the easy side of the peak was rough enough,
but the jeep was equal to it. With enough foresight, it was pos-
sible to pick a route among the really heavy boulders that
would otherwise have barred our way. A little more than halfway
up, we hit a relatively level area of hard earth, surrounding the
basin of a natural spring coming out of the cliff; and we stopped to
rest and taste the water, which was cold enough to set our teeth on
edge. I had not been conscious of being thirsty, except for a fleet-
ing moment when I told Richie to bring back a jerry can of water
with the other things. He had; and I had forgotten to get a drink
then. Now I felt a thirst like that of someone lost in the desert for
two days. I drank until my jaws ached, paused, drank, paused, and
drank again.
After a bit we went the rest of the way up to the top of the
peak, where the building was. Seen up close, it turned out to be a

178
structure maybe sixty feet in diameter, with only one entrance and
no windows. Like a blockhouse at a firing range, only larger.
The entrance had a door, which slid aside as we came within a
stride of it. We had a glimpse of darkness beyond, then lighting
awoke within, and we stepped into a brightly illuminated, circular
interior, with a raised platform in the center and open cubicles all
around the exterior wall, each cubicle with a padded chair, its
back toward the center of the room and its cushions facing a sort
of console fixed to the wall.
"What is it?" asked Bill, almost in a whisper. He was standing
with Porniarsk and me on the raised platform but, unlike us, turn-
ing continually on his heel as if he wanted to get a view of all hun-
dred and eighty degrees of the room at once.
"It is," said Porniarsk, "something you might think of as a
computer, in your terms. It's a multiple facility for the use of ob-
servers who'd wish to draw conclusions from their observations of
the inhabitants in the village."
"Computer?" Bill's voice was louder and sharper. "That's all?"
"Its working principle isn't that of the computers you're familiar
with," said Porniarsk. "This uses the same principle that's found
in constructs from the further future, those I've referred to as
devices-of-assistance. You'll have to trust me to put this construct
into that future mode so it'll be useful in the way we need."
"How'll we use it?" Bill asked.
"You won't use it," said Porniarsk. "Marc will use it."
They both turned their heads toward me.
"And you'll teach me how?" I said to Porniarsk.
"No. You'll have to teach yourself," Porniarsk answered. "If
you can't, then there's nothing anyone can do."
"If he can't, I'll try," said Bill tightly.
"I don't think the device will work for you if it fails for Marc,"
said Porniarsk to him. "Tell me, do you feel anything at this mo-
ment? Anything unusual at all?"
"Feel?" Bill stared at him.
"You don't feel anything, then," said Porniarsk. "I was right.
Marc should be much more attuned. Marc, what do you feel?"
"Feel? Me?" I said, echoing Bill. But I already knew what he
was talking about.
I had thought, at first, I must be feeling a hangover from the

179
fight with the inhabitants of the village. Then I'd thought the feel-
ing was my curiosity about what was inside this building, until I
saw what was there. Now, standing on the platform in the center
of the structure, I knew it was something else—something like a
massive excitement from everywhere, that was surrounding me,
pressing in on me.
"I feel geared-up," I said.
"More than just geared-up, I think," Porniarsk said. "It was a
guess I made only on the basis of Marc's heading for this area; but
I was right. Porniarsk hoped only that a small oasis of stability
might be established on the surface of this world, in this immediate
locality. With anyone else, such as you, Bill, that'd be all we could
do. But with Marc, maybe we can try something more. There's a
chance he has an aptitude for using a device-of-assistance."
"Can't you come up with a better name for it than that?" said
Bill. His voice was tight—tight enough to shake just a little.
"What would you suggest?" asked Porniarsk.
I turned and walked away from them, out of the building
through the door that opened before me and shut after me. I
walked into the solitude of the thin, clean air and the high sun-
light. There was something working in me; and for the moment, it
had driven everything else, even Ellen, out of my mind. It was like
a burning, but beneficent, fever, like a great hunger about to be
satisfied, like the feeling of standing on the threshold of a cavern
filled with treasure beyond counting.
It was all this, and still it was indescribable. I did not yet have
it, but I could almost touch it and taste it; and I knew that it was
only a matter of time now until my grasp closed on it. Knowing
that was everything, I could wait now. I could work. I could do
anything. The keys of my kingdom were at hand.

18
Then began a bittersweet time for me, the several weeks that Por-
niarsk worked on the equipment in what we were now calling the
"roundhouse." It was sweet because, day by day, I felt the device-
of-assistance coming to life under the touch of those three tenta-
cle-fingers Porniarsk had growing out of his shoulders. The avatar
had been right about me. The original Porniarsk had not suspected
there would be anyone on our Earth who could use the device
without being physically connected to it. But evidently I was a
freak. I had already had some kind of mental connection with this
place, if only subconsciously, during the days of The Dream in
which I had pushed us all in this direction and to this location. I
said as much to Porniarsk one day.
"No," he shook his head, "before that, I'd think. You must
have felt its existence, here, and been searching for it from the
time you woke to find your world changed."
"I was looking," I said. "But I didn't have any idea what for."
"Perhaps," said Porniarsk. "But you might find, after the device
is ready and you can look back over all you've done, that you un-
consciously directed each step along the way toward this place
and this moment, from the beginning."
I shook my head. There was no use trying to explain to him,

182
I thought, how I had never been able to let a problem alone. But I
did not argue the point any further.
I was too intensely wrapped up in what I could feel growing
about me—the assistance of the device. It was only partly mechani-
cal. Porniarsk would not, or could not, explain its workings to me,
although I could watch him as he worked with the small colored
cubes that made up the inner parts of seven of the consoles. The
cubes were about a quarter the size of children's blocks and
seemed to be made of some hard, translucent material. They clung
together naturally in the arrangement in which they occurred be-
hind the face of the console; and Porniarsk's work, apparently,
was to rearrange their order and get them to cling together again.
Apparently, the rearrangement was different with each console;
and Porniarsk had to try any number of combinations before he
found it. It looked like a random procedure but, evidently, was
not; and when I asked about that, Porniarsk relaxed his no-infor-
mation rule enough to tell me that what he was doing was check-
ing arrangements of the cubes in accordance with "sets" he al-
ready carried in his memory center, to find patterns that would
resonate with the monad that was me. It was not the cubes that
were the working parts, evidently, but the patterns.
Whatever he was doing, and however it was effective, when he
got a collection of cubes to hang together in a different order, I felt
the effect immediately. It was as if another psychic generator had
come on-line in my mind. With each addition of power, or
strength, or whatever you want to call it, I saw more clearly and
more deeply into all things around me.
—Including the people. And from this came the bitter to join
with the sweet of my life. For as, step by step, my perceptions in-
creased, I came to perceive that Ellen was indeed intending to
leave with Tek as soon as my work with the device had been
achieved. She was staying for the moment and had talked Tek into
staying, only so that he and she could hold down two of the
consoles, as Porniarsk had said all of the adults in our party would
need to do when I made my effort to do something about the time
storm. After that, they would go; and nothing I could say would
stop her.
The reasons why she had turned to Tek as she had, I could not
read in her. Her personal feelings were beyond the reach of my

183
perception. Something shut me out. Porniarsk told me, when I
finally asked him, that the reason I could not know how she felt
was because my own emotions were involved with her. Had I been
able to force myself to see, I would have seen not what was, but
what I wanted to see. I would have perceived falsely; and since the
perception and understanding I was gaining with the help of the
device were part of a true reflection of the universe, the device
could give only accurate information; consequently, it gave noth-
ing where only inaccuracy was possible.
So, I was split down the middle; and the division between the
triumph and the despair in me grew sharper with the activation of
each new console. After the fourth one, the avatar warned me that
there was a limit to the step-up I could endure from the device.
"If you feel you're being pushed too hard," he said, "tell me
quickly. Too much stimulus, and you could destroy yourself be-
fore you had a chance to use the device properly."
"It's all right," I said. "I know what you're talking about." And
I did. I could feel myself being stretched daily, closer and closer
toward a snapping point. But that point was still not reached; and
I wanted to go to the limit no matter what would happen after-
wards.
It was the pain of Ellen's imminent leaving that drove me more
than anything else. With the device beginning to work, I was
partly out of the ordinary world already. I did not have to test my-
self by sticking burning splinters in my flesh to know that the
physical side of me was much dwindled in importance lately. It
was easy to forget that I had a body. But the awareness of my im-
material self was correspondingly amplified to several times its
normal sensitivity; and it was in this immaterial area that I was
feeling the loss of Ellen more keenly than the amputation of an
arm and a leg together.
There was no relief from that feeling of loss except to concen-
trate on the expansion of my awareness. So, psychically, I pushed
out and out, running from what I could not bear to face—and then,
without warning, came rescue from an unexpected direction.
It was late afternoon, the sunlight slanting in at a low angle
through the door to the roundhouse, which we had propped open
while Porniarsk worked on the last console. Bill and I were the
only other ones there. We had opened the door to let a little of the

184
natural breeze and outer sun-warmth into the perfectly controlled
climate of the interior; and in my case, this had brought the
thought of my outside concerns with it, so that for a moment my
mind had wandered again to thinking of Ellen.
I came back to awareness of the roundhouse, to see Bill and
Porniarsk both looking at me. Porniarsk had just said something. I
could hear the echo of it still in my ear, but without, its meaning
had vanished.
"What?" I asked.
"It's ready," said Porniarsk. "How do you feel—able to take
this seventh assistance? You'll remember what I told you about
the past increases not being limited? They each enlarge again with
each new adaptation you make to the device. If you're near your
limit of tolerance now, the effect of this last increase could be
many times greater than what it is presently; and you might find
yourself crippled in this vital, non-physical area before you had
time to pull yourself back from it."
"I know, I know," I said. "Go ahead."
"I will, then," said Porniarsk. He reached with one of his shoul-
der tentacles to the console half behind him and touched a colored
square.
For a second there was nothing. Then things began to expand
dramatically. I mean that literally. It was as if the sides of my head
were rushing out and out, enclosing everything about me . . . the
roundhouse, the peak, the village, the whole area between the
mistwalls that now enclosed me, all the other areas touching that
area, the continent, the planet. . . there was no end. In addition,
not only was I encompassing these things, but all of them were
also growing and expanding. Not physically, but with meaning-
acquiring many and many times their original aspects, properties,
and values. So that I understood all of them in three dimensions,
as it were, where I before had never seen more than a single facet
of their true shape. Now, seen this way, all of them—all things, in-
cluding me—were interconnected.
So I found my way back. With the thought of interconnection, I
was once more in The Dream, back in the spider web spanning the
universe. Only now there were patterns to its strands. I read those
patterns clearly; and they brought me an inner peace for the first
time. Because, at last, I saw what I could do, and how to do it, to

185
still the storm locally. Not just in this little section of the earth
around me, but all around our planet and moon and out into space
for a distance beyond us, into the general temporal holocaust. I
saw clearly that I would need more strength than I presently had;
and the pattern I read showed that success would carry a price. A
death-price. The uncaring laws of the philosophical universe, in
this situation, could balance gain against loss in only one unique
equation. And that equation involved a cost of life.
But I was not afraid of death, I told myself, if the results could
be achieved. After all, in a sense, I had been living on borrowed
time since that first heart attack. I turned away from the patterns I
was studying* and looked deeper into the structure of the web it-
self, reaching for understanding of the laws by which it operated.
Gradually, that understanding came. Porniarsk had used the
word "gestalt" in referring to that which he hoped I would per-
ceive if I came to the situation here with a free and unprejudiced
mind; and the word had jarred on me at the time. The avatar, we
had all assumed, came from a race more advanced than ours—
whether it was advanced in time or otherwise. I had taken it for
granted that any twentieth century human terms would be inade-
quate to explain whatever Porniarsk dealt with, and that he would
avoid them for fear of creating misunderstandings.
—Besides, "gestalt" came close to having been one of the cant
words of twentieth century psychology; the sort of word that had
been used and misused by people I knew, who wanted to sound
knowledgeable about a highly specialized subject they would never
take the time to study properly and understand. Granted, the ava-
tar was probably using the human word nearest in meaning to
what he wanted to say, I had still felt he could have explained
himself in more hard-edged technical or scientific terms.
But then, later, he had also used the word "monad"; and, re-
membering that, I now began to comprehend one important fact.
The forces of the time storm and the device he was building so I
could come to grips with them, belonged not so much to a physi-
cal, or even a psychological, but to a philosophical universe. I was
far from understanding why this should be. In fact, with regard to
the whole business, I was still like a child in kindergarten, learning
about traffic lights without really comprehending the social and
legal machinery behind the fact of their existence. But with the aid

186
of the device, I had finally begun, at least, to get into the proper
arena of perception.
Briefly and clumsily, in the area in which I would have to deal
with the time storm, the only monads—that is, the only basic, inde-
structible, building blocks or operators—were individual minds.
Each monad was capable of reflecting or expressing the whole uni-
verse from its individual point of view. In fact, each monad had al-
ways potentially expressed it; but the ability to do so had always
been a possible function, unless the individual monad-mind had
possessed something like a device-of-assistance to implement or
execute changes in what it expressed.
Of course, expressing a change in the universe, and causing that
change to take place, was not quite as simple as wishing and mak-
ing it so. For one thing, all monads involved in a particular expres-
sion of some part of the universe at a particular moment were also
involved with each other and had to be in agreement on any
change they wished to express. For another, the change had to
originate in the point of view of a monad capable of reflecting all
the physical—not just the philosophical—universe as plastic and
controllable.
The time storm itself was a phenomenon of the physical uni-
verse. In the limited terms to which Porniarsk was restricted by
our language, he had explained to me that it was the result of en-
tropic anarchy. The expanding universe had continued its expan-
sion until a point of intolerable strain on the network of forces that
made up the space-time fabric had been reached and passed.
Then, a breakdown had occurred. In effect, the space-time bubble
had begun to disintegrate. Some of the galaxies that had been
moving outward, away from each other and the universal center,
producing a state of diminishing entropy, began, in spot fashion, to
fall back, contracting the universe and creating isolated states of
increasing entropy.
The conflict between opposed entropic states had spawned the
time storm. As Porniarsk had said, the storm as a whele was too
massive for control by action of the monads belonging to our origi-
nal time, or even to his. But a delaying action could be fought.
The forces set loose by the entropic conflict could be balanced
against each other here and there, thereby slowing down the gen-
eral anarchies enough to buy some breathing time, until the minds

187
of those concerned with the straggle could develop more powerful
forces to put in play across the connection between the philo-
sophical and physical universes.
I was a single monad (though, of course, reinforced with the
other seven at their altered consoles), and not a particularly capa-
ble one basically. But I was also something of a freak, a lucky
freak in that my freakiness apparently fitted the necessity of the
moment. That was why I could think, as I was privately doing
now, of creating an enclave in the time storm that would include
the whole earth and its natural satellite, instead of merely an en-
clave containing just the few square miles surrounding us, which
had been Porniarsk's hope.
"I'll need one more console adapted," I said to Porniarsk.
"Don't worry, now. I can handle it."
"But there's no one to sit at it," said Bill.
"That's correct," said Porniarsk patiently. "There are only
seven other adults in your party. I haven't any effectiveness as a
monad. Neither has the little girl."
"She hasn't?" I looked hard at the avatar.
"Not ... in effect," he said, with a rare second of hesitation.
"A monad is required to have more than just a living intelligence
and a personality. It has to have the capability of reflecting the
universe. Wendy hasn't matured enough to do that. If you could
ask her about it, and she could answer you, she'd say something to
the effect that to her the universe isn't a defined entity. It's amor-
phous, unpredictable, capable of changing and surprising her at
any moment. For her, the universe as she now sees it is more like
a god or devil than a mechanism of natural laws—something she's
got no hope of understanding or controlling.
"All right," I said. "I'll settle for the fact she's at least partially
a monad."
"There's no such thing," said Porniarsk. "A monad either is, or
is not. In any case, even if she was a partial monad, a partial
monad is incapable of helping you."
"What about when it's combined with another partial monad?"
"What other partial monad?" Bill asked.
"The Old Man, down at the village."
"This is even worse than your idea of using Wendy," said Por-
niarsk. For the first time since we'd met him, the tone of his voice

188
came close to betraying irritation with one of us. "The experi-
mental down below us are artificially created animals. The very
concept of 'universe' is beyond them. They're only bundles of
reflexes, conditioned and trained."
"All but one of them," I said. "Porniarsk, don't forget there're
a lot of things I can see now with the help of the seven sets you've
already produced, even if they don't have monads in connection
with them yet. One of those things is that the Old Man may have
been bred in a test-tube—or whatever they all came from—but he's
got some kind of concept of 'universe,' even if it's limited to his
village and a mile or so of the rock around it. When we first came
in here and passed the initial test of their attack, all the rest of
them immediately took us for granted. Not the Old Man. By de-
sign or chance, he's got something individual to measure new
things against, plus whatever it takes to make new decisions on the
basis of that measurement. And you can't deny he's adult."
No one said anything for a moment.
"I don't think," said Bill at last, "that Marie's going to like
Wendy being hooked up to something like the Old Man."
"Wendy won't be. They'll both just be hooked in with all the
rest of us. Anyway, I'll explain it to Marie."
"How'll you get the Old Man to cooperate?"
"He doesn't have to cooperate," I said. "I'll bring him up here,
connect him to one of the consoles and chain him to it with Sun-
day's chain. Then give him a day or two to get used to the feel of
assistance, and his being in connection with my mind. Once he
feels the advantages these things give him, my bet is he'll get over
being scared and become interested."
"If you use force to bring him up here," said Porniarsk, "you'll
undoubtedly trigger off the antagonisms of his fellow experi-
mentals."
"I think I can do it without," I said. "I've got an idea."
With that, I left the two of them and went back down to our
camp, which was set up at the foot of the peak. I unchained Sun-
day and went looking for Marie. Sunday could only be trusted to
stick around the camp when I was there. He had shown no partic-
ularly strong hunting instincts before in all the time I had known
him; but for some reason the experimentals seemed to fascinate
him. Since the first day of our camp at the foot of the hill, when I

189
had caught him stalking one of the village inhabitants who was out
hunting among the rocks, we had kept him chained up when I was
up on the peak. It was possible he might not have hurt the experi-
mental, but the sight I had had of him, creeping softly along, belly
almost dragging the ground and tail a-twitch, was too vivid to
forget.
At any rate, now I let him loose, and he butted his head against
me and rubbed himself against my legs all the time I was looking
for Marie. I found her, with Wendy, down at the creek by the foot
of the peak, doing some washing.
It was not the time to mention that I wanted Wendy at one of
the consoles. The little girl had come to trust me; and—I don't care
how male and solitary you are—if a small child decides to take to
you, you have to carry your own instincts somewhere outside the
normal spectrum not to feel some sort of emotional response. Any-
thing unexpected or new tended to frighten Wendy; and any con-
cern or doubt about it by her mother made the fright certain. The
idea would have to be presented to Wendy gently, and with
Marie's cooperation. I spoke to Marie now, instead, about the
other matter I had in mind.
"Have you got any of that brandy left?" I asked.
She put down in a roaster pan some jeans of Wendy's she was
wringing out and shook her hands to get the excess water off. She
had her own slacks rolled up above her knees and her legs and feet
bare so that she could wade into the creek. The work had pink-
ened her face and tousled her hair. She looked, not exactly
younger, but more relaxed and happy than usual; and for a second
I felt sad that I had not been able to love her after all, instead of
Ellen.
"What's the occasion?" she asked.
"No occasion," I said. "I'm hoping to bait the Old Man in the
village down there, so I can get him up to the roundhouse. We
want to try him with the consoles. You do have some brandy
left?"
"Yes," she said. "How much do you want?"
"One full bottle ought to be plenty," I said. "Is there that
much?"
"I've got several full bottles," she said. "Do you want it right
away, or can I finish up here first?"

190
"I'd like to get down to the village before dark."
"I'll be done in five minutes."
"Fine, then," I said and sat down on a boulder to wait. It took
her closer to fifteen than five minutes, as it turned out, but there
was still at least an hour or so of sunset left. We went back to the
camper; she got me an unopened bottle of brandy, and I walked
down to the village with it.
The whole thing was a gamble. I had no idea what kind of body
chemistry the experimentals had. From what Porniarsk had said,
they had evidently been developed by future humans from ape
stock; chimpanzee at a guess. The larger part of their diet seemed
to be some sort of artificially prepared eatable in a cube form that
came from inside one of the dome-shaped buildings. But since the
building was small, and the supply of the cubes seemed to be inex-
haustible, I had guessed that there was some kind of underground
warehouse to which the building was merely an entrance. How-
ever, in addition to the cubes, the experimentals were at least
partly carnivorous. They went out into the rocks around the vil-
lage in the daytime to hunt small rodent-like animals with their
throwing knives; and these they either ate raw on the spot or
carried back into their buildings at the village to be eaten at
leisure.
All these things seemed to add up to the strong possibility that
they had digestive systems and metabolisms pretty similar to a hu-
man's. But there was no way of being sure. All I could do was try.
The Old Man was not out in the open when I first walked into
the village, but before I was half a dozen steps down the main
street, he had emerged from his dwelling to hunker down in front
of his doorway and stare at me steadily as I approached. I de-
toured along the way to pick up a couple of handleless cups or
small bowls that one of the local workmen was turning out on his
machine. I'd thought earlier of bringing a couple of containers
from our camp, then decided the Old Man would be more likely to
trust utensils that were familiar to him. I came up to within ten
feet of him, sat down cross-legged on the hard-packed, stony dirt
of the street, and got my bottle from the inner jacket pocket in
which I had been carrying it.
I put both cups down, poured a little brandy into both of them,
picked up one, sipped from it and started staring back at him.

191
It was not the most lively cocktail hour on record. I pretended to
drink, pouring as little as possible into my cup each time, and put-
ting somewhat more into the other cup, which slowly began to fill.
The Old Man kept staring at me; apparently, he was capable of
keeping it up without blinking as long as the daylight lasted. Even-
tually, even the small amounts of liquor with which I was wetting
my tongue began to make themselves felt. I found myself talking. I
told the Old Man what fine stuff it was I was drinking, and I in-
vited him to help himself. I speculated on the interesting dis-
coveries he would make if he only joined me and became friendly.
He continued to stare.
Eventually^ the other cup was as full as it could safely be, and
the sun was almost down. There was nothing more I could do. I
left the cups and the bottle with the top off and got to my feet.
"Pleasant dreams," I said to him, and left. Back once more in
the rocks a safe distance from the village, I got out my field glasses
and peered down in the direction of his building. It was almost
dark, and one thing the experimentals did not have was artificial
lighting. They all disappeared into their buildings at dusk and only
reappeared with the dawn. But by straining my vision now, I was
able to make out a dim figure still in front of the Old Man's build-
ing. I squinted through the binoculars, my eyes beginning to water;
and, just as I was about to give up, I caught a tiny glint of light on
something moving.
It was the bottle, being upended in the general area of the Old
Man's head. I gave an inward, silent whoop of joy. Unless he had
decided to use the brandy for a shampoo, or unless he turned out
to have a body that reacted to alcohol as if it was so much branch
water, I had him.
I waited until the moon came up, then got the pickup and drove
by moonlight down through the main street of the village to the
Old Man's building. I took an unlit flashlight and went in the
building entrance. Inside, I turned the flashlight on and found the
Old Man. He was curled up in the corner of the single room that
was the building's interior on a sort of thick rug. He reeked of
brandy, and was dead drunk.
He was also no lightweight. I had not thought it to look at him,
for all the experimentals looked small and skinny by human stand-
ards; but apparently they were nothing but bone and muscle. Still,

192
I managed to carry him out to the pickup and get him inside the
cab. Then I drove back out of the village to the camp.
At the camp, I took him out of the pickup, unchained Sunday
and put him in the pickup, put the chain and collar on the Old
Man and lifted him, still snoozing, into one of the jeeps. By this
time, I was surrounded by people wanting to know what I was
doing.
"I want to try him out on the equipment up at the roundhouse,"
I said. "He drank almost a full bottle of brandy, and he ought to
sleep until morning, but with all this noise he may just wake up.
Now, will you let me get him put away up there? Then I'll come
down and tell you all about it."
"We already had dinner," said Wendy.
"Hush," said Marie to her, "Marc'll have his dinner when he
gets back. You're coming right back down?"
"In twenty minutes at the outside," I said.
I turned on the lights of the jeep and growled up the hillside in
low gear. The partitions between the consoles had supports that
were anchored in the concrete floor of the roundhouse; and I
chained the sleeping Old Man to one of these. As an afterthought,
I took from the jeep the canteen of drinking water we always kept
with each of the vehicles and left it beside him. If he got drunk
like a human, he was likely to have a hangover like a human.
Then I growled my way back down again to the camp to turn
Sunday loose, answer questions, and have my dinner.
To everybody except Porniarsk and Bill, who already knew
what I had in mind, I explained my capture of the Old Man with a
half-truth, saying I wanted to see if he could be useful as a partial
monad when we tried to use the equipment in the roundhouse, the
day after tomorrow. It was not until later that evening, in the pri-
vacy of the camper, after Wendy was asleep, that I talked to Marie
about using the little girl at one of the consoles. Surprisingly,
Marie thought it was a very good idea. She said Wendy had no one
to play with but the dogs, and she had been wanting badly to get
in on what the adults were doing.

I slept that night, but I did not rest. As soon as I closed my eyes I
was off among the strands of the spider web, riding the shifting
forces of the time storm about our world. I scuttled about, study-
ing them. I already knew what I would have to do. Every so often,
for a transitory moment, the forces in this area I had chosen came
close to a situation of internal balance. If, at just the right mo-
ment, I could throw all the force controlled by the eight other
monads and myself against the tangle of conflicting forces that was
the storm, hopefully I could nudge this tiny corner of the storm
into a state of dynamic balance.
Why do I say "hopefully"? I knew I could do it—if only Wendy
and the Old Man, under the assistance of the device, would give
me amplification enough to act as an eighth monad. For it was not
power I needed but understanding. As clearly as I could see the
forces now, I needed to see them many times more clearly, in
much finer detail. Close in, focused down to the local area which
was all that Porniarsk had envisioned me bringing into balance,
my vision was sharp enough. But on wider focus, when I looked
further out into the time storm, the fine detail was lost. One more
monad and I could bring those distant, fuzzy forces into clarity.
It was merely a matter of waiting until morning, I told myself,
finally, and made myself put the whole problem out of my head.
19

194
At my bidding, it went; which was something such a problem
would never have done a week before. But then another thought
came to perch on my mind like a black crow.
I was aware I had never been what the world used to call a kind
or moral man, a "good" man, as my grandfather would have said.
I had always let myself do pretty much what I wanted, within
practical limits; and I had never been particularly caring, or con-
cerned for other people. But ethical laws are a part of any philo-
sophical universe; they have to be. And was it entirely in agree-
ment with those laws, now, my carrying these eight other
people—nine, if you counted the Old Man as being in the people
category—into a joust with something as monstrous as the time
storm, only because of my own hunger to know and do?
Granted, I could not see any way in which they could be hurt.
The only one I was putting on the line, as far as I knew, was my-
self. But there are always understandings beyond understandings.
Perhaps there was some vital bit of information I did not have.
On the other hand, perhaps that was not really what was both-
ering me. I looked a little deeper into myself and found the real
fishhook in my conscience; the unanswered question of whether,
even if I knew there was real danger to the others, I would let that
be reason enough to stop me. Perhaps I would go ahead anyway,
prepared to sacrifice them to my own desires, my own will.
This question was harder to put out of my mind than the time
storm problem, but in the end, I managed. I lay, open-eyed and
without moving, until the dawn whitened the shade drawn over the
window on the side of the camper across from the bunk on which
I lay with Marie.
I got up and dressed quietly. Marie slept on, but Wendy opened
her eyes and looked at me.
"Go back to sleep," I told her. She closed her eyes again with-
out argument. (Probably only humoring me, I thought.)
Dressed, I glanced at Marie, half-tempted to wake her and say a
few words to her. But there was no good reason for that, I real-
ized, unless I only wanted to leave her with some enigmatic, but
portentous, statement she could remember afterwards and worry
over, wondering if she could have done something more for me in
some way; and things might have been different. I was a little

195
ashamed of myself and let myself out of the camper as softly as I
could.
Outside, the morning air was dry and cold. I shivered, even
under the leather jacket I was wearing, and fired up the coleman
stove to make a pot of coffee. All the time I was making it, I could
feel the Old Man's presence in the back of my mind. He was con-
nected to the console, which meant he was in connection with me.
I could feel that he was awake now and suffering from the hang-
over I had anticipated. The discomfort was making him savage—I
could tell that, too. But underneath the savagery he was beginning
to wonder a little at what his mind could now sense of me, and
through me, of tile larger universe.
I made my coffee, drank it, and drove one of the jeeps to the
roundhouse. Inside, around where the Old Man had been, it was a
mess. He had been sick—I should have thought of the possibility of
that. In addition, he had urinated copiously.
I cleaned up, cautiously. Now that he was awake, I had enough
respect for those ape-like arms of his not to let him get a grip on
me. But he let me work on until I was right next to him, without
making any move in my direction. He was still staring at me all the
time, but now there was a speculative gleam in his brown eyes. He
had now realized who it was his mind connected to. I could feel
him in my head, exploring the connection and the situation. I had
guessed right. Now, he was interested. But his mind was still alien
to me, much more alien than Porniarsk's.
I took a chance, disconnected him from the console, unhooked
his chain from the stanchion, and led him outside, to ensure that
any further eliminations he was moved to would take place some-
where else than in the roundhouse. I found a boulder too heavy
for him to move and with a lower half that was narrower than the
top, so that the loop of chain I locked around it could not be
pulled off over the top. I rechained him to this. The boulder was
on the far side of the roundhouse, so that he could neither see his
village nor be seen from it, assuming that his fellows down there
had distance vision good enough to pick him out. Then I left him
with some bread, an opened can of corned beef and a refilled can-
teen of water, and went down to my own breakfast. He let me go
without a sound, but his eyes followed me with their speculative

196
look as long as I was in sight. All the way down the mountain, I
could feel his mind trying to explore mine.
Once back at the camp, I got out the binoculars and looked
over the village. Its inhabitants were out of their homes and about
their daily activities. None of them seemed to be missing the Old
Man or showing any curiosity about the lack of his presence. That
much was all right, then. I went back, put the binoculars away and
ate breakfast. All the others were up and also breakfasting; but
there was a tension, a taut feeling in the very air of the camp.
I did not feel like talking to anyone; and the rest seemed to un-
derstand this. They left me alone while I was eating—all but Sun-
day, who clearly sensed that something unusual was up. He did
not rub against me in his usual fashion, but prowled around and
around me, his tail twitching as if his nerves were on fire. He made
such an ominous demonstration that I was alarmed for Bill, when
at last, he started to come toward me.
But Sunday drew back just enough to let him get close, although
he circled the two of us, eyeing Bill steadily and making little oc-
casional singing noises in his throat.
"I don't want to bother you," Bill said. His voice was hardly
more than a murmur, too low for any of the others to overhear.
"It's all right," I said. "What is it?"
"I just wanted you to know," he said, "you can count on me."
"Well," I said, "thanks."
"No, I really mean count on me," he insisted.
"I hear you," I said. "Thanks. But all you'll have to do today is
sit at that console and let me use you."
He looked back at me for a second in a way that was almost as
keyed-up and strange as Sunday's present behavior.
"Right," he said and went off.
I had no time to puzzle over him. There was Sunday to get into
the cab of the pickup and the doors safely closed on him; and the
leopard was just not agreeable to going in this morning. In the end
I had to haul him in as a dead weight, swearing at him, with one
fist closed on the scruff of his neck and my other arm around his
wedge-shaped cat chest below his forelegs. I didn't dare have any
of the others help me in the mood the leopard was in—even the
girl. Though, in fact, she was busy at the moment, doing some-

197
thing in the motorhome with Marie—and she probably would not
have come anyway if I'd called.
I finally got Sunday in and the door closed. Immediately he
found himself trapped, he began to thrash around and call to me. I
closed my ears to the sounds he was making and got my party into
the jeeps and headed up the side of the peak. I was already at
work with the back of my head, monitoring the present interplay
of the forces in the storm, as far as I could pick them out. A real
picture of the pattern out as far as the Moon's orbit would have to
wait until the others were all at their consoles and connected with
me. I thought I was gaining some advantage from them already,
which was a yery good sign. Either I had been building psychic
muscle since the last two consoles had been finished, or the Old
Man was proving to be even more useful than I had hoped. Actu-
ally, in one way, he had already exceeded expectations; because I
was still as strongly linked to him as I had been when he had been
connected to the console and chained inside the roundhouse.
Wendy, who had been chattering away merry and bright in the
back of the jeep I was driving, fell into dubious silence as we
pulled up to the level spot where the roundhouse stood and she
saw the Old Man staring at us. But he only gave her and the
others a single surveying glance and then came back to concen-
trate on me as I got out of the jeep and came back toward him.
He knew where I was going to take him. He came along almost
eagerly when I unlocked the chain and led him to the roundhouse
door. It slid aside automatically as we got within arm's length of it,
and he went over the threshold ahead of me with a bound, headed
toward his console. I took him to it and chained him on a short
length of the chain, so that he could not reach around the partition
to whoever would be at the console next to him.
Bill followed me in and blocked the door open to the outer air,
as we had got in the habit of doing. The others followed him. They
began to take their places under Porniarsk's direction and let
themselves be connected to their consoles. The dark material clung
to itself when one end of it was loosely wrapped around the throat.
The further end of it reached through the face of the console to
touch the pattern of blocks inside. It was so simple as to seem un-
believable, except for the fact that the strap had a mild, built-in
warmth to it. It was a semi-living thing, Porniarsk had told me. All

198
the connections in the roundhouse were made with such semi-liv-
ing objects. They operated like psychic channels. If you imagine
the tube through which a blood transfusion is being given, as being
alive and capable of making its own connection with the blood sys-
tems of the two people involved in the transfusion, you have an
analogous picture.
The straps were vaguely comforting to wear, like a security
blanket. I noticed Wendy brighten up for the first time since seeing
the Old Man, when hers was wrapped around her throat by Bill.
There was one waiting for me at the monitoring station in the mid-
dle of the room; but I wanted to try seeing what kind of connec-
tion I could have with the other monads without it, before I
strapped myself in.
Bill and Porniarsk strapped in the others, then Bill strapped
himself in, and Porniarsk went to the monitoring station. He
reached with one tentacle for the colored square on the console
there that activated all connections. His tentacle flicked down to
touch the square, and the connection already established between
myself and the Old Man suddenly came alive with our mutual un-
derstanding of what would happen when activation took place.
The Old Man howled.
His vocal capabilities were tremendous. All of us in the round-
house were half-deafened by the sound, which rang like a fire siren
in our ears, and broadcast itself outward from the propped-open
door. In that same second, Porniarsk's tentacle touched the sur-
face of the square, and the connections were activated. Full con-
tact with all the other monads there erupted around me; and full
perception of the time storm forces out of Moon orbit distance
smashed down on me like a massive wall of water. The Old Man's
howl was cut off in mid-utterance. I found my body running for
the roundhouse door.
For with contact had come full understanding of what the
Alpha Prime had done, and what he had been trying to do. I burst
out of the roundhouse and looked down the steep, bouldered face
of the peak that fell toward the village. The lower edge of it was
alive with black, climbing bodies.
How the Old Man had contacted them, I did not know. His
connection with me and the console had made it possible, that was
obvious; but he had used channels of identity with his own people

199
that were not part of my own, human machinery. The most I
could understand was that he had not actually called them, in a
true sense. He had only been able to provoke an uneasiness in
them that had sent most of them out hunting among the lower
rocks, in the direction of the peak.
But now they had heard him. Lost somewhere in the gestalt of
the monad group of which he and I were a part—Porniarsk had
been right in his use of that word, for the group, myself and this
place were all integrated into a whole now—the Old Man's mind
was triumphant. He knew that he had called in time, that his peo-
ple had heard and were coming.
I whirled around and stared back into the roundhouse through
the open door, though I already knew what I would see. Inside, all
the figures were motionless and silent. There was not even a chest-
movement of breathing to be seen in any of them, for they were
caught in a timeless moment—the moment in which we had con-
tacted the storm and I had paused to examine the pattern of its
forces. Even Porniarsk was frozen into immobility with his tenta-
cle-tip touching his activation square on the monitor console. The
square itself glowed now, with a soft, pink light.
I was still unconnected and mobile. But the Old Man's people
would be here in twenty minutes; and all our weapons were down
at the camp.
I watched my body turn and run for the nearest jeep, leap into
it, start it, turn it, and get it going down the slope toward camp. I
had the advantage of a vehicle, but the distance was twice as
much, down to camp, than it was up the slope the experimentals
were climbing, and twice as far back up again. The jeep bounced
and slid down the shallower slope on this side of the peak, skid-
ding and slewing around the larger boulders in the way. My body
drove it; but my mind could not stay with it, because I had already
seen enough of the present moment's pattern to locate the upcom-
ing pressure point I searched for. That pressure point would be
coming into existence in no more time than it would take the vil-
lagers to climb to the roundhouse, possibly, even in less time. I
had that long only to study all the force lines involved and make
sure that my one chance to produce a state of balance was taken
exactly on the mark.

It was not the pattern of forces in the time storm itself I studied;
but the image of this pattern in the philosophical universe during
that fractional, timeless moment when I had first tapped the abili-
ties of our full monad-gestalt. That image was like a three-dimen-
sional picture taken by a camera with a shutter speed beyond
imagination. Already, of course, the configuration of the forces in
the storm had developed, through a whole series of changes, into
totally different patterns, and they were continuing to change. But
with the gestalt and the device to back me up, I could study the
configuration that had been and calculate how the later patterns
would be at any other moment in the future.
In any such pattern—past, present, or future—the time storm
forces of any given area had to have the potential of developing
into a further state of dynamic balance. The potential alone, how-
ever, was not good enough. To begin with, the forces had to be
very close to balance, within a very small tolerance indeed; other-
wise, the relatively feeble strength of my gestalt would not be able
to push them into balance.
But first, the imbalances to be corrected must be understood in
detail. Balance was an ideal state; and the chances of it occurring
naturally were as small as the total time storm itself was large. The
only reason it was barely possible to achieve it artificially lay in a
20

202
characteristic of the time storm itself; the storm's tendency to
break up progressively into smaller and smaller patterns and for
these to break up in turn, and so on. This was the same charac-
teristic that Porniarsk had mentioned as presenting the greatest
danger of the storm if it was not fought and opposed. The continu-
ing disintegration would continue to produce smaller and smaller
temporal anomalies until, at last, any single atomic particle would
be existing at a different temporal moment than its neighbor. But
in this case, it offered an advantage in that the disintegration proc-
ess produced smaller temporal anomalies within larger ones, like
miniature hurricanes in the calms that were the eyes of larger
ones; and so, by choosing the right moment to act, it was possible
to balance the forces of a small, contained anomaly, without hav-
ing to deal with the continuing unbalanced forces of a larger dis-
turbance containing it.
Of course, the word "hurricane" did not really convey the cor-
rect image of a temporal anomaly. In its largest manifestation,
such an anomaly represented the enormous forces released in in-
tergalactic space along the face of contact between an expanding
galaxy and a contracting one. Here on earth, in its smallest—so far
—manifestation, it was an area such as the one we and the experi-
mentals were inhabiting now, with the conflicting forces existing
where the mistwalls marked their presence. Temporally, the mist-
walls were areas of tremendous activity. Physically, as we had dis-
covered, they were no more than bands of lightly disturbed air and
suspended dust, stretching up from the surface of the earth until
they came into conflict with other forces of their same "hurri-
cane."
In my philosophical image of the apparent walls that were time
storm force-lines, I saw them in cross-section, so that they seemed
like a web of true lines filling a three-dimensional space, the inter-
stices between lines being the chunks of four-dimensional space
they enclosed. Seen close up, the lines looked less like threads
than like rods of lightning frozen in the act of striking. Whatever
this appearance represented of their real properties in the physical
universe, the fact was clear that they moved and were moved by
the other force-lines with which they interacted; so that they devel-
oped continually from one pattern to another, in constant rear-
rangement, under the push of the current imbalance.

203
I already knew in what general direction the patterns in the area
I was concerned with were developing. But now I projected these
developments, studying the parade of succeeding configurations for
specific details, looking for one that would give me a possibility of
forcing a balanced pattern into existence before the experimentals
arrived at the roundhouse. I could not do this until I had returned
with weapons and driven off the figures now climbing the peak, for
the good reason that the pattern showed me the development of
affairs here, as well as the larger picture. I alone, even with guns,
would not be able to drive off those who were coming. There were
more than a hundred of them; and this time they would not give
up as easily as they had before. They had been conditioned to ig-
nore the roundhouse. Now, somehow, the Old Man had managed
to break that conditioning. The only thing that would stop them
would be fright at some great natural event. A volcanic eruption,
an earthquake—or the meteorological reaction when the mistwall
through which we had entered went out of existence, and the at-
mosphere of the area on its far side suddenly mixed with the at-
mosphere on this.
I must get down, get weapons, get back up, and hold them off
long enough to use the gestalt successfully to produce balance in
the pattern. My mind galloped past the developing patterns, check-
ing, checking, checking; and as it went, the jeep under me was
skidding and plunging down the slope to our camp.
I slid in between our tents, at last, in a cloud of dust and
stopped. I jumped out of the jeep, unlocked the door of the mo-
torhome, and plunged inside.
Warm from the hot, still atmosphere within, the guns were
where we always kept them, in the broom closet, with the ammu-
nition on a shelf above. I grabbed two shotguns and the two heav-
iest rifles, with ammo. But when I reached for the machine pistol,
it was not there.
I spent, perhaps, a couple of frantic minutes looking for it in
improbable places about the motorhome, before I finally admitted
to myself that it was gone. Who could have managed to get into
the vehicle, which Marie and I kept locked religiously except when
one of us was in it, was something there was no time to puzzle
about now. With its extendable stock collapsed, the weapon was
light and small enough to be carried under a heavy piece of outer

204
clothing by either man or woman—and most of us going up to the
roundhouse this morning had worn either a jacket or a bulky
sweater. I got out of the motorhome in a hurry, not even bothering
to lock it behind me. I made the driver's seat of the jeep in one
jump, gunned the still-running motor and headed back up the
slope of the peak.
I was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards from the camp when
the dead silence that had existed there registered. Sunday had been
back there all the time I was getting the guns, locked up in the cab
of the pickup. But I had not heard a sound from him, in spite of
the fact that he must have heard the jeep arrive, and seen, heard,
and possibly even smelled me. He should have been putting up as
much racket as he could, in an effort to make me come and let
him out. But there had been no noise at all.
I drove another twenty yards or so before I gave in to the sud-
denly empty, sick feeling inside me. Then, I wrenched the jeep
around and roared back down to the camp to the pickup.
I did not need to get out of the jeep to look at it. I did not even
need to get close. From twenty feet away, I could see the wind-
shield of the pickup lying on the hood of the vehicle like a giant's
lost spectacle lens. Somehow, Sunday had managed to pop it com-
pletely out of its frame. And he was gone.
I knew where he had gone. I got the field glasses and looked off
up the steep slope leading directly to the roundhouse, where the
tiny black figures of the experimentals could now be seen more
than halfway up. Down below them, I saw nothing for a moment—
and then there was a flash of movement. It was Sunday, headed to
join me on top, where he must have believed me to be, not travel-
ling by the roundabout, easy slope I had come down in the jeep,
but directly up the mountainside on a converging route with those
from the village below.
He would keep coming. If the experimentals did not get in his
way, he would simply pass them up. But if they tried to stop him,
he would kill as long as he could until he was killed himself. But
he would keep coming.
The idiotic, loving beast! There was nothing but death for him
where he was headed; but even if he had known that, it would not
have stopped him. There was nothing I could do for him now. I

205
could not even take time out to think of him. There were eight
people and a world to think of.
I ripped the jeep around and headed up the slope. The best I
could do; the longer distance before me would make it a tossup
whether I could get back to the roundhouse before the experi-
mentals arrived.
I had the upcoming patterns of the time storm in my head now.
I could see the one I wanted developing. It was not an absolutely
sure thing, so far; but it was as close to a sure thing as I could
wish for in limited time, such as we had now. It would form within
seconds after I made the top of the peak and the roundhouse.
There was nothing more I could do now but drive. In the
roundhouse the others were still immobile—even the Old Man-
caught up in the gestalt. I gave most of my attention to the ground
ahead.
It was the best driving I had ever done. I was tearing hell out of
the jeep, but if it lasted to the top of the peak that was all I asked
of it. I did not lose any time, but what I gained—the best I could
gain—was only seconds. When I did reach the level top and the
roundhouse at last, the experimentals were not yet there.
I skidded the jeep to a stop beside the door of the roundhouse
and tossed one rifle, one shotgun, and most of the ammunition in-
side. Then I pulled the block that was holding the door open—and
all this time, the storm pattern I was waiting for was coming up in
my mind—stepped back, and the door closed automatically. The
experimentals did not have doors to buildings. Perhaps they did
not know what a door was and would think, seeing this one closed,
that there was no entrance into the roundhouse. If they did by ac-
cident trigger the door to opening, those inside would have the
other two guns which, one way or the other, they would be awake
and ready to use; for in a moment I would either win or lose, and
the gestalt would be set free again.
I watched the door close and turned just in time to see the first
round, ape-like head come over the edge of the cliff-edge, some
forty yards away. I snatched up the rifle and had it halfway to my
shoulder when I realized I would never fire it. There was no time
now. The moment and the pattern I waited for were rushing down
upon me. I had no more mind to spare for killing. Still standing
with the rifle half-raised, I went back into the pattern; meanwhile,

206
as if through the wrong end of a telescope, I was seeing the black
figure come all the way up into view and advance, and other black
figures appear one by one behind him, until there were four of
them coming steadily toward me, not poising the knives they held
to throw, but holding them purposely by the hilt, as if they wanted
to make sure of finishing me off.
It was the final moment. I saw the pattern I had waited for
ready to be born. I felt the strength of my monad gestalt; and at
last, I knew certainly that what I was about to try would work.
The four experimentals were more than halfway to me; and now I
could understand clearly how the indications I had read had been
correct. I would be able to do what I had wanted; and with the
windstorm that would follow the disappearance of the mistwalls,
the experimentals would panic and retreat. But the cost of all this
would be my life. I had expected it to be so.
I stood waiting for the experimentals, the pattern rushing down
upon me. In the last seconds, a different head poked itself over the
edge of the cliff, and a different body came leaping toward me. It
was Sunday, too late.
The pattern I awaited exploded into existence. I thrust, with the
whole gestalt behind me. The fabric of the time storm about me
staggered, trembled and fell together—locked into a balance of
forces. And awareness of all things vanished from me, like the
light of a blown-out lamp.

The world came back to me, little by little. I was conscious of a
warm wind blowing across me. I could feel it on my face and
hands; I could feel it tugging at my clothes. It was stiff, but no
hurricane. I opened my eyes and saw streamers of cloud torn to
bits scudding across the canvas of a blue sky, moving visibly as I
watched. I felt the hard and pebbled ground under my body and
head; and a pressure, like a weight, on the upper part of my right
thigh.
I sat up. I was alive—and unhurt. Before me, out beyond the
cliff-edge where the experimentals had appeared, there was no
more mistwall—only sky and distant, very distant landscape. I
looked down and saw the four black bodies on the ground, strung
out almost in a line. None of them moved; and when I looked
closer I saw clearly how badly they had been torn by teeth and
claws. I looked further down, yet, at the weight on my thigh, and
saw Sunday.
He lay with his head stretched forward to rest on my leg, and
one of the leaf-shaped knives was stuck, half-buried in the big
muscle behind his left shoulder. Behind him, there was perhaps
fifteen feet of bloody trail where he had half-crawled, half-dragged
himself to me. His jaws were partly open, the teeth and gums red-
21

208
stained with blood that was not his own. His eyes were closed. The
lids did not stir, nor his jaws move. He lay still.
"Sunday?" I said. But he was not there to hear me.
There was nothing I could do. I picked up his torn head, some-
how, in my arms and held it to me. There was just nothing I could
do. I closed my own eyes and sat there holding him for quite a
while. Finally, there were sounds around me; I opened my eyes
again and looked up to see that the others, released now that the
gestalt was ended, had come out of the roundhouse and were
standing around looking at the new world. Marie was standing
over me.
Tek and Ellen were off by themselves some thirty yards from
the roundhouse. He had turned the jeep around and evidently
pulled it off a short distance in a start back down the side of the
peak. But for some reason he had stopped again and was now get-
ting back out of the driver's seat, holding one of the rifles, proba-
bly the one I had thrown into the roundhouse, tucked loosely in
the crook of his right elbow, barrel down. Ellen was already out of
the jeep and standing facing him a few steps off.
"You go," she was saying to him. "I can't now. He doesn't even
have Sunday now."
I remembered how much Sunday had meant to her in those first
days after I had found her. And how he had put up with her more
than I ever would have expected. But she had always been fond of
him. And I—I had taken him for granted. Because he was mad.
Crazy, crazy, insane cat. But what difference does it make why the
love's there, as long as it is? Only I'd never known how much of
my own heart I'd given back to him until this day and hour.
Ellen was walking away from Tek and the jeep now.
"Come back," Tek said to her.
She did not answer. She walked past me and into the round-
house through the door that was once more propped open. In the
relative shadow of the artificially lit interior, she seemed to vanish.
Tek's face twisted and went savage.
"Don't try anything," said Bill's voice, tightly.
I looked to the other side of me and saw him there. He was
pale-faced, but steady, holding one of the shotguns. The range was
a little long for accuracy with a shotgun; but Bill held it purpose-
fully.

209
"Get out if you want," he told Tek. "But don't try anything."
Tek seemed to sag all over. His shoulders drooped; the rifle bar-
rel sagged downward. All the savageness leaked out of him, leav-
ing him looking defenseless.
"All right," he said, in an empty voice.
He started to turn away toward the jeep. Bill sighed and let the
shotgun drop butt-downward to the earth; so that he held it, al-
most leaning on the barrel of it, wearily. Tek turned back, sud-
denly, the rifle barrel coming up to point at me.
Bill snatched up the shotgun, too slowly. But in the same sec-
ond, there was the yammer of the machine pistol from inside the
roundhouse,'and Ellen walked out again holding the weapon and
firing as she advanced. Tek, flung backward by the impact of the
slugs, bounced off the side of the jeep and slid to the ground, the
rifle tumbling from his hands.
Ellen walked a good dozen steps beyond me. But then she
slowed and stopped. Tek was plainly dead. She dropped the ma-
chine pistol as if her hands had forgotten they held it; and she
turned to come back to me.
Marie had been standing unmoving, close to me all this time.
But when Ellen was only a step or two away, Marie moved back
and away out of my line of vision. Ellen knelt beside me and put
her arms around both me and the silent head I was still holding.
"It'll be all right," she said. "It's all going to be all right. You
wait and see."

We had won. In fact, the world had won, for the freezing of the
movement of the time lines into a state of dynamic balance was
complete for the immediate area of our planet. But for me, person-
ally, after that there followed a strange time, the first part of which
I was not really all there in my head and the second part of which,
I was most earnestly trying to get out of my head.
It was left to the others to pick up the pieces and deal with the
period of adjustment to the new physical state of affairs, which
they did by themselves. Of the months immediately following the
moment of change at the station, I have no clear memory. It was a
period of time in which days and nights shuttered about me, light
and dark, light and dark, like frames on a film strip. Spring ran
into summer, summer into fall, and fall into winter, without any
real meaning for me. When the cold months came, I would have
still sat outside in jeans and a tank top if the girl or Marie had not
dressed me to suit the temperature; and I would probably have
starved to death if they had not put food in front of me and stood
over me to see that I ate it.
My reality during that time was all inside my skull, in a universe
where the grey fog of indifference only lifted to a sharp awareness
of psychic pain and guilt. Sunday had loved me—the only thing in
the world that ever had—and I had killed him.
22

212
Porniarsk had worked a piece of technological magic almost im-
mediately, out of knowledge from the time and place of his origi-
nal avatar; but it did not help the way I felt. He had created some
kind of force-field enclosure, in which Sunday's stabbed and slain
body was held in stasis—a sort of non-cryogenic preserving cham-
ber. He could not bring Sunday back to life, Porniarsk told me;
but as long as time had become a variable for us, there was always
the chance that, eventually, we would contact someone with the
knowledge to do it. He told me this many times, repeating himself
patiently to get the information through the fog about me. But I
did not believe him; and, after the first time, I refused to go any-
where near the black-furred body lying still, inside its glass-like en-
ergy shell.
The core of my guilt, though none of the rest suspected it, lay in
the knowledge of my responsibility for Sunday's death—and some-
thing more. The further element was part of the knowledge that I
had always failed with any person or thing who had tried to get
close to me. It was a fact of my experience; and, buried behind it
all this time, had been the darker suspicion that when I could not
turn love away from me, I would always at least manage to de-
stroy its vehicle. Now, in my awareness of my own responsibility
for the death of Sunday, I had confirmed that suspicion.
The confirmation was my own private purgatory. No one, not
even Porniarsk, seemed to suspect that I might have, subcon-
sciously, used the moment of coming to grips with the time storm
to rid myself of the one creature who embarrassed me with an
affection I lacked the personal machinery to return. But I myself
knew the truth. I knew—and I woke fresh to the knowledge every
morning. I sat with it through days of the months that followed
and went to sleep with it at night.
As I saw it, my sin was not one of simple, but of calculated,
omission. Which made it one of commission instead. It printed it-
self as a damning question on the clouds above me in the daytime
and glowed, invisible to all eyes but mine, on the darkness of the
ceiling above me, at night. If I could read the factors of the time
storm, the question ran—and I had been able—then why hadn't I
also taken a moment to puzzle out the factors of human and ani-
mal interaction that had led to the deaths of Tek and Sunday?
I had not done so, the whisper inside me repeated night and

213
day, because I had wanted them dead. Particularly, I had wanted
Sunday dead; for if he continued to exist and follow me about,
eventually the other humans would discover that there was an
emptiness in me where a heart ought to be. Then it would strike
them that I could never care two cents for them either; and they
would turn on me because who could be safe with someone like
me around?
So, I told myself all this through something like a year and a
half following the time storm; and in the telling I skirted the grey
edge of insanity, because I could not stand myself as I now knew
myself to be. It \vas a grim trick of fate that had sent me into life
lacking the one necessary, invisible part that would have made me
human, rather than some flesh and blood robot. Inside my mind, I
pounded on walls, screaming at the unfairness of circumstances,
that had taken me out of a situation where I had not known what
an emotional cripple I was and brought me face to face with the
fact of it.
For that was what had happened. Beginning with my mental ex-
plosion, when I had found out that Swannee was gone—dead and
gone, gone forever—there had been a string of small confron-
tations. A series of little turns which gradually turned me about
one hundred and eighty degrees, until at last I saw myself full-on
in the mirror of my mind and stared at the metal bones shining
through my plastic skin, the glow of the light bulbs artificially illu-
minating the polished caverns of my eyesockets. It was then I real-
ized what had been going on in my unconscious all along.
Only Swannee had known me for the essentially nonhuman I
was. Her reaction to that had been a sort of proof that I was
human; but with all hope of finding her gone, I ran the risk of
being recognized. At first, I had believed that the two with me—the
crazy girl and the insane cat—were no threat to my secret. No one
could expect me to have to prove myself to them. But then had
come Marie and the unrecognized, but nagging, suspicion that she
sensed the lack in me. Then Bill, another real person to watch me
and draw conclusions. Then Porniarsk, who, perhaps, was too
alienly knowledgeable; and after him, the experimentals, who, by
definition, must also be creatures without souls, so that at any mo-
ment any one of the other people, the real people, might say to
themselves—look at the way he acts with Sunday! Doesn't that

214
strike you as being like the way you'd expect the experimentals to
respond to any affection or kindness?
But the greatest danger had come from the girl outgrowing her
craziness after all. She had known me too long; and she had
known Sunday. There had been signs in her to show that she knew
me better than I had thought she did. I wanted to keep her
around; but unless I did something, she would be the very one
who would watch me with Sunday and put two and two together-
after which she would have no use for me, and I would lose her
forever.
Of course, Tek had threatened to take her away anyway, which
would have solved things in a way I did not want. But deep inside
me, I knew Tek was no match for me. He had never really been a
threat. There were a dozen ways in which I could have eliminated
him from the situation, right down to following him and the girl,
killing him and bringing her back by force. No, Sunday had been
the one to eliminate, and now I had taken care of him. Sitting
around by myself as the days and nights went past, I mourned—not
for him, but for the bitterness of having to face what I was, when I
had been so successful at hiding it from myself before.
The others were very patient with me. I would have shot me,
dug a grave, tumbled myself in and got rid of the extra mouth to
feed, the extra clothes to wash. But they were different. So they
endured me, letting me roam around as I liked, only coming to
collect me when it was time for a meal or bedtime; and I had the
privacy I wanted.
Or at least, I had it for a long time. But then my isolation began
to be invaded. I don't know when I first became conscious of it;
perhaps I had been seeing his dark, lean figure around, but ignor-
ing it for some time. But the day came when I noticed the Old
Man sitting watching me, hunkered down in the shade of a boul-
der (it was summer again by that time) about thirty yards off
along the hillside where I sat by myself.
I remember wondering then how he had gotten loose. In the
back of my mind, he had been still chained up, all this time, in the
station. Possibly, I thought, they had turned him loose some time
since to go back down with his fellow experimentals. I did not
want to come out of my grey fog to the effort of asking any of the
others about him, so I decided to ignore him. He was simply sit-

215
ting, watching me; and his limited mind, I thought, should get tired
of that after a while, and I would be rid of him.
I decided to ignore him.
But he did not grow tired of watching and go away. Gradually,
I began to be aware that he would always be around somewhere
close, even if he was not plainly visible. Not only would he be
there, but after some weeks, it became obvious that he was gradu-
ally lessening the distance at which he sat from me.
I had no idea what he was after; but I wanted him gone. I
wanted to be left alone, even by imitation subhumans. One day-
he was now in the habit of sitting less than twenty feet from me—I
let one hand that was hidden from him by my body drop casually
on a stone about the size of a medium hen's egg, gathered it in,
and waited. Some time later, when I thought I saw his attention
distracted for a moment—as it turned out I was wrong—I scooped
it up and threw it at him as hard as I could.
He lifted a hand and caught it before it reached him.
The catch he made was so effortless that I never tried to throw
another thing at him. Nothing except his arm had moved, not even
his shoulder. His long, skinny arm had simply lifted and let the
stone fly into the palm of it. Then he had dropped it, discarding it
with a disinterested opening of his fingers; and all the while, his
eyes had stayed unmoving on mine.
Sour fury boiled in me at that; and it was enough to bring me
partway back to life. My first reaction was that I would tell Bill or
one of the others to take him away and chain him up again. But
then, it struck me that if I betrayed the fact that I was no longer
pretty much out of things, the others would want me to come back
to being human with them again-which would put me once more
on the way to having my secret discovered.
I decided I would have to get rid of the Old Man myself; and I
began to plot how to do it. Eventually, I worked out a simple, but
effective, plan. I would take one of the handguns when no one was
looking and hide it in my shirt until I had a shot at him that a
blind man could not miss. Then when the others came to find out
who had fired, I would tell them he had made threats of attacking
me for some time now; and finally, I had been forced to kill him in
self-defense.
The business of getting the gun was simple enough. The hand-

216
guns and most of the rifles were still kept in the motorhome where
I lived with the girl, Marie and little Wendy. I helped myself to a
Snubnose .32 revolver the morning after I had concocted my
scheme and tucked it inside my shirt into the waistband of my
slacks. The shirt was loose enough so that it hid any outlines that
might have shown through. Then I went about my daily business
of leaving the others as soon as I had eaten breakfast and going off
to sit among the rocks of the hillside about half a mile from camp.
I had been tempted to go even farther than usual from the camp
—far enough so that the sound of my shot could not be heard. But,
now that I had made up my mind to kill the Old Man, I was afraid
of doing anything out of the ordinary that might make him suspi-
cious. Therefore, I went to my usual place and sat down in the
morning sunlight. Shortly I spotted him, squatting less than thirty
yards off in a patch of shadow.
I sat where I was, ostensibly ignoring him. After a little while, I
made an excuse to glance in his direction and saw that he was a
good deal closer than before—perhaps half the distance. It was cu-
rious, but I had never been able to actually catch him in the proc-
ess of moving. Whenever I looked, he was always seated and still,
as if he had been there for several hours.
The morning wore on. He came close—but close was still not
close enough. He was less than fifteen feet from me at last and
would come no closer, but he was off to my left side behind me, so
that I would have to turn about to face him and pull the gun at the
same time—two movements that, I was sure, would startle him into
leaping for protection behind one of the large boulders that were
all around us.
That particular day ended with nothing happening. I sat. He sat.
The only difference from the many days we had spent, together
but apart, before was that for the first time, my mind was not con-
centrated on my inner fog, but on stealthily observing him and cal-
culating the possibility of luring him within certain range of my
weapon.
However, he did not cooperate. The next day, it was the same
thing. The next day, again the same. I finally realized that he was
either too wary or too diffident to approach me except from an ob-
lique angle. I would have to resign myself to waiting until he came

217
almost close enough to be touched, or otherwise put himself in
some other completely vulnerable position.
I consoled myself with the fact that all I needed was patience.
He would be bound to come close eventually, since every day he
inched a little nearer. In fact, it took him nearly three weeks be-
fore he did come near enough to provide the target I wanted; and
in those three weeks, something strange began to happen to me. I
found myself actually enjoying the situation we were both in. I was
still trapped in my own miseries like a fly in a forest of flypaper,
but at the moment, I was navigating between the sticky strands
under the impetus of the excitement of the hunt. I was reminded
one day of a poem I had not thought of for years, or read since I
was a boy, by Rudyard Kipling and called "The Ballad Of Boh Da
Thon." It was about a bandit who had been chased by an English
army unit weeks on end, and it had a pair of lines that applied
nicely to the Old Man and me:
And sure if pursuit in possession ends,
the Boh and his trackers were best of friends ....
For the first time I found myself beginning to like the Old Man,
if for no other reason than that he was giving me something to
want.
However, the day finally came in which—glancing out of the
corners of my eyes—I felt, rather than saw, him squatting almost
within the reach of one of my arms and certainly within the reach
of one of his.
There was no way I could miss with the revolver or he could
dodge, at this distance. But, strangely enough, now that I had him
exactly where I wanted him, I was more than ever fearful of fright-
ening him off, of missing him somehow. I was as shy as a kid on
his first date. I wanted to turn and look at him; but it took all my
will to do so. For a long time I could not manage to turn my head
towards him at all. Then, as the sun began to climb higher in the
sky, I began to swivel my head on my neck so slowly that it felt
like the movement a stone statue might make over centuries.
When the sun was directly over our heads, I was still not looking
squarely at him, although now I was conscious of his dark shape
as a sort of cloud, or presence, at the corner of my left eye.

218
All this time I had been sliding my hand gradually in between
the two lowest buttons of my shirt. I slid it in until my cold fingers
lay flat on the warm skin of my belly, and the tips of those same
fingers touched the hard curve of the polished butt of the revolver.
It was now noon, lunchtime; but I was afraid of breaking the
spell. So I continued to sit without going back to camp, and the
Old Man continued to sit, and the sun moved on while the slow,
agonizing, almost involuntary turning of my neck continued. I was
like someone under a spell or curse. I began to be afraid that the
day would end, and I would have not turned enough to catch his
eyes with my own, to hold his attention for the seconds I would
need to draw the gun and shoot him. Strangely, in this moment, I
had finally lost all connection with my reason for killing him. It
was simply something to which I was committed, as a tightrope
walker might be committed to cross a narrow wire stretched from
one cliff to another.
Then—I don't know why—but there was an abrupt snapping of
the tension. Suddenly, I was free to turn my head as swiftly as I
wanted.
I turned and looked directly at him.
It was a shock. I had completely forgotten that I had never
looked closely into his features before. The black-haired anthro-
poid face, with something of the immutable sadness of the gorilla,
looked back at me. It looked back at me from as close a distance
as the features of some human companion might face me across a
table in a restaurant. But the Old Man's face was all black fur, red
nostrils, yellow teeth and yellower eyes—eyes as yellow as Sunday's
had been.
For a moment, those eyes froze me. They placed a new paraly-
sis upon my soul, one that, for a moment, I did not believe I could
throw off. Then, with a fierce effort, I told myself that this was not
Sunday or anything like him; and I felt my hand reaching auto-
matically for the revolver.
My fingers closed upon the butt. I pulled it loose from the pres-
sure of the waistband of my pants—and all the time I was looking
directly into his face, which did not alter its expression, but gazed
steadily back at me.
It was a moment outside of time. We were caught together in a
tableau, flies in amber both of us, frozen and incapable of move-

219
merit—except for that gun-hand of mine which continued to move
with a life of its own, closing about the gun butt and lifting it to
clear the muzzle toward the face before me. There was something
inevitable about its movements. I could have felt no more trapped
by circumstances if I had been tied down in the path of a jugger-
naut.
In a second it would have been over—but in that second, the
Old Man reached out and placed a hand on both my shirt and the
hand holding the gun, arresting my movement.
The pressure of his hand was a calm, almost a gentle touch. I
could feel the unexerted strength behind his fingers; but he was not
gripping my hand, merely laying his own on top of it, just as, once,
I might have stopped some business guest reaching for the check
of a lunch to which I had just taken him. It was not the kind of
touch that could have checked me from continuing to draw the
gun and shoot him if I had decided to. But somehow, I was
stopped.
For the first time I looked directly into—deeply into—those eyes
of his.
I had gone to zoos once and looked into the eyes of some of the
animals there. There were no more zoos now, nor was it likely that
there would ever be again. But once there had been; and in their
cages, particularly in the cages of the big cats, the apes, and bears
and the wolves, I had looked into wild animal eyes from only a
few feet of distance. And there had been something in those eyes
that was not to be found in the eyes of my fellow humans. There
were eyes that looked at me from the other side of the universe.
Perhaps they could be loving, perhaps, under stress, they could be
filled with fury and anger; but now, to me, a human, they were
remote—separated from me by a gulf neither man nor beast could
cross. They looked at me, without judgment and without hope.
If they lived and it was their fate to encounter me in the open,
they would deal with me as best their strength allowed. If I died
they would watch me die, simply because there was nothing else
they could do, whether I was their deepest enemy or their dearest
friend. Their eyes were the eyes of creatures locked up alone in
their own individual skulls all the hours and minutes of their life.
As animals, they neither knew nor expected the communication

220
every human takes for granted, even if he or she is surrounded by
mortal foes.
The eyes of the Old Man were like that—they were the fettered
eyes of an animal. But mixed in with that, there was something
more—for me alone. It was not love such as Sunday had had for
me. But it was something in its own way, perhaps, as strong. I rec-
ognized it without being able to put a name to it—although sud-
denly, I knew what it was.
The Old Man and his tribe, who had been born from test tubes,
had been created on the brink of humanity. They teetered on the
nice edge of having souls. Of these, the most aware was the Alpha
Prime, Old Man himself, because he was the most intelligent, the
strongest and the most questioning. Also, he had shared the
monad with me in that moment in which we had brought the local
effects of the time storm to a halt. In fact, he had shared it alone
with me, before any of the other humans had joined in. He had
been exposed then to communication for the first time in his life;
and it must have awakened a terrible hunger in him. I realized
that, all this time, he had been trying to get back into com-
munication with me.
So, that is why as soon as he had been let free again—whenever
that was—he had begun to search me out, to approach me little by
little, day by day, until now, at last, he sat at arm's length from
me. He not only sat at arm's length from me, but with his hand in
a gesture that was almost pleading, arresting the gun with which
he must know I had planned to kill him.
My own soul turned over in me. Because I suddenly understood
what he had understood. From the beginning, because of what we
had shared in the moment of the taming of the time storm, he had
been much more understanding of me than I had suspected. He
had known that I did not want him near me. He had known that
my desire to be free of him could be murderous. And he had
known what I was doing when my hand went inside my shirt.
I had had enough experience with him to know that my strength
was like a baby's compared to his—for all that we probably
weighed about the same. It would have been no effort for him to
have taken the gun from me. He could have easily broken the arm
that held it or throttled me with one hand. But he had done none
of these. Instead he had merely come as close as he ever must

221
have come in his life to pleading with someone to spare him, to ac-
cept him, to be his fellow, if not his friend.
In that same moment I realized that he—strange as it seemed
and incredible as it was that he should have the capability, just
from that solitary shared moment in the monad—understood better
than any of them how Sunday had felt about me, and how I had
felt about Sunday. In his animal-human eyes I read it, how I had
really felt about Sunday; and at last—at last—I fell apart.
I had been right both ways. I had been right in that I was some-
one who did not know how to love. But I had been wrong, in spite
of this, when I told myself I had not loved the crazy cat. All this I
understood suddenly, at last, in the moment in which the Old Man
squatted before me, with one long hand still laid flat against my
shirt, over the spot where my fist and the revolver that was to have
killed him were concealed. The floodgates within me went down
suddenly and I was washed halfway back again once more to the
shores of humanity. Only halfway, but this was farther than I had
ever been before.

I sat there and cried for a long time; and the Old Man waited me
out as he might have waited out a storm, squatting in a cave in the
hills. When it was over, I was sane again; or at least as close to
sanity as I could expect to be, under the circumstances. Together
we went back to the camp, and from then on, he was openly at my
side most of the daylight hours.
What he had done, of course, was to crack the protective shell I
had grown about myself in reaction to the massive internal effort
of controlled power that had been involved in using the monad. In
doing that, I had discovered muscles of the inner self that I had
not known I owned, and I had also tuned myself up emotionally
with a vengeance. In self-defense, with Sunday's death, my mind
had closed itself off until it could heal the psychic tearings these
stresses had created. Now that I was back in my skull, however,
these things were suddenly very obvious to me; and some other
things as well. Chief of these was that there was a great deal I
needed to do with myself if I wanted to continue my joust with the
time storm and the universe.
Meanwhile, I was faced with reentering the world of the living.
To my pleasure and to the feeding of a new humbleness inside me,
the others had been doing very well without my guiding hand. I
found that I was now ruler of what might well be called a small
23

224
kingdom—and that was only the beginning of the discoveries
awaiting me.
A great deal had happened in the year and a half that I had
been obsessed with myself. For one thing, the world was a world
again. With the interference from the moving time lines ended,
short-wave radio communication had tied the continents back to-
gether, to the mutual discovery of all us survivors that there were
more of us than we had suspected. The North American continent
was now a patchwork of relatively small kingdoms, like my own,
with the exception of the west coast, from Baja California north-
ward halfway into British Columbia, Canada. That west coast
strip, as far east as Denver and in some cases beyond, was now a
single sovereignty under a woman who called herself the Empress.
The Empress was from the Hawaiian Islands—which appeared to
have suffered less than any other part of the world from the mov-
ing mistwalls and the time changes of the time storm. The islands
had lost no more than two-thirds of their population, as opposed
to a figure that must be much closer to ninety-eight or ninety-nine
per cent for most of the rest of the world. The Empress was a
woman from the island of Hawaii itself, who had seized control
there with a ragtag, impromptu army, and then gone on to take
over the other islands and the west coast of North America.
England and Ireland, apparently, were nearly deserted. Most of
northern Europe also was a wasteland because of a brief ice age
that had come with some of the time changes and covered most of
that continent with an ice sheet from the Arctic Circle as far south
as the middle of France. This ice sheet was now gone; but the
human life that was left was now all below the former ice line.
Stretching around the Mediterranean and into the north of Africa
were essentially nothing more than scattered, single family house-
holds. The rest of Africa, like South America, was largely non-
communicating, from which Bill assumed that those areas had
been pretty well depopulated by the time storm also.
Russia, India and the whole Oriental area had also been hard
hit. As a result they appeared to have fallen back into a sort of
peaceful medieval, agricultural condition, with small villages scat-
tered sparsely across the immensity of land. Australia and New
Zealand had lost almost all of their cities, but had a surprising
number of families surviving pretty much as they always had in the

225
interior and on the rest of that island continent. However, these
people, although articulate and largely supplied with their own ra-
dios, were so widely scattered that they were also, in effect, no
more than individual families living in isolation.
Bill had made a large map on one wall of the rambling, con-
tinually building structure that my group had come to call the
summer palace. The place was a strange construction, being com-
posed partly of lumber, partly of native rocks cemented together,
and partly of cement blocks trucked in from a half-obliterated
town thirty miles away, that had owned a cement block factory.
The palace had poured concrete floors and bare walls for the most
part; but Bill had been a good enough architect to see that it was
adequately wired and equipped with ductwork, not only for heat-
ing, but for summer air conditioning. I think that I had been con-
scious of the existence of his map in it, during my nonparticipating
period; but I had never looked at the map with any degree of in-
terest until the Old Man cracked me out of my shell. Now that I
did, I found myself marveling that what was left of the world
could have gotten its scattered parts back into contact with each
other in such a short time.
I discovered something else, as a byproduct of reawakening to
what was going on around me. This was that our new world was a
world hungry for news, and I myself was a piece of that news. By
this time, all the people on earth who had radio receivers knew
who it was who had brought the local effects of the time storm into
balance. They knew what I looked like, who my lieutenants were,
and what our local situation here was. I was, I discovered, re-
garded as a sort of combination of Einstein and Napoleon—and
the planet's number one celebrity. This attention might ordinarily
have given me a large opinion of myself. However, under the cir-
cumstances, it had a hollow ring to it. It was rather like being
crowned King of the Earth on the stage of the empty Hollywood
Bowl, while an audience of five sat in the middle of the front row
seats and applauded energetically. After discovering what it was
like, I put my position in the world-wide, public eye out of my
mind and concentrated on matters close to home.
It was curious that I, who had once believed that I could never
endure to be married, now had two wives. Of course, legally, I was
married to neither one of them; but wives they were in every prac-

226
tical sense of the word, and particularly in the eyes of the commu-
nity surrounding us. Marie and Ellen—I would have bet anyone
that if there were ever two women likely not to get on with each
other at all, it would be those two. Marie was talkative, conven-
tional and probably—she had never told me her age—older than I
was. The girl was certainly still well under twenty, close-mouthed
to an almost abnormal degree, and recognized no convention or
rules but her own. What the two of them could have in common
was beyond me. I puzzled over it from time to time but never suc-
ceeded in getting an answer.
But they joined forces magnificently when it came to lining up
in opposition to me. One of the typical examples of this appeared
directly after I had come back to my senses and rejoined the world
of the living. All the time that I had been more or less out of my
head, they had taken care of me as if I had been three years old.
Now that I had my ordinary wits back, rather than just getting
back to normal ways, they both apparently decided, without a
word, that I should get it through my head that my days of being
waited upon were over.
This would have been all right if they had merely returned to
the normal pattern of affairs that had existed before we got the time
storm forced into balance. But they now moved as far in the direc-
tion of leaving me to my own devices as they had gone previously
in watching over me. In fact, the whole matter went to what I con-
sidered ridiculous limits.
For example, during the time I had been obsessed with my inner
problems, I had been, except for rare intervals, as sexless as a
eunuch. When I came back to myself, of course, that changed. The
day the Old Man helped me break me loose, I found myself wait-
ing for the evening and the hours of privacy in the motorhome. I
had never been one to want more than one woman in my bed at a
time; and I was not at all sure whether it was the girl or Marie I
wanted that night. But I definitely knew that I wanted one or the
other. I gave them time to get settled first; but when I came to the
motorhome, Ellen was nowhere to be seen and Marie was a mound
under covers on her own bed, her back towards me.
I blew gently into her ear to wake her up and get her to turn to-
ward me. She came to, but not satisfactorily.

227
"Not tonight," she murmured sleepily, and pulled the blanket
up to where it almost covered her head.
Annoyed, I left the motorhome and went out to look for Ellen.
I found her after some search, in a sleeping bag at the foot of a
tree, with her rifle leaning up against it in arm's reach. The rebuff
from Marie had taken some of the rosy glow off my feelings. I
poked the sleeping bag and her eyes opened.
"What are you doing out here?" I said.
"Sleeping," she said. "Goodnight."
She closed her eyes and pulled her head down into the sleeping
bag.
Angry, and not a little hurt, I wandered off. Was this all the two
of them cared for me after all? Here I was back to normalcy and
neither one seemed to give a damn. It was almost as if they had
preferred me as the mindless near-idiot I had been for the past
eighteen months.
I went back into the motorhome, opened the cupboards that
held our bottled goods and took out a bottle of sour mash bour-
bon. I made myself a solitary campfire off into the woods, at the
edge of the clearing holding the motorhome and the half-finished
shape of the summer palace, and set out to get myself drunk by
way of solitary celebration. But it did not work. I got thickheaded
without feeling any better and finally gave up, going back to the
motorhome and falling into my own lonely bunk without bothering
to do much more than take off my boots.
If that was all they cared for how it had been with me this past
year and a half, I thought resentfully as I dropped off.
It was not until late the next morning, when I woke up to a dry
mouth, a headache and the sunlight streaming through the win-
dows of the motorhome, that it occurred to me to think how it
might have been for them too. If I had been essentially without a
woman all that time, they had been essentially without a man. Or
had they? That was a question I found I really didn't want to con-
sider, although I made a mental note to find the answer sometime
later. (I never did find out as a matter of fact.) I got up, washed,
shaved, changed clothes and went out.
Not only had they forsaken my bed, there was no sign of any
breakfast made for me. Not that I was incapable of cooking for
myself, but I had gotten used to having the spoon all but put in my

228
mouth, and I felt the transition to the present state of neglect to be
unnecessarily harsh and abrupt. However, the motorhome refrig-
erator, run from the standby oil generator outside it, had cold
juice, eggs and canned sausage. I made myself a pretty decent
meal, scrupulously washed up after myself—just to rub their noses
in the fact that I could be independent too—and went outside to
see what was going on.
There was no one around outside the summer palace, not the
girl or Marie—not even Wendy. Now that I began to think of it, I
had a vague impression from the past months that Wendy was
ceasing to be the timid little creature she had been when I first saw
her and was beginning to develop into a lively young girl, busy
every hour of the day all over the place.
I went into the summer palace, prowled through its rooms and
discovered Bill busily at work at a large draftsman's table in the
same room that had the map on the wall. Besides those two items,
the room had three large filing cabinets, a regular desk covered
with papers, and one wall entirely in bookcases.
"Hello," I said to Bill.
He glanced at me over the top of whatever it was he was draw-
ing, put down his pen and ruler and got off the high stool he had
been sitting on. We shook hands with awkward formality.
"How are you?" he asked.
"Fine," I said. "Just fine."
I glanced around the room.
"You've all been pretty busy," I said.
"Oh well," answered Bill, "there's always a lot to do."
"And you've been doing most of it, I'd guess," I said.
"Oh, no," he shook his head, "I couldn't have carried most of
the responsibility here if I'd wanted to. Actually, all I've been
doing is handling the instruction, the maintenance and supply, and
things like that. Marie and Ellen have been doing most of the ev-
eryday work of running things. Marie's a natural manager, and
Ellen-"
He paused.
"Go on," I said, interested. "You're about to say that Ellen
is-"
"Well, I was going to say—sort of a natural general," he said
awkwardly. "Maybe I ought to say, a natural war leader. She's

229
been the one who's been making sure that all our people know
how to use their guns and that none of our neighbors think they
can walk in here and help themselves to anything we've got."
"Neighbors? What neighbors?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "to the north and northwest of us it's the
Ryans, and the TvLostChord. To the west, it's Wallinstadt. South
and moving around to the east, it's Billy Projec and his tribe. Not
that we've anything really to worry about, even if they all took it
into their heads to combine against us."
He shot me a quick glance.
"We've now got over six hundred people," he said.
"Six hundred people!"
I was rocked back on my heels. I had vaguely gathered during
the last year and a half that the numbers of my small community
were growing; but I had guessed that, at the most, we would have
somewhere between thirty and fifty people. Six hundred under
these conditions was a small nation.
"Where did they all come from?" I asked.
"Some of them knew about us back when the mistwalls were
still operating," said Bill. "Or they heard about us from others
they ran into. We were a pretty good-sized party—and a well-
equipped party—to be moving around back then. After the time
changes stopped locally, they began gradually to drift in, either out
of curiosity or because they'd always wanted to join us."
He waved a hand at the filing cabinets.
"I've got each one down on the census rolls," he said. "In fact,
if you'd like, you can read each one's life history up to the time
they've joined us. About nine months ago, I made everybody fill
out a complete file on themselves; and now we make every new
person do that before we accept them here. I've got not only the
facts of the life, but bloodtype, medical history, occupational skills
and everything else that might be useful information for us."
I shook my head. His mind and mine were two different con-
structs. The last thing I would have thought about with a group
that size would be getting into their former occupations and blood-
types. It had probably been the first thing that Bill had thought of.
He had an orderly brain.
"You don't need me," I said. "From what I can see you've all
been doing fine on your own."

230
Now he shook his head.
"All we've been doing is keeping the machinery running, idling,
waiting for you to do something with it," he said. "Do you want to
look around at things?"
"Yes," I said.
He led me out of the room and down a corridor of the summer
palace that I had not been in before—or if I had, I didn't re-
member having been through it—and out another door. A jeep and
a station wagon were parked there. He got in behind the wheel of
the jeep and I climbed in beside him.
"Porniarsk's got his working area back here behind the summer
palace," Bill said as he started up the motor of the jeep and
backed it away from the building, to swing it around to head down
the hillside. "But I thought we'd end up with him. Let me show
you the rest of it first."
We drove down through the belt of trees into the lower area
where the village of the experimentals had stood. I had not been
down here since we had halted the effects of the time storm, and
what I saw was startling. The village of the experimentals was still
there; although it was now enclosed in cyclone fencing and the
gates wide enough to drive a truck through were standing ajar.
Sprawling out on the open space beyond and slightly downhill
from the village was what could only be described as a town—a
new town of everything from prefab houses to tents.
"Eventually," Bill spoke in my ear over the noise of the motor
as we negotiated the now clearly marked, if unsurfaced, road
downward from the tree belt, "we'll set up some uniform con-
struction. For the present, however, we've been giving anyone
who's accepted here a free hand, provided their housing and their
habits conform with our sanitary regulations and local laws."
"Who enforces our local laws?" I asked, bemused.
"Everybody belongs to the militia, and everybody who belongs
to the militia pulls police duty on a regular rotation," said Bill.
"That's Ellen's department. You should ask her about it. She's on
top of it all the time; and she makes it work without a hitch. From
what I can gather, we've got a much more organized community
here than they have almost anyplace else in the world. Of course,
the people who are here badly want to be here. They all think that
you're going to go on pulling miracles out of your hat and that

231
they'll end up, either on top of things, or with all the luxuries of
former civilization back again."
"All that, just because we managed to stop the time storm?" I
said.
"It's a function of the situation," Bill said, with his precise pro-
nunciation of each word. "Think of it this way. You're the sor-
cerer. Porniarsk's your demon assistant."
"You're my Grand Vizier, Ellen's General of the Armies and
Marie's the Number One Queen—is that it?" I asked.
Bill laughed.
"Yup," he said.

By this time we were almost down level with the gates of the exper-
imentals' village.
"How come you've got them penned up?" I said.
"They're not penned," Bill answered. "That fence is there for
their own protection, in case some of our newcomers don't have
the sense to leave them alone. Or in case there's a sudden surprise
attack on us from somewhere. They can lock their gates and have
a certain amount of protection until we drive the attackers off.
They seem to understand that perfectly well."
He looked at me briefly.
"I think the Old Man can communicate with them all right," he
said. "Anyway, things have gone pretty smoothly with all of them
since we stopped the effects of the time storm."
There were a few of the experimentals out in front of their
buildings; and these watched us solemnly as we passed, but made
no move either to come toward us or to retreat inside. The jeep
roared on and we drove down what seemed to be a sort of center
street between the heterogeneous buildings of the human commu-
nity. Eight or nine young children were flying kites in a clearing
half-surrounded by trees, just beyond the village. The picture they
made was so normal and so pre-time storm that it jolted me.
"Where did all the kids come from?" I asked.
24

234
"Some of the people coming in had them," Bill said, braking the
jeep to a halt before one large quonset hut. "And we've had sev-
eral babies born here during the past year. Of course, those are too
young to play yet. Still, the proportion of children to adults isn't
that large. I don't think we've got more than twenty of them."
I shaded my eyes and tried to make out a familiar figure among
the darting young bodies.
"Is that Wendy out there?" I said.
"I don't think so," said Bill without turning around. "She's
probably out with the dogs somewhere. She handles them now
most of the time, instead of Marie; and they've gotten so that they
follow her wherever she goes. Generally, Marie thinks it's a good
thing; and I agree. The dogs are good protection for her. This is
our government building here. Come on in."
He got out of the jeep. I followed him and we went up three
wooden steps and in the front door of the quonset. It was like
stepping into any busy office. Behind a low barrier of wooden
fencing, there were five desks at which three men and two women
were sitting, typing or engaged in other paperwork. File cabinets
occupied one wall and there was a large copying machine in a
corner.
"Where are you getting the power to run all this?" I asked Bill.
For the typewriters were all electric, and the copier looked as if it
had to require at least a 220 volt line.
"We put in a much larger gas generator," said Bill, leading me
through a gate in the wooden fence. "Before fall, we ought to
finish a dam on the river and have a waterpowered generator
that'll take care of all our needs for the next five years."
He led me into a corridor with two doors on each side and
opened the first one on the right briefly.
"Supplies," he said.
I looked in. It was, as he had said, a supply room. Most of the
supplies were clerical; but I saw some stacks of blankets and other
material for household living. A chained and locked gunrack
against the far wall of the room held rifles, and there was a rack of
handguns below it, also chained and locked. I shut the door again
and turned open the door across the way.
"Communications," he said briefly, and led me into a radio
room containing two women, one young and one middle-aged. It

235
was filled with radio equipment that even to my amateur eye
seemed impressive.
"Bebe, Jill," Bill said, "this is Marc Despard."
The two looked up from their panels, smiled and nodded to me.
Bill led me out of the room again.
"Now," said Bill, moving down to knock on the second door on
the left, "this is-"
"Come in," said Marie's voice.
Bill smiled at me and led me in. Marie was seated behind a
large desk in a very businesslike office, with papers in front of her.
She was looking over the papers at a lean, big-boned man who
must have stood about six feet six when he was on his feet. Right
now he was sitting down, dressed in a white shirt and what seemed
to be white duck pants.
"I'll be right with you, Marc," she said, and picked up what was
apparently an interrupted conversation with the man in white.
"What you've got to make them understand, Abe, is that if they
want to draw supplies and cook their own meals, they have to do
it according to our rules. At our convenience, not theirs. I'm not
going to put up with anyone either wasting food or not eating
adequately—any more than I'd put up with their breaking any of
the other laws. That means they submit their menu for the week in
advance to you, you approve it, and then—only then—you author-
ize one of your own people to give them supplies for just exactly
what they've planned to serve. You understand?"
"Sure," said Abe, in a deep slow voice. He had a touch of some
Eastern European accent.
Marie looked away from him over to me again.
"Marc," she said, "this is Abe Budner, our Director of Food
Services and chef for the community kitchen. I'm hoping we can
train people to take the chef's job off his hands before long."
Abe Budner got up as slowly and solemnly as he had spoken,
shook hands with me and sat down again.
"We're just looking around," Bill said.
"Good," said Marie briskly. "Because I really don't have time
to stop and talk now. I can tell you all about this work this eve-
ning, Marc."
We were dismissed. Bill and I left.

236
"And this," said Bill, knocking on the remaining door in the
corridor, "is Ellen's."
We waited, but there was no answer to his knock.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened behind us.
"Something?" said a voice. We turned and I saw what looked
like a boy of about eighteen, wearing dark pants and a khaki shirt
with two brass buttons pinned on the left side of his shirt collar.
"Ellen's out checking the Ryan boundary," this individual said.
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
He looked questioningly at me.
"This is Marc Despard, Doc," said Bill.
"Marc Despard? I'm really glad to meet you, sir," said Doc flus-
teredly and energetically, shaking my hand. "I've looked forward
to meeting you."
"Well, now you have," I said. I was not exactly taken with him.
"Doc is Ellen's second in command," said Bill. "His full name's
Kurt Dockwiler, but we all call him Doc. His militia rank is cap-
tain."
"Oh?" I said.
"I was just going to show Marc Ellen's office," Bill added.
"You bet. Come in," said Doc, stepping past us, throwing open
the door and leading us in. I followed him and Bill brought up the
rear.
I don't know what I had expected; but Ellen's office was simply
a tidy, utilitarian place with the usual filing cabinets, a perfectly
clean desk and a few extra chairs facing the desk as if she had
been holding a conference recently.
"If you'd like to wait," said Doc, "she ought to be back in
about twenty minutes. I can send over to the kitchen for coffee—or
anything else."
"No, I'm just looking around," I said. "I'll see her tonight."
"Of course!" Doc followed Bill and myself back down the cor-
ridor and out through the outer office. "If I can ever be useful in
any way, Mr. Despard, the message center can reach me at any
time."
"I'll remember that," I said getting in the jeep.
Bill started up and we drove off.
"How old is he, anyway?" I said.

237
"I don't know exactly," answered Bill. "Twenty or twenty-one,
I think."
"He looks more like Ellen's age."
"Nothing wrong with that," Bill said.
I looked at him. But his face was perfectly innocent of any par-
ticular expression.
"I'm just surprised there aren't any older men around to hold
down a job like that," I told him. "That's all."
"We've got older men, of course," said Bill. He was heading the
jeep back up into the trees in the direction of the summer palace.
"Most of them have families, or at least somebody, who make
them a bad choice for a high risk occupation. Then again, none of
them have Doc's qualifications."
"Qualifications?"
"His father was career army," Bill said. "He absorbed a lot of
the military art, just by growing up in various bases. That and
other things. He's a black belt in judo and he's taught survival
classes. Also he's a mountain climber."
There was not much to say to that. I sat quiet during most of
the ride back up to the summer palace, and in that time I came
around to feeling that I might have been a little unfair to Doc.
"We'll go see Porniarsk now," Bill said, stopping the jeep once
more at the palace. "I didn't take you to him right away because I
thought either Marie or Ellen might have things they'd want to
show you in their areas; and their schedule is pretty well tied in
with other things. Porniarsk, you can see any time."
I felt a warmth of old affection at the thought of the alien ava-
tar. Porniarsk, with his ugly bull-dog shape and unemotional re-
sponses, was a particularly stable point in my pyrotechnic and
shifting universe. I followed Bill into the palace, thinking with
surprise that, in all the last year and a half, I had not sought out
Porniarsk once and had seen him in total perhaps no more than
half a dozen times.
The room in the summer palace that Bill led me into, eventu-
ally, must have had as much floor space as the quonset hut down
in the village we had just left. It was a rectangular room with floor,
walls and ceiling painted white and a row of windows all down one
side. The other walls were occupied mainly by equipment that had

238
once been in the station. Apparently, Porniarsk had had it all
transported down here.
However, what caught my eye immediately was not this, nor
even the friendly sight of Porniarsk himself, but a box shape with
transparent sides perhaps twenty feet long by six wide and three
deep, almost filled with some greyish-blue substance. When I got
closer, I saw that whatever it was seemed to be a liquid. There was
a noticeable meniscus, and a black tube running over the edge of
one of the sides and down into the box showed the apparent
angular distortion at the surface that a stick does, poked down into
water. Porniarsk had been doing something with the tank; but he
turned and came to meet us as we entered.
"How are you, Marc?" he said as we met, his easy speech at
odds, as always, with the curious mechanical sound of his voice,
and his manner of speaking.
"I'm fine—now," I said. "How've you been?"
"There's been no reason for me to be other than I always am,"
Porniarsk said.
"Of course," I said. "Well, then, how have things been going?"
"I've been getting a few things done," Porniarsk said. "But
nothing with any great success. But then, real progress isn't often
dramatic, being a matter of small steps taken daily that add up to
a total accomplishment over a period of time."
"Yes," I said. I thought of the experience it had taken me a
year and a half to come to terms with. "There's a lot of things I'd
like to talk to you about."
"I'm glad to hear it," said Porniarsk. "On my part, I've been
looking forward to talking to you. I can progress much more rap-
idly if I've got a primary mind to work with; and the only primary
mind we've produced so far is you."
"Only me?" I said. It jarred me slightly to hear it—at the same
time I felt a small ego-pleasure.
"Primary minds can only be developed or uncovered by monad
activity," he said. "All the other minds involved in the gestalt only
resonated and amplified yours, without developing. So I've been
restricted to doing what I can with the resonating minds. In fact,
I've been restricted to the one resonating mind that had no other
duties to occupy it."
He turned his head and nodded ponderously toward a corner. I

239
looked and saw the Old Man, perched on the seat before one of
the consoles taken from the station, the helmet on his head.
"The Alpha Prime," said Porniarsk. "He's been my main sub-
ject. Happily, he seems eager for the experience of being con-
nected with the equipment here. Daytimes, he's generally unavaila-
ble. I understand he's been with you most of the time. But at
night, he often comes here on his own initiative to work with me."
I gazed at the Old Man. He squatted utterly still on the chair
before the console, with a curious assurance—almost as if it was a
throne and he was a king.
"What could you learn from him?" I asked.
"It's not what I can learn from him," said Porniarsk deliber-
ately, "but what I could learn through him. Just as I want to learn
and discover matters through you—though since you're a primary
mind, I'd expect that you'd also learn, and be able to add the
knowledge you personally gain to what I can gain."
He stopped speaking for a second, then started again.
"In fact," he said, "I ought to point out that what I can learn is
limited by the kind of instrument I am, myself—personally. As an
avatar of Porniarsk I've got only so much conceptual range. On
the other hand, Marc, your conceptual range is something I don't
know. It could be less than Porniarsk's—that is to say, mine—or it
might be a great deal greater. It could be limitless, in that you
might be able to go on increasing it, as long as you want to make
the effort to extend its grasp. Which brings me to an important
point."
He stopped again. But this time he did not continue immedi-
ately.
"What point?" asked Bill, finally.
"The point," said Porniarsk in his unvarying accent, "of
whether Marc, after his one experience with the monad, really
wants to explore further into an area where mind becomes reality
and where it's impossible to draw a line where the definitive
change occurs."
"I'll answer that," I said.
It came to me suddenly, that while I'd never really come to
doubt that I wanted to dig deeper into the time storm and every-
thing connected with it, for the last year and a half, I'd been hiding
from the fact that I'd eventually have to get back to that work.

240
"I don't have any reverse gear," I said. "The only way for me
to go is straight ahead. Even standing still doesn't work."
"In that case," said Porniarsk, "you and I have a big job ahead
of us."
"Fine with me," I said.
"I guessed so from the beginning," said Porniarsk. "So, in that
case, maybe we might talk right now about the basic principles in-
volved here, and how you can be involved also."
"Absolutely," I said. I meant every word I said. "This all ties in
with something I want to do—something I'm going to do."
"If you'll forgive me," said Porniarsk, "I felt that about you
from the first time we met. However, it's a lot bigger universe than
you, or the entities of your time, seem to realize. If you were any-
thing else than a rather unusual individual, I'd have to say you're
presumptuous to have the ambition I think you're entertaining."
"I told you I've got something to do," I said. "In any case, we
both want the same thing, don't we? To control this runaway situ-
ation with time?"
"Quite correct. But remember what I said—if you weren't an
unusual individual, I wouldn't be devoting this much energy to
you. Not because I wasn't interested; but because it'd be a waste
of time. By your own standards, Marc, you're arrogant. Partly, this
is simply because you recognize your own ability. Part of it is a
prickliness, what you'd call a chip on the shoulder, because other
people don't see what you see. I can sympathize with this. But it's
still something you'll have to overcome, if you're going to achieve
the full primary identity you'll need."
"We'll see," I said.
I had been looking forward to talking to him. I had a great deal,
I had thought, to tell him. What I most wanted to talk about was
how it could be that, just as it had been back in the days when I
had been playing the stock market, I could almost taste—almost
feel—what it was I wanted to take hold of in the time storm. But
his sudden criticism put me off.
"You said this was some sort of representation of the storm?" I
said, turning to the tank.
"Yes," he answered.
"I don't see anything."

241
"It's not operating right now," said Porniarsk. "But I can turn
it on for you."
He went to a control panel on the far wall and touched several
studs and dials there with the tips of his shoulder tentacles.
"What you'll see," he said, coming back to Bill and me, "isn't
actually a view of the time storm. What it is, is a representation
produced by the same equipment that was in the station. Look
into the tank. Not at it, into it."
I'd already been looking—but now I realized my error. I had
been staring the same way you might stare at a fish tank from en-
tirely outside it. But what this piece of equipment apparently re-
quired—and require it did, for it was evidently already warming
up, and I could feel it drawing my attention psychically the way a
rope might have pulled me physically—was for an observer to put
his point of view completely inside it.
There was nothing remarkable about the first signs of its activa-
tion. All I saw were little flickerings like miniature lightning, or,
even less, like the small jitterings of light that register on the optic
nerves when you close your eyes and press your fingers against the
outside of the eyelids. These small lights will-o-the-wisped here
and there through the blueness of whatever filled the tank; and I
suddenly woke to the fact that what I had taken to be a sort of
blue-grey liquid was not liquid at all. It was something entirely
different, a heavy gas perhaps. Actually, I realized, it had no color
at all. It was any shade the subjective attitude of the viewer
thought it was. For me, now, it had become almost purely black,
the black of lightless space; and I was abruptly, completely lost in
it, as if it was actually the total universe and I stood invisible at
the center of it.
The little flickerings were the forces of the time storm at work.
They had been multiplying to my eye as my point of view moved
their centerpoint; and now they filled the tank in every direction,
their number finite, but so large as to baffle my perception of
them. I understood then that I was watching all the vectors of the
full time storm at work at once; and, as I watched, I began slowly
to sort their movements into patterns.
It was like watching, with the eyes of a Stone Age savage, a
message printing itself on a wall in front of you; and gradually, as
you watched, you acquired the skill of reading and the under-

242
standing of the language in which the message was set down, so
that random marks began to orient themselves into information-
bearing code. So, as I watched, the time storm began to make
sense to me—but too much sense, too large a sense for my mind to
handle. It was as if I could now read the message, but what it told
was of things too vast for my understanding and experience.
Two things, I saw, were happening. Two separate movements
were characteristic of the patterns of the still-expanding storm.
One was a wave-front sort of motion, like the spreading of ripples
created by a stone dropped in a pond, interacting and spreading;
and the other was like the spreading of cracks in some crystalline
matrix. Both these patterns of development were taking place at
the same time and both were complex. The wave-fronts were mul-
tiple and occurring at several levels and intensities. They created
eddies at points along their own line of advance where they en-
countered solid matter, and particularly, when they encountered
gravitational bodies like stars. Earth had had its own eddy, and it
had been only the forces within that eddy that we had been able to
bring into dynamic balance.
The crystalline cracking effect also intensified itself around
gravity wells. It was this effect that threatened the final result of
the storm that Porniarsk had first warned us about—a situation in
which each particle would finally be at timal variance with the par-
ticles surrounding it. The cracking extended and divided the uni-
verse into patterns of greater and greater complexities until all
matter eventually would be reduced to indivisible elements. . . .
So much I saw and understood of what the tank showed. But
in the process of understanding so much, my comprehension
stretched, stretched, and finally broke. I had a brief confused sen-
sation of a universe on fire, whirling about me faster than I could
see . . . and I woke up on the floor of the room, feeling as if I had
just been levelled by an iron bar in the hands of a giant. The
heavy, gargoyle head of Porniarsk hung above me, inches from my
eyes.
"You see why you need to develop yourself?" he asked.
I started to get up.
"Lie still," said the voice of Bill, urgently; and I looked to see
him on the other side of me. "We've got a real doctor, now. I can

243
get him on the radio from the communications room here and
have him up here in twenty minutes—"
"I'm all right," I said.
I finished climbing to my feet. Looking beyond Porniarsk, I saw
a huddled mass of black fur at the base of the console, a helmet
still on its head.
"Hey—the Old Man!" I said, leading the way to him. Porniarsk
and Bill followed.
He was still on the floor by the time I reached him and took the
helmet off; but apparently he, too, was coming out of it. His brown
eyes were open and looked up into mine.
"Yes," said* Porniarsk, "of course. He'll have been in monad
with you just now."
The Old Man was all right. He continued to stare at me for a
second after I took his helmet off; then he got to his feet as if
nothing had happened. I thought that if he really felt as little
jarred as he looked, by what had decked us both, he was made of
stronger stuff than I. My knees were trembling.
"I just want to sit down," I said.
"This way," Bill answered.
He led me out of the room and down a corridor, the Old Man
tagging after us. We came to a solid, heavy-looking door I had
never seen before in the palace. He produced a key, looked at me
for a second with a shyness I'd never seen in him before, then
unlocked the door and pushed it open.
"Come in," he said.
I stepped through, feeling the Old Man crowding close behind
me—and stopped.
The room Bill had opened for us was narrow and long; and one
of its lengthier walls was all windows. They were double windows,
one row above the other so that, in effect, that wall of the room
was almost all glass; and the view through them was breathtaking.
I had seen what was to be seen through them, but not from this
particular viewpoint.
From where I stood in the room, my gaze went out and down
the open slope just below the palace, over the tops of the tree belt
below to a familiar view, the village of the experimentals and the
human town beyond. But then it went further—for the angle of this
room looked out, between a gap in the lower vegetation, to the

244
open land beyond, stretching to the horizon and divided by a road
that had not been there a year and a half ago. Now this road
stretched like a brown line to where earth and sky met, with some
small vehicle on it a mile or so out, moving toward us with its dust
plume, like a squirrel's tail in the air behind it.
"How do you like it?" I heard Bill asking.
"Wonderful!" I said—and meant it.
I turned to talk to him, and for the first time focused in on the
interior of the room itself. There was a rug underfoot and a half a
dozen armchairs—overstuffed armchairs, comfortable armchairs. I
had not realized until now that I had not seen a comfortable piece
of furniture in months. The kind of furniture that we tended to ac-
cumulate was that which was most portable, utilitarian straight
chairs and tables of wood or metal. Those in this room were mas-
sive, opulent things meant for hours of comfortable sitting.
But there was more than furniture here. Most of the available
floorspace was stacked with books and boxes containing books.
All in all, there must have been several thousand of them, stacked
around us. The piles of them stretched between the armchairs and
right up to a massive stone fireplace set in the middle of the wall
opposite the windows. There was no fire in the fireplace at the mo-
ment, but kindling and logs had been laid ready for one. At the far
end of the wall in which the fireplace was set, I saw what the ulti-
mate destination of the books would be, for the first two vertical
floor-to-ceiling shelves of built-in bookcases were completed and
filled with volumes, and framing for the rest of the shelves
stretched toward me what would eventually be four solid walls of
reading matter.
"Sit down," said Bill.
I took one of the armchairs, one that faced the windows, so that
I could gaze at the view. The small vehicle I had seen—a pickup
truck—was now close to the town. Without warning, the music of
The Great Gate of Kiev from Moussorgsky's Pictures At An Ex-
pedition poured forth around me into the room.
"I thought," said Bill from behind me, "that we ought to have
some place just for sitting. . . ."
He was still being shy. The tones of his voice carried half an
apology, half an entreaty to me to like what I saw around me.
"It's really magnificent, Bill," I told him and turning, saw him

245
standing at one end of the windows, looking out himself. "Who's
been building all this for you?"
"I've been doing it myself," he said.
I took a long look at him. I had known he was a good man in
many ways; but I had never thought of him as a carpenter, mason,
or general man of his hands. He looked back at me stiffly.
"I wanted to surprise people," he said. "Only just now you
seemed jolted by what happened, so ... I actually wasn't going
to tell anyone until I had it all finished, the books on the shelves,
and all that."
"Look. This room's the best idea you could have had," I told
him.
I meant it. God knows, if anyone ever loved reading, it was me.
I was no longer looking at the view now, I was looking at the
books, beginning to feel in me a stirring of excitement that I would
not have guessed was still possible. The books were suggesting a
million things to me, calling to me with a million voices. Maybe
only a handful of those voices had anything to tell me about the
things I really needed to know; but the possible smallness of their
number did not matter. It was me against the time storm and I was
humankind; and what was humankind was locked up in those
codes of black marks on white paper that had once filled libraries
all over the earth.
Suddenly, I wanted to know a million things, very strongly.
There was the dry ache in my throat and the fever in my head of
someone athirst and lost in a desert.

I was reading the last paragraph of Joyce's short story "The
Dead" in his collection Dubliners:
"Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part
of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon
the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the
dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every
part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and head-
stones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His
soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end
upon all the living and the dead."
There was something there I told myself, tight with certainty.
There was something there. A certain part of humankind and the
All. A tiny something; but something.
I put down that book and went to find the words of Ernest
Hemingway, in the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms:
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village
that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the
bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in
the sun and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the
channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the
25

248
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of
the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year . . .
Something ... I went looking further.
Hui-Nan Tzu, in the second century before Christ, had written:
"Before Heaven and Earth had taken form all was vague and
amorphous. Therefore it was called the Great Beginning. The
Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the
universe. . . . The combined essences of heaven and earth be-
came the yin and yang . .
Sigmund Freud:
"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-
tamed demons that inhabit the human breast . .
Tennyson, in The Passing of Arthur:
Last, as by some one deathbed after wail
Of suffering silence follows, or thro' death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead hush fell; but when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle, but no man was moving there ....
Einstein, What I Believe:
"It is not enough that you should understand about applied
science in order that your work may increase man's blessings.
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief
interest of all technical endeavors . . . that the creations of our
mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget
this in the midst of your diagrams and equations . . ."
"Do you feel it?" I asked, looking at the Old Man as the two of
us sat alone in Bill's library. "Do you feel it, too, there—
someplace?"
He looked back at me out of his fathomless, savage brown eyes
without answering. He was not my companion in the search for
what I sought. Only a sort of trailer or rider who hoped I would
carry him to the place which would satisfy his own hunger for un-

249
derstanding—that hunger which being part of the monad had
awakened in him. It was his curse not to be quite human—but still
not to be simply a beast, like Sunday, who could love, suffer and
even die, unquestioningly. It was something I could see, like a
heavy load on him; how he knew he was dependent on me. After a
second, he put a long hand lightly on my knee, in a nearly be-
seeching gesture that had become habitual with him lately and
stirred my guts each time he did it.
So we continued; he with me, and I poring over the books in the
library, along with many more Bill had since brought me from the
surrounding territory. What I was after was still undefined, only a
feeling in me of something that must be there, hidden in the vast
warehouse of human philosophy and literature. But I kept finding
clues, bits and pieces of thought that were like gold dust and stray
gems spilled from the caravan of knowledge I tracked.
I had not concerned myself about it during the first few days of
this. But after a week or two, it occurred to me to wonder that no
one, not Marie, or Bill, or even Ellen, had been after me to take
charge of our community, once more. The wonder brought with it
both a touch of annoyance and a sneqjking feeling of relief. I was
bothered that they did not miss my help more; but at the same
time, I felt in my guts that what I was doing was by all measures
more important than being an administrator. So, the summer
colors outside the window dried and brightened to fall ones, then
faded to the drab brown of winter grass and the occasional white
of snow, with only the different hues of evergreen to relieve the
scene; and I came to understand that my presence was required, so
to speak, only on state occasions.
One of these was called Thanksgiving, although for convenience
it was held on the tenth of December and began three weeks of
general celebration that ended with New Year's Day. At Thanks-
giving dinner that year we had as guests in the summer palace the
leaders and chieftains of the surrounding communities Bill had
listed for me.
The leaders themselves were a mixed bunch. Merry Water of
the TvLostChord was in his early twenties, thin, stooped, black,
and intense. He had the look of someone about to fly into a rage at
a word; and in fact, the three wives and five children he brought
with him walked around him, so to speak, on tiptoes. He was the

250
only really young man among the leaders present, and the rest of
his semi-communal group, Bill told me, were about the same age.
Bill Projec was in his late thirties. He claimed to be pure-
blooded Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota;
but he did not have the look of the Sioux I had seen around Min-
nesota, although otherwise he looked undeniably Indian. He had a
face that looked as if he could walk through a steel wall without a
change of expression. Actually, he was almost exclusively a politi-
cal leader for his colony, of whom only a few were also Indian.
Petr Wallinstadt was in his mid-fifties, a tall post of a man with
iron grey hair, large hands and a heavy-boned face. He was a
limited-minded man whose quality of leadership lay in an utter
steadfastness of attitude and purpose. Whatever Wallinstadt said
he would do, he would do, Bill had told me in the briefing he had
given me on the leaders before their arrival, and calling him stub-
bora was a weak way to describe him. Once he had made up his
mind, it was not merely no use to try to argue further with him, he
literally did not hear you if you tried to talk about it.
Old Ryan—otherwise called Gramps—was the patriarch among
the leaders, and the patriarch of his own group as well. He may
have been only a few years older than Wallinstadt, or he may have
been as much as twenty years older. He was white-haired, as wide
as a wall, bright, tricky, domineering, and explosive. He and
Merry Water did not hide their intentions about steering clear of
each other; and there had been bets made in the other communi-
ties for some time now as to when the two would hit head on and
over what. One possible reason why this had been avoided so far
may have been the fact that the young Ryans (anyone in Gramps'
group was labelled a Ryan, whether he or she was one by blood or
not) sneakingly admired the more esoteric freedoms of the TvLost-
Chord people; and there was a good deal of fraternization—and
sororization, to coin a word-going on. Meanwhile, the two leaders
stayed close to home and ran into each other in person only on oc-
casions such as this Thanksgiving bash at our place.
There had been considerable jockeying by the four leaders from
the moment they showed up to see who could get the most of my
attention. Not surprisingly, Old Man Ryan was the clear winner.
He could not monopolize my time, but he could and did get half
again as much of it as anyone else. I found myself with a sneaking

251
liking for the old bastard, a title he came by honestly both in the
ancestral and moral sense and was, if anything, rather proud of.
For one thing, he had both brains and experience; and he was not
the monomaniac that Merry was, the taciturn farmer that Petr
Wallinstadt was and had been before the time storm, or the suspi-
cious chip-on-the-shoulder character that Billy was. Ryan could
talk about many things and did, and his sense of humor was well-
developed, though raunchy to the point of unbelievability.
It was he who brought up the matter of the Empress, after
about a week or so of celebrating. We were standing in the library,
brandy snifters half-full of beer in our hands, looking down the
slope in the late-winter afternoon sunlight to the river, where a
skating party was in progress on the ice that stretched out from the
banks to the black, open water of midchannel.
"What'll you do if she comes?" Ryan asked, without warning, in
the midst of a talk about spring planting.
"Who?" I asked, absently.
My attention and my mind were only partly on the discussion
we had been having about storing root vegetables; and it seemed
to me I had missed something he had said. Actually, I had been
concentrating on the skaters. In the early twilight, some of them
had put on hard hats with miner's lamps attached to them and
these, now lit, were glinting like fireflies in the approach of the
early twilight. The little lights circled and wove figures above the
grey of the ice. Patterns of all kinds had been a fascination to me
from my beginning. It had been the patterns I saw in the move-
ments of the stock market that had been the basis of my success
there. Similarly, with the management of my snowmobile company
and everything else right up to our duel with the time storm, in
which my ability to see the force-patterns was crucial. Now, I was
beginning to make out a pattern in the encircling lights. It was a
fragile, creative pattern, built as it developed, but determined by
the available space of ice, the social patterns of the occasion, and
the affections or dislikes of the individuals involved. I felt that if I
could just study the swirl of lights long enough, I would finally be
able to identify, by his or her movements, each invisible individual
beneath a light source.
"Who?" I asked again.
"Who? The Empress! Beer getting to you, Despard? I said,

252
what'll you do if she comes this way? And she'll be coming, all
right, if she lives that long; because she's out to take over the
world. You've got a pretty good little part-time combat force but
you can't fight three hundred full-time soldier-kids, equipped with
transports, planes, helicopters and all sorts of weapons right up to
fly-in light artillery."
"What'll you do if she comes?" I asked, still not really with
him.
"Christ! Me? I'll wheel and deal with her, of course," he
grunted into his glass, drinking deeply from it. "I know I can't
fight her. But you might be sucker enough to try."
He tickled me. I finally pulled my attention entirely from the
skater patterns on the ice.
"So?" I said, mimicking his own trick of argument. When he
got serious like this, he talked with the explosiveness of a nineteen-
twenties car backfiring. "I better not plan to ask you for help if
I'm crazy enough to take her on, then? That it?"
"Damnright!" He stopped backfiring suddenly, turned full on to
face me, and switched to purring like an asthmatic alley cat. "But
you're smart. You know well as I do how many ways there are to
peel a grape like that. Now, if you'd just let old Gramps do the
talking-for your bunch and mine only—I tell you I can deal with
someone like her. . . ."
"Sure you can," I said. "And with you dealing with her for your
people and mine, all the other groups would be forced into joining
us, in their own self-defense. Which would leave her with the idea
—particularly since you could help it along while you were doing
the dealing—that you were the real power in this area, the man to
settle with; and, like all the rest, I was in your pocket."
"Screw you!" He swung away from me to stare out the window
at the skating party. The cold afternoon was darkening fast; and
his fat profile, against the dimming light, showed panting and
angry. "Let her take your balls then. See if I make you a neigh-
borly offer like that a second time!"
I grinned. He could not help himself. It was simply in him to
push for an advantage as long as he had the strength to do it. If I
ever really needed an alliance with him, I knew he would jump at
the thinnest offer. From what Bill had told me, we would have had

253
very little trouble conquering all our neighbors, including Gramps
and his clan, if we took the notion.
But all this did not alter the facts that the Empress was nothing
to grin about and that the old man had a head on his shoulders. I
sobered.
"What's this about her having three hundred full-time soldiers,
aircraft and artillery?" I asked. "Where'd you hear that?"
"One of my boys came back from the west coast," he said.
"Back from the west coast?" I said. "When did any one of your
people go out there?"
"Ah, it's some time back," he said, taking a drink from his
snifter. He was lying and I knew it, but I couldn't waste half an
hour pinning him down to the truth. "The point is, he was in San
Luis Obispo. There's an old army camp outside that town, and
she's been using it as a training area. All the people in town know
about the planes and the helicopters and the guns. And the sol-
diers come into San Luis Obispo every night to hit the bars.
They've got four actual bars in there."
"She's got half the world to go after down to the top of South
America, and the other half clear up to Alaska," I said. "What
makes you think she'd be coming this way?"
"Don't be a jerk," grunted Ryan. "It's not country you take
over nowadays. It's people. The important places. And this place
is important enough. It's got you here."
Unfortunately, he was right. It had gradually begun to dawn on
me, since I came from living exclusively inside my own skull, how
much I was considered some sort of post-time storm wizard, not
only among the people of our own community, but generally
around the globe. Why they had settled on me and not on Por-
niarsk—or even on Bill, for that matter—puzzled me. Possibly Bill
was not colorful enough to make good myth and legend; and Por-
niarsk could be considered too inhuman to be judged the wizard
rather than the wizard's familiar. But it was a fact that this impres-
sion of me seemed to be spreading all over the world, according to
the shortwave talk we heard, no doubt growing more wild and
hairy the greater its distance from anyone who had ever seen me in
person.
That being the case, it suddenly made sense why the Empress
might mount an expedition in my direction. She could hardly lose.

254
If I was as magical as rumor had it, she would be acquiring a valu-
able sort of Merlin. If I was not, she could still keep me close
under wraps and maintain the legend, threatening people with my
powers, and gaining the sort of credit anyone acquires by owning a
pet sorcerer.
A corner of that situation suddenly opened up into innumerable
corridors of possibilities; and the pattern-seeking portion of my
mind began to gallop along them to map out the territory to my
own advantage.
Ryan was still talking to me.
"What?" I asked.
"Got through to you with that, didn't I?" he said.
"That's right, Gramps," I told him, "you got through to me."
I turned to face him.
"I want to talk to that boy of yours," I said. "I want to hear
him tell me about everything he saw."
"Well, now I don't know
"We can dicker over your price for letting him talk to me later.
Is he here with the people you brought along?"
"No," said Ryan, frowning. "Now, where did he say he was
going? Seems to me he said something about going east this
time . . . ."
But, of course, this was only his way of making sure he gave
nothing away for nothing. I had to promise him I'd send someone
over to do welding for him on a windmill generator he was putting
up—none of his group could weld for sour apples; and then of
course, it turned out that the relative who'd been on the west coast
was out on the ice right now, together with the others we were
watching from the window.
I had the boy in—he was only eighteen—and with Ryan, Bill,
and Ellen standing by, we shook him down for everything he could
remember about the Empress and her armed forces. He was a lit-
tle reticent about why he had gone away to the Pacific coast in the
first place. I got the impression he had had a fight with Gramps
and run off before the old man could have him beaten up by some
of the more loyal sons and daughters of the clan. He kept moving
because he ran into no one who particularly wanted him to stay;
and so he had ended up somewhere around San Bernardino, where
he found work as a wagon-driver (the west coast was short of pe-

255
troleum products, and horse breeding was becoming a way of life).
As a teamster he had eventually driven a load of freight north to
San Luis Obispo and spent a week or so in the town before selling
his freight goods to someone other than the person he was sup-
posed to deliver them to, and cutting and running with the sale
price.
Once safely away from San Luis Obispo, he had decided to
head home. Not only because San Bernardino was now an un-
healthy place for him, but because he thought he could probably
buy his way back into Gramps' favor with the stories he had to
tell, if not with his newly acquired possessions. For he had used
the value of the goods he had stolen to buy himself the best horse,
saddle and rifle he could find. Besides, as he told us, he was more
than a little homesick by that time.
It turned out, however, he did not have that much more of
value to add to what Gramps had already told me, except that his
description of the planes used to transport the Empress' troops
revealed them to me to be VTOL's, vertical-take-off-and-landing
craft. That bit of information explained how the Empress could
plan to airlift her soldiers into potential battlefields around a world
where airports and landing strips were either no longer in existence
or in bad states of repair. With VTOL's, she would be able to land
just about anywhere.
But—there was a joker in the deck at the same time. My mind
went click and put the matter of the petroleum shortages and the
horse breeding together, in a military context. Her aircraft would
need fuel to operate. That meant that to come as far east as we
were, she either had to be sure of finding refueling spots along the
way—the remains of cities with fuel still in storage somewhere—or
carry her fuel along. To carry it along in the aircraft themselves
would leave no room for the troops. It was an equation in supply
that had only one sensible solution. Before she went anywhere, she
would need to send the fuel ahead of her overland, for which
horse-drawn wagons were the only answer. Not only that, but her
soldiers must necessarily hoof it to within a few miles of their ob-
jective. Meanwhile, the pilots of the aircraft would undoubtedly fly
them empty, except perhaps for the Empress herself and her im-
mediate staff, to a rendezvous with the soldiers on foot, when
those were at last within striking distance of their objective.

256
I sent Gramps and his wandering relative away and laid the
matter, as I saw it, before Bill and Ellen.
"What it means," I told them, "is that we've got a cushion of a
few months between the time when she decides to come this way
and when she actually gets here. Not only that, but we ought to be
able to set up some sort of agreement with communities west of us
to warn us when her soldiers and wagons start to come through. Is
there someone around here we could send off to do that for us?"
Bill looked at Ellen.
"There's Doc. He'd be good at it," Bill said, "if you could spare
him for a couple of weeks."
"Doc?" I echoed; and then I saw them looking at me. "All
right, all right I just can't get over how young he is."
That was not the right thing to say. Ellen's face did not change
an inch, but I could feel her reaction.
"Once they get to know him," Bill said, "Doc can command a
lot of respect. And it isn't exactly like taking a stroll in the park,
travelling around like that these days. The number of things that
still might have kept somebody like young Ryan from coming back
alive might surprise you, Marc. With Doc, we'd have the best pos-
sible chance of getting our envoy back."
"All right," I said. It was a time for giving in. "I was just think-
ing how he'd strike other people who'd see him the way I see him.
But you know better than I do. I suppose I ought to get to know
him better myself."
Ellen grinned, a thing she did rarely.
"You'll learn," she said.
I was left with the feeling that while I was forgiven, I had lost
a point to her, nonetheless.
Well, as I told myself after they left, all that was mainly in her,
Bill and Marie's department My department, right now, was
tracking down that something I searched for in the library and in
my own head. I had not been able to do much while the holiday
season was still on, with the guests around; but as soon as all that
nonsense was over, I went back to work.
The search I returned to kept producing the same results as it
had before, only more of them. I kept picking up clues, bits, indi-
cations, tingles—call them what you like. What they all really
added up to was evidence that what I searched for was not just in

257
my imagination. At the same time, they were no more than evi-
dence. I began to lie awake nights, listening to the breathing of the
woman-body beside me, staring at the moon-shadowed ceiling
over the bed and trying to stretch my mind to form an image of
what I was after. But all I could come up with was that whatever
its nature, it was something of a kind with the time storm. Not
akin to the time storm, but something belonging to the same
aspect of the universe.
What I searched for had to deal with the total universe, no mat-
ter what else it did. If nothing else, the track of its footsteps was
undeniably there, like the track of some giant's passing, all through
the thought and creativity of the literary world.
I became avaricious, impatient to close on the quarry I hunted.
My reading speed, which had been fast to begin with, increased
four or five times over. I galloped through books furiously, swal-
lowing their information in huge gulps, making a pile of unread
volumes at the right of my chair in the library every morning,
mentally ripping out the information they contained in chunks,
and dropping the empty to the left of the same chair, in the same
second that I was picking up the next book. As the winter wore on
toward spring, I became like an ogre in a cave—I turned into a
blind Polyphemus, made drunk by Ulysses, bellowing for books,
more books.
Nonetheless, I did not lose myself in this, the way I had lost my-
self after Sunday's death. I continued to dress, shower, shave, and
eat my meals on time. I even pulled myself out of my search now
and then when there was an administrative or social matter that
needed the attention of Marc Despard. But, essentially, the winter
snows and the waking year that took place around me this year
were like some scene painted fresh daily on a wall at which I
barely looked; and it came as a shock to me one morning to look
out on the fields of April and see that the snow was gone and there
was a fuzz of new green everywhere.
I had made a fresh stack of books at the end of the previous day
on the right side of my chair; but the morning I first noticed the
new green of the landscape, I did not reach out, as usual, to pick
up the top volume and start devouring it. For some reason the Old
Man was not keeping me company that day. Lately the sun,
through the wall of windows, had been so warm that I had gotten

258
out of the habit of making the fire in the fireplace. That morning a
curious stillness and peace seemed to hold all the room, piled and
cluttered and jumbled as it now was with the books I had de-
manded and discarded until it looked like a warehouse.
But out beyond the window was warm yellow sunlight; and
where I sat was like a small bubble of timelessness, a moment out
of eternity where anyone could catch his breath, without the mo-
ment wasted being charged against his life. Instead of reading, I
found myself just sitting, looking out down the slope and over the
town and the plain beyond.
I had been reading a great deal of writing on religion in the past
few weeks, on yoga and Zen and all the martial arts, trying to pin
down what the Chinese called Ch'i and the Japanese Ki, and
which was usually translated by the English word "spirit." As I sat
staring out the window, a male cardinal flew down and perched on
a feeding platform for birds which Bill had set up during the win-
ter without my hardly noticing it. I stared at the cardinal; and it
came to me that I had never seen such a beautiful color in my life
as the rich red of his body feathers leading up to the black ones at
his throat. He balanced on the feeder, pecked at some seeds Bill
had put there, then lifted his head and was perfectly still against
the high blue sky of spring.
Something happened.
Without warning, the timeless moment that enclosed me also
reached out through the glass pane of the window to encompass
the cardinal as well. It was not a physical thing happening, it was a
moment of perception on my part—but all the same it was real.
Suddenly I and the cardinal were together. We were the same, we
were identical.
I reached down and picked up not one of the unread books, but
the last volume that had been in my hands the evening before. It
fell open near the beginning, where I had laid it face down, open,
for a minute yesterday; and under the influence of the timeless mo-
ment, the words I had read before stood forward to speak to me
with a voice as large as the world. They were the words of the
opening paragraph of Chapter 2: THE VALUE OF OUR EX-
ISTENCE, in the book Aikido in Daily Life by Koichi Tohei, who
had founded Ki Society International, and who had himself stud-

259
ied under Master Morihei Ueshiba, the founder and creator of the
art of Aikido.
"Our lives are a part of the life of the universal. If we under-
stand that our life came from the universal and that we have come
to exist in this world, we must then ask ourselves why the univer-
sal gave us life. In Japanese we use the phrase suisei-mushi, which
means to be born drunk and to die while still dreaming, to de-
scribe the state of being born without understanding the meaning
of it and to die still not understanding . . .
With that it all came together; not suddenly, but at once, so that
it was as if it had always been together. I had been like someone
born drunk, doomed to die drunk—and now I was sober. The car-
dinal was still on the feeder; the timeless moment still held the li-
brary; but it was as if a strange golden light had come out to flow
over everything. All at once I understood that what I had been
after was not just in the scraps of lines I had read in the books
that had passed so hotly through my hands. It was not the frag-
ments of ideas, the shards of wisdoms I had studied that alone
were precious bits of what I sought; but that everything I had
read, everything I had experienced, the world and all in it—all time
and all space—were what I hunted and needed to grasp. And now I
could grasp it, not by making my hands big enough to cup the uni-
verse in my palms, but by taking hold anywhere, in anything as
small as a moment, a sentence, or the sight of a bird on a feeder.
With that understanding, it seemed to me that the golden light
was suddenly everywhere; and I was abruptly aware of life around
me as far as my mind could stretch to picture it. I could feel the
rapid beating of the heart of the cardinal on the feeder. I could
feel the beating hearts of the experimentals and the humans at the
foot of the slope. I could feel the slow, true life in the firs and the
oaks and the grasses and flowers. I could feel the blind stirring of
the earthworms in the newly warmed earth. My new sensitivity
ranged on and out without limit, beyond the horizon and over the
whole world. I could feel life stirring everywhere, from the shark
cruising the hot tropical seas, to the Weddell seal sun-bathing on
the south Polar ice. The whole globe beat to the rhythms of exist-
ence, and below that beat were the quieter, more massive rhythms
of the inanimate, of the soil, rock, water, wind, and sunlight.
Gravity pulled. The Coriolis force spun, clockwise to the north,

260
counterclockwise to the south. The intermixing patterns of weather
sounded together like the disciplined instruments of an orchestra
rendering a symphony.
I do not remember the golden light leaving and the sensitivity it
had brought me. Just, after a while, it was gone and the cardinal
had vanished from the feeder. I was back to feeling with merely
the ordinary sensitivities of my body and mind; but within those I
felt alive as I never had before. Everything seemed as if seen under
a very bright light, clear and sharp. My mind was racing. I seethed
with energy. I could not wait to put what I had just found to prac-
tical use. I bolted from the chair and went out of the summer pal-
ace by the entrance where the vehicles stood. There was a jeep
sitting in the parking area. I climbed behind its wheel and sent it
bouncing down the slope toward the town. I did not quite know
where or how I was going to take hold of the universe in the new
way of doing so that had just become clear to me; but now it
seemed impossible that I could not find a place and a means.
But oddly, as I got close to the flat ground and the houses, a
strange shyness came over me. I had been down there only briefly
before on half a dozen separate occasions, and each time I had
gone directly to City Hall to see Ellen, Marie, or someone else,
then left again in less than an hour. It came home to me that I
really had never met those who lived in the town; and I was
abruptly as conscious of my stranger status as a grade school child
on a first day at a new school.
I parked the jeep in some bushes that hid it several hundred
yards from the closest of the buildings, got out and went ahead on
foot.
The first building I found myself heading for was a temporary
one with a platform floor, plank walls and a canvas tent roof. To
this was being added a more permanent structure of cement block
walls and gable roof, already shingled. There was no glazing as yet
in the window opening, and outside the door aperture, a white
pickup truck was parked, from which a man in blue jeans and
sweater was carrying in various lengths of lumber.
I reached the pickup while he was still inside and waited by it
until he came out again. He was a lean, black-haired type in his
late twenties or early thirties with a long, straight nose.
"Hi," I said.

261
He glanced at me indifferently.
"Hullo," he said, went to the truck, and began pulling off some
twelve-foot lengths of two by four.
"Can I give you a hand?"
He looked at me again, not quite so indifferently.
"All right," he said. "Thanks."
I went over to the truck as he backed off from it with his two by
fours, picked up several of my own and followed him through into
the building.
There was no light inside except what came through the window
openings, but this was enough to see that the building would be il-
luminated well enough with natural light, even on dark days, once
it was finished. The two by fours were apparently for wall studs,
for he had several partitions already framed up.
I carried my load over to where he was piling his. A cement
floor had been poured, but not professionally finished, and the
footing was both gritty and a little uneven. But it, like the wall
framing and the block laying of the outer shell was good enough
for security and use. We worked together at unloading the truck
for some time without saying anything to each other.
I found myself getting an odd pleasure out of being useful in
this ordinary way. The feeling was above and in addition to the
pleasure of the physical exertion which, once I warmed up to it,
was body-enjoyable, the way such efforts usually are. I was con-
scious of the housebuilder eyeing me as we worked, but that was
as much reaction as he showed until we had finished getting all the
two by fours into the building. I came out from carrying in the last
two lengths of lumber and found him standing, considering what
was left on the truck—mostly nails and odds and ends of hardware.
"What next?" I asked him.
"I forgot to pick up conduit for the wiring," he said, without
looking at me. "Well, let's get the rest of it in. You and I better
take the nail cartons together, one by one. They're heavy."
We pulled a nail carton to the open tailgate, took it each on a
side and carried it in. As we went toward the door opening, he
spoke.
"You're Marc Despard, aren't you?"
"Yes," I said.
He stared hard at me for a second.

262
"No, you're not," he said, as we stepped into the semigloom of
the interior.
"I'm afraid I am."
"You can't be."
"I'm afraid I am."
"Look, he's got a long beard and he's six inches taller than you
are."
We laid the carton of nails down and went out after another.
"I tell you," he said, as we went in carrying the second carton,
"you can't be. I know. I know what Despard looks like."
I grinned. I couldn't help myself.
"So do I," I said.
"Then you admit you aren't him."
"No," I said. "I'm him. What makes you think I've got a beard
and I'm six inches taller?"
"Everybody knows that. Besides, you never come down from
that mountain."
"I do now."
"Shit!"
We carried in the other cartons without words. It occurred to
me suddenly that he might think I had been laughing at him and
that all this was some sort of practical joke on my part. I was
distressed.
"If I don't look like Marc Despard," I asked him, "why'd you
ask me if that's who I was?"
He did not answer me immediately. It was not until we had
made one more delivery inside and were back out in the sunlight
that he spoke again, without looking directly into my face.
"I don't know why you'd want to help me."
"You had this truck here to be unloaded," I said. "It goes faster
with two people than with one."
"There's got to be more to it than that." He stopped dead and
faced me. "What's up? What is it? What's going on? Is there some
kind of law here or something like that I've broken?"
"Man—" I began, and then broke off. "Look, I don't even know
your name."
"Orrin Elscher."
"Orrin—" I held out my hand. "Marc Despard. Glad to meet
you."

263
He stared at my hand as if it had a mousetrap in it, then slowly
put out his own hand and we shook.
"Orrin," I said, "it was just such a fine day I thought I'd come
down, and when I got here I saw you unloading the truck, so I
thought I'd offer you a hand. That's all there is to it."
He said nothing, only took his hand back.
We finished unloading the truck. It was strange, but once upon
a time it would have bothered me that he was bothered. I would
have geared up emotionally in response to his emotions. But now
all I could think of was what a nice day it was and the enjoyment
of using my body to some practical and useful purpose. I was get-
ting the same sort of pleasure from unloading that truck that I
might have gotten from engaging in a favorite sport; and I was
grateful to Orrin Elscher for providing me with the opportunity for
that pleasure. As far as his puzzle about me went, I felt no pres-
sure to explain it. In his own time he would understand; and if
that time never came, it would not make any real difference to the
world. All that really mattered was that his truck was unloaded, he
had been saved some work, and I had enjoyed myself.
I had gotten this far in my thinking when I remembered I had
left the summer palace intending to put my new insight to work;
and here I had forgotten about it completely.
But of course I hadn't. I saw the connection now between the
insight and what I was presently doing. I had set out to take hold
of the universe; and I had done that. There was no such thing as
an unrelated action; and the act of my helping Orrin to unload his
truck connected with the necessary completion of his house, the
development of the whole town, the future of the people here, plus
their effect and interrelation with all the rest of the people in the
world. In fact, it connected with the whole future pattern in a way
I could see building and stretching out until it became part of the
great spider web of interacting forces that contained the time
storm itself. As for me, in enunciating that connection by being
part of it and recognizing it, I had expanded my own awareness
that I needed to stretch before I could take the next step against
the storm.
We finished unloading the truck.
"Well, take care of yourself," I said to Orrin and turned away.

264
I was perhaps five steps from him, headed back toward where I
had hidden the jeep, when I heard him call me.
"Mr. Despard—"
I turned to find him right behind me.
"I—thank you," he said.
"Nothing to thank me for," I answered. "I enjoyed the work-
out. I suppose I'll be seeing you around?"
"Sure," he said—and then, more strongly, added, "Sure. You
will!"
"Good."
I turned and went. I had gotten a good echo from him, like the
unblurred ring of uncracked metal when you tap a bronze vase
with a fingernail. I went back to the jeep, got behind the wheel,
and after a moment's thought headed on into City Hall.
But there was no one around when I got there. Even the typists
were not at their desks. I looked at my watch and saw it was
just after ten in the morning. Coffee break time, perhaps. I went
out, got back in the jeep and headed back up toward the summer
palace, enjoying the bright day, the sight of the buildings and peo-
ple I passed, as if the whole world was something marvelous in-
vented yesterday that I had never seen before.
When I got to the summer palace there were eight vehicles of
various kinds parked in the parking area. As I climbed out of the
jeep, Bill came out of the door with a rush.
"There you are," he said. "We've been looking all over for you.
The Empress is on her way. We just got word."

We were not surprised to see the helicopters ignore the town and
head directly toward the summer palace. There were three of
them, all the size of aircraft I had flown in between airports like
LaGuardia and Kennedy in New York. They could each hold at
least thirty people comfortably.
We stood in the parking area and watched them come—a
baker's dozen of us, including the Old Man and Porniarsk. There
was nothing much else we could do. Our advance warnings from
the communities farther west had earlier confirmed the fact that
Paula Mirador, the Empress, was indeed moving toward us with at
least five hundred armed bodies (about one-third of them women)
plus three .155 millimeter howitzers. She had apparently merely
passed through these other communities, pausing just long enough
to accept their formal submissions on her way. Wisely, no one had
tried to oppose her, and we ourselves were hardly in a position to
do so, even though we were probably the strongest single social
unit between our territory and the Rockies.
According to her usual battle plan, which our scouts had
confirmed, she had the main body of her troops standing off just
over the horizon, with the VTOL transports ready and waiting.
The howitzers were with them, ready to be moved in close to
pound flat any property we owned before the troops followed to
26

266
mop up any still-living defenders. It was a strong military argu-
ment she proposed.
We had not given in to it—yet. Our town was evacuated, except
for a half-dozen fortified positions with .50 caliber machine guns,
hidden among the buildings. These, if they survived the artillery,
could make it something less than a picnic for the troops advanc-
ing on the wreckage. Whether the Empress knew about our ma-
chine guns was a question. She apparently knew a good deal about
us, but possibly not the full extent of our weapons and supplies.
The rest of our noncombatants were scattered, back in the hills,
with a light force to guard them and weapons of their own, as well
as enough food and other basic supplies to last a year. She could
not hunt them all down, even if she wished to spend the time try-
ing. Aside from all this, there were three more heavy machine guns
and gun crews camouflaged and dug in to cover this parking area
from the surrounding rocks and trees—and one other machine gun
nest hidden inside the palace. Even if she were bringing as many
as sixty or eighty soldiers in her helicopters, it would not be a wise
idea for her to simply try and make the thirteen of us prisoners by
head-on force.
But of course all this was beside the point. She did not really
want to waste trained people and ammunition on us, any more
than we wanted to fight a small war with her. She and we were
both lining up our resources face-to-face for a bargaining session.
The helicopters sidled in, looking very dramatic against the blue
sky with its few patches of high clouds, and settled to earth with a
good deal of noise and raised dust.
The doors of the two furthest from us opened, and uniformed
men with rifles and mortars and a couple of light machine guns
jumped out and set up a sort of perimeter, facing the surrounding
country. They did not, however, move too far away from their
planes and seemed to be making the point that they were there to
protect the helicopters and themselves primarily.
After they had settled down, there was a wait of two or three
more minutes, then the door to the helicopter closest to us opened,
the steps were run down, and a dozen men and women in civilian
clothes came out to range themselves like an honor guard in a
double line ending at the foot of the steps.
Another brief wait, and a single figure came out. There was no

267
doubt that this was Paula Mirador, even if the rest of the proceed-
ings had been designed to leave any doubt. I stared, myself. I had
not seen anything like this since before the time storm; nor had
any of us, I was willing to bet. We had grown so used to living and
dressing with practicality and utility in mind that we had forgotten
how people had used to wear clothes, and what sort of clothes they
might wear.
Paula Mirador was a page out of some ghostly fashion maga-
zine, from her dainty, high-heeled, cream-colored boots to an elab-
orately casual coiffure. She looked like she had just walked out of
a beauty shop. In between was a tall, slim woman who only missed
being very beautiful by virtue of a nose that was a little short and
a little sharp. -Besides the boots and the warm brown hair of her
coiffure, she wore a carefully tailored white pants suit over an
open-throated polka-dotted blouse, with the wide collar of the
blouse lying over the collar of the suit. A grey suede shoulderbag
with an elaborately worked silver clasp hung from one shoulder.
She took my breath away—and not by virtue of her band-box
perfection alone. Her hair was not that blonde, her face was not
that perfect, but something about her rang an echo of Swannee in
my mind.
She walked down the steps, not looking at us yokels, and gazed
around at the general scenery, then said something to one of her
civies-dressed attendants, who popped to and turned away to peel
off an escort of eight armed troopers to come toward us.
Once upon a time, I would have credited the attendant with a
prior knowledge of what I looked like, seeing him come directly
towards me, alone. Lately, however, I had begun to realize how
much the way in which human beings instinctively position them-
selves gives out signals. The group pattern of those standing
around me amounted to a sign with an arrow pointing to me and
the words here is our leader.
At any rate, the envoy, a round-faced young man in his mid-
twenties, who looked something like a taller version of Bill, came
up within a dozen feet of me and stopped. His troopers stopped
with him.
"Mr. Despard?" he said. "You are Mr. Despard, aren't you, sir?
I'm Yneho Johnson. The Empress would like to speak to you. Will
you follow me, please?"

268
I did not move.
"That makes two of us," I said. "I'd like to talk to her. I'd like
to know what the hell she's doing here on my property without my
invitation. I'll wait here five minutes. If she hasn't come personally
to explain by that time, I'll blow the whole batch of you apart.
You're parked on top of enough buried industrial dynamite to
leave nothing but dust."
He blinked. Whether because of my tone and attitude, or be-
cause of the information about the dynamite, was hard to tell.
Probably both. The dynamite, of course, was a bluff. It would
have taken twenty truckloads of that explosive to mine the whole
parking area even sparsely. But there was no way he and the rest
of Paula's party could be sure we did not have that much; and in
any case, I had nothing to lose by bluffing since they outgunned us
anyway.
He hesitated. I turned away.
"Bill," I said, "see he doesn't waste time."
I walked back a few steps toward the palace, hearing Bill's
voice behind me.
"You've lost fifteen seconds already," Bill was saying. "Do you
want to try for more?"
I turned around and saw Johnson, with his escort, retreating at
a fair pace toward his mistress. He rejoined her and spoke animat-
edly. She, on the other hand, as far as we could tell from this dis-
tance, was the picture of cool indifference. She waved a hand
gracefully on the end of one slim wrist, and he came back to us
with his bodyguards.
"Mr. Despard," he said. "The Empress warns you. If you're
bluffing, you'll be shot down by our escort troops as soon as the
five minutes are up. If you're not bluffing, whether you kill us or
not, her troops, who love her, will catch you and roast you over a
slow fire. She, herself, never bluffs."
I turned toward Doc.
"Doc," I said, "shoot him."
Doc unslung the machine pistol he had hanging from his right
shoulder.
"Stop. Stop—" shouted Yneho Johnson. "Don't! Wait a minute.
I'll be right back."

269
"Just under two minutes left," I reminded him, and watched
him gallop back across to his Empress.
They were still talking a minute later.
"Four minutes up," said Bill, behind me.
"Let it get down to thirty seconds," I told him.
We waited.
"Coming up on four and a half minutes," Bill said.
I stepped out in front of the others and made an elaborate show
of looking at my watch.
"Now," I said to Bill, under my breath.
He had a small detonator switch in his pocket, with a wire run-
ning from it back into the palace and from there out again to a
spot in the parking area near its west edge. He reached into the
pocket, pressed the detonator button; and a fountain of dirt ex-
ploded very satisfactorily to about thirty feet in the air, thereby
cleaning us out of dynamite almost completely—and not industrial
dynamite at that, but the sort of explosive that used to be available
in hardware stores in mining areas. I made a large show of looking
at my watch again.
"Maybe they won't realize it's a warning," said Marie, tightly.
"They'll realize," Ellen said.
They had. The Empress was at last on the move toward me—not
by herself, but with her whole entourage surrounding her. Men-
tally, I docked her a couple of points for not coming sooner. It
should have been obvious to her that if there was one patch of
ground in the parking area not likely to be mined, it would be the
space where I and my own people were standing. She came on
until her group merged with mine, and she walked up to stand face
to face with me, smiling.
"Marc," she said, "you and I have to have a private talk."
"I can talk out here," I said.
"You probably can." She was very pleasant. "I find it works
better for me if I don't take my own staff into my confidence ex-
clusively. But don't you think we could both be a little more
relaxed and free if it was just the two of us chatting?"
It was not an unreasonable argument; and I had already made
my point—which was that I was not about to make any deal be-
hind the back of my associates. I could afford to give in gracefully.
"All right. Come inside," I said.

270
I took her into the palace. On the still air indoors, I could catch
a hint of perfume about her that had not been noticeable outside. I
was suddenly very conscious of her physically—both of her female
presence and her bandbox costuming. The ghost of Swannee
moved momentarily between us, once more. On impulse I took her
to the library, cleared the books off one of the other chairs for her,
and we sat down facing each other.
"You must have somebody around who cares about preserving
information," she said, looking about the room.
"Yes," I said. "What did you want to talk about?"
She crossed one leg over the other.
"I need your help, Marc."
"You could have written me a letter, Paula."
She laughed.
"Of course—if it'd just been a matter of you and me. But I'm
the Empress and you're Marc Despard, the man who controls the
time storm. When two people like us get together, it has to be a
state visit."
"Aside from the fact that I don't begin to control the time
storm," I said, "what about this state visit of yours? A state visit
with an army and three howitzers?"
"Don't pretend to be something other than the intelligent man I
know you are," she answered. "All this show of force is an excuse
for you, Marc—an excuse for you to agree to work with me be-
cause that's the only way you can keep the people you have
around you now from being hurt."
"I'm that valuable?"
"I said, don't pretend to be less bright than you are. Of course
you're that valuable."
"All right. But why should I take advantage of your excuse?
Why should I want to work with you, in any case?"
"Wouldn't you rather have the resources of the whole world at
your fingertips, than just what you can reach here, locally?"
"I don't need any more than I have here," I said.
She leaned forward. There was an intensity, a vibrancy about
her that was very real, unique. She had to know I knew she was
using it deliberately to influence me.
"Marc, this world still has got a lot of people in it who need
putting back together into a single working community. Don't tell

271
me you don't want to have a hand in that. You're a natural leader.
That's obvious, aside from the time storm and what you've done
with it. Can you really tell me you'd turn your back on the chance
to set the world right?"
She either had a touch of the occult about her, or she was capa-
ble of reading patterns from behavior almost as accurately as I
might have myself. My deep drive to defeat the time storm reached
out with its left hand to touch the basic human hunger to conquer
and rule. Mentally, I gave her back the two points I had docked
her earlier—and a couple more besides. But I did not answer her
right away; like a good salesman, she knew when to close.
"Say you'll at least talk it over with me in the next few days,"
she added.
"I suppose I can do that," I told her.
So it turned out that her appearance became a state visit in real-
ity. The main body of her troops and the howitzers stayed out of
sight over the horizon, although none of us, including me, ever for-
got they were there; and she, with her immediate official family,
slipped into the role of guests, as old Ryan and the others had
been over the Thanksgiving holidays.
She was a good deal more entertaining than my neighbors had
been, and much more persuasive. She had a mind like a skinning
knife. But the most effective argument she brought to bear on me
in the next five days was the pretense that she was putting her mil-
itary strength aside and trying to convince me by argument alone.
I knew better, of course. As I just said, none of us could forget
those troops and the artillery just beyond field glass range. But her
refusal to bring her military muscle directly into the discussion
left me to argue silently with my own conscience over whether it
was not just personal pride or stubbornness on my part that made
me so willing to expose my wives and friends to death or maiming
rather than join forces with her.
She had another lever to use on me, although at the time I did
not rate its effectiveness with that of the argument-only ploy. She
was reputed to have the kind of legendary sexiness that made her
troops dream of her at night and consider all other women as wa-
tered-down substitutes; but I got no such signals from her at all.
Except for the odd moments in which she reminded me of Swan-
nee, she was good company and interesting, that was all. At the

272
same time, by contrast, she did seem to make Marie look limited
and unworldly, and Ellen juvenile.
Of course, she and I had very little time out of each other's
company. We were the two heads of state and if she was to be en-
tertained by us, I usually had to be on stage myself. The time I
had with my own people was what was left over, usually either the
early hours in the morning, before Paula had put in an appearance
from the several rooms—suite was too pretentious a word for them
—we had turned over to her and her several personal attendants—
or late at night after she had tired out.
It was a situation that put both Ellen and Marie, particularly, at
some distance from Paula and myself, but perhaps this was not a
bad arrangement. It developed that neither of them liked her or
saw anything but serious trouble coming from any extended asso-
ciation with her.
"She really doesn't like you, either, you know," Marie told me,
the evening of the third day Paula had spent with us. "She doesn't
like anyone."
"She can't afford to," I said. "She's a ruler. She's got to keep
her head clear of likes and dislikes for individuals so she can make
her decisions strictly on the basis of whether something is a good
thing for her people, or not."
"A good thing for her or not, you mean," said Marie.
That was unusually outspoken for Marie. But the more I
thought over what I had said to her, the more I liked the ring of
my own words. I went to Ellen's room and tried the same speech
on her.
Ellen snorted.
"Is that supposed to be an answer?" I said. "All rigjit, tell me.
Exactly what is it that's wrong with Paula?"
"Nothing's wrong with her," said Ellen.
"Well, you must think something's wrong or you wouldn't be
acting this way. What is it?"
"You."
"Me?"
"You want to be a damn fool, go ahead and be one."
I lost my temper.
"How can I be a damn fool? I've got to find some way to deal

273
with her and do it with gloves on. She can wipe us all off the map
if I don't!"
Ellen got up out of bed, put on her clothes and went for a walk
—at three in the morning. Nobody but she could have done some-
thing like that with such finality and emphasis. Her back was an
exclamation mark going out the door.
Bill did not like her either. Neither did Doc. For that matter,
neither did the Old Man, who always disappeared when Paula
came on the scene. I began to feel like the tragic hero in a Greek
play with the chorus in unison warning me of disaster at every
step. I did not mention any of this to Paula; but she evidently
sensed some of it at least, because along about the end of the week
she got off on a subject that was particularly timely in view of the
situation.
". . . It is a lonely life," she said, apropos of something I had
said. We were taking a stroll through the woods below the summer
palace early in the morning. "Rank does more than isolate you
socially. Do you realize, Marc, you're essentially the only person
in the world I can talk to on the level, so to speak? With everyone
else, I have to remember I'm the Empress. But it's not even that so
much as having to put myself in the balance sometimes against ev-
eryone around me when it comes to making decisions. Every so
often, all the advice I get is one-sided; and sometimes I have to
brace myself to turn it all down and go just the opposite way, be-
cause when it gets down to it I have to trust my own decision more
than all of theirs or else I'm not a fit ruler."
"I know what you mean," I said.
"Sure you do." She glanced at me for a moment, then looked
ahead the way we were walking. "You can't take on responsibility
without taking on everything else that goes with it."
She stopped and turned to face me. I stopped also, necessarily,
and turned toward her.
"That's why it would mean so much to have you with me,
Marc," she said. "I know you've got your own work with the time
storm. I've only just begun to realize these last few days how im-
portant that is. But what you're needed more for, now, is to help
me unify this torn-up Earth we've got and put it on a single, work-
ing community basis. That's your higher responsibility, at the mo-
ment"

274
"And if I'm not with you, I'm against you?"
"Oh, Marc!" she said, sadly. "I'm not a monster."
I felt slightly ashamed of myself. It was a fact that, so far, I had
seen nothing in her that was not reasonable to the point of being
admirable. The only evidence I had ever had that contradicted this
was contained in the large body of rumor about her; and I had
some experience with rumors, having heard some of the ones that
circulated about me.
"Well," I said, "how much time are you asking me to invest?"
"A couple of years at the most." She looked sideways at me as
we walked. "Certainly no more than that."
"You think you can take over the world in two years? That's
better than Alexander's record, and he was only thinking about
the Asian continent."
"There aren't that many people nowadays. You know that as
well as I do," she said. "And it's a matter of contacting just the
large population centers. Once those are organized, the small com-
munities in each area and the individuals will want to adjust to the
situation on their own."
"Two years ..." I said. All at once, it seemed like a long time
away from here, away from the library and Porniarsk's workroom.
"Look," she said, stopping again. Once more we faced each
other and, for the first time since I had known her, she touched
me, putting a hand lightly on my arm. "Let's forget about it for
today. Why don't we do something different? You let me entertain
you for a change."
"How?"
"We'll fly to my base camp and have lunch there. You can see
for yourself what my regular soldiers are like and why I think it
won't take even two years to bring order to the world."
"I don't know," I said. "The others may worry. . . ."
"Even if they do, it'll do them good," she said. "When they see
you coming back safe and sound after going off alone with me,
they'll understand I'm no one to be afraid of."
"All right."
We went back up to the palace. I did not quite feel like telling
Ellen or Marie I was taking a solo jaunt into Paula's armed camp,
so I looked for Bill or Doc. Doc was the one I found first; and he

275
took the idea of my going calmly enough. In fact, it seemed to me
his eyes even lit up a bit at the idea.
"Want me to come?" he asked.
"It's not necessary—" I checked myself. "Come to think of it,
why not? You may be able to see some things there I won't."
I sent him to tell Bill we were both going and went back to ex-
plain to Paula that there would be two of us, feeling somewhat
smug with the notion that I had taken some of the force out of the
objections the others would have to my going entirely alone.
"Of course, bring him," said Paula graciously, when I men-
tioned that I couldn't come after all, unless I had someone like
Doc along with me. It had occurred to me that, just as I had, she
might be underestimating Doc because of his youth. I had learned
better during the past few months; but if she was making the same
initial error, it could do us no harm and might turn out to our
advantage. On the helicopter ride to her camp, accordingly, I
watched her closely for any sign that this was the case, but saw no
clear signals either way. She was friendly but a little condescending
to him, which could mean that she did not, in fact, recognize his
worth, or simply that she lumped him in with all those human bod-
ies she looked down on from her status as Empress.
The camp, when we got there, was impressive enough. Paula's
soldiers might or might not love her, as rumor had it, but they
were well-uniformed, well-armed, and under good discipline. Their
field tents were pitched in a hollow square with Paula's clump of
larger tents at the center, so that these were protected on all sides.
The helicopter that brought us put us down in the open space out-
side this interior clump of tents and within the camp area. If Paula
had been intending to make me prisoner once she had me here,
she would have had no difficulty once we had landed. There were
armed guards ten deep around me in all directions.
But as it was, our visit was nothing but pleasant. Paula evi-
dently travelled with a full complement of personal servants—I es-
timated at least two full helicopter-loads worth, which meant that
she might not have needed to be so saving of fuel as I had guessed
—including a number of younger women, none of them quite as
good-looking as she was, but close enough. These were dressed as
unpractically as she was, with an eye to appearance rather than
practicality; and this puzzled me until I began to realize that their

276
primary job, or at least their highly important secondary job, was
to act as ornaments and geishas. They were all over Doc and me
while we were having cocktails before lunch, and they both served
and joined us at the meal itself.
I did not at all mind being fussed over by these attendants; and
I could all but see Doc's ears wiggling. I say, I could all tout see his
ears wiggling. What I saw, of course, was that they did not wiggle
at all, and he was so poker-faced and determinedly indifferent to
the attentions he was getting that it was almost painful to watch.
Being a little more case-hardened by years than Doc, I had a
corner of my mind free to note that it was a shrewd move of
Paula's to provide herself with such courtiers. Not only did they
act as a setting to show her off and emphasize her authority, they
added an extra level between her and ordinary female humanity.
Perhaps her troops did worship her, after all, seeing her set off this
way, in the same way that they might worship a god or a demigod.
After lunch, Paula called in the commander of her soldiers, a
small, lean, grey-haired man named Aruba with three stars on
each shoulder strap of his impeccable uniform. General Aruba and
Paula together took us out to look over the camp and observe her
troops. Those in uniform were all young. I saw some boys and
girls I could swear were no more than fourteen or fifteen years old.
They were all cheerful, bright-looking and had the air of individ-
uals aware of themselves as members of an elite group. There was
a curious uniformity among them, too, which puzzled me for a
while before I realized that I saw no tall bodies among them, ei-
ther female or male. Like the general, they were short, and most
tended to a squareness of body.
Aside from their size, though, they were impressive. They were
apparently spending their time in active training while awaiting the
results of Paula's negotiations with us. They had set up an obstacle
course outside their camp, and we watched as some thirty or forty
of them ran through it, looking like trained athletes. They were, as
Gramps Ryan had hinted, a far cry from my part-time militia.
After the inspection tour, we stepped into Paula's largest tent
once more for drinks and then were flown back to the summer pal-
ace. I was itching to know what Doc's reaction was to everything
we had seen; but I was back in host position again and could not
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277
my staff. So it was nine that night before I had a chance to get to-
gether with him and the others. We held a staff meeting down in
the City Hall, safely away from the summer palace and the view or
hearing of any of Paula's attendants.
"Well," I said to Doc, when we were at last gathered over the
coffee cups in Ellen's office—he and I, Ellen, Marie, and Bill—
"how about it? What did you think of those soldiers of hers?"
"Well," Doc scratched his right ear, "they're in good shape
physically. They're well-trained. They're young and bouncy and
they've learned to obey orders. I'd guess they know their jobs—"
"Tough as we've heard they are, then," said Ellen.
"Maybe," said Doc.
"Why maybe?" I demanded.
"Well," said Doc, "they're not veterans. My dad and the other
officers used to talk a lot about that; and it was a fact. I mean, I
could see it too. The ones who'd actually been shot at somewhere
along the line knew what it was like; but there was no way the
ones who hadn't been shot at could know what it was like. My
dad and the others used to say there was no telling what a man
who hadn't been shot at was going to do the first time he was."
"What makes you so sure the ones we saw haven't been shot
at?" Bill asked.
Doc shrugged.
"They just look like they haven't. I mean, it shows."
"How?" I said. "For example?"
"Well . . ." he frowned into his coffee cup for a second, then
looked back at me. "They're too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Too gung ho. You understand? If they were veterans, they
wouldn't be wasting energy except when they had to. For example,
when they were off duty, you'd see them off their feet, sitting or
lying down somewhere. That sort of thing."
We thought about it for a moment.
"You try to remember," Doc said, "when it was you last heard
of the Empress actually fighting anyone. Maybe on the Islands,
where she started, there was some fighting. But ever since she
landed on the west coast, it seems she just shows up with all those
guns and whoever she's dealing with surrenders."
"Then you think we might have a chance, fighting her?" Bill
asked. "Is that it?"

278
"We might have a chance," Doc said. "One thing for sure, the
people we've got carrying guns are going to use them and keep on
using them when the fighting starts."
There was another short silence, full of thought.
"I don't like it," said Marie finally. "There's still too many of
them compared to us."
"I think so too," I said. "Even if we were sure of winning, I
don't want our town wrecked and even one of our people killed.
Now, Paula's been after me to join her for the next year or two
while she brings the rest of the world under control—"
They all started to talk at once.
"All right, now just hang on there for a moment!" I told them.
"If I do decide to go with her, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm
going to stay for two years, or even one year. But if that's the best
way, or the only way, to get her to leave everybody else alone
here, then my spending some time with her is a cheap way to buy
her off."
"But what sort of a place will this be without you?" said Marie
fiercely.
"Come on, now," I said. "The rest of you run everything here.
All Tve been doing is sitting around and reading books. You can
spare me, all right."
"Marc," said Bill, "you aren't needed here because you've got
duties. You're needed here because you're the pivot point of the
whole settlement."
"Let him go," said Ellen. "It's what he wants to do."
Bill looked at her quickly.
"You don't mean that."
"All right, I don't," said Ellen. "But it gripes me."
She folded her arms and looked hard-eyed at me.
"And what about the time storm?" Bill said to me. "How can
you keep on working toward a way to do something permanent
about that, if you go off with Paula? What if the balance of tempo-
ral forces we set up breaks down sometime in the time you're
gone? What if it breaks down tomorrow?"
"If it breaks down tomorrow, I can't do a thing more about it
but try to reestablish the balance again, the way I did the first
time."
"You can't do that if you're not here," Marie said.

279
"Don't talk nonsense, Marie," I said to her. "Paula needs a sta-
ble Earth as much as we do. She'd send me back in a hurry to re-
establish a balance of forces if that balance broke down and mist-
walls started moving again."
"It might not be so easy to reestablish next time, Porniarsk
says," Bill put in. "What about that?"
"If it's not as easy, it's not as easy," I told them all. "I tell you
I'm not yet ready to take on the time storm again to produce any
more permanent state of balance than I did before."
For a second, nobody said anything. The silence was as prickly
as a fistful of needles.
"Anyway," said Ellen, "have you checked with Porniarsk? You
owe him that much before you do anything like going off."
As a matter of fact, I had completely forgotten about Porniarsk.
The avatar was never concerned or consulted in any of our purely
human councils about community matters; and as a result, I had
fallen out of the habit of thinking about him when decisions like
this were to be made. Ellen was quite right. I could not do any-
thing with the time storm if I lost the help of Porniarsk. If I simply
went off with Paula and he should think I'd given up on the
storm. . . .
"I haven't checked with him yet," I said. "Of course I will. I'll
go talk to him now. I suppose he's in the lab?"
"I think so," said Bill.
"Yes, he is," said Ellen. "I was just in there."
That bit of information caught at my attention. As far back as I
could remember, Ellen had never paid any particular attention to
Porniarsk. I went out and down the corridors toward the lab. On
the way, I passed the little interior courtyard where Sunday lay
preserved; and on impulse I checked, turned, and went in to look
at him.
I had not come to see him in months. It had been a painful thing
even to think of him for a long time; and while now the pain was
understood and largely gone, the habit of avoidance was still
strong in me. But at this moment, there was a feeling in me almost
as if I should let the crazy cat know that I was going—as if he was
still alive and would worry when I did not come back immediately.
The roofless courtyard was dark, except for starglow, when I
stepped into it, and cold with the spring night. I closed the door by

280
which I had come out and reached out to thumb on the light switch
controlling the floodlights around the walls. Suddenly the court-
yard was illuminated so brightly it hurt my eyes; there, to my
right, was the transparent box in which Sunday lay.
It was like a rectangular fish tank a little longer than the leopard
and perhaps three feet deep, set up on a wooden support about
coffee table height and dimensions. Within, it held that same fluid-
looking stuff that filled Porniarsk's universe viewing tank and
which he had given me to understand was actually something like
an altered state of space—if you could picture nothingness as hav-
ing variable states. At any rate, what he told me it did was to hold
Sunday's body in a condition outside of the movement of time, any
time. As a result, his body was even now in exactly the same con-
dition it had been in less than two hours after his death, when Por-
niarsk had surrounded it with a jury-rigged version of this non-
temporal space tank.
Nearly two hours, of course, was far too long for him to have
been dead if we had been hoping for any sort of biological revival.
If it had been possible to mend his wounds and start his life
processes in the present state of his dead body, there would have
been nothing to bring to life. His brain cells had died within min-
utes without oxygen, and the information contained in them was
lost. A body in perpetual coma would have been all we could have
achieved.
But what Porniarsk had hopes of was something entirely
different. It was his expectation that, if we could learn to control
the time storm even a little, we might be able to either acquire the
knowledge directly, or contact others farther up the temporal line
who had it, so that we could return the temporal moment of Sun-
day's body back to a few seconds before he had been wounded. It
was a far-fetched hope and one that I, myself, had never really
been able to hold. But if Porniarsk could believe in it, I was
willing to go along with him as far as his faith could take us.
Perhaps at that, I thought to myself as I stood looking at Sun-
day's silent form lying there with its eyes closed and its wounds
hidden under bandages, I had indeed had some secret and sneak-
ing hope of my own, after all. I needed to hope. Because Sunday
was still there in my mind like a chunk of jagged ice that would
not melt. He represented unfinished business on my part. He had

281
died before I could show him that I appreciated what he had given
me—and the fact that the gift was an unthinking animal's one did
nothing to lessen the obligation. What I owed to the others, to
Ellen, to Marie perhaps, and Bill—or even to Porniarsk himself—I
still had time to pay, because they were still alive and around. But
the invoice for Sunday's love, and his death, which had come
about because he had rushed to rescue and protect me, still hung
pinned to the wall of my soul with the dagger of my late-born con-
science.
No—it was not because of how he had died that I was in debt to
him, I thought now, watching his motionless body in the flood-
lights. It was what he had done for me while he was alive. He
had cracked open the hard shell that cased my emotions, so that
now I walked through the world feeling things whether I wanted to
or not; which was sometimes painful, but which was also a part of
living. No, regardless of what happened with Paula, I could never
be diverted permanently from work with the time storm, if only for
my hope of seeing Sunday alive again, so that I could let him
know how I felt about him.
I turned off the lights. Suddenly, in the dark and the starlight, I
began to shiver, great shuddering, racking shivers. I had become
chilled, standing there in the raw spring night in my shirtsleeves. I
went back to the warmth inside and down the hall a little farther
to Porniarsk's lab.
He was there when I stepped through its door and the Old Man
was with him, squatting silently against one of the walls and
watching, as the avatar stood gazing into the universe tank. They
both turned to me as I came toward them.
"I thought I'd drop by," I said; and the social words sounded
foolish in this working room, spoken to the alien avatar and the
experimental, near-human animal. I hurried to say something
more to cover up the fatuous sound of it. "Have you found out
anything new?"
"I've made no great gain in knowledge or perception," Por-
niarsk said, quite as if I had last spoken to him only an hour or
two before, instead of something like months since.
"Do you think you will?" I said.
"I have doubts I will," he said. "I'm self-limited by what I am,
as this one here—" he pointed to the Old Man, who turned to gaze

282
at him for a second before looking back at me, "is self-limited by
what he is. Porniarsk himself might do a great deal more. Or you
might."
"You're sure there's no hope of getting Porniarsk here?" I
asked. I had asked that before; but I could not help trying it again,
iii the hope that this time the answer would be different.
"I'm sure. There's a chance of something large being accom-
plished here. But there's a certainty of something not so large, but
nonetheless important, being accomplished where Porniarsk is
now. He will never leave that certainty for this possibility."
"And you can't tell me where he is, even?"
"Not," said the avatar, "in terms that would make any sense to
you."
"What if things change? Could you then?"
"If things change, anything is possible."
"Yes," I said. I was suddenly very aware that we were at the
end of a long and full day. I would have sat down just then if there
had been a chair nearby; but since neither Porniarsk nor the Old
Man used chairs, the nearest one at the moment was at a far end
of the room, and it was not worth my going and bringing it back.
"I haven't been getting anywhere myself, I'm afraid," I said—
and immediately, having said it, remembered that this was not
quite true. I hesitated, wondering if my experience of several days
past with the cardinal that had come to perch on the bird feeder,
and all that had followed, would mean anything to the avatar.
"Well, there has been something."
He waited. The Old Man waited. If they had been two humans,
at least one of them would have asked me what that something
had been.
"I've been doing a lot of reading for some time now ..." I
went on after a moment; and I proceeded to tell Porniarsk how the
Old Man had cracked me loose from the mental fog I'd been in
ever since Sunday's death, and how I had started on my search
through everything 1 could lay my hands on between book covers.
I had never told him this before; and, hearing the words coming
from my mouth now, I found myself wondering why I had not.
Porniarsk listened in silence, and the Old Man also listened.
How much the Old Man comprehended I had no way of telling.
He certainly understood a fair amount of what we humans said to

283
each other, apparently being limited, not so much by vocabulary,
as by what was within his conceptual abilities. Certainly he knew I
was talking about him part of the time, and almost certainly, he
must have understood when I was talking about that moment on
the mountainside when I was ready to kill him and the touch of
his hand stopped me.
Porniarsk let me go through the whole thing, right down to the
description of the golden light and my helping Orrin Elscher
unload his pickup truck. When I was finally done, I waited for him
to say something, but still he did not.
"Well," I said, at last. "What do you think? Did I really break
through to something, or didn't I?"
"I've no way to answer that question," Porniarsk said. "Any
discovery can be valuable. Whether it's valuable in the way we
need it to be, valuable toward learning how to control the time
storm, I've no way of knowing. Basically, I'd say that anything
that expands your awareness would have to be useful."
I found myself less than happy with him. It had been a great
thing to me, that episode with the cardinal and the golden light
and the passage with Elscher; and the avatar's treating it so calmly
rubbed me the wrong way. I was on the edge of snapping at him;
then it came to me that I was having one of the suspect emotions
—anger.
So—why was I angry? I asked myself that, and the answer came
back quickly and clearly. I was angry because I had been expecting
to be patted on the back. Subconsciously, I had been cooking in
the back of my head all this time a neat little argument for him, to
the effect that I had made this large step forward, working on my
own; so going off with Paula would not waste any time, since I
could continue working toward more large steps while I was away.
But now Porniarsk had shot the whole scheme down by not show-
ing the proper astonishment and awe at my accomplishment; and I
was left without the necessary springboard for my argument.
All right. So it was a case of going back and starting over again
—with honesty this time.
"We're up against a situation," I said. "I may have to leave
here for a time. I don't know how long."
"Leave?" Porniarsk asked.
I told him about Paula.

284
"You see?" I said, when I was done. 'The only safe way for the
people here—and for that matter, for what you have in this room
and any work with the time storm—is for me to go along with her,
for a while anyway. But it's temporary. I'll only be gone for a
while. I want you to know that."
"I can understand your intentions," said Porniarsk. "Can I ask
if you've weighed the importance of what you want to protect
here against the importance of what you may be able to do eventu-
ally in combatting the time storm? If nothing else, an accident
could destroy you while you're away from here."
"Accident could destroy me here."
"It's much less likely to do so here, however; isn't that so? With
this Paula, you'll be moving into an area of higher physical risk?"
"Yes, I guess so," I said. "No. No guess about it. You're right,
of course."
"Then perhaps you shouldn't go."
"God help me, Porniarsk!" I said. "I've got to! Don't you un-
derstand? We can't fight her and survive. And we've got to survive
first and get our work with the time storm done after, because
there's no way to do it the other way around."
"You're sure we couldn't survive if you stayed?"
"As sure as I am of anything."
He stood, the heavy mask of his features facing me silently for a
second.
"Do one thing, please," he said. "It's been some time since you
looked into the viewer here. Will you look again now, and tell me
if there's any difference in what you see?"
"Of course," I told him.
I stepped up to the tank and looked into it. Now that I focused
in on the space contained by it, I once more saw the myriad of tiny
lights moving about in it. I looked at them, feeling a strange disap-
pointment; and it took me a second or two to realize the reason. I
had unconsciously bought my own story about having accom-
plished some breakthrough in understanding, the moment with the
cardinal. I had really expected to see something more than I ever
had, the next time I looked into this device; and now came disap-
pointment.
Identified, the disappointment grew to a sharp pang. It was
against a11 reason. I did not want to discover evidence that would

285
be against my going with Paula. I wanted evidence that I should
go, and it was exactly that sort of evidence that I was getting. But
I realized that this was not what I really wanted—it was not what
my heart wanted.
I reached into my memory to recapture the moment with the
cardinal and the golden light that had been everywhere. But it
slipped away from my imagination. I could not evoke it. A bitter
anger began to rise in me. My mind beat against the iron bars of
its own inability, and what I reached for went further and further
from me.
I may have said something. I may have snarled, or sworn, or
made some sound. I think I remember doing something like that,
though I am not sure. But suddenly, there was a touch on my left
hand. My mind cleared. I looked down and saw the Old Man be-
side me. He had taken hold of my fingers, and he was looking up
at me.
My mind cleared. Suddenly, Sunday and the cardinal and all
things at once came back together again. All the angry emotion
washed out of me and I remembered that it was not by pushing
out, but by taking in, that I had finally found the common pattern
that connected me with all things else. I let go then, opened up my
mind to anything and everything, and looked into the universe
tank once more.
There were the lights again. But now, as I watched, I began to
pick up rhythms in their movements, and identify patterns. Forces
were at work to shift them about, and those forces were revealed
in the patterns I saw. As I identified more and more of them, their
number grew until they began to interact, until larger and larger
clusters of lights were locking together in interrelated movements.
There was no golden illumination around me this time; but there
was an intensity—not a tension, but an intensity—that mounted like
music rising in volume until it reached a certain peak, and I broke
through. All at once, I was there.
I was no longer standing looking into a viewing device. I was
afloat in the actual universe. I was a point of view great enough to
see from one end of the universe to the other and, at the same
time, able to focus in on single stars, single worlds. Now I ob-

286
served not the representation, but the reality; and for the first time
I perceived it as a single, working whole. From particle to atom, to
star, to galaxy, to the full universe itself, I saw all the parts work-
ing together like one massive living organism moving in response
to the pressure of entropy. ...
"My God!" I said—and I heard my own voice through the bones
of my skull, very small and far away, for I was still out there in the
universe. "My God, it's collapsing! It's contracting!"
For it was. What I looked at were the patterns of a universe
that had been uniformly expanding, all its galaxies spreading out
from each other, creating an entropy that was running down at a
uniform rate. But now the pattern had been expanded too far. It
had been stretched too thin, and now it was beginning to break
down in places. Here and there, galaxies were beginning to fall
back into the pattern, to reapproach each other; and where this
was happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those places, en-
tropy was increasing, side by side and conflicting with those still-
expanding patterns in which entropy continued to decrease.
The result was stress; a chaos of laws in conflict, spreading like
a network of cracks fracturing a crystal, spreading through the
universal space, riding the tides of movement of the solid bodies
through space. It was stress that concentrated and generated new
fractures at the points of greatest mass, primarily at the centers of
the galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran, time states changed,
forward or back, one way or another.
Four billion years ago, the first stress crack had touched our
galaxy. My point of view turned time back to that point and I saw
it happen. An accumulation of entropic conflict near the galaxy
center. A massive star that went nova—but unnaturally, implosion
nova.
There was a collapse of great mass. A collapse of space and
time, followed by an outburst of radiating time faults, riding the
wave patterns of the stellar and planetary movements within the
galaxy, until at last the time storm reached far out into the galactic
arms and touched our own solar system.
What had gone wrong was everything. What was falling apart
was not merely this galaxy, but the universe itself. There was noth-
ing to tie to, no place to stand while the process could be halted,
the damage checked and mended. It was too big. It was every-

287
thing, all interconnected, from the particles within my own body to
the all-encompassing universe. There was no way I or anyone else
could stop something like that. It was beyond mending by me, by
humanity, beyond mending by all living intelligent beings. Facing
it, we were less than transitory motes of dust caught up in a tor-
nado, helpless to even dream of controlling what hurled us about
and would destroy us at its whim. . . .

I woke in my own bed and with the feeling that I had been
through this once before. For a moment, I could not remember
when; then I recalled my earlier experience with the universe tank
and how I had passed out after getting caught up in what I saw
there. I felt a momentary quirk of annoyance. If I was going to
fold up every time I tried to see things in that tank. . . .
But the annoyance faded as I remembered what I had seen.
Here, lying in the familiar bed in the familiar room with every-
thing simple and usual about me, the memory seemed impossible,
like nothing more than some bad dream. But it was not a bad
dream. It was reality; and in spite of the comfortable appearance
of everyday security that surrounded me, the fact of the time storm
as I had seen it loomed over us all like some giant, indifferent
mountain that might crumble and bury us at any moment, or
might let us live a thousand years in peace.
But still ... for all that I could feel the shadow of the storm
still dark on me, I was not quite as destroyed by it as I had been
when I had first seen it in its full dimensions, imaged in the tank.
A reaction had taken place inside me, a stubborn reflex against
utter despair and hopelessness. There was no way I could even
begin to dream, as I had for so long, of controlling the storm. And
still . . . and still . . . something inside me was refusing to give
27

290
up. Some strange and snorky part of my being was insisting that
the situation could still be fought and perhaps overcome.
It was impossible. Perhaps a thousand more individuals like my-
self, armed with powers beyond the powers of gods, might have
stood a chance of achieving control, but I was alone and had no
such powers. Only, there it was. I could not let go. Something in
me refused to do it.
Ellen came in, carrying a glass of water.
"How are you?" she asked.
"I'm all right," I said.
The shade was pulled down on the bedroom's one window and
a light was on. But now that I looked, I saw the paler, but brighter,
gleam of daylight around the edge and bottom of the shade.
"How long have I been here?" I asked, as she came over to me.
She handed me the glass of water and also, two white pills.
"Take these," she said.
"What are they?" I asked, looking at the pills in my hand.
"She didn't tell me, but Marie said you should take them when
you woke up."
"Now damn it, I'm not taking some medication I don't know
about just because you say Marie says I should take them."
"I think they're only aspirin."
"Aspirin?"
I looked at them closely. Sure enough, they had the little cross
stamped on one side that was the trademark of the brand we had
been able to get our hands on locally; and when I held them close
to my nose, I could catch a faint whiff of the acid smell that was
the sign of aspirin when it was getting old. Overage drugs were one
of our problems since we were restricted to stocks from time pe-
riods all antedating at least the time when we had balanced the
forces of the time storm. These two tablets were really fresher than
most of their kind that I had encountered in the last half year.
Marie must have been hoarding these against some emergency. I
felt ashamed of myself. I did not need the pills, but they would
only keep on aging toward uselessness if I did not take them, while
swallowing them would do me no harm and make Marie feel her
efforts had not been wasted.
I took them.
"Porniarsk wants to talk to you if you're up to it."

291
"I'm up to it, all right." I threw the covers back and sat up on
the edge of the bed. They had undressed me. "Where are my
pants?"
"Closet," said Ellen. "Maybe you'd better not get up."
"No, I'm fine," I said. She looked unconvinced and I decided to
lie a little. "I had a headache but it seems to be getting better al-
ready."
"If you're sure," said Ellen. "I'll go tell him then."
She went out, and I had time to get dressed before Porniarsk
trundled into the room.
"Are you well?" he asked me.
"Fine," I said. "No problems. I'm not even particularly tired."
"I'm glad to hear that. Do you remember what you said before
you collapsed?"
"I'm not sure . . . ."
"You said 'My God . . .' and then you said 'It's impossible. I
can't do it. It can't be done . . .' Can you tell me what you meant
and what made you say that?"
"What I saw in the tank," I said.
I told him what that had been. When I was through he stood for
a second, then creaked off one of his heavy-headed nods.
"So you believe now that further effort to control the storm is
useless?" he asked.
"That's the way those patterns looked," I said. "But now . . .
I'm not sure. I still don't see any hope in them, but at the same
time, I don't seem to be able to bring myself to give up."
"I'm glad of that," said the avatar. "With no will to succeed,
you'd fail even if there was good reason to expect success. But
with will, there's always hope. Porniarsk himself has always
believed that the apparent is only the possible. Therefore failure,
like success, can always be only a possibility, never a certainty."
"Good," I said. "But what do we do now?"
"That's my question to you," said Porniarsk. "My earlier guess
was right. Your capabilities are far beyond mine. It's up to you to
find the answer."
For the next three days I tried, while holding Paula in play as
well as I could. But the evening of the fourth day her impatience
came out in the open.
"I'll need an answer tomorrow, Marc," she said, as she went

292
back to her own rooms. "I've spent more time here now than I
planned."
It was the eleventh hour, clearly. I thought of calling Porniarsk,
Ellen, and Marie together for a brainstorming session and rejected
the notion. There was nothing they could do to help me. As Por-
niarsk had said, it was up to me—alone.
I isolated myself in the library, paced the floor for a while, and
came up with absolutely nothing. My mind kept sliding off the
problem, like a beetle on a slope of oily glass. Finally, I gave up
and went to bed alone, hoping that something might come to me in
my sleep.
I woke about three hours later, still without a solution. My
mind was spinning feverishly; but only with worries. What was to
become of Ellen and Marie, and for that matter, our whole com-
munity, if I went off as Paula's captive-servant and either died or
did not come back? What could help the world if the local forces
of the storm broke out of balance again? There was no answer
anywhere except the hope of doing something with the storm after
all and using control of its forces to somehow break the hold that
Paula's superior army gave her over us all.
And I could not find such a hope. Every possibility seemed
bleak and dry and worn out. There was only one way to unlock
the door confronting me—with some kind of a key; and there was
no key. My thoughts had spun around in a circle so long they were
exhausted. I threw on the topcoat that I used as a bathrobe and
went back to the library to get away from my own circular idea-
dance.
Under the artificial lights, the library was still and comfortless. I
sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs and closed my eyes. My
mind skittered off at all angles, throwing up pictures of everyone
for whom I felt responsible . . . Marie, Wendy, Ellen, the ava-
tar. . . .
Their images chased each other before the vision of my imagi-
nation, like movie film played on the inner surfaces of my closed
eyelids. Even the shapes of people who were not around any more.
I watched Tek, going down from the bullets of the machine pistol
in Ellen's hands; Samuelson, waiting with his rocket launcher for
the outsize toy-like attackers of his small town; Sunday, as I had

293
first seen him; Sunday again, with Ellen, back when I had called
her only "the girl"; Sunday. . . .
Sunday.
Suddenly, with the thought of him, it all came together. My
mind opened up like a flower at sunrise, and life flowed back into
me. The light and all things in the still room seemed to change.
Once more, I felt my identity with all my people and the cat who
slumbered; and I saw at once what could perhaps be done if there
was time enough. I got to my feet with my idea still in me and
went as quickly as I could to Porniarsk's lab.
Porniarsk was standing immobile beside the vision tank, his
eyes fastened ofl nothing, when I turned the lights on in the dark
room. It was impossible to tell whether he slept at times like this,
or whether in fact he slept at all. We had all asked him about that
at one time or another, and he had always answered that the
question was meaningless in his terms and unanswerable in ours.
Now, when the lights went on, he stayed as he was for a second,
then turned his head to look at me.
"What is it, Marc?" he asked.
"I think I might have it!" I said. "It just came to me. Look, you
can run this tank like a computer, can't you? I mean you can ex-
trapolate the storm forward and back?"
"Yes."
"How far forward?"
"Until extrapolation's no longer possible," he said. "Until the
time storm destroys the universe, or the capacity of the tank's logi-
cal sequencing is exceeded."
"Look," I said. My vocal cords were tight and my voice
bounced loudly off the bare, white-painted concrete walls.
"There's always been the chance we might be able to get help with
the storm up forward, but I've never thought about that in terms
of a really long way forward. I remember now, when I was seeing
the patterns in the tank, I thought that if I could find a thousand
like me something might, just might, be done. We'd never find
anything like that in the reasonably near future. But, if we went as
far forward as we could—maybe way up there there really are a
thousand others like that. Away up there. As far into the future
as we can reach."

294
"And if there were," said Porniarsk. "How could we contact
them?"
"We might be able to go to them." The words were galloping
out of me and my brain felt wrapped in flames. "If I could just see
what the storm patterns were, up in that time—just the patterns
affecting this immediate area, the area right around this house,
maybe just even around this lab—I might be able to unbalance the
present forces enough so they'd correspond. I might be able to
produce a time change line; one single mistwall to move just us,
far down the future-line to them."
He neither moved nor made a sound for five or six seconds,
while my heart beat heavily inside me, shaking my chest.
"Perhaps," he said.
The breath I had not realized I was holding went out of me in
something like a grunt.
"We can do it?"
"I can show you the ultimate pattern possible to this device—
perhaps," he said. "Are you sure you can make use of it, if I do?"
"No," I said, "I can try, though."
"Yes," he said. His head went up, his head went down, in one
of his nods. "I'll need time to work out the storm patterns that far
forward."
"How much time?"
He looked at me steadily,
"I don't know. Maybe days. Maybe, some years."
"Years!" I said. But then the sense of what he was saying sank
into me. The furthest pattern perceivable by the vision tank could
only be reached by going through all preceding patterns.
"When I've reached the limits of the device's capacity," he said,
"I can call you in to see it."
"Then we need to buy whatever time that takes," I said. "That
settles it. I'll tell Paula I'll go with her."
"Probably that's best. But you'll have to be able to come back
here when I've found the final pattern."
"I'll get back," I said. "Don't worry about that."
I felt wonderful. All my frustration had vanished in a burst of
energy and certainty. I would not have gone back to bed even if I
could have slept. I looked at my wristwatch, and it was five-thirty
in the morning.

295
"I'll wake up everyone who needs to know and tell them," I
said, "right now. Will you come along?"
"You don't need me," he said, "and any time wasted from now
on delays the final moment of achievement."
"All right."
I went out and started waking up the others. A little under an
hour later I had them all sitting around the dining room of the
summer palace, drinking coffee to get their eyes open and waiting
for an explanation. I had rung into the meeting all those whom I
thought must know what would be going on, but nobody else. At
the table were Ellen, Marie, Bill, Doc, and Wendy—Wendy look-
ing particularly sullen. She was grown up enough now to have a
fourteen-year-old boyfriend—or thought she was. I thought ten
years old ridiculously young for anything like that, though it was a
fact she was beginning to develop physically; and she had asked to
have him take part in this council as well. Naturally, I had spiked
the notion. It was merely the last in a series of efforts she had
made recently to get her mother and the rest of us to adopt the
boyfriend into our inner family.
For the rest, Doc looked unperturbed, as if he was the only per-
son there, besides myself, who was wide awake. Ellen looked con-
cerned, Marie looked drawn and older than I had ever seen her
look, and Bill was still white-faced and shrunken-looking from in-
terrupted slumber.
"I'm going to tell Paula today I'll go with her," I said, without
preamble. "We'll probably take off later today."
I told them about my hope, my talk with Porniarsk and about
what he was already at work on at this moment
". . . The point is," I wound up, "Porniarsk and the rest of you
are probably safe here as long as Paula still considers me a friend
and coworker. If that changes, she might think of keeping me
under control by picking up some of you as hostages for my good
behavior. So, if things get prickly between the two of us I'll send
you warning of it; and I want you all to clear out of here immedi-
ately and scatter. Scatter all over the place, each one by yourself—
and don't let the rest of the community know you're going."
Wendy looked grim.
"I mean that," I said, looking her in the eye. "Nobody. Wendy,
you can stay with your mother; but everybody else take off alone."

296
"Marc," said Marie, "do you really need the rest of us to go
into the far future with you, if this works? Can't you just go alone,
tell the people there what you want to tell them, and then come
back?"
"How can I?" I said. "You know I need a monad gestalt to
control the storm forces; and that'll take all of you. So, listen.
What I'll do is take the Old Man with me. If I send him back to
you or if he comes back under any conditions, that's your signal.
Take off and scatter."
"Marc," said Doc, "you'll need some way of getting the mes-
sage from us in a hurry when Porniarsk finds what he's after.
How's about I make regular runs to you, just to bring in letters
from the home folks and a box of cookies and such, so Paula's
people won't think anything of it when I pop in with the word?"
I looked over at him gratefully. It was nice to hear a sensible
mind at work around the table that morning.
"Good," said Ellen. "Then if you need help getting away from
wherever you are, Doc can help you."
Another sensible mind.
"Fine idea, Doc," I said. "You're right, Ellen. Anybody else
have any suggestions?"
"How long will you be gone altogether?" Marie asked.
"I can't tell," I said. "It depends on how fast Porniarsk can
reach the ultimate configuration in his tank. Why?"
I knew why. She was having more and more trouble controlling
Wendy and was leaning on me more and more for that task.
"Maybe Wendy could go with you. She could see something of
the rest of the world that way."
"No!" said Wendy and I, simultaneously. That was all I needed,
to have Wendy on my hands, while I was trying to keep Paula
happy and unsuspecting. I thought quickly. "Too dangerous for
her."
"I don't want to," whimpered Wendy, who was no slouch her-
self at picking up cues. Marie looked from the girl to me, help-
lessly. She knew she was being doubleteamed, but she was help-
less to do anything about it.
"All right," I said. "Then, if nobody's got any more suggestions,
you can get busy putting together what I'll need to take with me
and spreading the word that I'll be going. I'll break the news my-
self to Paula over breakfast in an hour or so."

Paula took the news coolly. Whether this was because some of her
people had already picked up the word of it that was spreading
rapidly through the ranks of our own people, or simply because it
was a strategy on her part to act as if her enlisting me had never
been in doubt, was impossible to tell. In either case, it made no
difference to me, who was going with her for my own private
reasons.
"All right," she said, over the breakfast table. "How soon can
you be ready?"
"Six hours, maybe," I said.
"In that case, I'll wait for you and you can join my staff right
here. If you hadn't been able to move quickly, I'd have needed to
let you catch up with me. I'll send word to my officers. No offense
to your kitchen help, Marc, but I'll be glad to get back to my own
headquarters and have some decent coffee."
There was only one small incident of interest in our leaving.
Paula's people had already climbed aboard the helicopters that
had been sitting parked and waiting for them, and I was not yet
aboard the one carrying Paula herself. The Old Man, as I said, had
shown no liking for Paula; and now he had made himself scarce.
Doc had found him, finally, about half a mile from the summer
palace among the rocks of the hillside and literally held an auto-
matic pistol at his head to get him to come along back to the
28

298
takeoff point. The Old Man knew what human weapons were and
came, but not happily.
When I finally saw him approaching, squatting ominously beside
Doc in the front of the jeep, I changed my mind about taking him.
"Look," I said to Doc, under my breath, when the jeep drove
up and stopped by the entrance ladder of the 'copter, "this isn't
going to work. If he's going to bolt the minute I take my eyes off
him, this'll never work. Leave him here and you come along in-
stead while we figure things out. Then I can send you back with
word."
"All right," said Doc, climbing out of the jeep. "Do I have time
to pick up any gear, or—"
But at that point, the Old Man solved the problem for us. He
had been staring at the 'copter, and at me, all the while the jeep
was driving out to us on the open area. He was not unintelligent
and he must have finally realized that I was actually going, with or
without him. At any rate, he took a sudden leap out of the jeep
directly onto the first step of the ladder, caught my hand and
pulled me toward him and the steps.
"That's all right, then," I said to Doc. "But why don't you come
along anyway, at least until I've had a chance to settle down. No,
you won't have time to bring anything. Got any kind of weapon
with you?"
"Pistol."
"All right. I can shake down Paula's people for what you'll need
beyond that, and what you'll need to get back here from wherever
she's headed next. Let's get inside."
He followed me up the ladder, the Old Man preceding us.
"What's this?" said Paula when we were inside and the ladder
was being taken in, the entry hatch being shut behind us. She
looked from Doc to me.
"There's some unfinished business," I said. "I've got some deci-
sions yet to make. He can carry word back from wherever we
stop, a couple of days from now—if that's all right with you?"
"Certainly. Why not?" She turned her attention to the Old Man
who still clung to my hand. "This is the creature? I thought I saw
it around earlier. Is it housebroken?"
"Since long before I met him," I said. "All his people learn to

299
live like human beings while they're growing up, just as our chil-
dren do."
"People?" She smiled. "Well, keep him out of the way. Find
your seats now."
She turned away.
Apparently, we were not to return to where her camp had been
when I had visited. Her orders had already gone out, and her
troops and wagons had been on the move from an hour after I had
broken the news to her over our breakfast table. We flew on east-
ward and put down by a river about twenty-five miles further on,
where the motorized section of Paula's transport had already ar-
rived and set up her personal tents. Later, that evening, the main
body of her* wagons and infantry arrived.
I kept Doc with me for four days, mainly so he could prowl
around and get acquainted with the way Paula's people did things;
then I sent him home before they saw through the bright-eyed,
teenage image he had been careful to wear anywhere near her and
them. The Old Man stayed close in the tent I had assigned to me
for my exclusive use and was no problem. I found myself happy to
have him there. He was, after all, a small touch of home.
We continued to move steadily eastward. In open country, be-
tween objectives, the pattern seemed to be for Paula's head-
quarters to stay comfortably put for three days while her army
marched forward. Then her motorized division would move the
headquarters tents and equipment forward one short day's trek in
their jeeps and trucks. Meanwhile Paula, her general, and a hand-
ful of us who were at the top of the table of organization took it
easy for most of the day, then struck the pavilion tent and made a
half to three-quarters of an hour hop in a single 'copter to the new
site, while the other two aircraft followed empty except for pilots
and copilots.
It was a pleasant life, but monotonous; particularly when it
began to be obvious that Paula had no real need for services from
me, but was only carrying me along as a satellite to impress possi-
ble enemies and reluctant allies. I had a great deal of time on my
hands; but it turned out this had been provided for by Paula's
foresight. I discovered one of the main duties of her large staff of
women clerks and attendants.
Briefly, they were there to keep everyone happy, from me down

300
to the lowest officer in the army; and also to keep us out of Paula's
way and off her mind, except when she had a need for us. A good
share of this, I picked up from my own observation; but it was
General Pierre de Coucy Aruba who dotted the i's and crossed the
t's for me.
The general was a drinker. That is, he could not yet be called a
drunk because he held his alcohol without visible sign and never
seemed to prolong his drinking beyond three or four drinks. But
those drinks came at every lunch, dinner, cocktail hour and late
supper at which I ever saw him.
"You could call me a philosopher," he told me one evening in
his tent, after a post-dinner planning session with his staff had con-
cluded. His officers were gone and he had invited me in for a pri-
vate chat with just the two of us.
"You might think that I could probably set up with my own
army and carve out a nice little empire for myself," he went on.
"And I could—I could. But I'm not the kind who wants an empire
for himself. 'Everybody's a little mad except thee and me, and I
even have my doubts about thee/ People intrigue me. I like to be
comfortable and watch them. So I'm the perfect commander for
our Empress. She knows she never needs to worry about a military
coup as long as I'm in control."
"I can see she'd appreciate that," I said.
"Yes, indeed." He smiled at me—and it was a smile, not a grin,
with the sun-wrinkles deepening at the corners of his eyes and the
tidy, little grey mustache quirking upwards at the corners.
"Wouldn't you, in her shoes?"
"I gather she makes a good boss?" I said.
"A good Empress, you mean." He waggled a forefinger at me.
"Always remember that. An Empress has to be an Empress, at all
times. That's why the young ladies."
"The young ladies?"
"Of course. Familiarity breeds contempt." He smiled again.
"And there's no familiarity like that in bed, eh?"
"That's true enough," I said soberly, thinking of my own two
women.
"Most queens had trouble out of getting laid," he said. "Most
empresses, too. Queen Elizabeth . . . Catherine of Russia . . .

301
notice none of the girls around here, though, are quite as good-
looking as the Empress?"
"I had," I told him.
"Obviously. The art of controlling a man with your female pres-
ence is to be just out of reach, but out of reach. You understand?"
I did. Not only did I understand, but a certain near-demonic im-
pulse moved in me, and my trader's instinct was challenged. Dur-
ing the days when Paula had been talking to me about coming
with her on her road of conquest, she had sent up clear signals
that she was attracted to me personally. I had taken for granted,
that part, if not all of this was calculated, to gain her own ends.
But, as it turned out, she had wanted me neither for my services as
a magician nor myself; she had simply bought herself a show
piece at the cost of nothing more than promises, rather than hav-
ing to spend her troops and materiel to get it. Again, it had been a
case of "seller beware"; so I really had no kick coming if I had
taken counterfeit currency for what I had sold. But for her to as-
sume that, after having been sharped, I would cheerfully reconcile
myself, given the equivalent of two cents on the dollar, was some-
thing of an insult.
Accordingly, I played the game with the female staff, so as not
to arouse any suspicions; but privately, I set my sights on Paula
after all. I was patient. I had my ability to see patterns working for
me. Success would be along, down the line there, somewhere.
Meanwhile, in the patterns, I had found another hobby to oc-
cupy my time. Now I had broken through twice to the oneness of
the universe, and there was no longer any doubt in my mind that
such a state of mind existed; and if that was so, anything was pos-
sible, even the destruction of the time storm. I made it an invisible
exercise to look around me for patterns constantly, and to develop
my perception of them to the point where that perception and rec-
ognition and understanding of the patterns would be simultaneous.
The work paid off. The patterns were there, all about me all the
time. They were there in the interactions of people, in their physi-
cal movements, their speech, their reactions, and their thinking;
and in all else about fauna, flora, earth, and sky. Little by little,
my knowledge of such patterns became deeper and surer, until it
began to approach eerily close to the true magic of telepathy and
second sight. I could have played chess now, better than anyone I

302
had ever encountered; but the chess patterns, for all that they were
fascinating and innumerable, were dead patterns. I preferred the
live patterns created by my fellow men and women.
So I observed and learned; and, curiously, I could feel the Old
Man learning through me.
Meanwhile, we were marching to the Atlantic seaboard. The
points we searched out were sometimes the fragments of cities or
towns that still held supplies or needed equipment; or sometimes
they were population centers like my own community, which had
not existed before the time storm forces had been balanced, but
which had sprung up since around some acquired communication
equipment or military force.
In every case, however, these places and the people in them
were plainly inferior to the armed strength of the Empress. They
sometimes bluffed for a day or two before yielding, but in the end
they all acknowledged her as their overlady. Then, at last, we ran
into opposition.
We had reached the ocean and a place that called itself Capitol,
which once had been half Washington International Airport, and
was now half that and half something else, because deep-water
ocean lapped up against the base of cliffs that abruptly cut off the
main road into the airport. On the ocean, moored out a little dis-
tance from a jerry-built wharf, were a number of small oceango-
ing craft. Still hangared about the airport were a number of 1980
commercial passenger jets and—on the land area of that part that
now opened to the ocean—some light, five-passenger craft, that
were like flying bubbles with stubby wings, and a tiny power plant
that seemed permanently fueled with an inexhaustible, built-in
supply of energy.
These were from some time later than the twentieth century;
and these also were the real prize from Paula's point of view. The
craft, in their own right, were almost as famous as I was in mine.
For, although there were still large cruise ships and other massive
watercraft to be found up and down the Atlantic coast, there was
no way now to either maintain or operate them. It was still possi-
ble to cross the Atlantic in boats up to the size of small yachts.
But the trip would be uncomfortable and a matter of some weeks.
With these light aircraft out of the post-twentieth century, the
ocean could be crossed in hours.

303
Once more, Paula moved in, going gutsily herself with a small
guard to negotiate, while readying her armed forces and artillery
behind her. But this time, the target did not yield; and she was
forced to fight for what she wanted.
Not only that, but these people fought hard. It took nearly a
week for Aruba and his soldiers to take the place and subdue its
inhabitants; and it cost them over half of their strength in casual-
ties. Replacements would have to be marched across the continent
from the west coast, since she could not trust any of the recently
subjugated communities in between to furnish her with loyal
fighters. That meant months. Fall and winter would be upon us be-
fore they were here and trained. Paula herself, and her inner staff
officers, could cross the ocean by air at any time; but the small
boats available could not ferry her army across the Atlantic in bad
weather. We were stuck where we were until spring.
I saw the pattern of this situation evolving ten days before the
rest of them did. It solidified in my mind on the first day of hard
fighting in which they pounded the enemy positions with artillery
and confidently advanced afterwards, only to be cut to pieces by
machine gun fire. I saw it; and I raged inside at the inevitable
delay it implied for Paula's plans of world conquest. Doc was
overdue for one of his periodic visits, and for the first time, I
found myself fearing, rather than hoping, that he would bring me
word that Porniarsk had found the ultimate universe pattern possi-
ble to the viewing tank. If the avatar had found it, I had no choice.
I could not delay going home, with the risk that, in the meantime,
some chance here might kill me, cripple me, or somehow prevent
me from returning at all.
On the other hand, I told myself, I did not want Paula still on
the North American continent when I left her, without leave, and
headed once more for my own territory. I wanted her on the other
side of the world, by preference; or at least across the Atlantic, so
that the trouble and expense of sending forces after me to bring
me back would be so great she would delay as long as possible in
doing so. It was, I believed, a reasonable reason for wishing her
success. Therefore, as the week of fighting went on and casualties
mounted, I looked grim along with everyone else in the Empress*
camp—but for my own private reasons.
About Thursday, Doc finally arrived.

304
"Porniarsk's found it?" I said, the moment we could get off
someplace where we were safe from being overheard. In this day-
light instance, that meant a training area behind the field hospital,
where we could see there was no one else within earshot.
"No," he said. "Not yet."
"Good!" I said. He stared at me for a fraction of a second.
"Never mind," I told him. "I'll explain later. What's the rest of
the news?"
"I was going to say," he said, "Porniarsk doesn't have it yet,
but he thinks he's close—"
"Hell's bloody buckets!"
This time he really did stare at me, his tanned young face
stretched smooth-skinned with puzzlement.
"I've got a reason," I said. "Go on."
"I was saying, Porniarsk hasn't found the furthest possible fu-
ture configuration the device can show; but he did find a sort of
sticking point—some point where he got hung up for some reason.
He's pretty sure he can get the tank to go beyond it, with a little
more work; but he says to tell you he thinks this sticking point is
some kind of sign he's close to the ultimate."
I took a deep breath.
"All right," I said. "If he has, he has. I'll talk to you about that
in a minute. Anything else important? How's everybody? The
community running the way it should?"
"Nothing else. I've got some letters for you, of course." He
tapped the leather wallet that hung from one of his shoulders. He
always brought me a bundle of personal mail, that being the osten-
sible reason for his coming. "But everyone's fine. And the place's
running, like always, on the button."
"Fine. Let's go back to my tent."
We headed toward it. It was a matter of elementary caution not
to talk to him for more than a few seconds as we were now, for
fear of triggering off suspicions. Given the important and general
news, we could do a fairly good job of discussing matters in hyper-
bole while I went through the home mail, even if there might be
ears listening.
At the tent the Old Man leaped up to seize my hand, then
turned to grasp one of Doc's as well. He walked with us to a pair
of armchairs, still hanging on, and hunkered down between us.

305
Since he and I had been away from home, he had become more
dependent, not only on me, who had been the only human, origi-
nally, he would get close to, but on Doc during Doc's brief visits.
"Make yourself a drink," I said to Doc now, "while I go
through these letters."
"Thanks," he said enthusiastically. He pried his hand loose
from the Old Man's and went over to the table that did duty as my
liquor cabinet. Doc was, in fact, a nondrinker as well as a non-
smoker. But he always carried cigarettes with him, and he was ex-
pert at making a show of both smoking and drinking, these being
only two of a large number of casual acts he had perfected, ap-
parently on the off-chance that the misdirection in them might
prove useful-someday. I ripped open my letters and read them.
They were perfectly ordinary, personal mail from home; and in
spite of the fact that they were intended primarily as camouflage, I
found myself going through them as eagerly as anyone else would,
away from home and family against his will. Marie was still
worried about Wendy, who herself had written me a few lines of
pure prattle—under duress probably. Ellen had written almost as
brief a note, saying that things were fine, just the way I'd left them,
and there was no need to worry about anything. I read the last line
as a hint to take Marie's motherly concern with a certain amount
of advisement. Ellen's language could not have been any more
spare and stiff if she herself had been a soldier in the field; so that
the word "love" at the end looked incongruous. But I knew her.
Bill wrote he was pleased with the way things were going.
From him, this would be a reference to Porniarsk's work. Also, he
mentioned that he had finally refined the "emergency harvest
plans," which would be a reference to my orders that they all split
up and scatter if Paula suddenly decided to take some of them
hostage as insurance against my noncooperation. Porniarsk sent no
message.
"Good," I said to Doc, when the last letter had been read.
"Things seem all right at home."
"They are," he answered. "Have you got letters for me to take
back?"
"Over on the writing table, there," I said. He went to get them.
"Were you planning on heading back right away?"
"Unless there's something to keep me here."

306
He tucked the letters I had written into his wallet, came back
and sat down. The Old Man took his hand again.
"I was just thinking—why don't you stick around a day or so
until we've taken this local area? They're putting up quite a fight,
and if you stay you'll be able to go back and tell the women per-
sonally that I didn't get hurt in the process."
"Glad to," said Doc. "You've got a good life here. Far as I'm
concerned, it's a vacation with all expenses paid."
He had a nice, light tone to his voice as he said it; but his eyes
were sharp on mine, ready to read why I was asking him to stick
around. I shook my head very slightly, to tell him not now, and
started to talk about the situation, saying nothing that wasn't
highly complimentary to Paula and confident about her eventual
achievements here, but filling him bit by bit with data on the ac-
tual state of affairs militarily. When I was done, he knew what the
facts were, but not what the connection was between these and the
reason I wanted him to stick around.
That was the third day of the battle for control of the area. It
was not until Sunday that Paula's soldiers overran most of the
strong points of the opposition and not until Monday afternoon
that they finished mopping up.
"As long as you've stayed this long, you might as well stay for
the victory celebration, too," I told Doc.
"Suits me," he said. His voice sounded a little thickly from one
of the couches in my tent where he sprawled with a glass in his
hand; but his eyes were as clean and steady as the eyes of a sniper
looking along the sights of his rifle.
I was more glad to have him there than I had thought. I had
seen the pattern of the battle's consequences building all week.
Paula and Aruba, in particular, must be seeing the same thing
themselves, now that the fight was over and the returns were in.
So, while the rank and file survivors whooped it up in celebration,
Paula herself and her immediate staff would now be biting into the
bitter fruit of a win that had cost so highly. The way they would
react, I had told myself, could tell me a lot more about their pat-
terns; and part of what I might learn might be useful information
to send home with Doc.
Paula had already had to face one particular ugly truth; that
there was a point beyond which her well-trained soldiers would

307
not obey her. From dressed-up recruits they had turned into vet-
erans in the bloodbath of the last seven days; and commanders
back to the dawn of history could have told her what would hap-
pen when such soldiers were finally allowed to overrun an enemy
who had bled them heavily in preceding days. Her kids had turned
into killers. They slaughtered right and left on that Monday after-
noon as they subjugated the conquered people.
It was Paula's first setback. There were aircraft mechanics and
boat mechanics, as well as other experts, among her former ene-
mies that were worth regiments to her; but there was no way she
could hold her blood-high soldiery back long enough to weed out
such valuable individuals from the otherwise killable chaff of the
local population. Monday cost her dearly.
Nonetheless, she had to put a good face on it and appear to en-
courage the wild celebration that ensued that night. It began at
late afternoon and went on until dawn, by which time all but a few
rarely tough individuals had collapsed. It was at dawn that Aruba
came for me.
That he came himself for me, rather than sent for me, was an
index of his upset. He stepped into my tent, peered for a second at
the still form of Doc, who appeared to be asleep on one of the
couches, and then looked back at me. In the early daylight coming
through the plastic windows of the tent, his face was sallow, the
shade of new liverwurst.
"She wants to see you," he said.
"Paula?" I asked.
He nodded. I got to my feet. I was still dressed. Anything could
have happened in that night just past and I had not felt like trying
to sleep.
"What about?" I asked, as I went with him out into the cool
morning. A breeze was blowing from the ocean.
"She'll want to tell you herself," he said and licked his lips. He
had been badly shaken and I could see him reaching for a bottle
the minute he was alone in his own quarters.
I nodded indifferently enough, but inwardly I braced myself. On
this morning, her purpose in wanting to see me would not be good.
I walked alongside Aruba to the entrance of the pavilion tent,
where two of her officers—colonels—now stood with machine rifles,
doing sentry duty. He stopped at the tent flap.

308
"Go in," he said, "she's waiting for you."
I went in alone. Paula was alone also, wearing a filmy yellow
dressing gown as if she had just risen from bed; but her face was
hard and weary with the look that comes from being up and
tensely awake for hours.
"Marc," she said, and her voice was pure industrial diamond in
tone, "there's a paper over there on the desk. Sign it."
"Sign. . . ?" I went across to the desk and looked down. It was
a neatly typed letter, several pages long, beneath the letterhead she
had given me as one of her staff.
"Just sign it," she said.
"Not until I read it," I answered.
Our eyes clashed. Then she shrugged and turned away; but I
could almost see the note her memory made of this, my balking at
her command. It would be recalled when the hour was right.
"Of course," she said.
I bent my head to the letter again and read. It was like being
unexpectedly hit in the stomach. Or, more accurately, it was like a
sickening collision in the dark, running full tilt into a concrete wall
you had known was there all the time, but whose existence you
had put out of mind—an impact so unexpected and brutal it left
you nauseated; because suddenly I understood Paula, saw her
complete and naked in the glaring, fluorescent light of what she
was planning to set me up for.
I read that I had been shocked by the irresponsible behavior of
some of her soldiers in taking over the enemy area. But, over and
above my shock, I had been aghast to see the criminal murder of
certain innocent individuals among the defenders; artisans and me-
chanics, as well as other trained personnel, who had only been in
the enemy camp under duress. The slaughter of these innocents
was not only a heinous crime against them as individuals, but
amounted to treason against the Empire, since the Empress was
now deprived of the willing services of these people and many of
her subjects would suffer because of that lack. Consequently, I
called upon her formally to take action against the criminals re-
sponsible and see that they were brought to justice, since I, with
the skills that had allowed me to halt the ravages of the time
storm, could see more deeply and clearly than anyone into the ter-

309
rible cost we must all bear because of the deaths of these inno-
cents.
Suddenly, reading this, the pattern I had been building on Paula
was complete. I saw the hell she had in mind not only for the sol-
diers responsible for delaying her here over the coming winter, but
for anyone who had been around to witness this happening to her;
and that told me more about her than she might have betrayed to
me in two more years of my observing her.
I signed.
"I'm proud to do this," I said, taking the letter over to her. "It
doesn't say anything I didn't feel myself. No wonder you're the
Empress, Paula. You can even read minds."
She smiled and took the letter. I was by no means forgiven for
wanting to read before signing, but for the present small moment,
the smile was genuine. I would never have risked flattering her so
grossly before I had stepped through the flap of this tent; but now
I knew when and where she was vulnerable.
"Dear Marc," she said. "You understand."
She looked at me; and I understood, all right. Ironically, sud-
denly the moment I had patiently waited for, in which I could gain
control over her by securing her physically, was with me. In this
devastated moment she was available, if I had still wanted her. But
the fact was, after reading that letter, I now would not have
touched her with a shark-stick.
"More than ever before," I said. "Do you want me to let other
people know I've written you this letter?"
She hesitated, but it was only the habit of caution operating in
her. Again, if she had been herself, I myself would have hesitated
to show her such rapid agreement. But she was not herself. That
was the crucial truth that had broken out into the open, with the
completing of her pattern in my mind just now. She had a flaw I
had never really appreciated until now, a deep flaw that would
cost her the rulership of the world that had seemed so possible up
until now. Already, she was adapting to my own hint that I was
eager to accept the authorship of the letter she held. Already she
was beginning to make herself believe the attractive idea that I had
indeed written it on my own initiative.
"If I just drop the letter with you and go out to spread the
word, I know your officers'll be eager to back me up. I know they

310
will," I said. "Then we can arrest the guilty ones and bring them
to justice before they have time to fill the minds of their fellow sol-
diers with lies."
"Yes." She laid the letter softly down on the end-table beside
her. "Of course. You've got my permission to tell what you've
written me. Justice should be speedy."
"I'll go right now, then," I said. "Wait a second, though. Maybe
if you give me a written order to do what's necessary, I can make
sure none of them escape. Or, for that matter, with that kind of
authority I could do anything necessary in connection with the
matter. . . ."
She smiled dazzlingly, seeing me setting the noose of respon-
sibility for this so firmly around my own neck.
"Of course," she said.
She crossed to the desk, wrote on the top sheet of an order pad
sandwich, tore off the top sheet and pushed the carbon copy to the
back of the desk.
"There you are."
"Thank you." I took it without looking at it and moved toward
the door. "Probably I shouldn't waste time. . . ."
"No. No, you shouldn't. I have to rest now; but—see me after
lunch, Marc. Dear Marc. . . . What would I do without you?"
"Come on, now. You're the Empress. You can do anything."
She smiled dazzlingly.
I went out. Aruba was gone, as I had expected him to be; and I
went directly back to my own tent. Doc was off the couch and on
his feet the second the tent flap fell behind me.
"We're leaving for home right away," I said. "I'll explain as we
go. You armed?"
"My rifle's with the jeep," he said. He patted his shirt at belt
level before and behind. "Belly gun and knife."
"Right. I want your help in bringing some blood-soaked crimi-
nals to justice," I said. "The Empress has given me special author-
ity to corral the soldiers who committed atrocities on certain inno-
cent people among the civilian population opposing us until
tonight."
His eyebrows went up ironically. I reached into my shirt pocket
where I had put the order after folding it up, still without having
read it. I unfolded it and read it now, then passed it to him.

311
"'Marc Despard has asked for authority from me, and I have
given it to him, to do whatever is required . . .'" he nodded
slowly. "All riiight!"
I took the order back from him and replaced it in my pocket.
"The first thing I want to do is check those future-built aircraft
we captured," I said, "to make sure none of those responsible for
the atrocities are planning on using them for escaping. They may
even have explosives to destroy the aircraft they can't use. You're
an expert on explosives. What kind do you think they might be
able to get hold of for something like that?"
He grinned and patted himself at belt level again.
"Primer cord," he said. "It wouldn't take much to do a lot of
damage—particularly if they know what they're doing."
"That's what we'll search the area for, then. Come along."
We headed out the door. The Old Man came with us.
"Want me to put him back inside?" Doc asked, as we stopped
just beyond the tent.
"Why, no," I said. "Seeing him with us, they won't think I'm
doing anything important. It'll serve to allay suspicions—Major!"
I called out to a short, swarthy block of an officer in his mid-
twenties who was passing by. ITie fact that he was on his feet
at all this morning meant that he had not been deeply involved in
the celebrations of the night before. He came closer and I recog-
nized him. There were only so many majors in Paula's army, in
any case.
"Major Debrow? Sorry to interrupt whatever you're doing; but
I've got a special job and I'm going to have to ask you to help.
Take a look at this."
I passed him Paula's authorization.
"You see," I said, while he read it, "we want to move before
these criminals take off on us—don't we, Major?"
His face did not agree. Someone who was unprejudiced might
have found a trace of loathing in it for me, a civilian who called
combat-battered soldiers "criminals."
"Yes, Mr. Despard."
"Good. I knew I could count on you, Major. We've got an idea
that some of them might be trying to get away in some of the valu-
able future aircraft these people had. We're going to go and check.
I want you to come along with us."

312
"Those planes are locked up, as well as being under guard,"
Debrow said. "Nobody could get away with one of them."
"Let's make sure."
We walked toward that part of the former airport where the
post-twentieth-century planes were kept. It was not a short dis-
tance, but eventually we clambered over a low barrier of sandbags
and found ourselves not more than forty feet from the entrance to
a separate hangar, around which perhaps a dozen apparently sober
and competent male soldiers stood guard.
"Go get their officer and bring him here, quietly, so we can ex-
plain things, will you, Major?"
"Just what is it you want?" Debrow asked. "What do you want
him to do?"
"I want to check the men on guard and have a look inside," I
said. "And I want the officer with us when we do that."
Debrow went forward to the two soldiers on guard at the han-
gar door and was challenged. As he answered, I turned to Doc and
saw him looking at me questioningly.
"I want you and me to take off from here in one of those planes
inside," I said in a low voice. "I don't want the other planes left
behind to be workable; and I want the soldiers on guard here out
of action. I'll try to arrange it to give you a chance at them, one at
a time."
"Just the two of us to leave. Not the major?"
"Not the major."
Doc nodded. Debrow came back, led us forward to the hangar
doors and in through a small personnel door set in one of them. In-
side was the large, dim, echoing interior of the hangar with small,
pearly glowings in the gloom that were the future aircraft. To our
right was a glassed-in office brightly lit with self-powered battle
fluorescents, standing in for the built-in fluorescent lights in the
ceiling, now dark for lack of power from the community's central
supply.
Inside at a desk was a single thin, young officer with first lieu-
tenant's silver bars on the straps of his uniform leather jacket. He
got to his feet as we came in.
"Major?" he said.
"Lieutenant," said Debrow. "This is Marc Despard."
"I know Mr. Despard," said the lieutenant.

313
"And his . . Debrow glanced at Doc and the Old Man, "ser-
vants. Mr. Despard has some special authority from the Empress
for you to see."
I passed Paula's authorization to the lieutenant. The light blond
eyebrows jumped several times while he was reading it, although
the rest of his narrow face remained calm.
"Yes sir," he said passing the letter back to me. "What is it you
want, Mr. Despard?"
"First," I said, "I want to check the future aircraft, without
making a fuss about it. Just you, the Major and I, and Doc here."
I nodded at Doc.
"Doc," I sa;d, "has had some experience in handling sabotage.
If we find one or more of the aircraft has been booby-trapped, he
may be of help to us in disarming it. This Experimental with us is
called the Old Man. His sense of smell, particularly, is much more
acute than ours, and he works well with Doc on jobs like this.
Now, how many of the future planes are there?"
"Nine," said the lieutenant.
"Does anyone here know how to fly them?"
"Nobody's tried so far," said the lieutenant. "I believe the plan
is to talk first to these people who had them."
"It seems to me I heard they weren't hard to operate," I said.
"The criminals we're looking for may have heard that, too. These
planes would buy them anything they wanted, anywhere in the rest
of the world, if they could successfully steal them from the Em-
press."
I saw both officers looking at me oddly and wondered if I'd
been laying on my image of self-importance too thickly.
"All right," I said. "Let's go then. Major, Lieutenant, we'll take
three planes apiece. We won't take the Experimental on this first
search. I'll keep Doc and the Experimental with me until they're
needed. Do you have flashlights?"
"You mean hand torches?" said the lieutenant. "Yes, sir." He
went to a locker across the office and came back with flashlights
for Debrow and myself. Leaving the Old Man in the office, we
went out into the hangar proper and split up.
I took the three planes closest to me, forcing the two officers to
take the ones further over. In the illumination of the flashlight, the
first aircraft I came to seemed to glow with an inner gleam of its

314
own. It was made of some milky, semi-translucent plastic and
looked light enough to float up in the air if it was breathed on too
heavily. But in spite of appearances, it was solid and firm when I
pulled open the door in its curving side and stepped in. Within,
possibly because of the almost egg-shaped hull, there was more
room than I would have guessed. I went forward to the control
panel.
It was a simple-looking affair, a single small television-like
screen inset in the panel and a five-key keyboard just below it. I
pushed down one of the keys at random and the lights went on;
not only on the panel but all over within the aircraft.
"Ready," said a voice.
I grinned. There had been no pattern at all to what I was look-
ing at; and now, suddenly, there was very nearly a complete one.
"How do I take off?" I asked.
"You may pilot yourself, or instruct a takeoff and flight"
"Thanks. Go back to sleep." I punched the same key again and
the lights went out. Experimentally, in the glow of the flashlight, I
punched another of the keys.
"Ready " said a voice, as the lights went on once more.
"Go back to sleep."
So, that was it. The secret to flying these things. It was that
there was no secret at all. I punched off again, the lights went out
and I beckoned Doc to follow me. Together, we left the plane.
"All right," I whispered to him, "get busy taking out those
other planes. I'll take my time with the two I've still got to look at.
Meet you at the last one, the third one up straight ahead near the
back of the hangar. I'll go as slow as I can, but don't let those two
officers see you."
"They won't," said Doc and he evaporated in the gloom.
I took the Old Man and went on to the next plane and let my-
self in, then sat down before the control panel and turned it on. I
had quite a little conversation with the computer, or whatever it
was, on this second aircraft; and by the time I had finished asking
questions, I had as good a general knowledge of this kind of craft
as if I had kept one around for some years. They were ridicu-
lously, child-level foolproof, and operable.
After I had wasted as many minutes as I thought I reasonably
could, I went on to the third craft, poked about inside for a while,

315
and then stepped out again. Neither Doc nor the other two men
were in sight. I stepped around to the far side of the plane to wait;
and a finger tapped me on the shoulder.
I whirled, stepping back instinctively as I did so, and found Doc
grinning at me.
"All set," he said.
"Good. Come on then."
We walked toward the next plane over and found the lieutenant
there, conscientiously examining the craft's undercarriage with his
flashlight.
"Did you find anything, Lieutenant?"
He got to his feet.
"No sir. You, sir?"
"No luck for me, either. Maybe Major Debrow's found some-
thing. Shall we go see?"
We all moved over and found Debrow inside his last aircraft.
After a moment he came out.
"Nothing," he said.
"I'm greatly relieved," I said. "Now, if you don't mind, Lieu-
tenant, I'd like to examine the men you've got on guard here?"
"But why, sir? We didn't find anything."
"For that very reason. We want to be sure. The Empress wants
us to be sure. Doesn't she, Major?"
"Lieutenant," said Debrow with a tight throat.
"Yes, Major. Yes, Mr. Despard. If you'll come up to the office,
I'll bring in the men on the doors first—"
"You'll bring them in one at a time, Lieutenant," I said. "Is
there another door to this hangar besides those in the front?"
"There's a small service entrance in the back wall."
"Good." I turned to Doc. "After we examine each one, I'd like
you to take him out the back way and back to his post. See he
doesn't talk to any of the others, particularly not to any who
haven't been examined yet. You go out with the lieutenant here, so
you'll know where to bring them back to. Lieutenant?"
"Mr. Despard?"
"I imagine you'll be taking the place of each of your guards as
you relieve them. If Doc should come for you without returning
the man he last took—if he comes for you alone—it'll mean we've
found one of them. I'd like you to come back with Doc as natu-

316
rally as possible, so as not to alarm any of the others we may
find."
The lieutenant opened his mouth, glanced at the Major and
closed it again.
"Perhaps," said Debrow, "it might be better if the lieutenant
simply stayed here, Mr. Despard. It's a little unusual, his filling in
for one of the enlisted men on post; and—"
"If you don't mind, Major?" I said.
"No sir," said Debrow slowly. "I don't mind, sir."
"Then we'll do it this way, I think. Lieutenant, will you take
Doc out so he can get the first guard?"
They went off. I turned to Debrow.
"Major, how well do you know the lieutenant?"
"I've known him for several years. More than three years, I'd
say."
"But do you know him well?"
Debrow looked at me with sudden caution. After a second he
answered, slowly.
"I couldn't say . . . well, Mr. Despard."
"Yes," I said.
I left it at that. After a few minutes of silence on both our parts,
Doc came back with the first guard, a chunky lance corporal five
and a half feet tall and looking about the age of the lieutenant.
"Your name?" I asked.
"Lance Corporal Charles Onash, sir. Third Platoon, Fourth
Company, Blue Regiment."
"Have you ever ridden a motorcycle, Corporal Onash?"
"No sir."
"Good. You can go. Take him back, Doc."
The next man had never ridden a motorcycle either. No more
had the three after that. The fifth man we questioned had. I had to
reach for some other mysterious question.
"Ever fly a sailplane, Private Mahn?"
"As a matter of fact, yes, sir."
"How about drive a hydroplane?"
"Yes sir."
Debrow shifted uneasily in the seat he had taken behind one of
the desks. I was beginning to feel a little trapped.
"How are you on reading Sanskrit?"

317
"Sir?"
"I said, can you read Sanskrit?"
"No sir."
"All right," I said, with inner relief, "take him back, Doc."
"Sir?" said Debrow, almost a little timidly, after Private Mahn
had left. "I'm afraid I don't understand
"You will, in due course."
He sat back without saying anything more. The seven more
enlisted men on duty there came through and I managed to send
them all back after getting each one to admit he didn't know how
to do something or other.
"Mr. Despard," began Debrow, after the final one had left.
"That's all the* men on duty here. Does that mean—"
"It means this situation is a good deal more serious than I
thought. Are you armed, Major?"
"No sir."
"That's unfortunate. Well, we'll have to do what we can. I'll
stay here. Will you go quietly to the personnel door we came in by,
and stand just inside it. Lock it if you can, and listen for any
sounds you can hear on the other side. If anyone tries to force it
open, let them; but stand back out of sight and when they're
through, go for help."
"Yes sir. But for Christ's sake, Mr. Despard, what's supposed
to be going on here?"
"I can't tell you quite yet. I've my duty to Paula—to the
Empress—to think of," I said. "Get going now. I'm going to step
off into the shadows just outside this office and be ready to warn
you if anyone who shouldn't comes from the other end of the
building."
He went. I took the Old Man by the hand and followed the
Major out, moving off to where the shadows hid us from him, but
where we would be in line to intercept Doc, coming back from re-
turning the last soldier to his post. From where we were, I could
see the thin line of daylight showing around the personnel door,
blocked out now and then by an uneasily shifting body standing
just this side of it. Eventually, this occultation ceased, and a sec-
ond or two later, Doc emerged alone from the dimness in front of
us.
"All set," he said under his breath.

318
"All taken care of?" I asked.
He nodded.
"The lieutenant?"
"I saved him until next to last."
"All right. The Major's over by the personnel door."
"Was. I've taken care of him, too. He was the last of them."
I wanted to ask how many of them were dead, but the words
stuck in my throat. It was a lifesaver to have a young timberwolf
like Doc for a friend, but it was a little illogical to demand he be
wolf and harmless at the same time.
"How about the aircraft?" I asked.
"The first one you looked at, I didn't touch," Doc answered.
"The rest are set to blow any time you want."
"All right. I've got to see if we can get the hangar doors open
easily. Otherwise, you may have to blow a hole in them—"
"No sweat there either. They're supposed to be electrically op-
erated, but there's a chain block-and-tackle type dingus to use if
the power's off. Can you fly that thing, Marc?"
"I can fly it. Or rather, I can tell it to fly itself and it will."
"Just checking," he said; and I could barely see his grin in the
gloom.
"I don't blame you. I would too," I told him. I was very tired,
suddenly. "Why don't you rig the other planes to destruct as soon
as we're safely out of here, and I'll move the one we're taking up
to this side of the doors? Then you open the door, hop in, and
we'll move."
"Right."
He moved off. I turned on my flashlight and led the Old Man
toward the aircraft Doc had specified as untouched. We climbed
in, shut the door, and I depressed one of the keys.
"Ready»
"Move up slowly on the ground to the inside of the doors to this
building. Or—to put it another way—move slowly forward along
the ground and I'll tell you which way to turn and when to
stop."
The craft stirred and seemed to slide rather than roll forward.
"Left," I told it. "Left maybe ten degrees. Now maybe five de-
grees more. All right, straight ahead . . . stop!"
We halted just inside the hangar doors. I opened the door of the

319
craft and waited. In a moment, there was a faint, rattling sound to
be heard through the opening; and the big doors slid apart to ei-
ther side of the opening they guarded, and bright sunlight blinded
us.
"That's good enough!" I called softly into the brilliance after a
moment. But the doors had already stopped parting with just
enough room for us to go through. I heard a faint thud and Doc
was in the cabin, shutting the aircraft door behind him.
"All set," he said.
"Go!" I told the craft, "Straight ahead, out on the ground
through this opening, take off and climb to three thousand meters.
Head west"
It slid forward through the doors into the full sunlight. Without
any run, it leaped suddenly skyward. There was a sound like a
paper bag popping below and behind us. I glanced back and down
to see smoke coming from the open doorway of the hangar build-
ing, dwindling rapidly to toy size below us. A second later, we
were up where the roads looked like thick pencil lines and the
landscape was starting to move backwards beneath us toward the
sun half way up in the clear sky.
"That takes care of everything, I guess," Doc said. He came
forward and pushed the Old Man off the seat next to mine—a
move the Old Man took without complaint. It was surprising what
the Old Man would take from Doc, nowadays. Almost as much as
Sunday used to take from Ellen. Doc seated himself where the Old
Man had been.
"Need any help flying, or anything like that?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"Then I'll get some sleep," he said, imperturbably. "This gadg-
et's better than a locked door. No one's going to break in and
surprise you in the middle of the air."
He curled up in the seat, closed his eyes, and dropped off.
I was not so lucky.

The aircraft out of the future did not seem to need any serious at-
tention. I asked it for a map of the country, and it was displayed
on the screen in front of me. On the map, I picked out the general
area of our community, asked to have it enlarged for me, and so
continued zeroing in and enlarging until I could identify our desti-
nation to the craft. Once this was done, I simply told it to take us
there and land by the summer palace-which I described-and my
duties were done. I would have liked, then, to curl up and sleep
like Doc; but I could not. I could not even imitate the Old Man,
who was half-dozing, opening his eyes every so often to blink at
me, as if to make sure I was still there.
Instead, I just sat, watching the empty, clean sky and the slowly
moving landscape far below. There was no sound of passage inside
the plane and I felt like a fly trapped under an overturned water
glass.
As long as we had been working to escape, my mind had been
clear and sharp and purposeful. But now, the effect of the body
adrenalin began to die out in me, leaving me feeling empty, dull,
and ugly. The thought of the soldiers on guard who had undoubt-
edly died so the three of us could go free came back to my mind
whether I wanted to think of them or not. God knows I had never
wanted to be the cause of anyone's death, particularly now, since I
29

322
had found that at least part of myself could blend with the rest of
the universe. It was, in fact, that specific, blendable part of myself
that I now felt I had betrayed, misused like a fine-edged tool put
to some wrong purpose.
But what else could Doc and I and the Old Man have done, I
kept asking myself? We had to escape, and the only route open to
us lay over the dead or incapacitated bodies of at least some of
Paula's warriors.
Did it? a jeering little voice in the back of my mind nagged at
me.
All right, I told myself, what other way was there?
You tell me. You're the man who can see patterns.
I couldn't see one here that didn't involve violence.
Then you're not much good, are you?
Leave me alone, I told it. Get out of my head.
How can I leave you alone? I'm you. You're stuck with me.
There's a way out, I thought. And I became very cold when I
thought it.
You haven't got the guts. And even if you did, what about Ellen
and Marie and all the rest you'd be leaving for Paula to take her
revenge on? You want their deaths on your conscience, too?
Paula—I forced myself to think of Paula instead. But that
brought no relief either. Her image summoned up another sort of
sick feeling inside me. Because I had been attracted to her. I actu-
ally had. The fact that she had challenged me with her unavailabil-
ity had been a cloak for the fact that I wanted her anyway, had
wanted her, in fact, from the moment I had first seen her getting
out of her helicopter looking like a page out of a fashion magazine
in a world now vanished forever. Having her would have been al-
most like getting that world back again.
Of course, I had known she had dressed like that deliberately,
that the whole matter of her entrance on the scene had been cool-
headedly calculated to produce the effect on all of us that it had.
But knowing this didn't alter the emotional leap I had felt. Seeing
her like that, I had been lifted out of the raw and dusty reality of
my present into a gilded dream of a memory. I had suddenly been
reminded of the tawdriness of the little world I was about to de-
fend with my life. I had felt suddenly embarrassed by the worka-
day plainness of the two women who shared my life with me, and

323
my handful of loyal friends. They were like coarse brown bread
compared to angel food cake. They were like flat homebrew beer
compared to champagne.
I had been attracted to Paula all right—from that moment. I
could have convinced myself I was in love with her, given time.
Given enough time, time enough to hang myself with, I could even
have gradually forgotten my duty to go back and finish what I had
begun with the time storm. Maybe, I thought now, there had been
the thought of not returning in the back of my mind all along. So
that when I raged at the possibility of Paula not being able to get
her army—and me—across to Europe this fall, I was really raging
against the dday of the excuse that being on the other side of the
Atlantic would have given me, the excuse to put off escaping from
Paula if and when word came that Porniarsk had succeeded in ac-
complishing the very large task I had set him to do.
Yes, it had all been there, hidden inside me, the impulse to
throw away the golden light I had found for the gaining of an
enameled tin ring. How purely tin, I had finally discovered when I
had seen her in her tent that dawn, and she had directed me to
sign the letter she had written for me.
At that moment, the last piece of her personal pattern had
clicked into place for me; and I was forced to see her as she in-
nately was. I had thought that there must be at least a touch of
something Napoleonic under the display brightness that was her
surface. After all, she conquered the larger part of the North
American continent. She had a government, a standing army, and
more accumulated resources than any other half-dozen communi-
ties in the world combined. Above and beyond this, she had an
Alexandrian dream of conquering the whole world. There must, I
thought, be something there that was unique and powerful.
But there was not. When I had stepped into her tent that morn-
ing, when I saw her appearance and the letter she had for me to
sign, her pattern had been completed for me; and I realized that
what I was looking at was an individual who momentarily, at least,
had gone irrational under the pressures of defeat and disap-
pointment. With the evidence of that irrationality, everything
about her had fallen into place. She was neither Napoleonic nor
Alexandrian. She was a borderline psychotic who had fallen into a
chain of circumstances which allowed her to ride forward trium-

324
phantly on the crest of a mounting wave—as long as everything
went her way. While luck was with her, she appeared to be in-
spired by genius. But when things went wrong, she had 110 plan.
Literally.
Those who were on her side were people. Those who were not
were rag dolls to be thrown at the wall or have the sawdust ripped
out of them if she was in a temper. She could wade in blood up to
her elbows and it would not matter; because, of course, it was not
real blood. It could not be real blood, because it belonged to those
who were against her. That was the psychotic side of her; that was
what had hit me like a swinging barn door in the face when I had
stepped into her tent.
All the communities who had given in to her on her way here
were composed of real people, of course. But Capitol had chosen
to refuse her. Therefore, its population were not real people and
she told her soldiers to kill them. But some of her soldiers had not
distinguished between those she wanted killed and those she did
not, and so obviously those soldiers were not real people either.
Therefore, she would have Marc Despard find them and kill
them. But Marc Despard would know that the idea to kill had
come from her in the first place, which might make him think
wrong things about her—things no real person would think. There-
fore, it should be arranged so that it looked as if the soldiers'
punishment were Marc's own idea, and then later she would use
some new soldiers to kill him for doing such a thing. Then every-
one would be happy again; because there would be nobody left
but people who agreed with her. Real people.
Of course, this pattern explained why she had never let me or
anyone else get close to her. Experience would have taught her
that anyone she let get too close to her might end up disagreeing
with her about something or other. I had thought I was beyond the
point where any other single human being could scare the hell out
of me; but she had done that, this morning in the tent. It had been
like finding myself locked in a cage with a wounded tiger.
So it was someone like Paula that I had been willing to trade
the universe for—the universe and everything else I thought I
loved. I was sick: sick at heart and sick at mind. And to cure a
bad situation I had now gone out and caused bloody deeds to be

325
done myself. I who had seen the golden light had done my own
wading in blood. I had sent Doc to kill. . . .
The pain of it was more than I could stand. I groped desper-
ately for the unity—the golden light—and could not find it. I scrab-
bled and clutched for self-justification and found nothing. Nothing,
but the wrong-end-to excuse of saving the lives of the few people
that meant something to me. I had killed that they should not be
killed. Nature, red in tooth and claw. . . . wrote Tennyson. The
books I had drowned in during earlier weeks danced in my head;
but there was no comfort in them. The only small, slim reason I
could find for my living was to defend what I loved. At least, if
there was nor justification in doing that, there was no agony. Per-
haps I could be simply pagan, and simply simple.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds.,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?
I had no ashes of my fathers, no temples and no gods. I was not
Horatius, the ancient Roman of whom Macaulay had rhymed in
these lines from his Lays of Ancient Rome. I only had my little
tribe of one-time strangers to guard against all things human, tem-
poral and infinite; and I wanted some comfort, some prayer to
cling to. Like an overboard passenger hanging on to a life pre-
server, I clung now to Macaulay's four lines and the idea of a
finish in battle, to end all, to wash all out; and I went whirling
down into darkness, into dreams and final forgetfulness . . . .
I woke suddenly, it seemed a long time later, staring up into two
close, concerned faces. One was the smooth face of Doc and the
other the hairy face of the Old Man.
"Marc!" said Doc. "Are you all right? Were you dreaming?"
"Why? What?" My tongue was thick and dry. "What is it?"
"Your eyes were closed and you kept saying, 7 can't do it—I
can't do it—' and we couldn't wake you up," Doc said.
The Old Man nuzzled my face in relief. I got a noseful of his
hair and realized he badly needed a bath. That brought me back to
normality faster than anything else.
"Where are we?" I said, sitting up.

326
"I think we're almost home," said Doc. "You take a look. You
know how this plane works. I don't."
I turned to the control panel and depressed one of the keys.
"Where are we?" I asked. "Show me with a mark on a map."
Obediently, the screen gave me the image of the last enlarge-
ment of the map I had asked it for earlier. A tiny image of the air-
craft appeared on this and I peered at it for a second or two before
I could see that it was actually in motion across the map lines.
"Looks like we're not more than a few minutes out," I said,
"depending on how fast we're travelling.
I looked out and down. We still seemed to be at the same alti-
tude; and, surprisingly, the sun seemed no higher above the hori-
zon behind us than it had been when we took off. That would
seem to indicate that we had been matching the earth's rotational
speed—which was a good rate of travel, to be sure.
"I've told it to go in and land by the summer palace," I told
Doc. I turned back to the control panel and spoke to it. "Land
slowly. I don't want any of our own people shooting at us. And I
don't want to scare anybody."
The craft took me literally. It came in over the summer palace
at exactly three thousand meters of altitude and then descended
vertically, and slowly. We took about twenty minutes to actually
touch ground in the landing area, and by the time we did, most of
the population of the community was on hand, standing off about
fifty feet from our touchdown spot, with the community leaders
in the front rank.
I opened the door of the future plane and stepped down to the
earth—and they all just stared at me, as if I were a man from
Mars. Then Doc and the Old Man came scrambling out behind
me; and everyone poured in on us with a rush. I was surrounded,
picked up and carried, literally, almost all the way to the summer
palace entrance before I could make them put me down on my
feet.
When I finally did get a semblance of quiet, I climbed up in one
of the jeeps parked there, stood on the back seat and told them, as
briefly as I could, that I had escaped from Paula, that she would
be after me eventually, but should not be showing up for some
weeks at least, and I would have more details for them tomorrow.

327
But right now, I had to sort myself out and talk things over with
the other leaders.
They were a little disappointed not to hear the whole story at
once; but they dispersed to their various activities eventually, after
I had promised a community-wide celebration for that evening. Fi-
nally, I got to go inside the palace with Ellen, Marie, Bill and the
rest.
Over food in the same dining room in which I had told them I
was going with Paula, I broke the news to them, bluntly.
"She's not completely sane," I said. "I don't mean she's out of
her head all the time; she'd be less dangerous if she was. I mean
that when it comes to certain things she'll do exactly what she
wants, regardless of the consequences. Because when she gets to
that point, nothing matters except doing what she wants. That's
why I left; because sooner or later, she would want something and
find me in the way; and that would be the end of me."
I told them about the letter she had me sign.
"The point was to hit back at the soldiers who had killed the
experts," I said, "and to saddle me with the blame for doing it.
Sooner or later, she would have used that blame to get rid of me.
That's why I had to get out of there without wasting time. Because
it could have been sooner. It could have been the minute the men
she wanted executed were executed."
"But what'll she do now?" Marie asked.
"She'll send a force to bring me back," I said. "But maybe not
right away, because she's understrength now. That's one reason
leaving her now was good timing. Here, I can work with Porniarsk
and maybe we can find a way to make the move forward before
her people can show up here. I've been working on pattern recog-
nition. I'm stronger in that area than I was. It's a fighting chance,
anyway."
I looked over at Porniarsk, who had not been outside with the
others when we landed, but who had come into the dining room
since we had been sitting there.
"I should have sent word to you sooner," he said. "The fact is,
I ran into this sticking point over a month ago, but I thought that
it was something I could get through. Now, I don't know. Maybe
the two of us can get through it."
"I'll come to the lab with you as soon as we're finished here," I

328
said, between bites of the home-cured ham I was digging into.
"But in any case—"
I looked back at the rest of them.
"In any case, everyone in the community who won't be needed
for the monad gestalt, when and if we're ready to use it, better
start making preparations to scatter, now. If Paula can't get me
back, she'll raise bloody hell—and I mean bloody hell literally—
with anyone connected to me she can get her hands on. Bill,
Marie-"
They both looked at me, from farther on down the table.
"You'd better start making plans as to how supplies are to be
portioned out, and where to, and how people are to take off. Also,
Doc-"
"Yo."
"We're going to need a fast, a really fast warning system to give
us as much notice as possible when we learn Paula or some of her
people are headed this way. Maybe you can figure out something
using that aircraft we came in."
"I think so, Marc." He looked at Ellen. "Right, Ellen?"
Ellen nodded.
"All right." I finished the ham and pushed my plate back. "Any-
one have any suggestions or comments, before I head out to the
lab with Porniarsk?"
"You need some sleep," said Marie. "You look dead. So does
Doc."
I looked at her. The words were Marie-type words, but there
was a difference about her which found an echo in the way she
said them. However, I had no time to investigate such things now.
"I slept on the flight coming in," I said. "Doc probably could
use some sleep."
"I slept last night," said Doc.
"Whatever," I said, getting to my feet. "Anyway, I'll catch up
on my sleep later. Porniarsk? Ready to go?"
"Yes," he said. We went out of the dining room together, leav-
ing the others behind us.
"It's an unusual situation," said Porniarsk, once we got to the
tank in the lab. "It's the kind of stoppage as if the extrapolative
element of this device—what you've been calling the computer-
had encountered a logical contradiction, so that further extrapola-

329
tions from this point would result in increasing error. But attempts
on my part to find out what such a contradiction might be have
produced no results."
"Let me look at where it stopped," I said.
He activated the tank. Once more I stared into the blue-
grayness, with the little firefly points of light flickering through the
space of it. For a moment, a small crawling fear woke inside me, a
fear that in my step aside with Paula I had lost whatever had given
me the ability to see patterns in the tank before. But then, slowly,
the little points of light began to relate and group themselves into
associations.
The pattern took shape. It was a strange and unfamiliar pat-
tern, which was to be expected. But when I tried to go one step
further and change my perception from that of small lights in a
tank to the actual universe envisioned, as I had done once before,
I could not do it. The small crawling fear came back, stronger.
"I can see what you've got there," I said to Porniarsk,
finally. "But I can't seem to make it mean anything to me. I don't
know what's wrong."
"You may just be tired," said Porniarsk. "Or perhaps you've
been away from the device long enough to feel unfamiliar with
it."
"Maybe."
I gave up and withdrew my attention from the pattern in the
tank. Suddenly, I was dead tired. Tired right down to the marrow
of my bones.
"You're right about one thing," I told Porniarsk. "I need sleep.
I'll go lie down."
I went back to my own room, part of the suite I shared with
Marie and Ellen. But neither of them were there now. It was only
early afternoon, and they, with the rest of the community, would
be hard at work. I felt a child's loneliness for someone to sit with
me while I fell asleep; but I pushed the emotion away from me. I
undressed, lay down on the bed, pulled a blanket over me and
stared at the white ceiling, lightly shadowed now and then by the
clouds outside reflecting from the window.
I was still dead tired; but I began to wonder if I would sleep. I
lay there.
I woke to someone shaking me. For a second, I thought I was

330
back on the future plane again and being woken by Doc and the
Old Man. Then I saw it was dark outside the window and dark in
the room, and the shape bending over me was female.
"Marc-" It was Ellen's voice. "I hate to wake you, but the
whole community's waiting for you. If you can just come out and
show yourself for a little while, you can come back after that and
sleep as long as you want."
"Sure," I said. "All right."
I levered my wooden body up to a sitting position on the edge
of the bed and she began to massage my neck, standing in front of
me and reaching around behind my head. I leaned my forehead
gratefully against the human softness of her belly, feeling myself
come alive again to the warm pressure of her fingers kneading the
stiff cords and muscles running up from my shoulders into the area
behind my ears. She felt and smelled delightful; and I wanted to
stay there for the rest of my life, getting my neck rubbed.
But she stopped after a while.
"You're awake now," she said. "Get dressed."
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 im-
plications of affection and concern. For a second, I could almost
feel what an animal might feel in such case—and there, for a sec-
ond, the universe-identity almost was with me again. But the sec-
ond 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 Mex-
ico 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

331
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 lit-
tle closer with each try—and a couple of weeks later I broke
through.
Whatever barrier I had been pushing against went down all at

332
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 mat-
ter! 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 previ-
ous 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. Its 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—fac-
tor; 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 mo-
tionless 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."

333
"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 onS morning.
"I've just made a swing east in the plane," he said. He had be-
come 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 rendez-
voused 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 tar-
get 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 conforma-
tion 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 sit-
uation developed, it turned out that the difference between restruc-
turing 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.
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
30

336
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 unguessa-
ble distance of time into the future. There was no way to measure
how far, but thousands of years anyway in terms of the old tempo-
ral 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 param-
eters 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 origi-
nally would have any idea of what to expect from involving them-
selves 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

337
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 ques-
tions, 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 mo-
ment when I got there was unimportant. The others were con-
cerned with the possibility of tigers and robbers on the way, the
availability of wells along the route, the quarters they would oc-
cupy 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.

338
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 mo-
ment 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 air-
craft 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 tak-
ing 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 vil-
lage 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.

339
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 fare-
well, 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.
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 peo-
ple 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

340
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 in-
significant 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

341
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."

342
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 to-
gether, 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 al-
ready 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.
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 every-

343
body 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 ho-
rizon 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 to-
gether with the strength of the others in the monad and the mem-
ory of the cicada sound was lost in the silent song of blended iden-
tities 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

344
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 sur-
rounded 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
31

346
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 some-
thing neither the welcome home blast, nor the information session
had possessed. There was a relaxed feeling of peace about this oc-
casion 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 some-
thing 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 for-
ward 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

347
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 dis-
covery 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 gath-
ered nearly two hundred people who really belong up here, thou-
sands 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.
". . . it shouldn't be such a surprise, though," he was going on
to say, even as I was noting the changes in him. "Stop to think
that the ones who gathered around us in the first place were survi-
vor types. You had to be a survivor type to stay alive while the
mistwalls were moving. Even if you were one of the few who were
lucky enough to stay put and have no mistwalls come near you,
contact with the survivor types around you afterwards either made
you like them in a hurry, or buried you."
"My point, though," I checked and glanced around to make
sure that none of the others were close enough to overhear me
discussing them in this clinical fashion, "my point is that these
people are a lot more than simple survivors."
"Right," said Bill, his brown face serious. "Look what hap-

348
pened, though. After the time storm, our group began to attract a
particular type of people—those who had heard of us and thought
they'd like to be associated with us. The ones we attracted were
the ones who saw the same sort of things in us they saw in them-
selves. So they came—but they didn't all stay. Those who didn't fit
went off again. The community was a sort of automatic self-filter
for a common type. Then, when it came down to a question of
who wanted to make the jump forward in time or not, that deci-
sion shook out the last of the chaff."
I winced inside; though I was careful to make sure no sign of it
showed on my face. He had labelled Marie with a tag I neither
agreed with, nor would have wanted to hear applied to her even if
I had agreed with it. At the same time, I had to admit he had laid
out a good argument. I said as much.
"Time will tell, of course," he answered. "I'll say one thing,
though." He turned and met my eyes directly with his. "I've never
felt happier in my life than when I realized that it was a settled
thing, an unchangeable thing, that I was coming forward like this."
"Well," I said, a little lamely. "I'm glad."
"I think even if Bettijean hadn't wanted to come along, I still
wouldn't have hesitated."
I opened my mouth to ask who Bettijean was, and then closed it
again. One more thing had evidently been going on under my nose
without my noticing. I would ask Ellen later.
"I'd better get back to the others," I said.
After the celebration had begun to settle down a bit, I got up on
my customary jeep-rostrum to tell them what we would be doing
in the next few days. I said that we would start setting up the com-
munity again, here. Meanwhile, Doc would be flying surveys to
locate other human settlements in this future world. He would, in
fact, fly a spiral course out of this area; and the navigating equip-
ment of the plane could be used to map the ground he covered, in
the sense that it would store up information about it, which could
later be recalled on the view screen of the control panel.
"How soon do you think we'll find other people?" some male
voice I did not recognize, somewhere toward the back of the
crowd, asked.
"I can't make any guesses," I said. "Actually, if I was betting,
I'd bet they'd find us first."

349
There was a silence; and I suddenly realized they were waiting
for me to expand on that.
"This is the future," I said. "Porniarsk and I found evidence
that up here they may be doing something about the time storm. If
that's the case, they have to be pretty competent technologically.
I'm assuming that sooner or later, and probably sooner, the fact
that we're here will register on whatever sort of sensing equipment
they've got. For one thing, if they're aware of the time storm,
they're going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly got
exchanged by the time storm forces for a chunk from the past."
There were a lot more questions after that, some serious, some
not so, covering everything from what future humans would look
like to whether we should post guards—against animals, if not
humans—until we learned that this was unnecessary. I turned that
suggestion over to Doc, who thought it was a good idea. The ses-
sion ended with Bill climbing into the jeep and making himself
somewhat unpopular by saying that he wanted to start tomorrow
morning getting a complete inventory of everything we had left
after those leaving had taken what they wanted; and he wanted ev-
erybody to cooperate by listing their own possessions.
I broke away from the gathering before it finally ended and got
together with Porniarsk in the lab. The view we had in the tank
was essentially the same as the one that had been in it before our
move. The difference was that now it was real rather than ex-
trapolated; and there were minor corrections in its display because
of that.
"Try it now," I said to Porniarsk. "See if we can extrapolate
forward from here, now that it's the present."
He worked with the equipment for perhaps twenty minutes.
"No," he said. "It's still hesitating over inconsistencies."
"Then we've landed in the right place—or time, I mean," I said.
"To tell the truth, I've been a little worried. Between you and me,
I half-expected the people from this time to be waiting for us when
we appeared."
"You were assuming that our activity of time forces would at
once attract their attention? I would have thought so, too."
"And that they'd have means of getting here the moment they
saw it," I said. "If they don't, how can they be advanced enough
to do anything about the time storm generally?"

350
"I don't know," said Porniarsk. "But I think there are too many
unknowns here for either of us to speculate."
"I hope you're right."
"About that, I believe I am. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess."
"All right," I said. "But if no one shows up within twenty-four
hours, I'm going to begin to worry."
No one did show up in the next forty-eight hours. Nor within
the forty-eight hours after that, nor in the week that followed.
Meanwhile, Doc was coming back from his daily mapping flights
and reporting no sign of other human existence. No habitations,
no movement. We were evidently at the far eastern end of a mid-
continental area of plains uniformly covered by the tall grass, like
central North America in the time of the buffalo; though there
were none of the bison breed to be seen now.
However, both the grasslands and the hardwood forest that
began about sixty miles west of where our chunk of territory had
landed were aswarm with other game. Deer, elk, wolf, bear,
moose . . . and the whole category of familiar smaller wildlife.
The hardwood forest gave evidence of stretching to the east coast
and had been in existence long enough to kill off most of the un-
dergrowth beneath it, so that it had a tidily unreal look about it,
like a movie set for a Robin Hood epic. Doc had landed in an
open section of it and reported great-trunked oaks and elms with
level, mossy ground beneath them, so that there was a cathedral
look to the sunlight streaming down between the lofty limbs over-
head.
I kept to myself my concern over the fact we were not being
approached by the other intelligences of this future time. Our com-
munity was digging in, literally. Just as we had arrived here in day-
light when we had left our former time period at night, so we had
also arrived here in the spring; although it had been fall where we
had left. A fair amount of planted crops had been lost behind us;
and even without Bill's urging, a number of our people were eager
to get seeds in the ground in this place. There would be no stores
of pre-time storm goods to plunder for additional food and sup-
plies in the time where we were now.
So the first week became the second, and the second the third,
with no sign of other intelligent life to be found on the continent
around us and no futuristic visitors. Gradually we began to adjust

351
to the fact that we might, indeed, be completely alone on this
planet of the future; and the life of our own community began to
take up most of our attention.
It was a strenuous time. In addition to coping with the fact that
here we would have to supply our own necessities, there was evi-
dence that the climate in this future time and area would have
colder winters than we had endured, back where we had been.
Possibly, much colder winters. There was a good deal of work to
be done to insulate buildings and expand the capacity of their
heating units, whether fireplaces or stoves.
With the move, we had lost the small river from which we had
powered our electric generator. Bill had said he could get some
windmill structures built in a few weeks to give us at least inter-
mittent current; but this depended on having the hands available
to do the work. More immediate was the need for firewood. Right
now the only wood available was on our section of a mountain
that had come forward in time with us. One hard winter would
deforest this completely. It was almost an imperative that we ar-
range somehow to bring fuel from the forested area sixty miles to
our east, or move the community to it; and we had too big a stake
in fixed property here to make that move in one short summer.
The result was that everybody worked time and overtime, in-
cluding me. In a way, this was something I was grateful for; be-
cause it kept my mind off the fact that no one had contacted us.
Doc had by now flown as far as the east coast and for some hun-
dreds of miles north of what had once been the Canadian border.
He had seen absolutely no sign of civilization. Everywhere, there
was only wilderness visible from the muskeg conifer forest of the
north, through the now-distorted pattern of the Great Lakes, down
to the flat country north of the former Mexican border. A cold
worry had begun to nibble at me that possibly Earth at this time
was completely uninhabited and forgotten; and if that was so, how
in my lifetime was I ever to contact time storm fighters who were
light-years—possibly hundreds to millions of light-years—away?
So I was grateful for the hard work, in one way. In another
way, it kept me from coming to grips with a second worry, one
that was like acid eating away deep within me. With Marie's leav-
ing, something in her had come out into the open that I had never
suspected she felt. Now, I was aware of it in Ellen as well. Ellen

352
was still there during the days; she was there beside me at night;
but I could sense now that not all of her was there. Some part of
her was being withheld from me. There was a wall between us,
as there had been between Marie and myself, although I had
never realized it.
I wanted to talk to her about it; but there was no time. In the
morning we only had time to rise, dress, eat, and run. During the
day there was no rest, no pause in which to talk. At night, there
was only time for another meal, and sleep would threaten to claim
us before we had finished refueling the weary, empty engines of
our bodies. We fell into bed, opened our eyes—it seemed—a mo-
ment later; and another day's cycle was already rushing us inex-
orably onward.
But there had to be a break sometime. It came at the end of the
fifth week, when the first of Bill's windmills began to power the
generator, and a trickle of electricity came to make our lighting
fixtures glow faintly against the ceilings and walls behind them. It
was as good an excuse as any to give people a breather, and I de-
clared a night and a day off.
For all the wonders of artificial light refound, there was little
celebrating that first evening. All that most of us wanted to do was
to sleep; and sleep we did, until late the next day. Then, in the
noon sunlight, we gradually came out of our sleeping quarters to
sit or move around slowly in the sun, either doing nothing at all, or
turning our attention at last to something that had long gone neg-
lected, that we now had time to check, clean, mend, or build.
It was the second of these activities that concerned me. When I
woke, Ellen was already up and out of the summer palace. I got
up, drank a couple of cups of black coffee and went looking for
her.
I found her hanging out a wash on the upsloping hillside that
lay on the opposite side of the summer palace from that which
held the landing area. Coming around the corner and seeing her
from a distance, I woke to the fact that she had necessarily taken
over all of Marie's household obligations in addition to her own. I
had been so used to having both of them around and being
selfishly immersed in my own problems, that it had never occurred
to me that Ellen would now be doing double duty in addition to
her outside work with the rest of the community. Nor had it ever

353
occurred to me to help either her or Marie before. I came around
a corner of the building and saw her from a little distance. I
stopped, and for a moment I simply watched her, for she had not
yet seen me. Then I went forward, picked up a pair of my own
jeans from the basket and joined her in hanging up the rest of the
wet stuff.
We worked side by side in silence.
"Look," I said, when we were done. "Why don't you sit down
for a moment? I'll take the basket in, bring out a card table and
some chairs and fixusa lunch. You just sit still. How about it?"
She looked at me. I had never been able to read the deep
thoughts behind her face, and I could not now. But I noticed
again, as I had come to notice since Marie had left, how Ellen had
also changed with the years in between. She was still young—what
had I figured out once, that she could not be any older than Doc
and was perhaps even younger? But there was nothing of a girl left
about her now; not even the ghost, it seemed, of she whom I had
picked up in the panel truck long since. The Ellen I looked at now
was a mature woman and another person entirely.
"All right," she said.
She sat down on the grass of the hillside, took off the scarf she
had tied around her head and shook her hair out. She was wearing
some old, autumn-brown slacks and a dark green shirt, open at the
throat. Her neck rose in one straight column from the spread col-
lar of the shirt, and under her dark hair, now loose about her head
and shoulders, her eyes were blue-green and brilliant.
I took the basket and went into the house. I rummaged around
the kitchen, trying to remember what she had shown a liking for,
in the way of food. I had become a halfway decent cook in my
years alone in the north woods before the time storm hit; but there
was not much available here in the way of foodstuffs. We were all
living off stored goods until fall, when the crops of our recent
planting would hopefully be in.
I finally found a small canned ham, and with this, some canned
new potatoes, and three of the highly valuable eggs from our com-
munity's small flock of chickens, managed to make a sort of ham
and potato salad, moistened with a spur-of-the-moment, home-
made mayonnaise I whipped up from the yolk of one of the eggs
and the corn oil we had in fair quantity. I also hunted around the

354
palace and found a bottle of Liebfraumilch that was not overage.
There was no way to cool it, lacking electricity for our refrig-
erator; but salad and wine, once I had the card table and chairs set
up outside with a tablecloth of sorts on it, looked reasonably fes-
tive.
"That's good," said Ellen, about the salad, as we ate; and I
warmed clear through.
"Glad to hear you say so," I told her. "Do you realize I really
don't know that much about what you like to eat?"
"I like everything," she said.
"That's good. Because it'll be a long time before we have any-
thing like what we were used to before," I said; and I went on
about what we could expect in the way of diet that winter, even if
the crops went well.
I was talking around and about, trying to get her to give me
some sort of conversational lead from which I could get onto the
topic I wanted to bring up. She said nothing, however, to help.
Nonetheless, with the relaxation of the food and wine in me, I
finally began to drift on the tide of my own words into the area I
wanted.
"There's two chances that might help protect Marie and the
others," I said. "One's that when Paula's soldiers arrived and
found the country changed where we'd been, they figured I'd mag-
icked everybody safely forever beyond their reach, and Paula
bought that idea when they told her—"
"Do you really think she would?"
I hesitated.
"No," I said. "If she was completely normal, mentally, I'd think
she might. But part of her mind is never going to rest, where I'm
concerned; and sooner or later, word is going to reach her of peo-
ple who've met and recognized some of our people who stayed
behind. Then her hunt'll be on again. All we can really hope for is
a delay."
"What's the other chance?"
"That's the long one. If I ever do get into contact with the time
storm fighters here and get to work with them, maybe I can learn
some way to go back and make Marie and the rest permanently
safe from Paula—maybe by shifting Paula herself to a different
time."

355
Ellen said nothing. There was a little silence between us; and a
fly that had discovered the empty wine bottle circled it, droning.
"God help her!" I said; and the words broke out of me, all of a
sudden. "God help them all!"
"It was her decision," said Ellen.
"I know," I said. "But I-"
I looked at her.
"How much did Paula have to do with her going?" I asked.
"Not much," said Ellen.
"You both knew how I reacted to—to Paula. Believe me, I
didn't even know it myself. I didn't even realize it until after I
caught on to.what she actually was, headwise, and then I knew I
had to get out of there."
"Paula wasn't that important to Marie."
"You say that? If it hadn't been for Paula and how I felt about
her, we'd still have Marie and Wendy with us."
"I don't think so," Ellen said.
"How can you say you don't think so? Marie never talked about
leaving before."
"Not to you. She did to me, lots of times."
I stared at Ellen.
"She did? Why?"
"She told you why, when she left. Marc," Ellen said, "you don't
listen. That's one of the reasons she went."
"Of course I listen!"
She said nothing.
"Ellen, I loved Marie!" I said. "Why wouldn't I listen to some-
one I loved? I loved Marie—and I love you!"
"No." Ellen got up from the table, picked up the empty plates
and silver and started in toward the house. "You don't, Marc. You
don't love anyone."
"Will you come back here!" I shouted after her. She stopped
and turned. "For once will you come back and say more than
three words in a row? For Christ's sake, come and sit down and
talk to me! There's something here, in the air between us. I can
feel it. I bump into it every time I turn around. And you?re telling
me that there was something like that between Marie and me and I
didn't know about it. Come back and tell me what it was. Come
back and talk to me, damn it!"

356
She stood facing me, holding the dishes.
"It wouldn't do any good."
"Why not?"
She did not answer.
"Do you love me?" I said.
"Of course. So did Marie."
"She loved me and she wanted to leave me? I didn't love her
and I want to keep her? What kind of sense does that make? If
you loved me the way you say you do, you'd explain it to me, so I
could do something about it, about me, or whatever was neces-
sary."
"No," she said. "You've got things the wrong way around. I
love you without your doing anything."
"All right, then!"
"But you're asking me to change. Talk doesn't come easily to
me. You know that. If I have to talk before you can love me, then
you don't love me. You wanted Marie to change, too, but she
couldn't. I can, but I won't. It's up to you, Marc, not me."
I stared at her; but before I could say anything more, a stranger
walked around the corner of the summer palace and came up to
us. He was a startling figure, a good four inches taller than I was,
completely bald, and wearing only a sort of kilt of white cloth
around his waist. Even his feet were bare. His features looked
something like those of an eskimo's but his skin was brown-dark,
and the muscles stood out like cords under the skin. He looked as
if he had spent his lifetime exercising, not with barbells, but on the
parallel rings and other gymnastic equipment. He came up to me.
"Marc Despard?" he said. He had no accent that I could put
my finger on, but the timbre of his voice was somehow different
from that of any other human voice I'd heard. "My name's Ob-
sidian. Sorry we took so long to come forward and meet you, but
we had to study you for a while, first"

He was offering his hand in ordinary fashion. I took it and
shook it automatically. I had been expecting him, or at least some-
one like him; but the delay had been long enough, and he had ap-
peared so suddenly that he had managed to knock me off balance
with his appearance, in spite of all my expectations. I found myself
going through the social routine.
. . my wife, Ellen."
"Ellen," and he shook hands with Ellen, "my name's Ob-
sidian."
He had a round, friendly face, a little flat-looking and mongo-
loid; and this, with the hairless skull, gave him something of a
tough look.
"Hello," said Ellen. "Where did you come from?"
"We're perhaps two hundred miles from you."
"Just a couple of hundred miles away?" I echoed.
"We had to keep you from finding us while we were studying
you," he answered. "You have to understand that we had to
gather a lot of data on you in order to work out your language and
customs. And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward under-
standing the accident that brought you here."
"Accident?" I said. "We came here deliberately."
He stared at me for a long second.
32

358
"You did?"
"That's right," I said. "I'd probably better take you down to see
the lab and Porniarsk. Sorry, maybe I'm getting the cart before the
horse. But after expecting you every day from the moment we
landed here, and not having you show up until now—"
"Expecting me when you arrived?" Obsidian said.
We seemed to be talking at cross purposes.
"That's right," I said. "We came here because I wanted to con-
tact you people who were doing something about the time storm—"
"Just a moment," he said. "Excuse me."
He disappeared.
He did not come back in a moment, either. He did not come
back the rest of that day, nor the day after. It was nearly a week
later that I stepped outside from the door of the summer palace
that opened onto the parking area, and found him standing there,
bright with the morning sun on his bare shoulders. Ellen stepped
out just behind me.
"Excuse me for not getting back before this," he said. "But pos-
sibly I got off on the wrong foot when I first visited you. I've
talked the matter over with a number of others, and we've decided
that our data was much more insufficient than we thought. Would
you be willing to sit down with me and tell me the whole story of
how you came to be here, so that we can have that information to
work with?"
"I'll be glad to," I said, turning back toward the door. "Do you
want to step inside?"
"No. If you don't mind, no," he said. "Later on, I'd like very
much to have the chance to look inside your summer palace, but
not just yet. Can we talk out here?"
"Certainly."
"Good." He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the
grass.
"If you don't mind, I'll use a chair," I said.
"I don't mind," he said. "I'm very interested. Is it actually com-
fortable for you, sitting on that piece of furniture?"
"It's more comfortable than sitting the way you are," I said. "I
can sit like that, but not for any length of time."
"I see."

359
I went inside and came out with chairs for myself and Ellen. We
sat down.
"The chair was more a product of western culture in my time,
though," I said. "In the east, even then, people would be perfectly
comfortable sitting the way you sit."
"Thanks," he said. "That's the sort of data we appreciate."
"All right," I went on. "Where do you want me to start?"
"Any and all information you can give us will help," he said.
"Suppose I start with the time storm then," I said. "We're to-
gether on that, aren't we? You know what I mean when I talk
about the time storm?"
"Oh yes," Obsidian said. "We're aware of the time storm."
"Well, we weren't," I said, "until it hit us without warning one
day. I was up in a northern, wild area of a state called Minnesota
in the north central part of this continent . . . ."
I picked up my own history from the moment when I had
thought I was having a second heart attack and proceeded to tell
it. I had thought it was something I could cover in an hour or so;
but I had badly underestimated what there was to tell, and I had
come nowhere near beginning to estimate how many things Ob-
sidian would need explained. We began with the matter of my
heart attack, which took some thirty minutes or so of explanation
by itself, and went on from there, frequently dropping into what
must have sounded like a vaudeville act built around the idea of
two blind men meeting in the middle of the Sahara desert at mid-
night.
"But there's no evidence of any damage to your heart, now."
"There isn't?"
"You mean you don't know there isn't?"
. . . And so on, far into the night. After a little while, Ellen
sensibly got up and left us to bring Porniarsk out to join us, and to
call Doc to let the rest of the community know what was going on.
Within a few hours Obsidian and I had a quiet, attentive audience
seated in a semicircle around us and consisting of everyone able to
get from the town up to the landing area.
The talk went on for four days. Obsidian had clearly come with
the intention of getting information, but giving little or none him-
self; but it proved impossible for us to communicate unless he ex-
plained something of his own time and civilization. He and I had

360
nothing in common but the language his people had deduced from
the first weeks of recording and then taught him to speak accent-
lessly, and by the end of the first hour, we were both realizing
how inadequate this was by itself.
The words alone meant little without their connotative ref-
erents, and his connotative referents and mine were separated by
thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. It was a curi-
ous sensation to hear a sentence made up of nothing but the old,
familiar sounds and, at the same time, realize that I had not the
slightest idea of what Obsidian meant as he uttered them. Luckily
he was an intelligent person; and above and beyond this, he had a
sense of humor. Otherwise the talks would have broken down out
of sheer exasperation on the parts of each of us.
But he was bright enough and sensible enough to adapt, in spite
of the consensus he had been sent out with, that he should listen
but not talk. By the end of the third day, he was telling us as much
about his people as we were telling him about us, and from that
point on, the information exchange began to work, to a point, at
least.
By this time we were once more talking privately; but with a
tape recorder powered by a stepped-down automobile battery that
had been charged by Bill's windmill generator. The tapes were du-
plicated and made available to the rest of the community. To hit
the high points of the information they gathered, Obsidian and his
associates here on Earth numbered under a thousand individuals
belonging to a race of latter-day humans that were primarily scat-
tered, very thinly indeed, across the habitable worlds of this
galaxy.
These humans did not think of themselves, however, so much as
members of a race, but as members of a larger community, includ-
ing representatives of some millions of other civilized races with
whom they intermixed. Individuals of these other races were also
thinly spread across the same habitable worlds; and some of them,
as well as some of the humans, were to be found as well in other
galaxies or elsewhere in the universe—although when this hap-
pened it was because of special circumstances Obsidian had not
yet explained.
The reason for all these individuals being scattered so widely
was apparently that (a) the time storm had cut populations on in-

361
habited worlds to the point where there were several habitable
worlds for each individual of intelligence; and (b) apparently
there were means of travelling not merely faster than light, but
many times faster than light, so that even visiting other galaxies
was not impossible. Obsidian shied away from my questions when
I tried to find out more about this means of travel. Evidently
faster-than-light did not describe it directly in his terms; and he
was clearly unsure of his ability to explain it to me at our present
level of communication.
We had encountered a number of such points of noncom-
munication. The main problem was the complete dissimilarity of
our referents, so that often we found ourselves talking at cross
purposes. Some cultural differences only emerged more or less by
accident. For example, it turned out that Obsidian was not his
name—not at least in the way we think of "names." In the way we
used that word he had no specific name. This was because he had
a certain unique identity, structure, or value—there was no way to
express it properly in our terms—which was recognized as Mm by
his fellow humans and other race individuals who had met him
and experienced this unique identity of his.
For reference purposes, in the case of those who had never met
him, he was referred to by a code word or symbol that essentially
told where he had been born and what he had been doing since.
But this was never used except for that sort of reference. For ordi-
nary communicative purposes he had a number of—nicknames is
not the right word for them, but it is the closest I can come—
depending on how the individual referring to him associated him.
The most common of these nicknames, the one he favored himself,
and the one generally in use here among his fellows on Earth, was
a name that compared him to the mineral we call "obsidian" and
since it had been established, during the month or so they had
been recording our speech, that we would recognize that word, he
had identified himself with it when he first met Ellen and me.
It was not just an arbitrary difference from us, this matter of
names, it seemed. It was something much more important than
that. The whole name business had to do with the different way
he and his community of humans and nonhumans thought and
worked; and until I could understand why they did their naming
that way, a vital chunk of their culture would remain a mystery to

362
me. Accordingly, I struggled to understand and to make him ex-
plain himself so that I could understand.
The name business had something to do with identity in that
word's most basic sense, which was tied to occupation among
them much more than it would be with us, which was, in turn, tied
to a different sort of balance between individual and group respon-
sibilities—which was all somehow connected with the fact that they
had not approached us the moment we had appeared here, but had
hid and studied us instead.
It had not been because they were in any way afraid of us. Fear
seemed to have a more academic quality to Obsidian than it did to
me. They had been obligated to be able to communicate with us
before they could appear. Consequently, they had stayed out of
sight of Doc in the plane—which was apparently not as hard as it
might seem, since they used structures much less than we did. In
fact, our buildings were almost a little forbidding to Obsidian,
which was why he had refused my invitation to come inside the
summer palace. Apparently, he was about as attracted to the inte-
rior of the summer palace as I might have been to the idea of a
neighborly crawl through the tunnels and dens of a human-sized
mole. Obsidian's people built observatories and such, but these
were generally constructed without walls or roof.
Apparently they did not need as much protection from the
weather as we needed. When I asked about this, Obsidian demon-
strated how he could envelop himself in a sort of cushion of invisi-
ble warmth, apparently just by wanting to do it—although he
insisted that the heat was generated by mechanical, not mental,
means. But beyond this, it was obvious to me early in our discus-
sions that he had a far greater tolerance for temperature extremes
and the discomfort of his physical surroundings than I did. In spite
of the chilliness of the spring mornings or the heat of the after-
noon, he showed the same indifference to the temperature and
wore the same kilt, no more, no less. It was not until the third day
that I discovered he was only wearing that out of courtesy to us, it
having been established by them that we had some kind of cloth-
ing taboos.
It was about the third day, also, that a great many other things
began to make sense. Surprisingly, my ability to communicate im-
proved much more swiftly than did his; so much so, in fact, that he

363
commented on it with unconcealed awe. The awe was almost more
unsettling to me than the other mysteries about him. It gave me an
uneasy feeling, mentally, to think that these people of the far fu-
ture might not be so superior to us after all; that they might, in
fact, be inferior in some ways. Obsidian and I worried over the
communication discrepancy together and finally concluded that,
paradoxically, Obsidian was in a sense being inhibited by the fine
command of the spoken language he had exhibited the first time he
appeared.
It emerged that his group was not used to translating concepts.
Sounds and symbols, yes. These varied from race to race among
them in infinite variety. But, just as they could agree on the unique
identity of any single individual, they were apparently able to
agree on the perfect value of any concept, so that translation, in
that sense, was never necessary. When we first appeared, they had
set up recording devices to pick up every sound made in our com-
munity and channelled these into a computer-like device which
had sorted them out and deduced the rules and vocabulary of our
language, with the observed or implied denotative values of each
sound. With this done, they had pumped the information into the
head of Obsidian and sent him to talk to us, confident that he could
now communicate.
Only, he had run into trouble. The sounds he used turned out to
have had meanings over and above what the language computer
had deduced. In short, Obsidian and his fellows were in the un-
comfortable position of people who have grown up with a single
set of concepts, thinking there was no other, and who had then run
into an entirely different set—ours. They were like the person who
grows to adulthood before he discovers that there are other lan-
guages than the one he knows, and then has to struggle emo-
tionally with the concept that anybody else can prefer some out-
landish sound to what he knows in his heart of hearts is the only
"real" sound for a thought or thing.
Because of this, his plans had gone awry. It had been planned
that he would drop in on us, pump us dry of all other relevant data
on us, feed that also into the computer, and come up with patterns
of us in all departments, from which it could be figured how to ad-
just us to the culture of their time, if this was possible. Instead,

364
here he was floundering at absorbing my patterns while I was pick-
ing up his, hand over fist.
Well, not exactly hand over fist. His patterns, unlike ours, were
all logical and logically interrelated, which gave me a great advan-
tage. But there were also abilities and concepts in his area that he
took for granted and I could not get him to talk about because I
had no way of describing what I was after.
It was not until the fourth day that I finally achieved a break-
through in that respect; and it happened for a strange reason. That
mind of mine, which could never leave a problem alone but must
keep worrying at it and chewing it over until either mind or prob-
lem cracked wide open, had been at work on the two enigmatic
conversations I had had with Marie, just before she left, and Ellen,
the day that Obsidian had appeared.
I still could make no sense of what they said. For all my efforts
to understand, my comprehension slid off the memories of their
words to me as if both had been encased in glass. At the same
time I had a reason to keep working at them, now. There was
something in me which I evidently could not see, as I could not see
my own eyeballs, except in a mirror, or the back of my head.
There must be something in me, I thought, like a dark area, a
shadow cast by the sensing mechanism itself, that was keeping me
from the closeness I wanted to have with other people—and of all
people, Ellen. I had been trying all sorts of approaches to the
problem, trying to find some way of sneaking up on the unseeable,
so to speak; and it occurred to me suddenly as I was talking to
Obsidian that there might be a similarity between this problem and
my problem of communication with him.
I had tried evoking the golden light as a means of reaching an
understanding of Ellen. But I had found that when I tried to reach
for the feeling of unity with all things for that reason, it was as it
had been in the plane after leaving Paula's camp—I could not
evoke the state of unity. It came to me now that it would do no
harm to try for it once more in the case of Obsidian and his peo-
ple, where the emotional roots concerned did not go so deeply into
the dark of my own soul.
So I tried. It helped that I had grown to like Obsidian in the last
few intense days of talking. I thought I could almost grasp what he
described as that unique identity element by which all other beings

365
of his time recognized him. So I picked a moment when he was
trying to explain to me what among them took the place of family
structure, as we in our community knew it. I watched him as he
talked, seated cross-legged on the ground. His face was animated
and his hands wove patterns in the air. He had the attribute of
seeming to be alive with energy even while he was obviously with-
out tension and relaxed. It was an ability I had seen before in cas-
ual encounters with professional athletes in top condition.
I was hardly listening to what he said. That is, my mind was
making automatic note of it, but I was comfortably aware of the
fact that the tape recorder was catching his words and I would be
able to review them again this evening in the quiet of the summer
palace library. Most of my attention was concentrated on him as a
complete entity; a sound-making, limb-moving individual extend-
ing energy to me in the form of sound and gesture. I squinted,
mentally, to focus in on him in this sense; and when I had him in
focus, slid on top of his image before ine the emotional/intellec-
tual gestalt that was my friend Obsidian, as I knew him.
The two melted together; and as they did I was able for the first
time to take a step back from him and the present moment. I kept
my point of view at that distance and slowly let the rest of the day
soak into me.
We sat just outside the summer palace and I had my back to it;
so that I looked past Obsidian, across the open stretch of the land-
ing area and out over the descending slope of the trees to the town
below and the tall grass marching in all directions to the horizon.
It was, for once, a perfectly clear day; there was not a cloud in
sight. But a small, cool wind was wandering back and forth across
the mountainside where we sat.
I saw the treetops moving to it and felt the intermittent light
touch of it on my face and hands, cancelling out now and again
the warmth of the steady afternoon sunlight. It was too early for
insects; but down on the wooded slope below me, a cloud of
specks that were small birds burst up unexpectedly as I watched,
to swarm dark against the far bright sky for a moment like a
cloud of gnats, and then settled back down out of sight into the
dark mass of the leaves below them again.
High up, another single speck swam against the cloudless sky. A
hawk? My vision went out to the horizon and beyond. Slowly, I

366
became conscious of a rhythm that was the beating of my own
heart and at the same time the breathing of the world. Once again,
the golden light began to grow around me and, once more, I felt
myself touching all things in the earth, sky, and water, from pole
to pole. I was touching all things, and I reached out to touch Ob-
sidian.
I looked at him without moving my eyes and saw him in full di-
mension for the first time. For he was a part of the universe, as all
these other things were a part of it; and that was what was at the
core of his community's difference from ours. They were aware of
the universe of which they were a part, while we thought of our-
selves as disparate and isolated from it. That was why Obsidian's
identity was unchangeable and instantly recognized by his fellows.
It was because the dimensions of that identity were measured by
the universe surrounding him, in which he was embedded, and of
which he was a working part. All at once the gestalt formed, and I
understood without words, without symbols, the different, fixed
place he and all other thinking minds of his period had in this,
their own time and place.
I had produced the golden light again and it had helped me
find what I had been seeking. I sat, just feeling it for a moment-
then let it go. The light faded, I came back into my ordinary body
and smiled at Obsidian.
But he did not smile back. He had stopped talking, and he was
staring at me with a startled expression.
"Obsidian—" I began, about to tell him what I now understood.
He vanished.

Once again, he did not come back for a while. He was missing all
the rest of that day and through the next two days. Under the con-
ditions applying up until five minutes before he left, I would have
worried that I had somehow damaged the relationship building be-
tween the two of us, and between our people and his interstellar
community. Following the moment of light and my sudden access
to understanding, I was sure this was not the case; and I tried to
reassure the other members of our group who were inclined to
worry about his nonappearance.
"It's not explainable in our words," I told Ellen, Bill, Doc, Por-
niarsk and about five others of the community who had been
emerging as leaders during the past few weeks. We were all sitting
around the fireplace in the library on the second evening, with the
windows open to the courtyard and the night sky outside. "But
I'm sure I didn't step on his toes in any way. I can't tell you how I
know it, but I know it."
"Why did he take off, then?" Bill asked. "Can't you give us
some idea, Marc?"
"He recognized what I was doing—this universe association
trick I've told you about. I've explained that the best I can, and I
won't try to explain it any more now. You'll have to learn how to
do it yourselves if you really want to understand."
33

368
"You'd better start giving us lessons, then," said Doc. They all
laughed.
"I will," I said. "Seriously, I will. When we've got the time."
"Go on, Marc," said Bill. "Finish what you were saying. He
knew what you were doing . . . and that's what disturbed him?"
"Not exactly disturbed, I'd say," I told them. "He was just sur-
prised. He's gone back to check with his friends. The way they are
—the way I now know they are—that sort of checking's a respon-
sibility on his part."
"So that's why you're sure he'll be back?" Bill asked.
"Isn't that what I've been saying?"
"Porniarsk," said Bill, turning to him, "can't you help explain
any of this? You're from a more advanced race than we are."
"By comparison with Obsidian and his associates," said Por-
niarsk, "I'm essentially of the same primitiveness as the rest of
you. Also, you'll remember, I'm only an avatar. I've no creativity,
and no imagination beyond what I acquired when I was produced
in the image of Porniarsk. I'm not equipped to speculate or inter-
pret."
"Well," said Bill. "Anyway, we've all got plenty of work to do
while we're waiting for him to come back. Marc, you'll speak to
him as soon as you can, about whether we can count on them for
supplies or assistance in case we need it?"
"Yes," I said. "I can talk to him about that as soon as he comes
back. I was afraid earlier that I couldn't explain what we wanted
without muddying up the idea we intend to be independent here.
We still do want to be independent and self-supporting, don't we?"
I looked around the room. I did not really need the murmurs of
agreement from all of them. I only wanted to remind them we
were all together on that one point.
"If it's only a station they've got here," said Leland Maur, a
thin, black man in his mid-twenties who was an architect and our
construction and mechanical engineering expert, "my feeling's that
this world is ours by right of settlement anyway. Not theirs. We
don't want to start off owing any piece of it to someone else."
That comment ended the business of the evening. We sat back
to drink coffee and compare notes on how things were going with
our individual work projects to get ready for winter; and after
about an hour of this, most of us were ready to fold for the night.

369
The next day, Obsidian had still not come back. That morning
happened to be the half-day a week we had begun to take off as a
rest period, following the good effect of our one day holiday after
the first windmill generator had been put into operation. We had
found that there was a limit to the efficiency involved in working
seven days a week. After several weeks of unbroken work, we
ended up going through the motions of our labors, but getting less
done in total than if we had taken a break and started in fresh
again. Accordingly, that morning I could stay home with a clear
conscience, instead of lending my strength to one of the work jobs
down in the town. Ellen was also home and busy doing something
with her clothes in one part of the summer palace. I took advan-
tage of the chance to dig once more into the books I had been
neglecting lately. But they did not seem to hold my attention, after
all. The urge had been growing in me to try for the golden light
state again and, once more, to try to reach toward Ellen as I had
reached toward Obsidian.
I was encouraged in this by my success with Obsidian, and also
by the fact I began to believe I was at last zeroing in on my inner
search. The outer search had always been the time storm; but the
inner search, I now began to suspect, went back to my relationship
with Swannee—and my mother.
I put the book I was holding aside and looked out into the
courtyard feeling once more for a unity with the universe. It did
not come easily this time. It was almost as if it knew why I wanted
it and was reluctant to help me in that direction. But slowly, as the
minutes went by, first the room and then the courtyard and the sky
I looked out on took on greater values of reality, as if I was seeing
them with a dimension added, a greater depth, a beyondness, in
addition to the ordinary height, depth and width of normal vision.
My body slowed its breathing and its heartbeat and began to blend
with the movements of the planet.
The light changed, the gold moved in, and once more, I had it.
I held where I was for some little time—perhaps as much as ten
or twenty minutes, although in that state of concentration time
seemed almost suspended—to make sure that my hold on the state
I had evoked was firm. Then I reached out to feel Ellen, elsewhere
in the palace.
My touch went out like a wave spreading up on a sloping beach.

370
I reached her, felt her there, lightly, and started to enfold her—and
something far out in myself jerked back, so that the wave of my
feeling was sucked away again, abruptly, and my touch against her
was lost. All at once, the golden light was gone and the unity was
destroyed. I was alone and isolated, in my armchair in the room,
looking out through the glass window panes at a world I could no
longer feel.
I sat there, dulled and numbed by my failure. But after a few
moments, a miracle happened; because the door opened, Ellen
walked in, bent over the chair and kissed me. Then, without a
word, she turned and went back toward the door.
"Why?" I managed to croak as she opened it.
She looked back and smiled.
"I just felt like it," she said.
She went out, closing the door behind her; and I sat there with
my heart rising like a rocket. Because now I knew. I had not suc-
ceeded in fully touching her; but I knew that I was going in the
right direction now; because she had felt me trying. If I lived, I
would reach her eventually.
Our half-day holiday ended with noon. I put on work clothes
and left the summer palace to go down and help the people who
were insulating and expanding our largest quonset, so that it could
become a combination dining hall, hospital, and living quarters for
those of us who might turn out to be too young, too old, or too
feeble to live out the winter cold in the other, flimsier, buildings of
the town. I had just shut the door of the summer palace behind me
when Obsidian appeared in front of me.
"Can we talk?" he said.
"Of course," I said. He came first before any rough carpentry of
which I was capable.
"We've come to an important decision, my colleagues and I,"
he said. "You remember I told you our original plan was to gather
enough information on you so that we'd know how to educate you
into adjustment with civilization? At least, educate you enough so
that you could stay with us, here?"
"I remember," I said.
"I'm afraid I didn't tell you everything," he said. "There was an
alternative I didn't mention. If it turned out you people couldn't be

371
adjusted to a civilized pattern, we were intending to send you back
to your own time, the time you left to come here."
"No, you didn't tell me that," I said. "But you didn't have to.
We primitives can think of those sort of alternatives without being
prompted, you know."
"Yes. Well," Obsidian looked uncomfortable, "as it happens,
you've turned out to be in some ways more than we guessed; in
fact, more than we bargained for. In particular, you're different,
yourself, from anything we imagined. So, now we've come up with
a third alternative. But for this we're going to need your agree-
ment."
"Oh?" I said. He did not answer immediately, so I prompted
him. "Agreement to what?"
"To an alternative that ties in to this desire of yours to get into
the work of controlling what you call the time storm. Logically, it's
unthinkable to expect someone from as far back in the past as you
are to be capable of learning to do a kind of work that's done only
by unusual, highly qualified individuals in our time. But because of
certain anomalies about you, we'd like to test your aptitude for
such work."
"Fine," I said. And for the second time that day my heart went
up like a rocket.
"You understand," Obsidian said, "this testing in no way
changes the fact that by no stretch of the imagination could we ex-
pect you to actually be able to work in the temporal area. It's sim-
ply a means of supplying us with data by which we can decide best
what to do with all your group, here."
"All right," I said.
"Are you sure you understand? Our interest in whether you
have any ability for temporal work is only academic."
"I hear you," I said. But my heart was still high inside me. Ex-
plain it any way he might, Obsidian could not hide from me the
fact that, in offering me such tests, they were letting me come one
step closer to the goal I had been working toward.
"Well, then," said Obsidian, "even if you're willing, there's a
further question. Ordinarily, there'd be no need for you to leave
your area, here. But in this particular case some special conditions
are involved; so that to be tested you have to be willing to go some

372
distance across the galaxy. Now, if you want time to consider
this—"
"Thanks. It's not necessary. I'll be happy to go wherever being
tested requires."
He gazed across the jeep at me for a full second.
"Are you sure you understand?"
"I think so," I said. "You want to know if I'm willing to be
tested for abilities in time storm fighting. I am. You also want to
know if I'm agreeable to going a large chunk of light years to
wherever I have to go to be tested. I am."
"You understand this means travel between the stars, through
space?"
"Well, I'd gathered that," I said. But he did not echo my grin.
"I'm a little surprised," he said. "I understood from what you
told me that you'd never been off this one world in your life."
"That's right."
"But you're willing to go, without thinking it over? Without
talking it over with the rest of your people?"
"I'll check with them, of course," I said. "But they've been get-
ting along without my immediate help while I've been talking to
you. They ought to be able to get along without me for a bit
longer. How long would I be gone?"
"In terms of time here, not more than a couple of your weeks.
Probably considerably less. It may be a single simple test will give
us an answer, once you've reached your destination. It's possible
we might have to test further, but probably not more than a day or
two."
"I see," I said. "The more ability I show, the more you'll go on
testing?"
"Essentially. But Marc," said Obsidian, "if you've got hopes of
our tests finding you to have very great ability in that area, I wish
you'd temper those hopes. Believe me—"
"I believe," I said. "I'm also willing to go. We're agreed?"
"Yes," he said, slowly.
"Good. The thing you have to understand about me, friend Ob-
sidian," I said, "is that I'll do whatever I decide is best. I'm not
going to leave the other people here in a bind because I didn't
bother to check. I'll check first. But I said I want to go, and I'm
going."

373
"Forgive me," he said.
"There's nothing to forgive," I said. "It's just that this isn't a
matter of group discussion. This is me, saying what I choose to
do."
"All right," he said. "But it's not quite what I'm used to. You
understand that? We have—"
"I know," I said. "You people've got a pattern of responsibility.
So've I. And I won't violate my pattern any more than you'd vio-
late yours. But I tell you, Obsidian, I want to go where your peo-
ple will test me. The fact it's across space doesn't matter; because
I'd go cross-universe as quickly as I'd go around this jeep to get
that done."
I had gotten a little warm on the subject; and I was braced to
have him react with equal emotion. Instead he only looked at me,
a long, questioning look. Then he nodded.
"This means more to you than we'd thought," he said.
I stared back at him. Something other than the golden light was
moving me now; a surge of feeling that was more like a tide, a
running tide carrying me irresistibly forward.
"You don't understand me at all," I said, "do you?"
"No." He shook his head.
"All right," I told him. "See if it has meaning for you this way.
I don't know who my remote ancestors were; but what moves me
as far as the time storm goes, must go as far back as they do.
There's something in me that's certain about one thing; that any-
thing can kill me, but until I'm killed I'm what lives. And as long
as I live, I'll fight. Come and get me out to face my special enemy,
whoever that is; and while I can still move, I'll stay after it. When
I'm finally done for, I'll still be happy; because I wasn't deprived
of my chance to do something. All I want is that chance—nothing
else matters; and here you come asking me if the fact I have to
cross some space to be tested might make me decide against
going!"
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.

374
"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 Por-
niarsk. 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 ten-
tacle 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, dy-
namic 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 de-
creasing 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."

375
"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 radi-
ating."
"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 dis-
tance here, of course, it still seems to be shining; since we're get-
ting 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 imag-
ination struggled to get a grip on it.
"I've got a message for you," I said, to shift the topic of conver-
sation.
I told him about Obsidian taking me to be tested, and his ques-
tion 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.
34

378
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 Ob-
sidian.
"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 some-
thing 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-gjobe 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

379
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—"
"I know," I said, "—doesn't exactly describe what happened.
Never mind. I'm not really interested in the mechanics of it, right
now. All right then, if we really are going to be here for five days,
I believe J'd appreciate a room of my own, after all; and I'd imag-
ine Porniarsk would too."
"It makes no difference to me," said Porniarsk. "But I am in-
terested in the mechanics of your space flight. Can I examine those
control panels?"
"By all means," said Obsidian. "If you like, I'll explain them to
you. They're for work back on the planet we just left, actually.
Our trip will be handled automatically."
"I'm interested in all things," said Porniarsk. "This is the effec-
tive result of being the avatar of an individual, Porniarsk, who has
always been interested in all things—"
He checked himself.
"—I should probably say, was interested in all things."
"Do you miss him?" Obsidian asked. "This individual of whom
you were an avatar?"
"Yes," said Porniarsk, "in a sense I do. It's a little like realizing
that part of myself is gone, or that I had a twin I now know I'll
never see again."
The tone of his voice was perfectly calm and ordinary; but sud-
denly I found myself looking at him closely. I had never stopped
to think of Porniarsk as having emotions, or stopped to consider
what he might have lost in a personal sense by going forward in
time with us.
"I should have asked you if you wanted to come with us," I
said.
"If you had, I'd have answered yes," said Porniarsk. "The proc-
ess of discovery and learning is what I was constructed for."
"Yes," I said.

380
I was suddenly very tired, with an almost stupefying feeling of
fatigue. Part of it, undoubtedly, was the work schedule we had
been keeping in the community these last few weeks. But the
greater part was something more psychological and psychic than
physical. In spite of Obsidian's insistence that the testing I was
about to take was that and no more, I was at last certain that I
had reached the last arena, the moment of final confrontation.
I was like someone who had trained physically for months and
years for one battle. 1 felt loose, light and ready, but drained and
empty inside, hollow of all but the inevitability of the conflict to-
ward which I was now marching inexorably. Not even enthusiasm
was left—only a massive and silent acceptance of what would be.
"I think," I said to Obsidian, "I'd like that private room now, if
you don't mind. I think I'd like to get some sleep."
"To be sure," he said.
Suddenly, the white walls were around me. I had not moved,
but now I was enclosed, alone with the picture window, or screen,
showing the innumerable stars and the shrinking Earth. I turned to
the largest of the cushions and fell on it. For a second the lighting
was still daylight strong, but just before I closed my eyes, it
dimmed to nonexistence; and the space in which I now rested was
lit only by the star-glow from the window.
I slept.
When I woke, the stars in the picture window were different.
Not merely a little different; they bore no relationship to anything
I had ever seen in the skies of Earth. Puzzled, I lay there looking
at them while gradually I came to full alertness; and either auto-
matically, or in response to some way of sensing my urge for better
visibility, the lighting in the room slowly increased, back to the
level of sunlight. I got up, explored, and found a doorway that let
me into a bathroom, which was too good a replica of what I was
familiar with to be anything but a construct created expressly for
me by Obsidian.
Still, I was grateful for the fact that it looked so familiar. Part of
my waking up had always been a morning routine involving a
sharp razor blade, soap and a good deal of hot water. This out of
the way, I left my private quarters and found Obsidian sleeping
quietly on one of the larger cushions of the main area, Porniarsk

381
busy doing incomprehensible things with one of the control con-
soles.
"Good morning, Marc," he said, turning to look at me as I
came up.
"Morning, if that's what it is—" I lowered my voice, glancing at
Obsidian. "Sorry, I forgot about him sleeping there."
"I don't think you need worry," said Porniarsk at ordinary con-
versational volume. "I don't believe he hears any noise he doesn't
want to hear until he wakes at the time he wants to wake."
I looked at Obsidian curiously.
"Good trick," I said. "What's the breakfast situation?"
"There's food of various kinds in a room there," said Porniarsk,
pointing a tentacle at a doorway in one of the walls that had been
there when we arrived.
I went to look and found he was right. It was a pleasant, small
room, apparently surrounded completely by the illusion of the for-
est in forenoon sunlight. There were chairs, my style, and a table,
my style; and a piece of furniture that looked like a heavy, old
fashioned wooden wardrobe.
When I opened the door of this last piece of furniture, however,
I found it filled with shelves full of all kinds of fresh earthly fruits
and vegetables. There were fruit juices in transparent vessels, milk,
and a pitcher of black liquid that turned out to be hot coffee; al-
though what was keeping its temperature up was a mystery. There
were no meat or eggs; and although I looked around carefully, I
could not find a stove or any means of cooking any of the other
foodstuffs. Well, at least the coffee was hot. I found a small empty
vessel to pour it into and settled down to eat.
It was an interesting meal. There were no shocks, but some
surprises. For one thing, the already-sliced loaf of bread I discov-
ered turned out to be hot. Not toasted. Hot, like the coffee. The
glass of what I had assumed was orange juice turned out to be
slightly fizzy, as if it had been carbonated. There was no sugar and
the honey tasted as if it had been spiked with vodka.
I finished up and went back into the other room. Obsidian was
still asleep and Porniarsk was still at work.
"Have you eaten?" I asked Porniarsk. I knew he did eat; al-
though Porniarsk and nutrition were something of a puzzle; be-
cause apparently he could go for weeks at a time without food. He

382
had told me once that his bodily fueling system was almost as
much a mystery to him as it was to the rest of us; since that was an
area of information in which Porniarsk, the original Porniarsk, had
no interest whatsoever. Apparently our Porniarsk, at least, had
some way of getting a great deal more energy out of the suste-
nance he took in than we humans did. I had played with the pic-
ture of a small stainless steel fission engine under the thick armor
plating of his body—although he had assured us he was pure ani-
mal protein in all respects.
"No," he said now. "There's no need. I'm greatly interested in
this equipment."
"It looks like we built up quite a velocity while I was asleep," I
said. "Where are we now?"
"That's the fascination of this," he said, nodding heavily at the
control console. "Apparently, as Obsidian said, our trip's com-
pletely under automatic control. But this console, since he showed
me how to operate it, has been furnishing me with information on
our movements as we make them. Right now we're something like
three million years in the past, and consequently, far displaced
from your solar system—"
"Displaced?" I said. But even as I said it, even as he began to
explain, my mind was jumping ahead to that explanation.
"Why, yes. Obsidian and his community," said Porniarsk,
"have evidently done a superb job of, first, balancing the large
areas of time forces; and second, an equally excellent job of chart-
ing specific force lines in between the balanced areas. In fact, I'm
inclined to think that the process of balancing was designed to
leave just the network of working force lines that remain. The re-
sult has been that, although they can't actually cross space at more
than light speeds, by using the force lines they can jump distances
equivalent to some hundreds or even thousands of light years, and
arrive at their destination in a matter of hours, or even days.
Watch the present stellar arrangement."
He touched the console in front of him with a tentacle tip. An-
other picture window appeared, showing the starscape beyond. My
memory for patterns now was too good to be deceived. This was a
different view again of the galaxy than the one I had seen in the
other room on waking up.

383
"We should be coming up on another transfer, momentar-
ily . . said Porniarsk. "There!"
The starview abruptly changed, without jar, without sound, and
so instantaneously that I did not even have the sensation of having
blinked at the scene.
"We've gone down the ladder in time in order to make large
shifts through space," said Porniarsk. "In the smaller node of
forces on Earth, the time jumps were also much smaller and the
physical displacement was minor. Here, of course, when we take a
large step forward or backward in time, the surrounding stars and
other solid bodies move around us. What's that phrase I once
learned from 'Marie about Mahomet not being able to go to the
mountain, therefore, the mountain must come to him? Obsidian's
people have learned to use the time storm to bring their mountains
to them, instead of themselves making the journey to the moun-
tains-"
He glanced at me. Porniarsk could not be said to have the most
readable facial and body expressions in the universe; but I knew
that hang of his tentacles well enough by now to tell when he was
being apologetic.
"—I mean, of course," he said, "to refer to the stars and other
solid bodies of the universe as 'mountains'."
"I'd guessed you did," I said.
"I'm afraid I'm sometimes a little pedantic," he said. "So was
Porniarsk himself, of course. It's a failing that often goes with an
enquiring mind."
"Don't let it bother you where I'm concerned," I said. "One of
my worst habits is telling other people what the situation is, at
great length."
"That's true, of course," he answered, with gentle unconcern for
my feelings. "Nonetheless, two wrongs do not—I believe our host
is waking up."
He had creaked his head to one side as he spoke, to gaze at Ob-
sidian, who now opened his eyes and sat up cross-legged on his
cushion, all in one motion, apparently fully alert in the flicker of
an eyelash.
"Are you rested, Marc?" he asked. "I finally had to take a nap,
myself. Apparently Porniarsk needs very little sleep."
"Damn little," I said.

384
"We'll have a little more than four days more before we reach
our destination," said Obsidian. "I'm looking forward to doing a
lot more talking with you, Marc. I gather you've already come to a
better understanding of the present time."
"I think so," I said. "Tell me if I'm wrong, but as I see it, all
the intelligent races in the galaxy have joined together to fight for
survival. Animate organisms against the inanimate forces that oth-
erwise might kill you all off."
"That's a lot of it," Obsidian said. "We're concerned with sur-
vival first, because if life doesn't survive, everything else becomes
academic. So the first job is to control the environment, right
enough. But beyond survival, we're primarily interested in growth,
in where life goes from here."
"All right. But—" I checked myself. "Wait a minute. I ought to
give you a chance to get all the way awake before I tie you up in a
discussion like this."
"But I am awake," said Obsidian, frowning a little.
"Oh. All right," I said, "in that case, suppose you start filling
me in on the history of everything. How did this brotherhood of
civilized entities start? What got it going?"
"As a matter of fact," he answered, "what began the getting to-
gether of races that later became the present civilized community
was what you call—excuse me, I'll just use your word for it from
now on—the time storm, itself. This was paradoxical; because it
was the time storm that threatened the survival of all life, and here
it made real civilization possible. . . ."
With that, he was underway with a flood of information almost
before I had time to find myself a seat on a nearby cushion. In the
next four days, while his house, so to speak, flitted through space
from time force line to time force line, and Porniarsk watched that
process fascinatedly with the control console, Obsidian drew me a
picture of some forty-odd thousand years of known history—on the
time scale of our galaxy—and an unknown amount of time before
that in which life was nearly destroyed by the time storm, but in
which the foundation of a universal community was discovered
and erected.
"The process was instinctive enough," he said. "We tried to
adapt to an environment that included the time storm and, in the
process, learned to manipulate that environment, including the

385
time storm, as far as we could. Right now the time storm makes
possible a number of things we couldn't have unless it existed. At
the same time, by existing, it continues to threaten to kill us. So,
we're doing our best to control it. Note, we no longer want to wipe
it out; we want to keep it, but under our domination."
"Like taming a tiger," I said, "to be a watchdog."
He frowned for a second. Then his face cleared.
"Oh," he said. "I see what you mean. Yes. We want to tame
and use it."
"So do I," I said.
He looked unhappy.
"I was hoping," he said, "that you'd be beginning to appreciate
the difference between someone of your time and people of the
present. We'll be arriving shortly, in a matter of hours in fact; and
I thought that, maybe, with the chance we've had to talk on the
way here, you'd be seeing the vast gulf between what you know
and are, and what anyone from the present would have to know
and be."
"It's not that vast," I said. "Now, wait a minute—"
He had opened his mouth, ready to speak again. When I held
up my hand, he closed it again—but not with a particularly com-
fortable look on his face.
"All right, look," I said. "You've evolved a whole science. But
anyone born into this time of yours can learn it in that person's
lifetime, isn't that so?"
"Oh, of course," Obsidian said. "I didn't mean to sound as if
the hard knowledge itself was something more than you could
learn. In fact we've got techniques and equipment which could
teach you what you'd need to know in a matter of days. But the
point's that the knowledge by itself wouldn't be any use to you; be-
cause to use it requires the sort of understanding of the time storm
that only growing up and being educated in the present can give
you."
"What you're saying," I told him, "is that aside from the intel-
lectual knowledge that's necessary, I'd need the kind of under-
standing that comes from knowing a culture and a philosophy.
And the cultural part is simply the same philosophy expressed on
a nonsymbolic level. So, what it boils down to is understanding
your basic philosophy; and you've just finished telling me that

386
that's been shaped by contact over generations with the time
storm. All right, I've had contact with the time storm. I've had
some contact with you. And I tell you that your culture and your
philosophy isn't that much different from what I've already under-
stood myself where the time storm forces are concerned."
He shook his head.
"Marc," he said, "you're aiming right at a disappointment."
"We'll see," I answered.
"Yes." He sighed. "I'm very much afraid we will."
Just as there had been no sensation of taking off when we had
left Earth, so there was no sensation of landing when we got to our
destination. Simply, without warning, Obsidian broke off some-
thing he was saying about the real elements of art existing fully in
the concept of the piece of artwork alone-a point with which I
was disagreeing, because I could not conceive of art apart from its
execution. What if the statue of Rodin's Thinker could be trans-
lated into a string of symbolic marks? Would the intellectual ap-
preciation of those marks begin to approach the pleasure of actu-
ally seeing, let alone feeling, the original statue with whatever
microscopic incidentals of execution had resulted from the cuttings
of the sculptor's tools and the textural characteristics of the origi-
nal material? The idea was absurd—and it was not the only absurd
idea that I had heard from Obsidian, for all his personal like-
ableness and intelligence, during the last five days.
At any rate, he broke off speaking suddenly and got to his feet
in one limber movement from the cushion on which he had been
seated cross-legged.
"We're here," he said.
I looked over at the picture window and still saw only a star-
scape in the picture window. Just one more, if once again different,
starscape—with only a single unusual element about it, which was
a large, dark area just to the right and below the center of it. Por-
niarsk was also watching the window from his post near one of the
control consoles, and he saw the direction of my attention.
He trundled across the room and tapped with a tentacle at the
screen surface over the dark area.
"S Doradus," he said.
Obsidian turned his head a little sharply to look at the avatar.

387
"Aren't we down on some planetary surface?" I asked Ob-
sidian.
"Oh yes," he said. The starscape winked out, to be replaced
with a picture of a steep hillside littered with huge boulders. The
sky was a dark blue overhead and what looked like beehives,
colored a violent green and up to twenty or thirty feet in height,
were growing amongst the rocks. "The scene you were just look-
ing at is of space seen from the vantage point of this landing spot.
Haven't I mentioned that we nowadays have a tendency to sur-
round ourselves with the type of scene that suits us at the moment,
no matter where we are in a real sense?"
"You like the Earth forest scene yourself, then, Obsidian?"
"Not primarily," he answered me, "but I supposed you did."
"Thanks," I said. I felt gratitude and a touch of humbleness. "I
appreciate it."
"Not at all. May I introduce—" he turned abruptly to face the
several individuals who were now joining us from somewhere out-
side the illusion of the Earth forest.
There were only four of them; although my first impression
when I saw them entering was that there were more. None of them
wore anything resembling clothes or ornaments. In the lead was
what I took to be a completely ordinary, male human, until I saw
there was a sort of bony ridge, or crest, about three inches deep at
the nape of his neck, running from his spine at midback up to the
back of his head and blending into his skull there. He was some-
what taller than Obsidian. Next was a motley-colored individual
with patches of skin almost as light as my own intermixed with
other patches of rust-red and milk chocolate darkness. This one
was less obviously humanoid, but seemed plainly female, and of
about Obsidian's size. The third was something like a squid-crab
hybrid, with the squid growing out of the back shell of the crab—
and he, or she—or for that matter, it—entered the room floating on
a sort of three-foot high pedestal. I would have guessed this third
individual's weight at about a hundred pounds or so, Earthside.
The fourth was a jet-black, pipestem-limbed humanoid about
three feet tall, with a sour face and no more hair than Obsidian. I
was secretiy relieved to find that everybody with a generally
human shape, nowadays, was not someone I had to get a stiff neck
looking up to. As they all came into the room, its area expanded

388
imperceptibly until we stood in the middle of a space perhaps
thirty by forty feet. The illusion of Earth forest now only occupied
a portion of the perimeter about us. In the remaining space were
four other scenes, ranging from a sort of swamp to a maroon-sand
desertscape with tall, whitish buttes sticking up dramatically out of
the level plain below.
I was so interested in watching all this that I almost missed the
fact that Obsidian was trying to introduce me.
"Sunrise—" this was the individual with the neck crest.
"Dragger—" (the particolored female); "one of the Children of
Life—" (the squid-crab) and "Angel—" (the sour-faced, little
black individual).
"It's a remarkable thing to be able to meet you," I told them.
"I'd like you to know I appreciate the chance."
"Compliments are unnecessary," said Dragger, in a somewhat
rusty voice. "I suppose we can call you Marc without offending
you?"
"Certainly," I said. "You speak my language very well."
"It wouldn't have been practical to have you learn ours,"
Dragger said. She seemed to be the speaker for the group. "If you
don't mind, we'll get on with the test. Would you give your atten-
tion to that panel just behind you?"
I turned. The panel she was pointing at was about three feet
high by five feet long, sitting on top of a boxlike piece of equip-
ment that had appeared with their entrance. As I looked, an ellip-
tical pool of blackness seemed to flood out and cover the corner
areas of the slab. I stepped close to it and found myself looking
into, rather than at, the darkness, as if it had depth and I was
looking down into a three-dimensional space.
As I focused in, deeper into the darkness, I saw that it was alive
with shifting, moving fans of lights, something like the aurora
borealis with its successions of milky colors spreading out over the
northern sky at night. These lights I watched now moved much
faster than the northern lights I was used to, and their pattern was
much more complex. But, otherwise, they were remarkably
similar.
They were similar to something else, too. I stared at them, una-
ble to quite zero in on what they reminded me of. Then it burst on
me.

389
"Of course!" I said, turning to Dragger and the others. "Those
are time storm force line patterns, extremely slowed, but still force
line patterns in action."
The four of them looked at me. Then Dragger turned to Ob-
sidian.
"Thank you, Obsidian," she said. She looked back at me.
"Thank you, Marc."
She turned around and began to lead the rest out.
I stared after her, and at the rest of them.
"Wait a second!" I said.
"Marc," said Obsidian behind me. "Marc, I said you might be
working yourself up for a disappointment—"
"Disappointment!" I said. "The hell with that! I said they're
force line patterns, and they are. Come on back here—Dragger, the
rest of you. You can't just walk out. You owe me an explanation,
if I want one. I've picked up enough about your time to know
that!"
They slowed and stopped. For a moment they stood in a group,
and I had the strong impression that a discussion was going on, al-
though I could not hear a word or see a lip movement. Then they
turned back into the room, Dragger still leading, and came to face
me again.
"There is no explanation to give," Dragger said. "We wished to
test you for a sensitivity we feel is necessary, if you and your
group are to be allowed to stay in the present. Unfortunately, you
don't seem to show that sensitivity."
"And how do you figure that?" I said. "You showed me a pat-
tern of time storm forces in action, I told you what they were—
where's the indication of a lack of sensitivity on my part?"
"Marc," said Dragger, "I'm sorry to say that what you looked
at was not what you said it was."
"Not a pattern of force lines from the time storm?"
"No. I'm sorry." Once more she turned to go and the others
shifted with her.
"Damn it, come back here!"
"Marc—" It was Porniarsk, now, trying to interpose.
"Porniarsk, stay out of this! You too, Obsidian! Dragger, you
others, turn around. Come back! I don't know what the idea is,
your trying to lie to me like this. But it's not working. You think I

390
don't know time storm forces when I see them? Obsidian's been
told what I've done and been through with Porniarsk here. You
must know what I told him—or didn't you do your homework? If
you do know what I told him, you know you can't get away with
showing me a pattern of the storm lines and claiming it's some-
thing else."
The four stood facing each other in silence. After a second, Ob-
sidian took three quick steps across the floor and joined them.
They stood motionless and voiceless, facing each other for a long
minute. Then they all turned to face me.
"Marc," said Obsidian, "I assure you, that was not a repre-
sentation of lines of force from what you call the time storm. It
was a projected pattern of conceptual rhythms common to all
minds in our present-day culture. If you had shown a capability
for responding to those rhythms, the pattern would have evoked
some common images in your mind—water, gas, star, space . . .
and so on. Apparently, it didn't; so we have to conclude that you
don't have the capability to respond in modern terms. That's all.
You don't gain anything by this insisting that you were looking at
a representation of temporal force lines."
"I see!" I said.
Because suddenly I did. And suddenly I was so sure I was right
that I went ahead without even bothering to check the words out
in my head before I said them.
"In fact," I said, "I see a lot of things. One of them is that I un-
derstand you better than you understand me—and I'm going to
prove that right now. You see, I know you can't sluff me off and
send me back with that answer, if I say the proper words. Your re-
sponsibility reflex won't let you; and I'm going to say the proper
words now. The words are—you and these people here, and every-
one else you know, have one galloping cultural blindness. You're
dead blind in an area where I'm not; and I can see it where you
can't, because I'm standing outside your culture and looking in at
it. Your whole set of rules is based on the fact that you can't deny
me a hearing on that point. Now that it's been raised, you have to
settle conclusively whether I'm right about what I'm saying, or
wrong. If I'm wrong, then you can get rid me. But if I'm right,
then you, all of you, are going to have to learn different—from me.
Am I right?"

391
I stopped speaking and waited. They merely stood there.
"Well?" I said. "Am I right, or aren't I? Am I entitled to a
hearing or not?"
They looked at each other and stood for a moment longer. Then
they all turned back to me.
"Marc," said Obsidian, "we'll have to consult about this. In
theory at least, you're right. You'll get your hearing. But now we
have to talk the whole matter over, and that's going to take a little
time. Meanwhile, because of the importance of your challenge to
us, it seems you're going to have to learn our way of com-
municating after all."

It developed that the reason they had not tried to teach me, and
Porniarsk .for that matter, how to communicate in their way was
because of an assumption on their part that, conceptually, we were
not up to such education. But since I had now told them that I
believed the shoe was on the other foot, and that I knew things of
which they couldn't conceive, their original reason for not teaching
me had become indefensible. In short, whether I could actually
handle their language effectively, or not, I had to be given a
chance to explain myself in it, so that the accusation couldn't arise
that I had failed to make my point because I had not been given
the chance to state it in fully understandable terms.
That much established, the actual process of learning turned out
to be easy. As Obsidian had said, they had devices and techniques
for teaching. Within twenty-four hours, Porniarsk and I could han-
dle all four modes of their communication. These were sound; sig-
nal (limb-waving, etc.); attitudinal (which was really another
form of signal, since it meant communicating with physical atti-
tudes—body language); and modification-of-surroundings, which
essentially meant communicating by playing games with the sur-
rounding scenery, whether illusory or real.
These four modes actually duplicated each other. That is, they
had each been single, exclusive methods of communication origi-
35

394
nally, and had been combined as amplifying redundancies. Actu-
ally, I would be able to make my argument completely in the ver-
bal mode. But if I should be questioned on a particular verbal
statement, I could now nail down what I meant by repeating
what I had said in one or more of the other modes. In theory, any
statement made in as few as two modes established its message be-
yond any possibility of ambiguity.
So, I was ready for argument in twenty-four hours. The debate
was not called to order, however, for the equivalent of three more
Earth days. I was not too unhappy about that because it gave me
time to do some thinking. Under pressure, I had jumped to a con-
clusion, there in that moment when Dragger and the others had
turned to walk out; and that jump had been genuine inspiration.
But now I needed to build that inspiration up into a solid, cohesive
argument.
When the meeting was finally called to order once more, the
number of the universal community's members present had grown
from five individuals to thirty-two. The space that arranged itself
around us, consequently, was large and had sloping sides around
the flat central area; so the spectators looked down on Dragger
and me as if they were a crowd in a small arena or a lecture
hall.
Dragger began by replaying what had happened on our first
meeting. It was a little strange to stand there and see myself, in ap-
parently solid replica, demanding that the five come back and lis-
ten to me. When this reached an end with Obsidian's last words to
me, the illusory figures of our former selves winked out and
Dragger turned to me.
"You're going to point out a cultural blindness to us, Marc,"
she said. "Go ahead."
"All right," I said. "As briefly as possible, then—the first evi-
dence I noticed of a cultural blindness was during the first few
days that Obsidian and I talked. We found out then that he had
trouble understanding what I meant, in spite of the fact that he'd
been trained by your equipment. On the other hand, I was under-
standing him fairly well, in spite of the fact that he was trying to
gather information on my culture, rather than teaching me about
yours. You might want to check your records on that, sometime,
to see what I mean."

395
"We can show it," put in Dragger.
The illusory figures appeared again. This time, they were Ob-
sidian and myself talking back outside the summer palace. This
was a bit of assistance I had not figured on. I stood there, as my
image pointed out to Obsidian that he was like someone who had
grown up thinking everyone spoke only one language and was hav-
ing difficulty entertaining the idea that there might be other words
possible for a familiar object.
The second set of figures disappeared.
"This started me thinking," I went on. "From the beginning, in
your contact with us, you've assumed the only possible solution to
my group existing in the same time with you people would be for
us to adopt everything that was part of your culture and discard
anything of ours that didn't fit. As with the language situation,
your thought seemed to be that there was one, and only one, right
way of doing things."
I stopped and looked at Dragger, giving her a chance to argue
this point. But she said nothing and seemed to be merely waiting. I
went on.
"As far as I can gather," I said, "you wouldn't have had any in-
tention of testing me for present-day abilities, even to this small
extent you tried here a few days ago, except that Obsidian had
turned up a couple of anomalies in the characters of me and my
people that—because it's a cultural imperative on you to base your
conclusions on certainties—made it necessary to check. The first
anomaly was that I said we had moved ourselves to your present
time deliberately, using the time storm forces to do so."
I stopped again and looked at Dragger.
"Would you like to replay that particular conversation?" said
Dragger. "Very well."
Hie figures of myself, Ellen, and Obsidian appeared before
us.
" . . . And, of course, we wanted to collect data toward under-
standing the accident that brought you here,9' Obsidian was saying.
"Accident? We came here deliberately"
"You did?"
"That's right," I answered. "I'd probably better take you down
to see the lab and Porniarsk. Sorry, maybe I'm getting the cart be-

396
fore the horse. But after expecting you every day from the moment
we landed here, and not having you show up until now—"
"Expecting me when you arrived?"
"That's right. We came here because I wanted to contact you
people who were doing something about the time storm—"
"Just a moment. Forgive me" said the figure of Obsidian; and
he disappeared.
The figures of Ellen and me also winked out of existence.
"That bit of conversation," I went on to Dragger and the rest of
the audience, "shook Obsidian up, because here I was talking
about deliberately making use of time storm forces back in a time
long before anyone was supposed to be able to make use of them.
The second anomaly, and the one that made it imperative that you
test me, was the fact that Obsidian caught me making what I call a
universal-identification—I note, by the way, that this is one area of
my vocabulary in your languages that you haven't filled in for me.
You have to have a term for it yourselves—"
"We have," said Dragger. "You just used it. We term it 'univer-
sal-identification'."
"Sorry," I said. "My apologies. So you didn't deliberately leave
that part of my vocabulary out, then. At any rate, the point is,
once more Obsidian had discovered that I could do something that
I shouldn't be able to do, being from as far back in prehistory as I
was. But, making use of time storm forces to move in time or
space, and the concept of the individual being able to share the
identity of the universe or vice versa, are things you've believed
belong to your time, not mine."
"So far," said Dragger, as I paused to look at her, "I hear noth-
ing to disagree with. You must have more to say than this, though,
I assume?"
"I have," I said. "Let's call me fish and you mammal, in the
sense that I'm, in effect, your prehistoric ancestor. When you
found I could breathe air the same way you did and had legs
rather than fins, you had to classify me and those with me as
something more than fish. So you thought you'd check me out to
find if I was mammalian. But your first check turned up the fact
that I'm an egg-laying creature. Since mammals, in your experi-
ence, don't lay eggs, you assumed I must be a fish, after all. It
didn't occur to you that I might be something like a platypus."

397
I had used the human word for "platypus"; because there was
no alternative in their four communication modes. It was true their
spoken language gave me the building blocks to construct an
equivalent word; but from their point of view, that equivalent
would have been a nonsense noise. Dragger and the rest stared at
me in silence.
"Platypus," I said. "An animal from my planet. A monotreme—"
Now there was a word that was translatable into some sense in
their language. Dragger spoke up.
"Just a minute, Marc," she said.
There was a delay while the audience got a thorough briefing on
the fauna of Earth in general, and that of Australia in particular.
"It's understood, then?" I said, when this was over. "The
platypus lays eggs, but nonetheless it's a hair-wearing, lactating
mammal."
"Primitive mammal," said Dragger.
"Don't strain my analogy," I said. "The point is, there was a
possibility of my people and me belonging in a category which
your culture had made you blind to."
"That's an assumption," said Dragger.
"No," I said. "It's not. It'd be an assumption only if I was
wrong about what you showed me having anything to do with the
movement of time storm forces. Now, you were right in saying
there was no connection between what you showed me and the
storm. But in the overall sense, I was the one who was right, and
you were wrong. Because the connection is there; and you're so
culturally blind to it that I'm willing to bet that, even in these last
three days, none of you have checked out the possibility that that
connection might actually be there."
There was a second—only a second—of silence.
"You're correct. There hasn't been any check made of a possi-
ble connection," said Dragger. "On the other hand, we've nothing
but your guess that the connection exists."
"I told you the last time I saw you," I said, "it's no guess. I'm
neither fish nor fowl. I'm a monotreme. I've learned to use the
time storm and to make a personal identification with the universe
entirely without and apart from the history, culture, and tech-
niques that you people have developed. I can read the time storm

398
by reading patterns of movement. All movement falls into pat-
terns."
I looked around the room at the spectators.
"You're probably not aware of it," I said, "but the ways you've
grouped and sorted yourselves around me, here, show certain pat-
terns; and from those patterns, with what I now know about your
culture and language, I can see a habit of social sorting by individ-
ual specialties or abilities.
"If I didn't have that cultural information, I'd still be seeing
these patterns, I just wouldn't know what they implied. In the case
of your groupings here, I now do know; and in the case of the time
storm forces also, I do know."
"This is assertion only, Marc," said Dragger.
"No. It's a case of my being on the outside of your culture, so
I'm able to see clearly something you're refusing to see. You peo-
ple have struggled with the time storm for hundreds of genera-
tions. That struggle literally created your community the way it is
now and dominated every element of it. It's quite true the panel
you showed me was supposed to be showing patterns of concep-
tual rhythms common to your time and culture; and that I didn't
recognize them as such because my own conceptual rhythms aren't
like that."
I looked around at them.
"Marc," said Dragger, "have we waited these several days and
gathered together here only to hear you admit that we were right
to begin with?"
"No!" I said. "Because you're wrong. What I saw, and recog-
nized, were time storm force patterns. You, all of you, couldn't re-
alize that because you don't recognize how much the time storm's
become a part of you over this long struggle—part of your body,
mind, and culture. Your conceptual rhythms are time storm
rhythms. You don't see that because they're so much a part of
you; you take them for granted. I can see it, because I'm standing
outside your culture, looking at you. I'm the most valuable mind
you've got in this present time of yours; and you'd better appreci-
ate that fact!"
I was almost shouting at them now. This was a strong statement
in their terms; but I needed to wake them up, to make them hear.
"Don't take my word for it!" I said. "Check those conceptual

399
rhythms on your instrument against the patterns of the time storm
forces and pick up the identity between them for yourselves!"
I stopped talking. In my own past time, a moment of this would
have provoked a buzz of unbelief from the spectators, or outcries
against my idea or myself—anything but the way these individuals
reacted, which was in a thoughtful silence. There was no visible
evidence that I had attacked the very base of the culture they had
always taken for granted.
But I knew what was happening in their minds. I knew, because
I now knew more than a little about how they thought and about
their obligation to consider any possibility for truth which that
same culture put upon them. I knew they had been jarred, and
jarred badly, by what I had just told them. But my knowledge of
that was about all the emotional satisfaction I was likely to get
from the situation. As far as appearances went, they showed no
more reaction than they might have if I had told them that I
planned on not shaving when I got up tomorrow.
The meeting was breaking up. Some of the figures in the stands
were simply disappearing, some were walking off through visible
doorways, some were simply melting into the illusions of surround-
ing scenery. I found myself alone with Porniarsk, Obsidian, and
Dragger.
"We'll check, of course," said Dragger to me. "Tell me, Marc,
what is it exactly you want?"
"I want to fight the time storm. Myself. Personally."
"I have to say I can't see how that can be anything but a com-
plete impossibility," she said. "On the other hand, there are always
new things to be learned."

"They're a great people, Marc," said Porniarsk, once we were
alone again in the ordinary configuration of Obsidian's quarters—
which Obsidian had, by now, largely given over to our own private
use. "You shouldn't forget that."
"You think they are?" I said.
I heard him as if from a middle distance. I was once more as I
had been when we had just left Earth on the way here in Ob-
sidian's quarters; like someone who had trained years for a single
conflict. I was light and empty inside, remote and passionless, hol-
low of everything but the thought of the battle that would come,
which nothing could avert or delay.
"Yes," he said, "they've survived the time storm. They've
learned to live with it, even to use it for their own benefit, and
they've made a community of innumerable races, a community
that's a single, working unit. Those are great achievements. They
deserve some honor."
"Let other people honor them, then," I said. It was still as if I
was talking to him from some distance off. "I've got nothing left
except for what I've still got waiting for me."
"Yes," he said. He sounded oddly sad. "Your foe. But these
people aren't your foe, Marc. Not even the time storm's your
foe."
36

402
"You're wrong there," I told him.
"No." He shook his ponderous head.
I laughed.
"Marc," he said, "listen to me. I'm alive, and that alone sur-
prises me. I'd expected I'd stop living, once I was taken from the
time in which Porniarsk existed. But it seems, to my own deep in-
terest, that in some way I've got an independent life now, a life of
my own. But even if this is true, it's a single life only. I was con-
structed, not engendered. I can't have progeny. My life's only this
small moment in which I live it; and I'm concerned with what and
whom I share that moment. In this case, it's you, Ellen, Bill, Doc,
and the rest."
"Yes," I said. At another time, what he had said might have
moved me deeply. But at the moment, I was too remote, too con-
centrated. I heard and understood what he told me; but his words
were like a listing of academic facts, off somewhere on the horizon
of my existence, shrunken by their distance from what obsessed
me utterly.
"Because of this," he said, "I'm concerned with what you're
planning to do. I'm afraid for you, Marc. I want to save what I've
got no other words to call but your soul. If that's to be saved,
sooner or later, you'll have to reconcile yourself with things as
they are. And unless you do it in time, you'll lose your battle.
You'll die."
"No," I said. The need for sleep was deep in me and I only
wanted to end the talking. "I won't lose. I can't afford to. Now
I've got to get some rest. I'll talk to you after I wake up, Por-
niarsk."
But when I finally woke up, Dragger was standing over the
cushion on which I lay.
"Marc," she said, "your training as a temporal engineer is going
to begin at once; and if you can absorb that, you'll be taken out to
where the line of battle runs with the time storm forces."
I was suddenly fully awake and on my feet. She was going on,
still talking. Porniarsk was also to be given the training. This was a
bonus, because in no way had I dared to hope I could win for
him also what I had wanted for myself. But now he, too, would
have the chance. There was a comfort for me in the sight of his

403
ugly, heavy bulldog shape. He was like a talisman from home, a
good omen.
Obsidian took us far across space again. For the first time we
came to another vehicle. It was like a raft the size of a football
field, with some sort of invisible, impalpable shield, like a dome,
over it to keep in an atmosphere that would preserve workable
temperatures and pressures for the massive engineering equipment
it carried. Barring the star scene that arched over us in every di-
rection, it was like nothing so much as being in the engine room of
an incredibly monstrous battleship.
All the way out to this star raft in Obsidian's quarters, and for
nearly two weeks of Earth time after we got there, Porniarsk and I
were force-fed with information from the teaching machines Ob-
sidian had talked about. It was an unnerving process. We were like
blank cassette tapes in a high speed duplicator. There was no
physical sensation of being packed with instruction; and in fact,
the information itself did not become usable until later, when con-
tact with some of the actual engineering work going on aboard the
raft tapped it, the way a keg of wine might be tapped. But at the
same time, there was a psychic consciousness of mental lumber
being added to our mental warehouses that was curiously ex-
hausting in its own way. The sensation it produced was some-
thing like that which can come from weeks of overwork and
nervous strain, to the point where the mind seems almost phys-
ically numb.
How Porniarsk reacted to it was something I had no way of
knowing, because we were kept separated. Emotionally isolated by
my own purpose, I was generally indifferent to what was being
done to me, physically or mentally; and when, in due time, the
process of information-feeding ended, I fell into a deep sleep that
must have lasted well beyond the six hours of my normal slumber
period. When I woke, suddenly, all the knowledge that had been
pumped into me exploded from the passive state into the active.
I had opened my eyes in the same unstressed state of thought-
lessness that normally follows a return from the mists of sleep. I
was at peace, unthinking—and then, suddenly the reality of the
universe erupted all about me. I was all at once bodiless, blind,
and lost, falling through infinity, lifetimes removed from any an-
chor point of sanity or security.

404
I tumbled; aware—too much aware—of all things. Panic built in
me like a deep-sea pressure against the steel bulkhead of my rea-
son, threatening to burst through and destroy me. There was too
much, all at once, crowding my consciousness. Suddenly I had too
much understanding, too much awareness . . .
I felt the pressure of it starting to crack me apart; and then,
abruptly, my long-held purpose came to my rescue. Suddenly I
was mobilized and fighting back, controlling the overwhelming
knowledge. I had not come this far in time and space and learning
to disintegrate now in an emotional spasm. The universe was no
bigger than my own mind. I had discovered that for myself, before
this. I had touched the universe, not once, but several times pre-
viously. It was no great frightening and unknowable entity. It was
part of me, as I was part of it. A thing did not frighten itself. An
arm did not panic at discovering it was attached to a body.
I surged back. I matched pressure for pressure. I held.
But my mind was still far removed from my body, back on the
raft. It felt as if, at the same time, I was floating motionless, and
flying at great speed through infinity. My vantage point was some-
where between the island universes, out in intergalactic space. In a
sense, it was as if I stood on the peak of a high mountain, from
which I could see the misty limits of all time and space. Almost, it
seemed, I could see to the ends of the universe; and for the first
time, the total action of the time storm activity became a single
pattern in my mind.
"So, Marc," said a voice—or a thought. It was both and neither,
here where there were no bodies and no near stars—"you sur-
vived."
It was Dragger speaking. I looked for her, instinctively, and did
not see her. But I knew she was there.
"Yes," I said. I was about to tell her that I had never intended
anything else, but a deeper honesty moved me at the last second.
"I had to."
"Evidently. Do you understand the temporal engineering proc-
ess, now?"
"I think so," I said; and as I said it, the knowledge that had
been pumped into me began to blend with what I was now ex-
periencing, and the whole effort they were making unrolled into
order and relationship, like a blueprint in my mind.

405
"This isn't the way I imagined it," I said. "You're actually try-
ing to stop the time storm, by physical efforts, to reverse its physi-
cal effect on the universe."
"In a sense."
"In a sense? All right, say in a sense. But it's still physical
reversal. To put it crudely, in the sort of terms you're most famil-
iar with, the normal decay of entropy began to stop and reverse it-
self when the universe stopped expanding. Then, when the farther
stars and the outer galaxies started falling back here and there,
they set up areas where entropy was increasing rather than decay-
ing. Isn't that right, Dragger? So it had to be these stresses, these
conflicts between the two states of entropy in specific areas, that
spawned the nova implosions and triggered the time faults, so that
on one side of a sharp line, time was moving one way, and on the
other, a different way. So that's what made the time storm! But I
assumed you'd be attacking the storm directly to cure it."
"We're after the root cause."
"Are you, Dragger? But this way—this is using sheer muscle to
mend things."
"Do you know of a better way?"
"But—using energy to reverse the falling back of these physical
bodies, to force them to move apart again? There ought to be
some way that wouldn't require tapping another universe. Isn't
that what you're doing—and tapping a tachyon universe at that?
You're working with forces that can tear this universe apart."
"I asked you," repeated Dragger, "do you know a better way?"
"No," I said. "But I've got to see this for myself. I can't believe
you can control something that powerful."
"Look, then," said Dragger. "S Doradus is only a thought away
from us here."
It was true. Merely by thinking of it, we were there, with no
time spent in the movement. Bodiless, with Dragger bodiless beside
me, I hung in space and looked at the great spherical darkness that
was the massive engine enclosing the young blue-white giant star
called S Doradus. It was an engine that trapped all the radiation
from that vast sun, to use it as a focus point, a lens in the fabric of
our universe, through which then flowed the necessary jet of en-
ergy from the tachyon universe that was being tapped for power-
to push not only stars, but galaxies around.

406
A coldness took my mind. Through that lens, we were touching
another place where every physical law, and time itself, was re-
versed from ours. As long as the lens aperture was controlled, as
long as it remained small and unvarying, the reaction between the
two universes was under command. But if die lens should tear and
open further, under the forces it channelled, the energy flow could
flash to proportions too great to be constrained. The fabric be-
tween the universes would break wide open; it would be mutual
annihilation of both—annihilation in no-time.
"You see now," said Dragger, "why we didn't think it was pos-
sible for you to do this work. In fact, if you hadn't been able to
make the conceptual jump that set you free to survey the situation,
like this, there'd have been no point in even considering it."
"Made the jump? Just a minute," I said. "This isn't something
I've done all on my own. I must be getting some technological as-
sistance to let my point of view go wheeling through infinite dis-
tances, like this."
"Of course you are," said Dragger. "But the only person who
could make it possible for your mind to endure such assistance
was you, yourself. You're strong enough to endure the sense of
dislocation involved. We didn't think you were. I didn't think you
were. I was wrong."
"I've got work I want to do," I said. "That helps."
"A great deal, evidently. At any rate, Marc, you're one of a se-
lect group now. Less than a millionth of one percent of all our
people have the talent to do this work and endure the conditions
under which it's done. Are you surprised we doubted that you
could? An individual has to be born with the talent to be a tempo-
ral engineer. Evidently, you were born with it—millenia before
there was such work."
"I didn't know about this," I said. "That's true enough. But
there were other things that called for the same kind of abilities."
I was thinking of the stock market of that part of me which
could never rest until it had tracked down what it searched for;
also, of that other part of me that had immediately recognized, in
the time storm, an opponent waiting for me. . . .
My mind boggled suddenly and strangely, and shied away from
finishing that particular thought. Puzzled, I would have come back
to it; but Dragger was talking to me again.

407
"Are you listening to me, Marc?"
"I'm listening," I said. I returned my full attention to the mo-
ment, and our conversation, with an effort. "Something bothers
me, though. If it's pure technology at work, why is it talent's
needed at all? Why is it only a few can do this? There must be
more than a few who can endure the conditions, as you say."
"There are," she answered. "And that's why you've got one
more strength you have to demonstrate. We need people with a
special talent because when we move stars, and more than stars,
we make gross changes in the time storm forces. We don't have
any technological device quick enough to safely measure and
assess the effect of those changes on the stresses by which we con-
trol the flow of energy from the tachyon universe. If the pressure
against which we're exerting our energy flow changes suddenly, the
flow can increase, the lens may dilate, and you must have guessed
what can happen then, before any adjustment can be made."
"You mean the lens tearing open," I said.
"That's right. Only minds able to read the pattern of the time
storm forces, directly, can see danger coming fast enough to cor-
rect for it. We who are temporal engineers have to direct our
stream of extra-universal energy and, at the same time, make sure
that it doesn't get out of our control."
She stopped speaking. Eyeless, I hung in space, w7atching the
great darkness that was the engine, the dyson sphere enclosing
S Doradus. My imagination pictured the unbelievable holocaust
within that shell of collapsed matter and the Klein bottle forces,
that made the core of a star millions of times the mass of our sun
into a tiny rent in the fabric of a universe. I had thought I was
equal to any dimensions that might exist in the battle I wanted to
join; but the dimensions here were beyond imagination. I was less
than a speck of dust to that stellar nucleus; and in turn, it was
infinitesimal, to the point of nonexistence, compared to the two
great opposed masses of energy between which it formed a bridge
and a connection.
And I was going to share in the control of that bridge?
My courage stumbled. There was a limit, even to imagination;
and here that limit was exceeded. I felt my view of the space
around me growing obscured and tenuous. I was aware of
Dragger, watching, judging me; and with remembrance of her

408
presence, my guts came back to me. If she could stay and work
here, so could I. There was nothing any life born in this universe
could do, that I could not at least attempt.
The view of the space before me, and the mighty engine in it,
firmed. It grew clear and sharp once more.
"You're still with us?" asked Dragger.
"Yes," I said.
"Then there's only one more step to take," she said. "We'll test
you on the line. If you don't succeed there, no one can help you.
There'll be no way out."
"I'm ready."
We went forward, toward the dyson sphere. Bodiless, we
passed, like thought through its material shell, through the Klein
bottle forces, down into the sea of radiation beyond any descrip-
tion that was the enclosed star. We approached the core that was
the lens. Here, ordinary vision was not possible. But with the help
of the information that had been pumped into me, the lens area
rendered itself to my mental perception as an elliptical opening,
dark purple against a wall of searing blue-white light. The energy
stuff of the other universe pouring through that opening, was invis-
ible, but sensible. It rendered itself as a force of such speed and
pressure that it would have felt solid to the touch, if touch had
existed in that place and it had been safe to use it upon that
inflow.
Dragger led me almost to the lip of the lens.
"Do you feel anything?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
There was an odd counter force at work here. In spite of the
tremendous outflow, I felt something like an undertow, as well,
sucking us toward the lens. From where I felt it, it was nothing I
could not resist; but I did not want to get closer.
"The downdraft," said Dragger—the word she used in her com-
munication form was not a precise or scientific term, but a casual
one, almost a nickname for what I felt. "Does it bother you?"
"Yes," I said; for the touch of its pull toward the open lens
filled me with uneasiness. "I don't know why."
"It bothers us all," she said, "and none of us is sure why. It's no
problem here, but out at operations point it becomes something

409
you'll need to watch out for. Now, meet the others working in this
area."
She spoke in turn to at least a couple of dozen other identities.
My stored information recognized the symbols that were their per-
sonal identification as they answered her and spoke to me. Our
conversation seemed to be mind to mind, here in the heart of the
star. But actually, as I knew, we were talking together through the
purely technological communications center of the space raft
where my body and Porniarsk's were. Most of those I spoke to
had been at my full-dress argument session, previously. I was a
little surprised to realize how many, there, had been temporal en-
gineers; although, now that I thought of it, it was only logical that
most of them should have been, since they would be the ones most
concerned with me.
"Marc is going on line with us, out at operations point,"
Dragger said. "If he works out, there, we've got another operator.
Marc, are you ready to go?"
"Yes," I said.
We withdrew from the lens, from the star and the engine. I had
expected that I, at least, would be returning to my body on the
raft, from which I would then go by ordinary, physical means to
the operations point. But our identities instead started moving out
along the energy projection from the engine, through interstellar
space from the lesser Magellanic Cloud, where S Doradus was, to-
ward our own galaxy.
"Your bodies will be sent back," she said.
"Bodies?"
I woke to the fact that the identity of Porniarsk had just joined
us.
"Porniarsk!" I said. "You're going on the line, too?"
"Only as an observer, I'm afraid," he answered. "As I think
I've said to you in the past, I lack creativity. And a certain amount
of creativity is required for direct work in temporal engineering.
But in all other respects, I'm qualified; and our instructors thought
you, at least, might find me useful to have with you."
"Dragger?" I said.
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"The decision wasn't mine," she answered. "But I think it's a

410
good one. In spite of the fact you've passed all tests, Marc, you're
still very much an unknown quantity to us. Aside from whatever
advantage it'll be to you to have your friend with you, it'll make
the rest of us feel more secure to know that there's an observer
ready to tell us what happens if you do have trouble."
"Enlightened selfishness," I said.
"Of course."
The trip we were now taking was a curious one. My newly
educated memory told me it would have been thoroughly possible
to make an immediate jump over the hundred and forty thousand
light-years of distance from the neighborhood of S Doradus to our
own galaxy. But Dragger evidently had a reason for taking me
over the distance slowly, following the route of the energy being
sent from the engine to the retreating matter of our galaxy; and
now I began to understand what that reason was.
The energy from the tachyon universe was not projected in the
form it was received, like a light beam aimed over a hundred and
forty thousand light-years of distance. Instead, it was converted to
a time force line, itself—an extension across space of form without
mass, which would not be converted back into energy until it
touched the solid material at its destination; and even then, it
would be absorbed, rather than felt, as an outside force, by that
material.
The form in which it was extended, however, was designed to
increase in cross section until it was as wide as the galaxy to which
it was being sent. Crudely, then, the energy flow could be repre-
sented as a funnel shape, with the small end at the lens of S Dor-
adus and the width of the funnel increasing over the light-years
of intergalactic distance between lens and galaxy, until the large
end could contain our whole galaxy, including its spiral arms.
We were following, then, alongside this expanding funnel; and
as we travelled, I became acutely conscious of its steady growth,
and of a corresponding increase in the uneasiness I had felt about
the downdraft. And this was ridiculous; because here, with the en-
ergy converted into a massless form, there was no downdraft to be
felt. Dragger's reason for moving Porniarsk and me this slowly
along the route of the projected energy was becoming apparent.
I set my teeth against the reaction. It did not let itself be beaten
down easily, because there was something very old about it; as if I

411
had suddenly come face to face with a dire wolf out of prehistory,
lurking among the shadows of some well-groomed, civilized park,
at sunset. But it was only one more enemy to conquer; and gradu-
ally, as I faced it, it ceased to gain against me and then finally re-
treated. It was all but gone when Dragger spoke.
"How do you feel, Porniarsk?"
"I'm filled with wonder," said Porniarsk.
"Outside of that, nothing?"
"Nothing," he answered.
"And you, Marc?"
"Something," I said. "But I think I've got it licked."
She did not say any more until we came, at last, to the edges of
our own galaxy and moved in among its stars, ourselves now
within the mouth of the funnel.
"When possible," she said, "we give the individual engineer a
sector of work that includes their own home world. Your sector,
Marc and Porniarsk, will include the world from which Obsidian
brought you to us. Just now, there's no work going on in it. For
the moment, no changes in the temporal forces are appearing here,
although the earlier forces aren't balanced fully except in the local
area of your world where you balanced them yourself, we under-
stand, back before we have records of the storm. But there are
going to be forces building up farther in toward the galaxy's center
in about nine months of your local time. You'll have that many
months to study your sector. Your bodies are being returned there
and you'll be able to spend some time in them. Obsidian's return-
ing them and bringing in the equipment you'll need individually to
work in this sector."
We were in sight of Sol, now; and to my eyes, the star scene had
a familiar look that moved me more deeply than I would have ex-
pected it could.
"I was told of one more test to be passed back here," said Por-
niarsk.
"There's one," said Dragger, "but not for you—for Marc. Marc,
in the final essential, the only way we'll ever know whether you
can work with the time storm is to see you work with it. Only, if it
turns out you can't, it'll almost certainly destroy you. That's why
this is the last test; because it's the one that can't be taken under
other than full risk conditions."

412
"Fencing with naked weapons," I said.
I had not meant to say it out loud, for one reason because I did
not think Dragger would know what I was talking about; but she
surprised me.
"Exactly," She said. "And now, I'll get back to my own work.
Marc, Porniarsk, watch out for the downdraft, now that you're
sensitized to it. It seems diffuse and weak out here; but don't for-
get it's always with you, whether you're in space like this, or down
on a planet surface. Like any subtle pressure, it can either wear
you down slowly, or build up to the point where it can break you."
"How soon will Obsidian return, so we can have our bodies
back?" Porniarsk asked.
"Soon. No more than a matter of hours now. Perhaps, in terms
of your local time, half a day."
"Good," said Porniarsk. "We'll see you again."
"Yes," she said. "Before the next buildup of forces that affects
this sector."
"Goodby, Dragger," I said. "Thanks."
"There's no reason for thanks. Goodby, Marc. Goodby, Por-
niarsk."
"Goodby, Dragger," Porniarsk said.
She was suddenly gone. As we had been talking, we had drawn
on into the Solar System, until we now hung invisibly above the
Earth at low orbit height of less than two hundred miles above its
surface.
"I'd like to go down, even without our bodies and make sure
everything's been going well," said Porniarsk.
"Yes," I said; then checked myself. "-No."
"No?"
"Something's sticking in my mind," I said. "I don't like it.
Dragger was talking about this sector being affected by a buildup
of time forces farther in toward the center of the galaxy, in about
nine months."
"If you'll consult the same information I had impressed on me,"
said Porniarsk, mildly, "you'll see that the area of space she was
talking about is quite large. It'd be reasonable to assume that the
chance of our own solar system being strongly affected by that
buildup should be rather small—"
"I don't like it, though," I said, "I've got a feeling. . . ."

413
I stopped.
"Yes?" said Porniarsk.
"Just a feeling. Just a sort of uneasy hunch," I said. "That's
why I didn't say anything about it to Dragger—it's too wispy an
idea. But I think I'd like to take a look at the forces of that full
area from close up, out here, before I go down to Earth. You go
ahead. It won't take me much longer to do that than the few hours
we have to kill, anyway, before Obsidian gets here with our
carcasses; and nobody's going to realize we're around until then.
You go ahead. I'll be along."
"If that's what you want," said Porniarsk. "You don't need me
with you?"
"No reason for you to come at all," I said. "Go ahead down.
Check up on things. You can check up for both of us."
"Well, then. If that's what you want," said Porniarsk.
I had no way of telling that he had gone; but in any case, I did
not wait to make sure he was. Even while I had been talking to
him, the uneasy finger of concern scratching at my mind had in-
creased its pressure. I turned away from the Earth and the solar
system, to look south, east, west, and north about the galactic
plane at the time storm forces in action there.

It was not just the forces themselves I wanted to study. It was true
that they would have progressed considerably since I had last
viewed them in the tank of Porniarsk's lab; but that tank had still
given me patterns from which I could mentally extrapolate to the
present with a fair certainty of getting the present picture of mat-
ters, in general. But what concerned me was how those patterns
would look in the light of my new knowledge; not only of the en-
gine around S Doradus and the lens there, but of the downdraft as
well. The downdraft worried me—if only for the fact that it had
had the capacity to disturb me, gut-wise as well as mentally, when
I had encountered it.
The situation I found in the area when I examined it was one in
which the sectors were established within force lines that had been
stabilized by the universal community, so that they might be used
by members of that community in physical travel amongst stars. I
was now able to trace with no difficulty the first twenty-nine force
line time shifts Obsidian's quarters had used in carrying us to the
testing by Dragger and the others. I could have continued to trace
them all the way to our destination; but right now, I was con-
cerned only with the situation in the area to which Dragger had as-
signed me.
Between the force lines, stability did not exist—except in our
37

416
own area around Earth where we had produced it ourselves.
Struck by a sudden curiosity, I checked the Earth's balance of
forces with what I now knew about the time storm and satisfied
myself that the present balance was not my doing. My original bal-
ance had evidently lasted far longer than I had expected—in fact,
for several hundred years. But since that time, it had been periodi-
cally renewed by an outside agency. I was puzzled for a second
that Porniarsk had not picked up this evidence of outside time
storm control earlier than the present period. Then I remembered
that the search had been made by the computer mind of the tank;
and undoubtedly Porniarsk, like myself, had never bothered to in-
struct it to consider a continuing state of inaction, in what was al-
ready a nonstorm area, as an anomaly.
Within the fixed boundary lines of the stabilized force lines set
up to be used for cross-space transportation, the time storm had
gone on in its normal pattern of developing and spreading tempo-
ral disintegration, until about three thousand years ago, when
there began to be evidence of periodic checking of areas threat-
ening to set off large-scale disturbances throughout the general,
galaxy-wide pattern. This checking had apparently been so minor
as to be essentially unnoticeable, until the cumulative effect of a
number of such incidents began to show evidence of anomaly on
the large, general scale; and the tank picked them up.
I studied the stabilized force lines; and I studied the earlier,
smaller evidence of disturbance checking. What was gnawing at
me, I finally decided, was the fact that corrections which were too
small to be important, taken singly, could pile up to have a much
more serious cumulative effect on the stress situation of the galac-
tic area as a whole.
Moreover, this could kick back against the flow through the lens
and cause exactly the sort of tearing and enlargement that was the
everpresent danger there.
It was all very iffy. It was a chain reaction of possibilities, only—
but I did not like the look of it. I swung back and forth mentally
over the force line stress pattern in my sectors, trying to make it
all add up in some other way than it had just done; but I kept get-
ting the same answer.
What I was hunting for were those elements of patterns that
would point me toward the evolution of one particular pattern, less

417
than a year from the present moment. It was difficult and frus-
trating because, so far, I had no idea what kind of ultimate pattern
it was I was after. All I had to go on was a subconscious reaction
to something I did not like; as when someone who spends his life
in the open, in the woods or on the sea, will step out of doors on a
morning, sniff the air, feel the wind, look at the sky and say—"I
don't like the looks of the weather." The day might even be bright,
sunny and warm, with no obvious hint of change about it; and
still, some deep-brain sensor, conditioned by an experience con-
sciously forgotten, sends up an alarm signal.
I thought of calling Dragger and immediately saw the pitfall on
that path. Dragger had warned me that the only way, in the end,
to prove I could work with the time storm was for me to work
with it. My starting at shadows, if indeed that was what I was
doing now and there was nothing really for me to worry about,
might strike her as just the sort of sign she had been talking about,
that I could not deal with the storm.
She might even be right in thinking that. She had given me no
reason to think there was any dangerous situation building up
here; in fact, she had deliberately reassured me this was not the
case.
Maybe, I thought, the best thing for me was to put it out of my
mind and follow Porniarsk back down to Earth's surface. I had
been paying little attention to time, but now I realized that at least
as many hours had gone by as Dragger had said it would take be-
fore Obsidian was due back on Earth with Porniarsk's body and
mine. I should go to his station now, pick up my body and go back
to my own clan.
I turned and went Mentally, it was only a single stride to Ob-
sidian's quarters, in the forest east of our community. Obsidian
himself was not there when I arrived, nor was the body of Por-
niarsk, which meant that the avatar must already be back home.
But my own body was waiting for me; and I sat up in it on the
edge of the cushion on which it had been lying, feeling the strange-
ness of experiencing the weight and mass of it under the pull of
gravity once more.
As I sat up, the illumination of the room increased around me,
responding to my increased heart beat, temperature, and half a
dozen other signals picked up by its technology from my now ac-

418
tivated body. I stood up and moved to one of the two consoles
that still stood in roughly the same places they had stood on our
voyage out.
I knew how to use these now. I touched the keys of one of them
and stepped from the room in Obsidian's quarters to the spot on
the landing area, outside the door of the summer palace, where
Obsidian had always appeared.
The darkness about me when I arrived came as a small shock.
Waking in the room at Obsidian's, I had not realized I might have
come home during the hours when that face of my planet was
away from our sun. For a second after appearing there, I felt oddly
as if I had not come home in the body, after all, but as if I was still
only a point of view, hovering there, as I had hovered in space a
few moments past, overlooking the whole galaxy and all the stars
that were now shining down upon me.
The drawn shades on the windows of the summer palace were
warm with light. Everyone there would be celebrating Porniarsk's
return and expecting me at any moment. I turned and looked
away, down the slope to the town below; and under the bright new
moon of midsummer, I saw the buildings down there had their
windows also warmly lit against the night. I had been intending to
turn to the door immediately, and go on into the palace; but now I
found myself caught where I was.
The small, cool wind of the after sunset hours wrapped itself
around me. I could hear it moving also in the distance, whistling
faintly amongst the trees on the slope below. No night bird called;
and the chill and the silence held me apart from the light and the
talk that would be indoors. Out of the avalanche of printed words
I had read during my mad period crept something more for me to
remember. Not a quote this time, but a story—the French-
Canadian legend of La Chasse Galerie. It was a myth about the
spirits of the old voyagers who had died away from home, out on
the fur trade routes, coming back in a large ghost canoe on New
Year's Eve for a brief visit with their living families and the
women they had loved.
Standing alone in the darkness, strangely held from going inside,
I felt myself like one of those returned ghosts. Inside the lighted
windows there were the living; but no matter how much I might
want to join them, it would be no use. Like the ghosts of the voy-

419
agers, I was no longer one of them, within. I had become some-
thing else, part of another sort of place and time. It seemed to me
suddenly that the small cold breeze I felt and heard no longer
wrapped around me, but blew straight through my bones, as it did
through the tree limbs below me; and I thought that all my life I
had been outside, looking at lighted windows, thinking how good it
would be to be inside.
Once, I might have made it to there. God knows I had tried,
with my mother, with Swannee ... but now it was too late; and
that was no one's fault. It was not even my fault, in a sense. Be-
cause at each fork in the road along the way, I had made the best
choice I knew to make; and all those choices had led me here. If
here was outside forever, still, getting here had led me to many
good things, beginning with Ellen and the crazy cat and continuing
to this same moment, which was also, in its own way, good. For if
I was lonely out here in the dark, looking at the lighted shades of
the windows and knowing I could not be behind them, I was less
lonely knowing who and what were there, and that their lives,
which were part of me now, could be warm and bright.
Thinking this, I felt some of the warmth come out and enter me,
after all. I remembered that I had discovered before this, that
there was no real separateness. I was all things and all things were
me . . . and, with that bit of remembering, I began to move again
into touch with the universe. I flowed out to be part of the breeze
around me, the ground under me and the trees beyond me, part of
all the houses below with their lights and separate lives. I felt the
summer palace behind me and reached into it to touch everyone
there. There was no light, but the gold came into everything again.
I saw them all behind the walls at my back, the eternally-sleeping
Sunday, Doc, Bill, Porniarsk and Ellen. I saw Ellen and I touched
her; and she was the key to all the rest between the walls of
infinity and all infinities beyond those walls. I had a larger picture
of this universe and all others now. I went out and out. . . .
"Marc!"
I turned to vanish, to step back into Obsidian's quarters; and
even as I turned, I knew it was already too late. I came all the way
around to face the summer palace and saw, darker shadow within
shadow, Ellen there.
"Ellen," I said, "how did you know I was here?"

420
She came toward me.
"I know where you are," she said, stopping in front of me. I
could barely make out her face. "I always know where you are.
Porniarsk was back, and when you didn't come in, you had to be
here."
"Go back inside," I said. My voice was a little hoarse. "Go
back in. I'll be along in a moment."
"No you won't," she said. "You were going to leave and not
come in."
I said nothing.
"Why, Marc?"
Still, I could not answer. Because suddenly, I knew why. What
had been niggling at me all the time I had been studying the force
lines now suddenly rearranged itself from a possibility to a cer-
tainty, from a suspicion to a knowledge, as the absolute vision of
my unity with the universes took hold.
I had been turning away because I knew I would not be coming
back.
"Why?"
I realized, then, that she was not asking me why I had been
leaving. She already knew it was because I would not be back. She
was asking me why I would go to something from which I would
never return.
"I have to," I said.
She put her arms around me. She was very strong, but we both
knew she could not hold me there. The whole damn universe was
pulling me in the other direction. There always was Doc for her, I
thought bleakly, looking down at her. I had seen the way he felt
about her. But I was wiser now than I had been; and I knew better
than to mention that to her now.
"I do love you, Ellen," I said.
"I know you do," she said, still holding me. "I know you do.
And you don't have to go."
"I do," I said. "It's the time storm."
"Let somebody else do it."
"There isn't anyone else."
"That's because you've made it so there isn't."
"Ellen, listen." I felt terribly helpless. "The whole universe is
going to blow wide open unless I do something."

421
"When?"
"When?" I echoed.
"I said, when? Ten years from now? Ten months? Two weeks?
Two days? If it's two days, take the two days-the first two, real
days of your life—stay here and let it blow."
"I can't do that."
"Can't?" she said. She let go and stepped back from me. "No,
that's right. You can't."
"Ellen ..." I said. I stepped toward her; but she moved back
again, out of reach.
"No," she said. "You go now. It's all right."
"It isn't.all right," I said.
"It's all right," she repeated. "You go."
I stood there for a second more. But there was no way I could
reach her, and I had no more words to say that would do any
good. She already knew I yearned to stay. She knew I wouldn't.
What was there to tell her beyond that?
I went. It was like tearing myself down the middle and leaving
the larger half behind.
I stepped back into Obsidian's quarters and turned to the con-
sole to put in a call to Dragger. There was a little delay, and then
Dragger's voice spoke to me out of the air of the softly lit room,
with its cushions and its nighttime trees all around.
"Forgive me, but I'm working now and can't be disturbed. Leave
word if you want me to call you back."
It was a canned message.
"This is Marc," I said. "Call me as soon as you get this mes-
sage. It's critical."
I sat down on the cushion I had gotten up from earlier and sent
my mind back out among the stars.
The forces of the time storm were still out there, waiting for me.
Now that I came back to them with the additional insight of my
momentary contact with the universe, outside the summer palace,
what I had only suspected before showed as not only certain but
unavoidably obvious. But whether I could convince Dragger and
the other engineers of its obviousness was by no means certain.
My conviction rested on my own way of interpreting the forces,
which was different from theirs.
The time storm was too much in their blood and bones for them

422
to hate it and love it the way that I did. For I did, I realized now,
both hate and love it. I hated it for what it had done, for the mil-
lions of lives it had swept out of existence. Or perhaps they were
all still in existence somewhere else—locked up in little dead end
universes—my wife, Swannee; and all those Ellen had known;
Marie's husband; Samuelson's family; and the countless others
erased by moving mistwalls, not only on Earth but all through the
universe. But I loved it, even as I hated it, for being my opponent,
for giving me an enemy to grow strong in fighting.
So it was because of both the love and hate that I could see
where it was trending now; and it was because they saw it only as
a technological problem that I feared the temporal engineers like
Dragger would not. I traced the lines of my suspicion again now,
through the network of forces, out beyond my sector, out beyond
the galaxy and the influence of the one lens I had seen, until I had
checked it out against the storm across all the viewable universe.
What I feared was there, all right. I could trace the paths of my
suspicions, I could see the connections to my own satisfaction, but
I could not turn up any solid evidence to present to the engineers.
I was still searching for something to prove what I believed
when Dragger called me back.
"Marc?" her voice sounded in my mind. "You had something
critical to talk to me about?"
"The time storm's going to get out of hand," I said. "It's going
to get out of hand right here in our own galaxy, and possibly in a
number of others throughout the universe, at the same time. The
pattern's already evolving out of the patterns of the last thousand
years. You've already got evidence of it You told me there'd be
increased activity here in nine months or so, my local time. That
isn't just going to be increased activity. It's going to be activity
that's quadrupled, sextupled, a hundred or a thousand times in-
creased, all at once."
"What makes you say so, Marc?"
"The character of the patterns I see evolving."
There was a little silence.
"Marc, can you describe what you mean by 'character'?"
"The color, the feel, the implications of the patterns in the way
they form and change."
There was another silence.

423
"None of these words you mention have any precise meaning
for me, Marc," she said. "Can you describe what you're talking
about in hard concepts? Failing that, can you give me the concepts
you're talking about in more than one mode?"
"No," I said, "because these verbal symbols of your language
only approximate my personal meanings. I'm translating verbal
symbols from my own language. Symbols that have special value
derived out of my experience, my experience with all sorts of
things outside your experience, my experience with buying and
selling shares of stock in a market, with painting pictures in varied
colors, with understanding what is written and carved in the name
of art, with thousands of things that move intelligent and nonin-
telligent life, and make it the way it is."
"I think I understand," Dragger said. "But to convince me
you're right about this coming emergency you're talking about,
you'll need to give me evidence in terms and symbols I can value
and weigh exactly as you do. The only symbols like that are in my
language, which you now also know."
"I can't explain things your language hasn't any symbols for."
"Then you're saying that you can't convince me of what you
guess is going to happen,"
"Not guess. Know"
"If you know, show me how you know."
There was an emptiness of desperation in me. I had known it
would be like this, but I had hoped anyway. Somehow, I had
hoped, the gap would be bridged between our two minds.
"Dragger, don't you remember how I explained to you how I'd
learned about the time storm by a different route than the rest of
you? That route gave me a view of it you others don't have; and
that view gives me insights, knowledge, you don't have. Don't you
remember how I convinced you I had a right to be tested? And
didn't I pass those tests?"
"But have you actually passed the last part of that test, now?"
Dragger said. "Or are you finding some incapability in yourself in
actual practice, an incapability which you hide from yourself by
imagining there's an emergency condition building, that none of
the rest of us can see and you can't substantiate?"
"Dragger," I said. "I know this is going to happen!"

424
"I believe you think you know. I don't yet believe you're cor-
rect."
"Will you check?"
"Of course. But if I understand you, my checking isn't likely to
turn up any evidence that agrees with you."
"Check anyway."
"I've said I will. Call me again if you find something more to
prove what you say."
"I wUl."
She said no more. She had gone then. I said no more, either,
merely hung there, a point of nothingness in open space. The con-
clusion was the conclusion I'd feared. I was alone, as I had always
been, as I still must be.
Dragger would check, but find nothing to convince her I was
right. It was up to me either to find something she could under-
stand, or stop the time storm myself.
It was the latter that I'd come to, eventually—I might as well
face that now. It had been inevitable from the first, that the time
storm and I should come to grips at last, alone, like this. I had
come this far forward in time to find the tools to fight it and the al-
lies to help me. I had not found the allies after all; but I had found
some tools. Thanks to Dragger and the others, I knew that the
storm could be affected by massive use of energy. Thanks to my-
self, I now knew that all things, all life, all time, were part of a
piece; and if I could just reach out in the right way, I could be-
come part of that piece and understand any other part as if it was
part of me.
The thought was calming. Now that there was no hope of out-
side help, the solitary and abandoned feeling began losing its edge
in me. It was ironic that I had come this far forward to find help
who could handle a time storm I believed was too big for me to
handle alone, only to discover that, while the help was here, it
would not aid me. But now the irony no longer mattered. All that
did was that I was back at ground zero, alone; and there was no
need to waste any more effort on false hopes.
If anything was to be done, I would have to do it, by myself;
and if nothing could be done, nothing could be done.
I felt more at peace than I could have dreamed I would, at this
point. The unity with the universe came on me without my reach-

425
ing for it, and I hung bodilessly in the midst of the galaxy that had
produced my race and myself, sensing and touching all things in it.
I had thought of failure as inconceivable. Nothing was incon-
ceivable. Ellen had said to let the universe blow and take what
time remained for myself, even if it was only a couple of days. It
would be more than a couple of days, of course. It would be
months, at least; and each day of that could be a lifetime if I lived
it touching everything around me.
Ellen had been right in her own way, and I should have told her
so. I thought of going back now and saying it—and then I realized
that she was reaching for me.
"Ellen?" I said; as I might have spoken to Dragger.
No words came back. She could not speak to me in symbols, be-
cause she did not have access to the technological equipment of
the engineers. But across the touch between us, I could feel her
thought, even though it was not in words.
I shouldn't have let you go like that, she was telling me.
"It's all right," I told her. "I'll come back."
No, she told me, you mustn't come back. Not as long as you
still think you can do something and want to do it. I want you to
do what you want to do. I just didn't want to cut you off; I didn't
want to be separated from you.
"You don't have to be," I said. "You never have to be sepa-
rated from anything as long as you can really hold it in your mind.
I didn't know that before; but I know it now."
A sudden discovery moved in me.
"Ellen," I said, "where are all the short words, and the short
speeches? You're thinking just the way everybody talks."
It just always came out the other way, she answered. But I
talked to you like this, in my head, from the very beginning, from
the first day you picked me up.
"I should have known," I said. "Anyway, I know now. Ellen,
I'm coming home."
No, she told me. You mustn't unless you're sure you don't want
to stay at all. Are you sure?
We no longer talked in a place where there were any rooms to
hide what I did not want her to know.
"No," I said. "You're right. There may not be anything at all I
can do, but I want to try. I've got to try."

426
Then try, she said. It's whatever you want, because I'm with
you now. Aren't I with you?
"Oh, you are," I said. And I reached, forgetting how I was
bodiless, to hold her.
With that she came to me, like a wraith but real, across the
light-years of space from our little planet, to where I now floated.
And with her came another wraith, a bounding, furry shape that
bounced against me and sandpapered my face and hands with its
rough tongue and crowded between our legs as we clung together.
"Sunday!" I said.
Of course, Ellen told me, he was always there if only you'd
reached for him.
With them both there, with the three of us—we three ghosts-
together once more, my heart broke apart with happiness and out
of the broken pieces rose a strength that spread and towered in me
like a genie let loose from a bottle when the Solomon's seal is
snapped. There was no universe or combination of universes that I
was not now ready to attack, to save what I now held; and I
reached to the ends of all time and all spaces. So-at last—by the
one route I had never dreamed existed, understanding dawned on
me.
"I should have realized it," I said to Ellen. "It's one and the
same thing, the time storm and what's always been inside me,
what's always been inside all of us."

"What's been inside you?" Ellen echoed. She was still not
speaking to me by the physical route Dragger had used; but what
she said was now so clear to me that my mind supplied her voice as
if both it and my ears were physically present.
"The storm," I said, "the struggle. The fight to understand, and
be understood by everyone else in the face of the equally strong
need to be yourself and yourself only, that unique and completely
free identity that never was before this moment in time and will
never be again, once you're gone. 'I've got to do that, say that' the
identity says, 'otherwise I can't grow, I can't make.' 'No, you can't
do that,' say the other identities outside your skull, all also strug-
gling to grow and be free. 'If you do that, I won't understand why.
I'll take it as a threat. I'll isolate you; or I'll fight you.' So, before
each action, along the road to each goal, there are all the interior
battles to find a way of compromising what you want, and need to
do, with what others will accept your doing. The storm within. Ev-
eryone has it; and the time storm without is its analogy."
"I don't see that," said Ellen. "Why?"
"Because both storms are the result of conflict between two
things that ought to be working together. Like a couple of mill-
stones, badly adjusted, chewing each other up, throwing off stone
38

428
chips and sparks instead of joining to mill the grain between
them."
"But even so," said Ellen, "why's that important, here and
now, and with you, particularly?"
"Because I never knew how to quit, to give up," I said. "When
I ran into the inner storm I couldn't stop trying to conquer it;
but because it was inside me, because it was subconscious, instead
of conscious, I couldn't get at it. So I made everything else a sur-
rogate for it—the stock market, the business, my heart attack . . .
and at last, the time storm."
"Even so, what good could it do to fight other things?"
"It could teach me how to fight. It could help me discover and
forge weapons to fight my inner storm with. And it did! By God, it
did! I've found the answer to the inner storm."
"Not fighting," said Ellen, very positively.
"All right. That—yes. But there's more to it than just not
fighting. The full answer's in the unity of everything. Reaching out
and becoming part of everyone and everything else. It was you and
Sunday who first broke me in to being a part of someone else with-
out struggle. You were both completely dependent on me, so it
never occurred to me that I had to adjust myself to suit you."
"There was something besides that," said Ellen. "We cared for
you."
"I know," I said. "I know. I took that for granted too. I'm
sorry, I didn't know any better than to take it for granted, then. I
didn't begin to know any better until Sunday was gone and I sud-
denly found the big hole in myself where he'd been. I didn't realize
then why it hit me as hard as it did; but actually, something of my-
self had just become suddenly dead. If Sunday hadn't been killed,
just then—"
I broke off, looking instinctively for her face before I remem-
bered she was not there in the body to be seen.
"Would you have gone off with Tek, then, if Sunday hadn't
been killed?"
"I don't know," she said. "If I had, though, I think I'd have
come back. I never loved Tek. But I couldn't make you hear me
or see me."
"I remember-" The wraith of Sunday jumped up to hug my
bodiless spirit with nonexistent forepaws and tried to lick my face

429
that was not there. "It's all right, Sunday. Down, cat! I'm not feel-
ing bad now; I was just remembering something. . .
"But the time storm's still there. You mean you can give up on
it, now?" Ellen asked.
"I think I could—now."
"But you don't really want to."
"No," I said. "Hie truth is, no. If I give up, nothing'll be done;
and that means the end, for all of us."
"You're sure it does?"
"Yes. There's been a situation building up for a few thousand
years now, ever since the temporal engineers started working with
the storm. They've been trying to cure an imbalance between ener-
gies in this universe by importing more energy from another uni-
verse, to shore up the weaker of the two energies here. It's worked
for a while, but it's also been creating the potential of a bigger im-
balance if the scale should suddenly tip the other way, and the
weak side become the strong one, with all that extra, imported en-
ergy added to its natural advantage. And I think it's about to tip-
in this universe at least—in about nine months."
"The engineers don't know this?" Ellen asked. "You're sure
about that?"
"They know it, but they don't realize how great the reaction can
be."
"In any case, what can you do by yourself?"
"I don't know. I need to think. Quiet, cat. Leave me alone for a
few minutes."
Sunday stilled. His ghost body lay down with crossed paws, on
nothingness, and resigned itself to patience. I still held my vision
of unity with the universe, that had come on me after I had finally
faced the fact that there was no hope from Dragger or her col-
leagues. I had found what I had stumbled toward and struggled for
all this time; and now I wanted to live, as even more I wanted
Ellen, Sunday, and my universe with everyone in it to live. It went
against reason that I could have come this long journey through
life and time without picking up the skill and knowledge to do
something about the situation. Somewhere, there had to be a
chance; and if there was a chance, my blessing/curse of being un-
able to turn away from an unsolved problem should keep my mind
hunting until I found it.

430
"If I'm right about the parallel. ..." I began at last, slowly.
"What parallel?" said Ellen.
"The parallel about the time storm being an analogy of the
inner storm. If I'm right about that, and I had to get outside my-
self to find the key to my inner storm, then. . . ."
Ellen said nothing.
"Then," I went on, after a moment, "the answer to the time
storm has to be outside too. Outside the universe—outside this uni-
verse. If I go outside this universe, I ought to be able to see it."
"But how can you do that?" asked Ellen.
I did not say anything.
"There's no way you can do that, is there?"
"Yes," I said, slowly, "there is. There's the lens."
"What lens?"
I told her.
"Marc!" said Ellen. "Are you crazy?"
"It's the only way to get outside."
"But it's the center of a star—and worse than that. You'd be
burned up before you got into the lens."
"I'm not material at the moment, remember. It's my mind only
that'd be going."
"But even if you could go through this lens without being de-
stroyed, there's the problem of getting back. How could you do
that?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you check the idea out, first, with the temporal en-
gineers?"
"They might want to stop me; and maybe they could," I said.
"They can't help me, Ellen. The time storm's too much inside all
of them, just like my inner storm was too much inside me. I'm the
only one who can do anything; and the only thing I can think of to
do is go through the lens."
She said nothing for a moment. The wraith of Sunday lay wait-
ing, trusting, leaving it all up to me.
"If you don't, we all die?"
"I believe so."
She sighed.
"Then you do have to go. There actually is no choice," she said.
"All right. I'm going along."

431
"I don't think you can," I said. "Where are you? Back down in
the summer palace asleep?"
"I'm in my own bedroom at the summer palace," said Ellen,
"lying on the bed. But I don't think I'm asleep."
"You're there, though. I'm here. Tell me, can you feel the
downdraft?"
"The what?"
I explained what it was. She was quiet for a little while after I
finished. Finally, she spoke.
"No," she said.
"I thought so," I said. "I'm probably reaching down to you, as
much as you're reaching up to me. You see, I really am out here-
in a sense. I'm an energy pattern projected by the engineering de-
vices of the temporal engineers. I can go from place to place at
faster than light speeds only because I can turn off my projection
in one spot and turn it on at another."
"If you're a pattern of energy, then the energy coming through
the lens can destroy you! Or at least, change you. Energy is mate-
rial."
"Maybe. I've got to try it, anyway."
"There has to be some way I can go with you!"
"I don't think so; and that's good. Because then I couldn't stop
you from coming; and there's no sense in both of us . . . going."
"Let's try and find a way. Wait a bit. You said we had nine
months."
"Nine months before the axe falls; but it may be already too
late to stop its swing. I can't wait. I've got to go, now."
"Wait just a little bit. Come back home for a couple of days, or
even one, so we can talk it over first."
"If I did that, I might not go after all. Particularly not now,
with the two of you around. Ellen, I've got to go. I've got to go
now!"
We flowed together, we ghosts. She held me. Sunday held me. I
held them.
"All right, go then," she said at last. "Go now."
"Goodby," I said. "I love you. I love you both. I'll be back."
"You'll be back," said Ellen.
I pulled away from them and shut them out of my mind. I was

432
alone among the stars; and, by reaching out for it, I could feel the
funnel of energy and also the downdraft—weak, as Dragger had
said, way out here, but unceasing, relentless.
I let the pull of the downdraft fill my mind. I let myself go with
it. At first there was nothing; it was like floating on a lake. Then I
noticed a slight movement, a drifting, and I became aware of the
fact that I was dropping down below the galactic plane. I revolved
and saw the direction of my movement, toward the Lesser Magel-
lanic Cloud and a darkness there enclosing a young, blue-white
giant star, a darkness I was still too far off to distinguish.
I let myself drift. . . .
The plane of the galaxy receded above me. I was in intergalactic
space. There was nothing to measure the speed of my movement
now, but I sensed that it was increasing. I was falling faster and
faster, down the funnel of extra-universal energy, reaching from
the lens at S Doradus to our galaxy.
I fell a hundred and forty thousand light-years; and time be-
came completely arbitrary. It may have been minutes, and it may
have been months, that I fell with steadily increasing velocity until
I must have been travelling faster than any pulsar measured in my
early, original time. I think it was probably minutes rather than
months, or at least hours rather than months, because I could feel
that my acceleration was not merely steady, but steadily increasing
all that time. I had no ordinary way to measure this—I only knew it,
with some measuring back part of my mind.
It became plain to me, finally, that I would not see the lens be-
fore passing through it. By the time I would be close enough to
make out the dark circle of the engine among the lights of the
Lesser Magellanic Cloud, I would be only a fractionless fraction of
a second from entering the tachyonic universe, too small a moment
of time for perception. I relaxed, letting myself go. . . .
And it happened.
There was a shock that felt as if the subatomic particles of the
energy pattern that was my identity were being torn apart and
spread through endless spaces. Following that, incomprehen-
sibility.
I was afloat in darkness, streaked by lines of light that shot past
me on every side almost too fast to see. Other than these, there
was nothing. But the darkness had a value and the lights had a

433
value—even if I could not read them. Feeling stricken and dismem-
bered, I floated helplessly, watching the shooting lights.
I had no power of movement. I had no voice. I could find no
means by which I might measure the time, the space, or anything
else about me. If I had indeed come into the tachyon universe, I
had arrived completely helpless to learn what I needed to know,
and helpless to take the knowledge back with me. Look about as
best I might, I could see nothing left to me but to give up; and the
only reason I did not do so immediately was because I was not
sure if I was even able to do that.
I floated; and gradually, like a shocked heart starting to beat
again, my ancient weird woke again in me. I could not give up, be-
cause even here, I was still lacking the reverse gear I had been
born without. Alive, dead, or in living pieces less than electron
size, I was still committed to chewing at any cage that held me
until I could gnaw a way out.
But what way was there? Where do you begin when there is no
starting point on which to stand? A journey of a thousand miles
may begin with a single step; but where to begin—if you are not
standing still, but skating across eternity in total darkness, with
meteor-like lights flashing all around you? I hunted through myself
for something to hang to, and found nothing. Then Ellen came to
my rescue.
"Remember?" she said. "When you first found me, I was lost
like that; and I found a way back."
She was not speaking out loud to me. She was not even talking
in my mind, as she had as I hung in space, normal space, just be-
fore I had come here. It was the Ellen which had become a part of
me, speaking to me out of a corner of myself, as Sunday had come
bounding back from death to hug me with nonexistent paws, out
of a corner of myself where he had been all this time, without my
realizing.
"If I did it, you can do it," Ellen-that-was-me said. "Do it the
way I did it before. Take what there is, and build from there."
She was right, of course; and I drew strength from her. If she
had been able to do it once, she was able to do it again. Therefore,
I could do it, as long as she was part of me. I drew certainty from
her and looked about once more at what I had.
I had the darkness and the lights. The lights were totally incom-

434
prehensible; but with Ellen's certainty that I could build with
them, I started to watch them. They were too momentary to form
patterns ... or were they?
I floated, watching; and the watching became a studying.
All that underwent change fell into patterns of alteration, even-
tually. It was a long time resolving to my understanding, but
finally, I began to see the elements of patterns in the streaking
lights. They were not entirely random after all.
If they had patterns, they were part of a larger identity in which
such patterns could be held, a larger identity which was the uni-
verse of their context—whether that universe was as small as an
atom of an atom, or larger than all other universes put together. If
this was so, then there was a relationship between the universe
that held them and the patterns that it held.
What I had learned in my own universe could be the key here,
also. Incomprehensible as this place was, the unity of every part of
it with the whole, the identity of every part of it with the whole,
might be certain here, as it had been where I came from. If this
was so, I had to be a part of this universe and it had to be a part
of me, simply because I was now in it. Therefore, its patterns had
to be part of me also, as understandable as my own physical
speech in action when I was back in my old body, because a part
of the whole cannot be either strange or alien to the whole, as I
had found.
"Now you see," said Ellen-that-was-me. "And, since you see,
all you have to do now is reach out and touch."
She was right again. There was no cardinal here, perched on a
bird feeder; and the golden light was lost and left behind in an-
other infinity. But she was still right; there was nothing to stop me
from reaching out and trying to touch, to connect with, that of
which I was now a part.
I reached. I felt outwards for my identity with this place sur-
rounding me, just as I had felt in my home universe. Identity was
slow coming; but in the end, it turned out to be only one step more
than I had needed to make in reaching out for identity with Ob-
sidian and his peers.
I touched something. It was something, or some things, with an
ability to respond. After that, it was only a matter of mastering the
necessary patterns to communicate with them; and in this they met

435
me halfway. Apparently—I say apparently, because the situation
does not translate into words easily if at all—the distinction be-
tween living matter and nonliving matter was not the sharp divi-
sion existing in our own universe. Instead, the important division
was between those, or that, which had finite lifetimes and those
who, or that which, did not; and the lights I had been watching
were each a single lifetime, lighting up from the apparently brief
moment of its birth until the moment of extinguishment at its
death.
But what seemed so brief was not necessarily so. Looked at
from another viewpoint, what seemed to me a momentary lifetime
could have existed the equivalent of billions of years in our uni-
verse. Also, to live here was to communicate; so that, in the end, I
myself lived to communicate and communicated by living. It was a
long moment for me, because I had a large job in making them un-
derstand what I wanted them to know about us and our situation.
But the time came when I got through; and after that, no more
time was needed. I was left, with my mission accomplished, but
myself isolated.
The only way I had of telling that I had gotten the mes-
sage to them was by the change I could observe in their patterns.
For, of course, there was no way they could speak directly to me
any more than I had been able to speak to them. Actually, the
most I had been able to do had been to signal crudely in their di-
rection; like someone on a hilltop waving flags to people in a val-
ley far below, to direct their attention to a distant danger. It was
not just the mechanism of communication that was lacking be-
tween them and me—it was the fact that not merely our thinking
processes, but our very existences, were too different.
So, there I was successful, but stranded. I had no conception of
what might now be left to me; for I had no conception of what I
might be, here, in this different universe. It was possible that, here,
I had an incredibly long life before me; a slow, almost imper-
ceptible decay into extinction like that of some radioactive element
with a half-life measured in millions of years. It might be that I
was only seconds from extinction, but that the vastly different per-
ception of time would make this into a practical eternity. It might
be that I was truly immortal here and would exist forever, observ-

436
ing and apart from a universe filled with a life for which "alien"
was an insignificant, inadequate word, but unable to end.
Curiously, none of these prospects bothered me. I had done
what I had set out to do and, in the larger measure, I was content.
The only sadness left in me was because I could not tell my own
people that the message had been carried, the battle won. Battles,
I ought to say; because in coming here, in managing to get my
message through to the life of this place, I had finally got outside
myself, finally seen myself in full reflection, and come to the inner
understanding I had been trying to find all along.
My hunt had been nothing more than the human search for
love. Only I had been afraid of finding it even while I was pursu-
ing it. So I had made sure to create masks for all those I encoun-
tered, so that if I became attached to any of them, my attachment
would be to the mask and not to the real being behind it. That
way, if the person betrayed me, it did not matter, because I had
never really known them anyway. There was no way the living
person behind the mask could sink emotional hooks into my soul
because it was to the mask I had committed myself. In retrospect,
I had put a mask on my mother and sister. I had put masks on
Swannee and Marie and Paula. Those whom I feared I might love
I gave unlovable masks. Only to those I was sure were unable to
love me did I give masks that I could love.
It was a fail-safe system. It was only when I forgot to use it that
I got tripped up. The crazy cat and the idiot girl-who would have
suspected in the beginning that either of them would be able to
reach through and tear me up inside? True, I had wakened to the
danger in the girl and tried to put a mask on her, but by that time,
it was too late. Meanwhile, the crazy cat had already got to me.
When he was killed, for the first time in years, I hurt; and, hurt-
ing, I came back to life, whether I wanted to or not.
Now I was grateful for that return to life, because what I had
been doing was wrong. It was against instinct and could only have
led me nowhere finally, but to a dessicated hell of sheer loneliness
that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the contented
isolation in which I now hung. This way I was alive. The other
way, I would have been dead. The golden light had been first to
give me the answer; but then, I had still struggled against it.

I was in my own bedroom of the summer palace. For a moment,
the terrible thought came that the whole thing had only been some
sort of dream. But then, I knew better.
I looked around and saw Ellen, standing beside my bed with
Porniarsk and Dragger.
"Hello," I said to Ellen, and my own physical voice echoed
strangely in my ears. "I'm back."
"Yes," she answered.
It was the sort of answer I would have expected from her. I lay
there, savoring the familiar goodness of it, feeling warm and com-
fortable, while the three of them stood watching me with a careful
concern, as if I were some sort of carefully brooded egg which was
about to hatch and which might produce something strange. I
thought over half a dozen things to say; decided against all of them
and simply held out my arms to Ellen, who came and hugged me.
"How did I get back here?" I asked, finally, when she let me go.
Outside of feeling as weak as dishwater, I seemed to be fine.
"We brought your body here right away," said Dragger, speak-
ing twentieth century English now, as well as Obsidian ever had.
"Just as soon as we caught you. We were barely in time to keep
your identity from going through the lens."
I stared at her.
39

438
"No, you weren't," I said.
At that, Dragger looked embarrassed, like someone caught in a
lie, which surprised me. I would not have thought it possible for
her to show that particular reaction; and I would not have ex-
pected myself to be able to interpret it, if she had. But there was
no doubt about what I was seeing now.
"At any rate," she said, almost defensively, "we trapped your
mental energy pattern in time to keep it from going through.
Something else could have gone through, that was a part of you,
though what it would be, there's no way of telling."
"His soul," said Porniarsk, firmly and clearly.
"Call it that, for the moment, then," said Dragger. "At any rate,
it's been some eight of the local days here, since then."
"Eight days? Is that all?"
"That's plenty," said Ellen.
"It felt like. ..." I began, and ran out of words.
"Temporal differences," said Dragger, more briskly, "or possi-
bly differences in temporal perception? It'll take a great deal of
study."
"But you did it, Marc," said Ellen. "Whoever they are in the
other universe, they've been sending messages in through the lens.
The engineers here understand now. They're cutting off the inflow
of differential energy and doing something with the downdraft in-
stead. It's going to work out. It's all going to work out."
"You were right in the first place, Marc," said Dragger. "We
were too much a part of the time storm ourselves to realize the
forces that were building up."
"It's interesting," put in Porniarsk. "When you get down to it,
there's nothing in such great supply that it's inexhaustible, no con-
tainer so large it can't be filled."
"And that's true for a universe as well as boxes, bags, oceans,
and galaxies," said Ellen.
"I should say, however," Porniarsk corrected himself, "it may
be that the human spirit is inexhaustible. Time and work will tell."
"You were right, as I said, Marc," Dragger repeated. She was
apparently determined to make her apology, or say her piece,
whichever it was. "We were too close to the problem to see it
properly. Are you interested in the details?"
"You could say that," I answered. I pulled the pillow up behind

439
me and propped myself up against it. I got it crooked, but Ellen
straightened it out.
"Essentially," Dragger said, "you were right in assuming that it
was a mistake to import energy into this universe from another
one—Ellen told us what you told her, before you tried to go
through the lens."
"The energy already stored in the increase of entropy by matter
falling back in toward itself," I said, "can be tapped to push it out
again, instead of using the energy flow from the other universe."
"They told you about it over there, then?" Dragger asked.
"They didn't tell me," I said. "When you've seen both universes
it becomes 'obvious. Theirs is the opposite of ours. There, some-
thing travelling at the speed of light is standing still. When you
started tapping the differential in energy between their universe
and ours, you triggered off the equivalent of an entropic decrease
in their universe, where normality was a continually increasing en-
tropy and a collapsing universe."
"Ah," said Dragger, "that explains it."
"Explains why you've got to work with them to pump back the
energy you've taken from them?" I said.
"No," said Dragger, "we're already doing that, of course. It be-
comes possible if we use the downdraft to trigger the release of en-
ergy stored on this side, as you said. No, I'm talking about a mes-
sage we got from them, thanking us for solving their problem."
"Oh," I said.
"Apparently," said Dragger, "they don't realize that you
weren't deliberately sent to them as our representative, and that
your concern was to solve the problem here, rather than altruis-
tically offering to aid them with their problem."
"I see," I said.
"All this is rather embarrassing to us," said Dragger. "There's
little we can do to set the record straight with them—at least until
communications between the two universes becomes more sophis-
ticated and we understand their conceptual processes better. In
time, no doubt, we can make it clear to them they owe us no grat-
itude. But that still leaves us overwhelmingly obligated to you."
"I don't know what you can do about that," I said. "I was in-
terested in saving this universe for myself and those I now know I
care for. Wait—"

440
"Yes?" Dragger said.
"There's one thing," I said. "One of the things that Porniarsk
and I hoped for from the beginning was that you could do some-
thing for a leopard who used to be a friend of mine. He was killed,
and Porniarsk put him in a state of timelessness, hoping that, up
here in our future, you people would know how to reverse time for
him back before the moment he was hurt and killed. If you could
do that for me-"
"Oh, yes," said Dragger. "Ellen and Porniarsk both told me
about this; and we've looked at the body of the creature. I'm
afraid there's absolutely nothing we can do with that."
"I see," I said.
"Life isn't something that can be created simply by an alteration
of the temporal matrix, forward or back. You have to have no-
ticed," said Dragger, "that when you passed through a time line—a
mistwall, as you called it in the past—and through time lines in
travelling with Obsidian to your testing, that your movement in ex-
ternal time did not change your apparent age or state of health—"
"All right," I said. "Yes. I understand. All right. Let it go
then."
"But what I was going to say," went on Dragger, "is that life is
apparently a concept; and, given the concept, the rest isn't
difficult. As you discovered yourself at the time you had your con-
versation with Ellen, in space, before you went to pass through the
lens-"
"Oh, for God's sake!" said Ellen, exasperatedly.
She went to the door of the bedroom, opened it, and put her
head out into the corridor.
"Doc!" she called.
"—you were able to summon up a complete conceptual gestalt of
your leopard, probably largely thanks to your developed ability to
recognize and think in patterns. We've theorized that what you did
was to put together in your mind a critical number of behavior
patterns of the leopard and this triggered off a creative whole.
Now, given this, of course, it's simple for us—"
"I should have thought of it myself, of course," said Porniarsk.
"I'm ashamed that I didn't."
"—to build a duplicate of the physical body to which that con-
ceptual gestalt belonged. As Porniarsk says, this much was possi-

441
ble even in his culture, back in that early time. So, we took the
completed pattern from your unconscious several days ago—"
Doc appeared in the open doorway. A black, furry thunderbolt
shot past him, flew through the air and landed on top of me, strop-
ping my face with a file-rough tongue. The bed collapsed.
"Oof!" I said.
I had intended to say, "Will you get the hell off me, you crazy
cat?" but I didn't have the wind. He had knocked it all out of me.
It didn't matter.