“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 select 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 temporal 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.
“Are you listening to me, Marc?”
“I’m listening,” I said. I returned my full attention to the moment, 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 control 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 correct 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, watching 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 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 description 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 invisible, 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 communication 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 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 personal 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 engineers; 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, toward 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 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.”