“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 represented as a funnel shape, with the small end at the lens of S Doradus 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 energy 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 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 gradually, as I faced it, it ceased to gain against me and then finally retreated. 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 understand, 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 returning 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 expected it could.
“I was told of one more test to be passed back here,” said Porniarsk.
“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.”
“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 forget 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, Porniarsk.”
“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....”
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 increased 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.
37
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 matters, in general. But what concerned me was how those patterns would look in the light of my new knowledge; not only of the engine 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.