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 concerned only with the situation in the area to which Dragger had assigned me.
Between the force lines, stability did not exist—except in our 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 balance had evidently lasted far longer than I had expected—in fact, for several hundred years. But since that time, it had been periodically 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 instruct it to consider a continuing state of inaction, in what was already 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 temporal disintegration, until about three thousand years ago, when there began to be evidence of periodic checking of areas threatening 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 galactic 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 getting 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 than a year from the present moment. It was difficult and frustrating 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 consciously 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 before 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 Obsidian’s quarters, in the forest east of our community. Obsidian himself was not there when I arrived, nor was the body of Porniarsk, 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 strangeness 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 activated 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 voyagers, I was no longer one of them, within. I had become something 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.