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. Because 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?”
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 certainty, 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.”
“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 console 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 message. 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 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 millions 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 increased, all at once.”