“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.
“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 nonintelligent 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!”
“I believe you think you know. I don’t yet believe you’re correct.”
“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 will.”
She said no more. She had gone then. I said no more, either, merely hung there, a point of nothingness in open space. The conclusion 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 understand, 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 allies 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 myself, 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 become 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 outside 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 reaching 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 inconceivable. 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, because 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 separated 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.”
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.