“If you feel you’re being pushed too hard,” he said, “tell me quickly. Too much stimulus, and you could destroy yourself before you had a chance to use the device properly.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know what you’re talking about.” And I did. I could feel myself being stretched daily, closer and closer toward a snapping point. But that point was still not reached; and I wanted to go to the limit no matter what would happen afterwards.
It was the pain of Ellen’s imminent leaving that drove me more than anything else. With the device beginning to work, I was partly out of the ordinary world already. I did not have to test myself by sticking burning splinters in my flesh to know that the physical side of me was much dwindled in importance lately. It was easy to forget that I had a body. But the awareness of my immaterial self was correspondingly amplified to several times its normal sensitivity; and it was in this immaterial area that I was feeling the loss of Ellen more keenly than the amputation of an arm and a leg together.
There was no relief from that feeling of loss except to concentrate on the expansion of my awareness. So, psychically, I pushed out and out, running from what I could not bear to face—and then, without warning, came rescue from an unexpected direction.
It was late afternoon, the sunlight slanting in at a low angle through the door to the roundhouse, which we had propped open while Porniarsk worked on the last console. Bill and I were the only other ones there. We had opened the door to let a little of the natural breeze and outer sun-warmth into the perfectly controlled climate of the interior; and in my case, this had brought the thought of my outside concerns with it, so that for a moment my mind had wandered again to thinking of Ellen.
I came back to awareness of the roundhouse, to see Bill and Porniarsk both looking at me. Porniarsk had just said something. I could hear the echo of it still in my ear, but without, its meaning had vanished.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s ready,” said Porniarsk. “How do you feel—able to take this seventh assistance? You’ll remember what I told you about the past increases not being limited? They each enlarge again with each new adaptation you make to the device. If you’re near your limit of tolerance now, the effect of this last increase could be many times greater than what it is presently; and you might find yourself crippled in this vital, non-physical area before you had time to pull yourself back from it.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“I will, then,” said Porniarsk. He reached with one of his shoulder tentacles to the console half behind him and touched a colored square.
For a second there was nothing. Then things began to expand dramatically. I mean that literally. It was as if the sides of my head were rushing out and out, enclosing everything about me... the roundhouse, the peak, the village, the whole area between the mistwalls that now enclosed me, all the other areas touching that area, the continent, the planet... there was no end. In addition, not only was I encompassing these things, but all of them were also growing and expanding. Not physically, but with meaning-acquiring many and many times their original aspects, properties, and values. So that I understood all of them in three dimensions, as it were, where I before had never seen more than a single facet of their true shape. Now, seen this way, all of them—all things, including me—were interconnected.
So I found my way back. With the thought of interconnection, I was once more in The Dream, back in the spider web spanning the universe. Only now there were patterns to its strands. I read those patterns clearly; and they brought me an inner peace for the first time. Because, at last, I saw what I could do, and how to do it, to still the storm locally. Not just in this little section of the earth around me, but all around our planet and moon and out into space for a distance beyond us, into the general temporal holocaust. I saw clearly that I would need more strength than I presently had; and the pattern I read showed that success would carry a price. A death-price. The uncaring laws of the philosophical universe, in this situation, could balance gain against loss in only one unique equation. And that equation involved a cost of life.
But I was not afraid of death, I told myself, if the results could be achieved. After all, in a sense, I had been living on borrowed time since that first heart attack. I turned away from the patterns I was studying and looked deeper into the structure of the web itself, reaching for understanding of the laws by which it operated.
Gradually, that understanding came. Porniarsk had used the word “gestalt” in referring to that which he hoped I would perceive if I came to the situation here with a free and unprejudiced mind; and the word had jarred on me at the time. The avatar, we had all assumed, came from a race more advanced than ours— whether it was advanced in time or otherwise. I had taken it for granted that any twentieth century human terms would be inadequate to explain whatever Porniarsk dealt with, and that he would avoid them for fear of creating misunderstandings.
—Besides, “gestalt” came close to having been one of the cant words of twentieth century psychology; the sort of word that had been used and misused by people I knew, who wanted to sound knowledgeable about a highly specialized subject they would never take the time to study properly and understand. Granted, the avatar was probably using the human word nearest in meaning to what he wanted to say, I had still felt he could have explained himself in more hard-edged technical or scientific terms.
But then, later, he had also used the word “monad”; and, remembering that, I now began to comprehend one important fact. The forces of the time storm and the device he was building so I could come to grips with them, belonged not so much to a physical, or even a psychological, but to a philosophical universe. I was far from understanding why this should be. In fact, with regard to the whole business, I was still like a child in kindergarten, learning about traffic lights without really comprehending the social and legal machinery behind the fact of their existence. But with the aid of the device, I had finally begun, at least, to get into the proper arena of perception.
Briefly and clumsily, in the area in which I would have to deal with the time storm, the only monads—that is, the only basic, indestructible, building blocks or operators—were individual minds. Each monad was capable of reflecting or expressing the whole universe from its individual point of view. In fact, each monad had always potentially expressed it; but the ability to do so had always been a possible function, unless the individual monad-mind had possessed something like a device-of-assistance to implement or execute changes in what it expressed.
Of course, expressing a change in the universe, and causing that change to take place, was not quite as simple as wishing and making it so. For one thing, all monads involved in a particular expression of some part of the universe at a particular moment were also involved with each other and had to be in agreement on any change they wished to express. For another, the change had to originate in the point of view of a monad capable of reflecting all the physical—not just the philosophical—universe as plastic and controllable.
The time storm itself was a phenomenon of the physical universe. In the limited terms to which Porniarsk was restricted by our language, he had explained to me that it was the result of en-tropic anarchy. The expanding universe had continued its expansion until a point of intolerable strain on the network of forces that made up the space-time fabric had been reached and passed. Then, a breakdown had occurred. In effect, the space-time bubble had begun to disintegrate. Some of the galaxies that had been moving outward, away from each other and the universal center, producing a state of diminishing entropy, began, in spot fashion, to fall back, contracting the universe and creating isolated states of increasing entropy.