The whole thing was a gamble. I had no idea what kind of body chemistry the experimentals had. From what Porniarsk had said, they had evidently been developed by future humans from ape stock; chimpanzee at a guess. The larger part of their diet seemed to be some sort of artificially prepared eatable in a cube form that came from inside one of the dome-shaped buildings. But since the building was small, and the supply of the cubes seemed to be inexhaustible, I had guessed that there was some kind of underground warehouse to which the building was merely an entrance. However, in addition to the cubes, the experimentals were at least partly carnivorous. They went out into the rocks around the village in the daytime to hunt small rodent-like animals with their throwing knives; and these they either ate raw on the spot or carried back into their buildings at the village to be eaten at leisure.
All these things seemed to add up to the strong possibility that they had digestive systems and metabolisms pretty similar to a human’s. But there was no way of being sure. All I could do was try.
The Old Man was not out in the open when I first walked into the village, but before I was half a dozen steps down the main street, he had emerged from his dwelling to hunker down in front of his doorway and stare at me steadily as I approached. I de-toured along the way to pick up a couple of handleless cups or small bowls that one of the local workmen was turning out on his machine. I’d thought earlier of bringing a couple of containers from our camp, then decided the Old Man would be more likely to trust utensils that were familiar to him. I came up to within ten feet of him, sat down cross-legged on the hard-packed, stony dirt of the street, and got my bottle from the inner jacket pocket in which I had been carrying it.
I put both cups down, poured a little brandy into both of them, picked up one, sipped from it and started staring back at him.
It was not the most lively cocktail hour on record. I pretended to drink, pouring as little as possible into my cup each time, and putting somewhat more into the other cup, which slowly began to fill. The Old Man kept staring at me; apparently, he was capable of keeping it up without blinking as long as the daylight lasted. Eventually, even the small amounts of liquor with which I was wetting my tongue began to make themselves felt. I found myself talking. I told the Old Man what fine stuff it was I was drinking, and I invited him to help himself. I speculated on the interesting discoveries he would make if he only joined me and became friendly.
He continued to stare.
Eventually, the other cup was as full as it could safely be, and the sun was almost down. There was nothing more I could do. I left the cups and the bottle with the top off and got to my feet.
“Pleasant dreams,” I said to him, and left. Back once more in the rocks a safe distance from the village, I got out my field glasses and peered down in the direction of his building. It was almost dark, and one thing the experimentals did not have was artificial lighting. They all disappeared into their buildings at dusk and only reappeared with the dawn. But by straining my vision now, I was able to make out a dim figure still in front of the Old Man’s building. I squinted through the binoculars, my eyes beginning to water; and, just as I was about to give up, I caught a tiny glint of light on something moving.
It was the bottle, being upended in the general area of the Old Man’s head. I gave an inward, silent whoop of joy. Unless he had decided to use the brandy for a shampoo, or unless he turned out to have a body that reacted to alcohol as if it was so much branch water, I had him.
I waited until the moon came up, then got the pickup and drove by moonlight down through the main street of the village to the Old Man’s building. I took an unlit flashlight and went in the building entrance. Inside, I turned the flashlight on and found the Old Man. He was curled up in the corner of the single room that was the building’s interior on a sort of thick rug. He reeked of brandy, and was dead drunk.
He was also no lightweight. I had not thought it to look at him, for all the experimentals looked small and skinny by human standards; but apparently they were nothing but bone and muscle. Still, I managed to carry him out to the pickup and get him inside the cab. Then I drove back out of the village to the camp.
At the camp, I took him out of the pickup, unchained Sunday and put him in the pickup, put the chain and collar on the Old Man and lifted him, still snoozing, into one of the jeeps. By this time, I was surrounded by people wanting to know what I was doing.
“I want to try him out on the equipment up at the roundhouse,” I said. “He drank almost a full bottle of brandy, and he ought to sleep until morning, but with all this noise he may just wake up. Now, will you let me get him put away up there? Then I’ll come down and tell you all about it.”
“We already had dinner,” said Wendy.
“Hush,” said Marie to her, “Marc’ll have his dinner when he gets back. You’re coming right back down?”
“In twenty minutes at the outside,” I said.
I turned on the lights of the jeep and growled up the hillside in low gear. The partitions between the consoles had supports that were anchored in the concrete floor of the roundhouse; and I chained the sleeping Old Man to one of these. As an afterthought, I took from the jeep the canteen of drinking water we always kept with each of the vehicles and left it beside him. If he got drunk like a human, he was likely to have a hangover like a human.
Then I growled my way back down again to the camp to turn Sunday loose, answer questions, and have my dinner.
To everybody except Porniarsk and Bill, who already knew what I had in mind, I explained my capture of the Old Man with a half-truth, saying I wanted to see if he could be useful as a partial monad when we tried to use the equipment in the roundhouse, the day after tomorrow. It was not until later that evening, in the privacy of the camper, after Wendy was asleep, that I talked to Marie about using the little girl at one of the consoles. Surprisingly, Marie thought it was a very good idea. She said Wendy had no one to play with but the dogs, and she had been wanting badly to get in on what the adults were doing.
19
I slept that night, but I did not rest. As soon as I closed my eyes I was off among the strands of the spider web, riding the shifting forces of the time storm about our world. I scuttled about, studying them. I already knew what I would have to do. Every so often, for a transitory moment, the forces in this area I had chosen came close to a situation of internal balance. If, at just the right moment, I could throw all the force controlled by the eight other monads and myself against the tangle of conflicting forces that was the storm, hopefully I could nudge this tiny corner of the storm into a state of dynamic balance.
Why do I say “hopefully”? I knew I could do it—if only Wendy and the Old Man, under the assistance of the device, would give me amplification enough to act as an eighth monad. For it was not power I needed but understanding. As clearly as I could see the forces now, I needed to see them many times more clearly, in much finer detail. Close in, focused down to the local area which was all that Porniarsk had envisioned me bringing into balance, my vision was sharp enough. But on wider focus, when I looked further out into the time storm, the fine detail was lost. One more monad and I could bring those distant, fuzzy forces into clarity.
It was merely a matter of waiting until morning, I told myself, finally, and made myself put the whole problem out of my head.
At my bidding, it went; which was something such a problem would never have done a week before. But then another thought came to perch on my mind like a black crow.
I was aware I had never been what the world used to call a kind or moral man, a “good” man, as my grandfather would have said. I had always let myself do pretty much what I wanted, within practical limits; and I had never been particularly caring, or concerned for other people. But ethical laws are a part of any philosophical universe; they have to be. And was it entirely in agreement with those laws, now, my carrying these eight other people—nine, if you counted the Old Man as being in the people category—into a joust with something as monstrous as the time storm, only because of my own hunger to know and do?