He knew where I was going to take him. He came along almost eagerly when I unlocked the chain and led him to the roundhouse door. It slid aside automatically as we got within arm’s length of it, and he went over the threshold ahead of me with a bound, headed toward his console. I took him to it and chained him on a short length of the chain, so that he could not reach around the partition to whoever would be at the console next to him.
Bill followed me in and blocked the door open to the outer air, as we had got in the habit of doing. The others followed him. They began to take their places under Porniarsk’s direction and let themselves be connected to their consoles. The dark material clung to itself when one end of it was loosely wrapped around the throat. The further end of it reached through the face of the console to touch the pattern of blocks inside. It was so simple as to seem unbelievable, except for the fact that the strap had a mild, built-in warmth to it. It was a semi-living thing, Porniarsk had told me. All the connections in the roundhouse were made with such semi-living objects. They operated like psychic channels. If you imagine the tube through which a blood transfusion is being given, as being alive and capable of making its own connection with the blood systems of the two people involved in the transfusion, you have an analogous picture.
The straps were vaguely comforting to wear, like a security blanket. I noticed Wendy brighten up for the first time since seeing the Old Man, when hers was wrapped around her throat by Bill. There was one waiting for me at the monitoring station in the middle of the room; but I wanted to try seeing what kind of connection I could have with the other monads without it, before I strapped myself in.
Bill and Porniarsk strapped in the others, then Bill strapped himself in, and Porniarsk went to the monitoring station. He reached with one tentacle for the colored square on the console there that activated all connections. His tentacle flicked down to touch the square, and the connection already established between myself and the Old Man suddenly came alive with our mutual understanding of what would happen when activation took place.
The Old Man howled.
His vocal capabilities were tremendous. All of us in the roundhouse were half-deafened by the sound, which rang like a fire siren in our ears, and broadcast itself outward from the propped-open door. In that same second, Porniarsk’s tentacle touched the surface of the square, and the connections were activated. Full contact with all the other monads there erupted around me; and full perception of the time storm forces out of Moon orbit distance smashed down on me like a massive wall of water. The Old Man’s howl was cut off in mid-utterance. I found my body running for the roundhouse door.
For with contact had come full understanding of what the Alpha Prime had done, and what he had been trying to do. I burst out of the roundhouse and looked down the steep, bouldered face of the peak that fell toward the village. The lower edge of it was alive with black, climbing bodies.
How the Old Man had contacted them, I did not know. His connection with me and the console had made it possible, that was obvious; but he had used channels of identity with his own people that were not part of my own, human machinery. The most I could understand was that he had not actually called them, in a true sense. He had only been able to provoke an uneasiness in them that had sent most of them out hunting among the lower rocks, in the direction of the peak.
But now they had heard him. Lost somewhere in the gestalt of the monad group of which he and I were a part—Porniarsk had been right in his use of that word, for the group, myself and this place were all integrated into a whole now—the Old Man’s mind was triumphant. He knew that he had called in time, that his people had heard and were coming.
I whirled around and stared back into the roundhouse through the open door, though I already knew what I would see. Inside, all the figures were motionless and silent. There was not even a chest-movement of breathing to be seen in any of them, for they were caught in a timeless moment—the moment in which we had contacted the storm and I had paused to examine the pattern of its forces. Even Porniarsk was frozen into immobility with his tentacle-tip touching his activation square on the monitor console. The square itself glowed now, with a soft, pink light.
I was still unconnected and mobile. But the Old Man’s people would be here in twenty minutes; and all our weapons were down at the camp.
I watched my body turn and run for the nearest jeep, leap into it, start it, turn it, and get it going down the slope toward camp. I had the advantage of a vehicle, but the distance was twice as much, down to camp, than it was up the slope the experimentals were climbing, and twice as far back up again. The jeep bounced and slid down the shallower slope on this side of the peak, skidding and slewing around the larger boulders in the way. My body drove it; but my mind could not stay with it, because I had already seen enough of the present moment’s pattern to locate the upcoming pressure point I searched for. That pressure point would be coming into existence in no more time than it would take the villagers to climb to the roundhouse, possibly, even in less time. I had that long only to study all the force lines involved and make sure that my one chance to produce a state of balance was taken exactly on the mark.
20
It was not the pattern of forces in the time storm itself I studied; but the image of this pattern in the philosophical universe during that fractional, timeless moment when I had first tapped the abilities of our full monad-gestalt. That image was like a three-dimensional picture taken by a camera with a shutter speed beyond imagination. Already, of course, the configuration of the forces in the storm had developed, through a whole series of changes, into totally different patterns, and they were continuing to change. But with the gestalt and the device to back me up, I could study the configuration that had been and calculate how the later patterns would be at any other moment in the future.
In any such pattern—past, present, or future—the time storm forces of any given area had to have the potential of developing into a further state of dynamic balance. The potential alone, however, was not good enough. To begin with, the forces had to be very close to balance, within a very small tolerance indeed; otherwise, the relatively feeble strength of my gestalt would not be able to push them into balance.
But first, the imbalances to be corrected must be understood in detail. Balance was an ideal state; and the chances of it occurring naturally were as small as the total time storm itself was large. The only reason it was barely possible to achieve it artificially lay in a characteristic of the time storm itself; the storm’s tendency to break up progressively into smaller and smaller patterns and for these to break up in turn, and so on. This was the same characteristic that Porniarsk had mentioned as presenting the greatest danger of the storm if it was not fought and opposed. The continuing disintegration would continue to produce smaller and smaller temporal anomalies until, at last, any single atomic particle would be existing at a different temporal moment than its neighbor. But in this case, it offered an advantage in that the disintegration process produced smaller temporal anomalies within larger ones, like miniature hurricanes in the calms that were the eyes of larger ones; and so, by choosing the right moment to act, it was possible to balance the forces of a small, contained anomaly, without having to deal with the continuing unbalanced forces of a larger disturbance containing it.
Of course, the word “hurricane” did not really convey the correct image of a temporal anomaly. In its largest manifestation, such an anomaly represented the enormous forces released in intergalactic space along the face of contact between an expanding galaxy and a contracting one. Here on earth, in its smallest—so far —manifestation, it was an area such as the one we and the experimentals were inhabiting now, with the conflicting forces existing where the mistwalls marked their presence. Temporally, the mistwalls were areas of tremendous activity. Physically, as we had discovered, they were no more than bands of lightly disturbed air and suspended dust, stretching up from the surface of the earth until they came into conflict with other forces of their same “hurricane.”