It was the final moment. I saw the pattern I had waited for ready to be born. I felt the strength of my monad gestalt; and at last, I knew certainly that what I was about to try would work. The four experimentals were more than halfway to me; and now I could understand clearly how the indications I had read had been correct. I would be able to do what I had wanted; and with the windstorm that would follow the disappearance of the mistwalls, the experimentals would panic and retreat. But the cost of all this would be my life. I had expected it to be so.
I stood waiting for the experimentals, the pattern rushing down upon me. In the last seconds, a different head poked itself over the edge of the cliff, and a different body came leaping toward me. It was Sunday, too late.
The pattern I awaited exploded into existence. I thrust, with the whole gestalt behind me. The fabric of the time storm about me staggered, trembled and fell together—locked into a balance of forces. And awareness of all things vanished from me, like the light of a blown-out lamp.
21
The world came back to me, little by little. I was conscious of a warm wind blowing across me. I could feel it on my face and hands; I could feel it tugging at my clothes. It was stiff, but no hurricane. I opened my eyes and saw streamers of cloud torn to bits scudding across the canvas of a blue sky, moving visibly as I watched. I felt the hard and pebbled ground under my body and head; and a pressure, like a weight, on the upper part of my right thigh.
I sat up. I was alive—and unhurt. Before me, out beyond the cliff-edge where the experimentals had appeared, there was no more mistwall—only sky and distant, very distant landscape. I looked down and saw the four black bodies on the ground, strung out almost in a line. None of them moved; and when I looked closer I saw clearly how badly they had been torn by teeth and claws. I looked further down, yet, at the weight on my thigh, and saw Sunday.
He lay with his head stretched forward to rest on my leg, and one of the leaf-shaped knives was stuck, half-buried in the big muscle behind his left shoulder. Behind him, there was perhaps fifteen feet of bloody trail where he had half-crawled, half-dragged himself to me. His jaws were partly open, the teeth and gums red-stained with blood that was not his own. His eyes were closed. The lids did not stir, nor his jaws move. He lay still.
“Sunday?” I said. But he was not there to hear me.
There was nothing I could do. I picked up his torn head, somehow, in my arms and held it to me. There was just nothing I could do. I closed my own eyes and sat there holding him for quite a while. Finally, there were sounds around me; I opened my eyes again and looked up to see that the others, released now that the gestalt was ended, had come out of the roundhouse and were standing around looking at the new world. Marie was standing over me.
Tek and Ellen were off by themselves some thirty yards from the roundhouse. He had turned the jeep around and evidently pulled it off a short distance in a start back down the side of the peak. But for some reason he had stopped again and was now getting back out of the driver’s seat, holding one of the rifles, probably the one I had thrown into the roundhouse, tucked loosely in the crook of his right elbow, barrel down. Ellen was already out of the jeep and standing facing him a few steps off.
“You go,” she was saying to him. “I can’t now. He doesn’t even have Sunday now.”
I remembered how much Sunday had meant to her in those first days after I had found her. And how he had put up with her more than I ever would have expected. But she had always been fond of him. And I—I had taken him for granted. Because he was mad. Crazy, crazy, insane cat. But what difference does it make why the love’s there, as long as it is? Only I’d never known how much of my own heart I’d given back to him until this day and hour.
Ellen was walking away from Tek and the jeep now.
“Come back,” Tek said to her.
She did not answer. She walked past me and into the roundhouse through the door that was once more propped open. In the relative shadow of the artificially lit interior, she seemed to vanish.
Tek’s face twisted and went savage.
“Don’t try anything,” said Bill’s voice, tightly.
I looked to the other side of me and saw him there. He was pale-faced, but steady, holding one of the shotguns. The range was a little long for accuracy with a shotgun; but Bill held it purposefully.
“Get out if you want,” he told Tek. “But don’t try anything.”
Tek seemed to sag all over. His shoulders drooped; the rifle barrel sagged downward. All the savageness leaked out of him, leaving him looking defenseless.
“All right,” he said, in an empty voice.
He started to turn away toward the jeep. Bill sighed and let the shotgun drop butt-downward to the earth; so that he held it, almost leaning on the barrel of it, wearily. Tek turned back, suddenly, the rifle barrel coming up to point at me.
Bill snatched up the shotgun, too slowly. But in the same second, there was the yammer of the machine pistol from inside the roundhouse, and Ellen walked out again holding the weapon and firing as she advanced. Tek, flung backward by the impact of the slugs, bounced off the side of the jeep and slid to the ground, the rifle tumbling from his hands.
Ellen walked a good dozen steps beyond me. But then she slowed and stopped. Tek was plainly dead. She dropped the machine pistol as if her hands had forgotten they held it; and she turned to come back to me.
Marie had been standing unmoving, close to me all this time. But when Ellen was only a step or two away, Marie moved back and away out of my line of vision. Ellen knelt beside me and put her arms around both me and the silent head I was still holding.
“It’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s all going to be all right. You wait and see.”
22
We had won. In fact, the world had won, for the freezing of the movement of the time lines into a state of dynamic balance was complete for the immediate area of our planet. But for me, personally, after that there followed a strange time, the first part of which I was not really all there in my head and the second part of which, I was most earnestly trying to get out of my head.
It was left to the others to pick up the pieces and deal with the period of adjustment to the new physical state of affairs, which they did by themselves. Of the months immediately following the moment of change at the station, I have no clear memory. It was a period of time in which days and nights shuttered about me, light and dark, light and dark, like frames on a film strip. Spring ran into summer, summer into fall, and fall into winter, without any real meaning for me. When the cold months came, I would have still sat outside in jeans and a tank top if the girl or Marie had not dressed me to suit the temperature; and I would probably have starved to death if they had not put food in front of me and stood over me to see that I ate it.
My reality during that time was all inside my skull, in a universe where the grey fog of indifference only lifted to a sharp awareness of psychic pain and guilt. Sunday had loved me—the only thing in the world that ever had—and I had killed him.
Porniarsk had worked a piece of technological magic almost immediately, out of knowledge from the time and place of his original avatar; but it did not help the way I felt. He had created some kind of force-field enclosure, in which Sunday’s stabbed and slain body was held in stasis—a sort of non-cryogenic preserving chamber. He could not bring Sunday back to life, Porniarsk told me; but as long as time had become a variable for us, there was always the chance that, eventually, we would contact someone with the knowledge to do it. He told me this many times, repeating himself patiently to get the information through the fog about me. But I did not believe him; and, after the first time, I refused to go anywhere near the black-furred body lying still, inside its glass-like energy shell.