In a second it would have been over—but in that second, the Old Man reached out and placed a hand on both my shirt and the hand holding the gun, arresting my movement.
The pressure of his hand was a calm, almost a gentle touch. I could feel the unexerted strength behind his fingers; but he was not gripping my hand, merely laying his own on top of it, just as, once, I might have stopped some business guest reaching for the check of a lunch to which I had just taken him. It was not the kind of touch that could have checked me from continuing to draw the gun and shoot him if I had decided to. But somehow, I was stopped.
For the first time I looked directly into—deeply into—those eyes of his.
I had gone to zoos once and looked into the eyes of some of the animals there. There were no more zoos now, nor was it likely that there would ever be again. But once there had been; and in their cages, particularly in the cages of the big cats, the apes, and bears and the wolves, I had looked into wild animal eyes from only a few feet of distance. And there had been something in those eyes that was not to be found in the eyes of my fellow humans. There were eyes that looked at me from the other side of the universe. Perhaps they could be loving, perhaps, under stress, they could be filled with fury and anger; but now, to me, a human, they were remote—separated from me by a gulf neither man nor beast could cross. They looked at me, without judgment and without hope.
If they lived and it was their fate to encounter me in the open, they would deal with me as best their strength allowed. If I died they would watch me die, simply because there was nothing else they could do, whether I was their deepest enemy or their dearest friend. Their eyes were the eyes of creatures locked up alone in their own individual skulls all the hours and minutes of their life. As animals, they neither knew nor expected the communication every human takes for granted, even if he or she is surrounded by mortal foes.
The eyes of the Old Man were like that—they were the fettered eyes of an animal. But mixed in with that, there was something more—for me alone. It was not love such as Sunday had had for me. But it was something in its own way, perhaps, as strong. I recognized it without being able to put a name to it—although suddenly, I knew what it was.
The Old Man and his tribe, who had been born from test tubes, had been created on the brink of humanity. They teetered on the nice edge of having souls. Of these, the most aware was the Alpha Prime, Old Man himself, because he was the most intelligent, the strongest and the most questioning. Also, he had shared the monad with me in that moment in which we had brought the local effects of the time storm to a halt. In fact, he had shared it alone with me, before any of the other humans had joined in. He had been exposed then to communication for the first time in his life; and it must have awakened a terrible hunger in him. I realized that, all this time, he had been trying to get back into communication with me.
So, that is why as soon as he had been let free again—whenever that was—he had begun to search me out, to approach me little by little, day by day, until now, at last, he sat at arm’s length from me. He not only sat at arm’s length from me, but with his hand in a gesture that was almost pleading, arresting the gun with which he must know I had planned to kill him.
My own soul turned over in me. Because I suddenly understood what he had understood. From the beginning, because of what we had shared in the moment of the taming of the time storm, he had been much more understanding of me than I had suspected. He had known that I did not want him near me. He had known that my desire to be free of him could be murderous. And he had known what I was doing when my hand went inside my shirt.
I had had enough experience with him to know that my strength was like a baby’s compared to his—for all that we probably weighed about the same. It would have been no effort for him to have taken the gun from me. He could have easily broken the arm that held it or throttled me with one hand. But he had done none of these. Instead he had merely come as close as he ever must have come in his life to pleading with someone to spare him, to accept him, to be his fellow, if not his friend.
In that same moment I realized that he—strange as it seemed and incredible as it was that he should have the capability, just from that solitary shared moment in the monad—understood better than any of them how Sunday had felt about me, and how I had felt about Sunday. In his animal-human eyes I read it, how I had really felt about Sunday; and at last—at last—I fell apart.
I had been right both ways. I had been right in that I was someone who did not know how to love. But I had been wrong, in spite of this, when I told myself I had not loved the crazy cat. All this I understood suddenly, at last, in the moment in which the Old Man squatted before me, with one long hand still laid flat against my shirt, over the spot where my fist and the revolver that was to have killed him were concealed. The floodgates within me went down suddenly and I was washed halfway back again once more to the shores of humanity. Only halfway, but this was farther than I had ever been before.
23
I sat there and cried for a long time; and the Old Man waited me out as he might have waited out a storm, squatting in a cave in the hills. When it was over, I was sane again; or at least as close to sanity as I could expect to be, under the circumstances. Together we went back to the camp, and from then on, he was openly at my side most of the daylight hours.
What he had done, of course, was to crack the protective shell I had grown about myself in reaction to the massive internal effort of controlled power that had been involved in using the monad. In doing that, I had discovered muscles of the inner self that I had not known I owned, and I had also tuned myself up emotionally with a vengeance. In self-defense, with Sunday’s death, my mind had closed itself off until it could heal the psychic tearings these stresses had created. Now that I was back in my skull, however, these things were suddenly very obvious to me; and some other things as well. Chief of these was that there was a great deal I needed to do with myself if I wanted to continue my joust with the time storm and the universe.
Meanwhile, I was faced with reentering the world of the living. To my pleasure and to the feeding of a new humbleness inside me, the others had been doing very well without my guiding hand. I found that I was now ruler of what might well be called a small kingdom—and that was only the beginning of the discoveries awaiting me.
A great deal had happened in the year and a half that I had been obsessed with myself. For one thing, the world was a world again. With the interference from the moving time lines ended, short-wave radio communication had tied the continents back together, to the mutual discovery of all us survivors that there were more of us than we had suspected. The North American continent was now a patchwork of relatively small kingdoms, like my own, with the exception of the west coast, from Baja California northward halfway into British Columbia, Canada. That west coast strip, as far east as Denver and in some cases beyond, was now a single sovereignty under a woman who called herself the Empress. The Empress was from the Hawaiian Islands—which appeared to have suffered less than any other part of the world from the moving mistwalls and the time changes of the time storm. The islands had lost no more than two-thirds of their population, as opposed to a figure that must be much closer to ninety-eight or ninety-nine per cent for most of the rest of the world. The Empress was a woman from the island of Hawaii itself, who had seized control there with a ragtag, impromptu army, and then gone on to take over the other islands and the west coast of North America.