There was no one around outside the summer palace, not the girl or Marie—not even Wendy. Now that I began to think of it, I had a vague impression from the past months that Wendy was ceasing to be the timid little creature she had been when I first saw her and was beginning to develop into a lively young girl, busy every hour of the day all over the place.
I went into the summer palace, prowled through its rooms and discovered Bill busily at work at a large draftsman’s table in the same room that had the map on the wall. Besides those two items, the room had three large filing cabinets, a regular desk covered with papers, and one wall entirely in bookcases.
“Hello,” I said to Bill.
He glanced at me over the top of whatever it was he was drawing, put down his pen and ruler and got off the high stool he had been sitting on. We shook hands with awkward formality.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Just fine.”
I glanced around the room.
“You’ve all been pretty busy,” I said.
“Oh well,” answered Bill, “there’s always a lot to do.”
“And you’ve been doing most of it, I’d guess,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he shook his head, “I couldn’t have carried most of the responsibility here if I’d wanted to. Actually, all I’ve been doing is handling the instruction, the maintenance and supply, and things like that. Marie and Ellen have been doing most of the everyday work of running things. Marie’s a natural manager, and Ellen-”
He paused.
“Go on,” I said, interested. “You’re about to say that Ellen is-”
“Well, I was going to say—sort of a natural general,” he said awkwardly. “Maybe I ought to say, a natural war leader. She’s been the one who’s been making sure that all our people know how to use their guns and that none of our neighbors think they can walk in here and help themselves to anything we’ve got.”
“Neighbors? What neighbors?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “to the north and northwest of us it’s the Ryans, and the TvLostChord. To the west, it’s Wallinstadt. South and moving around to the east, it’s Billy Projec and his tribe. Not that we’ve anything really to worry about, even if they all took it into their heads to combine against us.”
He shot me a quick glance.
“We’ve now got over six hundred people,” he said.
“Six hundred people!”
I was rocked back on my heels. I had vaguely gathered during the last year and a half that the numbers of my small community were growing; but I had guessed that, at the most, we would have somewhere between thirty and fifty people. Six hundred under these conditions was a small nation.
“Where did they all come from?” I asked.
“Some of them knew about us back when the mistwalls were still operating,” said Bill. “Or they heard about us from others they ran into. We were a pretty good-sized party—and a well-equipped party—to be moving around back then. After the time changes stopped locally, they began gradually to drift in, either out of curiosity or because they’d always wanted to join us.”
He waved a hand at the filing cabinets.
“I’ve got each one down on the census rolls,” he said. “In fact, if you’d like, you can read each one’s life history up to the time they’ve joined us. About nine months ago, I made everybody fill out a complete file on themselves; and now we make every new person do that before we accept them here. I’ve got not only the facts of the life, but blood type, medical history, occupational skills and everything else that might be useful information for us.”
I shook my head. His mind and mine were two different constructs. The last thing I would have thought about with a group that size would be getting into their former occupations and blood-types. It had probably been the first thing that Bill had thought of. He had an orderly brain.
“You don’t need me,” I said. “From what I can see you’ve all been doing fine on your own.”
Now he shook his head.
“All we’ve been doing is keeping the machinery running, idling, waiting for you to do something with it,” he said. “Do you want to look around at things?”
“Yes,” I said.
He led me out of the room and down a corridor of the summer palace that I had not been in before—or if I had, I didn’t remember having been through it—and out another door. A jeep and a station wagon were parked there. He got in behind the wheel of the jeep and I climbed in beside him.
“Porniarsk’s got his working area back here behind the summer palace,” Bill said as he started up the motor of the jeep and backed it away from the building, to swing it around to head down the hillside. “But I thought we’d end up with him. Let me show you the rest of it first.”
We drove down through the belt of trees into the lower area where the village of the experimentals had stood. I had not been down here since we had halted the effects of the time storm, and what I saw was startling. The village of the experimentals was still there; although it was now enclosed in cyclone fencing and the gates wide enough to drive a truck through were standing ajar. Sprawling out on the open space beyond and slightly downhill from the village was what could only be described as a town—a new town of everything from prefab houses to tents.
“Eventually,” Bill spoke in my ear over the noise of the motor as we negotiated the now clearly marked, if unsurfaced, road downward from the tree belt, “we’ll set up some uniform construction. For the present, however, we’ve been giving anyone who’s accepted here a free hand, provided their housing and their habits conform with our sanitary regulations and local laws.”
“Who enforces our local laws?” I asked, bemused.
“Everybody belongs to the militia, and everybody who belongs to the militia pulls police duty on a regular rotation,” said Bill. “That’s Ellen’s department. You should ask her about it. She’s on top of it all the time; and she makes it work without a hitch. From what I can gather, we’ve got a much more organized community here than they have almost anyplace else in the world. Of course, the people who are here badly want to be here. They all think that you’re going to go on pulling miracles out of your hat and that they’ll end up, either on top of things, or with all the luxuries of former civilization back again.”
“All that, just because we managed to stop the time storm?” I said.
“It’s a function of the situation,” Bill said, with his precise pronunciation of each word. “Think of it this way. You’re the sorcerer. Porniarsk’s your demon assistant.”
“You’re my Grand Vizier, Ellen’s General of the Armies and Marie’s the Number One Queen—is that it?” I asked.
Bill laughed.
“Yup,” he said.
24
By this time we were almost down level with the gates of the experimentals’ village.
“How come you’ve got them penned up?” I said.
“They’re not penned,” Bill answered. “That fence is there for their own protection, in case some of our newcomers don’t have the sense to leave them alone. Or in case there’s a sudden surprise attack on us from somewhere. They can lock their gates and have a certain amount of protection until we drive the attackers off. They seem to understand that perfectly well.”
He looked at me briefly.
“I think the Old Man can communicate with them all right,” he said. “Anyway, things have gone pretty smoothly with all of them since we stopped the effects of the time storm.”