There was not much to say to that. I sat quiet during most of the ride back up to the summer palace, and in that time I came around to feeling that I might have been a little unfair to Doc.
“We’ll go see Porniarsk now,” Bill said, stopping the jeep once more at the palace. “I didn’t take you to him right away because I thought either Marie or Ellen might have things they’d want to show you in their areas; and their schedule is pretty well tied in with other things. Porniarsk, you can see any time.”
I felt a warmth of old affection at the thought of the alien avatar. Porniarsk, with his ugly bull-dog shape and unemotional responses, was a particularly stable point in my pyrotechnic and shifting universe. I followed Bill into the palace, thinking with surprise that, in all the last year and a half, I had not sought out Porniarsk once and had seen him in total perhaps no more than half a dozen times.
The room in the summer palace that Bill led me into, eventually, must have had as much floor space as the Quonset hut down in the village we had just left. It was a rectangular room with floor, walls and ceiling painted white and a row of windows all down one side. The other walls were occupied mainly by equipment that had once been in the station. Apparently, Porniarsk had had it all transported down here.
However, what caught my eye immediately was not this, nor even the friendly sight of Porniarsk himself, but a box shape with transparent sides perhaps twenty feet long by six wide and three deep, almost filled with some greyish-blue substance. When I got closer, I saw that whatever it was seemed to be a liquid. There was a noticeable meniscus, and a black tube running over the edge of one of the sides and down into the box showed the apparent angular distortion at the surface that a stick does, poked down into water. Porniarsk had been doing something with the tank; but he turned and came to meet us as we entered.
“How are you, Marc?” he said as we met, his easy speech at odds, as always, with the curious mechanical sound of his voice, and his manner of speaking.
“I’m fine—now,” I said. “How’ve you been?”
“There’s been no reason for me to be other than I always am,” Porniarsk said.
“Of course,” I said. “Well, then, how have things been going?”
“I’ve been getting a few things done,” Porniarsk said. “But nothing with any great success. But then, real progress isn’t often dramatic, being a matter of small steps taken daily that add up to a total accomplishment over a period of time.”
“Yes,” I said. I thought of the experience it had taken me a year and a half to come to terms with. “There’s a lot of things I’d like to talk to you about.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Porniarsk. “On my part, I’ve been looking forward to talking to you. I can progress much more rapidly if I’ve got a primary mind to work with; and the only primary mind we’ve produced so far is you.”
“Only me?” I said. It jarred me slightly to hear it—at the same time I felt a small ego-pleasure.
“Primary minds can only be developed or uncovered by monad activity,” he said. “All the other minds involved in the gestalt only resonated and amplified yours, without developing. So I’ve been restricted to doing what I can with the resonating minds. In fact, I’ve been restricted to the one resonating mind that had no other duties to occupy it.”
He turned his head and nodded ponderously toward a corner. I looked and saw the Old Man, perched on the seat before one of the consoles taken from the station, the helmet on his head.
“The Alpha Prime,” said Porniarsk. “He’s been my main subject. Happily, he seems eager for the experience of being connected with the equipment here. Daytimes, he’s generally unavailable. I understand he’s been with you most of the time. But at night, he often comes here on his own initiative to work with me.”
I gazed at the Old Man. He squatted utterly still on the chair before the console, with a curious assurance—almost as if it was a throne and he was a king.
“What could you learn from him?” I asked.
“It’s not what I can learn from him,” said Porniarsk deliberately, “but what I could learn through him. Just as I want to learn and discover matters through you—though since you’re a primary mind, I’d expect that you’d also learn, and be able to add the knowledge you personally gain to what I can gain.”
He stopped speaking for a second, then started again.
“In fact,” he said, “I ought to point out that what I can learn is limited by the kind of instrument I am, myself—personally. As an avatar of Porniarsk I’ve got only so much conceptual range. On the other hand, Marc, your conceptual range is something I don’t know. It could be less than Porniarsk’s—that is to say, mine—or it might be a great deal greater. It could be limitless, in that you might be able to go on increasing it, as long as you want to make the effort to extend its grasp. Which brings me to an important point.”
He stopped again. But this time he did not continue immediately.
“What point?” asked Bill, finally.
“The point,” said Porniarsk in his unvarying accent, “of whether Marc, after his one experience with the monad, really wants to explore further into an area where mind becomes reality and where it’s impossible to draw a line where the definitive change occurs.”
“I’ll answer that,” I said.
It came to me suddenly, that while I’d never really come to doubt that I wanted to dig deeper into the time storm and everything connected with it, for the last year and a half, I’d been hiding from the fact that I’d eventually have to get back to that work.
“I don’t have any reverse gear,” I said. “The only way for me to go is straight ahead. Even standing still doesn’t work.”
“In that case,” said Porniarsk, “you and I have a big job ahead of us.”
“Fine with me,” I said.
“I guessed so from the beginning,” said Porniarsk. “So, in that case, maybe we might talk right now about the basic principles involved here, and how you can be involved also.”
“Absolutely,” I said. I meant every word I said. “This all ties in with something I want to do—something I’m going to do.”
“If you’ll forgive me,” said Porniarsk, “I felt that about you from the first time we met. However, it’s a lot bigger universe than you, or the entities of your time, seem to realize. If you were anything else than a rather unusual individual, I’d have to say you’re presumptuous to have the ambition I think you’re entertaining.”
“I told you I’ve got something to do,” I said. “In any case, we both want the same thing, don’t we? To control this runaway situation with time?”
“Quite correct. But remember what I said—if you weren’t an unusual individual, I wouldn’t be devoting this much energy to you. Not because I wasn’t interested; but because it’d be a waste of time. By your own standards, Marc, you’re arrogant. Partly, this is simply because you recognize your own ability. Part of it is a prickliness, what you’d call a chip on the shoulder, because other people don’t see what you see. I can sympathize with this. But it’s still something you’ll have to overcome, if you’re going to achieve the full primary identity you’ll need.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
I had been looking forward to talking to him. I had a great deal, I had thought, to tell him. What I most wanted to talk about was how it could be that, just as it had been back in the days when I had been playing the stock market, I could almost taste—almost feel—what it was I wanted to take hold of in the time storm. But his sudden criticism put me off.