“You said this was some sort of representation of the storm?” I said, turning to the tank.
“Yes,” he answered.
“I don’t see anything.”
“It’s not operating right now,” said Porniarsk. “But I can turn it on for you.”
He went to a control panel on the far wall and touched several studs and dials there with the tips of his shoulder tentacles.
“What you’ll see,” he said, coming back to Bill and me, “isn’t actually a view of the time storm. What it is, is a representation produced by the same equipment that was in the station. Look into the tank. Not at it, into it.”
I’d already been looking—but now I realized my error. I had been staring the same way you might stare at a fish tank from entirely outside it. But what this piece of equipment apparently required—and require it did, for it was evidently already warming up, and I could feel it drawing my attention psychically the way a rope might have pulled me physically—was for an observer to put his point of view completely inside it.
There was nothing remarkable about the first signs of its activation. All I saw were little flickerings like miniature lightning, or, even less, like the small jitterings of light that register on the optic nerves when you close your eyes and press your fingers against the outside of the eyelids. These small lights will-o-the-wisped here and there through the blueness of whatever filled the tank; and I suddenly woke to the fact that what I had taken to be a sort of blue-grey liquid was not liquid at all. It was something entirely different, a heavy gas perhaps. Actually, I realized, it had no color at all. It was any shade the subjective attitude of the viewer thought it was. For me, now, it had become almost purely black, the black of lightless space; and I was abruptly, completely lost in it, as if it was actually the total universe and I stood invisible at the center of it.
The little flickerings were the forces of the time storm at work. They had been multiplying to my eye as my point of view moved their centerpoint; and now they filled the tank in every direction, their number finite, but so large as to baffle my perception of them. I understood then that I was watching all the vectors of the full time storm at work at once; and, as I watched, I began slowly to sort their movements into patterns.
It was like watching, with the eyes of a Stone Age savage, a message printing itself on a wall in front of you; and gradually, as you watched, you acquired the skill of reading and the understanding of the language in which the message was set down, so that random marks began to orient themselves into information-bearing code. So, as I watched, the time storm began to make sense to me—but too much sense, too large a sense for my mind to handle. It was as if I could now read the message, but what it told was of things too vast for my understanding and experience.
Two things, I saw, were happening. Two separate movements were characteristic of the patterns of the still-expanding storm. One was a wave-front sort of motion, like the spreading of ripples created by a stone dropped in a pond, interacting and spreading; and the other was like the spreading of cracks in some crystalline matrix. Both these patterns of development were taking place at the same time and both were complex. The wave-fronts were multiple and occurring at several levels and intensities. They created eddies at points along their own line of advance where they encountered solid matter, and particularly, when they encountered gravitational bodies like stars. Earth had had its own eddy, and it had been only the forces within that eddy that we had been able to bring into dynamic balance.
The crystalline cracking effect also intensified itself around gravity wells. It was this effect that threatened the final result of the storm that Porniarsk had first warned us about—a situation in which each particle would finally be at timal variance with the particles surrounding it. The cracking extended and divided the universe into patterns of greater and greater complexities until all matter eventually would be reduced to indivisible elements....
So much I saw and understood of what the tank showed. But in the process of understanding so much, my comprehension stretched, stretched, and finally broke. I had a brief confused sensation of a universe on fire, whirling about me faster than I could see... and I woke up on the floor of the room, feeling as if I had just been levelled by an iron bar in the hands of a giant. The heavy, gargoyle head of Porniarsk hung above me, inches from my eyes.
“You see why you need to develop yourself?” he asked.
I started to get up.
“Lie still,” said the voice of Bill, urgently; and I looked to see him on the other side of me. “We’ve got a real doctor, now. I can get him on the radio from the communications room here and have him up here in twenty minutes—”
“I’m all right,” I said.
I finished climbing to my feet. Looking beyond Porniarsk, I saw a huddled mass of black fur at the base of the console, a helmet still on its head.
“Hey—the Old Man!” I said, leading the way to him. Porniarsk and Bill followed.
He was still on the floor by the time I reached him and took the helmet off; but apparently he, too, was coming out of it. His brown eyes were open and looked up into mine.
“Yes,” said Porniarsk, “of course. He’ll have been in monad with you just now.”
The Old Man was all right. He continued to stare at me for a second after I took his helmet off; then he got to his feet as if nothing had happened. I thought that if he really felt as little jarred as he looked, by what had decked us both, he was made of stronger stuff than I. My knees were trembling.
“I just want to sit down,” I said.
“This way,” Bill answered.
He led me out of the room and down a corridor, the Old Man tagging after us. We came to a solid, heavy-looking door I had never seen before in the palace. He produced a key, looked at me for a second with a shyness I’d never seen in him before, then unlocked the door and pushed it open.
“Come in,” he said.
I stepped through, feeling the Old Man crowding close behind me—and stopped.
The room Bill had opened for us was narrow and long; and one of its lengthier walls was all windows. They were double windows, one row above the other so that, in effect, that wall of the room was almost all glass; and the view through them was breathtaking. I had seen what was to be seen through them, but not from this particular viewpoint.
From where I stood in the room, my gaze went out and down the open slope just below the palace, over the tops of the tree belt below to a familiar view, the village of the experimentals and the human town beyond. But then it went further—for the angle of this room looked out, between a gap in the lower vegetation, to the open land beyond, stretching to the horizon and divided by a road that had not been there a year and a half ago. Now this road stretched like a brown line to where earth and sky met, with some small vehicle on it a mile or so out, moving toward us with its dust plume, like a squirrel’s tail in the air behind it.
“How do you like it?” I heard Bill asking.
“Wonderful!” I said—and meant it.
I turned to talk to him, and for the first time focused in on the interior of the room itself. There was a rug underfoot and a half a dozen armchairs—overstuffed armchairs, comfortable armchairs. I had not realized until now that I had not seen a comfortable piece of furniture in months. The kind of furniture that we tended to accumulate was that which was most portable, utilitarian straight chairs and tables of wood or metal. Those in this room were massive, opulent things meant for hours of comfortable sitting.
But there was more than furniture here. Most of the available floorspace was stacked with books and boxes containing books. All in all, there must have been several thousand of them, stacked around us. The piles of them stretched between the armchairs and right up to a massive stone fireplace set in the middle of the wall opposite the windows. There was no fire in the fireplace at the moment, but kindling and logs had been laid ready for one. At the far end of the wall in which the fireplace was set, I saw what the ultimate destination of the books would be, for the first two vertical floor-to-ceiling shelves of built-in bookcases were completed and filled with volumes, and framing for the rest of the shelves stretched toward me what would eventually be four solid walls of reading matter.