“I can see what you’ve got there,” I said to Porniarsk, finally. “But I can’t seem to make it mean anything to me. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“You may just be tired,” said Porniarsk. “Or perhaps you’ve been away from the device long enough to feel unfamiliar with it.”
“Maybe.”
I gave up and withdrew my attention from the pattern in the tank. Suddenly, I was dead tired. Tired right down to the marrow of my bones.
“You’re right about one thing,” I told Porniarsk. “I need sleep. I’ll go lie down.”
I went back to my own room, part of the suite I shared with Marie and Ellen. But neither of them were there now. It was only early afternoon, and they, with the rest of the community, would be hard at work. I felt a child’s loneliness for someone to sit with me while I fell asleep; but I pushed the emotion away from me. I undressed, lay down on the bed, pulled a blanket over me and stared at the white ceiling, lightly shadowed now and then by the clouds outside reflecting from the window.
I was still dead tired; but I began to wonder if I would sleep. I lay there.
I woke to someone shaking me. For a second, I thought I was back on the future plane again and being woken by Doc and the Old Man. Then I saw it was dark outside the window and dark in the room, and the shape bending over me was female.
“Marc-” It was Ellen’s voice. “I hate to wake you, but the whole community’s waiting for you. If you can just come out and show yourself for a little while, you can come back after that and sleep as long as you want.”
“Sure,” I said. “All right.”
I levered my wooden body up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and she began to massage my neck, standing in front of me and reaching around behind my head. I leaned my forehead gratefully against the human softness of her belly, feeling myself come alive again to the warm pressure of her fingers kneading the stiff cords and muscles running up from my shoulders into the area behind my ears. She felt and smelled delightful; and I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life, getting my neck rubbed.
But she stopped after a while.
“You’re awake now,” she said. “Get dressed.”
She was right. I was awake; and there was nothing to do but get dressed. I was standing on one leg, putting on my pants, when it came to me suddenly that what I had felt was second cousin to what makes dogs and other animals enjoy being petted and stroked by humans. Not the physical sensation alone, but the implications of affection and concern. For a second, I could almost feel what an animal might feel in such case—and there, for a second, the universe-identity almost was with me again. But the second passed, and it was gone.
I finished dressing. Ellen had already gone ahead. I followed down the corridors, out through the door, and stepped into the warm, early evening dark of outside. A barbecue pit had been dug in the landing area, and I could smell roasting meat. There were several other large fires, throwing sparks high in the air so that they seemed to mingle with the stars overhead; and the open space around them was filled with moving silhouettes and the hubbub of voices. For some reason, it reminded me of a small town in Mexico I had happened to go through once on vacation on an evening of a fiesta. I could not remember the name of the saint who was the cause of the fiesta; but it had been night, and fireworks were exploding high in the air over the town, their sparks raining down into the dark streets. Lights and voices had been all over the place, with people coming and going in the narrow streets, so that it all had a sort of incredible richness to it. I had wondered then where that feeling of richness came from; but of course now I knew where. Unconsciously, I had been reading the patterns of the fiesta around me the way those who lived in the area read them. I was picking the rich feeling up from them; and now I was doing the same thing, picking up the magic and warmth of the moment from the rest of the community, gathered here to celebrate the fact that Doc and I, and even the Old Man, were back safe.
I went forward into the crowd, and was recognized. The faces and bodies swirled around me, drink was shoved into my hand. I was mobbed and hustled and questioned and patted on the back and kissed until my head started to spin. Between that spinning and the fatigue I had, measured by the little sleep I had just had, I was not to remember most of the events of that evening. It was merely one long happy blur that ended when I finally groped my way back into my dark room and fell on my bed again, some hours later.
Ellen was there and I hung on to her.
“Where’s Marie?” I asked after a while.
“She’s still outside,” Ellen said. “Sleep, now.”
I slept.
I did not come to until late the next day. But in spite of that long, exhausted slumber, it was three days before I was really back in proper body and mind again. The night of the celebration with the crowd had healed me somewhat, in a way I could not quite pin down, but I felt more whole and healthy generally. I went back to Porniarsk’s lab on the third day and tried the pattern of the tank again.
The first time I tried it, I was no more successful than I had been the first day I had come home. Still, my failure did not leave me with the sensation of being so helpless as before, and after a rest I tried again. This time I was also unsuccessful, but I got the impression I had come closer to actually envisioning the universe; and so I continued, trying and trying again, feeling that I got a little closer with each try—and a couple of weeks later I broke through.
Whatever barrier I had been pushing against went down all at once. Without warning, I was suddenly in the universe of galaxies and stars—and what I saw leaped at me so hard that I was jarred out of it, back into the conscious reality of the lab and myself standing there, staring into the tank.
“Why, hell!” I said. “It’s wrong!”
“Wrong?” Porniarsk said. “In what way?”
I turned to the avatar.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do know; but it doesn’t matter! Don’t you see? Your device here shut itself down because it began to turn up inconsistencies within the patterns it was evolving from the patterns it had evolved previously. Logically, there couldn’t be any inconsistencies, but there are!”
“I don’t understand,” said Porniarsk.
“Don’t you? Look,” I said, “this tank has been extending previous patterns that were correct and getting one that is incorrect.”
“Then you’re saying the device has broken down? I don’t see how it could,” said Porniarsk.
“No. It hasn’t broken down—that’s the point. It’s not wrong! What’s wrong is reality. One of the factors the device takes into account is the human—pardon me, I mean the intelligent life—factor; and that factor logically evolved is creating inconsistencies with the purely physical evolution of the other factors considered. Don’t you see what that means?”
“I do not,” said Porniarsk.
“It means somewhere up there in the future—at the time we’re looking at right now—intelligent life is doing something about the time storm. Doing something at least effective enough to produce inconsistencies with what would have happened if the storm had just been allowed to run its course. We’ve found them, Porniarsk! We’ve found a time when they’re able to do something about the time storm!”
The avatar stood perfectly still, looking at me. He was so motionless and his silence went on so long that I began to entertain the outrageous thought that he had not heard me.
“I see,” he said, speaking just as I opened my mouth to repeat to him what I had just said. “Then our search is over.”
“That’s right. All we have to do now is figure out how the monad needs to shift the immediate small factors so that at least this lab can move forward to that time.”