“Is it possible?”
I had never actually stopped to doubt that it was possible; and his question took half the joy out of me at one blow.
“Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. We’re away down at the end of the chain of storm changes. The forces dealing with this area have to be relatively light....”
I ran down.
“We’ll have to check and see, of course,” I said. “Maybe we’d better do that first before I tell everyone what we’ve found and start getting their hopes up.”
We were still checking several days later when Doc came into the lab one morning.
“I’ve just made a swing east in the plane,” he said. He had become used to the craft now and he flew daily patrols. “There’s a force of about a hundred and fifty of Paula’s soldiers, about half on foot and half on horseback, about a hundred and twenty miles east of here. No motorized transport or anything more than carry weapons. They aren’t wearing her uniforms, but they can’t be any other troops. No one else on this continent can put together that many people and get them to move in formation like that.”
“How did they get so close?” Porniarsk asked.
“They must have started out individually or in small groups,” Doc said. “That’s the only way I can think of. Then they rendezvoused someplace last night, so that this was the first day they’ve been all together. I’d have spotted them from the air otherwise. At the rate they’re marching, they’ll be here in less than a week.”
I looked at Porniarsk.
“That ends the checking,” I said. “All we can do now is go, and hope we make it.”
30
There was something wrong in the atmosphere around the summer palace. I could feel it, but I could not take the time to pin it down. I set the rest of the community to packing up, ready to get out, and with Porniarsk, got down to the choosing of an optimum target nanosecond on the day before the soldiers were due to arrive. We wanted a time when the pattern of storm forces concerned with our small area would be as close as possible to the conformation I was going to try to force them into with the monad. My original idea had been to deal with as small an area as possible— probably only the lab itself and everything inside it But as the situation developed, it turned out that the difference between restructuring the forces dealing with just the lab and those dealing with an area including the summer palace, mountain section and enough of the plain to contain the town and a couple of square miles outside it, was essentially no difference at all, in terms of the size of the forces to be dealt with.
This put a new complexion on things. It was the first good news I could remember finding in a long time. Now I could take along everybody, if they wanted to go. I was tied to the work in the lab, but I sent Doc out to tell the rest of the community that as things had turned out, they didn’t need to run and hide from the soldiers unless they wanted to. Those who wanted to come along with the monad and myself into the future could simply stick around.
Having sent the word out I got back to work. Matters, for once, seemed to be all going in the right direction. The more I pinned down the force-changes to be made, the more possible they looked. Even setting aside the fact that I was much more pattern-experienced and more developed and mature than I had been when I had balanced the forces in the immediate area of the planet, what I now looked at was a much simpler job.
This, in spite of the fact that we would be moving an unguessable distance of time into the future. There was no way to measure how far, but thousands of years anyway in terms of the old temporal yardsticks we had used before the time storm. The reason for this was that, even taking in the area including the town, I was dealing with a very small patch of space compared to that which enclosed the immediate neighborhood of the Earth. What it amounted to was that I would be making a much larger temporal change—but in a very, very much tinier area than I had the time before. It was as if I multiplied by a factor of a few thousand, but then divided the result by millions.
So, matters in the lab progressed well; but nothing goes with complete smoothness. It was a good thing that Porniarsk and I were, if anything, ahead of our schedule for charting all the parameters of the shift as I had laid it out; because I found myself called away from the lab to deal with the human side of the move.
Without realizing it, I had hit everyone in the community harder than I had planned when I had sent out word with Doc that those who wanted to come with me could do so. Living with the time storm as I had been all this time, I had forgotten that only those who had been with me at the time of the balancing of forces originally would have any idea of what to expect from involving themselves in what I planned to do. Nor did they look on going far into the future as calmly as I did.
Accordingly, they were seething with questions that needed some kind of answers if they were to come up with their individual decisions. I found I had to call a meeting of the community as a whole to explain matters and answer those questions. We were too many to crowd into even the largest Quonset hut, so the meeting was held outside on the landing area, with a public address system rigged by Bill for the occasion, with extra microphones on long cords, so that everybody could hear the questions as well as the answers.
I began by explaining the mechanism of the time storm as well as I understood it, and how this mechanism had affected us here on Earth. Porniarsk stood beside me in the jeep I was using for a speaker’s platform, ready to answer questions himself; but no one asked him any. I think they were still a little wary of Porniarsk, whom few besides those in the summer palace had, in fact, ever seen.
When I finished that part of my explanation, I called for questions, but there were none. So I went on to explain how I believed that up ahead in the future, people—not merely human people, but “people” in the larger sense, including intelligent, civilized life like that represented by Porniarsk’s race—would finally come to grips with the time storm and find some way of stopping it. Finally, I repeated what I was sure they must know already, that I thought I had located such a time and I planned to go there. Those who wanted to go with me, could.
Once more I asked for questions. This time I got them—three hours or more of them, mostly unanswerable, by me or anyone else there at least.
Basically, they were unanswerable because what they all wanted most to know was what it would be like for them up there in the future. This was, naturally, something about which I had no more idea than they had themselves. It began to sink in on me as I stood there doing my best to answer them, what an unimaginable gulf exists between those who are obsessed by a goal and those who simply want to live as best they can. In a manner of speaking, I wanted only to arrive in Samarkand, and anything short of the moment when I got there was unimportant. The others were concerned with the possibility of tigers and robbers on the way, the availability of wells along the route, the quarters they would occupy once they arrived and the marketplace where they would eventually vend their wares.
I could not help them. Without realizing it, I had discounted myself completely from the price I was willing to pay to get what I wanted. They had not. They could not think like me; and—God help me—I could no longer think like them.
But I did what I could. I gave them words, explanations, until my throat was hoarse, and they went away discussing what I had said, sure that I had told them something of importance, but finding themselves still unsatisfied, and unreassured.
Porniarsk and I went back to the lab. With or without the extra people, I had to close with the storm forces when the proper moment came; and the moment was marching inexorably toward us.