We finished going over all possibilities by mid-afternoon of the day before the soldiers were due in. Doc had been checking the progress of our invaders from the air, at heights of ten to fifteen thousand feet. Whether they noticed him—the milky-colored aircraft was all but invisible to the ground at that altitude—or not, they continued to come on steadily, neither slowing nor increasing their first observed rate of travel. If they had been the total force that Paula could bring against us, it would have been a temptation to go out and meet them. A night raid or two on their camp, led by some of our people who had picked up special skills from Doc, plus a few good daytime ambushes, could have cut their strength to a point where we would have been able to defend against them quite handily. But Paula could keep after us forever, and there was no use wasting lives.
I had been worrying about what to do with the Experimentals, now that some of us were moving forward in time and the rest taking to the hills. Paula was just the sort of person to kill them all on sight when she found out I had escaped, if they were left behind and undefended.
That problem, however, I found no longer existed. Apparently, when the Old Man had taken his interest in me, the rest of the village had started to disintegrate socially. Except for a few of the others who had formed alliances with some of the human families and were either going forward with these families or taking to the hills with them, the rest had long since wandered away from the village on their own and disappeared. It was a sad sort of diaspora to think about, because there was nothing away from here for them but the lives of solitary, intelligent animals; but there was nothing I, or any of our people, could do about it now. It could be, I told myself, that there was a consciousness in them that their race, as a race, had no future—just as it had had no past beyond a test tube. But that thought did not make me feel any better.
In any case, I had no time to think about Experimentals now. This afternoon was the afternoon that had been picked for saying goodbyes. I made myself available out in the landing area; and they came up by individuals and families and groups to say farewell, not only to me, but to the rest of us who were going. I was surprised, and even a little secretly unhappy, to see the number who had decided to take their chances running from Paula the rest of their lives, in preference to following me forward. But, it was their decision; and better they make it now while they had the chance than regret that they had not made it, later.
Dinner time was to be the end of the farewells. We broke off finally and went inside. I had wanted to hold a meeting of the people who would be with me in the monad before we settled down to eat; but when we all gathered in the dining room there were some extra faces. One of these was merely Wendy, who had never shown any interest in being part of the time storm work, but who was welcome to the monad if she wanted to join. Also, there were her gangling young boyfriend, who was not welcome under any circumstances, and Abe Budner, our big, slow-moving Director of Food Services and former chef, whom I liked personally, but whom I had never thought of as being monad material.
“Abe,” I said, as I sat down at the table, “no offense, but we’re just about to start a business meeting. You and—”
“Marc,” said Marie.
My mind suddenly became alert. By which I mean that it came out of the whole problem of the move into time and back to the everyday present of the dining room and the people now in it. I woke to the fact that Marie, Wendy, the boyfriend and Abe were all in hiking gear, rough clothes and heavy boots. I also became aware that there was a silence in the room, a tense silence on the part of everybody else that said that all of them there had known for some time about what I was just now recognizing.
I looked at Marie.
“You’re not going?” I said.
“That’s right, Marc,” she said. Now that I really examined her for the first time in a very long, long period, I was a little shocked at what I saw. Her face was tired, and definitely now showed the signs of middle-age, the crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes, the sagging of the chin line. I had never really looked at her in all these months. I had never thought to look.
“Get out of here, the rest of you,” I said, hoarsely. I did not specify who the rest were, but they all left the room except the four who were dressed to travel, and Ellen.
“Wendy and Walter don’t want to go into the future, Marc,” Marie said. “And I’ve decided to go along with them and Abe.”
“Marie...” I said. The words would not come. Patterns flashed and clicked through my mind; and I saw what I did not want to see. If Marie stayed here, Paula would find her sooner or later; and Paula would remember that Marie had been one of my two wives. It was inevitable—no, it was not inevitable. Did I think I was a deity to deal in inevitability? But it was so overwhelmingly probable that the chances it might not happen were too insignificant to consider.
“Marie,” I said. “Don’t you understand? Unless you go with me, you’ll land right in Paula’s hands. Believe me, I know. You will.”
“Even if I do,” she said.
“Look...” I made an effort to get the emotion out of my voice and talk reasonably. “There’s no point in throwing yourself away just because Wendy wants to stay. I know, she’s young, and-”
“You don’t understand,” Marie said. “I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay here myself.”
Understanding suddenly struck me like a numbing blow. I had not fooled anyone, it seemed, except myself. I realized now that she and Ellen had known all along how I had reacted to Paula, and what at least part of my reason was for going off with her.
“Listen to me,” I said. “About Paula and me—”
“Marc,” Marie said. “You’re going to have to understand. It’s me who doesn’t want to go into the future. It’s me. I can’t take this moving any more. I’m sick of it. I want to settle in one place and stay.”
“With Paula hunting you down?” I couldn’t believe what I heard.
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be here, in this world, not in some other. Not starting all over again. I can’t keep starting over and over again, Marc. You can. All right, you go ahead. But I want a little ordinary life for as long as I can have it, here, before the end comes.”
I shook my head. It was all crazy. Vaguely, I became aware that even the ones who had stayed behind before had gone—Wendy and the boyfriend and Abe. All except Ellen, and she was standing far back now in a corner of the room, almost lost in shadow. Marie came around the table to me.
“You never did understand me, Marc, did you?” she said. “You didn’t understand me from the first; and you didn’t love me.”
“Maybe not at first,” I said; and my voice had gone hoarse again. It was part of the general craziness that I should be standing here now telling her this while the other woman I loved stood back listening. “It’s different now.”
“Not different enough,” she said. “Not to the point where you’d move one inch out of your way for me. Or anyone.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then prove it. Stay here yourself. Don’t go forward.”
“Marie! For Christ’s sake, talk sense!”
“I am talking sense. But you can’t even hear me.” She stopped and said nothing for a moment; then, surprisingly, she reached up and stroked my cheek with her fingers, very gently. “It’s all right, Marc. You don’t have to hear. You can’t change for me, I know that. But there’s a point beyond which I can’t change for you. Nobody can make all the changes you’d like them to make, don’t you know that?”
“I just want you to live,” I said. “I don’t want Paula to get you.”