“I know, dear,” she said. “But it won’t work. I’ve got to stay; and even if you wanted to stay too, you couldn’t protect me.”
“Don’t be so damn sure about that!” I said; and for an insane, small second, hope of straightening this out after all flickered alive in me. “If I decided to take Paula and all her army apart, it might take some time; but—”
“You’d be throwing yourself away on something other than what you’re built to do,” she said. “If things went that way, I’d have held you prisoner here, instead of you taking me prisoner into the future.”
I didn’t know what to tell her.
“Marc,” she said, raising her face to me. “Say goodby to me.”
The ghost of some giant hand took me by the neck and bent my head down to hers. I kissed her and her lips felt dry and strange, as if I had never known them before. She hugged me, and I hung on to her in return until she used strength to break herself loose.
“There,” she said, stepping back a pace, “it’ll be all right. A big part of it is you just can’t bear to lose anything, Marc. But it’ll be all right in the long run. Goodby now; and be careful.”
She went out. I watched the doorway through which she had gone, and when I looked around not even Ellen was in the room. I went out into the shadows of the evening and walked by myself for a long while.
When I came back inside, it was nearly ten o’clock and there were a great many things to be done. I called together the monad, which now consisted of the Old Man, Ellen, Bill and myself. Doc had volunteered to join us; and with Marie missing, I now more than wanted him, I needed him there. I went over the patterns with them, as best I could describe them. Not so much because the patterns would mean anything particular to them; but the more their minds could identify with mine once we were in action together, the stronger we would be as a unit, and the more certain I could be of doing what I had set out to do.
Most of the people in the community who were leaving had already gone by midnight, when the meeting broke up. I sent Doc out to check that everyone was clear of the area who did not want to be transported forward with the rest of us. It was one of those coffee nights, when everything is due to happen with the next day’s sunrise, and the nerves feel stretched to the point where they sing like guitar strings at a touch. A warm weather front had moved in early in the evening, and the dark outside was still and hot. Only a faint rumble of thunder sounded from below the horizon, from time to time; and the lights among the buildings down below were fewer even than they might be at this hour on an icy winter night, so that already the community looked like a ghost town.
Doc came back.
“Everyone gone but the Mojowskis,” he said, “and they were just leaving as I came up. Be clear of the area in another twenty minutes.”
“Fine,” I said. “Go on into the lab. Porniarsk’s getting everybody into helmets and set to go. Tell them I’ll be along in twenty minutes.”
He went. I took one more turn around outside. The night air was so dark and still it could almost be felt by the fingers; and the mutter of distant thunder seemed to sound halfway around the horizon of the plain below. I had a vision of Paula’s soldiers night-marching through the gloom to take us by surprise. But even if they had started to move the moment the sun was down, they could not get here in time. No one was moving in the streets of the town below. Those going with us would be in their homes, waiting.
I went into the summer palace and took a final tour of the building. The rooms seemed oddly empty, as if they had been abandoned for years. I stepped into the courtyard where Sunday lay for a moment, but without turning on the lights. As I stood there, a cicada shrilled suddenly in the darkness at my feet and began to sing.
I went back inside, with the song of the cicada still trilling in my head. It stayed with me as I went down the halls and into the brightly lit lab. Everybody was in place, with helmets already on. Only Porniarsk stood by the directing console, which he had moved out into the center of the room by the tank. I went to the tank myself, to make one last check of the patterns, for we had it set on the pattern of our moment of destination. There was no change in what I saw there.
I seated myself and took a helmet. As I lowered it over my head, the cicada sound was still ringing in my ears, so that it was like being trapped under there with it. I felt my strength flow together with the strength of the others in the monad and the memory of the cicada sound was lost in the silent song of blended identities as I opened myself to the time storm forces in balance around us.
They were there. They had been there all this time, waiting, quivering in balance like a tangle of arrested lightnings. I read their pattern at a glance this time and laid the far future pattern that I wanted like a template upon them. There was matching and overlap and disagreement between the two patterns. I reached out with the strength of the monad, pushed, and the two slid together. It was suddenly done, and over. There had been nothing to it.
I took off my helmet and looked around. The others were taking off their helmets also and, under the fluorescent lights, their faces looked pale and wondering, like the faces of children. “We’re there?” said Ellen. “But where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Then I noticed that around the corners of the drawn shades of the windows, the gleam of full daylight was showing.
31
We put up the shades; and the sunlight, which looked no different than any sunlight we had ever known, poured in. But outside the windows, all we could see was the same inner courtyard that held Sunday. Overhead, it was a half-cloudy day with thick white cloud masses and clear blue alternating.
We went down the corridors and out into the parking area. Below us, the empty village of the Experimentals and the town were unchanged; but beyond a short distance of plain that surrounded these, high grasses now began. The stalks looked to be six feet tall at least and stretched to the horizon like an endless field of oversize wheat. The road was gone. What now was on the other side of the mountain behind us, we could not, of course, see.
Down in the town, there was still no one stirring. This was not surprising, since many of them might not yet have realized that the move had been made. There had been no sound, no feeling of physical movement when it had happened. It was difficult even for me to realize that this was the far future I had talked about.
“Shall I go tell them, below?” Doc asked.
“Go ahead,” I said.
He hopped into one of the jeeps and drove off. I stood where I was with Ellen beside me, and the others, including Porniarsk, not far off. A moment later, we could see Doc’s jeep emerge beyond the trees and drive in among the buildings of the town, stopping here and there while he jumped out and went inside.
Each time he came out again, he was followed by people from inside a building. Soon the streets were swarming, and the figures below were starting to stream back up the slope toward us. Half an hour later, there was an impromptu celebration underway on the landing area.
It struck me, caught up in it as I was, that I had had more shocks, and more large gatherings recently than in any time since before the time storm. Nonetheless, this last one—this arrival party, as it was named almost immediately—vibrated with something neither the welcome home blast, nor the information session had possessed. There was a relaxed feeling of peace about this occasion that I had not noticed before. It was a warm, almost a cozy, feeling. Moving about among my fellow time travellers, picking up patterns, I finally zeroed in on the reason for it. There was something held in common by all the people now around me that I had not thought to look for in them, before we made the move.