In a sense, those who had come with us were the adventurers among our community, the true pioneers. Those particular words all rang a little off-note, applied to the situation we were in. But what I mean is that, to an individual, those who had come forward with me were men, women, and even children who did not want to be any further back down the line of history than they had to be. In all of them, there was an urge to be at the very front of the wave, up where the race as a whole was breaking new ground.
Realizing this, something new and unsuspected in me warmed to them. It was a corner of myself that I had not even realized existed before. It was, in fact, the part of me that felt just the way they did. Even if I had known before we started that what we would all find up here would be the hour of Armageddon and the final end for our kind, I at least would have wanted to go anyway, to be part of even that, while it lasted, in preference to living out my life in any previous time, no matter how comfortable.
Now, here I was with perhaps a hundred and eighty people who felt the same way I did. Under the most unlikely set of conditions that could be imagined, I had unconsciously put together my own special tribe. I was so elated with this discovery that I had to talk about it with someone. Ellen was busy helping organize the food and drink aspect of the gathering, so I went looking for Bill.
I found him also busy. He had set up a table with some sheets of paper and was asking everybody to sign up so that we could have a complete and correct list of who had actually come through with us, since there were people at the last moment who had changed their minds either for or against the move. The sign-up table, however, was essentially self-operating, now that word of it was being passed through the crowd, and I managed to pull him aside.
We walked off a little way from the rest, and I told him my discovery about the pioneer element in those who had come and my pleasure in it.
“I can’t get over striking gold like that,” I said. “Stop and think how small the whole North American population was after we got the mistwalls halted. And out of that small population we’ve gathered nearly two hundred people who really belong up here, thousands of years ahead in time.”
“That’s true, of course,” he said.
His handsome, small face had been tanned by several years of outdoor weather, and the same amount of time seemed to have thickened and matured even the bones of it, so that he now looked more competent and mature. I realized that it was with him as it had been with Marie. Just as I had not really looked at her for a long time, so I had not really looked at him either; and he had been changing under my nose.
“... it shouldn’t be such a surprise, though,” he was going on to say, even as I was noting the changes in him. “Stop to think that the ones who gathered around us in the first place were survivor types. You had to be a survivor type to stay alive while the mistwalls were moving. Even if you were one of the few who were lucky enough to stay put and have no mistwalls come near you, contact with the survivor types around you afterwards either made you like them in a hurry, or buried you.”
“My point, though,” I checked and glanced around to make sure that none of the others were close enough to overhear me discussing them in this clinical fashion, “my point is that these people are a lot more than simple survivors.”
“Right,” said Bill, his brown face serious. “Look what happened, though. After the time storm, our group began to attract a particular type of people—those who had heard of us and thought they’d like to be associated with us. The ones we attracted were the ones who saw the same sort of things in us they saw in themselves. So they came—but they didn’t all stay. Those who didn’t fit went off again. The community was a sort of automatic self-filter for a common type. Then, when it came down to a question of who wanted to make the jump forward in time or not, that decision shook out the last of the chaff.”
I winced inside; though I was careful to make sure no sign of it showed on my face. He had labelled Marie with a tag I neither agreed with, nor would have wanted to hear applied to her even if I had agreed with it. At the same time, I had to admit he had laid out a good argument. I said as much.
“Time will tell, of course,” he answered. “I’ll say one thing, though.” He turned and met my eyes directly with his. “I’ve never felt happier in my life than when I realized that it was a settled thing, an unchangeable thing, that I was coming forward like this.”
“Well,” I said, a little lamely. “I’m glad.”
“I think even if Bettijean hadn’t wanted to come along, I still wouldn’t have hesitated.”
I opened my mouth to ask who Bettijean was, and then closed it again. One more thing had evidently been going on under my nose without my noticing. I would ask Ellen later.
“I’d better get back to the others,” I said.
After the celebration had begun to settle down a bit, I got up on my customary jeep-rostrum to tell them what we would be doing in the next few days. I said that we would start setting up the community again, here. Meanwhile, Doc would be flying surveys to locate other human settlements in this future world. He would, in fact, fly a spiral course out of this area; and the navigating equipment of the plane could be used to map the ground he covered, in the sense that it would store up information about it, which could later be recalled on the view screen of the control panel.
“How soon do you think we’ll find other people?” some male voice I did not recognize, somewhere toward the back of the crowd, asked.
“I can’t make any guesses,” I said. “Actually, if I was betting, I’d bet they’d find us first.”
There was a silence; and I suddenly realized they were waiting for me to expand on that.
“This is the future,” I said. “Porniarsk and I found evidence that up here they may be doing something about the time storm. If that’s the case, they have to be pretty competent technologically. I’m assuming that sooner or later, and probably sooner, the fact that we’re here will register on whatever sort of sensing equipment they’ve got. For one thing, if they’re aware of the time storm, they’re going to know that a chunk of their real estate suddenly got exchanged by the time storm forces for a chunk from the past.”
There were a lot more questions after that, some serious, some not so, covering everything from what future humans would look like to whether we should post guards—against animals, if not humans—until we learned that this was unnecessary. I turned that suggestion over to Doc, who thought it was a good idea. The session ended with Bill climbing into the jeep and making himself somewhat unpopular by saying that he wanted to start tomorrow morning getting a complete inventory of everything we had left after those leaving had taken what they wanted; and he wanted everybody to cooperate by listing their own possessions.
I broke away from the gathering before it finally ended and got together with Porniarsk in the lab. The view we had in the tank was essentially the same as the one that had been in it before our move. The difference was that now it was real rather than extrapolated; and there were minor corrections in its display because of that.
“Try it now,” I said to Porniarsk. “See if we can extrapolate forward from here, now that it’s the present.”
He worked with the equipment for perhaps twenty minutes.
“No,” he said. “It’s still hesitating over inconsistencies.”
“Then we’ve landed in the right place—or time, I mean,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’ve been a little worried. Between you and me, I half-expected the people from this time to be waiting for us when we appeared.”
“You were assuming that our activity of time forces would at once attract their attention? I would have thought so, too.”