That comment ended the business of the evening. We sat back to drink coffee and compare notes on how things were going with our individual work projects to get ready for winter; and after about an hour of this, most of us were ready to fold for the night.
The next day, Obsidian had still not come back. That morning happened to be the half-day a week we had begun to take off as a rest period, following the good effect of our one day holiday after the first windmill generator had been put into operation. We had found that there was a limit to the efficiency involved in working seven days a week. After several weeks of unbroken work, we ended up going through the motions of our labors, but getting less done in total than if we had taken a break and started in fresh again. Accordingly, that morning I could stay home with a clear conscience, instead of lending my strength to one of the work jobs down in the town. Ellen was also home and busy doing something with her clothes in one part of the summer palace. I took advantage of the chance to dig once more into the books I had been neglecting lately. But they did not seem to hold my attention, after all. The urge had been growing in me to try for the golden light state again and, once more, to try to reach toward Ellen as I had reached toward Obsidian.
I was encouraged in this by my success with Obsidian, and also by the fact I began to believe I was at last zeroing in on my inner search. The outer search had always been the time storm; but the inner search, I now began to suspect, went back to my relationship with Swannee—and my mother.
I put the book I was holding aside and looked out into the courtyard feeling once more for a unity with the universe. It did not come easily this time. It was almost as if it knew why I wanted it and was reluctant to help me in that direction. But slowly, as the minutes went by, first the room and then the courtyard and the sky I looked out on took on greater values of reality, as if I was seeing them with a dimension added, a greater depth, a beyondness, in addition to the ordinary height, depth and width of normal vision. My body slowed its breathing and its heartbeat and began to blend with the movements of the planet.
The light changed, the gold moved in, and once more, I had it.
I held where I was for some little time—perhaps as much as ten or twenty minutes, although in that state of concentration time seemed almost suspended—to make sure that my hold on the state I had evoked was firm. Then I reached out to feel Ellen, elsewhere in the palace.
My touch went out like a wave spreading up on a sloping beach.
I reached her, felt her there, lightly, and started to enfold her—and something far out in myself jerked back, so that the wave of my feeling was sucked away again, abruptly, and my touch against her was lost. All at once, the golden light was gone and the unity was destroyed. I was alone and isolated, in my armchair in the room, looking out through the glass window panes at a world I could no longer feel.
I sat there, dulled and numbed by my failure. But after a few moments, a miracle happened; because the door opened, Ellen walked in, bent over the chair and kissed me. Then, without a word, she turned and went back toward the door.
“Why?” I managed to croak as she opened it.
She looked back and smiled.
“I just felt like it,” she said.
She went out, closing the door behind her; and I sat there with my heart rising like a rocket. Because now I knew. I had not succeeded in fully touching her; but I knew that I was going in the right direction now; because she had felt me trying. If I lived, I would reach her eventually.
Our half-day holiday ended with noon. I put on work clothes and left the summer palace to go down and help the people who were insulating and expanding our largest Quonset, so that it could become a combination dining hall, hospital, and living quarters for those of us who might turn out to be too young, too old, or too feeble to live out the winter cold in the other, flimsier, buildings of the town. I had just shut the door of the summer palace behind me when Obsidian appeared in front of me.
“Can we talk?” he said.
“Of course,” I said. He came first before any rough carpentry of which I was capable.
“We’ve come to an important decision, my colleagues and I,” he said. “You remember I told you our original plan was to gather enough information on you so that we’d know how to educate you into adjustment with civilization? At least, educate you enough so that you could stay with us, here?”
“I remember,” I said.
“I’m afraid I didn’t tell you everything,” he said. “There was an alternative I didn’t mention. If it turned out you people couldn’t be adjusted to a civilized pattern, we were intending to send you back to your own time, the time you left to come here.”
“No, you didn’t tell me that,” I said. “But you didn’t have to. We primitives can think of those sort of alternatives without being prompted, you know.”
“Yes. Well,” Obsidian looked uncomfortable, “as it happens, you’ve turned out to be in some ways more than we guessed; in fact, more than we bargained for. In particular, you’re different, yourself, from anything we imagined. So, now we’ve come up with a third alternative. But for this we’re going to need your agreement.”
“Oh?” I said. He did not answer immediately, so I prompted him. “Agreement to what?”
“To an alternative that ties in to this desire of yours to get into the work of controlling what you call the time storm. Logically, it’s unthinkable to expect someone from as far back in the past as you are to be capable of learning to do a kind of work that’s done only by unusual, highly qualified individuals in our time. But because of certain anomalies about you, we’d like to test your aptitude for such work.”
“Fine,” I said. And for the second time that day my heart went up like a rocket.
“You understand,” Obsidian said, “this testing in no way changes the fact that by no stretch of the imagination could we expect you to actually be able to work in the temporal area. It’s simply a means of supplying us with data by which we can decide best what to do with all your group, here.”
“All right,” I said.
“Are you sure you understand? Our interest in whether you have any ability for temporal work is only academic.”
“I hear you,” I said. But my heart was still high inside me. Explain it any way he might, Obsidian could not hide from me the fact that, in offering me such tests, they were letting me come one step closer to the goal I had been working toward.
“Well, then,” said Obsidian, “even if you’re willing, there’s a further question. Ordinarily, there’d be no need for you to leave your area, here. But in this particular case some special conditions are involved; so that to be tested you have to be willing to go some distance across the galaxy. Now, if you want time to consider this—”
“Thanks. It’s not necessary. I’ll be happy to go wherever being tested requires.”
He gazed across the jeep at me for a full second.
“Are you sure you understand?”
“I think so,” I said. “You want to know if I’m willing to be tested for abilities in time storm fighting. I am. You also want to know if I’m agreeable to going a large chunk of light years to wherever I have to go to be tested. I am.”
“You understand this means travel between the stars, through space?”
“Well, I’d gathered that,” I said. But he did not echo my grin.
“I’m a little surprised,” he said. “I understood from what you told me that you’d never been off this one world in your life.”
“That’s right.”
“But you’re willing to go, without thinking it over? Without talking it over with the rest of your people?”